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I agree: she is highly hypocritical. Adria's work seems to be primarily in marketing, not technology, so she isn't exactly a poster girl for women in technology. And she is using sexual innuendo, unprofessional dress and gestures, and controversy over feminist causes as part of her image and work.

Once a bitch always a bitch. Here's some backstory on the problem told from the perspective of a decent and respectable woman.

Nice play. For once it didn't work out quite as she expected

Actually I think she knew exactly what would happen, the same thing as always, people rape threatning her and calling her all kind of things. Amanda Blum's excelent blog post highlights the problem with Adrias behaviour but hopefully give you some insight to the larger problem.

If this has thought us something it is that there are some serious problem with sexism at tech conferences, even if you don't like what she did the backlash kind of proved her point IMHO.

hypocrite troublemaker who is creating divisions in the dev community along gender lines for no good reason only her own need to validate herself out of victimhood

Bit strong, but not too far from Amanda Blums's experiences with Adria Richards.

I think it is time to pull the plug on solar and focus instead on wind and research thorium reactors.

When you factor everything (e.g. panel production environmental cost, maintenance, use of land, longevity of the panels, and so on), solar is just not worthy, or at least very rarely better than wind. So i see no reason to artificially keep it alive.

Also there is not as much uranium as people think. Civilization is a 18TW bulb. If you power (all of) it only with existing uranium resources the light would last barely one year, (go run the number yourself if you don't believe it or have a look at this). Thorium should be better.

Even more evidence of Ms. Richards' tatics. This isn't the first time she's played games like this. See http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

Elsewhere on the internet someone made what I felt was a valid point that if jokes about dongles and forks aren't appropriate at a tech conference, then where the hell are they appropriate?!

On a more serious note, I believe that the jokes were part of a private conversation, so if that was was said a little too loud, then it's perhaps deserving of a disapproving scowl... or even mildly curt rebuke if it really needed to be amped up to 11. But not a Twitter photo post.

I do believe it's unfortunate that Adria got fired, but at no point did she seem to understand that the way she reacted was waaaaay wrong, and also, rather passive-aggressive-bullyish.
Also, in-case you've not seen my previous post, it turns out she has a history of this which causes me to be somewhat less sympathetic to her currently unemploy[ed|able] situation.

True, but this this isn't the first time she's made questionable allegations of sexism. If it hadn't blown up and resulted in someone being sacked, it wouldn't have been the most impressive one either; her T-shirt stunt involved her being actively hostile towards a woman who wanted to include (non-sexualised) depictions of women, and who could've avoided the whole fuss if the T-shirt went with the safe option and used the stereotypical male geeks. She's an active disincentive to including women.

Hardly. I think this blog post sums it up best. http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/. She didn't try and work with anyone, she wasn't out to correct anything. She was out use her bully pulpit to 1: make herself more important 2: hurt those that had the audacity to offend her. That said it doesn't excuse by ANY means the attitudes show both for and against her position that went well beyond the pale. What's more sad is at the VERY SAME conference she was offended at she made this jewel: https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/312265091791847425. Reeks of hypocrisy.

I think you just described my level of math knowledge as well. I was trying to understand this explanation of Weil conjectures and couldn't make it past the first paragraph without being lost.

You might want to try reading Gowers's account of the work of Deligne. It's a short article, and slightly less technical than the one you "read". Here : Pierre Deligne's Work

Well you can use scripting of KDE Plasma to setup the layout. See this example and the Plasma Desktop Scripting documentation. Then you can probably create just one script and run it on all systems to set them up.

Check out this one that will be released soon...http://husbandhelperapp.wordpress.com

Seriously how is that bad. If one private entity wants to acquire my property because they feel they can make better use of it that I can why should the government side with them. If they want it bad enough they should ask me to submit in writing what it will take to part with the property and then either accept, decline or make a counter offer. It is not like that had been unheard of previously. I also remember a similar story about Rockefeller or Carnegie where 2 people refused to sell property where one didn't want to sell and the other was trying to get some truly absurd amount and Rockefeller or Carnegie gave up trying to acquire either property. I tried looking for it and couldn't find anything on it.

Aecurity and authentication were not built in to POTS protocols. That answers your question. They were not designed to handle geolocation nor identity.

The caller ID system relies on either the caller, or a database provided by the caller's provider. Once you transfer from one provider to another, typical in any long-distance call, the second provider has no way to track the caller beyond what the first provider claims. I found this article enlightening, although slightly off topic it is fundamentally about caller ID spoofing.

http://telemarketerspam.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/pacific-telecoms-robo-call-revenue-sharing-scheme-revealed/

Now you're going to ask why we can't fix it? Because it's not worth the amount of money it would take to re-configure the entire phone infrastructure. The companies that would pay the most would benefit the least. Individuals would not sign up in large enough numbers, and so we are stuck.

Yes we have the technology, but not the will. US Congress has made it illegal to send false info, but has not found a way to ensure companies follow the law. As common carriers, they can set up a scam-friendly block and blame the customers for all mischief. The only way to positively identify the people behind the calls is to hand over your credit card information, let a bogus charge hit, and spent a few years fighting back.

It works fine in FreeBSD, just don't use the proprietary drivers.

Here is the magic link: http://masterofpc.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/brother-mfc-7420-under-linux-without-the-proprietary-brother-drivers/

Download Xange. They'll swear it's Vista. Look at this.

Given NASA's constant funding problems for the last few decades

During the last few decades (1990-) NASA has enjoyed consistent funding just north of 15 billion inflation adjusted dollars every year. That pattern has survived four presidents and almost six administrations.

The "funding problem" you imagine is received bullshit. Given that NASA is just one of many 'discretionary' costs that must compete with the ever bloating welfare state and chronic $1E12+ annual deficits since 2008, a NASA spending authority loss of only 5% is a testament to our values and our wisdom.

Our wisdom... sounds weird doesn't it? Taking the occasional break from self-flagellation is useful behavior.

This looks a lot like Autodesk's 123D Catch, but the bonus here is you don't have to sign up for an account with Autodesk.

I for one would be pretty excited to have my 3D scan data local, so I don't have to wait for Autodesk's cloud to do the processing or have my scans tracked by a third party. I'm kind of not cool with Autodesk having a model of the inside of my bedroom, for instance.

I once did a 123D scan of a model sculpted out of banana bread: http://zheng3.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/yes-we-have-no-bananas/ --the resolution's OK but I don't think I'd use this technology for anything that I planned to deform or edit too much. The geometry's just too dense to work with easily.

China is likely rapidly increasing their stockpile to bring it inline with the US and Russia. According to this diagram they are still quite far behind. Even if the US removes 1000 warheads, they will still be far behind. If that matters or not in the end is another argument entirely.

20 to 40 percent of men on dating sites are married. http://sofalabs.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/sad-stat-20-40-percent-of-men-on-dating-sites-are-married/

See discussion at link below, which has lots of info and commentary

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/volcanic-co2/

People want better ads? No. People do not want ads, But if they are forced to chooses between two evils, they will chooses the less evil one.
In this case that is better ads.
Sure, sometimes the ads are better then the content (Superbowl anybody?) but that does not mean I want to watch ads all the time.
Soa Paulo in Brazil does not have any ads anymore.
I would be happy if all cities in the world would follow their example.

Banksy has a nice idea about it:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

The Internet is very adamant that bees are the good guys, actually.

QVC recently showed up OTA here in Houston, on channels 10.4 and 34.3. Not sure why they're broadcasting on 2 channels, perhaps they're low-power stations that cover different parts of the city (though I get them both where I live). Quality's pretty bad though, they're sending it letterboxed on a 4:3 480i signal so when you watch it on an HDTV you get black bars on ALL FOUR SIDES of the picture.

Here's the The Houston DTV blog entry about it and other recent channel changes.

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party has a good summary of the attempt to ban porn as well as a call to action. Apparently getting e-mail through to the parliamentarians is not as straight forward as one might wish. Christian EngstrÃm, MEP, also of the Swedish Pirate Party has a good analysis of the attempted ban. Basically it's a grab at control and censorship under another guise.

There's a blog article that describes the biological origin of homosexuality.
On Defending God's Reputation From Brain-Washed Idiots" (Section 7) Basically, it points out that at the time sexual reproduction began to exist, it first existed via organisms that both donated and received genetic material (hermaphrodites). The key question is this: When hermaphrodites engage in sex, are they interacting homosexually, heterosexually, or bisexually? The best answer is "homosexually", since hermaphrodites are all the same sex! Next, since there is a gene-based desire to breed with one's own kind, it logically follows that the definition of "one's own kind", for hermaphrodites, is also about being "homosexual". Later there was a functional split in sexual roles. But the genetic tendencies were already in place, to interact sexually with one's own kind! Obviously the tendency has been modified somewhat, else heterosexuality would have been a failed experiment. But it is equally obviously not entirely gone from the population. And so the opinions of Religion are simply worthless, on this topic.

http://bobcargill.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/535132_10150690521932395_705822394_8026655_1008504104_n.jpg Nope, Not Goatse.

It's interesting to see this as a comment in a forum where taking a copy of something is usually considered legal and ethical.

You're comparing copying a commercially released product to copying someone's DNA? Pete Hoekstra, is that you?

In two of the three cases, the attorneys are representing themselves, according to this lawyer.

Michael O.Church has blogged a lot about the "open allocation" model used by Value. A LOT. Like a TL;DR lot. But if you're into thinking deeply about these things, go read his blog.

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

Using gravity to slowly nudge an asteroid from its trajectory is impractical and a foolish suggestion. Why?

All asteroids large enough to make this work are known and known not to collide with earth. All asteroids that are a threat to earth are small, unknown and liable to be discovered only a relatively short time - certainly not decades - before impacting earth. There is also good reason to expect those to be more common than the claim that they only hit earth "once a century". A typical dangerous asteroid to be discovered will measure between 15m and 100m. That's a simple matter of the chance to detect such asteroids being very small, while the numbers in which they occur are much larger than anything in the several 100m or km class.

We also happen to have just right stuff to do something about the typical asteroids - rockets capable to carry a few tons of stuff beyond earth orbit, anywhere within the solar system. Crash a compact impactor (lead, steel, depleted uranium ... whatever) into the asteroid at your typical speed of 10km/s or more (depending on the exact trajectory and propulsion used) and the kinetic energy released will be sufficient to break it up into small enough pieces. Each ton of material impacting at this speed has the energy of four Tallboy bombs. Those had enough energy to make craters 24m deep and 30m wide on earth.

This works because the large energy is carried by a small mass with little momentum of itself, which means that the energy will be released in all directions, just like a conventional bomb would. Such a collision creates debris small enough to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere (albeit in spectacular fashion).

America in 50 years

The rest of the world in 50 years

---

Well either that or we all end up like this, given our lunatic governments.

It's not accurate to say that the Dragon will be automatically docking with the ISS, since the Dragon doesn't support automated docking yet. Rather, it very slowly approaches the station, holds steady at about 10m, and then the crew (or mission control in Houston) spends hours operating a robotic arm to grab it and bring it in.

As others have pointed out, NASA has the final say over whether the Dragon can even come within a kilometer of the ISS.

The initial approach during the COTS-2 demo was 0.24 meters/second according to this link and this link, and the final approach from 30m is even slower.

I'd imagine that the ISS could manage to avoid an object traveling towards it from 30m at roughly the speed of a tortoise, considering that most other dangerous objects in space are traveling much faster.

That's not to say that the thrusters couldn't misfire at just the wrong moment, but considering the care taken in the approach, it's not like they're just aiming it in the direction of the ISS and hoping for the best. It'd have to be a failure that didn't manifest at all until close to the last second, which would be extraordinarily bad luck.

An artist at my University has worked towards trying to raise awareness of these sorts of risks - particularly topical for the San Diego region where we have a confluence of lots of defense companies and high-tech university research. His art piece generated a lot of attention for wanting to stimulate the conversations we'd have when a crash occurs in a residential or otherwise inopportune area, before the event actually happens. http://uccenterfordrones.wordpress.com/regarding-recent-drone-malfunction/ was his piece on it, and one of the many articles explaining the 'hoax' http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/-Source-of-Mystery-Drone-Crash-Revealed-182407811.html

As mentioned in the other recent academic publishing story, there has been some progress but it has been slow. One thing that I am hopeful about are "epijournals" which separate the review from the distribution by serving as overlays to the remarkably successful arxiv preprint servers, at least in many areas of math and physics.

There are a number of issues here, many of which have been brought up often before. A few to recap:

1. Prestige: As a fully-promoted researcher who isn't worried much about prestige, I am free to only submit articles to journals which are either open-access or are reasonably-priced (for example, many of those run by universities or professional societies, rather than by for-profit organizations.) Which I choose to do, and have made clear for many years via the Banff Protocol and now the CostOfKnowledge petition. However, when collaborations with junior researchers lead to publications, I am willing to submit to some of the other journals, as for the co-author, the prestige may be important for them getting a job, tenure, promotion, or grant funding.
2. Standards: Oddly, many of the open-access/free electronic journals have standards that are much higher than many of the for-profit journals. The second and lower tiers of for-profit journals will often publish less-than-impressive to just plain terrible articles and have much lower standards than the typical electronic ones. They have economic incentives to publish many articles, and there are sites devoted to exposing various sham journals or editorial failings of journals from Elsevier, etc. I think that many of the electronic free journals are worried about not being prestigious enough and so they tend to have high standards, significantly higher than many for-profit ones. I've had things that were rejected by good electronic journals that were accepted quickly and with high praise to middling traditional journals.
3. Author-pays model: there has been a proliferation of "open-access" publications, some of which are outright scams, see Beall's list of predatory "open-access" publishers. Often, these journals have names very similar to existing prestigious-to-middling journals, which complicates things and has made many authors naturally suspicious of various open-access journals as a whole.
4. Institutional culture: it takes a while for things to change. There have been a few mass resignations of for-profit journal editorial boards to start more-or-less identical less-expensive or free versions which are basically identically, but not nearly as many as I have hoped. Tim Gowers' efforts and the recent White House memo in the USA are progress but of course there is still a long way to go.

I did find that other prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?

In other Elsevier news, I found some more journal shenanigans described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions.

http://www.newser.com/story/125261/mexican-helicopter-mistakes-airports-lands-in-texas.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023633/Mexican-military-helicopter-soldiers-lands-airport-Texas--MISTAKE.html
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Mexican-military-helicopter-lands-in-Laredo-by-2082188.php
https://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/mexican-military-helicopter-spotted-flying-over-texas/
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mexican-helicopters-flying-over-texas-would-obama-respond-to-mexican-invasion-with-use-of-force/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread557760/pg1
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110905191138AAP32Xj
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=429229#.US-m5WJ2n4Y

BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous. No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake; that's why they have GPS in aircraft now, not to mention basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations (plus the Rio Grande river, which is obvious from the air) rule this excuse out.

http://www.newser.com/story/125261/mexican-helicopter-mistakes-airports-lands-in-texas.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023633/Mexican-military-helicopter-soldiers-lands-airport-Texas--MISTAKE.html
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/article/Mexican-military-helicopter-lands-in-Laredo-by-2082188.php
https://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/mexican-military-helicopter-spotted-flying-over-texas/
http://texasliberal.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/mexican-helicopters-flying-over-texas-would-obama-respond-to-mexican-invasion-with-use-of-force/
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread557760/pg1
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110905191138AAP32Xj
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=429229#.US-m5WJ2n4Y

BTW, the idea of a Mexican helicopter "mistakenly" landing 16 miles away from its target is utterly ridiculous. No competent pilot would ever make such a mistake; that's why they have GPS in aircraft now, not to mention basic navigational skills and fuel-burn calculations (plus the Rio Grande river, which is obvious from the air) rule this excuse out.

I think I'd prefer the Monotracer over the C1. One thing that I don't see with the C1 is what happens when you step out and turn the thing off. Those Gyros can't run indefinitely.

I ran into the IPCC people the other day.

Ack! Leftward spin. I hate it when I post with a severe caffiene deficiency going on...

I don't think there's any parcticular need for a special package if you already have fast broadband. Most of the decent free TV is on iPlayer, which covers all the BBC channels and now has content from the major free to view commercial rivals:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

You might also want to check out the ITV Player, 4od and Demand 5 sites (I rarely bother).

You can grab BBC (only) programmes from iPlayer with get_iplayer, which generates standard mp4 files you can play anywhere (finally a use for that Apple TV!):

http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html

Some US TV sites can be accessed by methods like this (or get a VPN):

http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/how-to-watch-the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-in-the-uk/

http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/how-to-watch-hulu-and-us-television-in-the-uk/

I don't think there's any parcticular need for a special package if you already have fast broadband. Most of the decent free TV is on iPlayer, which covers all the BBC channels and now has content from the major free to view commercial rivals:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

You might also want to check out the ITV Player, 4od and Demand 5 sites (I rarely bother).

You can grab BBC (only) programmes from iPlayer with get_iplayer, which generates standard mp4 files you can play anywhere (finally a use for that Apple TV!):

http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html

Some US TV sites can be accessed by methods like this (or get a VPN):

http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/how-to-watch-the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-in-the-uk/

http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/how-to-watch-hulu-and-us-television-in-the-uk/

Well, those giant money bins for them to swim in all their cash to build themselves, you know...

It does on Windows, unless you set various options that aren't really supported and are likely to break when the big theme refresh lands.

The new UI is happening, too. See, for instance, this blog post about the changes to customization that will restrict what you can do with the UI. Or the UX branch, which has curvy tabs already.

Extensions can probably address many of the problems they're introducing, but -- particularly with the theme changes -- it's really getting to the point where an actual fork would be easier.

And here is why.

Looking at his bio, most of his work for FAS seems to be arguing against missile defense. He seems to be a bit of an activist. Basically, he comes across as a bit of an ostrich about Iran's nuclear program: nuclear weapons are bad, and war is bad; therefore if the Iranians are seeking nuclear weapons, it justifies ballistic missile defense (which he's against) and possibly an attack (which he's against) to stop Iran from reaching their goal; therefore Iran must not be seeking nuclear weapons. Not exactly a scientific chain of argument, but it seems to be the path he's on (based on that last link, and two of his other articles that I read through).

Driving a gas guzzler by choice, not necessity, is a form of expression? Well, I guess Pete Hoekestra type analogies are indeed a protected form of expression.

I've got an idea. Everybody go get a couple of these. Put them in some sort of suspicious enclosure with blinky lights. Go through the border with the device blinking merrily. Get it confiscated.

The DHS will stare at the device, likely confiscate it, eventually get bored and put it in some forgotten corner.

Wait a little while until their brains have fixated on the next Alfalfa.

Drive the local DHS folks bonkers.

Sit back and enjoy a job well done.

Microsoft has strong ties to Burson Marsteller and uses them to manage social media marketing.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow described B-M as follows in August 2012:

"Who's Burson-Marsteller? Well, let me put it this way -- when Blackwater killed those 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, they called Burson-Marsteller. When there was a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, Bobcock & Wilcox, who built that plant, called Burson-Marsteller.

        "[After the] Bhopal chemical disaster that killed thousands of people in India, Union Carbide called Burson-Marsteller. Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu -- Burson-Marsteller. The government of Saudi Arabia, three days after 9/11 -- Burson-Marsteller.

        "The military junta that overthrew the government of Argentina in 1976, the generals dialed Burson-Marsteller. The government of Indonesia, accused of genocide in East Timor, Burson-Marsteller.

        "The government of Nigeria, accused of genocide in Biafra, Burson- Marsteller. Philip Morris, Burson-Marsteller. Silicone breast implants, Burson-Marsteller. The government of Columbia trying to make all those dead union organizers not getting in the way of the new trade deal, they called Burson-Marsteller.

        "Do you remember Aqua Dots? Little toy beads coded with something that turned into to date rape drug when kids put the beads in their mouths and all these kids ended up in comas? Yes, even the date rape Aqua Dots people called Burson-Marsteller.

        "When evil needs public relations, evil has Burson-Marsteller on speed dial. That`s why it was creepy that Hillary Clinton`s pollster and chief strategist in her presidential campaign was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson- Marsteller."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/23/money.digitalmedia

They use other organizations as well.

Much of my work for Microsoft does indeed speak to advertising fraud. Microsoft must make sure Bing doesn’t show ads for scams, that fraudsters don’t use the Microsoft DRIVEpm ad network, that Windows Defender properly detects spyware/adware, etc. I’ve worked with Microsoft on these kinds of matters.

Ben Edelman