I’m serious. This prevents other companies from making it easy on the NSA. Facebook will never make any royalties from it, and they’ll likely never implement the whole system. I love it. It’s like the GPL: Using one kind of law (IP) against another.
Actually, I'm sure it has happened elsewhere, but when I was in junior high school, they banned book bags, on the grounds that in two years, they founds two firearms. But this no-touching thing trumps all other absurdities.
While many people learn a lot in college (I hope), the first thing that an employer learns when they find that you have a college degree is that you are likely to be able to finish something complex. There are lots of people without college degrees who can see complex and difficult things through to completion, but that is much harder to glean from glancing at a resume for two seconds. And that's all the time you get, because they go through massive numbers of resumes. And the fact is, most companies are less interested in employees who are smart than those who can follow instructions and work (however inefficiently) until they finish something.
Back in the late 90's a friend of mine worked for a "data services" arm of a well-known communications company. They had a very successful process for developing large applications on time, on-spec, and on-budget, and it was designed around having morons do the work. A handful of people at the top did the design work, which trickled down through layers of less and less skilled worker until you go to the bottom. At the bottom, the code monkey (not necessarily their terminology) would have a stack of sheets of paper, each describing one function or procedure to write. It would describe the function name, the inputs, the outputs, and the algorithm to be coded. The algorithm was described in such detail that even the least skilled coders could do the job. And then it would be reviewed by someone else to make sure it did the job, integrated with the growing application, etc. Now, while a handful of scrappy coders could often complete projects in less time, what this big company had was predictability, so they could enter into a contract where they could be precise about the time and cost from the outset.
Unless you understood their business model, you could find their hiring criteria to be to be counter-intuitive. But what they wanted was cheap college graduates willing to do drudge work. If you could play dumb and do the job, then you could gradually work your way up the chain. But in general, a smart 'rebel' type would never get hired there, nor would they generally want to. Linux geeks are used to thinking about computer programmers as being smart, but that's not how the business world sees them. Coders are a commodity to be bought and sold like corn (and just as lacking in useful content).
I don't know about other people, but I had nothing but bad experiences with their DRAM products. I would call their tech support and usually get a voicemail. They would never return those calls. If I called anothe department (sales always answered), they would just forward me to the same voicemail. If I was persistent enough, calling enoug times per day, I might get someone on the phone with technical support.
Their "performance" DRAM products seemed to deteriorate over time. I would configure my system with the exact voltage and timing numbers they specified and run a burn-in test. It would work great for the first couple of days. Perfect stabillity, good performance. Memory tests, kernel compiles, everything was great. But after the first few DAYS, it would all go to hell. There were no hard memory errors, but the system would start crashing during compiles. With a lot of effort, I managed two exchanges with OCZ (so that's three pairs of DIMMs I tried in sequence), and each set went through the same pattern -- worked great then started failing. After the third set, I paid the restocking fee with Newegg and bought form Crucial. I have no idea what the problem was, but OCZ was not interested in figuring it out.
Sure, but all that will do is limit the supply of goods to one relatively limited Asian market, right? I mean, Korea is pretty big, but not as big as the EU or China.
London traffic has become unsustainable, so the government instituted usage charges for using the roads within certain confines in London. The idea is that if people have to pay something to go there, they won't go there if they don't NEED to. I'm not sure how effective if has been, because as it is in NYC, most people driving in London HAVE to, while others use public transport or don't even bother to go.
By adding a marginal cost to medical car, however, this might improve the sustainability of the NHS in two ways. One is that it'll bring in some additional revenue. The other is that it will discourage people from going if they don't have a significant concern, reducing excessive demand on the system. I've always seen this sort of thing as good way to prevent abuse. In the US, many insurange companies require "co-payments" of like $20 when going to the doctor. As long as the cost is lower for lower-income situations, then this can have only positive effects on the system. (Well, unless the system wastes the money.)
We get all these people who think that vaccines are linked to autism because one discredited scientsts said it was, so we get all this controvercy over vaccines. But what about all the other crap we're putting into our bodies? Hormones in the water supply. Industrial pollutants. Even intentional fluoridation, which has been correlated with lower IQ. But do these people rally against this stuff? No, because it takes too much work. It's easier to go on about government conspiracies and skip going to the doctor.
This is from Silicon Spectrum, who bought the graphics accelerator from Number Nine (i128, Ticket-to-Ride, etc.). It appears they've deviced to open source that IP. The i128 was mostly 2D with some very limited 3D support. I don't know if they managed to develop anything with programmable shaders, but they might have. Also, I think they've been selling graphics accelerator IP for FPGAs for a while; not sure.
Haha. However, it's interesting to note that an iPhone is much faster with tons more memory than the original IBM mainframes that ran MVS. Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't written an OS/360 emulator for the iPhone. Actually someone probably has...
When I was in grad school, studying linguistics, compitational linguistics, and automatic speech recognition, I recall it mentioned more than once the idea of using latent semantic analysis and such to do this kind of translation. So am I correct in assuming that this hasn't been done well in the past, and Google finally made it work well because they have larger corpora of translated texts?
A single iPod isn't going to cause any interference with flight electronics. But I've wondered what it might be like if everyone on the plane were using cellular devices at maximum power. Could that be a problem?
Also, during times when the plane is not completely level or experiencing turbulence or headed for an uncomfortable emergency water landing, I would not appreciate having someone's iPad slip out of their hand and fly into my face. Just saying.
Fly neurons aren't terribly different from ours. There are just fewer of them, doing less sophisticated processing. So the amount of processing that is done can happen in less time. In other news, Gedit is smaller and faster (at simple text editing) than Libre Office.
This is one of those situations where the intuitively obvious is now scientifically established in a way that it wasn't before, I guess. But that's important, because a lot of intuitively obvious things are wrong, so they all have to be tested.
If I google this, I get a lot of noise. Are there any documented cases where a GMO food has caused identifiable harm? I see lots of claims about what MIGHT happen, complaints about people playing God, introduction of harmful allergens, etc. But I haven't heard of any verified cases.
I often ask food producers about corn products in their food. The real reason is that my wife has a corn allergy, and you just can't get away from the stuff. The FDA has no legal definition of corn as an allergen (in contrast to gluten, for instance). So in addition to asking the question, I point out that a lot of people avoid corn to avoid GMOs. I honestly don't care about them being GMOs, but food companies that make specialty products (like gluten free foods) are sensitive to customer perceptions, sensible or not. For instance, while it's great for celiac patients that there are certified gluten-free products, the fact is, many people eating gluten-free are doing it because they think it'll help them lose weight.
The other night, I was watching Netflix in bed on my iPad. It was propped up on my chest, and I was using one hand to hold it upright. Well, at one point, my hand slipped, and the iPad flopped at what must have been light speed right onto my nose. Ever been hit on the nose by something hard? My eyes were watering, and the pain didn't go away for what seemed like millenia.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what might have happened to a spinning hard disk in this case, but I AM sure my nose would have hurt just as much.
We need an organization whose mandate is similar to the NSA.
For a second there I thought you were going to propose an anti-NSA organization: a government agency whose mandate and sole purpose is to protect Americans from NSA spying.
I feel dumb for not having thought of this. Mind you, protecting us from violations of our rights in general should be the job of the executive branch. The law is that we're not to be spied on without a clear chain of evidence constituting probable cause. The executive branch is supposed to enforce the law. Too bad they don't.
The "problem" with this is that there are only two groups who will use these tools. Innocent privacy enthusiasts and criminals. The NSA will be unable to distinguish between them
Are you implying that they can distinguish between them now? I don't think they particularly care. They are just building a database they can search, a private NSA Google.
True. And as someone who knows just enough about information retrieval to be dangerous, I can assure you that what they get out will be almost entirely garbage. Look up "precision" and "recall." It's like Heisenberg. If they increase precision, recall will plummet, and even real criminals won't be found. If they increase recall, their precision will be terrible, and they'll indict basically only innocent people.
We need an organization whose mandate is similar to the NSA. When the FBI, for instance, lawfully obtains evidence that gives them probable cause to get a warrant to invasively follow a chain of evidence, we need this information-gathering capability.
But the NSA over-stepped their bounds, broke the law, and betrayed all Americans and their allies. As a result, people are now more motivated to produce tools to evade organizations like the NSA. Because American citizens have the right to privacy, and they now have to go out of their way to get it, criminals are now gaining more sophisticated tools they can also use to evade the NSA. Looking at the other comments, the app mentioned in particular here isn't necessarily all that effective, but give it time. Pretty soon, you'll be able to put up an impenetrable wall around your data that the NSA can't break through.
The "problem" with this is that there are only two groups who will use these tools. Innocent privacy enthusiasts and criminals. The NSA will be unable to distinguish between them, essentially making rationally paranoid people targets of criminal investigations. And the NSA will be stupid about everyone else, seeing people NOT using encryption as low-hanging fruit, criminalizing countless innocent citizens merely in an effort to show that the NSA is catching *someone*, justifying their enormous budget. (In other words, they will make up criminals to justify their existance.)
If the NSA had obeyed the law, we wouldn't be in this mess, where it is inevitable that we can no longer spy on real criminals, probable cause or not.
They're using "overclocking" here as a metaphor, but people seem to take it literally. Overclocking the drive would involve raising voltage and increasing clock speeds. That's probably possible. But what they're talking about appears to be to give the user the ability to influence the amount of overprovisioning on the drive. For an SSD, the physical capacity is larger than the logical capacity. This is important in order to decrease the amount of sector migration needed when looking for a block to erase. From zero, adding overprovisioning will substantially increase write performance, but at a diminishing rate as you add more extra space.
As for compression, it does two things. It allows more sectors to be consolidated into the same page, amplifying the very limited flash write bandwidth. And it effectively increases the amount of overprovisioning. These two mean that more compressible data will have substantially higher write performance and somewhat higher read performance. (Although reads are already fast enough, on many drives, to max out the SATA bandwidth.)
Anyhow, giving the user the ability to tweak overprovisioning seems pretty worthless to me. At best, some users will be able to increase the logical capacity, at the expense of having lousy write performance. Maybe this would help for drives where you store large amounts of media that you write once and read a lot. But how much more capacity could you get? 25%? Another knob might be compression "effort", which trades off compute time against SSD bandwidth. There's going to be a balancing point between the two, and that probably should be dynamic in the controller, not tweaked by users who don't know the internal architecture of the drive. Some writes will take longer than others due to wear leveling, migration, and garbage collection, giving the drive controller more or less free time to spend on compressing data.
Although (as far as I know), it's anecdotal, from what I've read, there's a stonger link between autism and sensitivity to certain foods. There are documented cases where taking kids off of wheat and dairy _appeared_ to eliminate the autism symptoms. In any case, it's well known that a lot of people are sensitive to gluten, and gluten-free food is more than just a fad.
On the other hand, I've heard of TWO court cases where vaccines were linked to autusm (two, not two thousand). And in the one I read more about, the girl had a pre-existing mitocondrial condition and would have developed autism eventually anyway. Two instances does not make any kind of trend!
So what these churches should be going on about is avoiding certain highly allergenic foods (look up the top 8 on wikipedia), which would result in people eating less processed food and a more varied and ballanced diet. That would have all sorts of positive effects, even on those with no propensity for autism.
But in my experience, big churches aren't really big hot-beds of clean living and nutrition. Rather, they seem to attract fringe conspiracy theories. So why can't they start harping on about Monsanto and its conspiracy with other food providers to make us fat and stupid?
Probably because eating well is too much effort for lazy people who would rather sit like sheep in pews.
Note: I'm not against religion in general. Just fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists. On the other hand, I do buy somewhat into the idea that the TSA exists to make us complacent about invasive government, but that's perhaps knee-jerk about being fondled every time I want to get on a plane. Oh, and our government has gotten to the point where it's no longer particularly representative of citizen wants, needs, and rights. But that's a separate discussion. Probably.
If The Doctor had started out as a women, I think I'd be just as much a fan. Now, keeping in mind that regeneration is fantastical to begin with, to me, the doctor becoming a woman would be like turning James Bond into a women. Different actors or not, James Bond is James Bond, and The Doctor is The Doctor. As Stephen Moffit said, the different Doctors aren't different people; they're all the same man who just can change his appearance. From a genetic point of view, I'm assuming his DNA doesn't change much when he regnerates, and that in Time Lord DNA, there are markers for gender like there are for humans. So turning into a woman would be a more substantial rewrite. And would he really be a woman, or would it be more like a sex change operation? (This is not a debate on gender reassignment, because as far as I'm concerned, people should have control over their appearance and identity. Even The Doctor, I guess.)
I feel that Doctor Who has done much weirder things, and much of the series from the beginning (if you really want to be honest) has been kinda lame, particularly Series 7 Part 2. I mean aside from "The Name of the Doctor" (which was awesome), the most of the rest of Series 7 has been dreadful. And I could point out more than a few classic serials that were pretty darn awful as well. If they do pick a woman for the role in the future, I'll just continue to watch the show like I always have, on the lookout for those few episode gems, like I always do. However, I might be inclined to assume that they chose a woman mostly because of social pressure, not necessarily because it's a good idea. It MIGHT INDEED be a good idea, but any indication that the producers reasoned based on anything but coersion would not be evident.
This isn't any different from all the pressure to write a multi-Doctor episode. Stephen Moffit addressed this issue when he (as I mentioned above) pointed out that they're all the same man who can change his appearance. He was only willing to write a multi-Doctor episode if it make a really good story (which is ironic given some of the recent episodes). So likewise, the producers should be willing to gender-change The Doctor only if it's going to do something really good for the series. And that being said, there are LOTS of female actors who could do a fabulous job in the role. Given that any woman they'd pick would be under much closer scrutiny by the fanbase (many of whom would blame the actress for what is really just bad writing), I think the producers would be smart enough to (a) carefully choose an actress who epitomizes the role, and (b) do a better job on the script writing to avoid misdirected criticism.
And given that last bit of reasoning, I think I'd rather like to see it done. It'll force the writers to do a better job and make the show all-around a lot better.
BTW, as for the number of times he can regenerate, the producers have said they're not going to respect the limit of 12. In a Sarah Jane Aventures episode, he said he could generate 507 times, which I assume to be just a big number be picked to be funny. Another suggestion I've heard is that because of the time war, the Time Lords reengineered themselves to have no limit on regeneration.
IIRC, there's been plenty of research into using 13nm UV to do lithography. Intensity was one issue. The issue not mentioned in the summary is that 13nm is ionizing. It actually damages the silicon (and probably also the masks). So using 193nm, we get high process variation in part due to lithographic aberations (another cause is the randomness of dopant insertion). At 13nm, we get high variation due to damaging the device.
Recently, the CDC put up and then removed a page linking polio vaccines to cancer-causing viruses (http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/cdc-disappears-page-linking-polio-vaccines-to-cancer-causing-viruses/). Actually, over the years, many vaccines have been found to have one contamination or another.
But then again, so does every food item we buy, our drinking water, and basically, eveything else we come into contact with.
Singling out vaccines is just the vogue thing to do. With vaccines, when you weight the risks (of some rare complications) and the benefits (immunity to some nasty diseases, in most cases), the vaccines are a clear win.
Litt asks a very good question, but it's based on a bias toward the way the law is worded, which is worded that way as a means to for law enforcement to have sensible ways to legally acquire information about people. If you offer "private" data to a third part, legally, it's not private anymore. But that's not how people really think about it. People want to have the freedom to choose who does and does not have access to "private" data. And since this goes contrary to the law, the will of the people really needs to lead to some changes in the law. Publishing on Facebook may provide it to a 3rd party, but Facebook is just a data store, and people are putting specific restrictions on who can see what parts of their personal information. If we can infer the intent of someone to commit murder by their actions and statements, we can also infer the intent of someone to constrain how their private information is shared. The courts should reason about both similarly.
Personally, I only put in Facebook what already has to be public anyway, like my educational credentials. I'm a state employee, so that also has certain implications about information that is already public with regard to my job. You can find out a lot about me online, and this is partly due to the line of work I'm in. I'm betting you can also find out how much money I make. But certain information about my home and family is simply not shared and off-limits.
One of my fears is that because I choose to re-share some already-public data about myself, some judge will infer that I intend to share everything and issue a warrant for the rest of my data. And of course, I'm afraid that such a warrant might be requested in the first place because there are so damn many people with the same name as mine, and the NSA is probably a hot-bed of false correlations. We need new laws that block the development of a surveillance state and respect MODERN conceptions of what is public and private. This idea that you should have no fear if you're doing nothing wrong is bullshit. Not only is this surveillance wrong, but there's almost a guarantee that they'll get their information wrong and start charging countless innocent people with crimes.
I see very large numbers of smart and highly motivated students coming through my classes, both domestic and international. There is no shortage of students getting degrees in STEM fields. I believe the complaints stem from employers who don't want to pay a premium for better skilled engineers. There are in fact far more STEM job applicants than there are jobs. Graduates have to apply to hundreds of positions, and employers have to sift through thousands of resumes. Applications are so numerous, in fact, that HR departments are reduced to superficial checklists of buzzwords to efficiently sift through all the options. Employers want cheap laborors who nevertheless do a good job, while students who want to get paid appropriately to their skill level are getting Masters and Doctoral degrees in the hopes of being more "qualified." (In fact, they're often culled first for being OVER qualified and therefore too expensive.)
So, what companies are doing is a spin game. They report to federal funding agencies that there's a shortage, when in fact what they want is to increase the probability of identifying more skilled applicants that they can dupe into taking lower paying jobs. The end result is that there are too many people getting STEM degrees (when they would be better off doing other things), not enough job openings, and rising unemployment. We need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, and they can earn a good living, but nobody seems to care about them.
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I’m serious. This prevents other companies from making it easy on the NSA. Facebook will never make any royalties from it, and they’ll likely never implement the whole system. I love it. It’s like the GPL: Using one kind of law (IP) against another.
Actually, I'm sure it has happened elsewhere, but when I was in junior high school, they banned book bags, on the grounds that in two years, they founds two firearms. But this no-touching thing trumps all other absurdities.
Wait, I thought we needed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
While many people learn a lot in college (I hope), the first thing that an employer learns when they find that you have a college degree is that you are likely to be able to finish something complex. There are lots of people without college degrees who can see complex and difficult things through to completion, but that is much harder to glean from glancing at a resume for two seconds. And that's all the time you get, because they go through massive numbers of resumes. And the fact is, most companies are less interested in employees who are smart than those who can follow instructions and work (however inefficiently) until they finish something.
Back in the late 90's a friend of mine worked for a "data services" arm of a well-known communications company. They had a very successful process for developing large applications on time, on-spec, and on-budget, and it was designed around having morons do the work. A handful of people at the top did the design work, which trickled down through layers of less and less skilled worker until you go to the bottom. At the bottom, the code monkey (not necessarily their terminology) would have a stack of sheets of paper, each describing one function or procedure to write. It would describe the function name, the inputs, the outputs, and the algorithm to be coded. The algorithm was described in such detail that even the least skilled coders could do the job. And then it would be reviewed by someone else to make sure it did the job, integrated with the growing application, etc. Now, while a handful of scrappy coders could often complete projects in less time, what this big company had was predictability, so they could enter into a contract where they could be precise about the time and cost from the outset.
Unless you understood their business model, you could find their hiring criteria to be to be counter-intuitive. But what they wanted was cheap college graduates willing to do drudge work. If you could play dumb and do the job, then you could gradually work your way up the chain. But in general, a smart 'rebel' type would never get hired there, nor would they generally want to. Linux geeks are used to thinking about computer programmers as being smart, but that's not how the business world sees them. Coders are a commodity to be bought and sold like corn (and just as lacking in useful content).
I don't know about other people, but I had nothing but bad experiences with their DRAM products. I would call their tech support and usually get a voicemail. They would never return those calls. If I called anothe department (sales always answered), they would just forward me to the same voicemail. If I was persistent enough, calling enoug times per day, I might get someone on the phone with technical support.
Their "performance" DRAM products seemed to deteriorate over time. I would configure my system with the exact voltage and timing numbers they specified and run a burn-in test. It would work great for the first couple of days. Perfect stabillity, good performance. Memory tests, kernel compiles, everything was great. But after the first few DAYS, it would all go to hell. There were no hard memory errors, but the system would start crashing during compiles. With a lot of effort, I managed two exchanges with OCZ (so that's three pairs of DIMMs I tried in sequence), and each set went through the same pattern -- worked great then started failing. After the third set, I paid the restocking fee with Newegg and bought form Crucial. I have no idea what the problem was, but OCZ was not interested in figuring it out.
Sure, but all that will do is limit the supply of goods to one relatively limited Asian market, right? I mean, Korea is pretty big, but not as big as the EU or China.
London traffic has become unsustainable, so the government instituted usage charges for using the roads within certain confines in London. The idea is that if people have to pay something to go there, they won't go there if they don't NEED to. I'm not sure how effective if has been, because as it is in NYC, most people driving in London HAVE to, while others use public transport or don't even bother to go.
By adding a marginal cost to medical car, however, this might improve the sustainability of the NHS in two ways. One is that it'll bring in some additional revenue. The other is that it will discourage people from going if they don't have a significant concern, reducing excessive demand on the system. I've always seen this sort of thing as good way to prevent abuse. In the US, many insurange companies require "co-payments" of like $20 when going to the doctor. As long as the cost is lower for lower-income situations, then this can have only positive effects on the system. (Well, unless the system wastes the money.)
We get all these people who think that vaccines are linked to autism because one discredited scientsts said it was, so we get all this controvercy over vaccines. But what about all the other crap we're putting into our bodies? Hormones in the water supply. Industrial pollutants. Even intentional fluoridation, which has been correlated with lower IQ. But do these people rally against this stuff? No, because it takes too much work. It's easier to go on about government conspiracies and skip going to the doctor.
This is from Silicon Spectrum, who bought the graphics accelerator from Number Nine (i128, Ticket-to-Ride, etc.). It appears they've deviced to open source that IP. The i128 was mostly 2D with some very limited 3D support. I don't know if they managed to develop anything with programmable shaders, but they might have. Also, I think they've been selling graphics accelerator IP for FPGAs for a while; not sure.
Haha. However, it's interesting to note that an iPhone is much faster with tons more memory than the original IBM mainframes that ran MVS. Actually, I'm surprised someone hasn't written an OS/360 emulator for the iPhone. Actually someone probably has...
When I was in grad school, studying linguistics, compitational linguistics, and automatic speech recognition, I recall it mentioned more than once the idea of using latent semantic analysis and such to do this kind of translation. So am I correct in assuming that this hasn't been done well in the past, and Google finally made it work well because they have larger corpora of translated texts?
A single iPod isn't going to cause any interference with flight electronics. But I've wondered what it might be like if everyone on the plane were using cellular devices at maximum power. Could that be a problem?
Also, during times when the plane is not completely level or experiencing turbulence or headed for an uncomfortable emergency water landing, I would not appreciate having someone's iPad slip out of their hand and fly into my face. Just saying.
Fly neurons aren't terribly different from ours. There are just fewer of them, doing less sophisticated processing. So the amount of processing that is done can happen in less time. In other news, Gedit is smaller and faster (at simple text editing) than Libre Office.
This is one of those situations where the intuitively obvious is now scientifically established in a way that it wasn't before, I guess. But that's important, because a lot of intuitively obvious things are wrong, so they all have to be tested.
If I google this, I get a lot of noise. Are there any documented cases where a GMO food has caused identifiable harm? I see lots of claims about what MIGHT happen, complaints about people playing God, introduction of harmful allergens, etc. But I haven't heard of any verified cases.
I often ask food producers about corn products in their food. The real reason is that my wife has a corn allergy, and you just can't get away from the stuff. The FDA has no legal definition of corn as an allergen (in contrast to gluten, for instance). So in addition to asking the question, I point out that a lot of people avoid corn to avoid GMOs. I honestly don't care about them being GMOs, but food companies that make specialty products (like gluten free foods) are sensitive to customer perceptions, sensible or not. For instance, while it's great for celiac patients that there are certified gluten-free products, the fact is, many people eating gluten-free are doing it because they think it'll help them lose weight.
The other night, I was watching Netflix in bed on my iPad. It was propped up on my chest, and I was using one hand to hold it upright. Well, at one point, my hand slipped, and the iPad flopped at what must have been light speed right onto my nose. Ever been hit on the nose by something hard? My eyes were watering, and the pain didn't go away for what seemed like millenia.
Anyhow, I'm not sure what might have happened to a spinning hard disk in this case, but I AM sure my nose would have hurt just as much.
Any more than that and you have them playing games and fighting each other instead of doing their job.
Isn't that what the Republicans and Democrats in congress already do?
We need an organization whose mandate is similar to the NSA.
For a second there I thought you were going to propose an anti-NSA organization: a government agency whose mandate and sole purpose is to protect Americans from NSA spying.
I feel dumb for not having thought of this. Mind you, protecting us from violations of our rights in general should be the job of the executive branch. The law is that we're not to be spied on without a clear chain of evidence constituting probable cause. The executive branch is supposed to enforce the law. Too bad they don't.
The "problem" with this is that there are only two groups who will use these tools. Innocent privacy enthusiasts and criminals. The NSA will be unable to distinguish between them
Are you implying that they can distinguish between them now? I don't think they particularly care. They are just building a database they can search, a private NSA Google.
True. And as someone who knows just enough about information retrieval to be dangerous, I can assure you that what they get out will be almost entirely garbage. Look up "precision" and "recall." It's like Heisenberg. If they increase precision, recall will plummet, and even real criminals won't be found. If they increase recall, their precision will be terrible, and they'll indict basically only innocent people.
We need an organization whose mandate is similar to the NSA. When the FBI, for instance, lawfully obtains evidence that gives them probable cause to get a warrant to invasively follow a chain of evidence, we need this information-gathering capability.
But the NSA over-stepped their bounds, broke the law, and betrayed all Americans and their allies. As a result, people are now more motivated to produce tools to evade organizations like the NSA. Because American citizens have the right to privacy, and they now have to go out of their way to get it, criminals are now gaining more sophisticated tools they can also use to evade the NSA. Looking at the other comments, the app mentioned in particular here isn't necessarily all that effective, but give it time. Pretty soon, you'll be able to put up an impenetrable wall around your data that the NSA can't break through.
The "problem" with this is that there are only two groups who will use these tools. Innocent privacy enthusiasts and criminals. The NSA will be unable to distinguish between them, essentially making rationally paranoid people targets of criminal investigations. And the NSA will be stupid about everyone else, seeing people NOT using encryption as low-hanging fruit, criminalizing countless innocent citizens merely in an effort to show that the NSA is catching *someone*, justifying their enormous budget. (In other words, they will make up criminals to justify their existance.)
If the NSA had obeyed the law, we wouldn't be in this mess, where it is inevitable that we can no longer spy on real criminals, probable cause or not.
They're using "overclocking" here as a metaphor, but people seem to take it literally. Overclocking the drive would involve raising voltage and increasing clock speeds. That's probably possible. But what they're talking about appears to be to give the user the ability to influence the amount of overprovisioning on the drive. For an SSD, the physical capacity is larger than the logical capacity. This is important in order to decrease the amount of sector migration needed when looking for a block to erase. From zero, adding overprovisioning will substantially increase write performance, but at a diminishing rate as you add more extra space.
As for compression, it does two things. It allows more sectors to be consolidated into the same page, amplifying the very limited flash write bandwidth. And it effectively increases the amount of overprovisioning. These two mean that more compressible data will have substantially higher write performance and somewhat higher read performance. (Although reads are already fast enough, on many drives, to max out the SATA bandwidth.)
Anyhow, giving the user the ability to tweak overprovisioning seems pretty worthless to me. At best, some users will be able to increase the logical capacity, at the expense of having lousy write performance. Maybe this would help for drives where you store large amounts of media that you write once and read a lot. But how much more capacity could you get? 25%? Another knob might be compression "effort", which trades off compute time against SSD bandwidth. There's going to be a balancing point between the two, and that probably should be dynamic in the controller, not tweaked by users who don't know the internal architecture of the drive. Some writes will take longer than others due to wear leveling, migration, and garbage collection, giving the drive controller more or less free time to spend on compressing data.
Although (as far as I know), it's anecdotal, from what I've read, there's a stonger link between autism and sensitivity to certain foods. There are documented cases where taking kids off of wheat and dairy _appeared_ to eliminate the autism symptoms. In any case, it's well known that a lot of people are sensitive to gluten, and gluten-free food is more than just a fad.
On the other hand, I've heard of TWO court cases where vaccines were linked to autusm (two, not two thousand). And in the one I read more about, the girl had a pre-existing mitocondrial condition and would have developed autism eventually anyway. Two instances does not make any kind of trend!
So what these churches should be going on about is avoiding certain highly allergenic foods (look up the top 8 on wikipedia), which would result in people eating less processed food and a more varied and ballanced diet. That would have all sorts of positive effects, even on those with no propensity for autism.
But in my experience, big churches aren't really big hot-beds of clean living and nutrition. Rather, they seem to attract fringe conspiracy theories. So why can't they start harping on about Monsanto and its conspiracy with other food providers to make us fat and stupid?
Probably because eating well is too much effort for lazy people who would rather sit like sheep in pews.
Note: I'm not against religion in general. Just fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists. On the other hand, I do buy somewhat into the idea that the TSA exists to make us complacent about invasive government, but that's perhaps knee-jerk about being fondled every time I want to get on a plane. Oh, and our government has gotten to the point where it's no longer particularly representative of citizen wants, needs, and rights. But that's a separate discussion. Probably.
If The Doctor had started out as a women, I think I'd be just as much a fan. Now, keeping in mind that regeneration is fantastical to begin with, to me, the doctor becoming a woman would be like turning James Bond into a women. Different actors or not, James Bond is James Bond, and The Doctor is The Doctor. As Stephen Moffit said, the different Doctors aren't different people; they're all the same man who just can change his appearance. From a genetic point of view, I'm assuming his DNA doesn't change much when he regnerates, and that in Time Lord DNA, there are markers for gender like there are for humans. So turning into a woman would be a more substantial rewrite. And would he really be a woman, or would it be more like a sex change operation? (This is not a debate on gender reassignment, because as far as I'm concerned, people should have control over their appearance and identity. Even The Doctor, I guess.)
I feel that Doctor Who has done much weirder things, and much of the series from the beginning (if you really want to be honest) has been kinda lame, particularly Series 7 Part 2. I mean aside from "The Name of the Doctor" (which was awesome), the most of the rest of Series 7 has been dreadful. And I could point out more than a few classic serials that were pretty darn awful as well. If they do pick a woman for the role in the future, I'll just continue to watch the show like I always have, on the lookout for those few episode gems, like I always do. However, I might be inclined to assume that they chose a woman mostly because of social pressure, not necessarily because it's a good idea. It MIGHT INDEED be a good idea, but any indication that the producers reasoned based on anything but coersion would not be evident.
This isn't any different from all the pressure to write a multi-Doctor episode. Stephen Moffit addressed this issue when he (as I mentioned above) pointed out that they're all the same man who can change his appearance. He was only willing to write a multi-Doctor episode if it make a really good story (which is ironic given some of the recent episodes). So likewise, the producers should be willing to gender-change The Doctor only if it's going to do something really good for the series. And that being said, there are LOTS of female actors who could do a fabulous job in the role. Given that any woman they'd pick would be under much closer scrutiny by the fanbase (many of whom would blame the actress for what is really just bad writing), I think the producers would be smart enough to (a) carefully choose an actress who epitomizes the role, and (b) do a better job on the script writing to avoid misdirected criticism.
And given that last bit of reasoning, I think I'd rather like to see it done. It'll force the writers to do a better job and make the show all-around a lot better.
BTW, as for the number of times he can regenerate, the producers have said they're not going to respect the limit of 12. In a Sarah Jane Aventures episode, he said he could generate 507 times, which I assume to be just a big number be picked to be funny. Another suggestion I've heard is that because of the time war, the Time Lords reengineered themselves to have no limit on regeneration.
IIRC, there's been plenty of research into using 13nm UV to do lithography. Intensity was one issue. The issue not mentioned in the summary is that 13nm is ionizing. It actually damages the silicon (and probably also the masks). So using 193nm, we get high process variation in part due to lithographic aberations (another cause is the randomness of dopant insertion). At 13nm, we get high variation due to damaging the device.
Recently, the CDC put up and then removed a page linking polio vaccines to cancer-causing viruses (http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/cdc-disappears-page-linking-polio-vaccines-to-cancer-causing-viruses/). Actually, over the years, many vaccines have been found to have one contamination or another.
But then again, so does every food item we buy, our drinking water, and basically, eveything else we come into contact with.
Singling out vaccines is just the vogue thing to do. With vaccines, when you weight the risks (of some rare complications) and the benefits (immunity to some nasty diseases, in most cases), the vaccines are a clear win.
Litt asks a very good question, but it's based on a bias toward the way the law is worded, which is worded that way as a means to for law enforcement to have sensible ways to legally acquire information about people. If you offer "private" data to a third part, legally, it's not private anymore. But that's not how people really think about it. People want to have the freedom to choose who does and does not have access to "private" data. And since this goes contrary to the law, the will of the people really needs to lead to some changes in the law. Publishing on Facebook may provide it to a 3rd party, but Facebook is just a data store, and people are putting specific restrictions on who can see what parts of their personal information. If we can infer the intent of someone to commit murder by their actions and statements, we can also infer the intent of someone to constrain how their private information is shared. The courts should reason about both similarly.
Personally, I only put in Facebook what already has to be public anyway, like my educational credentials. I'm a state employee, so that also has certain implications about information that is already public with regard to my job. You can find out a lot about me online, and this is partly due to the line of work I'm in. I'm betting you can also find out how much money I make. But certain information about my home and family is simply not shared and off-limits.
One of my fears is that because I choose to re-share some already-public data about myself, some judge will infer that I intend to share everything and issue a warrant for the rest of my data. And of course, I'm afraid that such a warrant might be requested in the first place because there are so damn many people with the same name as mine, and the NSA is probably a hot-bed of false correlations. We need new laws that block the development of a surveillance state and respect MODERN conceptions of what is public and private. This idea that you should have no fear if you're doing nothing wrong is bullshit. Not only is this surveillance wrong, but there's almost a guarantee that they'll get their information wrong and start charging countless innocent people with crimes.
I see very large numbers of smart and highly motivated students coming through my classes, both domestic and international. There is no shortage of students getting degrees in STEM fields. I believe the complaints stem from employers who don't want to pay a premium for better skilled engineers. There are in fact far more STEM job applicants than there are jobs. Graduates have to apply to hundreds of positions, and employers have to sift through thousands of resumes. Applications are so numerous, in fact, that HR departments are reduced to superficial checklists of buzzwords to efficiently sift through all the options. Employers want cheap laborors who nevertheless do a good job, while students who want to get paid appropriately to their skill level are getting Masters and Doctoral degrees in the hopes of being more "qualified." (In fact, they're often culled first for being OVER qualified and therefore too expensive.)
So, what companies are doing is a spin game. They report to federal funding agencies that there's a shortage, when in fact what they want is to increase the probability of identifying more skilled applicants that they can dupe into taking lower paying jobs. The end result is that there are too many people getting STEM degrees (when they would be better off doing other things), not enough job openings, and rising unemployment. We need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, and they can earn a good living, but nobody seems to care about them.