At work, Windows 8.1 (ugh) i7 5820k, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd. Dual monitor setup, because I code.
Personal laptop, asus zenbook ux31a, dual-booting windows 10 and ubuntu. Recently upgraded the ssd on it to 1tb after the 256gb that came with it failed. Other than that, fantastic laptop.
Home gaming machine, Dual booting Windows 10 and Steam OS. Same as the work machine, except 1 tb platter hard-drive (I need to get an ssd for it) and a geforce gtx 970.
Home file storage / media server. Atom processor d510, 4gb ram, running ubuntu server. Storage drives running a zfs pool raidz setup.
I have an old mac mini in the office that doesn't get turned on very much, except when I want to try my hand at some iOS development.
Sad that theres so much password reuse that this sort of thing is needed... Awesome of these companies to take initiative and let people know their accounts aren't safe.
In this day and age, there's no excuse for password reuse because why not use a password manager. That said, password reuse *shouldn't* be a problem. Client-side salt + hash, encrypted session so the hashed password doesn't go down the wire in plain text, second hash server-side for storage + verification. The server you're connecting to shouldn't be able to TELL what your password is, the salt makes it so that an unscrupulous employee can't use a rainbow table to figure it out (or even determine if the same password was used based on the hash, because they would have different salts), and the server-side hash makes it so a data breach doesn't get you access even to that account, much less others where the password was reused.
That makes it such that the only way you can break a weak password is by trying a bunch of the common ones. Lock out the account after a number of tries, and enforce a certain amount of time between tries even before the lockout, and you honestly shouldn't care if the user picked 1234 for his password (I have the same combination in my luggage), it will be secure. Much more so than depending on your users to be smart about password selection.
I have never taken a narcotic drug (unless you count the weakest possible prescription, three or four days post-wisdom tooth removal). My daily expenditure in continuing to not take narcotic drugs is consequently next to zilch.
If by that you mean that you've never over-indulged on food, and thus never got used to thinking that 4 slices of pizza in one thinking is the norm, then you're right. It's much harder to give up snacking every time you sit in front of the tv once it becomes a habit than it is to just never gain that habit in the first place, for example.
As I see this it's nothing short of a human tragedy that so many people—in an otherwise wealthy society—got themselves into this adverse metabolic state in the first place
It's not an adverse metabolic state. When you study the metabolism of two different people at the same height and waste, and take the absolute lowest range and compare it to the absolute highest range, the difference is no more than 250 kcals. That's less than two glasses of coke, which most people will drink during dinner. Drink water instead and you just made up for being at the low end of metabolism for your size. You can even compare yourself to body builders. An extra pound of lean muscle only gains you an extra 9 kcals a day in expenditure, on average.
The cause of obesity is exactly the fact we're a wealthy society. Food isn't scarce. I don't have to count calories because my metabolism sucks. I have to count calories because over the course of a day I'll be offered free sodas, somebody will bring doughnuts to work, we'll go grab a burger for lunch at a place where the burger plus a side of fries by itself can have more calories than I need for an entire day (it's pretty easy to get a 2,000 kcals lunch in this society.
It's fine. The food is tasty. I don't deny myself those. But if I have a 4,000 calories worth of food today because I've splurged, I make note of it so I make it up by eating ~350 calories less a day for the next days to make up for it. You can't eat double your calories every single day and expect not to gain weight, but in today's society that is extremely easy to do without paying attention.
It's also really easy to overestimate how many calories you need. I need about 2,000 a day to maintain my weight, which is what people think of as the standard for males. But I'm 5'10", 150 lbs. I don't spend that much just living and sitting at my chair in the office. I spend that much because I also work out every day, and I'm either running for 4 miles or swimming laps for 30 minutes or doing the stationary bike for an hour....otherwise, I'd need to eat about 1400-1500 calories to maintain. If you're not active, it's unlikely you should be eating 2,000 kcals. People don't realize our work changed. We used to have to walk to work, and to be on our feet all day long. My job is sitting all day I'm spending less calories and have easier access to more calories, and people are surprised average weight goes up?
Finally, people think there exist people who can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, because you might see me eat that 2,000 calorie lunch when you go out to eat with me, every time. You think that's representative, and you don't realize you have no idea what I"m eating for dinner, what I ate for breakfast, and what I'll eat the next days when I'm not meeting you for lunch. People who are thin simply don't eat as many calories and / or spend more than you. That's it. Metabolic differences exist, but that's peanuts compared to the real issues.
Not everyone needs to count calories, but those that don't simply aren't tempted by food as much, don't regularly snack, and normally gravitate to less calorie dense foods so they're getting less calories in the first place. If you're the guy always wondering, "should I get the fries today, or am I better off not getting a side", you need to count calories in order to actually answe
IMHO the entire concept of "dieting" is flawed; any temporary fix is just that; temporary.
That's true.
Unless the changed behaviour becomes the normal (unconscious) behaviour, it will inevitably revert to what was previously normal.
That's not. If your unconscious behavior is to overeat, then it means you have to be forever vigilant. I count my calories every day. I will always count my calories every day. I always have to force myself to go workout even when I don't feel like it. I always have to weigh myself every day and ensure the weight remains healthy. None of this is unconscious behavior, none of it is temporary. It's just a responsibility, like showering, brushing your teeth, and flossing. You know you have to do it, and you know you'll always have to do it for your entire life, you don't get a break from it.
I686 was the first to enable MMX, so the funny thing is that you probably weren't taking advantage of it until about 2010 if you were running Ubuntu. Just in time to switch over to amd64
Hah. Yeah, I wasn't running Linux at all in those days, but I still doubt I benefited from it in any way. I remember my computer included an intel disk with sample software to demonstrate how great the processor was, that I'm sure was compiled with their own compiler with MMX support. It also came with a racing game that had MMX printed on the cover (really, go Intel marketing), so I'm sure they compiled it with support for those instructions. I can't be certain I remember the name of the game but I think it was called Pod.
That said, in the 2000s when I started getting into Linux, I experimented with Gentoo and going nuts with compiling optimizations (don't judge me, what idiot things were YOU doing in your 20s?), and I'm sure I enabled MMX and SSE.
Remember back in the Pentium days when RAM was cheaper than hard-disc space?
No, I don't. I've never had more RAM than hard disk space, and I've definitely never seen it any cheaper. I would have loved that back in the day, we talked about setting up ram drives all the time to speed up disk access, which was really slow. This is just a case of a very large company paying a premium for ram because they needed it, and they didn't need the extra hard drive space.
In fact, it's pretty weird to have a Pentium 120 MHz with a 16MB HDD. When I upgraded from my 486, I got a Pentium 133 MHz (with MMX instruction set, w00...I had no idea what that meant at the time while still in high school, but Intel sure marketed it successfully) with 32MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. My 486 had a 500 MB drive in it, which we upgraded to from an 80 MB drive.
In other words, they dont want to support or develop it any more and now they can point to the Free price tag for justification.
Which is awesome of them? I mean, companies are under no obligation to give you their software for free just because they're going to stop development on it. Most don't. They can just stop selling, stop supporting, and move on.
I mean, talk about entitlement mentality. They give you software and you respond by saying, "but you're going to stop investing your resources on it!" They don't owe you anything, thank them for what they chose to give you anyway.
When it comes to battery life, NOTHING on the market can beat Pebble's first generation Pebble Watch and Pebble Watch Steel. Even Pebble's own second generation Time and Time Steel run time took a hit when they introduced the color screen.
No, it really didn't. The second generation beats it pretty handily. My Pebble Time Steel lasts 10 days on a charge.
You're probably using a watchface that updates seconds. Those faces killed battery life on the first generation too. Pick something that doesn't display every second, and just displays the minutes, and you get the improved battery life they claim in their marketing.
However chess programs do just fine. They can still simulate out all the moves to a good number of turns ahead and statistically decide the more optimal ones.
Although, interestingly, even the computers do a bit worse:)
Chess isn't a broken game, and there are a lot of permutations that have never been seen before. In the beginning of the game, a lot more options are available, and chess programs rely on a known library of openings and their counters. The middle game, assuming you're equally familiar with the openings, is where you can get an advantage (although it's not likely these days, because computers have gotten fast enough to look a good number of turns ahead, as you've said. Still, it's possible). The end game is optimal for the computer, as the number of permutations left become small enough to exhaustively search. So, if you randomize the board, no opening library for the computer, same as as with the human masters and grandmasters.
Where that threshold is that we can call the endgame where the computer becomes flawless continuously comes a little bit earlier, as processing power improves.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly...
What the Government is demanding is not just for Apple to blow up the safe, they are requesting a permanent opening be made in ALL safes for their convenience.
No, they're not. They're not requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to all iPhones. They're requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to phones they have a warrant for, issued with probable cause.
A safe maker may be compelled to produce a key for a safe, and reimbursed for the cost of making said key. If the safe owner modified the lock and the key does not work, the Government can NOT compel the safe maker to blow open the safe.
They CAN, however, compel the safe maker to give them the specs on the safe, so that they may better try to crack it. Which is the FBI's point here. If you refuse to have your expert engineers help us, then hand over all the source code so we can make the modification ourselves.
he's playing against it like it's a human opponent, he's playing against it like he's a go champion, he needs to play against it like he's a programmer. I would be curious as to how it deals with mirror play, or wildly suboptimal plays. I would wonder if it's overfit to go played well.
Ever tried that with a chess program? Doesn't go over well. A wildly suboptimal play just makes the tree search look really good for the computer. It doesn't get emotionally distraught because it thinks you've seen something it didn't. It just sees better valued moves.
This Go algorithm is even more complex. It's a neural-network algorithm combined with tree-search (I don't play Go, but as I understand it, the number of permutations are so high, tree-search alone isn't feasible). This neural network was trained using input from previous tournaments, using games against expert players, and using games against itself. I don't think you can throw anything at it that will break it. Computers have officially become better than humans at Go. In a decade or so, when the really good Go programs can run in your phone, you'll be seeing the same type of cheating attempts going on that currently plague chess competitions.
It's not that it's difficult, it's just that it requires more time than the heat death of the universe to execute.
Eh...most phones I've seen limit your key to a 4-digit pin. So we're really talking 10,000 combinations, and that's without taking in consideration the non-uniform distribution of pins people choose.
Therefore, balancing calories in to Calories out is not so stupidly simple as it seems to the underweight layperson.
What about the previously slightly obese person and currently healthy weight person (by BMI measurement)? Because that's me. And even during the obese period, I never had any delusions about it not being as simple as balancing calories in and out. It was a matter of changing my mindset so that I was actually serious about the work involved.
Are they right that the number of calories you take in isn't exact? Of course. It's even harder to measure the number of calories out. Does this matter? Not in the least. They're good enough rough approximations. If you're trying to match your calories in to your calories out to a net -5 calories, you're doing it wrong. Aim for at least -500. Even if you're wrong by, say, 400 calories, you're still negative -100 and in the long term will lose weight. Sometimes you'll be wrong in the other direction and will be negative even more that 500 calories for that day. Chances are, in fact, that the long-term average will approximate what you're aiming for.
>And with good reason. Isn't the whole point of the registry to be able to contact the owner of a wayward quadcopter and hold them responsible for whatever has caused it to be in your possession.
Yes, but not directly. If somebody knocks out your mailbox with their car, you take down that license plate number, and give it to the police, who then run the plates and get a warrant. You can't directly get the name of who owns that license plate number and show up at the dude's door, and nor should you.
If somebody did something illegal that caused you to be in possession of their wayward quadcopter, then you can call the police and report it. Then let them figure out who the owner is. That prevents you from harassing a guy who was doing something perfectly legal that you think ought to be illegal.
Why this change? It's not reasonably discoverable.
As stupid as that reasoning is, that's the point.
There's a fad among certain UI people that you shouldn't confuse users with options, and give them only what they need. The small number of people who need to do more stuff than the majority of people, should either not do what they want to, and adapt to what the interface presents you, or go through a painful process to figure out how to do it. The idea being that if you're computer savvy enough to do something different than the majority of users, you're computer savvy enough to google and go through the extra process. If it's easily discoverable, the non-computer savvy user will come across it and get confused / perform an action he didn't mean to and doesn't know how to do undo.
I can't emphasize enough how stupid that is, but the gnome people have always suffered from it. I like their window manager a lot honestly, this is my one gripe. Options are good, people.
Apparently it really depends on your definition of mass shootings. By the most broad definition I could find (4 or more people shot in a single incident) there were 353 mass shootings in the US in 2015 by November 23rd. So about one per day on average.
Fair enough, but whatever definition you use, the question is whether it's getting better or worse if you use consistent definitions year-to-year. And the person you're replying to is right: it's getting better, gun homicide is significantly down from past decades. source
He didn't follow their advice and continue to wonder around the school with it, not obeying other instructions, which could be seen as suspicious.
You don't arrest people because you're suspicious. This culture of fear is a terrible thing and it really needs to stop.
You see a kid with something that might be potentially dangerous, you approach him and ask him, "what's that?" He shows it you, tells you it's a clock. You look at it, you let him explain it to you. At that point, you said, "cool" and leave him alone because it's clearly not dangerous. There's no reason he should put it away, there's no reason he shouldn't have it on him. The next person who sees it and is concerned should simply follow the same procedure and ask.
Doing anything beyond that is completely unjustified. If he tried to pass it off as a bomb, that'd be another thing, but everyone who asked was told it's a clock. He deserves a settlement for the shit he was forced to go through. I don't know about the amount, but that's all up to the lawyers.
Like seizing Tormail and using it to install malware in Tor users browsers? I agree, the FBI should be putting some of their own in federal prison for these crimes the same as anyone else would be. If anything police should be punished more severely for breaking the law than anyone else.
I'm not familiar with that case, but if they did so without a warrant, then yes, absolutely. I agree entirely with your sentiment, I do think law enforcement should be held even more strictly to the laws than everyone else.
What are your thoughts on warrantless use of stingray?
That's a very good analogy, and I had to go read about how it works in order to answer your question.
I think I'm ok with the use of stingray to intercept communications as it happens today, but think it should be treated as a security flaw and the method shouldn't work in the future. It works by forcing nearby cell phones to connect to it, but in order for the call to be completed it must also connect to a legitimate cell phone tower in a man-in-the-middle attack.
Ideally, the cell phone companies should fix the protocol with stronger authentication between phone and towers, to prevent such attacks. Then, in order to operate a stingray in this mode, a warrant would be required that would compel the mobile company to provide the police with a valid key for use by the stingray device for a particular tower, for a given period of time.
'Consultants' perform wide-scale, warrantless, attack against large number of individuals not even suspected of wrongdoing on behalf of FBI under the guise of 'research'(probably not IRB approved); FBI thanks them for their assistance and introduces the fruits of an operation that would have been dubiously legal in scope even with a warrant; much less without one.
I'm the first to complaint about warrantless search of Americans, but I don't think this qualifies. If you're going to install software on computers you don't own in order to capture information, you need a warrant. If you're going to ask a private company to hand over data on their users, you need a warrant. If you're going to capture information that passes through your own hardware, even if it's encrypted, that's fair game. If you find a way to break the anonymizing network by creating your own fake relays to do it, as far as my judgement goes, the data was yours to play with, because it passed through your relays, and the research was legitimate, because you did find a flaw on the network.
The only thing I see wrong with this entire operation is that we have laws against what people can or can't take. It's their life, their bodies, their decision, and the FBI is wasting resources going after people who pose no danger to society (at least as far as Silk Road 2.0. The first Silk Road had the guy in charge trying to hire a hit man. Definitely not just a drugs thing. The investigation was legit, the research was legit, and it gives the Tor Project something to think about as far as improving their network.
When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
That's not actually what Occam's Razor says. What Occam's Razor says is that we should consider all explanations that haven't been proven false by evidence. When two explanations give the exact same predictions, and therefore can't be differentiated through observation of evidence, then you assume the simpler one. Not because it has a higher probability of being right, because given nothing to differentiate between the two theories, you can't make that claim. Simply because even if the more complex explanation is right, the simpler explanation is clearly an excellent model for it.
In this case, there's a perfectly natural explanation that seems to fit the case. By all means, let's not assume that it's aliens and make decisions based on that conclusion. The dominant theory at the moment should be debris by a large planetary collision. That said, we have nothing to falsify the partial Dyson Sphere theory, and it does give some different predictions than the natural explanations. So it absolutely means we should dedicate some telescope time and see if we can gather more evidence for or against all possible explanations. That's how science works.
Theora, based on VP3, is roughly H.263-class technology comparable to Sorenson Spark (FLV) and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX and Xvid). H.264 and VP8 are a generation ahead of it in rate/distortion performance at Internet bitrates
That's mostly true, although Theora has been improved to the point where it is closer to H.264.
That said, Xiph has also been working on Daala, which is intended to compete with H.265.
1) Real AI will NOT be directly controlled by it's original programs. That is not AI, that is a well simulated AI.
Why should artificial intelligence be any different from natural intelligence? We can't act outside our programming, why would AI?
Intelligence tells you how to get what you wants. How you're wired tells you what you wants. Who you're attracted to, what foods you like and dislike, what activities you find enjoyable...your conscious self has zero control over those things. All you can do and decide how to go about getting in the things you're programmed to go after and avoid the things that you're programmed to dislike.
Oh, sure. Intelligence can help you draw complex conclusions. You want to eat a ton of crap, but you don't want the consequences of being obese. Intelligence lets you make the connection between overeating, obesity, and the consequences of it that you've been programmed to avoid. But you can't choose these things, you can't choose your end goals, and neither will AI.
Why does that matter? If she was allowed to opt out of the system, then asked for it in her later years when she realized she needed it, then you'd have a point. But she participated in the system the same as anyone who agreed with it. To not partake in the benefits after you've paid into it makes zero sense.
Everybody except the rich does.
First, that's not necessarily true. My father died this year at 65 years old. Do you think he got more than he paid in?
Second, why is it justifiable to take from the rich? It is their property, so if they're not benefiting from it, how do you justify taking it from them?
I actually am in favor of social security, but let's be honest and use valid arguments, shall we? First, a society that allows people who can't take care of themselves to suffer is a very cruel society, and not one I'd want to be a part of. Second, the rich do benefit from social programs, because a large number of homeless individuals in the society they live in isn't conducive to business and it will hurt their bottom line. Example: I have no children, but I bought a house near a place with good schools. My property taxes pay for that school, and although I don't benefit from the school directly, my property value appreciates at a greater rate as a result of it, giving me an indirect monetary benefit.
The driver should never use a feature of a car that can make it move in a way that it can hit a human.
Except for features of a car that are designed to function without a human. The entire point of moving to self-driving / self-parking cars is so you don't have to do it.
Now, we're not at that point yet, and I agree that in this instance it's the driver's responsibility. However, it's not defensible or ethical for Volvo to sell the pedestrian-detection feature separately from the self-parking feature anymore than it would be for them to sell seat-belts as an option. They know idiot drivers exist, they know the feature could save lives. If you don't offer a self-parking system with that capability, that's fine. However, if you have done the R&D to develop it, you better include it as a selling point of your improved self-parking system over other manufacturers, not as a separate feature. Doing otherwise is simply not ethical.
At work, Windows 8.1 (ugh) i7 5820k, 16gb ram, 500gb ssd. Dual monitor setup, because I code.
Personal laptop, asus zenbook ux31a, dual-booting windows 10 and ubuntu. Recently upgraded the ssd on it to 1tb after the 256gb that came with it failed. Other than that, fantastic laptop.
Home gaming machine, Dual booting Windows 10 and Steam OS. Same as the work machine, except 1 tb platter hard-drive (I need to get an ssd for it) and a geforce gtx 970.
Home file storage / media server. Atom processor d510, 4gb ram, running ubuntu server. Storage drives running a zfs pool raidz setup.
I have an old mac mini in the office that doesn't get turned on very much, except when I want to try my hand at some iOS development.
Sad that theres so much password reuse that this sort of thing is needed... Awesome of these companies to take initiative and let people know their accounts aren't safe.
In this day and age, there's no excuse for password reuse because why not use a password manager. That said, password reuse *shouldn't* be a problem. Client-side salt + hash, encrypted session so the hashed password doesn't go down the wire in plain text, second hash server-side for storage + verification. The server you're connecting to shouldn't be able to TELL what your password is, the salt makes it so that an unscrupulous employee can't use a rainbow table to figure it out (or even determine if the same password was used based on the hash, because they would have different salts), and the server-side hash makes it so a data breach doesn't get you access even to that account, much less others where the password was reused.
That makes it such that the only way you can break a weak password is by trying a bunch of the common ones. Lock out the account after a number of tries, and enforce a certain amount of time between tries even before the lockout, and you honestly shouldn't care if the user picked 1234 for his password (I have the same combination in my luggage), it will be secure. Much more so than depending on your users to be smart about password selection.
I have never taken a narcotic drug (unless you count the weakest possible prescription, three or four days post-wisdom tooth removal). My daily expenditure in continuing to not take narcotic drugs is consequently next to zilch.
If by that you mean that you've never over-indulged on food, and thus never got used to thinking that 4 slices of pizza in one thinking is the norm, then you're right. It's much harder to give up snacking every time you sit in front of the tv once it becomes a habit than it is to just never gain that habit in the first place, for example.
As I see this it's nothing short of a human tragedy that so many people—in an otherwise wealthy society—got themselves into this adverse metabolic state in the first place
It's not an adverse metabolic state. When you study the metabolism of two different people at the same height and waste, and take the absolute lowest range and compare it to the absolute highest range, the difference is no more than 250 kcals. That's less than two glasses of coke, which most people will drink during dinner. Drink water instead and you just made up for being at the low end of metabolism for your size. You can even compare yourself to body builders. An extra pound of lean muscle only gains you an extra 9 kcals a day in expenditure, on average.
The cause of obesity is exactly the fact we're a wealthy society. Food isn't scarce. I don't have to count calories because my metabolism sucks. I have to count calories because over the course of a day I'll be offered free sodas, somebody will bring doughnuts to work, we'll go grab a burger for lunch at a place where the burger plus a side of fries by itself can have more calories than I need for an entire day (it's pretty easy to get a 2,000 kcals lunch in this society.
It's fine. The food is tasty. I don't deny myself those. But if I have a 4,000 calories worth of food today because I've splurged, I make note of it so I make it up by eating ~350 calories less a day for the next days to make up for it. You can't eat double your calories every single day and expect not to gain weight, but in today's society that is extremely easy to do without paying attention.
It's also really easy to overestimate how many calories you need. I need about 2,000 a day to maintain my weight, which is what people think of as the standard for males. But I'm 5'10", 150 lbs. I don't spend that much just living and sitting at my chair in the office. I spend that much because I also work out every day, and I'm either running for 4 miles or swimming laps for 30 minutes or doing the stationary bike for an hour....otherwise, I'd need to eat about 1400-1500 calories to maintain. If you're not active, it's unlikely you should be eating 2,000 kcals. People don't realize our work changed. We used to have to walk to work, and to be on our feet all day long. My job is sitting all day I'm spending less calories and have easier access to more calories, and people are surprised average weight goes up?
Finally, people think there exist people who can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, because you might see me eat that 2,000 calorie lunch when you go out to eat with me, every time. You think that's representative, and you don't realize you have no idea what I"m eating for dinner, what I ate for breakfast, and what I'll eat the next days when I'm not meeting you for lunch. People who are thin simply don't eat as many calories and / or spend more than you. That's it. Metabolic differences exist, but that's peanuts compared to the real issues.
Not everyone needs to count calories, but those that don't simply aren't tempted by food as much, don't regularly snack, and normally gravitate to less calorie dense foods so they're getting less calories in the first place. If you're the guy always wondering, "should I get the fries today, or am I better off not getting a side", you need to count calories in order to actually answe
IMHO the entire concept of "dieting" is flawed; any temporary fix is just that; temporary.
That's true.
Unless the changed behaviour becomes the normal (unconscious) behaviour, it will inevitably revert to what was previously normal.
That's not. If your unconscious behavior is to overeat, then it means you have to be forever vigilant. I count my calories every day. I will always count my calories every day. I always have to force myself to go workout even when I don't feel like it. I always have to weigh myself every day and ensure the weight remains healthy. None of this is unconscious behavior, none of it is temporary. It's just a responsibility, like showering, brushing your teeth, and flossing. You know you have to do it, and you know you'll always have to do it for your entire life, you don't get a break from it.
I686 was the first to enable MMX, so the funny thing is that you probably weren't taking advantage of it until about 2010 if you were running Ubuntu. Just in time to switch over to amd64
Hah. Yeah, I wasn't running Linux at all in those days, but I still doubt I benefited from it in any way. I remember my computer included an intel disk with sample software to demonstrate how great the processor was, that I'm sure was compiled with their own compiler with MMX support. It also came with a racing game that had MMX printed on the cover (really, go Intel marketing), so I'm sure they compiled it with support for those instructions. I can't be certain I remember the name of the game but I think it was called Pod.
That said, in the 2000s when I started getting into Linux, I experimented with Gentoo and going nuts with compiling optimizations (don't judge me, what idiot things were YOU doing in your 20s?), and I'm sure I enabled MMX and SSE.
Remember back in the Pentium days when RAM was cheaper than hard-disc space?
No, I don't. I've never had more RAM than hard disk space, and I've definitely never seen it any cheaper. I would have loved that back in the day, we talked about setting up ram drives all the time to speed up disk access, which was really slow. This is just a case of a very large company paying a premium for ram because they needed it, and they didn't need the extra hard drive space.
In fact, it's pretty weird to have a Pentium 120 MHz with a 16MB HDD. When I upgraded from my 486, I got a Pentium 133 MHz (with MMX instruction set, w00...I had no idea what that meant at the time while still in high school, but Intel sure marketed it successfully) with 32MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. My 486 had a 500 MB drive in it, which we upgraded to from an 80 MB drive.
In other words, they dont want to support or develop it any more and now they can point to the Free price tag for justification.
Which is awesome of them? I mean, companies are under no obligation to give you their software for free just because they're going to stop development on it. Most don't. They can just stop selling, stop supporting, and move on.
I mean, talk about entitlement mentality. They give you software and you respond by saying, "but you're going to stop investing your resources on it!" They don't owe you anything, thank them for what they chose to give you anyway.
When it comes to battery life, NOTHING on the market can beat Pebble's first generation Pebble Watch and Pebble Watch Steel. Even Pebble's own second generation Time and Time Steel run time took a hit when they introduced the color screen.
No, it really didn't. The second generation beats it pretty handily. My Pebble Time Steel lasts 10 days on a charge.
You're probably using a watchface that updates seconds. Those faces killed battery life on the first generation too. Pick something that doesn't display every second, and just displays the minutes, and you get the improved battery life they claim in their marketing.
However chess programs do just fine. They can still simulate out all the moves to a good number of turns ahead and statistically decide the more optimal ones.
Although, interestingly, even the computers do a bit worse :)
Chess isn't a broken game, and there are a lot of permutations that have never been seen before. In the beginning of the game, a lot more options are available, and chess programs rely on a known library of openings and their counters. The middle game, assuming you're equally familiar with the openings, is where you can get an advantage (although it's not likely these days, because computers have gotten fast enough to look a good number of turns ahead, as you've said. Still, it's possible). The end game is optimal for the computer, as the number of permutations left become small enough to exhaustively search. So, if you randomize the board, no opening library for the computer, same as as with the human masters and grandmasters.
Where that threshold is that we can call the endgame where the computer becomes flawless continuously comes a little bit earlier, as processing power improves.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides, "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly ...
What the Government is demanding is not just for Apple to blow up the safe, they are requesting a permanent opening be made in ALL safes for their convenience.
No, they're not. They're not requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to all iPhones. They're requesting Apple flash the modified firmware to phones they have a warrant for, issued with probable cause.
A safe maker may be compelled to produce a key for a safe, and reimbursed for the cost of making said key. If the safe owner modified the lock and the key does not work, the Government can NOT compel the safe maker to blow open the safe.
They CAN, however, compel the safe maker to give them the specs on the safe, so that they may better try to crack it. Which is the FBI's point here. If you refuse to have your expert engineers help us, then hand over all the source code so we can make the modification ourselves.
he's playing against it like it's a human opponent, he's playing against it like he's a go champion, he needs to play against it like he's a programmer. I would be curious as to how it deals with mirror play, or wildly suboptimal plays. I would wonder if it's overfit to go played well.
Ever tried that with a chess program? Doesn't go over well. A wildly suboptimal play just makes the tree search look really good for the computer. It doesn't get emotionally distraught because it thinks you've seen something it didn't. It just sees better valued moves.
This Go algorithm is even more complex. It's a neural-network algorithm combined with tree-search (I don't play Go, but as I understand it, the number of permutations are so high, tree-search alone isn't feasible). This neural network was trained using input from previous tournaments, using games against expert players, and using games against itself. I don't think you can throw anything at it that will break it. Computers have officially become better than humans at Go. In a decade or so, when the really good Go programs can run in your phone, you'll be seeing the same type of cheating attempts going on that currently plague chess competitions.
It's not that it's difficult, it's just that it requires more time than the heat death of the universe to execute.
Eh...most phones I've seen limit your key to a 4-digit pin. So we're really talking 10,000 combinations, and that's without taking in consideration the non-uniform distribution of pins people choose.
Therefore, balancing calories in to Calories out is not so stupidly simple as it seems to the underweight layperson.
What about the previously slightly obese person and currently healthy weight person (by BMI measurement)? Because that's me. And even during the obese period, I never had any delusions about it not being as simple as balancing calories in and out. It was a matter of changing my mindset so that I was actually serious about the work involved.
Are they right that the number of calories you take in isn't exact? Of course. It's even harder to measure the number of calories out. Does this matter? Not in the least. They're good enough rough approximations. If you're trying to match your calories in to your calories out to a net -5 calories, you're doing it wrong. Aim for at least -500. Even if you're wrong by, say, 400 calories, you're still negative -100 and in the long term will lose weight. Sometimes you'll be wrong in the other direction and will be negative even more that 500 calories for that day. Chances are, in fact, that the long-term average will approximate what you're aiming for.
>And with good reason. Isn't the whole point of the registry to be able to contact the owner of a wayward quadcopter and hold them responsible for whatever has caused it to be in your possession.
Yes, but not directly. If somebody knocks out your mailbox with their car, you take down that license plate number, and give it to the police, who then run the plates and get a warrant. You can't directly get the name of who owns that license plate number and show up at the dude's door, and nor should you.
If somebody did something illegal that caused you to be in possession of their wayward quadcopter, then you can call the police and report it. Then let them figure out who the owner is. That prevents you from harassing a guy who was doing something perfectly legal that you think ought to be illegal.
Why this change? It's not reasonably discoverable.
As stupid as that reasoning is, that's the point.
There's a fad among certain UI people that you shouldn't confuse users with options, and give them only what they need. The small number of people who need to do more stuff than the majority of people, should either not do what they want to, and adapt to what the interface presents you, or go through a painful process to figure out how to do it. The idea being that if you're computer savvy enough to do something different than the majority of users, you're computer savvy enough to google and go through the extra process. If it's easily discoverable, the non-computer savvy user will come across it and get confused / perform an action he didn't mean to and doesn't know how to do undo.
I can't emphasize enough how stupid that is, but the gnome people have always suffered from it. I like their window manager a lot honestly, this is my one gripe. Options are good, people.
Apparently it really depends on your definition of mass shootings. By the most broad definition I could find (4 or more people shot in a single incident) there were 353 mass shootings in the US in 2015 by November 23rd. So about one per day on average.
Fair enough, but whatever definition you use, the question is whether it's getting better or worse if you use consistent definitions year-to-year. And the person you're replying to is right: it's getting better, gun homicide is significantly down from past decades. source
He didn't follow their advice and continue to wonder around the school with it, not obeying other instructions, which could be seen as suspicious.
You don't arrest people because you're suspicious. This culture of fear is a terrible thing and it really needs to stop.
You see a kid with something that might be potentially dangerous, you approach him and ask him, "what's that?" He shows it you, tells you it's a clock. You look at it, you let him explain it to you. At that point, you said, "cool" and leave him alone because it's clearly not dangerous. There's no reason he should put it away, there's no reason he shouldn't have it on him. The next person who sees it and is concerned should simply follow the same procedure and ask.
Doing anything beyond that is completely unjustified. If he tried to pass it off as a bomb, that'd be another thing, but everyone who asked was told it's a clock. He deserves a settlement for the shit he was forced to go through. I don't know about the amount, but that's all up to the lawyers.
Like seizing Tormail and using it to install malware in Tor users browsers? I agree, the FBI should be putting some of their own in federal prison for these crimes the same as anyone else would be. If anything police should be punished more severely for breaking the law than anyone else.
I'm not familiar with that case, but if they did so without a warrant, then yes, absolutely. I agree entirely with your sentiment, I do think law enforcement should be held even more strictly to the laws than everyone else.
What are your thoughts on warrantless use of stingray?
That's a very good analogy, and I had to go read about how it works in order to answer your question.
I think I'm ok with the use of stingray to intercept communications as it happens today, but think it should be treated as a security flaw and the method shouldn't work in the future. It works by forcing nearby cell phones to connect to it, but in order for the call to be completed it must also connect to a legitimate cell phone tower in a man-in-the-middle attack.
Ideally, the cell phone companies should fix the protocol with stronger authentication between phone and towers, to prevent such attacks. Then, in order to operate a stingray in this mode, a warrant would be required that would compel the mobile company to provide the police with a valid key for use by the stingray device for a particular tower, for a given period of time.
'Consultants' perform wide-scale, warrantless, attack against large number of individuals not even suspected of wrongdoing on behalf of FBI under the guise of 'research'(probably not IRB approved); FBI thanks them for their assistance and introduces the fruits of an operation that would have been dubiously legal in scope even with a warrant; much less without one.
I'm the first to complaint about warrantless search of Americans, but I don't think this qualifies. If you're going to install software on computers you don't own in order to capture information, you need a warrant. If you're going to ask a private company to hand over data on their users, you need a warrant. If you're going to capture information that passes through your own hardware, even if it's encrypted, that's fair game. If you find a way to break the anonymizing network by creating your own fake relays to do it, as far as my judgement goes, the data was yours to play with, because it passed through your relays, and the research was legitimate, because you did find a flaw on the network.
The only thing I see wrong with this entire operation is that we have laws against what people can or can't take. It's their life, their bodies, their decision, and the FBI is wasting resources going after people who pose no danger to society (at least as far as Silk Road 2.0. The first Silk Road had the guy in charge trying to hire a hit man. Definitely not just a drugs thing. The investigation was legit, the research was legit, and it gives the Tor Project something to think about as far as improving their network.
When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
That's not actually what Occam's Razor says. What Occam's Razor says is that we should consider all explanations that haven't been proven false by evidence. When two explanations give the exact same predictions, and therefore can't be differentiated through observation of evidence, then you assume the simpler one. Not because it has a higher probability of being right, because given nothing to differentiate between the two theories, you can't make that claim. Simply because even if the more complex explanation is right, the simpler explanation is clearly an excellent model for it.
In this case, there's a perfectly natural explanation that seems to fit the case. By all means, let's not assume that it's aliens and make decisions based on that conclusion. The dominant theory at the moment should be debris by a large planetary collision. That said, we have nothing to falsify the partial Dyson Sphere theory, and it does give some different predictions than the natural explanations. So it absolutely means we should dedicate some telescope time and see if we can gather more evidence for or against all possible explanations. That's how science works.
Theora, based on VP3, is roughly H.263-class technology comparable to Sorenson Spark (FLV) and MPEG-4 ASP (DivX and Xvid). H.264 and VP8 are a generation ahead of it in rate/distortion performance at Internet bitrates
That's mostly true, although Theora has been improved to the point where it is closer to H.264.
That said, Xiph has also been working on Daala, which is intended to compete with H.265.
1) Real AI will NOT be directly controlled by it's original programs. That is not AI, that is a well simulated AI.
Why should artificial intelligence be any different from natural intelligence? We can't act outside our programming, why would AI?
Intelligence tells you how to get what you wants. How you're wired tells you what you wants. Who you're attracted to, what foods you like and dislike, what activities you find enjoyable...your conscious self has zero control over those things. All you can do and decide how to go about getting in the things you're programmed to go after and avoid the things that you're programmed to dislike.
Oh, sure. Intelligence can help you draw complex conclusions. You want to eat a ton of crap, but you don't want the consequences of being obese. Intelligence lets you make the connection between overeating, obesity, and the consequences of it that you've been programmed to avoid. But you can't choose these things, you can't choose your end goals, and neither will AI.
She got way more than she paid in.
Why does that matter? If she was allowed to opt out of the system, then asked for it in her later years when she realized she needed it, then you'd have a point. But she participated in the system the same as anyone who agreed with it. To not partake in the benefits after you've paid into it makes zero sense.
Everybody except the rich does.
First, that's not necessarily true. My father died this year at 65 years old. Do you think he got more than he paid in?
Second, why is it justifiable to take from the rich? It is their property, so if they're not benefiting from it, how do you justify taking it from them?
I actually am in favor of social security, but let's be honest and use valid arguments, shall we? First, a society that allows people who can't take care of themselves to suffer is a very cruel society, and not one I'd want to be a part of. Second, the rich do benefit from social programs, because a large number of homeless individuals in the society they live in isn't conducive to business and it will hurt their bottom line. Example: I have no children, but I bought a house near a place with good schools. My property taxes pay for that school, and although I don't benefit from the school directly, my property value appreciates at a greater rate as a result of it, giving me an indirect monetary benefit.
The driver should never use a feature of a car that can make it move in a way that it can hit a human.
Except for features of a car that are designed to function without a human. The entire point of moving to self-driving / self-parking cars is so you don't have to do it.
Now, we're not at that point yet, and I agree that in this instance it's the driver's responsibility. However, it's not defensible or ethical for Volvo to sell the pedestrian-detection feature separately from the self-parking feature anymore than it would be for them to sell seat-belts as an option. They know idiot drivers exist, they know the feature could save lives. If you don't offer a self-parking system with that capability, that's fine. However, if you have done the R&D to develop it, you better include it as a selling point of your improved self-parking system over other manufacturers, not as a separate feature. Doing otherwise is simply not ethical.