As usual the summary isn't quite accurate. "Curing" the disease, as in reversing it once it has damaged a person's brain, is not the actual goal. From the article (emphasis mine):
Through talking to experts in the field over the past year, Gates said he had identified five areas of need: Understanding better how Alzheimer’s unfolds, detecting and diagnosing it earlier, pursuing multiple approaches to trying to halt the disease, making it easier for people to take part in clinical trials of potential new medicines, and using data better.
I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I'm gradually warming up to it. Throwing the entire timeline out the window (it is set before TOS, but is far more advanced technologically - I guess so the Klingons can be the bad guys again) is the worst part, IMO. They should have just placed it in some time after TOS and used some other species besides "Klingon" for the bad guys.
Anyway, to address your point more specifically:
Too bad the "magick spores traveling faster than warp" concept is so fucking retarded in contrast to the rest of the Star Trek universe.
In my opinion, TNG is the best Star Trek series. It epitomizes a lot of what is best about Star Trek. I've watched all the episodes numerous times, but I decided to start fresh since I started watching Discovery. Guess what is introduced in the very first episode of TNG:
1) An omnipotent, omniscient being that can read anyone's thoughts, instantly transport the ship anywhere with total disregard for distance, change and manipulate matter in any way, and even kill an entire species of creatures - wherever in the universe they may be - instantly. In other words, a purely magical being with zero scientific explanation or possibility. 2) A smallish room that multiple people can enter than can visually and physically simulate to those people any place, somehow providing each their own experience and allowing them to be far apart from one another than the size of the room, while allowing them to interact with objects that do not actually exist, in a totally perfect and flawless experience that cannot be recognized separate from reality. 3) A device which can instantly create any food or drink out of thin air.
So we have a magical being, a magical room, and a magical food making box. Discovery jumps the shark compared to this how, exactly? Sure, the whole biological "spore" thing that must somehow be navigated organically is quite annoying - if you're going to do this, just make it some kind of technology and not biological. Still, TNG was far more of a stretch over TOS than Discovery is over the various series that came before.
I think they are giving themselves too much credit. Let's strip away the advertising machine that is FB and distill it down to the most basic fundamental. A person can post information, and others who are connected to that person can see that information and react to it. That's it in a nutshell. The fact that people get a "little dopamine hit" when someone they are connected to reacts to something they did is not something Facebook engineered. It is human nature. It is why we like to sit around talking to one another, or why we like to see a person smile when we do something. This is nothing FB engineered or calculated or anything like that. For any virtual social network to be compatible with human nature and be accepted it must provide a way for people to provide feedback with one another. Calling it a "like" or letting someone comment on it is not exactly the height of software or social engineering.
Methinks he is giving Facebook way too much credit to stoke his ego that he had a hand in reshaping people's "relationship with society". Facebook was inevitable, and in fact had existed in many, many different forms in the past (Usenet, America Online dialup, MySpace, Slashdot commenting system, ad infinitum). Facebook was nothing more than a simplification of existing social networks to the point that anyone could use it. It hit a critical mass, like MS Windows, the iPod, etc, where it had to resources to outgrow the competitors.
That is totally incorrect. Since AI is software it can scale across multiple processors. There is no reason AI cannot be distributed. In that case it can scale in an unlimited fashion by running on multiple processors simultaneously. The speed of the individual processors is not a limitation as soon as you can run on more than one processor. Moore's "law" could come to a halt right now, and if an AI task needed 10 times faster processor than CPU technology allowed, you could just run it on 10 processors instead. Also keep in mind the fact that AI and its requirements are merely Turing complete. Thus the only difference processing power has on AI is how quickly it can "think", not how intelligent it is.
AI has been improving because the cost of processing speed, RAM and data storage has dropped to much. It would have been possible to have implemented Siri like speech recognition 25 years ago, but why would anyone use a multi million dollar supercomputer for something like that?
Unless all you're planning to do is steal their audience, it won't happen.
Game of Thrones only has one season left, and it will only have 6 episodes. Granted, they will surely produce some other spinoff series based on GoT, however there will be a large group of viewers ready to start watching some other (similar) epic series from the beginning once GoT has wrapped up. The final season will not air for about a year, so that gives the LOTR series enough time to sort things out and begin production so it can air less than a year after GoT ends.
Anyway what I'm saying is LOTR wouldn't compete with GoT (in first-run episodes) because GoT will already be done.
Really? J.K. Rowling over Tolkien?? Are we talking about the same Rowling who just invents things out of thin air every time she needs a plot device? The same author who invoked time travel in one single plot line but for some reason time travel was never used in any story before or after? I'm sorry, but as a fantasy author, Rowling is awful. I'll give you that Tolkien isn't known for "deep characterization", however I believe his plot lines are far more interesting and logical than Rowling's. Stephen King has incredibly "deep characterization" in The Stand, but that book totally falls apart, invoking deus ex machina in the end because he couldn't resolve the story even after killing off half the main characters. It's purely a matter of personal preference, but I prefer Tolkien's heavy-handed, consistent style of writing that is logical and historic in nature over Tolkien or even King's fantasy works.
Having read it twice, I still don't understand the point the summary is trying to make. It says piracy is much lower now than in 2011. It says Kodi "took over" the piracy arena and made it easier than ever before to access unlicensed content. It says a full 6 percent of households have a Kodi box. So what the heck is the point the summary is making? Piracy is down because Kodi makes it so much easier to access unlicensed media? That makes no sense at all. Or is this all past tense and Kodi has been stomped out and since it had taken over piracy was greatly reduced? I just don't understand what Kodi has to do with any of this, or how they know it took over online piracy when piracy is down even though Kodi makes it easier. Makes no sense.
Why would YouTube do this? Out of their good will and to simply "do what is right"? Of course not. They will make millions off of this, because they get a big cut of all the ads served.
I don't think that's true that OLED burn in is not permanent. I was very surprised to learn it is even possible in this day and age - OLED seemed to be the end-all technology for displays, as the contrast ratio is extremely high and the colors are vivid. I guess everything comes with a downside. Search for OLED burn in on Samsung phones, and you will see it's a serious problem. OLED pixels have a lifespan, and they will gradually wear out and dim over time. It's quite simple - if you have pixels that are consistently at a higher brightness than other pixels, they will wear out sooner and will look different.
A friend purchased a Samsung Note that has bad burn in. They tried a number of things to fix it (utilities that strobe the display in different colors, etc), and trust me, it is indeed permanent. The title bar and the keyboard areas are permanently ghosted on that phone. It's is most noticeable on bright white screens, as the worn out pixels cannot emit as brightly as the others. The darker the image being displayed the less noticeable it is.
I have a question for you. If we were back in time 30-40+ years, when pretty much every business either allowed smoking, or at least had a smoking section, and you could even smoke on airplanes and buses, would you have been able to kick the habit while being exposed to people doing it everywhere you went? Obviously you still see people smoking these days, but now you can very easily avoid them, which wasn't the case 30+ years ago. Just wondered what impact that amount of exposure would have on breaking such a difficult habit.
That's interesting, because just a couple days ago I noticed a small town near here with their own low-power radio station. When it gave station identification it was Pandora Media (I think the "Media" part was right) and it didn't have a human DJ - it was a male synthesized voice. With this ruling I think we'll see this sort of thing pop up everywhere - small low-power FM stations serving small areas that are 100% automated. That will be profitable because the FCC won't require staff in person at the stations.
I'm sounding like a broken record posting the same kinds of comments to these Kaspersky stories. The software itself isn't the issue. What does antivirus software do? Reads files, analyzes them for various content / fingerprints, transfers any files it deems "suspicious" files back to the company for "analysis" (default setting, unless disabled by the user), and modifies and deletes files. Same with the system registry. There will be no surprises here - we already know the software has total access to read and write to anything on the system and transfer our files to 3rd parties.
The issue is the dynamic control of the software, not how the software was written. That is in the form of antivirus definitions, which are the fingerprints to identify malicious code, and the scripts used to clean (or simply delete) infected files, which are pushed to the software practically daily. THAT is the issue - who controls the behavior of the software. Let's go worst-case and assume Russia wanted to weaponize Kaspersky antivirus. All they have to do is force the company to identify a few key pieces of Windows OS as malicious files, and delete those files as the way of quarantining the malware. Suddenly millions of Windows machines stop working. How does having access to the source code prevent that?
What we need is antivirus definitions that are controlled by some neutral "open" body that we can actually put some trust in. Currently, I rely on Microsoft's antivirus software. Why? Well, they already hold the keys to my system. They can already screw me over with a bad OS update (and it is harder and harder to disable automatic updates with each new version of Windows). So at least them having the ability to also screw me over with a bad antivirus update doesn't represent an entirely new vector by yet another 3rd party.
I'm curious the strategic use of bombers on 24 hour standby, when there are enough ICBMs, including those in nuclear subs which are likely really, really close to North Korea already, to totally decimate that country. North Korea could be a smoldering ruin before the bombers would even leave US airspace (even if they were on standby). So I wonder if the bombers would simply be more "obvious" to Kim Jong or what?
Although I think you're being funny, no, this couldn't be used in that way. Noise cancelling headphones work by using destructive interference, which requires an exact opposite waveform of the sound being cancelled out. Since the analog waveform of the music would be affected by any number of factors (the quality of the speakers playing it, the equalizer settings of their audio equipment, the bitrate of their source, the echoing of the sound off various objects, multiple speakers playing the audio, which would result in multiple "copies" of the music reaching your ear just very slightly delayed from one another, etc, etc), you couldn't use a "canned" waveform (the original MP3) to cancel out the actual waveform reaching your ears.
Now, while it might be possible, using AI, to try to do a best match of the ambient sound against a canned waveform, and cancel out only the ambient sound that seems to match, it still would not work perfectly. That would result in echos and certain portions of the frequency spectrum still being heard, which would sound very strange.
Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump
This is really getting tiresome. Trump doesn't give a flying flip about coal, or nuclear, or solar, or anything else (unless he has invested some money in one of them, which I haven't heard). Hillary was stupid enough to throw the coal miners under the bus during the election, so Trump used that to his advantage while campaigning to cozy up to them. I bet Trump wouldn't even know what a piece of coal looks like. Coal for power energy is a dead end - solar and natural gas are both cheaper and safer and are winning out and will continue to win out. Every frigging thing does not have to be about Trump or invoke his name in some way. Considering how much half of the population hates him, they sure like to talk about him at every opportunity they can.
Free market will drive energy production towards its natural destination, which is away from fossil fuels, and even nuclear. Distributed power generation and storage is where the future (currently) lies - the tipping point has already been reached. Solar production is not skyrocketing because the CAA pushed power companies away from fossil fuels. The core reason is the global manufacturing industry has slowly, and finally, ramped up photovoltaic cell production to the point that it is extremely competitive. Battery technology (not just driven by energy demands, but primarily by mobile computing which requires very high-density, long-lasting batteries) has been increasing steadily as well. Couple the two together and you have a big part of the future of energy production.
So as with many things in politics, this move is purely... political, and really doesn't matter either way. Sort of like the Paris Agreement.
This is the first attack in the USA I'm aware of using a fully automatic military weapon. The specific incident I'm aware of that (to this point) has claimed far more lives in Europe is the 2015 Paris attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Except for the magazine capacity, you are correct, which is why I placed "assault rifle" in quotes. Mainstream media has redefined (to the general public) that an "assault rifle" is a semi-automatic rifle that looks scary (like having a pistol grip and an adjustable stock). The point I was trying to make is the weapon used in Las Vegas was not something you could buy from Walmart or your normal gun store, and it requires special permits that take many months to acquire and are very expensive.
I didn't say annual gun deaths. I said "killed in mass incidents of this kind", which is when a person using illegal military weapons (full auto) attacks an large innocent group of people. Like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The weapon was fully automatic, which is very tightly regulated. It is likely the shooter either modified a weapon illegally or obtained one on the black market. That is no normal "assault rifle".
I slowed down one of the eyewitness videos and used a tap-counter to count how many rounds were fired. I counted 80 rounds in a single burst. He was either using a belt-fed automatic weapon, or some specialized extremely high capacity magazine. The standard magazine you can buy for an assault rifle is 30 rounds.
For all of the commentators saying this is what America gets for guns being legalized, I would like to point out that in Europe there have been far more attacks using fully automatic, illegal weapons like what just happened in Las Vegas, than in the USA. In fact, Europe still holds the record for the most people killed in mass incidents of this kind. This was a premeditated attack using specialized weapons by someone so incredibly deranged and unhinged that they would obtain several thousands of dollars of gear ahead of time, then open fire on a crowd of innocent people over and over with a fully automatic weapon.
Slashdot Mirror
As usual the summary isn't quite accurate. "Curing" the disease, as in reversing it once it has damaged a person's brain, is not the actual goal. From the article (emphasis mine):
Through talking to experts in the field over the past year, Gates said he had identified five areas of need: Understanding better how Alzheimer’s unfolds, detecting and diagnosing it earlier, pursuing multiple approaches to trying to halt the disease , making it easier for people to take part in clinical trials of potential new medicines, and using data better.
The summary is wrong. These must be cubic cubits, as measuring a computer in a single dimension makes no sense at all.
I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I'm gradually warming up to it. Throwing the entire timeline out the window (it is set before TOS, but is far more advanced technologically - I guess so the Klingons can be the bad guys again) is the worst part, IMO. They should have just placed it in some time after TOS and used some other species besides "Klingon" for the bad guys.
Anyway, to address your point more specifically:
Too bad the "magick spores traveling faster than warp" concept is so fucking retarded in contrast to the rest of the Star Trek universe.
In my opinion, TNG is the best Star Trek series. It epitomizes a lot of what is best about Star Trek. I've watched all the episodes numerous times, but I decided to start fresh since I started watching Discovery. Guess what is introduced in the very first episode of TNG:
1) An omnipotent, omniscient being that can read anyone's thoughts, instantly transport the ship anywhere with total disregard for distance, change and manipulate matter in any way, and even kill an entire species of creatures - wherever in the universe they may be - instantly. In other words, a purely magical being with zero scientific explanation or possibility.
2) A smallish room that multiple people can enter than can visually and physically simulate to those people any place, somehow providing each their own experience and allowing them to be far apart from one another than the size of the room, while allowing them to interact with objects that do not actually exist, in a totally perfect and flawless experience that cannot be recognized separate from reality.
3) A device which can instantly create any food or drink out of thin air.
So we have a magical being, a magical room, and a magical food making box. Discovery jumps the shark compared to this how, exactly? Sure, the whole biological "spore" thing that must somehow be navigated organically is quite annoying - if you're going to do this, just make it some kind of technology and not biological. Still, TNG was far more of a stretch over TOS than Discovery is over the various series that came before.
I think they are giving themselves too much credit. Let's strip away the advertising machine that is FB and distill it down to the most basic fundamental. A person can post information, and others who are connected to that person can see that information and react to it. That's it in a nutshell. The fact that people get a "little dopamine hit" when someone they are connected to reacts to something they did is not something Facebook engineered. It is human nature. It is why we like to sit around talking to one another, or why we like to see a person smile when we do something. This is nothing FB engineered or calculated or anything like that. For any virtual social network to be compatible with human nature and be accepted it must provide a way for people to provide feedback with one another. Calling it a "like" or letting someone comment on it is not exactly the height of software or social engineering.
Methinks he is giving Facebook way too much credit to stoke his ego that he had a hand in reshaping people's "relationship with society". Facebook was inevitable, and in fact had existed in many, many different forms in the past (Usenet, America Online dialup, MySpace, Slashdot commenting system, ad infinitum). Facebook was nothing more than a simplification of existing social networks to the point that anyone could use it. It hit a critical mass, like MS Windows, the iPod, etc, where it had to resources to outgrow the competitors.
That is totally incorrect. Since AI is software it can scale across multiple processors. There is no reason AI cannot be distributed. In that case it can scale in an unlimited fashion by running on multiple processors simultaneously. The speed of the individual processors is not a limitation as soon as you can run on more than one processor. Moore's "law" could come to a halt right now, and if an AI task needed 10 times faster processor than CPU technology allowed, you could just run it on 10 processors instead. Also keep in mind the fact that AI and its requirements are merely Turing complete. Thus the only difference processing power has on AI is how quickly it can "think", not how intelligent it is.
AI has been improving because the cost of processing speed, RAM and data storage has dropped to much. It would have been possible to have implemented Siri like speech recognition 25 years ago, but why would anyone use a multi million dollar supercomputer for something like that?
Unless all you're planning to do is steal their audience, it won't happen.
Game of Thrones only has one season left, and it will only have 6 episodes. Granted, they will surely produce some other spinoff series based on GoT, however there will be a large group of viewers ready to start watching some other (similar) epic series from the beginning once GoT has wrapped up. The final season will not air for about a year, so that gives the LOTR series enough time to sort things out and begin production so it can air less than a year after GoT ends.
Anyway what I'm saying is LOTR wouldn't compete with GoT (in first-run episodes) because GoT will already be done.
Really? J.K. Rowling over Tolkien?? Are we talking about the same Rowling who just invents things out of thin air every time she needs a plot device? The same author who invoked time travel in one single plot line but for some reason time travel was never used in any story before or after? I'm sorry, but as a fantasy author, Rowling is awful. I'll give you that Tolkien isn't known for "deep characterization", however I believe his plot lines are far more interesting and logical than Rowling's. Stephen King has incredibly "deep characterization" in The Stand, but that book totally falls apart, invoking deus ex machina in the end because he couldn't resolve the story even after killing off half the main characters. It's purely a matter of personal preference, but I prefer Tolkien's heavy-handed, consistent style of writing that is logical and historic in nature over Tolkien or even King's fantasy works.
Having read it twice, I still don't understand the point the summary is trying to make. It says piracy is much lower now than in 2011. It says Kodi "took over" the piracy arena and made it easier than ever before to access unlicensed content. It says a full 6 percent of households have a Kodi box. So what the heck is the point the summary is making? Piracy is down because Kodi makes it so much easier to access unlicensed media? That makes no sense at all. Or is this all past tense and Kodi has been stomped out and since it had taken over piracy was greatly reduced? I just don't understand what Kodi has to do with any of this, or how they know it took over online piracy when piracy is down even though Kodi makes it easier. Makes no sense.
Why would YouTube do this? Out of their good will and to simply "do what is right"? Of course not. They will make millions off of this, because they get a big cut of all the ads served.
I don't think that's true that OLED burn in is not permanent. I was very surprised to learn it is even possible in this day and age - OLED seemed to be the end-all technology for displays, as the contrast ratio is extremely high and the colors are vivid. I guess everything comes with a downside. Search for OLED burn in on Samsung phones, and you will see it's a serious problem. OLED pixels have a lifespan, and they will gradually wear out and dim over time. It's quite simple - if you have pixels that are consistently at a higher brightness than other pixels, they will wear out sooner and will look different.
A friend purchased a Samsung Note that has bad burn in. They tried a number of things to fix it (utilities that strobe the display in different colors, etc), and trust me, it is indeed permanent. The title bar and the keyboard areas are permanently ghosted on that phone. It's is most noticeable on bright white screens, as the worn out pixels cannot emit as brightly as the others. The darker the image being displayed the less noticeable it is.
I have a question for you. If we were back in time 30-40+ years, when pretty much every business either allowed smoking, or at least had a smoking section, and you could even smoke on airplanes and buses, would you have been able to kick the habit while being exposed to people doing it everywhere you went? Obviously you still see people smoking these days, but now you can very easily avoid them, which wasn't the case 30+ years ago. Just wondered what impact that amount of exposure would have on breaking such a difficult habit.
That's interesting, because just a couple days ago I noticed a small town near here with their own low-power radio station. When it gave station identification it was Pandora Media (I think the "Media" part was right) and it didn't have a human DJ - it was a male synthesized voice. With this ruling I think we'll see this sort of thing pop up everywhere - small low-power FM stations serving small areas that are 100% automated. That will be profitable because the FCC won't require staff in person at the stations.
Requires more training.
I'm sounding like a broken record posting the same kinds of comments to these Kaspersky stories. The software itself isn't the issue. What does antivirus software do? Reads files, analyzes them for various content / fingerprints, transfers any files it deems "suspicious" files back to the company for "analysis" (default setting, unless disabled by the user), and modifies and deletes files. Same with the system registry. There will be no surprises here - we already know the software has total access to read and write to anything on the system and transfer our files to 3rd parties.
The issue is the dynamic control of the software, not how the software was written. That is in the form of antivirus definitions, which are the fingerprints to identify malicious code, and the scripts used to clean (or simply delete) infected files, which are pushed to the software practically daily. THAT is the issue - who controls the behavior of the software. Let's go worst-case and assume Russia wanted to weaponize Kaspersky antivirus. All they have to do is force the company to identify a few key pieces of Windows OS as malicious files, and delete those files as the way of quarantining the malware. Suddenly millions of Windows machines stop working. How does having access to the source code prevent that?
What we need is antivirus definitions that are controlled by some neutral "open" body that we can actually put some trust in. Currently, I rely on Microsoft's antivirus software. Why? Well, they already hold the keys to my system. They can already screw me over with a bad OS update (and it is harder and harder to disable automatic updates with each new version of Windows). So at least them having the ability to also screw me over with a bad antivirus update doesn't represent an entirely new vector by yet another 3rd party.
I'm curious the strategic use of bombers on 24 hour standby, when there are enough ICBMs, including those in nuclear subs which are likely really, really close to North Korea already, to totally decimate that country. North Korea could be a smoldering ruin before the bombers would even leave US airspace (even if they were on standby). So I wonder if the bombers would simply be more "obvious" to Kim Jong or what?
Although I think you're being funny, no, this couldn't be used in that way. Noise cancelling headphones work by using destructive interference, which requires an exact opposite waveform of the sound being cancelled out. Since the analog waveform of the music would be affected by any number of factors (the quality of the speakers playing it, the equalizer settings of their audio equipment, the bitrate of their source, the echoing of the sound off various objects, multiple speakers playing the audio, which would result in multiple "copies" of the music reaching your ear just very slightly delayed from one another, etc, etc), you couldn't use a "canned" waveform (the original MP3) to cancel out the actual waveform reaching your ears.
Now, while it might be possible, using AI, to try to do a best match of the ambient sound against a canned waveform, and cancel out only the ambient sound that seems to match, it still would not work perfectly. That would result in echos and certain portions of the frequency spectrum still being heard, which would sound very strange.
Even in the age of coal enthusiast President Donald Trump
This is really getting tiresome. Trump doesn't give a flying flip about coal, or nuclear, or solar, or anything else (unless he has invested some money in one of them, which I haven't heard). Hillary was stupid enough to throw the coal miners under the bus during the election, so Trump used that to his advantage while campaigning to cozy up to them. I bet Trump wouldn't even know what a piece of coal looks like. Coal for power energy is a dead end - solar and natural gas are both cheaper and safer and are winning out and will continue to win out. Every frigging thing does not have to be about Trump or invoke his name in some way. Considering how much half of the population hates him, they sure like to talk about him at every opportunity they can.
...and climate change may play a role.
The scientists were able to rule out weather
So which is it?
This story is comment-bait, I think, to stir up these pointless arguments
Yes, and it was most certainly submitted by the Russians to stir discontent in the West!
You have to admit the genius in this. Why should the US waste money on pursuing him, when he's incarcerated himself through his own paranoia?
Free market will drive energy production towards its natural destination, which is away from fossil fuels, and even nuclear. Distributed power generation and storage is where the future (currently) lies - the tipping point has already been reached. Solar production is not skyrocketing because the CAA pushed power companies away from fossil fuels. The core reason is the global manufacturing industry has slowly, and finally, ramped up photovoltaic cell production to the point that it is extremely competitive. Battery technology (not just driven by energy demands, but primarily by mobile computing which requires very high-density, long-lasting batteries) has been increasing steadily as well. Couple the two together and you have a big part of the future of energy production.
So as with many things in politics, this move is purely... political, and really doesn't matter either way. Sort of like the Paris Agreement.
This is the first attack in the USA I'm aware of using a fully automatic military weapon. The specific incident I'm aware of that (to this point) has claimed far more lives in Europe is the 2015 Paris attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Except for the magazine capacity, you are correct, which is why I placed "assault rifle" in quotes. Mainstream media has redefined (to the general public) that an "assault rifle" is a semi-automatic rifle that looks scary (like having a pistol grip and an adjustable stock). The point I was trying to make is the weapon used in Las Vegas was not something you could buy from Walmart or your normal gun store, and it requires special permits that take many months to acquire and are very expensive.
I didn't say annual gun deaths. I said "killed in mass incidents of this kind", which is when a person using illegal military weapons (full auto) attacks an large innocent group of people. Like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The weapon was fully automatic, which is very tightly regulated. It is likely the shooter either modified a weapon illegally or obtained one on the black market. That is no normal "assault rifle".
I slowed down one of the eyewitness videos and used a tap-counter to count how many rounds were fired. I counted 80 rounds in a single burst. He was either using a belt-fed automatic weapon, or some specialized extremely high capacity magazine. The standard magazine you can buy for an assault rifle is 30 rounds.
For all of the commentators saying this is what America gets for guns being legalized, I would like to point out that in Europe there have been far more attacks using fully automatic, illegal weapons like what just happened in Las Vegas, than in the USA. In fact, Europe still holds the record for the most people killed in mass incidents of this kind. This was a premeditated attack using specialized weapons by someone so incredibly deranged and unhinged that they would obtain several thousands of dollars of gear ahead of time, then open fire on a crowd of innocent people over and over with a fully automatic weapon.