I wish had mod points. I'm glad someone else spotted this.
The parent comment comparing BBT to blackface is so wildly offensive and off base that I'm inclined to not be part of a community that would excitedly express their agreement (+5 insightful) for such a comparison. I mean, I know we're pretty out-of-the-loop with pop culture as nerds and geeks, but making comparisons like that is a great way to alienate huge swaths of the population.
Glad to see that there are a least one or two other reasonable people on this site still...:-)
I think the other point of the "attack" (and I admit that this is pretty flimsy) is that an attacker could make malicious code *look* like signed and verified code, defeating the whole purpose gatekeeper helping prevent you from accidentally running bad things.
I'd think the only solution would be to make every single executed snippet of code signed. I don't really know if that's possible though.
If your unfamiliar with how to use a checksum, I suggest reading http://lifehacker.com/247262/h...). Basically though, if they don't match, don't trust it.
The 80s was when Bob Lutz was an auto exec at Ford (1974-1986) and Chrysler (1986-1998) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Not great years for American cars in my opinion.
I feel disinclined to listed to old, white CEOs about where the future of things are headed in just about any industry at this point. These guys, time and time again, have shown themselves to be more interested in their bottom line at all costs (take the recent VW incident) than trying to do anything creative, different, or forward thinking. For most, it's all about cutting costs, not building better products.
Data speeds haven't improved because Gogo says the scale isn't big enough to do much infrastructure investment, and most of the hardware is custom-made.
The reason the "scale isn't big enough" is because they're charging so damn much for it. I'm perhaps not a great test-case, because I refuse to pay for wifi anywhere and everywhere, but last time I was on a delta flight they wanted $8 for an hour. ONE hour. They wanted some outrageous price for the entire flight ($20 or more, I don't remember the exact number). For those of us who only fly a couple of times a year, the monthly and yearly passes don't make any sense either.
The only argument that I would buy for pricing this high is that there is currently NO existing infrastructure that could support a plane full of folks using wifi and they need to discourage all but those willing to pay the highest prices from using it... but I don't believe that's the case.
Let's face it, if they wanted to bring wifi to everyone, they would figure it out. It must just not make sense for their bottom line right now to do so.
Let's just cherish the last few years before we have to listen to dickheads facetime throughout the entire flight.
"Both men stand accused of distributing knowledge and guides on how to obtain illegal content online and are reported to have confessed."
?
If there is, then they are probably in violation. But aren't there other resources on how to do illegal things that don't get shut down? Plenty of folks have written about how to get onto Silk Road and buy drugs and yet we haven't seen those sites disappear... curious. Just goes to show they don't care about whether its illegal or not, only if it *slightly* affects their bottom line. But we all knew that already, didn't we?
Pardon my ire, but Uber's management has clearly demonstrated that they are interested in the exact opposite of sharing. They can go fuck themselves and stop pretending that they're interested in helping anyone other than themselves.
Nothing. I meant "shitty" as a modifier to individual instances, not Wordpress as a whole. I was merely illustrating that the internet today is largely people who are not "computer people" and the bar for "tech savvy" is shifting for many.
The author is worried about the centralization of the internet, but much of the internet usage is concentrated on "platforms" (e.g. wordpress, facebook, squarespace, twitter, etc.) and "tech savviness" concentrated on a platform is not going to help decentralize things again.
I completely agree with the author's point. MOST people rely on a few social media sites for almost all of their internet surfing, and as others have pointed out, Slashdotters are almost unanimously going to agree that social media sites are not how we prefer to use the internet.
Perhaps though the underlying internet hasn't changed or disappeared, it's just that social sites are so much "friendlier" to use that folks that didn't use the internet a long time ago are now using the "internet" and the increase in their traffic has dwarfed the less "friendly" (although I disagree that it's less friendly), link-ier part of the internet the author references.
I have no numbers or citations, just wanted to throw that thought out there. I know people who consider themselves very computer savvy, but couldn't do much beyond set up a facebook profile or a shitty wordpress blog, but that doesn't mean that they've taken our "home" away.
I'm burning some mod points to post this under my username, but it's totally worth it. THIS is the kind of article that should be on Slashdot!
Can you elaborate on the programming structure/API you guys are envisioning for this? (it's cool if you can't, I'd understand:-D). Also, what particular types of problems are you guys targeting your chips to solve or to what areas do you envision your chips being especially well suited? Also, who do you think has done the best nitty-gritty write up about the project so far? I'd love to hear what you think is the best technical description publicly available. Can't wait to learn more as the project grows.
Although I'm not a programmer or CS person by training, I do GPGPU programming (although not BLAS-based stuff) almost exclusively for my research and enjoy it because once you understand the differences between the GPU and CPU it just become a question of how to best parallelize your algorithm. It'd be AMAZING to see the memory bandwidth and power usage specs you guys are working towards under a similar programming structure we currently see with something like CUDA or OpenCL. Any plans for something like that or am I betraying my hobbyist computing status?
Finally, if you ever need any applications testing, specifically in the medical imaging field, feel free get in touch.;-)
Your point is valid. After I made my post, I realized I probably just shouldn't have said anything since the headline of TFA is the exact same and nearly the same phrase is used directly in the article. It's definitely not a SJW thing, women can absolutely be bored housewives, I just LOATHE clickbait.
Whether or not it's factually accurate, the "bored housewife" angle this day in age has a certain connotation when used in internet news that, fairly or otherwise, tends to color how I read an article. I enjoy reading Slashdot because, for a while there, it didn't treat its readers like the idiots who fill out Buzzfeed quizzes all day long.
All in all, my post was a pretty knee-jerk reaction when I probably should've just shut up. Not being able to edit posts or delete them (a good thing really), makes it hard to express that.
This is a really cool and interesting piece of computer history that doesn't need a click bait headline. It can and should stand on its own merit. So I say this:
Stop it. Stop it right now. Please stop it? Let's be just a little bit better than the rest of the Internet.
I'm a grad student in a science field (medical physics) working on a pretty nitty-gritty project, and most people glaze over when I start talking about what I do. That's rather disheartening, but it may not necessarily be their fault: perhaps I'm not great at communicating exactly what it is I'm talking about, or I'm so used to discussing it with people of a similar background that I fail to see what is and isn't actually obvious.
This type of exercise could encourage developing skills to discuss your project with someone unfamiliar, like perhaps an investor, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed kid interested in science, friends and family who are not scientifically inclined but still care about what you do, etc. I think most of us in science could spare an hour or two of our lives to put together something explaining what we do to the general public.
Counterpoint to what I've just said above is that because research is so incremental these days, the subtlety of how one group's work is distinct from another may get lost in a five minute youtube video or two paragraph layperson summary. I'd hate for someone to fancy themselves an expert based off of the press releases (politicians: I'm looking at you) and not the actual paper. I don't think we'd see a youtube-ification of science though (maybe the comments) but the videos would most likely be pretty professional since they represent a research groups work over months if not years. People are already explaining science on youtube and I've really enjoyed what I've seen for the most part ( https://www.youtube.com/user/b... , https://www.youtube.com/user/m..., etc.).
All in all though I think this is a good idea so long as people are being rational about how much we can realistically expect to convey. Obviously the inner workings of abstract algebra are not going to make sense to an 8 year-old, but maybe a college student with one or two math classes under their belt would be a good target; I don't think that's too unreasonable.
I'm always in favor of trying to better expose science to the masses. Even if that means a little more work for me!
Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
... Or intelligent and resentful of their subjugating human overlords? I for one always give my robots a hug and a seat at the dinner table so when the robot apocalypse comes I'll hopefully have some cred.
Your dissent was entertainingly shrill and dubious.
Seriously! Some of the things he said makes me question whether or not he understands how our government works... and the purpose of the supreme court. A quote from his dissenting opinion:
A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
I'm all fine with someone disagreeing with how the supreme court works and how our government is set up, even politicians, but a supreme court justice? Seriously? It's his JOB to sit on that panel of nine people and decide the things that are not otherwise decidable. If he had such an issue with it, why did he decide to be a part of it? He seems happy enough to decide things when they go in his favor...
I'm sure there are plenty of other highly qualified folks that would sit on that panel and spend more time deciding and less time complaining about the system when the decision doesn't go the way they want.
I live in LA and subscribe to Time Warner. We pay for up to 40 Mbps in our apartment yet rarely see anything beyond... 21 (with only one device using the connection). Now that seems to make a little per sense...
I guess we could argue that it's "similar" (i.e. not the same), but it's pretty darn close;-).
The Mandelbrot set is a very different animal from what these algorithms are doing. I agree that a human couldn't draw a Mandlebrot set, but in some sense this work is much less precise and analytic than something like a Mandlebrot set.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish had mod points. I'm glad someone else spotted this.
:-)
The parent comment comparing BBT to blackface is so wildly offensive and off base that I'm inclined to not be part of a community that would excitedly express their agreement (+5 insightful) for such a comparison. I mean, I know we're pretty out-of-the-loop with pop culture as nerds and geeks, but making comparisons like that is a great way to alienate huge swaths of the population.
Glad to see that there are a least one or two other reasonable people on this site still...
I think the other point of the "attack" (and I admit that this is pretty flimsy) is that an attacker could make malicious code *look* like signed and verified code, defeating the whole purpose gatekeeper helping prevent you from accidentally running bad things.
I'd think the only solution would be to make every single executed snippet of code signed. I don't really know if that's possible though.
It's not signed code per-se, but nvidia does provide checksums from the website:
cuda_7.5.18_linux.run (md5sum: b22ef6bc073f7cf767f547a84fb0e3c2)
(see https://developer.nvidia.com/c... for more versions)
If your unfamiliar with how to use a checksum, I suggest reading http://lifehacker.com/247262/h...). Basically though, if they don't match, don't trust it.
The 80s was when Bob Lutz was an auto exec at Ford (1974-1986) and Chrysler (1986-1998) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Not great years for American cars in my opinion.
I feel disinclined to listed to old, white CEOs about where the future of things are headed in just about any industry at this point. These guys, time and time again, have shown themselves to be more interested in their bottom line at all costs (take the recent VW incident) than trying to do anything creative, different, or forward thinking. For most, it's all about cutting costs, not building better products.
These people also "sensitive" to the following:
;-)
data, facts, statistics, double blind studies, and science.
I can't fathom how they think this makes sense, or that there won't be pushback. Welcome to the police state.
Can I shoot at your "non-lethal" drone with my non-lethal weapons?
Data speeds haven't improved because Gogo says the scale isn't big enough to do much infrastructure investment, and most of the hardware is custom-made.
The reason the "scale isn't big enough" is because they're charging so damn much for it. I'm perhaps not a great test-case, because I refuse to pay for wifi anywhere and everywhere, but last time I was on a delta flight they wanted $8 for an hour. ONE hour. They wanted some outrageous price for the entire flight ($20 or more, I don't remember the exact number). For those of us who only fly a couple of times a year, the monthly and yearly passes don't make any sense either.
The only argument that I would buy for pricing this high is that there is currently NO existing infrastructure that could support a plane full of folks using wifi and they need to discourage all but those willing to pay the highest prices from using it... but I don't believe that's the case.
Let's face it, if they wanted to bring wifi to everyone, they would figure it out. It must just not make sense for their bottom line right now to do so.
Let's just cherish the last few years before we have to listen to dickheads facetime throughout the entire flight.
In fact, I'd say the only thing proven about it is the likelihood of failure! We have TONS of evidence supporting that.
Against this:
"Both men stand accused of distributing knowledge and guides on how to obtain illegal content online and are reported to have confessed."
?
If there is, then they are probably in violation. But aren't there other resources on how to do illegal things that don't get shut down? Plenty of folks have written about how to get onto Silk Road and buy drugs and yet we haven't seen those sites disappear... curious. Just goes to show they don't care about whether its illegal or not, only if it *slightly* affects their bottom line. But we all knew that already, didn't we?
Pardon my ire, but Uber's management has clearly demonstrated that they are interested in the exact opposite of sharing. They can go fuck themselves and stop pretending that they're interested in helping anyone other than themselves.
Nothing. I meant "shitty" as a modifier to individual instances, not Wordpress as a whole. I was merely illustrating that the internet today is largely people who are not "computer people" and the bar for "tech savvy" is shifting for many.
The author is worried about the centralization of the internet, but much of the internet usage is concentrated on "platforms" (e.g. wordpress, facebook, squarespace, twitter, etc.) and "tech savviness" concentrated on a platform is not going to help decentralize things again.
I so desperately wish I could mod this up!
I completely agree with the author's point. MOST people rely on a few social media sites for almost all of their internet surfing, and as others have pointed out, Slashdotters are almost unanimously going to agree that social media sites are not how we prefer to use the internet.
Perhaps though the underlying internet hasn't changed or disappeared, it's just that social sites are so much "friendlier" to use that folks that didn't use the internet a long time ago are now using the "internet" and the increase in their traffic has dwarfed the less "friendly" (although I disagree that it's less friendly), link-ier part of the internet the author references.
I have no numbers or citations, just wanted to throw that thought out there. I know people who consider themselves very computer savvy, but couldn't do much beyond set up a facebook profile or a shitty wordpress blog, but that doesn't mean that they've taken our "home" away.
I'm burning some mod points to post this under my username, but it's totally worth it. THIS is the kind of article that should be on Slashdot!
:-D). Also, what particular types of problems are you guys targeting your chips to solve or to what areas do you envision your chips being especially well suited? Also, who do you think has done the best nitty-gritty write up about the project so far? I'd love to hear what you think is the best technical description publicly available. Can't wait to learn more as the project grows.
;-)
Can you elaborate on the programming structure/API you guys are envisioning for this? (it's cool if you can't, I'd understand
Although I'm not a programmer or CS person by training, I do GPGPU programming (although not BLAS-based stuff) almost exclusively for my research and enjoy it because once you understand the differences between the GPU and CPU it just become a question of how to best parallelize your algorithm. It'd be AMAZING to see the memory bandwidth and power usage specs you guys are working towards under a similar programming structure we currently see with something like CUDA or OpenCL. Any plans for something like that or am I betraying my hobbyist computing status?
Finally, if you ever need any applications testing, specifically in the medical imaging field, feel free get in touch.
Your point is valid. After I made my post, I realized I probably just shouldn't have said anything since the headline of TFA is the exact same and nearly the same phrase is used directly in the article. It's definitely not a SJW thing, women can absolutely be bored housewives, I just LOATHE clickbait.
Whether or not it's factually accurate, the "bored housewife" angle this day in age has a certain connotation when used in internet news that, fairly or otherwise, tends to color how I read an article. I enjoy reading Slashdot because, for a while there, it didn't treat its readers like the idiots who fill out Buzzfeed quizzes all day long.
All in all, my post was a pretty knee-jerk reaction when I probably should've just shut up. Not being able to edit posts or delete them (a good thing really), makes it hard to express that.
(Although I do realize that the article uses that headline, I'd still prefer to not see it on slashdot).
This is a really cool and interesting piece of computer history that doesn't need a click bait headline. It can and should stand on its own merit. So I say this:
Stop it. Stop it right now. Please stop it? Let's be just a little bit better than the rest of the Internet.
I'm torn here.
I'm a grad student in a science field (medical physics) working on a pretty nitty-gritty project, and most people glaze over when I start talking about what I do. That's rather disheartening, but it may not necessarily be their fault: perhaps I'm not great at communicating exactly what it is I'm talking about, or I'm so used to discussing it with people of a similar background that I fail to see what is and isn't actually obvious.
This type of exercise could encourage developing skills to discuss your project with someone unfamiliar, like perhaps an investor, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed kid interested in science, friends and family who are not scientifically inclined but still care about what you do, etc. I think most of us in science could spare an hour or two of our lives to put together something explaining what we do to the general public.
Counterpoint to what I've just said above is that because research is so incremental these days, the subtlety of how one group's work is distinct from another may get lost in a five minute youtube video or two paragraph layperson summary. I'd hate for someone to fancy themselves an expert based off of the press releases (politicians: I'm looking at you) and not the actual paper. I don't think we'd see a youtube-ification of science though (maybe the comments) but the videos would most likely be pretty professional since they represent a research groups work over months if not years. People are already explaining science on youtube and I've really enjoyed what I've seen for the most part ( https://www.youtube.com/user/b... , https://www.youtube.com/user/m..., etc.).
All in all though I think this is a good idea so long as people are being rational about how much we can realistically expect to convey. Obviously the inner workings of abstract algebra are not going to make sense to an 8 year-old, but maybe a college student with one or two math classes under their belt would be a good target; I don't think that's too unreasonable.
I'm always in favor of trying to better expose science to the masses. Even if that means a little more work for me!
I enjoy reading what the "Technollama" blog (written by Andres Guamuz) has to say. http://www.technollama.co.uk/
He seems like a level-headed, well-informed lecturer with insight into UK law as well as US laws.
Will this distinction be more and more important in the future, when robots will be more widespread?
Your dissent was entertainingly shrill and dubious.
Seriously! Some of the things he said makes me question whether or not he understands how our government works... and the purpose of the supreme court. A quote from his dissenting opinion:
A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.
I'm all fine with someone disagreeing with how the supreme court works and how our government is set up, even politicians, but a supreme court justice? Seriously? It's his JOB to sit on that panel of nine people and decide the things that are not otherwise decidable. If he had such an issue with it, why did he decide to be a part of it? He seems happy enough to decide things when they go in his favor...
I'm sure there are plenty of other highly qualified folks that would sit on that panel and spend more time deciding and less time complaining about the system when the decision doesn't go the way they want.
I live in LA and subscribe to Time Warner. We pay for up to 40 Mbps in our apartment yet rarely see anything beyond... 21 (with only one device using the connection). Now that seems to make a little per sense...
I'm out of mod points, but...
<3
You almost had me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A human can't do it? Alex Gray begs to differ.
;-).
I guess we could argue that it's "similar" (i.e. not the same), but it's pretty darn close
The Mandelbrot set is a very different animal from what these algorithms are doing. I agree that a human couldn't draw a Mandlebrot set, but in some sense this work is much less precise and analytic than something like a Mandlebrot set.