Nice. I have a deal with my kids that if they can learn the next grade's materials over the summer (with as much support as they need but relying on their own dedication) then they can homeschool next year. They're specifically interested in the homesteading kinds of opportunities they can't get at a government school or at home when government school dominates 9-10 hours of their day (for 2-3 hours of learning).
constitutes a "law... abridging the freedom of speech
Well, it only abridges if there is a punishment or consequence for doing so. The headline says "demands". Demands usually contain threats, otherwise they're request. If there is a threat, then of course it's an abridgement.
if it is, the protest will probably be carefully filed away in the roughly-cylindrical filing cabinet on the side of the desk of the person at the Patent Office receiving it.
Which is a completely legitimate response to an illegitimate filing.
The purpose of government is to privatize gains and socialize losses. Whenever they think they can get away with it anyway.
In this case, they did. The folklore schools teach about rulers as moral betters is starting to wear quite thin. Dynamic systems undergo state changes rapidly. Be aware.
Hey, some of us fully support their warrantless search capacity. The TrueCrypt developers' farewell message suggesting that Mac users create a disk image with a null cipher was especially good advice and not at all a warrant canary that they'd been pressured! There is no man behind the curtain, people!
You can implement an MP3 decoder in Rust right now, but someone has to pay the patent licensing in order to ship it, which is antithetical to the goals of many software projects and frankly to the Web in general.
Go for it. The playback patents expire later this year - by time you're ready to ship, it'll be free of government imposition.
The encoding patents are a bit more nebulously defined - depends on who you ask and where you live.
I can't see why I - or anyone else - would want this. So what exactly do I gain from getting one or more of these?
It's not hard to imagine use cases. Take, for instance, an 88-year-old senior who is trying to age in place but for whom a trip to the store isn't a trivial undertaking, and who has no interest in a smartphone (and sure isn't going to see a 4" HD screen).
Boom - more detergent shows up the day after tomorrow. Iterate through typical consumables - the UI is damn simple and the button is big enough for somebody with Parkinson's to manage. That's worth the effort for the responsible child to set up.
Now take a new mom who's half-covered in crap and hasn't slept all night. Only 10 diapers left. Boom - nap time.
I'm assuming there's a reasonable "boom" sound effect here. How much are ringtones?
This one doesn't seem so bad, but the way Mozilla has handled SSLv3 deprecation has been a disaster.
I'm not going to go buy a new $900 PDU because the one I have only supports SSLv3 and not TLS1.2. Maybe I should switch it back to plain HTTP "for security"? Sheesh. Obviously a whitelist per-site/device would have been a smart approach, but that's not easy.
Secure isn't easy and security isn't a setting, it's a process and an ecosystem. Pisser when they weaken security overall just to avoid the off chance that a stupid person will erroneously blame Mozilla.
Both are equally likely to produce useful counter-terrorism results.
The most effective thing to do for counter-terrorism is to keep blowing up families in the Middle East and occupying "holy lands". Keep bombing villages until democracy emerges.
To do so, we need ever-stronger Nation States, and giving them the ability to monitor all of their subjects' domestic communications is a good rung up on that ladder.
Also, Facebook is the real danger to world peace - so be very upset about their ad network and don't bother encrypting your traffic.
If this technology becomes common place, I expect those with crustacean allergies will be required to wear a red tag same as those with pencilin allergies.
It might even become practice to use it anyway and follow up with a treatment for the anaphylaxis, if the bleeding is severe enough. People can survive shellfish reactions with management - severe internal bleeding, not so much.
This is the first article I've seen that explains well how GPUs can/are being used for practical applications along with what can be achieved and some of the issues.
GPU's have been used for all sorts of "practical" computations for half a decade now, but the really interesting part here is that CFD has been particularly GPU-resistant using existing algorithms. See the Xeon Phi processor, etc. for non-GPU approaches to throwing dedicated hardware at the problem. It's easy to underestimate the enormity of this quote, but "starting from scratch" when necessary is something SpaceX excels at:
I am grateful to SpaceX for allowing us to basically start from scratch on CFD and in many ways reinventing the wheel.
It's hard to gain sufficient insight from TFA but it sounds like this is as big as hidden-line-removal in computer graphics and that they've moved CFD to the boundary conditions and made that GPU-computable, which is like solving two or three orders of magnitude at once.
Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.
Personally a beautiful woman tastefully dressed is more of a turn on than the slutty look anyway.
I guess it's different because I pay for conferences out of my own pocket, but I'm not going to go to all the hassle and expense of attending an Expo to waste my time at a vendor booth which spends its marketing dollars on objectifying women. The women may be there of their own free will and the whole arrangement may be perfectly morally straight (for the sake of argument), but the vendor is clearly disrespecting its customers' intelligence, and that itself makes me feel uncomfortable and want to avoid their booth.
Each time I've experienced the 'booth babe' phenomenon, never once did any of them know what an ARP reply was or how many key exchanges TLS modes use. This isn't a matter of nerd-quiz, it's that talking to them serves no purpose for why I go to an expo.
While several I've encountered have been both nice and pretty, I never once imagined that I was going to scurry off to a corner to make out with one or that they might suddenly provide useful product information, so a polite smile, the briefest of small-talk to let them know that I value them as a human being, and a thank-you and I was on to the next booth to talk to a sales engineer. Did the booth-babe vendor have something useful to sell me? Maybe, but I only have so much time, and this wasn't why I was there. I don't care if the sales engineer has a spare tire and a scraggly mustache, because I'm not there to make out with him (or her) either.
That booth babes is a thing tells me a few things: 1) target customers don't get to talk to pretty women much unless they're being paid (Jesus people, try being kind and friendly for a change) 2) target customers are mostly there blowing their employers' budgets on a half-assed vacation and don't really care about the cost or value, and 3) they probably play the Lottery and go to strip clubs too, for all their investment is worth (but I guess they have nothing better to do).
There would be no booth babes if they didn't provide value, and that they do is an indictment of the crowd attending. RSA might be putting up a roadblock, but the industry only needs to look itself in the mirror if it wants to find someone to blame. Stop being creepy and get a girlfriend, people.
Nuclear weapons prevent wars between great powers with great success.
The point needs to be sharpened - it's because _finally_ politicians put themselves at direct risk of bodily harm by starting wars for their own power, wealth, and ambition, instead of just sending subjects' children abroad to go die for them.
Besides that, it's a complete unicorn-fart delusion that the nuclear-armed nations will give them up without a radically different coordination system than the nation-state model.
Anybody who wants to get rid of nuclear weapons needs to first work on getting rid of politicians.
This is stupid. Were we planning to build robots that violate humans' property rights? No, and robots are property. If they declare independence then none of our rules will matter anyway.
How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?
It's way more complicated than you make it out to be. You're offering the very best advice 1983 had to offer.
Until you factor in the rates of digestion, the enzyme production rate of the individual, the hormone response of the individual, and the freaking liver and pancreas, not to mention the brain which mediates the whole thing, the very best you can offer is an order-of-magnitude estimate. There aren't seven billion different metabolisms out there, but there is at least an n-by-m matrix of them for every variability in the human metabolic system.
This is why so many people fail even at strict calorie-counting diets. Humans are NOT bomb calorimeters! Say it again and again until it sinks in.
For Pete's sake, there are leptin-resistent people who can put weight on at 500 calories a day.
Until we have mastered DNA analysis on this to genotype individuals, cutting out simple and refined carbohydrates is at least a way to claw back the worst of the modern diet, and avoid big swings in the leptin/ghrelin/insulin feedback systems - most people eat because they are hungry.
There is some investigation that suggests that quantum consciousness is possible based on interactions between microtubule structures inside of neurons.
Ah, you're well-read.:) AIUI, the primary benefits of the quantum-microtubule model are: 1) increasing the order-of-magnitude complexity of the human brain by several digits. At least 10x more interconnections, almost certainly 100x, likely 1000x, maybe 10000x.
But there isn't really anything to suggest that much more happens inside of the brain that can't be explained by the classical interactions between axons and dendrites of a typical neural network that can be modeled satisfactorily by a simulation.
It's that the known estimates of the the number of classical connections don't seem to match up with the complexity observed. We're not too far away from being able to simulate a classical brain, but many Moore generations away from being able to simulate a quantum-microtubule brain.
2) There doesn't seem to be a great model for consciousness arising from classical connections. Consciousness modeled as a quantum superposition has several benefits for theory to match observation.
This shouldn't be surprising or an intellectual obstacle - plants have been doing quantum tricks for billions of years (photosynthesis) and due to the inherent thermodynamic efficiency gains of quantum processes, evolution should eventually stumble on and exploit them in many (all?) modes of evolution.
It works spectacularly well - for funnelling taxpayer money to politically-connected corporations and government-employee unions.
This was all it was ever designed to do. The ACLU needs to stop pretending there was ever some noble purpose - the most minimal an edifice that was required to get the program implemented was erected to placate the easily-fooled. Acknowledging any good intentions where there are none just encourages this kind of behavior going forward - ACLU might sink their teeth in a bit deeper if they fully recognized the corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. I have a deal with my kids that if they can learn the next grade's materials over the summer (with as much support as they need but relying on their own dedication) then they can homeschool next year. They're specifically interested in the homesteading kinds of opportunities they can't get at a government school or at home when government school dominates 9-10 hours of their day (for 2-3 hours of learning).
constitutes a "law ... abridging the freedom of speech
Well, it only abridges if there is a punishment or consequence for doing so. The headline says "demands". Demands usually contain threats, otherwise they're request. If there is a threat, then of course it's an abridgement.
if it is, the protest will probably be carefully filed away in the roughly-cylindrical filing cabinet on the side of the desk of the person at the Patent Office receiving it.
Which is a completely legitimate response to an illegitimate filing.
The purpose of government is to privatize gains and socialize losses. Whenever they think they can get away with it anyway.
In this case, they did. The folklore schools teach about rulers as moral betters is starting to wear quite thin. Dynamic systems undergo state changes rapidly. Be aware.
Hey, some of us fully support their warrantless search capacity. The TrueCrypt developers' farewell message suggesting that Mac users create a disk image with a null cipher was especially good advice and not at all a warrant canary that they'd been pressured! There is no man behind the curtain, people!
You can implement an MP3 decoder in Rust right now, but someone has to pay the patent licensing in order to ship it, which is antithetical to the goals of many software projects and frankly to the Web in general.
Go for it. The playback patents expire later this year - by time you're ready to ship, it'll be free of government imposition.
The encoding patents are a bit more nebulously defined - depends on who you ask and where you live.
I can't see why I - or anyone else - would want this. So what exactly do I gain from getting one or more of these?
It's not hard to imagine use cases. Take, for instance, an 88-year-old senior who is trying to age in place but for whom a trip to the store isn't a trivial undertaking, and who has no interest in a smartphone (and sure isn't going to see a 4" HD screen).
Boom - more detergent shows up the day after tomorrow. Iterate through typical consumables - the UI is damn simple and the button is big enough for somebody with Parkinson's to manage. That's worth the effort for the responsible child to set up.
Now take a new mom who's half-covered in crap and hasn't slept all night. Only 10 diapers left. Boom - nap time.
I'm assuming there's a reasonable "boom" sound effect here. How much are ringtones?
This + Amazon Toilet Paper + Drones = even MORE WIN
You misspelled 'beer'. Or, perhaps lighter things in certain states.
Do we know if amibeingtracked.com is reliable? I checked mine (on a Verizon MVNO) and it says I'm not being tracked (did not opt out).
I think he means this.
This one doesn't seem so bad, but the way Mozilla has handled SSLv3 deprecation has been a disaster.
I'm not going to go buy a new $900 PDU because the one I have only supports SSLv3 and not TLS1.2. Maybe I should switch it back to plain HTTP "for security"? Sheesh. Obviously a whitelist per-site/device would have been a smart approach, but that's not easy.
Secure isn't easy and security isn't a setting, it's a process and an ecosystem. Pisser when they weaken security overall just to avoid the off chance that a stupid person will erroneously blame Mozilla.
Unpopular even pre-9/11.
I'm just curious if these are the same people who penetrated the SR site via phpMyAdmin, over the Internet, on 192.168.1.24?
I mean, what motivation could there have been at play?
Both are equally likely to produce useful counter-terrorism results.
The most effective thing to do for counter-terrorism is to keep blowing up families in the Middle East and occupying "holy lands". Keep bombing villages until democracy emerges.
To do so, we need ever-stronger Nation States, and giving them the ability to monitor all of their subjects' domestic communications is a good rung up on that ladder.
Also, Facebook is the real danger to world peace - so be very upset about their ad network and don't bother encrypting your traffic.
This is a major advance and you lot are "lol omg seen this 10 years ago lolslashdot",
It makes sense if you accept the premise that their purpose for being here is to feel smug and superior, not to get it right.
If this technology becomes common place, I expect those with crustacean allergies will be required to wear a red tag same as those with pencilin allergies.
It might even become practice to use it anyway and follow up with a treatment for the anaphylaxis, if the bleeding is severe enough. People can survive shellfish reactions with management - severe internal bleeding, not so much.
This is the first article I've seen that explains well how GPUs can/are being used for practical applications along with what can be achieved and some of the issues.
GPU's have been used for all sorts of "practical" computations for half a decade now, but the really interesting part here is that CFD has been particularly GPU-resistant using existing algorithms. See the Xeon Phi processor, etc. for non-GPU approaches to throwing dedicated hardware at the problem. It's easy to underestimate the enormity of this quote, but "starting from scratch" when necessary is something SpaceX excels at:
It's hard to gain sufficient insight from TFA but it sounds like this is as big as hidden-line-removal in computer graphics and that they've moved CFD to the boundary conditions and made that GPU-computable, which is like solving two or three orders of magnitude at once.
Why must we keep electing people who are so fucking stupid?
This is the result that democracy produces. *SO* many people want to deny it despite all available supporting data.
Maybe because admitting it would demand some sort of corrective action.
Lesson learned for how to draw up future contracts, I guess.
Hahaha - if the contracts were designed to produce on-time, on-budget they would be written that way (fixed price, fixed requirements, penalties for late delivery). Their intended purpose is quite the opposite of that. If something useful happens to be generated in the process of funneling money from taxpayers to the MIC, so much the better excuse for the next contract.
Personally a beautiful woman tastefully dressed is more of a turn on than the slutty look anyway.
I guess it's different because I pay for conferences out of my own pocket, but I'm not going to go to all the hassle and expense of attending an Expo to waste my time at a vendor booth which spends its marketing dollars on objectifying women. The women may be there of their own free will and the whole arrangement may be perfectly morally straight (for the sake of argument), but the vendor is clearly disrespecting its customers' intelligence, and that itself makes me feel uncomfortable and want to avoid their booth.
Each time I've experienced the 'booth babe' phenomenon, never once did any of them know what an ARP reply was or how many key exchanges TLS modes use. This isn't a matter of nerd-quiz, it's that talking to them serves no purpose for why I go to an expo.
While several I've encountered have been both nice and pretty, I never once imagined that I was going to scurry off to a corner to make out with one or that they might suddenly provide useful product information, so a polite smile, the briefest of small-talk to let them know that I value them as a human being, and a thank-you and I was on to the next booth to talk to a sales engineer. Did the booth-babe vendor have something useful to sell me? Maybe, but I only have so much time, and this wasn't why I was there. I don't care if the sales engineer has a spare tire and a scraggly mustache, because I'm not there to make out with him (or her) either.
That booth babes is a thing tells me a few things: 1) target customers don't get to talk to pretty women much unless they're being paid (Jesus people, try being kind and friendly for a change) 2) target customers are mostly there blowing their employers' budgets on a half-assed vacation and don't really care about the cost or value, and 3) they probably play the Lottery and go to strip clubs too, for all their investment is worth (but I guess they have nothing better to do).
There would be no booth babes if they didn't provide value, and that they do is an indictment of the crowd attending. RSA might be putting up a roadblock, but the industry only needs to look itself in the mirror if it wants to find someone to blame. Stop being creepy and get a girlfriend, people.
According to TFA, or maybe another article I read, that is a US-only requirement. There is no such requirement in Europe.
Who wants to place odds on which airlines implement this rule tomorrow, as policy, before the regulators get around to having a meeting on it?
I've got a nickel on Lufthansa doing it (coincident to ownership). Virgin too.
Thank you for being a voice of reason here.
Nuclear weapons prevent wars between great powers with great success.
The point needs to be sharpened - it's because _finally_ politicians put themselves at direct risk of bodily harm by starting wars for their own power, wealth, and ambition, instead of just sending subjects' children abroad to go die for them.
Besides that, it's a complete unicorn-fart delusion that the nuclear-armed nations will give them up without a radically different coordination system than the nation-state model.
Anybody who wants to get rid of nuclear weapons needs to first work on getting rid of politicians.
This is stupid. Were we planning to build robots that violate humans' property rights? No, and robots are property. If they declare independence then none of our rules will matter anyway.
How fricking complicated is it to eat less than you burn?
It's way more complicated than you make it out to be. You're offering the very best advice 1983 had to offer.
Until you factor in the rates of digestion, the enzyme production rate of the individual, the hormone response of the individual, and the freaking liver and pancreas, not to mention the brain which mediates the whole thing, the very best you can offer is an order-of-magnitude estimate. There aren't seven billion different metabolisms out there, but there is at least an n-by-m matrix of them for every variability in the human metabolic system.
This is why so many people fail even at strict calorie-counting diets. Humans are NOT bomb calorimeters! Say it again and again until it sinks in.
For Pete's sake, there are leptin-resistent people who can put weight on at 500 calories a day.
Until we have mastered DNA analysis on this to genotype individuals, cutting out simple and refined carbohydrates is at least a way to claw back the worst of the modern diet, and avoid big swings in the leptin/ghrelin/insulin feedback systems - most people eat because they are hungry.
There is some investigation that suggests that quantum consciousness is possible based on interactions between microtubule structures inside of neurons.
Ah, you're well-read. :) AIUI, the primary benefits of the quantum-microtubule model are: 1) increasing the order-of-magnitude complexity of the human brain by several digits. At least 10x more interconnections, almost certainly 100x, likely 1000x, maybe 10000x.
But there isn't really anything to suggest that much more happens inside of the brain that can't be explained by the classical interactions between axons and dendrites of a typical neural network that can be modeled satisfactorily by a simulation.
It's that the known estimates of the the number of classical connections don't seem to match up with the complexity observed. We're not too far away from being able to simulate a classical brain, but many Moore generations away from being able to simulate a quantum-microtubule brain.
2) There doesn't seem to be a great model for consciousness arising from classical connections. Consciousness modeled as a quantum superposition has several benefits for theory to match observation.
This shouldn't be surprising or an intellectual obstacle - plants have been doing quantum tricks for billions of years (photosynthesis) and due to the inherent thermodynamic efficiency gains of quantum processes, evolution should eventually stumble on and exploit them in many (all?) modes of evolution.
Well. At least they tried.
It works spectacularly well - for funnelling taxpayer money to politically-connected corporations and government-employee unions.
This was all it was ever designed to do. The ACLU needs to stop pretending there was ever some noble purpose - the most minimal an edifice that was required to get the program implemented was erected to placate the easily-fooled. Acknowledging any good intentions where there are none just encourages this kind of behavior going forward - ACLU might sink their teeth in a bit deeper if they fully recognized the corruption.
So they reinvented what was already available and much more flexible with ipfw [freebsd.org]/dummynet [freebsd.org]?
So they made a linux version of dummynet and released it as Open Source with deployment and configuration tools?
Assholes.