You do realize that pre-supposing a specific treatment and then working backwards is exactly how the big, high-profile PACE study being defended in the article worked, right? They even modified their definition of successful treatment after the study started in order to get their results, then claimed it was vexatious harassment when the patients tried to find out what the results would've been according to the originally-planned procedure. (Which is, you know, only the correct and scientifically valid way to carry out a study like this so no big deal.)
Also, they pretty much threw out all the objective measures of treatment effectiveness that they tracked - stuff like hours successfully worked, fitness tests, etc - and just paid attention to the patient survey part. Which would be a little iffy even if it wasn't for the fact that the whole thing was inherently and unavoidably not blinded, or the way they insisted that it totally made the patients more fit for work and they were all just malingering.
From what I can tell, it was basically a technological dead end - she created a computerized version of IBM's older electromechanical MT/ST that didn't offer enough of an advantage over the older tech to justify itself, the company also didn't have the financial backing to undercut IBM because most customers rented rather than buying, and its whole approach was about to be obsoleted by actual recognizably-modern word processing systems with screens and interactive editing of text which other companies created first.
What a load of chemical industry apologist hogwash. Firstly, the new chemical in question is a slightly tweaked version of the one that's already known to be harmful, so you're essentially arguing that if companies selling harmful products modify them in a way that we have no reason to expect will fix that harm, they should be entitled to market those products as not having the problem until absolutely proven otherwise. Secondly, you certainly can prove that a newly developed chemical doesn't cause the same kind of harm as a similar, existing chemical - for instance, the experiment mentioned in the article could've shown that BPS had less effect on fertility and genetic damage than BPA. It's just that no-one wanted to test this.
The whole "dark posts" angle in the press mainly just seems to have been media fearmongering and spin anyway, an attempt to distract from how badly they fucked up with the election. The trouble with dirty tricks with dark posts is that people still end up seeing them - including people who don't support you and will take great pleasure in catching any mischief you might attempt - and there's no way around this because targetting is never perfect. (The only candidate who tried anything interesting in this area was Ted Cruz and his campaign failed miserably.)
To put this in perspective, this is being spun as some kind of victory over the evil, hidebound Puerto Rican electricity company which only managed to restore power to about a quarter of the whole of Puerto Rico in the time it took Musk to get power to this one hospital. It's totally a PR stunt, and it's working.
Remember that side note halfway through the NPR story? "As of Wednesday morning, the Electric Power Authority reported that its power service was at 25 percent." Who do you think was doing that - the magic power faries? And remember, we're not talking just restoring power to one building here - pretty much the entirety of the power transmission lines from the power plants to all of the buildings in Puerto Rico was down. Rebuilding those properly and permanently is going to be a hell of a lot more work than temporarily sticking enough solar panels for one building in a parking lot.
Despite all that, as far as I can tell grid power started being restored to hospitals there weeks ago, it just didn't make the headlines like Elon Musk 's little project.
Many optical illusions happen exactly because we build up a model of the world based on what makes sense to our brain based on past experiences, and carefully-constructed drawings can exploit the assumptions made by those models.
Pretty much. Current Tesla owners are surprisingly willing to put up with problems like having to return their cars for repair multiple times. It's not clear that the general public will be quite so kind to them.
Barbara Mikkelson put a huge and very visible amount of work into the site over, I think, pretty much its entire two-decade-long existence. It was quite common to come across fact checks researched and written by her. Before their divorce the site was generally presented as a joint effort by the Mikkelsons.
The A80 and A83T are, unfortunately, an exception. They're very different hardware-wise to the other Allwinner chips, there are few Pi-style hobbyist boards with them on (I think the CubieBoard 4 may be the only A80-based one out there actually), and what hardware does exist is very expensive. I know Allwinner have released source code to a lot of the stuff that's listed as GPL violations on the sunxi wiki, but even if they have released source for your board's drivers there's just not that much interest in them. Sorry. Most of the community effort seems to be focused on the much cheaper and more widely available H2/3/5-based boards like this one.
Devuan has gnome since it's a Debian fork, but all the information I can find says it doesn't work properly and they don't encourage people to use it, e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
I believe the answer to this should be zero closed binaries. None. Nada. You'll need a bleeding-edge version of uboot and either Linux 4.13 or a patched version of 4.12 with the ethernet driver and board config backported, and I'm not sure when the Plus2 will be supported as it's just been announced, but in theory it should work with 100% open source code.
Huh? Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days, though the newer ones may require some patches that haven't been merged into the mainline kernel quite yet. (For instance, apparently Ethernet support for the H5 is planned for 4.13, HDMI is still stuck in mailing list hell, and support for the SoC itself requires 4.12 - fairly bleeding-edge stuff.) The same definitely isn't true of the Raspberry Pi, which requires a binary blob running on an undocumented CPU architecture to even boot the thing.
Because systemd is now a hard dependency of the Gnome desktop, which a lot of distros want to ship. There were some interesting shenanigans involved in getting that through too - initially the Gnome developers insisted this was no bid deal because logind (the part they required) didn't actually depend on systemd and could be used seperately. Ubuntu did this for a while. Then Poettering declared that actually this was never supported, Ubuntu were idiots for doing it, and it would be broken shortly. Ubuntu reluctantly switched to systemd in the next release.
IMTS isn't the same as MTS. Also, the reason why MTS was so expensive and rare is because in the 1940s the technology simply wasn't there to run such a system without hugely expensive equipment weighing 80 pounds. Reason's argument that it's the Government's fault for not allocating the spectrum just doesn't fly; the UHF frequencies they're talking about are, if anything, harder to operate on than the VHF frequencies used by MTS. Similarly, the technology to do handoff between cells and automatic frequency selection and dialling didn't exist yet either. Both MTS and IMTS were actually right at the bleeding edge of what was possible when they were introduced - bear in mind that IMTS predated the availability of ICs and MTS that of transistors, while cellular handsets were complex enough to need microprocessors.
It's important to remember that Reason magazine has an ideological opposition to government regulation and indeed government in general that drives a lot of their reporting.
The timing of the final leak had nothing to do with the timing of the FBI investigation, which was entirely the result of when the deputy director of the FBI (a Clinton ally) chose to tell his boss about certain emails that were discovered several months earlier by the Weiner investigation.
It may well have been a generic with multiple sources back in 2007. As I understand it, Mylan made some design tweaks, patented them, and then claimed that anyone making a generic version would be infringing on their new patents.
In this case it's a pretty clear demonstration that Bruce Perens has no better argument for his position than it's not literally illegal, yes. For some weird reason people who roll out the "first amendment only applies to government restrictions on speech" argument always think that it cuts the other way and proves the person they're replying to has no better argument than that, even when the argument they're replying to has nothing to do with the first amendment or the legality of restrictions on speech (which it generally doesn't). I blame xkcd.
I have an LG monitor and the backlight-dimming feature definitely does activate during fades to black in normal content, especially movies. I'm guessing that the "sports, comedies, dramas and news programming" that this organization chose to test these TVs just happened to have a lot less of those fades to black than a broader, more representative set of content would. Wonder who's paying their bills.
No, this proves that in some applications, D-Wave's machine offers considerable speedup over intentionally de-optimized alternatives. From the blog post:
We should note that there are algorithms, such as techniques based on cluster finding, that can exploit the sparse qubit connectivity in the current generation of D-Wave processors and still solve our proof-of-principle problems faster than the current quantum hardware.
In other words, the current D-Wave machine requires that problems have a particular, very restricted structure and they're only 10^8 times faster when competing with poorly-optimised solvers that don't take advantage of that special structure. if you use a properly optimised conventional solver, the D-Wave machine is actually slower. Google are hoping that future, more densely connected versions that don't exist yet will somehow retain the same speed while conventional code will get bogged down, but those don't exist and may never meet the performance promises that Google are hoping for.
If I remember correctly, their test results for the previous chip were later demonstrated to be rather misleading. The previous chip was indeed faster at solving the particular problem class it was hardwired for than a particular general-purpose solver running on a conventional computer, but someone managed to come up with an optimised solver that was faster than D-Wave at solving the exact problem class D-Wave was made to solve, on a normal general-purpose PC. It's not clear if the same applies to the new chip.
I think DirecTV got away with that in part because they still owned the cards in question and were just allowing users to make use of them. (The hack worked by modifying official DirecTV cards.)
It's not a standard USB interface, and some applications link directly against FTDI's proprietary library and use its functionality. Also even for applications that only use it as a serial interface there's no generic USB serial driver that works on Windows out the box
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You do realize that pre-supposing a specific treatment and then working backwards is exactly how the big, high-profile PACE study being defended in the article worked, right? They even modified their definition of successful treatment after the study started in order to get their results, then claimed it was vexatious harassment when the patients tried to find out what the results would've been according to the originally-planned procedure. (Which is, you know, only the correct and scientifically valid way to carry out a study like this so no big deal.)
Also, they pretty much threw out all the objective measures of treatment effectiveness that they tracked - stuff like hours successfully worked, fitness tests, etc - and just paid attention to the patient survey part. Which would be a little iffy even if it wasn't for the fact that the whole thing was inherently and unavoidably not blinded, or the way they insisted that it totally made the patients more fit for work and they were all just malingering.
From what I can tell, it was basically a technological dead end - she created a computerized version of IBM's older electromechanical MT/ST that didn't offer enough of an advantage over the older tech to justify itself, the company also didn't have the financial backing to undercut IBM because most customers rented rather than buying, and its whole approach was about to be obsoleted by actual recognizably-modern word processing systems with screens and interactive editing of text which other companies created first.
What a load of chemical industry apologist hogwash. Firstly, the new chemical in question is a slightly tweaked version of the one that's already known to be harmful, so you're essentially arguing that if companies selling harmful products modify them in a way that we have no reason to expect will fix that harm, they should be entitled to market those products as not having the problem until absolutely proven otherwise. Secondly, you certainly can prove that a newly developed chemical doesn't cause the same kind of harm as a similar, existing chemical - for instance, the experiment mentioned in the article could've shown that BPS had less effect on fertility and genetic damage than BPA. It's just that no-one wanted to test this.
The whole "dark posts" angle in the press mainly just seems to have been media fearmongering and spin anyway, an attempt to distract from how badly they fucked up with the election. The trouble with dirty tricks with dark posts is that people still end up seeing them - including people who don't support you and will take great pleasure in catching any mischief you might attempt - and there's no way around this because targetting is never perfect. (The only candidate who tried anything interesting in this area was Ted Cruz and his campaign failed miserably.)
To put this in perspective, this is being spun as some kind of victory over the evil, hidebound Puerto Rican electricity company which only managed to restore power to about a quarter of the whole of Puerto Rico in the time it took Musk to get power to this one hospital. It's totally a PR stunt, and it's working.
Remember that side note halfway through the NPR story? "As of Wednesday morning, the Electric Power Authority reported that its power service was at 25 percent." Who do you think was doing that - the magic power faries? And remember, we're not talking just restoring power to one building here - pretty much the entirety of the power transmission lines from the power plants to all of the buildings in Puerto Rico was down. Rebuilding those properly and permanently is going to be a hell of a lot more work than temporarily sticking enough solar panels for one building in a parking lot.
Despite all that, as far as I can tell grid power started being restored to hospitals there weeks ago, it just didn't make the headlines like Elon Musk 's little project.
Many optical illusions happen exactly because we build up a model of the world based on what makes sense to our brain based on past experiences, and carefully-constructed drawings can exploit the assumptions made by those models.
The more obnoxious tab-unders also break the usual ways of opening a link in a new tab or window too, just to make sure you're thoroughly annoyed.
Pretty much. Current Tesla owners are surprisingly willing to put up with problems like having to return their cars for repair multiple times. It's not clear that the general public will be quite so kind to them.
Barbara Mikkelson put a huge and very visible amount of work into the site over, I think, pretty much its entire two-decade-long existence. It was quite common to come across fact checks researched and written by her. Before their divorce the site was generally presented as a joint effort by the Mikkelsons.
The A80 and A83T are, unfortunately, an exception. They're very different hardware-wise to the other Allwinner chips, there are few Pi-style hobbyist boards with them on (I think the CubieBoard 4 may be the only A80-based one out there actually), and what hardware does exist is very expensive. I know Allwinner have released source code to a lot of the stuff that's listed as GPL violations on the sunxi wiki, but even if they have released source for your board's drivers there's just not that much interest in them. Sorry. Most of the community effort seems to be focused on the much cheaper and more widely available H2/3/5-based boards like this one.
Devuan has gnome since it's a Debian fork, but all the information I can find says it doesn't work properly and they don't encourage people to use it, e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
I believe the answer to this should be zero closed binaries. None. Nada. You'll need a bleeding-edge version of uboot and either Linux 4.13 or a patched version of 4.12 with the ethernet driver and board config backported, and I'm not sure when the Plus2 will be supported as it's just been announced, but in theory it should work with 100% open source code.
Huh? Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days, though the newer ones may require some patches that haven't been merged into the mainline kernel quite yet. (For instance, apparently Ethernet support for the H5 is planned for 4.13, HDMI is still stuck in mailing list hell, and support for the SoC itself requires 4.12 - fairly bleeding-edge stuff.) The same definitely isn't true of the Raspberry Pi, which requires a binary blob running on an undocumented CPU architecture to even boot the thing.
Because systemd is now a hard dependency of the Gnome desktop, which a lot of distros want to ship. There were some interesting shenanigans involved in getting that through too - initially the Gnome developers insisted this was no bid deal because logind (the part they required) didn't actually depend on systemd and could be used seperately. Ubuntu did this for a while. Then Poettering declared that actually this was never supported, Ubuntu were idiots for doing it, and it would be broken shortly. Ubuntu reluctantly switched to systemd in the next release.
IMTS isn't the same as MTS. Also, the reason why MTS was so expensive and rare is because in the 1940s the technology simply wasn't there to run such a system without hugely expensive equipment weighing 80 pounds. Reason's argument that it's the Government's fault for not allocating the spectrum just doesn't fly; the UHF frequencies they're talking about are, if anything, harder to operate on than the VHF frequencies used by MTS. Similarly, the technology to do handoff between cells and automatic frequency selection and dialling didn't exist yet either. Both MTS and IMTS were actually right at the bleeding edge of what was possible when they were introduced - bear in mind that IMTS predated the availability of ICs and MTS that of transistors, while cellular handsets were complex enough to need microprocessors.
It's important to remember that Reason magazine has an ideological opposition to government regulation and indeed government in general that drives a lot of their reporting.
The timing of the final leak had nothing to do with the timing of the FBI investigation, which was entirely the result of when the deputy director of the FBI (a Clinton ally) chose to tell his boss about certain emails that were discovered several months earlier by the Weiner investigation.
It may well have been a generic with multiple sources back in 2007. As I understand it, Mylan made some design tweaks, patented them, and then claimed that anyone making a generic version would be infringing on their new patents.
In this case it's a pretty clear demonstration that Bruce Perens has no better argument for his position than it's not literally illegal, yes. For some weird reason people who roll out the "first amendment only applies to government restrictions on speech" argument always think that it cuts the other way and proves the person they're replying to has no better argument than that, even when the argument they're replying to has nothing to do with the first amendment or the legality of restrictions on speech (which it generally doesn't). I blame xkcd.
Speaking of countenancing deliberate lies, one of the supposed proofs that Palmer is an evil no-good Trump supporter is that he liked a Tweet by someone else criticizing CNN for lying about Trump, claiming he said "racial profiling" was a good way of stopping terrorism when he'd said nothing of the sort. The fight against Trump isn't about fighting deliberate lies at all, it's about an us-versus-them, and you have to countenance the correct lies about the enemy if you don't want to be seen as a supporter of them and potentially targeted for career destruction. And through it all, the people doing this insist that they're the ones fighting lies and that anyone who disagrees with their tactics is the real lie-supporter.
I have an LG monitor and the backlight-dimming feature definitely does activate during fades to black in normal content, especially movies. I'm guessing that the "sports, comedies, dramas and news programming" that this organization chose to test these TVs just happened to have a lot less of those fades to black than a broader, more representative set of content would. Wonder who's paying their bills.
No, this proves that in some applications, D-Wave's machine offers considerable speedup over intentionally de-optimized alternatives. From the blog post:
We should note that there are algorithms, such as techniques based on cluster finding, that can exploit the sparse qubit connectivity in the current generation of D-Wave processors and still solve our proof-of-principle problems faster than the current quantum hardware.
In other words, the current D-Wave machine requires that problems have a particular, very restricted structure and they're only 10^8 times faster when competing with poorly-optimised solvers that don't take advantage of that special structure. if you use a properly optimised conventional solver, the D-Wave machine is actually slower. Google are hoping that future, more densely connected versions that don't exist yet will somehow retain the same speed while conventional code will get bogged down, but those don't exist and may never meet the performance promises that Google are hoping for.
If I remember correctly, their test results for the previous chip were later demonstrated to be rather misleading. The previous chip was indeed faster at solving the particular problem class it was hardwired for than a particular general-purpose solver running on a conventional computer, but someone managed to come up with an optimised solver that was faster than D-Wave at solving the exact problem class D-Wave was made to solve, on a normal general-purpose PC. It's not clear if the same applies to the new chip.
I think DirecTV got away with that in part because they still owned the cards in question and were just allowing users to make use of them. (The hack worked by modifying official DirecTV cards.)
It's not a standard USB interface, and some applications link directly against FTDI's proprietary library and use its functionality. Also even for applications that only use it as a serial interface there's no generic USB serial driver that works on Windows out the box