Recent Comments

It's going to freeze soon but thankfully only in the early hours in the morning will it actually be bitterly cold. Unless it rain. Then I may be screwed.

And that reason is the Jet Stream.

I live in Belgium, we had the second warmest winter since we started recording, and we broke the record for highest lowest temperature (it never went below -0.5 degrees Celsius).

The reason: the Jet Stream, which normally makes a wave movement, stayed in the same position for a very long time. For us that meant a constant supply of hot air and very warm weather. For England, the consequence was a lot of rain and storms. For the USA, the consequence was a constant supply of cold air and a very cold winter.

Now if the Jet Stream remains stable in a slightly different position (my country is only 300km*150km at its widest), we have a constant supply of cold air and very cold winters, like in the previous two years.

The diminishing of the wave movement of the Jet Stream seems to be caused by the lower difference in temperature between the arctic and the equator, due to the melting of the arctic ice, due to global warming.

Source, in Dutch: http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/5376/Ecologie/article/detail/1823838/2014/03/20/Waarom-deze-winter-nooit-een-winter-is-geweest.dhtml

I loved Diablo. I still get a kick out of a run through Diablo 2. I didn't buy Diablo 3. Never played it. Probably never will.

In their quest to eradicate piracy they have lost a customer.

While we're on the topic, pity about the latest SIMS; for similar reasons.

Meanwhile, Torchlight looks like fun. Thanks to HumbleBundle it's next on my list when I feel like a new RPG :-)

Thanks. Fixed.

When I select "poll" from the left nav menu, it takes me to the correct page, but I noticed "pipe" is the menu item which receives the grey, selected, outline.

The lead acid battery recycling program (for automobile batteries) is one of the most successful recycling programs ever. Here's hoping that a similar program will exist for all these new Lithium car battery packs.

blake2sum just doesn't have the same ring to me, and with a sufficiently dirty mind, could suggest a double liason with a pair of blakes.

probably they found nothing. If they would have found a backdoor it would have been more effective to make this public. Instead they just tried to discredit Huawei publicly with false claims (they're false until proven otherwise).

>"I followed the link and do not see the double standard."

The link was not advertised as showing a double standard, just hypocrisy. I read it too, nowadays you can take the same text and exchange China with US which is indeed hypocrisy. Of course the US has complained about "Chinese hacking", but is there any hard evidence for that claim or are people just paraphrasing statements from the white house? We know how trustworthy their statements are, don't we. If they really would have found backdoors in Huawei products they could have just released exploits anonymously instead of false claims to discredit them publicly. They found nothing, they don't have any evidence, so we can assume they're liars.

>"Chinese citizens and companies have no privacy rights with respect to the US government."

Is this really the world you want to live in and subscribe to? You support your government in actively engaging in corporate espionage?? I'm really sick of Americans who think they have the right to do anything anywhere on this planet and get away with it.

I followed the link and do not see the double standard. We bitch about their hacking, and they bitch about ours...

Openness and transparency are generally praised, especially when they apply to governments. Their value is not automatically diminished by being the product of espionage. Of course it's different if a government trashes it's legitimacy by spying on its own citizens. But as far as I know, Chinese citizens and companies have no privacy rights with respect to the US government.

I think it's about 15 years off cable for us. We seriously do not miss it one single bit. We declared the money saved each month to be our DVD budget, and we rarely cut into that too deeply. We have half a wall of shelves full of legitimately purchased DVDs and we saved money - rather a lot of it - in the process.

Take that, Rupert Murdoch, you slimy SOB.

Everybody spies on everybody, and everybody knows it. Tough talk is one thing, but it's very rare for anyone to act on it.

Imagine the US response if there would be credible evidence circulating in the press that the Chinese did this to the America. Sanctions would be on the table immediately; there is a double standard.

Governments involved in corporate espionage was an "act of war" for the US in the pre-Snowden days. Just read about the hypocrisy http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21772596

Countries spying on each other is not a bad thing. It reduces uncertainty about the target's intentions, and also reduces the incentive to act preemptively. Knowledgable folks think WWI might have been avoided if countries had better intelligence about one another.

And Snowden confirms what everybody was suspecting. Again.

And a bit of conspiracy theory, perhaps they found something when they targeted Huawei which resulted in US government restrictions on Huawei gear???

From TFA: "P.S. Secure hash functions are not for hashing passwords! Secure hash functions are building blocks in cryptographic protocols and they should be as efficient as possible while still being secure. Password-hashing functions are for impeding brute force guessing of passwords, and they should be as inefficient as possible while still being usable."

This is complete and utter BULLSHIT. Anybody who does not use SHA512 for a *NIX login password by now is a fool. Ask DOD if you don't believe me. It's the default in RHEL6, FreeBSD10 and many other modern security-conscious distros. Nobody runs just a single round of SHA512 for passwords. As the very next paragraph in TFA admits, you can make any algorithm as bloody slow as you want by running a large number of rounds. The default in glibc is 5000. You can turn up the number of rounds for passwords in PAM, up to at least 999,999,999 if you don't mind everybody logging in having to wait and load a CPU to 100% for minutes for the password to be verified (and making sure any attacker would take millenia to brute force a single password).

I'm tempted to agree with you, but then I look down at my phone, which is laboring over its crappy 3G connection to bring in a webpage, and I think, there might be use for this thing yet?

In a way, internet-over-smartphone rivals the days of dialup in terms of frustration. There are some heavy, graphic laden sites I simply don't visit on my smart phone - not worth the bother; I know it will never work. (I know, let's create a parallel mobile site with some javascript to determine if we have to send you to that one! - No, fix your f*cking site).

No one cares about file size anymore. Even mobile views of your typical news site page are multiple megabytes in size, between useless embedded video/animated gifs, dozens of tracker .js files, slideshows, using html/css to resize full resolution images, etc.

5-10 years ago when bandwidth was a premium and substance mattered more than style, maybe WebP would have caught on. Today, general users don't care, they just want the shiny things.

Oh, and by the way, out of curiosity...how do you feel about being offered up to 'Fuck Beta' with a bottle of scotch poured over your head?

{Snark!}

Sorry, couldn't resist....:)

Interesting conversation gentlemen. (or ladies or amalgamation or automaton as fits) If I may throw my one and a quarter cents in here, (devaluation you know...) I would interject the following query:

" if everything gets connected, interlinked, and so on is if people and society start to lose the diversity of culture, opinion, language, etc. that makes us more interesting to each other because we have been isolated from one another, in part. "

Do you feel this would be a temporary thing, as in as we become more homogenous, and diversity decreases to the point that we as a society would lose interest in cultural differences. Resulting in a 'blending' of cultures (example: Firefly/Blade Runner/The Fifth Element and the multicultural but non separated, East/West mix) or will it result in more interest and 'containerization' of different subsets of culture to preserve the diversity? Perhaps a bit of both?

Or, am I making no sense at all...a very real possibility.

I think I'll wait for Blake7. It will be futuristic and revolutionary.

I stopped regularly watching television almost 14 years ago and I really don't feel like I'm missing anything. It seems like such a waste of time to me now.

... when they start saying things like "By your command."

Although there is a bit of a time delay, I'm happy with the blurays of HBO's Game of Thrones and Rome from Netflix.

I suspect there's a certain amount of inertia and "Nobody ever got fired for..." in favor of sticking with gcc. It takes time to vet something as large as libc. The size of the library is probably a non-issue for server apps.

Will it will notify Robo Cop about angry drivers?

Stainless version of the north Korean traffic girls ?

Good point, I've used that approach in some simple videos of my own, in fact.

I think I also remember watching a documentary about John Williams where he conducts the orchestra while watching the final film to actually lay down the music in sync with the video, but obviously this takes more financial muscle to pull off.

Another interesting point.

I can see how the ripple effects of these changes might keep getting wider in our Brave New World.

I was thinking the other day that the Galapagos Island and Madagascar are biologically unique/diverse in part because they have been somewhat isolated from other continents in the past. One ripple effect I could imagine if everything gets connected, interlinked, and so on is if people and society start to lose the diversity of culture, opinion, language, etc. that makes us more interesting to each other because we have been isolated from one another, in part.

Why not just line up the soundtrack so the climax falls where you want it, and then work backwards the length of time you require and add a fade in? Place climax, include 3 seconds earlier plus 0.5 second fade in. Badda boom, badda bing.

I looked at a few YouTube videos and "plugins for xbmc" does seem like a viable option; reminds me of my attempts to use Sopcast in previous years. I tend to like getting "official" streams/views, if possible though, so in some cases it looks like there is still a reason to subscribe and pay as you do with NHL Gamecenter.

Thanks for spelling out your calculations and thought process. Most informative... I particularly like the idea of taking the "saved" money and buying the "physical" copies, if you care too. I've thought about that but never got around to actually buying any, unless you count "Fawlty Towers" -- gosh, I love that show.

Talked to the cable company. Mentioned the one reason I wouldn't mind keeping service: HBO. The lowest they could get it to was $80/month due to minimum programming requirements before you could even purchase HBO. My service is going byebye at the start of April now. Hello, Roku.

Heh, same here. I can be a creature of habit, but creating those habits can be quite difficult. Exercise habits are losing the fight.

Screw it. I'm going through with it. I spent yesterday running the numbers.

I've got DirecTV and I'm paying $165/mo for expanded programming plus HBO/etc, two tuners, two televisions, and some friggin' insurance thingy that we got because there's a kid in the house. Here's my costs for replacing that with what's available online.

One time costs:

• $99 for a Roku - unless I wait till mid-April, and then it's $50
• $100 termination fee for the cable
• -$165 next month for dropping the cable.

Total up front costs: $34 .

Recurring costs:

• Already paying for Netflix - $17/mo. (I actually get and mail back DVDs. It's awesome.)
• Already paying for Hulu Plus - $8/mo.
• Aereo - $8/mo. Starts with a free month trial and is available in my city.
• Amazon Prime - $99/year. Another free month trial thing.
• Plex - free, or $4/mo if I decide to get fancy.

Total monthly charge: $45.25 , and I was already paying more than half of that already anyway.

All the shows I watch, I can get. Any shows I can't get "officially", I can toss into Plex - with subtitles, even, and no annoying "extra content" about car theft. Any shows I want to keep permanently, I can buy the DVD for with the $120 worth of "wiggle room" per month from dropping cable - and I'd have to buy 6 new releases at full price before I hit the levels I was spending before. Nobody buys that many new releases per month. Plus, once I've done that, I will own a physical fucking copy , not revokable "digital media" crap. There is literally no reason for me not to do this.

Worst part? I don't even like sports. I have no idea why I was wasting all this money before. Thanks, guys.

My cable company thinks otherwise, of course. I'll be talking to them later today, and they will no doubt give me the hard sell and desperately try to keep me. I just don't see how they can match this, though.

I hear the -- it makes one callous part -- this is a great risk...

I am still frequently puzzled about how to manage the dual goals of "avoid being conned" but "remain being helpful" in lots of circumstances.

Your inside job hypothesis is probably worth pursuing... I hadn't thought about that angle, but maybe that is how someone could portray knowledge that fit being the business owner.

I think what has been mentioned regarding databases and lack of control is indeed scary. But even scarier in my opinion is when the flight attendant greets you by your name or possibly leaks other information into the surrounding public ear through "corporate, forced, discussion" with you as she hands you that in flight drink. I don't want random people on a plane knowing anything about me. It's not their business, or the business of the airline. By forcing more intimacy between flight crew and customer, they are leaking personal information to potential identity theft.

I was thinking that one of the big challenges for scores accompanying Hollywood movies is getting climaxes in the music to match the cutting/editing of the film sequences and action. I wonder if right now film composers actually use a hybrid system whereby they develop the theme, variations and scores for the music, but they use algorithms to find best fits for the music to the video?

will be reading some article about how these robots will have algorithms for composing music to accompany the emotions of drivers who have gotten angry for having to wait at the intersections...

Your linked article was really, really interesting.

One of the highlights for me was the experiments in mice taking 6 days of exercise before new "good nuclei" started to form. Usually my attempts to re-energize my exercise regimens trail off in 3 :).

The downside was having to read yet another article implying that I should have taken better care of myself prior to now...

Momentary stupidity can be a bitch. One second you're guarded, then next moment you realize that guy who asked you what time it was intended to act as a distraction while you take your hands out your pockets to look at your cell or watch. Your guard is down, and his friend has your wallet.

That appeal for help is a preying on human generosity and sympathy. Events like that have sadly made me and I bet a large number of people in this world very callous individuals.

This article suggests muscles retain information about the individual's past muscular fitness and ability through use of DNA. DNA memory coupled with millions of years of selective evolution would create some pretty efficient muscular systems (If said memory can be passed down through offspring).

"Miracle Mike"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

I'm skeptical about algorithms being able to do something as subtly complex as this. As for Hollywood movies, aren't they already being written and acted by computers and robots anyway? (Keanu Reeves, whoever wrote the Diehard series: I'm looking at you). I mean, same crap, over and over and over. I think the entire romantic comedy genre has been coopted by a bit of software only marginally more complex than emacs' psychiatrist.

There's the famous muscle memory as well, not exactly an issue of intelligence, but habitual movement of certain muscle groups when certain neurons fire. 250 beats per second is pretty impressive, and being able to correct in 3 beats is also impressive. But somehow it's not surprising - if you're a fruitfly, remaining airborne seems like it should be what you focus most of your mental energy on.

It seems that, currently, the NSA backdoor "feature" is 3x more popular than the daily mailer! :)

Usually it isn't phrased as intelligence vs. not, it's described as conscious vs. unconscious. Conscious thought does happen in the brain, but a lot of unconscious things that you do are more distributed. Sneezing, orgasms, some reactions, are managed by your spinal cord.

There was that famous headless chicken, forget his name, that survived for quite a long time with no brain.

I think you're right, but I also think a lot of the people looking for soundtracks won't care. Big Hollywood studios will always be able to pay someone like John Williams to compose the score for feature films, but a TV producer on a tight budget who wants distinctive music for this week's episode might weclome software that would compose music from the script.

Presumably the algorithm can be altered as musical tastes change. It's interesting how a lot of movies and TV shows from, say thirty or more years ago don't look nearly as out-of-date as they sound .

I don't think that there is a debate about whether or not people should be trying to blind pilots, only about the severity of the offense. You say that the pilots don't have a lot of time to react, and I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't address the point that I was making, namely that cars are easier and more plentiful targets, and drivers on a highway have even less time to react than pilots do.