cowboysauce

Modern processors execute instructions speculatively, that is without knowing if the instructions should actually run. If it turns out they weren't supposed to be executed then the processor undoes effects of the instructions. However, not everything is undone. If the speculatively executed instructions access RAM, then they can move data in and out of the cache. By measuring how long it takes to read memory, you can tell what memory the speculatively instructions accessed.

Speculative execution is what allows Meltdown to work. You make the processor speculatively execute an access to kernel memory, then access a memory address based on the value of the data read from kernel memory. Intel processors preform the speculative execution without first checking if the memory access in allowed while AMD processors check before the speculative execution. This is why AMD processors aren't vulnerable to Meltdown.

SGX was thought not be vulnerable to a speculative execution attack because attempts to access SGX memory, without having the necessary access, just yield -1 for reads and writes are ignored, as opposed to causing an exception as with access to kernel memory. However, if the SGX memory is marked as not-present, then attempts to read the memory will trigger a page fault exception. The page fault circumvents the normal SGX protection and allows the memory to be read by speculatively executed instructions.

What does the author mean by preferences? The use of the word, to me, would seem to imply that people with depression prefer to feel numb and lose interest in their hobbies; people with OCD prefer to wash their hands until they bleed; etc. I can definitely understand preferences playing a role in some things, like culture bound syndromes, but to say that someone with schizophrenia prefers to hallucinate malicious voices seems bizarre.

I would have thought that the GameCube would be the last Nintendo console to use a fixed-function GPU. I was very surprised to see that the Wii used one as well.

Getting decapitated by a water slide is exceptional. The only other cases I can find about amusement park decapitations involve people being struck by roller coasters after they either entered a restricted area or were thrown out of a roller coaster. This case might be the only one of someone being decapitated while they stayed in the ride vehicle. Keep in mind that deaths at amusement parks are very rare, typically only two or three per year in the United States. And that's among all amusement parks. Most of those deaths are either due to pre-existing medical conditions or safety devices failing and people being ejected from the ride vehicle.

This case is neither. The kid died because the tallest water slide in the world was designed through trial and error by a guy with no experience in physics or engineering.

I don't know if I'd call a lot of the things described in this article camping. If I paid $200 a night to stay in a cabana in the Caribbean, eat three meals a day and have access to a bar, I'd say that I spent my vacation at a Caribbean resort and wouldn't dare to call it camping. Likewise, I don't think it counts as camping if you do the same thing in a forest in North America. I think it would be more accurate to call these places "Outdoor resorts" or something similar.

I don't think you have to hike 20 miles into the forest to camp, but I think the level of service and amenities provided at some of these places shift it away from being camping.

When I was 13 I wrote a C program that wrote random data to a file. I had the idea to try executing these files. Most of them did nothing, but I remember that one did end up causing the printer to print out pages of gibberish.

Years later I found myself wondering how that even worked in the first place. Surely the chance of generating a valid executable was basically zero. Now I know why.

I wish I had kept that executable, it would've been interesting to disassemble it.

Smoke detectors use Americium-241 which has a half life of 432 years. Unless that expiration date is a few centuries in the future, it's not because of radioactive decay.

No, interface {} is more like void pointers in C and C++ or Object in C# and Java. It can hold values of any type. One of the major selling points of actual generics is that they provide type safety, but interface {} doesn't provide that.

Yes, DRAM cells have to be refreshed every 60 ms or so. More RAM means more cells to refresh which means more power consumption.

There doesn't need to be anything sinister about it. Fentanyl is cheap and potent. You can take cheap, low quality heroin, mix it with a little fentanyl and sell it for more profit as high quality heroin.

However, if it's not mixed perfectly, you end up with "hotspots" of fentanyl. If someone ends up with a hotspot they can easily overdose. The occasion overdose also attracts more users because it gives the impression of potent, high quality heroin.

>they have hired “programmers with quantum computers to fight this stuff,”

Wow, either he's talking out his ass or he's been scammed hard. I'm leaning heavily towards the former given the overall shady feel of the business.

I think it's obvious that they knowingly tolerate these fake profiles, if not actively create them. To give the impression that their site has a lot of users.

So malware writers will switch to different techniques to obtain ransom. For example, there was an online illicit marketplace akin to silkroad that ran years before cryptocurrencies were even invented. It used Western union money transfers, if I'm remembering correctly, and ran for years before law enforcement was able to shut it down.

The Fourier transform is actually linked with linear algebra. You can think of it as taking a vector in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space (your signal) and decomposing it into its components (the amplitudes of the frequencies).

The thing I've always found most interesting about hydrofluoric acid is that it's corrosive and poisonous. Other acids like hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid are corrosive, but they're not poisonous like hydrofluoric is. Other common acids will burn you, but that's the extent of their damage. Hydrofluoric acid will burn you and absorb into your body, interfering with calcium ions in a way that can lead to death.

I honestly expected it to be 90% drugs, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of the items.

There's the dopamine hypothesis that posits that schizophrenia is caused by over-active dopamine receptors. It's based on the evidence that dopamine releasing agents like stimulants can cause pyschosis and that the medications used to treat schizophrenia block dopamine receptors. However, there's good deal of evidence that there's more to schizophrenia than just over-active dopamine receptors.

>One study estimated that viruses in the ocean cause a trillion trillion infections every second, destroying some 20 percent of all bacterial cells in the sea daily.

That excerpt really put it into perspective for me. I guess I always thought that viruses didn't have much of an impact, aside from ocasionally causing a pandemic and incorporating themselves into our genome. But the thought of viruses killing a fifth of all bacteria in the sea everyday is staggering.

Well, then you encounter problems with things like the triangulum Galaxy. Which has dark matter, but no supermassive black hole.

The gravitational pull of nearby, mundane objects is just as strong, if not stronger, than the pull of the stars and planets. If the gravitational pull of the stars and planets impacts human behavior, as astrology posists, then so should a cow several miles away.

Yes, the same company sells arduino compatible RISC-V microcontroller boards that are not capable of running Linux.

>Imagine what would have happened if the seller also had planted pot in the field, and got some of those mixed in...

Your story would be completely unchanged. Customs would seize the package and you would receive a letter saying that they seized contraband and that would be the end of it.

People have packages of drugs seized at customs without any consequences. Unless it's a massive amount or it happens frequently, nothing would happen to you.

How would that help? The kid ran out onto a street with traffic traveling at 50 MPH. Being aware of pedestrians does nothing when it's not physically possible to avoid hitting one.

>The spikes, skeletons and other deterrances are the kind of thing any future historian (or Indiana Jones style explorer) is going to find extremely interesting regardless of warnings. Even if they do know about nuclear radiation.

A future archeologist exploring the architecture is of no concern. A future environmental science team drilling down to study how well our containment procedures worked is of no concern. If people are aware of what's buried, it's not a problem.

The goal isn't to keep people out, per se, it's to let them know what's there. That's what the document proposes. None of the architecture is designed to physically prevent people from entering the site. It's all designed to tell people what's there.

>Suppose we discovered a 10,000 year old archaeological site with that message. Do you honestly think we would be like, "ok, I guess we won't go digging around to see what this ancient civilization found repulsive and worthy of such hatred?"

If the message is simply: "There is something dangerous here", we'd probably ignore it. If the message is "There is waste from the fission of uranium buried here. It consists primarily of the isotopes I-129, Cs-135, ... Here is how the waste is stored and laid out ...", we'd be much more inclined to listen. That's what the original document proposes as well, that there should be a hierarchy of messages from "There's something dangerous buried here" to detailed descriptions of the nature and composition of the waste.

How do you propose fooling a retinoscope?

>doesn't that heat up the Earth's crust and atmosphere more than the previous condition without the hole, therefore contributing to higher temperatures (and climate change)

It's irrelevant when compared to the amount of energy from the sun. World energy consumption is roughly 5.4 * 10^20 Joules per year. This is 86% of the total energy from the sun that hits the Earth in an hour.

It's like worrying over putting a single drop of poison into the ocean.

>“On the other hand, I mean, people have been implanting things into their body, like pacemakers and stuff to control your heart,” he said. “That's a way, way more serious thing than having a small chip that can actually communicate with devices.”

People don't get pacemakers for fun. They get pacemakers because they're medical devices that ensure their hearts beat properly.

I think at this point it's mostly of interest to security researchers and malware writers. It's not hard to imagine malware using this technique to transfer data out of an infected VM in a difficult to detect manner. If you can infect enough VMs it might be worth it. Also, this type of technique could be interesting to government employed malware writers.