solidangle

Dutchie here. More sidenotes:

> It makes a bit more sense when you realise that the man doesn’t actually like democracy

Why does this mean he doesn't like democracy? He doesn't like direct democracy, but he loves our indirect democracy. I don't see the need for a referendum in the Netherlands, the next parliamentary election is coming up soon and if people want to leave the EU they can vote for the Socialist Party or the Party for Freedom, both want to leave the EU.

> The Dutch have a lot to lose from Brussels forcing a UK/NL trade war on them.

We have a lot more to lose from Brussels forcing a NL/DE trade war, if we decide to leave the EU. Economically we're practically the 17th Bundesland of Germany.

> He’s also survived a prosecution for “inciting hatred” (he was found not guilty).

Geert Wilders is facing more prosecution for asking his followers whether they wanted more or less Moroccans in The Netherlands, after which they chanted "Less! Less! Less!".

The Intel graphics driver (i915) has an issue in Linux 4.4.0 which causes occasional black frames. Other than that it's running perfectly for me.

Wouldn't it be amazing if some poor grad student in the future had to explain to his supervisor that his simulation of the past failed because the people in the simulation figured out that they were being simulated? That would cause so many moral issues: do you kill your experiment, or do you let it run until big freeze?

Apparently complaining about living in poverty is victim culture. Apparently complaining about working two full-time minimum wage jobs while barely being able to pay the bills is victim culture. Apparently complaining about not being able to afford a quality education for your children (so that they do not have to live in the same poverty) is victim culture. Apparently complaining about not being able to afford healthcare is victim culture.

Sure, people doing startups or creating other businesses work hard, but that shouldn't be the norm. Working 40 hours a week as an employee should be enough. And by the way we're not even complaining about the people creating businesses, we're complaining about the people who inherit their wealth, get everything handed on a silver platter, and who still aren't grateful and don't want to pay their employees more than minimum wage. We shouldn't accept that kind of wealth in our society when there are people living in (extreme) poverty.

France has the absolute right to protect its citizens.

So why don't you just run a firewall on your router?

NAT is not a security feature, it never was and it will never be. Stateful connection tracking however is a security feature. NAT uses it to route the right packets to the right computers, but firewalls can also use the same feature to drop unsolicited packets. It's nearly trivial to do this with iptables, OpenWRT does it by default, and I'm sure most other IPv6-capable routers do it too. I'm just as secure on IPv6 as I'm on IPv4.

IPv6 also allows you to do weird stuff like using a single IP address per connection, which makes it even harder to address a single computer from the internet.

IPv6 is just as safe if not safer than IPv4, if you use it correctly.

Public-key encryption was supposedly invented at GCHQ by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson in 1975, one year before Diffie and Hellman published their paper. The work had to be kept secret though, so they never published it.

Blocking their cookies and Javascript codes circumvents that. This can be done using NoScript.

I guess it can't hurt if you only use it to resolve Netflix.com, as long as you enforce HTTPS.

You are mistaking the Anne Frank Foundation (Dutch: Anne Frank Stichting), which maintains the Anne Frank House and monitors racism (specifically anti-semitism) in the Netherlands, with the Swiss Anne Frank Fonds, which holds the copyright to her diary. It is currently under discussion whether or not the Anne Frank Fonds actually holds the copyright, as it has been more than 70 years since the death of Anne Frank copyright should have expired, but the Anne Frank Fonds claims that Otto Frank (Anne's father) was a co-author of the book.

Not really, it still needs to be ratified by the member states of the EU (and even after that citizens in some of the states can start a referendum about it) and after that it can still be shot down by the European Court. The pact is so vague about the protection of European citizens that there's a good chance that the European Court of Justice won't accept it, as they haven't fixed all of the problems that were in the previous "safe haven" pact.

> The rules are designed to be supported by an analysis tool. Violations of rules will be flagged with references (or links) to the relevant rule. We do not expect you to memorize all the rules before trying to write code.

But I agree, a short guide for C++ with the most important stuff in it would be nice.

The Disney BSDF [1, 2] is extremely flexible and offers a lot of artistic freedom. The only real limitation is that the BSDF is required to be energy conserving, but that's hardly a limitation. A physically-based renderer is still able to produce non-photorealistic results.

[1] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2012-shading-course...

[2] http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-course...

Indeed, at some point the situation with IPv4 will become so grave that it will become impossible to ignore IPv6. Transitioning to something like BangIP might be much easier, but it will be impossible to force people to adopt it, which will only lead to fragmentation. IPv6 might cause massive fragmentation on the internet right now, but once the IPv6 gets closer to 100% we can start dismantling the IPv4 infrastructure, which will force the remaining few to switch to IPv6. There's no way to do that with BangIP, as it involves keeping the IPv4 infrastructure intact, which will allow people to continue browsing a large part of the web and thus there will be little to no reason for a lot of people to switch to BangIP. In the end IPv6 will be a much better solution than BangIP.

It's not even that good here. Most series that ended within the last 10 years are not available. They don't have 9 out of 10 TV series that I want to watch. To make things even worse, they've raised prices from €8 to €10 even though it feels like they're removing more TV series (such as Lost) than they're adding back.

Then trust your router's firewall. And if you don't trust your router's firewall build your own router (or install OpenWRT on store-bought router).

I don't see your problem. If you don't want your TV to be a server that's accessible from the internet then don't open any ports on your router's firewall to your TV. NAT routers accidentally acted as firewalls (and newer routers also acted as proper firewalls), but that doesn't mean we're going to ditch the firewall on the router now that we have IPv6.

Starbucks also promised to create jobs in the Netherlands by locating their European coffee bean processing plant there. Extra jobs and tax revenue sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

If you're doing this then make sure that your router uses your DNS server so you don't have to manually enable it on all your devices (especially those pesky Android devices that don't allow you to have a custom dns server with a dynamic ip).

You can also replace your routers firmware with OpenWRT. OpenWRT uses dnsmasq by default (and allows you to customize the configuration, of course), so you don't even have to use a separate server.

Could it be a man in the middle that tries to install updates that aren't signed by Microsoft? It reminds me of this: http://www.leviathansecurity.com/blog/the-case-of-the-modifi... .

I really do wonder how much of these gaps can be attributed to the universities themselves. Elite universities are more likely to attract successful and motivated and thus will "produce" more successful graduates than other universities. No name state colleges are more likely to attract the less successful high school students and thus they will likely produce less successful graduates. I bet there is nearly as much correlation between SAT scores and pay as the eliteness of the attended university and pay.

What you describe is next event estimation.

Yeah, I was a bit disappointed that they started focusing on their own renderer instead of just explaining more of the basics of path tracing. Note that it isn't necessary at all to sort rays, although it can make things faster if done correctly. Also note that Disney isn't the first to consider sorting rays and tracing them at the same time, similar research was done in the 90s.

The video was made for this article:

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/innovations/hyperi...

If you want to learn more about rendering then here is some more info:

Stanford CS348b course notes:

http://candela.stanford.edu/cs348b/doku.php

Cornell CS6630 course notes:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs6630/2012sp/schedule.stm

Eric Veach's Phd thesis:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation by Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Wenzel Jakob (book and open source implementation of a state of the art renderer):

http://pbrt.org/

Bidirectional path tracing is one way of sampling paths (actually it combines many techniques for sampling paths and weights those using something called Multiple Importance Sampling). It's not the only way of doing it. Disney most likely uses path tracing with next event estimation. This means that they start a path as explained in the video and they end a path by sampling a point on a light and then connecting the start of the path with the point to form a full path. This is one the techniques used by bidirectional path tracing (bdpt), this technique uses n vertices on the camera path and 1 vertex on the light path, but bdpt also uses techniques with s vertices on the camera path and t vertices on the light path. This means that there are multiple ways to sample the same path, so these techniques need to be weighted using something called Multiple Importance Sampling.

That's very simple: if we don't end up hitting a light the path won't carry any radiance, so it won't contribute to the final image. If we start on a light and we don't end up hitting the camera the path won't carry any importance and so it won't contribute to the final image either.

Keep in mind that there is a very mathematical foundation to all this, we're not just tracing paths for the fun of it. Basically what we want to solve is a path integral (an integral over all paths), we do this using a technique called Monte Carlo integration (which basically means we use randomness). We first sample a path (using path tracing) and then we calculate the contribution of that path (which basically is the amount of radiance is carries divided by the probability of sampling the path) and then we add that contribution to the right pixel.

No that's wrong. You do start tracing paths at the camera. The lens usually is extremely small and the rays that do contribute are highly directional, the probability of hitting the lens is extremely low and the probability of the hitting the lens in a direction that actually contributes to the final image is even lower. On the other hand there usually are many lights in a scene with a total area that's much larger than the area of lens and most lights don't have a directional profile. So you're much more likely to hit a light than you are to hit the lens, hence we start at the camera and not at a light.

They do simplify things a bit though. Normally we don't trace one path at a time, but we trace multiple of them. Each time we intersect with an object we do not only create another ray to continue to path, but we also sample a point on a light and we connect the two points by a ray to finish the path. This process is called Next Event Estimation and we can combine both 'accidental' paths and 'connected' paths by using a technique called Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS).

It's not as fun as agar.io in my opinion. The biggest problem is the balance in this game: in agar.io big players are discouraged from attacking small players, they're too slow to catch them and the risk of splitting is not worth it. It's incredibly easy to attack a smaller ship in this game and there is no risk.

The mutual destruction in this game is an annoying mechanic in this game, yet you keep shooting at players with a similar size as there is a chance they wont react quickly enough.

It looks incredibly cool, but it needs some more balancing to be as fun as agar.io.

It's absurd that you have to press on a button called 'Customize' (which is really scary sounding for non-experts) to get any privacy in Windows 10. If users are brave enough to press this button they get a list of nondescript options that barely explain what kind of data is sent to Microsoft.

Microsoft should show always show all the privacy options to users and they should explain the pros and cons for each setting. Explain them that Cortana won't work anymore if they don't enable something, but also explain them that the NSA will be getting all their keystrokes if they do enable it.

Here in Europe we are not protected by US law against the NSA (although there seem to be all sorts of loop holes in the US too), so we should expect here that all the data that Microsoft collects is directly sent to the NSA. It's unacceptable that they offer a one click 'share everything with the NSA'-button when there is no matching 'keep all my data private'-button.

But the absolute worst thing ever is that they seem to throw away old settings after some updates. So even when I make sure that my parents computers are properly protected against Microsoft or even the NSA spying on them, I still can't expect that they will stay that way in the future.