tonysdg

Professional Engineers (note the capital 'E') are protected in the U.S. by such laws.

Professional engineers (note the lowercase 'e') are usually not protected in the U.S. -- they're regular employees whose profession happens to be engineering.

You mean http://github-trends.ryotarai.info/?

"Greetings, Professor Falken."

"Hello, Joshua."

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"

Isn't that exactly how bounties work on the StackExchange websites?

To my understanding, the problem is that when the lenders WERE calling colleges, it wasn't to say "this kid wants to borrow 100k in loans", it was to say "here's 50k in goodies, send your students to us for loans!". Hence the controversies over kickbacks and the like.

IIRC, they were bought by Fitbit, who discontinued the Pebble line.

I'd pay to see it. BR2049 was amazing IMO.

If I'm being honest, I'm willing to buy that argument. You're right in that censorship of any type is dangerous -- it draws a line in the sand, and once there's a line it can always be moved to block viewpoints that the censor disagrees with.

But true free speech isn't an option either -- it's well-established that someone falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded room should be held accountable if someone gets injured in the frenzy that follows. The implication there (as I see it) is you can be held accountable for speech that hurts others.

So how then do you define "hurting others"? That's where I feel the real debate begins, and those who dislike Reddit/Facebook/others' actions dislike their definition of "hurting others".

Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic "Dune". Amazing both for the entertainment value as well as for the thought-provoking ecological/sociopolitical ideas.

> If Pai gets his way, ISPs will be in a great position to cement Twitter and Facebook's monopoly with preferential treatment and free subsidized internet plans.

IANAL, but I wonder if this would open the door for anti-trust lawsuits by a future administration.

I've run experiments/developed on both Applied Micro's X-Gene 1 and Cavium's ThunderX (the original). Both of these have been touted as "ARM servers".

The X-Gene was complete crap in terms of both performance and power consumption. The ThunderX was only really useful for highly-parallel applications that don't require a lot of horsepower, and even then it's a power hog.

I'm cautiously optimistic with Qualcomm's Centriq and Cavium's ThunderX2, but unless they can make a compelling argument in terms of power consumption, I'm skeptical of them making any inroads into the market. Sure, Intel Xeons and IBM Power8s may suck power, but they're _damn_ fast, so you can execute your workloads quickly and then just shut the machine down or enter idle power states.

Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) wrote "Thing Explainer", a book that attempts to explain things using only the most popular 1,000 words in the English language: https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing-explainer/

I also remember having a book similar to this around that age (maybe a couple of years older): https://www.dk.com/us/9781465414175-knowledge-encyclopedia/

The nice thing about the latter one is that the pictures will be enthralling now, and as your child grows they'll be able to understand more and more of the book :)

Hehe reminds me of the computer engineering adage: "The only thing that can't be solved by another layer of indirection is too many layers of indirection."

Oh I'm well aware -- the lab I work in bought a couple of X-Gene 1s for testing, and even an X-Gene 2. They were complete and utter crap performance- and power-wise -- but they were (at the time) the only thing available.

Didn't know that about the ThunderX -- fascinating! Thanks!

I wonder how this will affect Cavium's ThunderX line. When Applied Micro was bought by Macom, their X-Gene line was more or less trashed. If this keeps happening to companies trying to develop ARM servers, you'll never see an ARM server in a datacenter.

Or DuckDuckGo, for that matter?

Obligatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/504/

So it's one order of magnitude difference compared to two? That's still not pretty.

I've never programmed a microkernel OS (and I've only done minimal Linux kernel programming), but I would assume it's even _more_ important, as a single change would impact almost every component of the system.

That's the whole idea behind the RISC-V platform [1]. It's well-funded, well-designed, has amazing pedigree (David Patterson literally wrote the book on computer architecture). It's even licensed such that companies can use it in proprietary designs.

And yet, making the actual switch is a tremendously difficult task. On the software side alone, it requires recompiling every application you want to run on your platform. That doesn't even touch the cost of rolling the actual hardware. There are more than a few examples of this: Intel's Itanium, Oracle's SPARC, Berkeley's MIPS, Transmeta's Crusoe, etc. Sure, these all had niches (embedded systems, research hardware, a few high-end servers) -- but breaking out into the mainstream (a.k.a. like x86-64 and ARM/ARM64) is damn near impossible.

[1] https://riscv.org/

We spend a lot of effort on much less important things <-- someone (not me, but someone) might argue that's exactly why our species should go extinct ;-)

3 cheap technologies:

> With the game console's ability to accurately track the exact position of the controller, he wondered, why not just duct-tape the controller to an ultrasound probe?

Never forget the duct-tape! ;)

Because it means that some RSA keys may be weaker than others. Without diving too far into the mathematics of it, the RSA cryptosystem (and indeed, many asymmetric-key cryptosystems) is based on the notion that multiplying two gigantic prime numbers together to get another gigantic non-prime number is easy; but taking a gigantic non-prime number and figuring out which two prime numbers were multiplied together is incredibly hard. This conjecture, if true, means that for some gigantic non-prime numbers, it is easier than expected (even if only slightly so) to figure out which two prime numbers were used.

It's likely because it's a reaction piece to this article [1], which is almost entirely sarcasm.

[1]https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...

Governments already deploy root CAs -- see here: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/71171/is-there-...

How much extra security does this actually provide over a subscription-based VPN service? I mean, yeah, I control the physical hardware (assuming my apartment doesn't get busted in), but it means I have to make sure everything is configured properly/patched/etc. Is it really worth all that extra effort? I'm legitimately curious here.

Ironically relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/504/

If I had to guess, it's because they're betting that for business users buying an ultrabook-style laptop, the battery life you gain with the M-series is more advantageous than the extra processing power.

My university subscribes to Engineering Village (https://www.engineeringvillage.com), which collates 3 major paper databases (Compendex, Inspec, NTIS). I set up a weekly alert for a variety of keywords that I'm interested in. It's not perfect - I do a bunch of searching on my own - but it at least lets me know of major papers so they don't slip under my radar.

Putting aside the politics of the situation, how exactly does the DNC continue to get hammered by apparently-malicious actors without making major changes to their information security practices? My understanding is that the hacks are on-going and persistent - after several weeks of this being in the news, and possibly being aware of it for months, why haven't they been able to harden their systems enough to repel at least a few of these attacks?

Or am I completely misinterpreting the news reports I keep hearing from the NY Times, ArsTechnica, etc.?