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Comment Yes. And it will be genetically engineered (Score 1) 165

Because as climate change makes more of the planet uninhabitable and the population grows, someone will built a 'long term solution' and kill a whole lot of humanity off. The tools to do it keep getting stronger and more accessible. It's inevitable.

Comment Re:Sense at last (Score 1) 296

There is nothing wrong with removing the limits. I'm an older nerd, and I started coding with 72 character IBM punched cards, which were based on Hollerith cards invented to program semi-automated looms. Yes, the cards contained 80 characters, but the last 8 were reserved for auto-sequencing punch machines. Once you got your code right, you ran it through the sequencer which punched the last 8 characters. Then if you dropped the deck, you could run it through the sorter and it would sort them back into the sequence. And dropping a deck... well the only equivalent nowadays is trashing your backups and your source code accidentally.

I'm all for removing artificial limits on names as well, but overly clever names on variables is a dumbass move. I comment. I comment like crazy. Date_except_on_thursday_because_fizzbin is as dumb as DETF.

Comment Corporate vs. Personal ? (Score 1) 156

Corporate - Webex has been getting more robust as the Work From Home trend continues.
Personal - Zoom is spotty as heck, and terrifyingly bad on crappy rural internet (Satellite Wild Blue). Fortunately the family is all Apple hardware users, so we Facetime conference every week to stay in touch. And that works really well, AND doesn't require tech support for an 80+ year old great grandma.

Comment Dark Star (Score 1) 893

Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter's student film. And a screamingly funny send-up of SF films of the late 60's and early 70's... done in a haze of herbal smoke. And containing some of the most human dialogue.....
Computer: "Sargent Pinback, it's time to clean the Beachball's cage."
Pinback: (whining) "Awww... I don't wanna !"

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0...

Comment Don't forget TEMPEST.... (Score 1) 112

I recall in the mid 80's a colleague demonstrated to our boss that he could read the computer screen (CRT) inside the lab on his oscilloscope with a scanning setup about 20 feet outside the lab. Needless to say they had to build a semi-SCIF for the Top secret SIGNIT work the company was doing.

The same dude then developed a SIGINT technique a few months later. Which was classified Top Secret. Except he only had a Secret clearance. We kept telling him he had to report to the nurse for brain surgery.

China

China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death (technologyreview.com) 154

A new report finds that the CRISPR babies created by Chinese scientist He Jiankui last year may be at risk of an early death. It finds that genetic mutations similar to those He created, to a gene called CCR5, shortens people's lives by an average of 1.9 years. MIT Technology Review reports: "It's clearly a mutation of quite strong effect," says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley, who made the discovery while studying DNA and death records of 400,000 volunteers in a large British gene database, the UK Biobank. "You can't have many mutations that do that, or you wouldn't live that long." The finding offers a warning light to anyone else seeking to enhance human beings. That's because many genes have more than one role, and scientists tinkering with the balance are likely to cause side effects they didn't expect or want.

Comment Supernovae are Industrial Accidents (Score 1) 435

the late Sir Arthur Clarke's quote... As civilizations search for more energy. the expectation is that someone will screw up. Remember the kerfluffle about the LHC creating black holes ? (Yes, I know, rogue physicist using crappy math pushed that idea, mostly because he was pissed at being kept out of the project)

Comment Re:Is Fred Pohl still alive? (Score 4, Informative) 148

Right. And these idiots used the name of a completely addictive beverage that, once hooked, condemns the drinker to a lifetime of consumerism ? I've heard of tongue in cheek, but jeez... why not just name it Liquid Heroin and be done with it ?

""...here's what makes this campaign great in my estimation - each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it's simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest - three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.""

Government

New Surveillance System May Let Cops Use All Of The Cameras (engadget.com) 117

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [Computer scientists have created a way of letting law enforcement tap any camera that isn't password protected so they can determine where to send help or how to respond to a crime.] The system, which is just a proof of concept, alarms privacy advocates who worry that prudent surveillance could easily lead to government overreach, or worse, unauthorized use. It relies upon two tools developed independently at Purdue. The Visual Analytics Law Enforcement Toolkit superimposes the rate and location of crimes and the location of police surveillance cameras. CAM2 reveals the location and orientation of public network cameras, like the one outside your apartment. You could do the same thing with a search engine like Shodan, but CAM2 makes the job far easier, which is the scary part. Aggregating all these individual feeds makes it potentially much more invasive. [Purdue limits access to registered users, and the terms of service for CAM2 state "you agree not to use the platform to determine the identity of any specific individuals contained in any video or video stream." A reasonable step to ensure privacy, but difficult to enforce (though the team promises the system will have strict security if it ever goes online). Beyond the specter of universal government surveillance lies the risk of someone hacking the system.] EFF discovered that anyone could access more than 100 "secure" automated license plate readers last year.
United Kingdom

British Spaceplane Skylon Could Revolutionize Space Travel (ieee.org) 226

MarkWhittington writes: The problem of lowering the cost of sending people and cargo into low Earth orbit has vexed engineers since the dawn of the space age. Currently, the only way to go into space is on top of multistage rockets which toss off pieces of themselves as they ascend higher into the heavens. The Conversation touted a British project, called Skylon, which many believe will help to address the problem of costly space travel. According to IEEE Spectrum, both BAE Systems and the British government have infused Skylon with $120 million in investment.

Comment And the MMM is not just about software projects (Score 1) 281

Having managed projects ranging from R&D, defense systems, construction, and software development.. the MMM is all about work teams. Most successful project managers learn this sort of thing from experience (read pain and failure). Everybody thinks they have some sort of 'new concept' that is the magic bullet to 'solve software development problems'.

Forgetting that the one common element is... people. No matter WHAT methodology you claim to follow, I guarantee at least half of your team will think it's bullshit, and begrudge the paperwork that is getting in their way of just getting the job done.. THEIR WAY.

The best thing a good manager does is remove restraints and barriers, and filter bullshit. And let the team gel and get their shit done.

Comment Obvious to the most casual observer (Score 1) 303

Some years ago my home network was zapped with a lightning strike that came in via the coaxial cable. Modem, router, and two switches died to save my computers. In military designs, we used opto-isolators to shield sensitive circuits from attack.

Despite the hysteria, this is not a 'broad attack threat'. The attacker needs physical access to the network, and will probably only compromise part of the network due to the energies and damage modes involved. Unless he's Nikola Tesla and carrying his own lightning bolt. Then all bets are off.

I do recommend that you isolate your network from power threats with surge suppressors on your coax line or RJ-45 line from your ISP, and of course your power lines.

Comment Re:This is just the looong tail of the distributio (Score 4, Insightful) 122

Absolutely agree that it's much ado about nothing. AND bad statistics ! CERN as an example is a lot of nonsense... it's a HUGE project with a HUGE population of PhD's, grad students, undergrads, managers, technicians, and everybody else. All working towards a common goal. And the science developed by those thousands of authors is an enormous collaboration, enabled by ... yeah, you guessed it, the World Wide Web. Which was INVENTED at CERN to enable... Collaboration.

WSJ, you look like a bunch of idiots. Stick to talking about stocks and rich people stuff. You suck at science.

AI

Microsoft Creates an AI That Can Spot a Joke In a New Yorker Cartoon 66

An anonymous reader writes: For over a decade Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at the New Yorker, and his assistants have gone through 5,000 cartoon entries for the magazine's caption contest each week. Needless to say, the burnout rate of his assistants is quite high, "The process of looking at 5,000 caption entries a week usually destroys their mind in about two years, and then I get a new one," Mankoff says. But now thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft, Bob may finally have found the perfect helper. Researchers have been working on an artificial intelligence project to teach a computer what's funny. Fortune reports: "Dafna Shahaf, a researcher at Microsoft, used the database of cartoons to train the program to understand commonalities and differences in the millions of cartoons, which lets the AI run through the entries the New Yorker receives each week for its back-of-magazine cartoon caption contest. About 55.8% of the time the humans agree with the captions the AI selects, which is a pretty good percentage."

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