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Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Will We Ever Be Able To Make Our Own Computer Hardware At Home?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The sheer extent of the data privacy catastrophe happening — everything soft/hardware potentially spies on us, and we don't get to see what is in the source code or circuit diagrams — got me thinking about an intriguing possibility. Will it ever be possible to design and manufacture your own CPU, GPU, ASIC or RAM chip right in your own home? 3D printers already allow 3D objects to be printed at home that would previously have required an injection molding machine. Inkjet printers can do high DPI color printouts at home that would previously have required a printing press. Could this ever happen for making computer hardware? A compact home machine that can print out DIY electronic circuits right in your home or garage? Could this machine look a bit like a large inkjet printer, where you load the electronics equivalent of "premium glossy photo paper" into the printer, and out comes a printed or etched or otherwise created integrated circuit that just needs some electricity to start working? If such a machine or "electronics printer" is technically feasible, would the powers that be ever allow us to own one?

Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Who Made China The Manufacturing Hub Of The Tech World? 13

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: We all know what tech gets manufactured in China — everything from PC motherboards to iPhones. We also know that China is far from a being a human rights observant country or Democracy by any measure — illicit organ harvesting, the Hong Kong situation and the explosion of CCTV surveillance in Chinese cities come to mind. The question: Precisely WHO came up with the idea of shifting so much tech manufacturing to China of all countries? Why not other developing countries with cheap labor but comparatively much better human rights standards, like India for example? What was so extra-special or extra-advantageous about this great big Communist holdout with no humans rights standards whatsoever that everybody wanted to manufacture their tech there? Couldn't you assemble an iPhone or laptop motherboard in dozens of other countries with cheap labor for around the same cost as China? Wouldn't the same investment in Vietnam, the Phillippines or some African country generate more or less the same financial result as pumping tens of Billions of Dollars into China each year? Why China when there were many comparable options?

Submission + - SPAM: 142,000 People, Mostly Children, Died From Measles In 2018

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest.

Most of the lives cut short were children aged under five.

Henrietta Fore, Unicef's executive director, said: "The unacceptable number of children killed last year by a wholly preventable disease is proof that measles anywhere is a threat to children everywhere."

Dr Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said: "It is a tragedy that the world is seeing a rapid increase in cases and deaths from a disease that is easily preventable with a vaccine.

"While hesitancy and complacency are challenges to overcome, the largest measles outbreaks have hit countries with weak routine immunisation and health systems."

Prof Larson said: "These numbers are staggering. Measles, the most contagious of all vaccine-preventable diseases, is the tip of the iceberg of other vaccine-preventable disease threats and should be a wake-up call."

The situation has been described by health experts as staggering, an outrage, a tragedy and easily preventable with vaccines.

Huge progress has been made since the year 2000, but there is concern that incidence of measles is now edging up.

In 2018, the UK — along with Albania, the Czech Republic and Greece, lost their measles elimination status.

And 2019 could be even worse.

The US is reporting its highest number of cases for 25 years, while there are large outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and Ukraine.

The Pacific nation of Samoa has declared a state of emergency and unvaccinated families are hanging red flags outside their homes to help medical teams find them.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Is Narrowmindedness In Science Harming Scientific Progress Itself?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Science powers everything these days, from the chemical battery and electronic camera sensor in your smartphone to the smart medicine you may take if you are ever diagnosed with cancer. Science and the scientific method are vital to making everybody's lives better. That said, it seems like not one week goes by these days where some kind of accepted scientific model, theory or assumption doesn't break. A metal or element behaves in unexpected ways in the university laboratory. A far away galaxy or black hole behave in ways that were considered "impossible". A never before seen biological entity is found that flips a biological mechanisms theory on its head. It seems like the same thing happens over and over and again — science posits with seemingly great certainty that X, Y, Z is "impossible" when it studies something, and then it turns out just 2 decades later that X, Y, Z is indeed possible. What does this obsession with stating "according to our best working model, X, Y, Z is impossible" do to scientific progress though? The obvious conclusion is that it a) easily leads to scientists trying to challenge existing models having their work ridiculed, discredited or ignored and b) reduces other scientists' motivation or willingness to explore if — indeed — what is posited as being impossible is very much possible. What is the point, considering how important exploring and explaining the unknown in science has always been, of mainstream science claiming over and over again that "according to theory X, Y is simply impossible"? Isn't this kind of narrowmindedness dangerous and ultimately self-defeating for Science?

Comment The Economist Is NOT Reliable On This Topic (Score 1) 1

by dryriver (#59474224) Attached to: Inequality could be lower than you think
The Economist has spent decades championing and promoting the economic policies that have led to horrible economic inequality in the first place. Now they seem to be trying to downplay the economic damage that they - along with similar publications - have inflicted on the world's poor. Inequality is ultra-high right now, and getting worse, especially in developing countries where some people live in shanty towns without clean water, and others drive around in mini convoys of 500K luxury jeeps. The Economist is never going to come clean and say "all the economic policies we have promoted for 50 years were essentially harmful to the poor". This is a publication chiefly read by the wealthy and well to do in the first place. Bankers. Traders. Investors. CEOs and managers.

Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Who Are Today's Great Inventors?

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: If you look back at the last 500 years or so, there is a fairly clear list of inventors who genuinely changed the world with their inventions and are today recognized as great or at least significant inventors. We live in a time of much more rapid innovation today. Who do you consider to be today's greatest inventors or innovators in any given field?
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Scientists Discover "Impossible" Supermassive Black Hole In Milky Way 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: A new black hole search method has just yielded fruit, and boy is it juicy. Astronomers have found a stellar-mass black hole clocking in at around 70 times the mass of the Sun — but according to current models of stellar evolution, its size is impossible, at least in the Milky Way.

The chemical composition of our galaxy's most massive stars suggests that they lose most of their mass at the end of their lives through explosions and powerful stellar winds, before the star's core collapses into a black hole.

The hefty stars in the mass range that could produce a black hole are expected to end their lives in what is called a pair-instability supernova that completely obliterates the stellar core. So astronomers are scratching their heads trying to figure out how the black hole — named LB-1 — got so chonky.

"Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution," said astronomer Jifeng Liu of the National Astronomical Observatory of China.

"LB-1 is twice as massive as what we thought possible. Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation."

The method by which the black hole was detected was really clever.

Black holes, unless they are actively accreting matter, a process that glows in several wavelengths across the spectrum, are literally invisible. They don't give off any radiation we can detect — no light, no radio waves, no X-rays, zip, zilch. But that doesn't mean we have nothing in our detection toolkit.

Way back in 1783, English natural scientist John Michell (the first person to propose the existence of black holes) suggested that black holes may be detectable if they were orbited by something that does emit light — such as a companion star — which would be tugged around the resulting binary system's mutual centre of gravity.

This is now known as the radial velocity method, and it's one of the main ways we search for and confirm the existence of hard-to-see exoplanets as they exert a small gravitational influence on their stars. And it can also be used to find other invisible things — such as black holes.

Liu and his colleagues were using the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China to search for these wobbly stars, and got a hit on a main-sequence blue giant star.

But it took follow-up observations using the powerful Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain and the Keck Observatory in the US to reveal the amazing nature of what the scientists had found.

The star, around 35 million years old and clocking in at around eight times the mass of the Sun, is orbiting the black hole every 79 days on what the researchers called a "surprisingly circular" orbit.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - RISC-V Foundation Moving to Switzerland over Trade Curb Fears (reuters.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The RISC-V Foundation, which sets standards for the open-sourced CPU architecture and controls who can use the RISC-V trademark on products, will soon move to Switzerland to ensure that universities, governments and companies outside the United States can help develop its open-source technology. “From around the world, we’ve heard that ‘If the incorporation was not in the U.S., we would be a lot more comfortable’,” its Chief Executive Calista Redmond said. Redmond said the foundation’s board of directors approved the move unanimously but declined to disclose which members prompted it. More than 325 companies or other entities pay to be members, including U.S. and European chip suppliers such as Qualcomm and NXP Semiconductors, as well as China’s Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies. The foundation’s move from Delaware to Switzerland may foreshadow further technology flight because of U.S. restrictions on dealing with some Chinese technology companies, said William Reinsch, who was undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the Clinton administration. “There is a message for the government. The message is, if you clamp down on things too tightly this is what is going to happen. In a global supply chain world, companies have choices, and one choice is to go overseas,” he said. The US has increased tenancy to sanction foreign, especially Chinese, companies using national security as an excuse, thus conveniently evading legal due process in the US justice system without providing any actual evidence.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Much Faster Is An ASIC Than A Programmable GPU? 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: When you run a realtime video processing algorithm on a GPU, you notice that some math functions execute very quickly on the GPU and some math functions take up a lot more processing time or cycles, slowing down the algorithm. If you were to implement that exact GPU algorithm as a dedicated ASIC hardware chip or perhaps on a beefy FPGA, what kind of speedup — if any — could you expect over a midrange GPU like a GTX 1070? Would hardwiring the same math operations as ASIC circuitry lead to a massive execution time speedup as some people claim — e.g. 5 X or 10 X faster than a general purpose Nvidia GPU — or are GPUs and ASICs close to each other in execution speed? Bonus question: Is there a way to calculate the speed of an algorithm implemented as an ASIC chip without having an actual physical ASIC chip produced? Could you port the algorithm to, say, Verilog or similar languages and then use a software tool to calculate or predict how fast it would run if implemented as an ASIC with certain properties (clockspeed, core count, manufacturing process... )?

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is There A Physiological Explanation For Unethical Behaviour? 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Reading tech news can be a depressing experience. Hackers. Identity thieves. Malware. Ransomware. Rampant data collection and privacy obliteration. Forced biometric identification. DRM and "you control nothing" software mechanisms. Patent trolls. Corporations that behave in predatory ways. Lying to sell a mediocre tech product. Companies that simply sit on their ass in terms of innovating when the competition can't catch up. Lots and lots of technically quite gifted people behaving — for lack of a better word — completely and utterly unethically. So where does unethical behavior originate? Do some people have an "ethics gene" or "idealism gene" and others a "malevolence gene" or "selfishness gene"? Are the brain structures or brain chemistry of ethical and unethical people different? Or is there something about using technology that makes people feel far less inhibited to do harm?

Comment There Is Only ONE Case For Curbing Speech (Score 1, Insightful) 194

And that is to prevent serious harm or death happening to someone. For example, you could legislate that you cannot tell people that sugar, sunflower oil and flour mixed together and taken orally twice a day will cure your cancer. That is disinformation that can kill gullible people. You can legislate that you cannot call for the murder of someone on social media. Again, necessary to prevent loss of life. Just about anything else is FREE SPEECH. Also consider that once you start to enable CENSORSHIP, that censorship HAMMER will pass from one political party to another each election cycle. Today, YOU may censor the political left or right. Tomorrow, the political left or right may censor YOU. Ever been on an internet forum with truly NASTY, NARROWMINDED moderators? One of those forums where just as you are trying to make a cogent argument, your forum account is nuked by the mods? It is hell. People have a God-given right to EXPRESS THEMSELVES. The sole case where you can curb this free speech is when it could - provably - lead to violence or death.

Comment Game Streaming Exists For ONE Reason Only (Score 5, Insightful) 19

by dryriver (#59437418) Attached to: Amazon's Cloud Gaming Service Could Arrive Next Year With Twitch Integration
And that reason is to get impressionable 5 to 18 year old youths used to the IDEA of using software RUNNING anywhere EXCEPT on your own hardware. The ultimate in SAAS in other words. You get NOTHING for your money - no digital download, no software discs, no save or config files, no box, no manual, no nothing. You pay 60 Dollars per game and own NOTHING. You can resell NOTHING. When you stop paying your RENT your game or software collection goes POOF - up in smoke. And when you GROW INTO AN ADULT WORKING IN AN OFFICE in 2028, well, you OWN OR CONTROL NOTHING EITHER. Your CAD design software runs on a remote server. Your programming IDE and COMPILER runs on a remote server. Your OFFICE SUITE runs on a remote server. Your 3D RENDER ENGINE runs on a remote server. Your entire DIGITAL FUCKING LIFE is essentially no longer under your CONTROL, OWNERSHIP or ADMINISTRATION. This is the sole reason GAME STREAMING is so FUCKING ATTRACTIVE to these companies. STEP 1 - tie all games to a DRM cloud client like STEAM, UPLAY, ORIGIN. This step was successful. STEP 2 - take THAT AWAY too and run the games COMPLETELY in the CLOUD as well. This will happen in the next 5 years. STEP 3 - congratulations, you are a GROWN ADULT who is UNABLE to BUY OR OWN OR CONTROL ANYTHING SOFTWARE related anymore. Because you WERE NOT AROUND IN THE 1980s AND 1990s, YOU THINK THIS IS "JUST THE WAY THE WORLD IS". There is no BIG PROFIT in game streaming. The big FINANCIAL PAYOFF is YOU spending YOUR ENTIRE FUTURE LIFE being dependent ON HIGHLY MONETIZED REMOTE SERVER COMPUTING. How much is that worth to the tech industry? TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OVER THE NEXT 30 years. You are SLAVE who has to PAY WHATEVER IS ASKED. I wouldn't be surprised if "COMPUTERS" are marketed in the future that have VIRTUALLY NO STORAGE CAPACITY built into them, save for a measly few Gigs required to run the OS of the device. The whole thing is about ENSLAVING THE USER. Us old farts won'y buy into this, so they have to go PEDO and INDOCTRINATE THE YOUNG that THIS IS SIMPLY THE WAY COMPUTING WORKS NOW AND FOREVER. You do that WITH GAMES while they are YOUNG.

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