But one Breivik is newsworthy only because it's such a rare occurrence.

THANKYOU!

I'm glad someone said it. Breivik was a rare occurrence. 9/11 was a rare occurrence. Fort Hood was a rare occurrence. The random nutter with a gun in Sydney is a rare occurrence. All crimes of this nature are rare occurrences. That is why they are remarkable, and that is why we take note of them.

When drones take out a whole street in Pakistan, nobody pays attention, because this is not a rare occurrence.

Except NK denied being behind the hacking.

Now there is no reason to believe anything NK says, but I would think they would be very proud of their computer achievements if they had been behind it.

The reason they don't falsely claim they are behind it is because they are worried the actual hackers would be found and then it would be clear they were lying.

Because they wanted to arrest him for drug trafficking.

Deporting him would mean he would probably sneak back or arrange with his friends still in the USA to continue drug trafficking. If you assume that drug trafficking is something that you don't want (and under current USA laws is something the police are supposed to prevent) then this is a totally logical approach.

I suspect the North Korean will not have a problem getting the USA to give him a tourist visa. He *will* have some trouble getting access to ask the USA for one, and for actually getting out of North Korea to use it.

http://rationalitate.blogspot....

Seems like Houston has minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes, so no.

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

Quote from your Pew Research link:

Emphasis mine. This does not support the claim of jihads or fundamentalism, unless you interpret the "defense of Islam" to mean "spread Islam everywhere". Might be interesting to compare that against a similar poll for Christians; I suspect you'd have similar results.

We could maybe try just leaving their religion alone? Then not only the great majority of peace-loving Muslims would be happier, but most of the rest too. Save the aggressive response for the nutjob violent individuals, treat them for the mentally ill criminals that they are, and leave religion out of it.

The "hot glue gun" is just a tiny part, namely the extruder hot end. Add to that a precision (computer-controlled) feed mechanism for the "glue", temperature regulation to work optimally with different feed rates and "glue" types, and a precision, high-speed, XYZ positioning mechanism for that "glue gun" (and optionally, additional "glue guns" so you can switch materials in mid print), together with a computer and firmware to drive all, and you're approaching what even the lowest-end consumer 3D printer does.

"Glorified"? Yes, and it is glorious. Perfect? Of course not, not any more than a cheap consumer Epson or Brother printer is compared to an Espresso Book Machine.

If your southern California car dashboard is hitting the 200+ Celsius temperatures needed to melt typical printer filament materials, I'd say you probably have worse things to worry about.

But sure, for some things you need material properties that just don't work well with fused filament deposition.

The PLA (polylactic acid) filament used in many printers is actually made from cornstarch, not petrochemicals. It prints at a slightly lower temperature and doesn't need a heated bed the way ABS* does.

Of course you could probably make a case about the amount of petrochemicals (fuel, fertilizer, pesticide) typically used in growing the corn in the first place.

*And some of the more exotic (for now) filaments like polycarbonate or nylon, which require even higher temperatures.

My local library system (Arapahoe County, Colorado) has 3D printers in each (or most) of its branch libraries for patron use.

Yep, ditto for third-party javascript.

If you simply must have the latest javascript widget on your website, host it on your own damn server, don't link to a third party. I might trust you, but how the hell do I know I can trust them? (noscript ftw).

So in order for a website to remain free for the users use, they will need to post more advertisements to make up for it.

I think you've got that backwards.

It isn't costing the websites money, it's costing the advertisers who are paying for clicks without any potential sales from those clicks. In theory this just helps the websites.

How the guys running the fraud bots get anything out of the deal is a bit mysterious, unless they're in cahoots with the website owners. But then the mechanics of online advertising is way, way down on my interest list -- most ad-servers resolve to localhost on my system.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.