If they wish to engage to aggression against other country's sovereignty, they should do it without the rest of the world helping fund them.

Better be careful what you wish for. If the rest of the world applied that standard to the USA and UK they'd have nobody to buy their bonds at all. You don't want China deciding to flex their economic muscles by playing with the bond market next time America invades some random country, do you?

Given that all our leaders in both the west and Russia are pathological liars, I'm always interested to find the other side of the story. Not that our media makes it easy.

This slashdot story reports what's happening as fact. But as far as I can tell what we have is actually only quotes from Kiev, the same people who have been claiming that Russia was invading for weeks. The same people who claimed that a convoy of aid was actually full of soldiers and military equipment, even after it was repeatedly spot checked by journalists and found to contain exactly what Russia claimed it did (food and aid). This is coming just days after Poroshenko dissolved his Parliament, there were apparently rising protests against conscription into the Ukrainian army, and the separatists were able to make progress.

Just to make things even more complicated: simultaneous with the claim that Russian troops are crossing into Ukraine, RT is claiming that Ukrainian troops crossed into Russia, in order to defect, and the Ukranian government admits this.

This comment on the Guardian story (which incidentally is much less biased than this Slashdot article and presents this as an accusation by Kiev) is what got me to look for these stories and I think interesting enough to quote in full:

Nothing really to explain. Ukraine troops, left without leadership and provisions, have been deserting and losing ground all week. Now that people are demonstrating in Kiev calling for Poroshenko's resignation, he's calling invasion.

- Close to 2,000 Ukraine combatants have put down their guns and asked for asylum in Russia.
- In the last 4 or 5 days, the DPR army has encircled and captured more than 7,000 troops, and all the hardware they possessed.
- On the 24th we all saw thousands of these defeated troops marched through Donesk city centre.

Now they have close to 80 tanks, and various other armored vehicles, all acquired from defeated Ukraine troops, and are sweeping over eastern Ukraine.

Poroshenko was given billions of dollars, and some how failed to pay pensions, salaries, or to send adequate supplies to the forces. He's losing this war, that's all.

You're bullying, Mellon. It's like this:

A. Tell me something you love.

Maybe you love the Bible. Maybe you love science. Maybe you love The Last Unicorn, by Peter Beagle.

B. Find something in it that you could make an unseemly story about.

If you love the Bible, get the story about the guy who had sex with his daughters.

If you love science, get the story about alpha silverbacks and how they dominate the society.

If you love The Last Unicorn, get the story about the red bull pushing unicorns into the sea.

C. Now accuse the fuck out of a person.

"If you love the Bible, then you define incest as life-defining, and you're not typical. You need to redefine your life, right now."

"If you think science is true, than you believe that controlling women is the Natural Order. You need to rethink the merits of science, and redefine your life, right now."

"If you get your rocks off watching the Red Bull dominate unicorns, you're not typical. You need to redefine your life, right now."

Forcing YOUR interpretations onto others is psychic/emotional violence, and it's also the behavior of a bully.

It's too bad that some teenage boy somewhere has rushed into Anita's damsel-in-distress gambit, but gamers everywhere and gamer culture are NOT the problem. Attack that kid, DON'T attack gamers as a culture -- which is what she's been doing.

Have you seen ye olde XKCD, where if a boy does poorly in math, it's "Damn, you suck at math," but if a girl does poorly in math, its "Damn, girls suck at math?" Well, the same here, but in reverse, and then further, socially embraced: When women are acidic towards men, it's "Damn, you're an aggressive individual." But when some teenage boy is acidic towards women, it's "Damn, gamer culture is to blame, and we need to re-engineer the thoughts and feelings of gamers everywhere, using social bullying."

Start at != fully loaded.

Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.

Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.

Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.

If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.

V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.

I understand why 64 bit can improve performance on x86 platforms because the 64-bit transition also rolled in other improvements like more registers.

I understand why 64 bit can improve the performance of security mitigations by making guessed addresses more likely to result in a controlled crash rather than arbitrary memory scribbling.

I cannot think of any reason why switching to 64 bit builds should halve the crash rate, unless this is just a side effect of 64 bit hardware being newer and less crappy overall. Can anyone else explain this to me?

Nah. It just takes more crashes before the exploit achieves penetration.

(Address space randomization is a terrible idea. It's a desperation measure and an excuse for not fixing problems. In exchange for making penetration slightly harder, you give up repeatable crash bug behavior.)

OK, so we build a ship that can take us anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. Then what? What's the point without a destination?

Right now, our technical ability allows us to detect planets that may be capable of harboring life. Why don't we go ahead and do what we can do rather than sulking over the fact that we can't do more? Once the day comes when we can actually go there, we'll do that. Until then, let's do what we can, which is detection.

The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.

It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. There's one site that lets you upload stuff. It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.

This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft developed something similar. Their idea was to render frames in layers, with the more distant or less active layers rendered less often. if the viewpoint changed, the background layers were scrolled, rotated, or transformed to match, rather than being re-rendered immediately. It never caught on, because graphics hardware became fast enough to re-render everything on for each frame.

This new thing is similar. Mispredicted frames are viewpoint-warped as a temporary measure so the user sees something. The image is wrong, but close enough to look OK until a new rendered frame is sent. It looks OK for Doom, on which it was tested, because Doom is mostly about the shooter and the opponents moving; there's not much general activity in the background. GTA IV/V would probably look much worse than normal.

The whole concept represents a desperate attempt to make something "cloud-based" that shouldn't be.

I don't use Linux anymore and couldn't care less about systemd - if it helps drag desktop Linux further out of the UNIX stone age then I'm all for it - but this article is the most pathetic attempt to seem neutral I've encountered all day.

It indicates that no matter how reasonable a change may seem, if enough established and learned folks disagree with the change, then perhaps it bears further inspection before going to production. Clearly, that hasn't happened with systemd.

The "established, learned old guard" are the main reason Linux has gained a reputation for being hard to use. They're the reason that basic things like hardware drivers constantly break and the only reliable way to get the latest version of an app is to compile the source code. If the old guard are upset about systemd, that probably means it's a good thing.

If you remember a little device from 2007 called iPhone - it introduced a "novel" idea: Let's find out where we are based on the nearby cell towers

Minor correction. This technique was not introduced by the iPhone. Google Maps was doing this on Nokia/SonyEricsson J2ME candybar phones for years beforehand. When Apple licensed Google Maps they got access to the same technology. As far as I know Google invented this, although it's one of those ideas that's obvious enough to anyone who explores the problem that I'm not sure "invent" is a useful word to deploy.

Except nobody actually does that. The whole JVM thing was done to make browser "applets" work. Nobody uses those any more. Most Java is server-side, running on farms of x86 machines.

"Computing's Narrow Focus"? Get a degree in petroleum geology or structural engineering if you want a narrow focus. Or pick the wrong field in biology. I know a woman who got a PhD in an area of microbiology that turned out to be a dead end. She ended up managing a coffee shop.

The strange thing about Java is that it still uses a virtual machine. There's so much "packaging" associated with Java that compiling to machine code and linking would almost be simpler.