While working on a linguistics minor for my CS degree, I heard a number of versions of the quip that a linguist is someone who knows 100 words in each of 100 different languages. Of course, this should be followed with the observation that the main focus of linguistics is understanding the structures of languages, and vocabulary is interesting only in that it shows relations between languages. This doesn't generally require having a large enough vocabulary to be fluent. Most of the actual linguists I've met are fluent in only a few languages. These are often languages that are radically different from each other, though, since radical differences in how to express something would be interesting to a linguist.

And how long is that excuse valid for? It's not like Europe has been very peaceful and tripped Africa up on purpose, we've started two world wars in the last 100 years on our own turf. Yes, I realize problems don't go away in a day or a year or even a decade but look how far Europe has come in the last 70 years. How far has Africa come? How much aid money, emergency relief, how many education and healthcare programs have they gotten for free?

Still trotting out that old excuse and blaming the white man for all their woes is probably going to backfire. It only nourishes the people who think Africa is the way it is because they're primitive deadbeats who can't get anything done on their own. It's not that there's anything wrong with the people as such, take a black man and put him in a different environment and he might end up as President and a Harvard magna cum laude graduate.

My impression is that most of Africa's problems are cultural, like for example the response to Ebola. If they'd just stop touching their dead and seek medical help they'd do fine, but through ignorance and indifference and working against those trying to help them they'll just let it spread. Like HIV, there's a reason it's a huge problem south of Sahara and practically nowhere else and it's because for some cultural reason they just don't seem to value safe sex.

It should be. But history (e.g. the "only sell through registered dealers" laws) says it won't be. It'll be in favor of whoever pays the most bribes to the right officials.

That's already the case in the US (and as I recall, we discussed it here a few years back). US law for some time has required that new auto tires contain an RFID tag. Granted, those can't be read at a distance, but they can be read by sensors under the roadway or in poles next to the street.

It's hard to believe that the purpose of this can be anything but tracking. Yeah, such tags might have other uses, but would any of those uses have resulted in laws mandating the tags?

Well, maybe, and maybe not.

I recall a couple years ago, when I was traveling south on a street in a nearby town, but when I glanced at the GPS gadget, it showed me about a block north of where I was -- and headed north. Traffic was light, so I looked at it frequently, to see what it did, and it showed me continuing north, until my actual location was nearly a mile south of what it showed. Then it decided I'd made a U-turn, and was proceeding south at a rather high speed. Finally, the little You-Are-Here icon reached my actual position, and slowed down to match me. A bit later, I checked its records of that trip, and it showed a max speed somewhat over 250 mph.

So if the police had access to that data, I'd have got a ticket for going about 8 times the legal speed limit. I sorta suspect that most judges would laugh and toss it out. But if it'd been only twice the speed limit, I'd probably have had a large fine to pay.

And note that the position was credible, though it was roughly a mile off. A couple of months ago, however, I noticed that, while my bearing and speed seemed accurate, my GPS position was roughly 100 miles SE of my actual position, which put me maybe 10 or 20 miles east of Cape Cod, driving along in the ocean. It stayed that way for at least 15 minutes, and then suddenly popped over to a local street a few blocks from my actual position.

I've also seen it showing my position as being in north-central Canada, and somewhere in Nevada, when I was actually in the Boston metro area.

So if the police are tracking our GPS position and speed, we have no defense. Yes, maybe the judges will dismiss the tickets that are obviously so badly wrong. But if they're only off by a few miles or mph, we'll all be getting completely bogus tickets that we'll have to pay.

Of course, they may still dismiss them for people who "look right" and "talk right", as they do with claimed drug offenses. ;-)

Actually, most religions claim there's an abundance of ways to fall for temptation and sin while the path to God is straight and narrow. You make it sound like making it a challenge and pointing out all the alternatives and benefits would be a good thing, while the religious consider it trying to lead the children astray and trying to put a wedge between them and God. Like say their interpretation of the Bible means sex belongs only in the marriage - bear with me on this one - then pointing out that "if you're going to have sex anyway, use a condom" is kinda upselling a sin. It leaves the impression they don't really think you'll stick with plan A anyway. So a lot of parent don't want their children to know there even is a choice. You think in terms of pros and cons, they think it's one good choice and a lot of bad alternatives they don't need to know about..

I think you need to distinguish between terrorism and reign of terror. Hit-and-run bombings like the IRA or ETA rarely succeed in people giving in to terror. Taking actual control of areas, waving the flags and killing off all that oppose you has a much better historical record, ask anyone from Pol Pot to Hitler and Lenin and Mao. In case you haven't noticed, they're using their brutal savagery primarily to quell resistance and internal dissent. The story they're selling is that they're too fucking crazy to pick a fight with and so far they seem more than willing to put that reputation to the test and post it on YouTube.

I mean, would you like to be in a resistance movement inside IS territory? Do they care that they can't find you? Heck no, they'll just round up a few civilians and shoot them in retaliation for your sabotage/assassination/sedition. Far more civilized occupants have used that tactic, all those millions of people they control are in practice hostages. You're fighting an enemy willing to overreact to any provocation, give them a push and you won't get a shove back they'll beat you to a bloody pulp. And given their history so far, I don't think they have a problem with human shields. You can not excise them without massive civilian casualties. Sadly I give them much better odds than you predict.

FYI, North Korea has made three underground nuclear detonations in 2006, 2009 and 2013. Very few doubt that they now got a few nukes in the kiloton range - basically 1940s tech - and the means to deliver them to Seoul - a mere 35 miles away from the NK border. China doesn't care. They got a loyal ally, they could crush him at any moment and it'd only create hostility between Koreans and Chinese. And the country is not worth the trouble. I guess if China ever went on the offensive they'd gobble up NK - and probably SK too - but only if they're on the warpath anyway.

And? Part of being a cross-platform toolkit is that you must keep up with the underlying platforms, if you start failing to look native or behave native or integrate nicely or lack interfaces to new functionality you'll quickly cease to be useful for that. It'll still function as a toolkit for building KDE though since they define their own native, but then it will gravitate back towards being a Linux-only thing.

P.S. Despite Qt being cross-platform, most KDE SC applications don't seem to be. There's been an ongoing project to make them cross-platform for years, but many still have trouble compiling or working correctly.

Exactly the feeling I got. We don't even have an Federal Internet Commission, and don't seem to need one.

We do need to have the Consumer Product Safety Commission setting safety standards for the Internet of Things. They're properly the lead agency of safety issues. That will probably happen after the first few deaths due to cloud-based control of home devices.

Well, you must also know the HTML entities, even in plain text mode... writing æøå doesn't work, but æøå works. In this case µ doesn't work though. And I think all languages have Unicode support good enough to strip control characters and shit if you're not lazy. My impression was that it was more to sabotage the ASCII "art" than anything else.

Well, sometimes they make convenient little assumptions about the write amplification and other things in coming up with that number. Also it's the number they use for warranty claims, so it may not reflect the kind of endurance you'd normally expect. The latest trick is to basically use part of your drive as a semi-permanent SLC cache and only write it to MLC/TLC NAND later, if ever so what you actually get will depend on your usage pattern. If you just keep on rewriting a small file it'll probably not leave SLC at all, while if you use it as a scratch disk filling it up with large files and emptying it you'll hit the MLC/TLC hard. The rating is just to give consumers who don't want an in-depth look something to relate to.

Personally my first idea was, if they can deliver us a MLC drive at 45 cents/GB doesn't that mean they should be able to deliver us a SLC drive at 90 cents/GB? That's not disturbingly much, considerably faster and should have all the endurance you'll ever need. That said, TechReport got 3 (out of 6) consumer drives they've written >1 PB to, so I'm guessing most drives fail from something else than NAND exhaustion. And I don't reinstall my OS disk every day.... I just checked and I've used up 50 of my 3000 P/E cycles after 150 days of 24x7 running so at this rate it should take 25 years.

I know people who turn on their computer maybe 2-3 hours a day on average, just streaming no heavy media usage. Any SSD will last them forever, it's all about $/GB. Now if you want a guess they said 5000 P/E -> 3000 P/E (60%) for 25nm -> 20nm MLC, so I'm guessing 3000 * 0.6 = 1800 P/E for 16nm. And TLC is probably like 500 P/E, though this drive doesn't use that.

If Kip Thorne can win a year's worth of Playboys for his bet that Cygnus X1 was a Black Hole, when current theory from Professor Hawking says Black Holes don't really exist, then can Professor Thorne please give me a year's subscription to the porno of my choice due to the non-existent bet that this wasn't such a star?

That's like wearing shoes with golf spikes all the time.

Traction control for feet does roughly the same thing as automotive traction control for cars. The basic idea is to keep the sideways force below the break-loose point. This is the down force on the wheel times the coefficient of friction.

For car wheels, the down force is mostly constant. For a legged robot, it changes throughout the ground contact phase So the side force has to be actively controlled and changed throughout the ground contact. It's also necessary to compensate for leg angle.

Legs have an additional option. If a leg has three joints, you can adjust the angle at which the contact force is applied. This is a big win on hills.

I used to work on this stuff in the mid-1990s, but nobody was interested in building legged robots back then. It could be used for animation, but it was overkill for games. I never expected that DARPA would spend $120 million on BigDog. Robotics projects in the 1990s were tiny.

Because C.