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Comment Can't disagree.... (Score 3, Insightful) 233

by clifwlkr (#59134014) Attached to: Whole Foods CEO Says Eating Plant-Based 'Meats' is Unhealthy
I have a hard time believing that a lab grown food item pressed into whatever shape, is somehow good for you. Time and time again we find that what grows in nature, touched as little as possible, is always the healthiest choice. It is crazy important to eat not only foods from as close to nature as we can, but foods close to where we live as well. More of that will not only save the environment, but probably increase our lives as well....

Comment Regional Sports Fee (Score 1) 193

by clifwlkr (#57573703) Attached to: The Average Cable Bill Has Increased More Than 50 Percent Since 2010
Was going through my bill the other day, and noticed the 'Regional Sports Fee'. $6 a month for something I never use as I don't watch sports. So I call the satellite provider and say, please drop all sports channels from my subscription, as I don't watch them and don't want to pay the fee. Surprise, they don't have any packages, except the very base one with almost no channels, that don't have the sports channels on them, so you have to pay the fee.

They really need to get ala carte going or I am going to cancel it completely. I just want a few basic channels to record things off of for shows that I like and that does not include any of the expensive channels that they have. My time is limited, or I would probably explore getting all of this setup off of the internet with a DVR functionality, but it is purposefully difficult right now. They could keep me as a customer if they just had packages targeted at this. In fact they used to have an option where they dropped the sports but kept everything else (although they did not advertise it), but recently ended that as well.

As it turned out, after complaining and threatening to cancel, low and behold they can suddenly give me $60 a month credit for the next year to get my bill inline with what I am willing to pay... I mean the satellite is already in the air, the equipment is in the house, the rest is gravy for them. Just offer choice of individual channels and I bet a lot of people would stay. Make a million pennies instead of a few dollars....

Comment Samsung S8 Active (Score 1) 19

Take a look at the S8 Active. I got that, and it has a metal edge to it, nice backplate, and flat glass. It is mil rated and waterproof. It also has a 4000mah battery so it will run for 2 days easy. Yes, it is a bit heavier, but I don't need a case so that makes up for it.

And for me, I hate the curved screen and this one is flat.
Bitcoin

Energy Riches Fuel Bitcoin Craze For Speculation-shy Iceland (apnews.com) 99

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Iceland is expected to use more energy "mining" bitcoins and other virtual currencies this year than it uses to power its homes. From a report: With massive amounts of electricity needed to run the computers that create bitcoins, large virtual currency companies have established a base in the North Atlantic island nation blessed with an abundance of renewable energy. The new industry's relatively sudden growth prompted lawmaker Smari McCarthy of Iceland's Pirate Party to suggest taxing the profits of bitcoin mines. The initiative is likely to be well received by Icelanders, who are skeptical of speculative financial ventures after the country's catastrophic 2008 banking crash. "Under normal circumstances, companies that are creating value in Iceland pay a certain amount of tax to the government," McCarthy told The Associated Press. "These companies are not doing that, and we might want to ask ourselves whether they should."
Education

Cryptocurrency Classes Are Coming To Campus (nytimes.com) 81

Posted by msmash from the taking-a-bite dept.
While the price of Bitcoin has dropped since Christmas, the virtual currency boom has shown no signs of cooling off in the more august precincts of America's elite universities. The New York Times: Several top schools have added or are rushing to add classes about Bitcoin and the record-keeping technology that it introduced, known as the blockchain. Graduate-level classes this semester at Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, among other places, illustrate the fascination with the technology across several academic fields, and the assumption that it will outlast the current speculative price bubble. "There was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on Bitcoin," said David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York University who offered one of the first for-credit courses on the topic back in 2014. "But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped after that." For a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has 225 people signed up for the class.
AI

Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries For Scarce AI Talent (santafenewmexican.com) 156

Posted by BeauHD from the supply-and-demand dept.
jmcbain writes: Machine learning and artificial intelligence skills are in hot demand right now, and it's driving up the already-high salaries in Silicon Valley. "Tech's biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source)," reports the New York Times, and "typical AI specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock." The New York Times notes there are several catalysts for rocketing salaries that all come down to supply and demand. There is competition among the giant companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Uber) as well as the automative companies wanting help with self-driving cars. However, the biggest issue is the supply: "Most of all, there is a shortage of talent, and the big companies are trying to land as much of it as they can. Solving tough A.I. problems is not like building the flavor-of-the-month smartphone app. In the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research, according to Element AI, an independent lab in Montreal."
Education

Stephen Hawking's Thesis Crashes Cambridge Site After It's Posted Online (bbc.com) 79

Posted by BeauHD from the free-for-all dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Demand for Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis intermittently crashed part of Cambridge University's website as physics fans flocked to read his work. Prof Hawking's 1966 thesis "Properties of expanding universes" was made freely available for the first time on the publications section of university's website at 00:01 BST. More than 60,000 have so far accessed his work as a 24-year-old postgraduate. Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people." He added: "Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding. It's wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis -- hopefully they won't be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!" The 75-year-old's doctoral thesis is the most requested item in Cambridge University's library. Since May 2016, 199 requests were made for the PhD -- most of which are believed to be from the general public rather than academics. The next most requested publication was asked for just 13 times. The Cambridge Library made several PDF files of the thesis available for download -- a high-resolution "72 Mb" file, digitized version that's less than half the size, and a "reduced" version that was even smaller -- but intense interest overwhelmed the servers. Here's the first paragraph of Hawking's introduction: "The idea that the universe is expanding is of recent origin. All the early cosmologies were essentially stationary and even Einstein whose theory of relativity is the basis for almost all modern developments in cosmology, found it natural to suggest a static model of the universe. However there is a very grave difficulty associated with a static model such as Einstein's which is supposed to have existed for an infinite time. For, if the stars had been radiating energy at their present rates for an infinite time, they would have needed an infinite supply of energy. Further, the flux of radiation now would be infinite. Alternatively, if they had only a limited supply of energy, the whole universe would by now have reached thermal equilibrium which is certainly not the case. This difficulty was noticed by Olders who however was not able to suggest any solution. The discovery of the recession of the nebulae by Hubble led to the abandonment of static models in favour of ones which were expanding."
IOS

Latest iOS Update Shows Apple Can Use Software To Break Phones Repaired By Independent Shops (vice.com) 128

Posted by BeauHD from the remote-control dept.
The latest version of iOS fixes several bugs, including one that caused a loss of touch functionality on a small subset of phones that had been repaired with certain third-party screens and had been updated to iOS 11. "Addresses an issue where touch input was unresponsive on some iPhone 6S displays because they were not serviced with genuine Apple parts," the update reads. "Note: Non-genuine replacement displays may have compromised visual quality and may fail to work correctly. Apple-certified screen repairs are performed by trusted experts who use genuine Apple parts. See support.apple.com for more information." Jason Koebler writes via Motherboard: "This is a reminder that Apple seems to have the ability to push out software updates that can kill hardware and replacement parts it did not sell iPhone customers itself, and that it can fix those same issues remotely." From the report: So let's consider what actually happened here. iPhones that had been repaired and were in perfect working order suddenly stopped working after Apple updated its software. Apple was then able to fix the problem remotely. Apple then put out a warning blaming the parts that were used to do the repair. Poof -- phone doesn't work. Poof -- phone works again. In this case, not all phones that used third party parts were affected, and there's no reason to think that, in this case, Apple broke these particular phones on purpose. But there is currently nothing stopping the company from using software to control unauthorized repair: For instance, you cannot replace the home button on an iPhone 7 without Apple's proprietary "Horizon Machine" that re-syncs a new home button with the repaired phone. This software update is concerning because it not only undermines the reputation of independent repair among Apple customers, but because it shows that phones that don't use "genuine" parts could potentially one day be bricked remotely.

Comment Intel's answer to a GPU (Score 5, Informative) 59

Seems most people don't understand what this is doing. It looks like it is using Caffe standard neural network libraries. It mentions 'limited' layer support, but not by how much. Specifically it says it will support convolutional neural networks, which are decent image detectors. They could be used for object detection, handwriting recognition, etc.

You then cross compile your network using their toolkit to run on this device, and much like GPUs and tensorflow, you get high powered processing of your network. When married with a low power CPU, this could allow you to do CNN processing on devices that were not otherwise up to the task.

That said, exactly how performant this is remains to be seen. Although at only $80, it is a pretty cheap experiment and somewhat interesting as an idea.

I wonder if you can plug it into your Edison, though? :-)
Programming

'Coding Is Not Fun, It's Technically and Ethically Complex' (qz.com) 359

Posted by msmash from the in-today's-rant dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article: For starters, the profile of a programmer's mind is pretty uncommon. As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten. Coding isn't the only job that demands intense focus. But you'd never hear someone say that brain surgery is "fun," or that structural engineering is "easy." When it comes to programming, why do policymakers and technologists pretend otherwise? For one, it helps lure people to the field at a time when software (in the words of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen) is "eating the world" -- and so, by expanding the labor pool, keeps industry ticking over and wages under control. Another reason is that the very word "coding" sounds routine and repetitive, as though there's some sort of key that developers apply by rote to crack any given problem. It doesn't help that Hollywood has cast the "coder" as a socially challenged, type-first-think-later hacker, inevitably white and male, with the power to thwart the Nazis or penetrate the CIA. Insisting on the glamor and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don't need discipline in order to progress. As anyone with even minimal exposure to making software knows, behind a minute of typing lies an hour of study. It's better to admit that coding is complicated, technically and ethically. Computers, at the moment, can only execute orders, to varying degrees of sophistication. So it's up to the developer to be clear: the machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more "decisions" are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological, or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it's rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what's going on beneath these processes.
Government

Gizmodo Went Phishing With the Trump Team -- Will They Catch a Charge? (arstechnica.com) 122

Posted by msmash from the catching-the-wrong-fish dept.
Earlier this month, technology publication Gizmodo published a report on how it "phished" members of the administration and campaign teams of President Donald Trump. The blog said it identified 15 prominent figures on Trump's team and sent e-mails to each posing as friends, family members, or associates containing a faked Google Docs link. But did the publication inadvertently break the law? ArsTechnica reports: "This was a test of how public officials in an administration whose president has been highly critical of the security failures of the DNC stand up to the sort of techniques that hackers use to penetrate networks," said John Cook, executive editor of Gizmodo's Special Projects Desk, in an e-mail conversation with Ars. Gizmodo targeted some marquee names connected to the Trump administration, including Newt Gingrich, Peter Thiel, (now-ex) FBI director James Comey, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, White House press secretary Sean Spicer, presidential advisor Sebastian Gorka, and the administration's chief policymakers for cybersecurity. The test didn't appear to prove much. Gingrich and Comey responded to the e-mail questioning its provenance. And while about half of the targeted officials may have clicked the link -- eight devices' IP addresses were recorded accessing the linked test page -- none entered their login credentials. The test could not determine whose devices clicked on the link. What the test did manage to do is raise the eyebrows of security experts and some legal experts. That's because despite their efforts to make it "reasonably" apparent that this was a test, Gizmodo's phishing campaign may have violated several laws, ignoring many of the restrictions usually placed on similar tests by penetration-testing and security firms. At a minimum, Gizmodo danced along the edges of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Comment Re:So you exclude half the taxes and what you get? (Score 1) 903

by clifwlkr (#54216939) Attached to: Sorry America, Your Taxes Aren't High
It's the nickle and diming. Obviously I can pay to do that or I would not have water, but why should I be? It is only because it is a form of lobbied for taxes that you must continue to pay. So I also have a new garbage fee that used to be on my property tax, because of reasons. Why not just put it on the property tax like it used to be? You pay it even if you don't get garbage service. Then there is the automobile safety inspection, of which they literally check the light bulbs and your tires and pretend to look it over at Jiffy Lube. Yeah, that is worth the $40 (and no, this does not include emissions that is separate). It is examples of hidden lobbied for fees that are in essence taxes and are not necessary at all.

I brought the backflow valve up only because I just had to have it done again. Asked the only guy up here how many he has seen fail, and the answer was zero after installation. So basically over 10,000 people are paying $200 for no reason....

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