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Submission + - US Government Doesn't Want You to Know How to Make a Hydrogen Bomb 3

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, another product of American ingenuity, that easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NYT that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. “They wanted to eviscerate the book,” says Ford. “My first thought was, ‘This is so ridiculous I won’t even respond.’ ” For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.

Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford’s book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book “contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb.” “Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions,” says Ford, “it would destroy the book.”

Submission + - Southern California Edison Lays off 500 workers- replaces with H1B Visa workers. (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Maxo-Texas
Maxo-Texas writes: California Edison workers are being laid off and replaced with Infosys H1B visa workers. They will be required to train their Infosys replacements in order to receive their severance pay and they will be required to sign NDA's in order to receive their full payment.

This violates the premise of H1B visa's-- that the workers are needed to fill jobs for which employees cannot be found. The story is being widely reported on conservative talk radio as well so this event may actually bridge the political gap and bring about bipartisan corrections to the H1B programs

Full details:
http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Submission + - We know where you've been: Ars gets 4.6M license plate scans from the Oakland PD (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: One citizen demands: "Do you know why Oakland is spying on me and my wife?"

If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs).

In response to a public records request, Ars obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely the largest publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world.

After analyzing this data with a custom-built visualization tool, Ars can definitively demonstrate the data's revelatory potential. Anyone in possession of enough data can often—but not always—make educated guesses about a target’s home or workplace, particularly when someone’s movements are consistent (as with a regular commute).

Submission + - NVIDIA Launches Maxwell-Powered Quadro M6000 Workstation Pro Graphics Cards (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA released its Quadro M6000 at last week's GPU Technology Conference, but interestingly, it was without much fanfare. Perhaps that has something to do with the card belonging to the professional market that NVIDIA didn't feel the need to trumpet the new release. As the "M" in its name implies, this is a Maxwell-based Quadro — the first of its kind. Just as with the desktop GeForce series, the move from Kepler to Maxwell on Quadro offers a slew of benefits, from improved general performance to increased power efficiency. Specs-wise, the M6000 is effectively a GeForce GTX TITAN X, but clocked down ever-so-slightly. It's comprised of 3,072 CUDA cores, a 988MHz clock speed, and memory throughput of 317GB/s (vs. 336.5GB/s of TITAN X). Also, like the monstrous TITAN X, the M6000 features 12GB of memory and a 250W TDP. While higher-end Kepler-based Quadro K6000 cards offered solid double-precision performance, the M6000 doesn't target that as much. The reason for this is that NVIDIA decided to push the single-precision performance higher, since that's the major demand lately and it also offers improved ray-tracing performance. In that comparison, the M6000 should be close to 20% faster than the K6000, although real-world performance gains greater than that might be achieved, depending on the scenario.

Comment Re:PHP is fine (Score 1) 182

by UnknownSoldier (#49324393) Attached to: Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices

> Lisp is perfect for you.

We're not talking about other languages. We're talking about how fucked up PHP is.

> it's not like the interpreter is making arbitrary decisions

Counter-example:

http://3v4l.org/tRieg

if( true OR false ) echo "1st true\n"; // OK
if( false OR true ) echo "2nd true\n"; // OK
 
$bar = true;
$foo = false;
 
$wat = $bar OR $foo;
echo $wat ."\n"; // OK: 1
if( $wat ) echo "wat = T|F\n";
 
$wat = $foo OR $bar;
echo $wat ."\n"; // WAT? doesn't print?
if( false OR $bar ) echo "F | bar\n"; // OK
if( $foo OR $bar ) echo "foo | bar\n"; // OK
if( $wat ) echo "wat = F|T\n"; // WAT? doesn't print?
 
var_dump( false OR true ); // OK: bool(true)
$wat = false OR true;
var_dump( $wat ); // WAT? bool(false)

Is to too much for the fucking language to just work ?

Oh wait, I forgot this was a:

Phucked-Up:
Hopeless-beyond-repair
Piece-of-Shit

"programming" language. That explains it!

--
PHP: Designed by fucktards for fucktards.

Submission + - Twitch.tv Security Breach (twitch.tv)

Submitted by FalleStar
FalleStar writes: Today, the world's largest video game livestreaming website, Twitch.tv, posted the following blog entry:

We are writing to let you know that there may have been unauthorized access to some Twitch user account information. For your protection, we have expired passwords and stream keys and have disconnected accounts from Twitter and YouTube. As a result, you will be prompted to create a new password the next time you attempt to log into your Twitch account. We also recommend that you change your password at any website where you use the same or a similar password. We will communicate directly with affected users with additional details.

The full details of the breach have yet to be released. Back in a 2013 blog post where Twitch reported that one of their CDNs had mistakenly exposed user account information, they mentioned that their user passwords are hashed, but gave no mention of whether or not they are salted. In addition to the blog post, Twitch users are being notified of the intrusion by email.

Comment Re:PHP is fine (Score 1) 182

by UnknownSoldier (#49324005) Attached to: Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices

> from some ideology that isn't based in rational discourse. /sarcasm Ah, so consistency is irrational now.

Only in a brain-dead language can you do stupid shit like this:

echo int ."\n"; // OK: int
 
echo (int) int ."\n"; // WAT? 0
var_dump( (int) int ); // WAT? int(0)
 
echo (foo) ."\n"; // OK: foo
echo (int) ."\n"; // WAT: Parse error
 
var_dump( foo ); // OK: string(3) "foo"
var_dump( int ); // WAT: Parse error

You PHP / Javascript apologists crack me up.

Comment Re:PHP is fine (Score 1, Informative) 182

by UnknownSoldier (#49323499) Attached to: Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices

Only a fanboy makes excuses for why they are too blind to see the many ways it is broken. PHP was designed and developed by a complete fucktard. Let's look at some code ...

php -a
echo true . "\n";
echo false . "\n"; // wat
echo TRUE . "\n";
echo FALSE . "\n"; // wat

Note: The online manual is completely useless:

* true http://php.net/manual-lookup.p...

* false http://php.net/manual-lookup.p...

* TRUE http://php.net/manual-lookup.p...

* FALSE http://php.net/manual-lookup.p...

More stupid shit PHP does ...

if( 1 == "1" ) echo "ok!\n";
if( 0 == "0" ) echo "ok!\n";
if( "0" ) echo "nope\n";
if( "00" ) echo "wat\n";
if( "-0" ) echo "wat\n";
if( "0.0" ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == "" ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == " " ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == " wat" ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == "\t" ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == "\r" ) echo "wat\n";
if( 0 == "\n" ) echo "wat\n";

In what bizarro universe would this stupid shit make _any_ sense??

PHP is just as bad as Javascript's == operator. If you are just going to force people to use === for type safety, then _maybe_ you just rethink what the equality operator is _supposed_ to do.

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