the vendor merely has to certify that they tested the update for any effect on clinical function.

So, it's exactly like he said and no updates are allowed to be installed.

ISVs are shit at security because nothing about security is their problem. Being in healthcare doesn't change that; if anything, it makes it worse. I would expect a vendor to spend exactly zero effort on verifying security updates, and less than that on notifying customers. If it ain't a new sale, they ain't interested.

Honestly, I hope some hospital gets the balls to sue an ISV for failing to act in a timely manner for perpetually ignoring security like we all know they do. It's not going to change until someone holds them accountable. They'll just hide behind their EULAs until then, and hospitals will get the bill for letting people die because of security holes.

So, while they deserve the year ban, the apology is nice. It's a shame we can never know what results a fair competition could have yielded ... and an even bigger shame that the media misreported Baidu as overpowering Google. I suppose the damage is done and the ILSVRC has made the right choice.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the classification problem but why isn't this run like most other classification problems (like Netflix and many other data challenges) where you get ~80% for training and the remaining 20% are held back for the final testing and scoring? Is the tagged data set too small to do this? Seems like wikimedia would contain a wealth of ripe public domain images for this purpose ...

Leaks and corrosion isn't "fail catastrophically", and typically happens after the battery has been dead for some time and the seals fail. Taking them to zero wasn't the problem - not removing them after they were dead was where the problems started. Many rechargable lithium chemistries, however, will generate oxygen and/or pure metal in bad places if excessively discharged (or charged), which then can translate into burning and toxic gases. Now that's catastrophic.

Yeah, the 1.35 or 1.4 number is total bull$#@!. Almost everything these days will run on the 1.1-1.2 of NiMH, as you point out. Even at that point, the remaining energy in a common alkaline (manganese dioxide) AA cell is nowhere near 80%. Alkaline goes "over the cliff" - the sharp point at the end of the discharge curve where there's no energy left and the voltage plummets - at about 0.8-0.9V. Even at 1.1V, there's only about 10% of the energy capacity left for a typical alkaline.

Look up "alkaline discharge curve" pretty much anywhere. Typically these will plot output voltage on the Y axis and amp-hours on the X axis. The energy remaining is the area under the curve to the right of where you're looking (because energy is measured in watt-hours, and voltage * amp-hours remaining is watt-hours). As you extract more energy (move right on the X), your voltage drops. When you hit a certain point... boom! straight to the floor.

Most battery powered devices these days either have a switching regulator that deals with this issue, or they use a low quiescent current, low dropout regulator and a big enough battery stack that can keep the supply rail where it needs to be until the batteries hit their dead point. While not strictly a scam, it won't do much good in most modern devices (and will actually decrease performance in well-designed ones, as I'm sure the switcher in these has a non-zero quiescent current, and an efficiency below 100%).

Carbon-zinc and alkaline (MnO2) batteries will go to complete discharge without any danger. You're thinking of various rechargeable chemistries that either suffer loss of capacity from excess discharge (Pb Acid, NiCd, NiMH, etc.) or have the potential to fail horribly (lithium chemistries).

Lithium AAs, while they exist, are fairly rare and not the same chemistry as the rechargables. As far as I know, there's no danger in taking them all the way to dead either.

Wow, so if I decide to stop using your payment service or even decide to cancel a third party service which happens to use your service for payments, I only have to change my bank account to get you to stop charging me.

It doesn't have to be difficult in order to make it completely ridiculous.

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

People who are religious are idiots and should be treated like second class citizens.

Well, it's good to know that just because you're atheist you don't think any different than the religious folks you despise so much. Idiots with opinions like, "people who disagree with me should be treated like second class citizens," was the entire purpose behind the First Amendment. I'm reassured it won't stop being relevant as the current population ages.

Parents choose to have children.

Children do not choose to be born.

This means that children owe their parents nothing in exchange for taking care of them before they are capable of taking care of themselves. It was the parents' actions which are responsible for the state of the child's infirmary (relative to adult capabilities), therefore it is their responsibility to correct.

Everything that parents do to bring their child into adulthood is simply the fulfillment of a obligation they incurred when they created a helpless and dependant child.

Do you expect your bank to go out of their way to thank you for paying your mortgage on time every month?