Everything you say after the last sentence I quoted is a straw man.

Reclassifying ISPs under Title II is not a legislative act. On the contrary, it depends on the legislative Act known as Title II.

Here is a common-language explanation of the legality of using Title II to classify communications company as "common carriers".

You seem to think that classifying communications companies requires a legislative act when it does not. It simply requires a vote by the FCC and a reclassification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II would have consequences but the enactment of new legislation is not one of them.

Why is the FCC regulating an industry that OBVIOUSLY WOULD BENEFIT FROM REGULATION a "problem to overcome"?

Oh, that's right. it's because the line of argumentation which backs populist conservative/Republican talking points cannot understand that Constitutionality does not prohibit the regulation of public utilities, especially when such regulation is in alignment with even the most hardcore conservative defenders of free market capitalism.

Given where US broadband is even in major metropolitan areas like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, regulation as Title II is EXACTLY what US ISPs need to get their acts together. I mean 12 mbs down and 5 mbs up for $50/month in 2015. Give me a fucking break.

The great part of this Republican-backed shill bill? Obama is going to VETO it.

Suck THAT you plutocratic, money-grubbing, technologically-illiterate enemies of the United States. (Yes, I'm talking about the so-called "honorable" representatives who are backing this bill, whatever their political stripes may be. [Though we all know exactly what those stripes are, right?])

My OMG moment came when I read

Nobody is saying that this system has exceeded the human ability to classify photos; indeed, if a human hired to write captions performed at the level of this neural net, the newbie wouldn’t last until lunchtime. But it did shockingly, shockingly well for a machine. Some of the dead-on hits included “a group of young people playing a game of frisbee,” “a person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road,” and “a herd of elephants walking across a dry grass field.”

because looking at those images made me realize the machine basically trained itself to do couple two domains of knowledge that even experts in language acquisition and image recognition only partially understand.

That's just flat out amazing.

The other part that got me going "Wow" reads

The neural-net system was left to its own deep learning devices to learn game rules—the system simply tried its hand at millions of sessions of Pong, Space Invaders, Beam Rider and other classics, and taught itself to do equal or surpass an accomplished adolescent. (Take notice, Twitch!) Even more intriguing, some of its more successful strategies were ones that no humans had ever envisioned.

As an old-timer (older than Dean which makes me feel like I missed the boat by spending so much time earning a doctorate in the humanities), I wanted to know precisely what successful alternative strategies DeepMind had devised in which games.

I mean, besides being completely fucking cool, that shit is like gothic scary.

The end of the article where Hassabis notes that humans should never spend any time wondering what book they should read next made me think of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 which is an incredible read about the attempt to build an AI capable of passing a Master's exam in English Literature. Not as nerdy as the /. might like but it raises many of the important questions that we face as machines increasingly become able to make autonomous decisions based on (as the article calls it) "unstructured data".

I'm really glad to hear DeepMind has formed an external board to monitor the progress of its development and while the composition of that board is secret, I do think the product of its deliberations should be made public. In any case, it won't be too long before the US government (or the government of whatever country DeepMind cares to be in) will consider it an issue of national security and categorize AI and neural net technology as a munition or whatever it takes to get greater insight into what DeepMind and companies like it are actually building.

To flip things around for a moment, what about all those female-dominated careers? Why is it that we aren't up in arms about the fact that yoga studios, elementary schools, secretarial staff, birthing services, and hospital nursing staffs are overwhelmingly dominated by women? Nobody seems to be losing sleep over the idea that there is some kind of pervasive gender discrimination that discourages men from these careers. Is that because these careers are seen as somehow less worthwhile- and if so, why? Because women do them?

Modern feminism seems consumed with the idea that career success for a woman can only come by pursuing a traditionally male career path. But this seems like an incredibly sexist viewpoint, because it's assuming that the only kind of job that's worthwhile or important for a woman to aspire to is one that a man traditionally has done. If you're not a CEO, a surgeon, a professor, then you're somehow less worthwhile. But taking care of other people- which is something a lot of female-dominated careers have in common- is incredibly important, and probably contributes as much or more to society than coming up with a better way for Amazon to flood my inbox with special offers.

The other issue is that feminism seems obsessed with the idea that women will be happy if they can pursue these career paths. But here's a thought. Maybe women opt out of certain career paths in favor of other career paths because those career paths better fit what they want out of life. Maybe many women- not all of them, but a lot of them- find working with kindergartners or being a midwife more rewarding than firing employees, shooting at insurgents, or writing computer code.

It's a bit like the iridium spike at the K-T boundary in that the use of nuclear weapons is an event that will have a worldwide signal, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if they got the idea from the asteroid impact. This would be a bit ironic because Alvarez, the guy who discovered the impact, was a Manhattan project alum who actually worked on the explosive lenses and triggers used in the Trinity implosion bomb. The issue with using Trinity is that from a biological/evolutionary standpoint its not that meaningful an event. The Chicxulub impact is a huge deal, it's the driver of the biggest mass extinction in 250 million years. The Trinity test has the advantage of being easy to measure but nuclear weapons have had pretty much zero effect on the biosphere. In fact, primitive hunter-gatherers running around with fire and spears have a vastly larger effect than nuclear bombs. After Homo sapiens moves out of Africa into Australia, Europe, and the Americas, we see massive dieoffs of the megafauna which, combined with the use of fire to alter the landscape, dramatically alter the fauna and vegetation on a continental scale. From an evolutionary standpoint, these migrations are important; they mark the first time the species began to alter the world on the level of entire ecosystems. So I'd argue that the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa would be the defining event, but obviously that's kind of hard to date.

I'm guessing the on-board guidance computer prioritizes position over angle. Thus, when the fins stopped controlling the angle of descent, the engine compensated to hit the target position.

Just a guess, though.

An open system is also a whole lot simpler. Weight is very important, but so is reliability. If a pump fails (keep in mind the extreme environment), you lose the stage. Increasing the reservoir size is much simpler and more reliable.

Actually, both the browser and the Apache log will tell you it's a permissions issue. Go to the root of /home and either add the Apache user to the group that has access to "/home/me/www/path/to/index.html" or change the group access to Apache's user.

Once the group is correct, change the permissions to g+r if necessary.

Taking the 15 seconds to properly set permissions when you know the issue is a permissions issue (otherwise why would chmod 777 fix the issue) really is just too easy not to do.

Also, use your signal lights!

Whenever I see devs take the stupid shortcut of "chmod 777" I wonder what is the brain drain for these "professionals" that they can't figure out how to enable make use of "chown root:admin" and then "chmod g+x", or whatever's the appropriate level of permissions for the task at hand.

How can developers be so lazy and so security naive? It's like using signal lights when driving. Just do it because it makes for good habits.

Until they start, at which point maybe they become unstable and lose their wealth. Wealth doesn't rain down from heaven. Automation has reduced the amount of human effort required, but less is not zero.

Yeah, but don't tell the government that. They really like thinking they're in control.

The month-long day/night cycle and low gravity are significant issues for long-term habitation of the Moon. There's also evidence now that Moon quakes regularly hit 5.5 Richters and last for 10 minutes. Mars presents plenty of challenges, but it's nowhere near as bad as the Moon.

But why is the router's diagnostic/config interface accessible from the WAN port? It seems rather obvious that only the LAN ports should have access to that.

Now, if this is some kind of buffer overflow error induced by malformed packets, that is of course rather different.

Today is not 1 April!

Hard to believe what I'm reading here. I was starting to grow cynical.

Anyhow, just wanted to post to say this appears to be a good thing. Very, very exciting.