In the most recent election, there were 10 or so elected judge positions. Each had 3 or 4 candidates. Of the total candidates, over 50% listed their occupation as "Gang prosecutor", or a similar phrase. Because the only thing judges ever do is hear cases about gangs, or so one might think. No traffic court, no civil litigation, no other criminal cases. Only gangs.

Way to go 'Merica!!

It's simple: quantity over quality. And because they can. Beyond that, if they can get funding, they (NSA/BND/etc) will do it, because spying is what they do. They need no other reason.

Of course the practical result is that they spend so many resources spying on the masses that they are incapable of doing anything else well. For example, they have the meta data on a large percentage of all the phone calls in the world, but they were caught flat footed by the rise of ISIS in Syria. If they spent 1/100 of the time and money wasted on tapping everyone's phone on doing the hard human intelligence in places like Syria, the world would be a better place.

So ultimately we are all demonstrably less safe because of the huge time and attention sinkhole of mass surveillance. Not to mention the cost and threat to democracy. All you need is know the history of the FBI to realize that illegal spying on civilians will inevitability lead to abuse of that information. We'll find out about the current abuses in 20-30 years, after the bad actors have retired or died, and it's too late to do anything for the victims. For example, the full text of the letter from the FBI to MLK trying to get him to commit suicide was just released a month or so ago.

Every time I post under this title I get modded down to -1,000,000. So what? I'm right, and tearing out a book page, or voting down reality is just a form of political masturbation. I'm going to continue saying this every time I see Republicans choosing to be stupid. Not opposing vile behavior is giving up.

The shorter version: fuck Republican stupidity.

Researchers from Stanford demonstrated in 2005 how to generate an image of a scene from the point of view of the light source instead of the camera. It's called dual photography, and has some similarities to the single pixel technique.

We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location. The technique is completely image-based, requiring no knowledge of scene geometry or surface properties, and by its nature automatically includes all transport paths, including shadows, interreflections and caustics. In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera; we demonstrate this by capturing a photograph using a projector and a photo-resistor. If the photo-resistor is replaced by a camera, we can produce a 4D dataset that allows for relighting with 2D incident illumination.

It exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to swap the camera view with the light view. If light is modeled as rays/photons, the path between the light source and a camera pixel is the same going from the light to the pixel, or the pixel to the light. Hence reciprocity.

Yes, Mr. ShashDot Pundit. You're absolutely right.

You are so smart and they are so dumb. it's guaranteed that they spent no time doing any calculations about this. Every engineer they have has never even seen the ocean, only designed stuff on paper/computers in nice clean rooms. They've never run any simulations, or done any physical testing at all, because all engineers just know that complex new things always work perfectly the first time.

So just call them and talk to the receptionist, or send them an email and tell them about your brilliant insight. I'm sure that once they hear your detailed criticism it will bring their foolish scheme to a screeching halt. At the very least they will give up, or see the light and appoint you the head honcho. Only your fantastically sharp mind can save them.

Good luck with your new position.

To late. The Republican party has decided to legislate against reality already.

House Republicans pass bill forbidding scientists from advising the EPA on their own research :

H.R. 1422, which passed 229-191, would shake up the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Board, placing restrictions on those pesky scientists and creating room for experts with overt financial ties to the industries affected by EPA regulations.

The bill is being framed as a play for transparency: Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, argued that the board’s current structure is problematic because it “excludes industry experts, but not officials for environmental advocacy groups.” The inclusion of industry experts, he said, would right this injustice.

But the White House, which threatened to veto the bill, said it would “negatively affect the appointment of experts and would weaken the scientific independence and integrity of the SAB.”

In what might be the most ridiculous aspect of the whole thing, the bill forbids scientific experts from participating in “advisory activities” that either directly or indirectly involve their own work. In case that wasn’t clear: experts would be forbidden from sharing their expertise in their own research — the bizarre assumption, apparently, being that having conducted peer-reviewed studies on a topic would constitute a conflict of interest. “In other words,” wrote Union of Concerned Scientists director Andrew A. Rosenberg in an editorial for RollCall, “academic scientists who know the most about a subject can’t weigh in, but experts paid by corporations who want to block regulations can.”

You've got it backwards. For the most part those with serious schizophrenia (and other mental disorders) are not so much of a threat because they are so mentally disorganized.

The people who are the real problems are "normal", but use religion as an excuse for their bad behavior, or those who follow religion so blindly that they do bad things because of group pressure.

You're absolutely right.

England should immediately ban people from communicating with one another in any way, shape, manor or form. No talking, no writing, no sign language, no winks, nods, frowns or smiles.

No facial expression allowed, because the terrorists might win!!!

They need mandatory unisex berkas with built in sound proofing. That's how to protect western values of freedom, by wrapping everyone up in a shroud and making them shut the fuck up. That will show those radical scum they can't push England around. Freedom!

Bullshit.

In more detail, let me modify one of your key sentences: "what's good for the corrupt oligarchs may not be the same as what's good for the country." Fixed that for you.

Impoverishing US workers will not "juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole". One that happens it will be hard as hell to bootstrap back to an overall high standard of living in the US. Just how stupid are you to even think that?

And then there is the issue that tech workers are just the latest group to be thrown under the bus in the name of short term greed.

Here's an example of how it's done. At one point construction and industrial jobs like meat packing were all unionized. Then the unions were broken and the jobs were filled by immigrant labor. That's why there are now large numbers of Spanish speaking non-documented workers in the Midwest, for example. It's not that native US workers are not good workers, it's that the employers don't want them because they want semi-slaves. They want workers who will put up with anything, including having their wages stolen or being maimed on the job and not being able to do anything about it.

For tech workers the plan is slightly more complex. First, offshore as many jobs as possible. Second, import as many non-citizen workers as possible. Third, flood the market with a bunch of severely under-trained "coders", like Zuckerberg and his co-conspirators are attempting with code.org. Having a vast army of unemployed makes anyone with a job completely fearful and willing to settle for crumbs.

So the US middle class is destroyed? Do you think that any of the rich care? Remember what Romney said during the election. He thinks that half of Americans are scum. As far as he and his ilk are concerned, if you don't do well it's all your fault. The reality is that he and his type profit from eliminating jobs in the US. They do well by making the rest of us do poorly, and they then have the gall to blame us for not being good enough.

I guess you think that you're immune, or perhaps you want to be a serf. You sure don't seem like someone who want to work and prosper in their own country. What's wrong with you?

Event though the Slashdot Pundits are clueless about the utility of such a simulation, it has real significance.

There is nothing like having the experience of another persons problems to make you more thoughtful and sympathetic. Even if someone like Tyra Banks shallowly exploits homelessness for a day, the principle still holds.

For a real world example of how vicious someone can be about a disease like Parkinson's, just look at what Rush Limbaugh did to Michael J. Fox:

In October 2006 Limbaugh said Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, had exaggerated the effects of his affliction in political TV ad advocating for funding of stem cell research. Limbaugh said that Fox in the ad had been "shameless" in "moving all around and shaking", and Fox had not taken "his medication or he's acting, one of the two". Fox said "the irony of it is I was too medicated", adding that there was no way to predict how his symptoms would manifest. Limbaugh said he would apologize to Fox "bigley and hugely...if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act". In 2012, Fox said Limbaugh in 2006 had acted on "bullying instincts" when "he said I faked it. I didn't fake it", and said Limbaugh's goal was to have him marginalized and shut down for his stem cell stance.

I would bet that anyone who had the simulated experience would never make that kind of odious claim against someone else. For example if kids in school were exposed to the effect they would be a lot less inclined to make fun of people with tremors.

This is an example of how technology can change perceptions in positive ways.

The article is shallow and dumb. It does not even mention the inventor of APL, Ken Iverson, even though two of the languages in the article are based on APL.

APL was not invented by IBM to be terse. It was invented by Iverson as a notation to describe array operations, and he published a book about it before he went to IBM.

This is just lazy journalism. The guy who wrote it got a stupiod idea, spent insufficient time doing research, wrote something trivial in even less time and screwed up his facts.

He gets an "I" for idiot.

We've seen this before, both IRL and on film.

In the "news" (not in fact), there was a claimed missile gap between the US and the USSR. This blew up (pun intended) just before the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, and helped Kennedy get elected. Kennedy blamed Nixon, who was Vice President during the previous Eisenhower administration, of being responsible for this failure.

In fact, the estimates about the number of Soviet ICBMs were grotesquely exaggerated.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-10-57, issued in December 1957, predicted that the Soviets would "probably have a first operational capability with up to 10 prototype ICBMs" at "some time during the period from mid-1958 to mid-1959." After Nikita Khrushchev claimed to be producing them "like sausages", the numbers started to inflate. A similar report gathered only a few months later, NIE 11-5-58 released in August 1958, concluded that the USSR had "the technical and industrial capability ... to have an operational capability with 100 ICBMs" some time in 1960, and perhaps 500 ICBMs "some time in 1961, or at the latest in 1962."

In a widely syndicated article in 1959, Joseph Alsop even went so far as to describe "classified intelligence" as placing the Soviet missile count as high as 1,500 by 1963, while the US would have only 130 at that time.

It is known today that even the CIA's estimate was too high; the actual number of ICBMs, even including interim-use prototypes, was 4.

So they were claiming over a hundred in two years, while the real number at the time was four.

In Kubricks's film Dr. Strangelove, this was parodied as a mineshaft gap

Dr. Strangelove recommends that the President gather several hundred thousand people, with a high female-to-male ratio (10 to 1), to live in deep mineshafts where the radiation would not penetrate, and to then institute a breeding program to repopulate the Earth when the radiation has subsided. Turgidson warns that the Soviets will likely do the same, and worries about a "mineshaft gap". In the middle of this discussion, Dr. Strangelove miraculously rises from his wheelchair, takes a few small steps, and shouts, "Mein Führer! I can walk!".

So in a time of shrinking budgets, when a Pentagon general gets up on a podium and screams "were falling behind, we need more money NOW!!!", maybe you should examine his claims very carefully. The Pentagon is not exactly a disinterested party. There is a lot of recent history suggesting he might not be right.

General Jack D. Ripper is a character in Stanly Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, a black comedy about nuclear holocaust. The character was played by Sterling Hayden.

Ripper gets WW III rolling:

United States Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) is commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, which houses the SAC 843rd Bomb Wing equipped with B-52 bombers. The 843rd is currently on airborne alert, in flight just hours from the Soviet border.

General Ripper orders his executive officer, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake of the UK Royal Air Force, to put the base on alert. Ripper also issues 'Wing Attack Plan R' to the patrolling aircraft, one of which is commanded by Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens). All of the aircraft commence an attack flight on Russia, and set their radios to allow communications only through the CRM 114 discriminator, which is programmed to transmit only communications preceded by a secret three-letter code known only to General Ripper.

Mandrake discovers that no order for war has been issued by the Pentagon, and tries to stop Ripper, who locks them both in his office. Ripper tells Mandrake that he believes the Soviets have been using fluoridation of United States' water supplies to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans. Mandrake realizes that General Ripper is insane.

YMMV, but I like top hide under my bed.

Hidden history. The original intent of the Space Shuttle was for both civilian/NASA and US Air Force use.

The crucial factor in the size and shape of the Shuttle orbiter was the requirement that it be able to accommodate the largest planned commercial and military satellites, and have over 1,000 mile cross-range recovery range to meet the requirement for classified USAF missions for a once-around abort from a launch to a polar orbit. The militarily specified 1,085 nm cross range requirement was one of the primary reasons for the Shuttle's large wings, compared to modern commercial designs with very minimal control surfaces and glide capability. Factors involved in opting for solid rockets and an expendable fuel tank included the desire of the Pentagon to obtain a high-capacity payload vehicle for satellite deployment, and the desire of the Nixon administration to reduce the costs of space exploration by developing a spacecraft with reusable components.

Of course the USAF then backed out on their commitment, and went with non-reusable launchers. From their point of view this had two very desirable characteristics: first, it kept the flow of funding/pork to the big existing aerospace companies (Boeing, Lockheed) and it also allowed Air Force personal to retire and go directly to work for those same companies. Between the self-serving political pork based decisions in Congress, and the self-serving revolving door in the military-industrial complex, the Space Shuttle didn't have a chance.

This left NASA with an intrinsically flawed design. With a reduced fleet size there were no economies of scale, and the platform never evolved. That's why it was never cost effective and took so long to refurbish between flights. Also, the screwed up design was the direct cause of both shuttle disasters. The SRBs and big wings with an external tank were the features that caused the accidents.

If NASA had not been forced to accommodate the Air Force requirements on a budget that was too small, they would have come up with a safe and cost-effective solution. They know how to do it right when there is not too much external interference. Almost every time there is a big screw up at NASA it's because decisions are imposed on them by politics.