Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

For me personally, I don't use gmail regularly, only to get access to Google's services. I'm careful to NOT opt in to anything with the account on the very rare occasions I need it. On the ultra-rare occasion I need to log in to the gmail account it is always filled with spam --- from Google itself. Whenever I add a Google service it automatically opts in by itself to spam me.

Just checking it now, I've got an enormous list under a tab called "promotions" with ads from Google Play. I've got a similar list under "Social" filled with weekly ads from YouTube. And I've got a weekly notice of how other people are using AdSense. Then I've got a bunch of "circle requests" from a bunch of spammy-looking people.

So gmail's spam filter works for me --- if it ends up in gmail, it is spam.

You might take a look at the article and at Intel's reply.

The issue is in sine, cosine, and similar trig functions, with an actual error of 4e-21. That error scales, of course.

Intel's documentation change basically says you should scale and reduce your numbers first before running the functions.

Consider what that level of error precision means. If you were measuring with a meter stick, you could be measuring the radius of electron charge radii with several precision bits left over. If you were measuring the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centari, you could do it in millimeters and have accuracy to spare.

Even though I've run HPC simulations most of my career, we've seldom needed more than around six decimal digits of precision; that's akin to variations of human hair width when working at the meter level. It's only a problem when someone throws some strange scale into the mix; we're running physics on the kg-m-s scale, and suddenly someone complains that their usage of microseconds and nanometers breaks the physics engine We answer simply, "Yes. Yes, it does." If you need to operate in both scales, you need a different library that handles it.

Finally, even the actual article admits this is mostly about documentation. "The absolute error in the range I was looking at was fairly constant at about 4e-21, which is quite small. For many purposes this will not matter. ... for the domains where that matters the misleading documentation can easily be a problem." He then points out that a bunch of existing math libraries know about it. He mentions that high precision libraries have different solutions and always have. He mentions that most scientists who need it use better, high precision libraries. And he details that is really just the rough approximations done on the FPU that already plays fast-and-loose by switching between 53-bit and 63-bit floating point values that have been documented as being only good for that kind of approximation since the 1980s. Everybody who works professionally with floating point for any amount of time already knows the entire x86 family (including AMD and Intel) dating back to the original coprocessor are all terrible if you need high precision.

<troll>Well, with yours you'd need a macro lens or a deep zoom, so your attitude makes sense.</troll>

More seriously, it is only a tiny subset of the modern society who does that.

On the male side, I'm guessing they're the ones who assume that if they show it off others will be attracted to them, or at least admire them somehow. They're the flashers who are confused why the women they flash don't immediately open their legs to them. They hear a woman say "What's your name?" and they reply "Can we have sex?" Or a woman sends a "lets go out to the movies" text and he replies with a picture of his junk, somehow believing that is appropriate. I'm hoping that they represent the tiniest sliver of society, but their actions are so outlandish that they get online notoriety.

On the female side, I'm guessing they're the ones who are desperately craving attention or the ones who give in to pressure. Women who want to show of their bodies can easily find the males looking for it (see above) and wouldn't need to send pics that delete themselves; for these women a permanent picture is unlikely to bother them. But like the males, I think the ones who do it without coercion are a tiny sliver of society, not the norm.

The problem isn't really with Google's business model.

It also is not limited to the US government.

Think back to various releases. News stories of the US government intercepting Cisco equipment shipments, installing back doors, and sealing them back in their original boxes with new factory seals. There are many news stories of logs with people communicating over supposedly secure connections and exchanging honeypot URLs, only to have the honeypot link hit several hours later by government-owned IP blocks or sometimes Microsoft or Apple IP blocks when using their 'secure' products.

As a result of those we set up honeypot links of our own, and I've seen reports that a percent of our site-to-site messages with honeypot links really are being visited by IP blocks from several nations. This is not just the US government, multiple governments and probably multiple big businesses have their spying tendrils inside businesses. We're looking for and slowly tightening down on potential leaks, either that or the assorted groups are slowly hitting our honeypots less and less. I used to think some of our security policies were draconian, but seeing how many probably-government groups are watching internal messages, I've become quite paranoid myself.

If someone cannot trust that their encrypted, supposedly secure communications are safe, they will stop using the products. When a government IP address hits a honeypot link shared over Apple's iMessage, does that mean Apple is a willing participant forwarding the messages while telling the public it is secured, or does that mean Apple is a victim too? Either way, iMessage is now one of many banned products in our workplace, sending any type of secure business information over it (or over Lync or Google's services or any but a short list of secure communications programs) has become a fire-able offense.

When the news broke on the Cisco equipment being intercepted this spring, their stock price plummeted and orders slowed. I know in my organization there were several major purchasing announcements, and they only buy HP equipment now (although I'm sure those are intercepted just as readily). Cisco went directly to the POTUS both publicly and privately to tell them to stop harming the company. I would not be surprised if their lawyers are nearly ready to file lawsuits for tortuous interference.

This is about far more than Google's business model. People cannot communicate within their own company infrastructure about business needs without some sort of government espionage or corporate spying. It is completely out of control.

Yup, the PC-AT keyboard has the one true enter key in the large reverse L shape. After that things went downhill: the US layout for the Model M chopped off the top part and made Enter a thin horizontal line like Shift, and the international or ISO layout (which I normally use) chopped off the left hand part and left Enter as a rectangle: better than the US version, but still too small for one of the most frequently used keys on the board.

The biggest annoyance with the AT keyboard is the lack of F11 and F12 keys, if your applications use those (e.g. to step into statements in a debugger). The Esc key being on the numeric keypad is also odd but you get used to that.

There's also the 122-key Model F 'aircraft carrier', which has a much more modern layout, close to the international Model M layout.

But if you do prefer the US Model M layout (de gustibus non est disputandum, after all), then here's a way to modify the PC-AT keyboard: http://geekhack.org/index.php?...

Do you mean the 122-key Model F 'aircraft carrier' (I have a couple of those, but they require Soarer's Converter) or something else? I haven't heard of a 138-key version.

I have never heard of a Model M keyboard damaging a computer when plugged into the PS/2 keyboard port. After all, the PS/2 keyboard port is specifically designed for PS/2 keyboards, and the Model M is like the reference implementation. When driven over USB using an adaptor, it is true that a Model M will require more current than a newer keyboard, but still within the USB spec.

Recycle them? Noooo! Please tell us you at least gave them to a thrift store or sold them on Ebay. FWIW, the recommended PS/2 to USB adaptor is called the 'blue cube' and works well with the Model M. There's also Soarer's Converter which you can build yourself with a Teensy programmable microcontroller, and handles a wide range of old keyboards including the M.

Model Ms are great. I have about a dozen of them. But the earlier Model F (based on capacitive switches underneath buckling spring) is even better. The Model F keyboard included with the original IBM PC excels in being heavy and clicky, but it has an awkward layout. The PC-AT introduced a much better layout, and the keyboard is electrically compatible with the later PS/2 plug (you just need a $2 adaptor). I am typing on a PC-AT keyboard now.

You mean study something that enhances profits for the very, very wealthy.

Academic research works on an awful lot of problems that *the world* needs to solve, yet it makes no money for the propertied class, so there are no investment or funds available to support it.

Many fighting this fight aren't fighting for their pocketbooks; they're fighting to do science in the interest of human goods, rather than in the interest of capitalist kings.

Earning beneath minimum wage with a Ph.D. and without benefits is considerably worse than a postdoc's lot.

It is very nearly eradicated globally. Good thing too.

The paralysis aspect is horrible. Those who got the disease didn't know if they would be hit by the paralysis. Those who were hit with the paralysis didn't know if it would become permanent.

Some people who had the paralysis hit lungs or heart and didn't make it to the hospital quickly enough were occasionally considered lucky. Some very unfortunate people were condemned to spend the rest of their lives on a ventilator. I knew several people (most are dead today) who had deformed faces, arms, and legs from the virus resulting in permanent paralysis. I knew several older folks with a gravely whispered voice as a result of the paralysis. I heard horror stories about people fighting in lines as the vaccine became available in the 1960s.

Last year the WHO declared a surge in polio as a world health emergency, it had jumped from below 200 globally known cases to over 400.

They track the progress and update it weekly. the web site says there are 209 year to date with a new outbreak in Syria.

It is a horrible, destructive disease. The Gates Foundation has made enormous donations, $1.8B last year. This year the Larry Ellison foundation threw in another $100M. The disease is so incredibly close to global eradication, it just needs that one final little nudge to the finish line.

So many responses are like "meh, polio, who cares."

The devastating effects of this virus are obviously forgotten by this generation. It results in paralysis that is fatal when it hits things like lungs and hearts, and results in sometimes temporary, sometimes life-long paralysis in many victims. I knew people who permanently lost their ability to talk, others with one paralyzed leg, others who lost an arm, others with distorted facial muscles and other ugly effects. In the early 1960s when it was released people lined up for the vaccine, they would lie, cheat, and steal to get the vaccine when supplies were still limited.

In you're case, you're basically discounting anyone under age 6? Polio is a 4-dose vaccination where the last dose usually isn't until age 4-6. Google says that is a half million people in Belgium. That's "not much of an issue"?

Anyone who has had a reaction to one of the components and cannot have the series, they also are irrelevant? It's probably a million or so of the population. Again, you're okay with them getting a permanently disabling disease?

The vaccines are not 100% effective, many people who were vaccinated according to schedule are still able to become sick. No idea what the percentage is, but anything other than 0 is too much. Are they really not that important?

What would you think if it was YOU or a loved one in the hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were paralyzed, hoping that the paralysis is temporary in your case.

Now, if we could limit the infections just to anti-vaxers (not the innocent children of anti-vaxers) that would be something else entirely. Anti-vax for chicken pox or milder diseases are not that bad, but anti-vax for polio and other seriously ravaging diseases is just stupid.

Polio is so close to global eradication. I applaud those like the Gates Foundation that are funding killing off the last few known wild cases.