Turns out I was wrong here -- the ordinance does already exist :

Of course, that ordinance is so vague that it effectively bans all hobbyist R/C airplanes in the city -- including at the two R/C club fields in town -- all the time, not just just during SXSW. It also bans paper airplanes. And kites. And frisbees too. (Letting your bird fly is OK, however, as birds are not devices.)

And it's been this way since at least 2003, though I don't think anybody really thought that it might apply to all of these things until now. Selective enforcement of the laws is rarely a good thing, and now that the cat is out of the bag it'll be interesting to see how this will be selectively enforced after SXSW is over.

423.003 likely did not apply there, because that's not really private property and I doubt the intent was to "conduct surveillance". (The term has a specific legal definition -- "Observation and collection of data to provide evidence for a purpose" -- and I'm not sure Texas has a more specific definition. Is looking for a cool picture "providing evidence"?)

Also note that APD's supposed ban says nothing of cameras, only of "drones". (No, contrary to what the media may tell us, R/C aircraft do not all have cameras or missiles.)

And of course "Reckless conduct" is vague enough that they could probably apply it to anything.

What probably did apply there is this NOTAM from the FAA which prohibits flying under 3000' over stadiums shortly before, during and shortly after events. State police don't normally enforce FAA regulations, but it's certainly possible.

That won't apply to the city of Austin during SXSW, and 423.003 probably won't apply to public spaces, but certainly, APD could try "reckless conduct" -- and even if the charges were eventually dropped because they don't really apply, that doesn't beat the ride downtown.

The city council could pass an ordinance, which APD could then enforce, but as it stands, unless the ordinance has been passed recently, no such ordinance exists.

That said, the parks and recreation department did recently decide to ban all R/C airplanes in all parks (page 11), with the only current exceptions being the HCAM and ARCA fields. That said, those rules only apply to parks -- if you fly from a street, or your driveway or a school or something, they don't apply.

(Oddly enough, I don't think anybody even knew about the ban. Based on the response I got from the city, I was the only person city wide to comment on it (and no, I was not in favor.)

In any event, if somebody is flying over a crowd, they might be able to find a law to charge somebody with. But if not over people and not over a park, not in a dangerous manner ... I don't see where they'd have any say in the matter.

We also discussed the challenge of recruiting more women to open source projects and women in the KDE community.

Why?

How about asking about the challenges of recruiting more GUI designers, or more programmers, or more QA testers, or more of some group KDE specifically needs more of. Why ask about women?

It's almost like there's some sort of additional agenda beyond just interviewing the KDE folks....

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.

It's just that I object folks who would be good community contributors being lured into being unpaid employees instead.

Say how do feel about idiots working for corporations contractually enmeshed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex. Why no spittle-laced hate for them?

The GNU Radio project was funded in part by a United States intelligence agency. They paid good money and the result is under GPL. What's not to like?

Keep all of the idiots that want to work for a millionare for nothing. Fire the others.

Anyone with sense has by now joined a non-profit project.

Compare-and-exchange and mfence would be doing cache flush all of the way to RAM and global cache line invalidation, wouldn't they? So, they can potentially be used to hammer too.

Multi-threaded programs really do need those cache flushes to implement their interprocessor communications, don't they? It seems to me that they would be the ones most likely to hit this problem.

It has yet to be established whether hammer techniques can result in a correct data+ECC pattern. If so, it should be possible to permute the memory in a way that defeats this, either on the memory module or the memory controller.

That would make a good research paper for someone.

Yes, you beat me to it. A correctly-configured ECC motherboard with real ECC memory would defeat this. Watch out for fake ECC memory that just simulates the correction bits.

Once memory starts being vulnerable to row interference, having a machine without ECC becomes much more dangerous, regardless of this exploit.