DON'T DO IT. or if you do, please put it into landscape mode next to the other monitors, in a circle. i had a large wide-screen display (big mac) - 24 in. i thought it was wonderful. i sat in front of it for 4 years, at a distance of about 1 metre. now my eyes are "prism", meaning that anything over 3 metres away i see *DOUBLE*, especially if it is off to the left or the right. but anything that is exactly 1 metre away, i see perfectly with extremely fast reaction time.

time and time again it has been shown that our eyes adjust to the conditions that we put them under. it is sheer arrogance of the optician industry to state "your eyes degrade with age". it is total shit. our eyes contain MUSCLES. therefore our eyes degrade with LACK OF EXERCISE, just like any other part of our body that has muscles.

the solution: i got plugable.com USB-to-VGA converters and surrounded my workstation with 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, in a semi-circle.... and threw away the "standard" prescription glasses given to me by the ignorant opticians, and bought glasses that were *two* diopters less than the prescription (which had to come from china). there are now opticians in the UK where you can give them exactly the prescription that you want. i recommend using them instead of buying cheap glasses from china.

I would also add that the most common reason why people write "ugly hacks" is to make their programs fast. If you care enough about speed to put these ugly hacks in your program, you're certainly not going to write it in Java or Python.

the key skill needed for programming is to be *able to pay attention to detail*. if you are unable, by any means, to focus on one thing for any length of time (because, for example, you have the attention span of a spider on cocaine or worse caffeine, because, for example, you have been brought up on txting and IMing and twittah) then it should come as absolutely no surprise that you are utterly useless at programming.

another person mentions that creativity is needed in programming. well, yes, this is true. if you have a bug that you don't know how it got there, you need to be extraordinarily patient [attention to detail] with yourself and your work, going over it *creatively* in different ways until such time as you have found, understood and then fixed the bug.

if you do not have the patience because you are, once again, brought up on a diet of twitter, instant gratitfication and refined sugar products, *no amount* of creativity is going to help if you cannot apply it.

i call myself a programmer: what i actually have is obsessive compulsion to be able to pay attention to one task for spans of time that exceed healthy limits. i can be freezing cold and not even notice... because i'm debugging something. only sheer complete exhaustion can get through under those circumstances. this is where it helps to be working in part of a team, as it sets some structure for social interaction. it's no accident, then, that there are entrepreneurs [this goes back a few years on slashdot - there's an article somewhere] who *only* take on *english language* majors [US i presume], and train them to be programmers. why? because people who can *communicate* turn out to make better programmers than people who have been through a university-driven programming course.

Bad parenting... or bad neighbourhood, or bad school, or bad...
It's only when you have kids that you realize that you only have so much influence over them.

I suspect that Let's encrypt is related to that issue.

Microsoft has an "Open License" which allows you to look at Windows NT source code. it's "open", yes? pay them $USD 1m per year, you get an "open" look at the source code of Windows NT. but if you ever dare to use it, talk about it, or do ANYTHING other than *read* it.... they will sue the fuck out of you.

bottom line: can we PLEASE stop using the word "open" in context with these types of stupid, stupid proprietary arrangements? it really isn't helping.

there are plenty of *LIBRE* licensed implementations of MIPS out there: many people have pointed that out (in comments i can see above this one), they're on http://opencores.org/ - there are at least eight MIPS core implementations that i can see, there, possibly the best one (most complete) is this: http://opencores.org/project,m... which has a 5-stage pipeline and a harvard architecture.

so please, stop using the word "open" to refer to proprietary, restricted and patented material.

Does anyone know if *any* work has become public domain in the last few years in US and Canada? From what I see it just sounds like anything that's was copyrighted will now forever be copyrighted as copyright gets extended by X years every X years (with X=20 here).

the issue that i have with "artificial" intelligence is this: there *is* no such thing as "artificial" - i.e. "fake" or "unreal" intelligence. intelligence just *IS*. no matter the form it takes, if it's "intelligent" then it is pure and absolute arrogance on our part to call it "artificial". the best possible subsitute words that i could come up with were "machine-based" intelligence. the word "simulated" cannot be applied, because, again, if it's intelligent, it just *is* - and, again, to imply that intelligence is "simulated" is, again, a direct falsehood. so we have a bit of a problem, there.

the other problem is this: if those who are creating intelligent machines are themselves of insufficient intelligence to recognise the existence of intelligence, then how on earth would they know that it had actually been created?? it's the "million monkeys" problem in a subtle new light.

but i think people are beginning to confuse "intelligence" with "consciousness". we already have intelligent networks - the next phase is CONSCIOUSNESS. self-awareness. and here we begin to get into interesting territory, not least because we have the very pertinent question "how can scientists who are themselves not truly consciously aware even of themselves possibly begin to *recognise* consciousness when they've created it??"

the problem is highlighted by the example of a friend of mine who refuses to help create machine consciousness. he's a researcher into the concept of consciousness, so he knows what goes into it - how to recognise it, and, by inference, how to make consciousness "happen" so to speak. and when i approached him about helping to make machine consciousness, he said, "sure i can help... but only if you can guarantee that the resultant beings would be in bliss (i.e. happy) rather than being permanently tortured".

and there you have the key, that anything that is self-aware and conscious - anything that has the ability to communicate and feel - *automatically* gains the right to freedom of expression and all the other rights that we *believe* humans - as the arrogant self-appointed "top of the food chain" - should also have... ... and until the arrogant quotes artificial quotes intelligence community recognises that and fights *IN ADVANCE* for the right of machine consciousness to have the same rights as humans, nobody who is a truly conscious and intelligent being is going to help that scientific community to create such advanced conscious beings, because the risks associated with such conscious machines being tortured - just because the scientists think they can - are too great.

this is nothing new: i believe the same study was the basis of the famous book "Outliers", which is a fascinating study of what makes people successful. if i recall correctly, it's completely the opposite of what people expect: your genes *do* matter. your attitude *does* matter. your circumstances *do* matter. working hard *does* matter. and luck matters as well. but it's all of these things - luck, genetics, circumstances *and* hard work - that make for the ultimate success story. bill gates is one of the stories described. he had luck and opportunity - by being born at just the right time when personal computing was beginning - and circumstances - by going to one of the very very few schools in the USA that actually had a computer available (for me, that opportunity was when i was 8: i went to one of the very very few secondary schools in the UK that had a computer: a Pet 3032).

so, yeah - it's not a very popular view, particularly in the USA, as it goes against the whole "anyone can make it big" concept. but, put simply, the statistics show that it's a combination of a whole *range* of factors, all of which contribute, that make up success. just "being intelligent" simply is not enough.

Dear NSA,

I would love to design the phone that you are asking for. please pay the sum of $USD 30 million into my bank account and i will organise it straight away. also, please sign a contract that you will subsidise the cost of every single phone sold because in order to add the extra encryption that you are expecting it will push up the price, and in a competitive business world nobody would buy it without subsidies.

I look forward to hearing from you shortly.

Signed, Luke Leighton
(Libre and FSF-Endorseable Hardware Design Engineer)

... actually... my understanding is that it was *not* unprovoked, but not possibly in the way that involves "direct provocation". james may explained that the team had been out the entire day, since early morning through to extremely late in the evening. by all accounts that would be well beyond a standard working day: without decent food it's fairly safe to conclude that their blood sugar levels and many other indicators would have been pushed well past normal acceptable limits.

  i've seen this happen before (both in myself and in other people). you get tired, then shaky, you feel pretty close to exhaustion, due to lack of sleep and rest your body's building up toxins it can't cope with, you're utterly stressed but are simply too tired even to express that, you can't sleep yet which would be the normal way for your body to recover and clear itself of toxins.... and then someone does something unexpected (or doesn't do something that you know will help, that you were counting on)... it's not *their* fault... but they're just the trigger for an outpouring of quite literally uncontrollable but perfectly forseeable emotion.

  my point is: the BBC should *never* have allowed these circumstances to occur. they should have had a full-time nutritionist on the team, advising them when to take breaks, when the exertion that the team is going through is beyond acceptable levels, what the consequences are and so on. this is a team that's been to some of the most hostile places in the world, so it should be a no-brainer that they'd need an expert consultant on nutrition.

so expecting someone to work 16 hours without proper food, running them well beyond their physical limits, then firing them as a direct result of them being put under far too much stress and pressure... *that* sounds like a recipe for a lawsuit.

http://hexayurt.com/

it's a free (libre) design, i'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the original post. the modular design (it's hexagons) allows for yes, things like solar-panel hexagons, WIFI-pre-installed hexagons, lighting-pre-installed hexagons and so on.

good question. If you have a laser strong enough to instantly ionize a patch of air between you and an exploding munition [we are talking milliseconds for the whole show here!] that itself must create a shock wave as the super-heated air expands more or less into what we would perceive as an explosion. I am hoping the Boeing Boeing engineers have some proof the cure is better than the disease, so to speak.
If you can shape the surface of the discontinuity in gas density by this method, you could cause a lensing effect that redirected the shock wave but you cannot get rid of energy by adding energy to it. If you manage to create an underpressure that coincides with the overpressure of the munition, that will happen at a certain point and will require an energy density on a par with the munition if you mean to protect by a cancellation of superimposed pressure waves. And watch out for your side lobes...the cancellation would be localized while elsewhere in the battle an addition would occur.

they are just going to take tapes of Star Trek to the patent office , maybe.

the difference is that costa rica is not considered to be a first world country, it's part of the emerging markets. also, all the other examples given (USA, Canada) are still using non-clean energy sources. the story is that this is an *entire country* running on *renewable energy*, 100%. that's a big hairy deal.