The paper's contribution is to propose a new cache coherence scheme which they claim has scalability advantages over existing schemes.

Somehow this was obvious to me even from the press release. I've never yet seen details of an ordering model laid bare where it wasn't the core novelty. Ordering models are inherently substantive. Ordering models beget theorems. Cute little Internets drool and coo.

At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?

Why does a dog lick his balls?

At least for now, we're keeping up with them

Over the commercial lifespan of 2000/XP, the cost of gene sequencing went down by five orders of magnitude (100,000 x) and there's still one more order of magnitude crumbling in full swing ($1b per human genome to $1000 per per human genome).

We're not merely drinking their milkshake, we're reading their source code, and it's gone from the Manhattan project garage to hamburgers served in the length of time it takes for a helpless human baby to mature into a helpless head case with little recourse to perspective or logic.

After we invented the steam engine, the Amazon wasn't the first forest we cut down. The Amazon is full of piranha and poisonous snakes and many other protective life forms.

Yet somehow you wish to depict the interval in human history between the invention of the steam engine as the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest as a race the forest can win?

Sure can, if the entire human race dies off in the next World Wide Crusade at some point in the next fifty-odd years.

Penicillin was an inspired one-off. Gene sequencing is the devil's root kit.

But maybe I'm wrong, and I severely underestimate microbial evolution. Twenty years from now we'll wake up one day to discover hostile bacteria with no chemical genome at all: it's all hidden behind some bitcoin quantum process we are unable to sequence, that mutates in nature faster than we can puzzle it out, and we'll all be left scratching our chins and wondering how that happened.

"There will always be a need for car dealerships,..."

But everyone knows what that conveys, even the dealers themselves:

We've been printing money for a long time by bilking our customers for costly extras, and even though they often know this and resent it deeply, until now there hasn't been a credible alternative, so they just squeal to silently to themselves, then come back for more. With recent developments, that's going to change real darn fast if we don't (A) somehow force the competition out of business, or (B) do a prompt about-face in our shifty business practices, or (C) both at the same time with the intent of achieving the first option ASAP.

Of course, this divides ranks with the dealership community itself, as the old guys close to retirement are going to continuing milking their cash cow by any means available, as the younger guys start to worry about their long term futures when the backlash strikes, which the old guys are doing nothing whatsoever to abate sooner rather than later.

They say that society is "only" three square meals from anarchy. That's a lot, actually. I estimate that the fraternal order of the car dealership is only two snifters of brandy and one Cuban cigar's worth of suggested forbearance away from king-sized flop house crossfire.

I'm presently reading Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James, a surfer-dude professor of philosophy from Harvard University trying to cash in on the On Bullshit surge, which sold surprisingly well for what it is. I don't totally agree with Mr James, but there are some great passages. We'll see after I finish the book.

That just screams "Ruby is dog slow".

Sorry, that screams asshole entitlement—but maybe just because I was reading that book yesterday evening, and having a shiny new book is a lot like having a shiny new toy.

At least we have a new snowclone: Three-word-cliche The-Shit three-word-cliche. Interesting, both "just screams" and "dog slow" are high on the list of the asshole lexicon. We all know it when we hear it.

Many scripting languages appear to be almost as fast as C not because it came easily (it never does with a scripting language) but because immense amounts of talent and clever optimizations were poured into the brew behind the scenes to perfect this illusion.

This isn't so different that the story of x86 vs ARM. x86 is reviled for having one of the worst instruction sets of all time, and after thirty-five years it's still holding its own. How many technologies born in a gutter manage that? True, Intel has poured more ingenuity behind the scenes to enable this illusion than any sane person wishes to contemplate. If Borges were an engineer, he wouldn't have written El inmortal, he would have just killed himself.

Nevertheless, bottom line, x86 is NOT dog slow. Aren't you happy they care? Is your little world complete now? I personally don't think the standard for inventing a useful scripting language ought to be Nelson Mandela's eighteen-year term breaking rocks in a rock quarry so that some entitled asshole enjoys the perfect crunch on the flower paths of his estate garden. Why should it be, when it's a simple matter to just call out to C or Boost when the need arises? No wait, that's what you hate most. That's the dog that cries slow in the night.

Awwooooooooooooooooo.

My how that sound chills the soul.

I first posed the question to my elementary school science teacher circa 1973 whether the dinosaurs weren't in some way usefully self-warming. I didn't have the vocabulary about homeostasis or mesotherms at that age.

***

So, young man, you're suggesting that the dinosaurs might have been mesotherms?

"Meso", everyone, means "in between" or "intermediate". So the idea here is that dinosaurs would be warmer than modern reptiles but not as warm as modern mammals—whales and cats and dogs and humans and horses—who maintain a fixed body temperature. By "fixed" temperature we mean within a narrow range, subject to regulation, or control. Among the regulatory abilities in humans are sweating when we get too hot, and shivering when we get too cold. (Does anyone know if whales shiver? Someone try to find that out for class tomorrow.) When our body temperature regulation fails we experience fever or chills. Chills are known to doctors as hypothermia, "hypo" meaning reduced and "thermia" meaning temperature; hypothermia means "reduced temperature". Fever and hypothermia are dangerous conditions that require prompt medical attention.

It's different when a lizard gets cold. For the lizard it's not an immediately dangerous condition; it just becomes sluggish until its environment warms up again. Now our lizard might be subject to predation—being eaten by a predator like an eagle or a snake—if it becomes sluggish at the wrong time or in the wrong place.

Mammals are the opposite in both ways: our temperature remains fairly constant regardless of our environment, and when our body temperature—not in our arms and legs and hands and feet, but inside our skull, our chest, or our belly—when this internal temperature changes, that's a big thing to worry about.

A mesotherm would be an intermediate creature, one who is able to generate enough body heat to remain active in a cold environment, which helps to avoid predation (remember that means being eaten), but isn't directly threatened by having a cold body temperature, if the food supply does not support maintaining a high activity level.

Something science has learned is that any organism that goes too long without food ceases to generate warmth internally. Now a large pile of dead plant matter—yard waste—can become much warmer than the surrounding environment, but this is due to smaller organisms with the plant matter which are busy eating the plant matter. It is also true that rotting meat will generate warmth from the small organisms inside the meat causing the meat to rot. Whatever the situation, if heat is being generated in a biological system, somewhere in that system there is some form of digestion taking place.

Now let's go back to the excellent question about dinosaurs could have been mesotherms. As young scientists, you are probably all wondering what is the evidence that dinosaurs were cold blooded or not. That's a very good question, everyone.

As a scientist, I wondered this myself. As a scientist we are trained to ask these questions whenever possible and seek as hard as we can to obtain the answers. Over my summer holidays—can you believe that?—I scoured all the science textbooks available to this school district, and I can't find a single sentence in any book explaining why dinosaurs are believed to be cold blooded, apart from their having a distant kinship with modern reptiles.

But then, think about this yourself. We know modern reptiles are much smaller than dinosaurs, who were waaaaay bigger than elephants. Large creatures often generate more heat than they want to have, which is why elephants have those giant, thin ears. All that extra skin helps them to transfer unwanted heat into their environment.

We'll be talking more about the relationship between heat and temperature in future classes. This is an important concept which is central to life as well as to modern machinery, which is why we eat regular meals and our cars visit gas stations. Heat and temperature are both connected to the concept of energy. That's a very important concept you'll be visiting year after year in your school education.

Unfortunately, it appears that all your textbooks—all the way until you leave school when you are much older—we written by the same idiot, who isn't a proper scientist at all. So we're all going to have to work hard to figure out our own answers to these important questions by thinking carefully in our own minds and challenging each other to support our opinions.

Does that sound like a good idea? Yeah, it does, doesn't it.

[Intercom buzzes.]

Well, my young students, I suspect that would be the principal's office summoning me to the guillotine for my immediate beheading.

I love you all, and I'll miss you so much. Good-bye everyone. It was worth it.

Can you imagine what he'll be like at 18? Or 28?

An open invitation to extrapolate? Whoa daddy that. Fasten your air-bags, ladies and gentlemen.

Will the clever little rug rat grow up to become the William James of maker-space or William James Sidis of faker-disgrace?

From a business perspective, this move makes perfect sense. From an educated geek end-user's perspective, it really sucks. But what are you going to do?

First of all, I'm not going to purchase any of those fancy apps. I'm going to use my smart phone as for phone calls, photographs, maps, and web browsing. While it's truly a waste of a beautiful technology, it's merely inconvenient not to bother with all those invasive programs.

I consider the new security model worse than not having the apps at all.

The Roman Emperor that converted to Christianity after being 'saved' is the real power behind Christianity...

Are you sure? I suspect the power behind the throne was really Helena, Constantine's mother. Or maybe Fausta.

In July, Constantine had his wife, the Empress Fausta, killed at the behest of his mother, Helena. Fausta was left to die in an over-heated bath. Their names were wiped from the face of many inscriptions, references to their lives in the literary record were erased, and the memory of both was condemned.

The record is unfortunately thin on which influencer wielded more power on gullible Constantine, but clearly Helena prevailed in this particular deed.

Consider also Aunt Jemima. She was a nobody—if she even existed—before some marketing genius slapped her mug on a bottle. If future archaeologists someday put together a landfill page rank, she'll be waaay up there.

Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.

Alternatively, we could roll back our immense gains in life-expectancy. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

The problem seems to be that human nature is willing to work very hard for $20 (if that pays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) or for a $20 million xmas bonus (if that's your second vacation home) but we're all pretty slack-assed when motivated by any sum in between.

These people would do as well to stand on a soap box on a public street corner to engage in gifted oration, then hand out leaflets to the crowd suggesting that people express their support and appreciation by signing up for a no-cost-to-your-pocket-book alcohol tolerance study at the local university (to more precisely characterize the vomit threshold for the advancement of medical science) , for which the orator himself receives a small referral fee.

Advertising, much like alcohol, is hardly known as a tonic to clarity of mind. I'll pass, thank you very much. I've far in extreme of the Mormons on the issue of what passes into my brain through my eye sockets. Alcohol only makes me vulnerable to the lizard housed within (he's not so bad, really, once you stare him down). Advertising, on the other hand, exposes me to spitting cobra exotoxins. The dead giveaway is the spinning iris of seduction: animated GIFs, Flash-based logo rotations, pop-ups, pop-overs, all resembling nothing so much as a vulture with the twitching tail of a live and highly agitated squirrel shit to the ischium out of the vulture's ass.

Shall I welcome this bubonic creature to peck at my eyeballs from the side of my screen? Even for "Four score and twenty" or "I have a dream"?

Nah. I don't think so. Not unless I've got a bag full of Shuriken ice picks and it's somebody else's HD monitor.

I think the better (and more common way) is to simply boot into Windows to play your games.

If I only had to boot into Windows in order to run my games (of which I have none, because of what comes after "only") then I would surely do so. What I'm not willing to do is boot into the Windows EULA and revenue collection racket—please inform me on how to do one without the other if you know how—after its ape-like thumb collapsed the trachea on any vestige of consumer choice worthy of so much as a solitary big whoop.

If Ambrose Bierce had an entry in his Devil's Dictionary for the word "simplicity" (he doesn't, I actually looked) he would most likely have defined it as "expediting gratification by paying more to receive less" or some scalding variation upon that theme at the expense your precise invocation, and many more besides.

This could all be fixed by issuing the original patent provisionally, and mandating a second, more thorough review by the patent office when the decorative sabre is first unsheathed.

Maybe the target of the action files an application for second-stage examination and ponies up a small fee on the order of $1000, then the patent office adds the patent to their public "notice of re-examination" board for sixty days to solicit any other public input. After the examination, the target recovers from the patent holder $250 for every claim shot down and another $5000 if the entire patent falls (the patent infringement action could permit the patent holder to exercise only certain claims, so as not to place themselves on the hook for the claim-reversal penalty award on every frivolous claim, but they still owe the $5000 penalty award if claims associated with the infringement action is reduced to the empty set).

Second-stage ratification doesn't need to be a big thing. It only needs to be as big as what the first-stage examination was originally presupposed to accomplish when this whole system was first set up, back when it was possible for a patent examiner to have his or her finger on the pulse of innovation to any extent at all, before human knowledge blue-shifted by a further six orders of magnitude.

To a first approximation, given enough eyeballs, all claims are hollow.

What we really need is a mechanical turk to challenge claims of novel art and claims of application (which should be separated). If the patent holder wished to instigate second-phase examination without filing against an adversary (so as to increase their litigational certitude before uncasking their powder), they would need to post $10,000 as a bounty fund. The public would be invited to submit arguments against any particular claim (much like a bug-tracking system). Maybe there's a $5 fee per hundred words (minimum $5) for each argument filed. The first argument (by filing time) to unseat a claim is awarded a $250 refutation bounty from the bounty fund.

Even better, people are allowed to pay $5 to click "me too". All the "me too" payments are funnelled to the person who originally filed the item (small profit, same day). All parties split the bounty (including the item owner) if that item scores (the incentive to be the fiftieth person to click "me too" is not attractive; by interpolation, the "me too" button functions as a prediction market).

I think we just need to bring a mechanical turk free market processes to bear on the patent approval system, and abuses would soon be dramatically scaled back.

If a company just wants to accumulate patents it could potentially waggle, nothing changes, and all the same press releases can still be penned (mentions of patents pursued would mean less, now being more frail in the waggling, but this is the usual erosion of sense anyone shrewd has long observed).

I've been parsing this kind of press release for a long, long time now. I can pretty much tell what we're dealing with by how hard it is to state the advantage of a new approach in narrow and precise language.

That this blurb doesn't even disclose the error model class (error correction is undefined without doing so) suggests that the main advantage of this codec lies more in the targeting of a particular loss model than a general advance in mathematical power.

Any error correction method looks good when fed data that exactly corresponds to the loss model over which it directly optimises.

The innovators of this might have something valuable, but they are clearly trying to construe it as more than it is. This suggests that there are other, equally viable ways to skin this particular cat.

Snowden is going to be the first person in human history to have a suspicious death at the age of one-hundred and five.

There's a big difference between what these agencies do under cover of darkness, and what they do under the glare of a public spotlight. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after two decades in exile, whereupon he continued to criticise his homeland for another fourteen years, before dying of heart failure under suspicious circumstances at age eighty-nine.

There's a good reason they get mighty twisted about having their darkness aired: no more summary judgement, no more page 13 obituaries of A-list adversaries.

Hurricane Lolita:

I once read of an interview given by Roman Polanski in which he described listening to a lurid radio account of his offense even as he was fleeing to the airport. He suddenly realized the trouble he was in, he said, when he came to appreciate that he had done something for which a lot of people would furiously envy him.

No, Snowden's exile is something different: a life not envied, not one little bit. That much his button-down steampunk adversaries can manage under the broad light of day.