Lorenz contraction, says the tachyon.
Why the long face? asks the barman.
A tachyon walks into a bar.

Seriously. The current Kindle does one job - reading long texts for leisure - really, really well, and is pretty much crap at anything else.

The e-ink display is very restful to read for long periods, even in bright sunlight and gives incredible battery life, but at the expense of a glacial refresh rate and the need for pixels to be regularly cycled to black. Its no good whatsoever for the sort of fluid touch interface that you'll see in a 'proper' tablet or smartphone.

The Kindle is my go-to device for 'sitting down with a good book' (or even 'sitting on a plane reading low-mental-load crappy SF shorts') but for any other use - even reading reference books where you need to rapidly scroll/skim, use indices/TOCs or follow links, a tablet, smartphone or laptop runs rings around it.

As soon as someone cracks a full-colour, high refresh-rate, low power 'eInk' technology to replace backlit LCD in tablets and phones, the e-reader will be dead overnight.

Also, I know Amazon is teh evilz (but no more so than Apple, Google or Microsoft), and the Kindle is their cash register, but they also run a bloody good service. As they say, the Devil has all the best tunes (and books).

Because PHP also has a perfectly good chassis, body, roof, steering wheel, gear shift, seats, windows, instruments, cup holders, audio, fluffy dice etc. that you know how to use and don't want to throw away.

People don't use PHP for the language (which is fugly), they use it because it has a huge collection of useful libraries, supported and well documented on the php.net site - and it is almost certainly available on your web hosting service.

Not knocking Node.js, but it is still "getting there" as far as mature library support goes: yes, there are plenty of modules, but you're still more likely to find 4 diverse, half-written modules for a particular function than one complete, well-documented, future-proof choice.

It can also be overly complex: Node's USP is asynchronous, event-driven programming, which is cool, but harder and overkill for many applications. Then there's the small matter of having to effectively roll your own web server for even the simplest dynamic web page (OK, you'll probably use a third party module - pick one and hope it stands the test of time, then learn how to configure it) and you'll still probably need a black belt in Apache to set up a reverse proxy to your app.

Mind you, the great thing about Node vs. PHP is that nobody ever has anything bad to say about Javascript as a programming language </sarcasm>

No, but maybe if you're going to have a bit of heavy machinery rolling along the road, someone needs to be "in charge" and responsible.

My guess is that an "autonomous" car will need an emergency kill switch (required on virtually any bit of machinery) and maybe the ability to be manually 'driven' at 5mph with a full symphony of flashing lights and warning beeps, so that if the computer gets stuck it can be manoeuvred out of the way.

It also seems sensible that it should be accompanied by a 'responsible person' with some minimal training in emergency procedure who can call the emergency services when needed (or *stop* the vehicle calling the emergency services unnecessarily). Nothing like the sort of training required a driving license, but AI has a long way to go before it can deal with anything the world can throw at it.

So, age requirements could be relaxed - but not removed. I'm sure a 14-year-old could cope. Some of the stricter drink-drive limits could also be relaxed - but that doesn't mean its a good idea to be paralytically drunk in one of these.

Yes, there are driverless trains, but (a) they are on rails, which limits the sort of scrapes they can get in to, and (b) there are humans on-call, at a much higher human-to-vehicle ratio than you could ever expect with domestic cars.

Instead of citing a silly youtube video that's part of the FUD campaign against the common core (motivated by political dogmas that have nothing to do with math or education), why don't you try referencing the actual common core state standards say is that 2nd graders should be taught to:

Note "strategies" (plural). Good "common core" activities take a class of problem and look at multiple ways of solving it. As others have pointed out, your 'common core' subtraction method is one perfectly valid strategy for doing a subtraction in your head. Its not a replacement for the traditional way (which, as you can see, is perfectly compatible with the common core definition. If any teachers really are teaching "your" method, rote, as "the way" to do do subtraction, and marking the traditional method wrong, then they really don't have a clue about common core. More likely someone with an axe to grind has cherry-picked the example from an activity in which students are specifically told to try different methods, or explore strategies for mental arithmetic, and presented it out of context.

Also, please bear in mind that the current 'status quo' in US schools is not:

32
-12
------
20

....but more like:

...and its logically impossible to get any more insane than that (plus, the kids still can't do it).

From the common core state standards:

Either your son urgently needs to change school or, more likely, you've again picked out part of an activity designed to help kids understand a topic from different perspectives and weed out common misconceptions. In this case, lots of kids would answer '0.06' or '0.6' because they think division always makes things smaller. This sort of activity helps them understand why that is not true.

A good activity might have kids repeating a method like this with 1.62/27, 162/27 and 162/0.27, maybe using manipulatives or some software, and reflecting on the result sandwiched between more traditional problems using the standard algorithms.

[Citation Needed]. There's certainly nothing of the sort here. If anything, the thrust of the common core is that there isn't just one right way of doing something (read the Common Core Math Practices).

If any teacher is actually doing as you describe then they are emphatically not teaching the common core, and someone, somewhere along the line has either pulled a massive TL:DNR (not impossible) or is deliberately spreading (or unwittingly retweeting) political FUD.

And remember, the status quo is that millions of kids fail to learn the good 'ol fashioned way of doing things.

Anybody who's actually any good at math (including most of slashdot) will tell you that the great thing about math was that they didn't have to remember lots of stuff because it all fitted together and made sense. The challenge is, how to make that happen for the other 90% of the population who are desperately trying and failing to learn math by rote. Back in the good old days of the 1950s, being able to add up, multiply and divide reliably without understanding it might land you a job as a clerk. Not any more - understanding is required, and a good way to achieve understanding is to slow down and spend some time looking at concepts from different angles... except then some dork comes in, takes a snapshot of what is visible that second and presents it as "what our kids are doing now instead of proper maths".

Well, radio interference maybe.

Here's betting that a sufficiently powerful magnet or a honking great lump of iron in the wrong place would screw it up nicely.

So, its a System that gives you your Position on the Globe, but not a GPS(TM). Thanks for the clarification...

Unless its just a super-accurate way of finding out which way is North in which case it is probably a compass (not trademarked, at least in that context, AFAIK). Carefully analysing the name "quantum compass" suggests that maybe, just maybe, that's the case - although it could still form part of a System that gives your Position on the Globe.

Maybe the key distinction is that a GPS (TM-or-otherwise) will work out your position from scratch, whereas the sort of hyper-accurate dead reckoning/inertial navigation system that TFA appears to describe would need to know where you started from...

....when a fully autonomous car shouldn't have any manual controls at all (JohnnyCab did - and look what happened!)

After a few years of fully autonomous cars on the road, there will be "owners" who - even if they have a license - have never driven a mile manually since they qualified (a few tens of hours of practice, possibly a half-hour test, or maybe just proof of potty training - depending on where you live). Newly qualified drivers already have a reputation for unsafe driving... imagine a newly qualified driver after 5 years of sitting in an autonomous car. Do you ever want such people actually controlling a car?

In practice, you'd probably want some sort of kill-switch to stop the car, and maybe a "get me off the freeway" system that let you move a few yards (with flashing lights and honking horns) to escape minimal peril. Beyond that, if it needs manual controls it isn't fully autonomous.

Fully autonomous cars should only be released when they've reached a stage where they are safer than the average driver. At that point, why let an average driver drive them? Affordable F.A.Cs would be the cue to make it much, much tougher to get - and retain - a 'manual' driving license. Until then, we should be very, very careful about partially autonomous cars. The "airline autopilot" model of the computer flying and the pilot taking over in an emergency might (might!) work in aviation, where the pilot is a highly trained professional paid to do the job, it won't work on the roads where the driver is Homer Simpson trying to get home from work in the only economical way available.

Of course, better public transport would be an even more effective idea...

c/f taking out their smartphone every 5 minutes to check incoming texts?

Or, as one of the posthuman characters in Greg Egan's Disapora says of the Fermi paradox: "That's what bacteria with spaceships would do".

The simplest way to explain away the Fermi paradox is that interstellar travel is really, really difficult, bordering on impossible. Even if you can plant a flag on your local equivalent of Proxima Centuri, scaling it up so that you can shift useful numbers of excess population and/or bring back the booty may be another matter.

As far as we know, FTL travel is impossible - all the theories require copious quantities of unobtanium and there's the small matter of violating causality. We could be wrong, but we're a little bit more advanced than "travelling over 30mph will cause suffocation" here.

Generation ships? Well, we still don't know how to build one of those in practice, but it sounds more attainable. However, if you can build a self-sustaining generation ship, that can survive for centuries in interstellar space without access to external energy or raw materials, and your race has the social maturity to maintain a stable population for generations (without reverting to savagery, worshiping the engines as a god and blowing the ship up in a holy civil war...) then your race has probably outgrown the 'lets conquer the galaxy for the hell of it' stage.

In any case, with that level of technology, it would be a hell of a lot easier to just build a Dyson Swarm and live in space habitats where there was plenty of external energy and raw material.

Maybe do the same for a couple of nearby stars, just for security, but any nearby star will do, no need to hunt for goldilocks-zone planets when asteroids are so much more useful. But more than that... well, psychotic expansionists who believe in continual exponential growth make bloody awful generation ship crews.

Or if you think your DNA is so good you need to share it with the rest of the universe... just send freeze dried viruses. Maybe the last squirrel flu epidemic was the colonists from the planet Zog?

Unit testing would only have caught this if someone had thought to test for an invalid payload length in the incoming request. Maybe OpenSSL would be a good candidate for full-blown formal methods that could mathematically prove that it matched the specification - however, then its important to remember that the proof only says that the code matched the specification not that the specification matched the real world, so all it really does is shift the complexity and scope for errors to the specification.

Thing is, for networking, those tests need to be right there in the code. Any data coming in off the web needs to be treated like a TSA officer treats a hippie in a 'Legalise Dope' T-shirt. Simple code review shows that OpenSSL wasn't doing that.

I don't disagree about the 'coding style' issue, but that kinda misses the point. The points are:

Theres a memcpy() - where is the bounds checking? Hello? Its not 1976. We all know memcpy is dangerous. Where there's a memcpy there should be a bounds check... even in a fart app. If the project has secure in the title there should be paranoid anal-retentive checking of both the source and destination buffers.

The code uses data that has come from teh interwebs, - again, where's the obsessive-compulsive validity checking on everything that comes in?

However, that's still not the point. Programmers make mistakes - and this bug was at least a bit more subtle than the usual one where the bad hat sends an over-length string.

The problem is with the oft-made claim that Open Source security software is extra-safe because the code is public has been seen by many eyeballs. That claim is dead. Possibly crypto experts have been all over the actual encryption/decryption algorithms in OpenSSL like flies on shit - however, clearly none of them looked at the boring heartbeat stuff. That shouldn't be the death of open source, though - Windows is proprietary and look at the sheer terror caused by the prospect of running Windows XP for one day after the security patches stop...

Its quite easily to believe that you could invite a scientist to be interviewed for a legitimate-sounding science documentary and then assemble a few soundbites that supported your cause by cherry-picking statements and using them out of context.

Its slightly harder to believe that someone could record the complete narration of such a film without getting some idea of what it was about - or at least getting suspicious. Nor does it pass the plausibility test that the makers would go to the time, expense or legal risk* of large-scale manipulation when there are plenty of real life Troy McLures out there would will read out whatever the hell they were handed if they needed money or lizards.

Of course, you'd really need to watch the film to make a judgement, and I don't propose to pollute my eyeballs with a single photon of it.

(* Yeah, its technically easy to change 'I do not believe that' into 'I do believe that' - but if you get caught you'll be slaughtered in the subsequent lawsuit. Better to take complete statements out of context and make it a question of interpretation).

Only because our leaders keep taking advice from the Americans about how to run a health service (and for some reason, dentistry has taken a far worse hit than other services: even if you can find a national health service dentist you still have to pay non-trivial sums for treatment if you're not a child or OAP - c.f. Doctors where the worst case is max ~£10/month for prescriptions. I guess not enough babies die from toothache to motivate the opposition).

Anyway, once they all rot and fall out you can get dentures and enjoy unnaturally white, uniform, plastic-looking teeth just like an American.

Plus, we're much more reluctant to humiliate teenagers by forcing them to wear mediaeval torture devices to straighten their teeth just when they're most sensitive about their appearance.

A litre? OK, you get to stick the burning splint into the collection bottle to test that it's hydrogen. I'm quite attached to my eyebrows. A few ccs in a test tube is enough for a satisfying 'pop'.

Half a litre of pure O2 is more than enough to do something inadvisable with, too. Pass the wire wool and the blowtorch please...

However, I wasn't suggesting that the hydrogen and oxygen were more of a deadly peril than the chlorine - just that its silly to single out one chemical because its been used in warfare and ignore the other potential risks. G.P. forgot to tell people not to drink the electrolyte, swallow the battery or get strands of copper wire stuck in their fingers.