tech how?

It's not, but Friday night is #GamerGate and MRAs night on Slashdot, when 8chan empties out and all the manbabies meet here to cry about how the feminazis are taking away their games and comics and action figures.

Look back a few months. It happens every Friday. There is a story about gender or sexual orientation or something that can be construed as violating the natural order of the primacy of white men. Then, the tears start to flow and it all ends in the gators and the MRAs in one big group hug.

It's harmless, really. If it keeps them off the streets, I'm all for them having their own neckbeard hugbox.

Not in any services I subscribe to.

What does "password strength" really mean?

If people used a textual representation of number obtained from a reliable hardware random number generator then the meaning would be unambiguous. It's the number of digits in that number. But most people don't do that (perhaps more should).

So what does it mean to say that a password has so many bits of entropy? Well, I guess it means how many truly random bits it would take to index their password from the universe of passwords the user considered. This is more an exercise in psychology than it is in mathematics. You have to figure out how users generate passwords or discount passwords. For example requiring a mix of upper and lower case letters doesn't add as much entropy as you'd think, because most users are mediocre typists who'll avoid using the shift key too often. Requiring digits means that many people will just "0" for "o" and "1" for "L".

So it's really easy to concoct passwords which you know are bad, because you know the methods used to select which passwords you'd consider; if the developers of the strength meter don't take your particular generation algorithm into account the meter will show the password to be stronger than you know it to be.

I'm imagining a kind of competitive tomboy/sibling rivalry thing, with the girl not always winning, but showing she can give as good as she gets. It'd put a "new" (ish) spin on the old Top Gear formula.

Seriously, an exotic woman driving exotic cars too fast? Who'd watch that?

I would, because I'm a man and I'm not afraid to admit that on some level I'm a pig. Ideally she'd be smart and funny too, because I don't like to think of myself as being a total pig, but either way I'm in.

Nailed it. It's like the old saw about the Chinese character for "crisis" being made up of characters for "danger" and "opportunity". No matter what happens now they're going to lose some of their long-term fans. But at some point young people aren't going to be so keen on watching some ancient codger behaving like an ass.

If they play this right it could become like Dr. Who, with a reboot every few years to bring in fresh blood.

Sure. But the man verbally abused and bullied a subordinate. Then he physically assaulted him -- or perhaps by that point the physical altercation was mutual.

At some point you have to ask yourself whether you have your priorities straight. As a fan of the show I'm sorry to the big ape gone. As a fan of civilized behavior I'm happy to see at least a minimum standard of decency in behavior getting enforced.

We don't need government help to prosper.

Said the guy, on the internet.

The public is moving inexorably toward acceptance of gay marriage.

Check the historical data:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/117...

I don't honestly see Jeb as having that much a chance, at least not if it were done today.

He's winning the money primary, which is the only one that really matters.

I also think there are a lot of folks in the US that just do not want another dynasty name in there, no more Clintons or Bushes.

Well, there's the problem, isn't it? It just doesn't matter that folks in the US think when it comes to US elections. The decisions are always made for us long before election day.

I'll see your anecdote and raise you some speculation.

I've worked with a number of young Indian engineers and found them to be roughly comparable to American engineers with the same level of experience; if anything they have a slightly higher level of textbook knowledge because (I speculate) their educational system puts a higher premium on memorization. That turns out to be awesome when you're lucky enough to be hiring someone with that certain spark of talent it takes to be great at the job. On the other hand it also means you can easily end up hiring a dud who interviews great because he happens to have a prodigious memory. When the VC my company worked with asked us to take on some surplus H1B engineers he'd sponsored I had a range of experiences from absolutely top-notch talent to total cement-heads with an encyclopedic recall of the GoF book.

But what I've never run into an Indian H1B who didn't know anything at all about his field, although I'm sure it happens. Given the size and level of economic development in India I'd be shocked if there were not at least a few diploma mills, but you'd be a fool to turn your nose up at a diploma from U of Mumbai or IIT/Delhi.

It can be tricky evaluate a candidate from a different country and culture than you, so you've got to expect that a conscientious company may end up hiring a few clunkers. But if your Indian colleagues were *all* ignoramuses, it suggests to me the companies you worked for were incompetent or bottom-feeders when it comes to recruiting engineering talent.

Here's the relevant bit:

long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
  for (int i=0; i

So if numIter is one million, they're generating and throwing away a million temporary objects, some of them quite large. No competent Java programmer would write a tight loop this way.

Considering the Democrats who controlled both parties failed to do anything but renew it, the Republicans may be our best shot - particularly while they don't control the executive branch.

With Jeb Bush about to become the nominated leader of the party? Good luck with that.

When it comes to stuff like homeland security and defense appropriations, the parties don't matter. It's neo-cons all the way down.

Did you know that Jeb Bush has asked Howard Baker to become his senior advisor?

It's gonna take a much bigger shift in government than just a one party or the other taking over to get rid of the Patriot Act.

Overhead on the CPU and in terms of interconnect latency. Because USB is higher level, it incurs a decent amount of load on the CPU. No big deal for basic use, but you wouldn't want it for your main drive or the like. Also USB's latency isn't great, on the order of 100 microseconds or so. Fine for many uses, but high by SSD reckoning and not something you want time critical system components on. PCIe latency is so low you tend to measure it in cycles, not in time.

Also 20Gbit/sec doesn't cut it for some of the internal shit. Graphics and compute hang on 16x slots those are 16GByte/sec in the 3.0 spec (half that in 2.0) per direction (it is completely full duplex). That's 128gbits/sec. For all that it is still extremely performance limiting if you regularly have to use it to access system RAM.

Really interfaces usually are designed for purpose, and not everything is compatible. When you are trying to balance cost, speed, complexity of implementation, complexity of signaling, distance, etc, etc something has to give. There's reason to have PCIe for internal connections, USB for devices, and Ethernet for network, and not try to cram all that in to one bus that is not well suited to them.

I just got my hands on a 6 string after too long without and was toying with 'ubuntu offerings this weekend.

You can use MuseScore to convert sheet music or midi files into guitar tab, if you're interested. You have to use plugins which are readily available from the MuseScore community.