Umm, no. According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye) the average human eye has a horizontal field of view of about 155 degrees. 60* toward the nose, 95* away. If you include eye motion, that increases to as much as 270 degrees. Yes, that means you you can see a ways behind you without turning your head - try it sometime.

I'll be glad to - just as soon as they actually do something to stop it. For now they've just given Paypal's lawyers a polite notification of a potential upcoming gymnastics match.

Soft tentacle robots have been around for decades, it's the *micro* part that's new. I don't think getting below the centimetre scale would be an advantage in the applications you're obviously not considering.

Post-mortem credit is no doubt of great comfort to the rotting corpses of once-ridiculed scientists, but it does nothing to ease the practical difficulties and discomfort of having a promising career destroyed.

*If* the binary blobs are only executed on the GPU then that would seem reasonable to me. And I suppose that might be the case - it would save a few nickles worth of flash or ROM on the graphics chip, which could be relevant for budget-oriented GPUs. Usually though, when you hear of binary blobs in a driver, they're running *as part of the driver* - aka on the CPU, NOT the GPU.

Not really. See my reply above: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Compromised hardware though is (potentially) far more limited in its invasiveness. The CPU and motherboard chipset has fairly unrestricted access to the entire system and must be trusted, but pretty much everything else must go through those, and generally through the OS as well, which limits the amount of nefarious activity it can get up to (or at least makes it considerably more difficult, one would hope). For example, the firmware on the video card itself will have a difficult time gaining unrestricted access to RAM, hard drives, user input, network traffic, etc. At least if the OS is even moderately restrictive about DMA activity. The CPU-hosted driver on the other hand will, in most current OSes, be running with such elevated privileges that it will be trivial for it to gain such access.

Or so I understand it. I'll freely admit it's been a long while since I paid much attention to such details.

And of course it also raises the question - if you can't trust Intel's binary blobs in the driver, how can you trust their CPUs and chipsets? In that context I'd say their fully open video drivers were more valuable as a good example to their competitors than as true security. Though I suppose it is much easier to retroactively compromise existing hardware at the driver level, and it would likely require far fewer people to be complicit than hardware/microcode compromises would.

The problem though, is that we might be approaching the limits of what is testable in modern physics by non-godlike beings. Yes, some supercollider might find something new that's inconsistent with superstring or alternative hypothesis, hence disproving them.

But we might also never find anything new at all. It's not impossible that we have already discovered all the fundamental particles that exist, or that those remaining would require the controlled annihilation of entire galaxies to create (aka the exertions of godlike beings). In which case our experiments could invalidate any hypotheses which *requires* intermediate particles, but sufficiently broad or untestable hypotheses (such as superstrings, taken as a class) would remain forever unfalsified.

Of course the flip side is that if we are entering such a period, then it's largely irrelevant what theories we adopt. So long as they're consistent with observable reality, that's all that really matters. With a couple caveats:
1) If the accepted theory actively discourages research in directions that *would* reveal new physics, we have a problem.
2) If the theories remain broadly accepted for long enough (many generations?) then there is a danger that if conflicting data is eventually found it will be rejected or suppressed. Many a researcher has had their career devastated by making claims inconsistent with accepted science, especially if the results can't be consistently replicated (a hallmark of new phenomena where we don't actually understand what's happening, but *something* seems to be). Fleischmann and Pons spring to mind - granted they did a particularly irresponsible job of releasing their findings, but follow-up research does continue to dangle tantalizing hints that under certain poorly-understood conditions fusion does occur.

While I'm inclined to dismiss binary blobs as largely innocuous in most scenarios, you are oversimplifying things considerably.

1) Just because *I* don't have the time or interest to modify display firmware, doesn't mean I'm not in a position to benefit from *other people* doing so. Witness the entire Linux infrastructure, which owes its existence to the fact that the software stack of the time was NOT locked down, and critical hardware was all reasonably well documented.

2) The binary blobs are themselves dangerous - driver software is typically running with very high security clearance, and you have absolutely NO idea what is going on inside those blobs. Couple that with the fact that we now KNOW the NSA (and presumably other organizations as well) have actively recruited several major companies to collaborate in compromising the security of commodity hardware, and we're in the position of being completely unable to trust ANY binary-blob software in a security-critical scenario. Since Intel was pretty much the go-to option for decent(ish) fully open-source display accelerators, that alone validates a subset of the original question: What are our options now if we want a modern desktop that can be be audited for security?

>if X launches from Texas, is there a nice place to land the first stage?

I'm not 100% certain, but my understanding is that the plan is to, depending on the amount of extra fuel allowed by unused payload capacity, either fly directly back to the launch pad, or land on the floating barge to refuel and *then* fly itself back to the launch pad. Though I remember some talk about SpaceX leasing one of the more remote and durable launch sites at Cape Canaveral, Florida, so I imagine they plan to eventually land there for refueling rather than on a barge in the open ocean, with the associated much greater weather sensitivity.

It may seem kind of wasteful in terms of both fuel use and engine wear and tear (though I believe only one of the nine engines is used on the return flight), but consider that the first stage is about 45m tall (around 15 storeys), with an empty mass of about 25,000kg (approximately the maximum mass of a loaded 20-ft shipping container). The size means it's pretty much impossible to transport over normal roads, and the mass means that only the largest military cargo helicopters could handle it. And I would assume it's not designed to survive significant lateral stresses (no point in normal usage = wasted mass on structural supports = reduced payload), so laying it on its side to transport it by ship or truck would probably be a major challenge. So either you build and maintain a specialized transportation vehicle, or you just let the thing do what it was designed for and fly itself.

>How far downrange was the barge, and what is that far from TX.
I've heard 400km, though I couldn't give you a reliable source. And obviously that's fairly trivial to extend considering the first stage is already hurtling downrange at high speed when the second stage separates. If it simply "glided" down to to cruising speed, just maintaining high altitude (low air resistance) instead of actively decelerating, it could extend that range considerably while likely consuming even less fuel (obviously the fuel required for the return trip would increase, but that has no effect on payload capacity).

The problem is most of the benefits of instant runoff get lost if you do your runoff voting before the various regional votes are combined. State X votes for "Candidate 3", with the result that the entire state's votes get "wasted" because the other states are still using the old way. Strategic voting again becomes a necessity, undoing the primary benefit of instant-runoff voting. Even if *all* the states are using IRV to decide who gets their electoral votes, the results will still tend to be far less satisfactory. Especially if the "fringe" candidates have a regionally biased appeal. You'd really want to combine all the citizens' votes, electorally-weighted of course, *before* beginning the instant runoff process.

Well, assuming you're talking about the presidential election (the only one that really occurs at a national level) you sort of lose the benefit of IRV if you subdivide the votes by states first. Assuming "fringe" candidates have a geographically biased appeal, most states will end up going to one of the big candidates, and any states where a fringe candidate wins will be throwing their votes away - completely defeating the whole "eliminates the need for strategic voting" that's the primary benefit ofthe various IRV schemes.

Now, what I *could* see working is an inter-state collaboration such as that being forwarded for proportional electoral college vote casting. Once enough states sign on then those states engage in a collective IRV procedure, with individual votes presumably weighted proportionally to their state's number of electoral votes divided by the number of votes cast in the election, followed by a "winner take all" casting of electoral votes in all participating states.

So, because you prefer an epic gaming experience, all other gaming forms should be ignored? Granted, if a game has less than two hours of gameplay, AND little replay value, I'll probably be disappointed, but not everyone is in it for the replay. Hell, a lot of the short games cost less than renting (much less going to) a movie, and considering the amount of drek coming out of Hollywood the odds are good that the game will offer more value for your money.

Or any of the many instant-runoff or proportional representation methods. Unfortunately, as hard as the established parties will fight against limits on their wealthy gravy-train, I suspect they'll fight *much* harder against any fundamental changes to the election system they've currently captured. And considering that it would take a constitutional amendment to change the rules, I'd say it' a non-starter until we've managed to take back a measure of control over both congress and the state legislatures.

That is a good one - I'll have to add that to my list.