massive earthquake and tsunami that caused three of the station's reactor cores to melt

Also, cold weather caused the Challenger to explode.

I wrote Falling Bodies, the ragdoll physics plug-in for Softimage, back in 1996-1997, so I got to see this happen. Back then, Softimage was #1 in Hollywood. Microsoft bought them, and when I went up to Redmond, the Microsoft guys were talking about making Softimage mass-market software. But that never happened. It was too hard to use, and required more graphics hardware than most users had back then. (I had a $2000 Dynamic Graphics card in an NT workstation back then. Every low-end GPU today has far more power.)

So Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid made overpriced film and video editing systems, sold with semi-customer hardware and built into cool-looking furniture. Softimage had a good video editor in addition to the 3D line, and that's what Avid really wanted. They had no clue what to do with the 3D product. They did convert from Softimage to "Softimage XSI", which broke all existing plug-ins and didn't have a plug-in API that worked. That's when I dropped Softimage.

As video editing went mainstream and Avid's sales of overpriced furniture declined, Avid sold off the 3D product to Autodesk. Autodesk had sort of become the default acquirer of 3D animation products. Most of them came from small companies with tiny product lines. Maya came from the merger of Alias and Wavefront and the mess at SGI. Autodesk picked up Lightwave and some other stuff, and of course they already had lots of 3D engineering tools.

This worked out well at Autodesk. The architectural design programs were integrated with the good renderers from the animation world, and images of what new buildings were going to look like got really good. (Adding a radioisity renderer with very realistic lighting models allowed architects to get all the right light fixtures in the right places.) Autodesk's real business is tools for making real physical stuff (their internal slogan is "If God didn't design it, one of our customers did"), but there's a lot of crossover between 3D design of real-world stuff and 3D design of animated stuff.

Softimage has pretty much been a has-been product for years now. After 20 years, it's probably time to phase it out.

The main problem with Mt. Gox was not that the code was a mess. It was a lack of basic financial controls. Mt. Gox lacked a chief financial officer, a controller, inside auditors, outside auditors, a board of directors, an audit committee, and a compliance officer. Yet they were doing a billion dollars of transactions a year. It's not even clear that they have a general ledger listing all transactions. Lack of financial controls is usually considered an indicator of fraud. I've been making this point on bitcointalk for the last year. None of the "Bitcoin exchanges" have proper financial controls. None have an outside auditor and published audits. Yet they're handling far too much money to operate that way.

As for "The National Police Agency seems to lack the ability to analyze the bitcoin trading history of Mt. Gox", that seems to be correct. One would think that the Japanese National Police Agency would have a cyber-crime division, but they don't. In 2013, they were trying to beef up their capabilities in the computer area. This is embarassing for a developed country. Today, any sizable financial mess involves computers, and Tokyo is a major financial center. Untangling any business collapse requires computer forensics and forensic accountants.

The Tokyo police have a backup option - putting Mark Karpeles through one of their standard 23-day interrogation sessions. That's probably going to happen at some point.

Mt. Gox didn't have that high a transaction rate. They only did two or three money transactions a minute on average. They had a lot of traffic from people querying their site for market info, but that's all read-only traffic, and they had nginx and Amazon AWS to help with that.

Their use of PHP wasn't the real problem. From the leaked code, a big part of the problem seems to have been that the front-end system that talked to web users also handled the money. Banks have a separation between the front-end web system and the money system, with standard-format transaction items flowing between them. All those transaction items are logged, often by a third system that just does logging. This allows auditing. It's separation of function that's important, not the language. As far as anyone can tell, Mt. Gox had nobody on staff who understood this.

This all screams "inside job". If you're running a business that handles a lot of money and you lack financial controls, you're scared that someone will rip you off. Unless you're the one doing the ripping off.

This is why open source bug reporting systems need a "developer in denial" status. Here's the original bug report. If a developer tries to close a bug and the users don't agree, the bug should go into "developer in denial" status and that should count against the developer's stats. This particular bug was closed by Drew Bliss of Valve. 3 followers, 0 stars, 0 following. Should be flagged as "unsuitable for employment on security-related projects".

The $100/hour seems about right for what utilities and others pay for a cop on private detail. The officer gets some of that in overtime, the city gets the rest as "profit" and overhead. $200k/year for a trained, licensed cop seems in the ballpark once you take into effect training, equipment, benefits, hiring and other costs. Your $75K/year PHP programmer probably costs the company $150K/year once you add in benefits, recruiting, real estate and training.

We're probably more than 15 years from strong AI. Having been in the field, I've been hearing "strong AI Real Soon Now" for 30 years. Robotic common sense reasoning still sucks, unstructured manipulation still sucks, and even Boston Dynamics' robots are klutzier than they should be for what's been spent on them.

On the other hand, robots and computers being able to do 50% of the remaining jobs in 15 years looks within reach. Being able to do it cost-effectively may be a problem, but useful robots are coming down to the price range of cars, at which point they easily compete with humans on price.

Once we start to have a lot of semi-dumb semi-autonomous robots in wide use, we may see "common sense" fractured into a lot of small, solveable problems. I used to say in the 1990s that a big part of life is simply moving around without falling down and not bumping into stuff, so solve that first. Robots have almost achieved that. Next, we need to solve basic unstructured manipulation. Special cases like towel-folding are still PhD-level problems. Most of the manipulation tasks in the DARPA Robotics Challenge were done by teleoperation.

On Facebook, sharing is spamming. That's how Facebook gets traffic driven to junk pages.

(Hint: if anyone sharespams commercial stuff at you, demote them from "close friend" to "friend".)

First question on the quiz: "When I share music with someone I feel a special connection with that person."

Are they thinking friendship, love, or co-defendant in a copyright infringement case?

"Software Defined Networking", as Stanford uses the term, means a centrally controlled virtual circuit switching system. Every time someone makes a "call" (a new IP/port IP/port tuple), the first packet is routed to Master Control, which decides if they get to make the call, logs the call, decides whether the call gets wiretapped or filtered, and chooses the priority given to the call. All the routers involved are then issued instructions from Master Control on how to route that call.

(Yeah, they don't use the term "call". But that's what it is, really.) Goodbye, "net neutrality". Goodbye, flat rate billing. Goodbye, distributed control. This puts everything you do on the Internet under central control and makes it billable.

What on earth are you gibbering about?

No dipshit, I'm saying education should be secular (like in France) which means the standard of education and curriculum are standard and that it doesn't favour one religion or tolerate religious interference within that framework. It doesn't stop parents from indoctrinating their kids outside of school if they so wish.

Sadly rights holders own the data. When you "buy" music, books, videos or apps on a device you are only buying the license to use said content. If the license says "non transferable" then that's the end of the discussion.

It serves everyone right for blindly walking into this situation. Digital content could be regarded as property but it isn't. I suspect the argument made by content owners is that anyone make a copy of a file whereas it takes too much effort to copy a physical item and the copy is imperfect.

But that's not really a good argument. We've already seen from the likes of digital libraries, Ultraviolet etc. that DRM protecting content is viable. The problem is that the DRM is focussed on protecting the content owners, not the individual. So when I buy a video and watch through Ultraviolet, the services offers no way for me to sell my content, or loan it, or even back it up.

What is necessary is content neutral DRM that imbues digital content with characteristics similar to physical content. e.g. when I buy an e-book it should be MY book. How could it do that? Well the book could be encrypted against a key held in a token. The token is given to me and I install it onto my registered devices. I can read the book on any of those devices. If I wish to sell the book, then I transfer the token to someone else and my devices lose the ability to read the book. Now within reason it is essentially property - there is only one readable copy of the book at any given time. I can also sell, loan, donate or bequeath the book by using the service to give the token to someone else. The system could facilitate permanent or temporary transfer of tokens. It could even incorporate a form of "wear and tear" by slowing down the time taken to transfer tokens based on how much they were transferred previously, e.g. a book which has been loaned 100 times might much longer to complete transfer of ownership which would incentivize services to buy new copies.

Aside from allowing people to actually own books or other content, it has other benefits. Many countries treat a license as software and slap a tax on it that other forms of content escape. If I wasn't buying a license but the actual book then I would benefit from the lower rates of tax that apply and the store that sells those books does so for less money. I can move my content to other, better devices, or back it up or do anything else I like with it subject to normal copyright laws.

The problem of course is the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon etc. don't want people to own content and they certainly don't want people to be able to move it around. Therefore it needs someone strong like the EU to define what digital property actually is, the formats it should be in, the framework it must implement and then compel or incentivize platforms to support it.

As long as all their examination pupils forfeit the marks from those questions, and if the school's reputation suffers as it slips down the league table, and if the government withdraws all public funding from the school for failing to follow the national curriculum. So if a question was worth 30 out of 200 points then their students automatically lose 30 points, or 15%. Under no other circumstances should they be permitted to take an alternative exam, or pupils be graded for their remaining questions.

And seriously what the fuck up with the UK and this stupid policy? They could learn a thing or two from the French on this - education should be secular. There should be no religious dress, no segregation by sexes, no exemptions from subjects on religious grounds, no indoctrination into religion and no pandering to the sensibilities of religion in any way shape or form. In the long term this will mean far less religious whackaloons which can only be a good thing.

That's not mainstream Judaism. That's a Haredi institution. They're not just anti-evolution. They're anti-TV, anti-Internet, anti-movies, anti-newspaper reading, anti birth control, anti public library usage, anti knowing the language of the country they're in, anti wearing colors, anti female equality... The sect is set up to give kids no option other than to stay in the Haredi community and overdose on religion for their entire lives.

It's a lot like Shia Islam, down to the beards. There's even a Haredi group in Canada that wants to move to Iran because Canada won't let them abuse their kids.

I think the storyline in Bioshock Infinite is a cut above most video games and some of the level design was amazing. But at the same time, what's the point of throwing the player into a world of time rips, alternate realities, cities in the cloud when they spend the majority of the game rooting around bins for candy bars and dollar coins?

Other game mechanics are also pretty whiffy - the expository voxophones lying conveniently around are such a lazy gaming trope (other games might use email terminals, voice mails, dictaphones etc.) that they should have been put down years ago.