So you're argument is Cruz might be an Obama of the right, roping in a lot of people and then carrying on as a progressive?

No, that he's an Obama of the Right, incompetent, self-absorbed and unable to make a difference on any of the important issues that matter to either of us.

And sadly, most nerds have very fragile psyches

Reading the comments to this article confirm this like nothing else I've seen.

Christ, it's a shitty operating system, marginally better than Windows 7, and you're making out like someone's raped your sister and then tweezed your nose hair. For fuck's sake, get some perspective.

I mean, do operating systems even matter any more? The only people who care about this are the sad sacks that do corporate end-user support...Oh wait, that's it isn't it? You have a shitty job and you're pissed at the world. Oh, OK. Carry on. Get it off your chest. You have precious little to live for, so if it makes you feel better to be the anti-MS Martin Luther and hammer your treatise to the church door, then by all means...

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".

I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

Is it possible that he was either unaware, or didn't take it seriously?

How does that sound to you? Sound it out and ask yourself.

If you hate the egoist-in-chief, are you really prepared to sign on with another, just because he makes noises that soothe your soul? Ted Cruz is every bit as empty as Obama. They're really two of a kind if you look half a centimeter beneath the surface.

I made a big mistake supporting Obama. Will you make the same one, just so I won't feel as bad?

Everyone dies, you dumbfuck.

Despite the "life-saving" diet? I'm shocked.

You've got to admit, it's a little bit like having Sonny Bono endorse a set of skis. Or Jim Fixx writing a blurb about how running prevents heart disease. While it may be true, it's probably not the best marketing strategy.

Yes, that was Cruz' statement last September. Except, here is a much more recent article (less than one month ago) from the Dallas News:

http://trailblazersblog.dallas...

Canadian immigration lawyers say they're baffled why it's taking Sen. Ted Cruz so long to renounce his Canadian citizenship. The Republican Texas senator and potential 2016 presidential candidate vowed several months ago to terminate his dual citizenship. He says he's hired lawyers and is preparing the paperwork. But experts in Canada say renouncing citizenship is a simple, quick and straightforward process. There's even an online, four-page PDF form on the Government of Canada website to initiative the process - no lawyers needed.

and...

"He's a Harvard-educated lawyer so what's the problem? It's elementary."

So, Senator Cruz, what's the hold up?

(He was actually released on Wednesday, BTW.)

You'd like us to believe that, wouldn't you?

It's pretty interesting that one of the endorsements over at the website for the "forksoverknives" whole foods regime documentary was this:

'"A film that can save your life." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times '

oops...

There's even some dude out there trying to convince the world that "Oligonicella is a wide-ranging genus of mantises".

Oligonicella is hardly a genus.

It barely broke 1500 on the SAT.

Hey, that's my online banking password!

Yesterday, a story about upskirt photos being legal in Massachusetts and today dark matter killing off the dinosaurs.

Coincidence? I think not.

You know, it's amazing the insights that a few Friday afternoon cocktails can bring.

Add in Li'l Boosie getting released from prison today, and you can't tell me the Illuminati isn't behind all this. Maybe.

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.