Comment Re: Bill Gates ... (Score 1) 17
... along with Steve Balmer should *both* burn in Hell.
Comment Re: Quit Flogging A Dead Horse. (Score 1) 42
> The laws of physics make clear you cannot get something from nothing without Divine Intervention.
Looks like you never heard of Quantum Mechanics. Go and look up "Casimir Effect".
Comment Re: Mockery? (Score 1) 175
Yeah, I'm aware of the "hard problem, and I agree it's hard. That's exactly why I'm very skeptical of @lkcl 's claim that "his philosopher friend knows of a mathematical definition of consciousness" and called him out on it. Unsurprisingly, he/she/it has not responded....
Comment Re: Mockery? (Score 2) 175
So your philosopher friend knows the secret to creating conscious AI? I don't think so.
no: he knows of a mathematical definition of Consciousness and has presented at multiple conferences on the topic of Consciousness for many years.
As they say in wikiland: 'Citation Needed'.
I study philosophy, specially philosophy of mind and more specifically the problem of consciousness, and have never heard of anything remotely like "a mathematical definition of Consciousness".
Can you please provide your friend's name and a reference to one of these presentations he has made regarding this, lest we be left imagining they are both just figments of your imagination?
Comment Re: headline next year: Detroit drivers getting si (Score 2) 145
The Earth has a magnetic field. I don't think they're going to make one bigger than that...
So, we don't need the wireless chargers in the first place, as the EV vehicles (and our smartphones!) can just charge off the Earth's magnetic field, right? Right?
Hint: it's not the *size* of the field, it's its *strenght*...
Comment Re:Waiting for 4800u, ultralight workstations (Score 1) 52
Hopefully we can get a few laptops that support ECC memory.
Absolutely, a machine like that (which can come with a Ryzen Pro desktop CPU) pratically begs for ECC memory support. Which the Ryzen Pro supports.
Unfortunately, it seems System76 dropped the ball on this one: an option for ECC RAM isn't even listed in their "Design & Buid" page. Probably because the 'motherboard' System76 is using doesn't have the traces, and/or its ROM doesn't enable it
Comment ECC memory support? (Score 1) 52
Either it has ECC memory support, or I'm not interested.
Unfortunately ECC isn't mentioned anywhere, and isn't offered as an option in System76's "Design & Build" custom-configuration page... :-/
Comment Good riddance to Ballmer & (hopefully soon) to (Score 1) 357
Good riddance, Ballmer, and don't let the door hit your fat butt on your way out.
Also, I hope MS itself doesn't take too long to follow you out of History's door.
Psycho CEO of a dishonest company selling crappy products, no one will be sad to see any of you go (except perhaps the suckers that invested in your stock).
Also, I hope MS itself doesn't take too long to follow you out of History's door.
Psycho CEO of a dishonest company selling crappy products, no one will be sad to see any of you go (except perhaps the suckers that invested in your stock).
Comment Mint: what Ubuntu should have never stopped being (Score 1) 627
Mint rocks... first experience was with Mint13 MATE, driven by the fsckup that Canonical is doing to Ubuntu (Unity? OUCH! to say nothing of Wayland/Mir and a thousand other smaller snafus); it's running perfectly in the two user desktops I've installed so far, and being totally compatible with Ubuntu packages and PPAs is a huge plus.
Even my completely non-technical users are prefering Mint to Ubuntu....
Also, there's Mint LMDE, so we have a escape route when Canonical finally manages to make Ubuntu unusable.
I plan on converting all my other desktops here and never looking back.
Comment Re:Oracle will do just fine (Score 1) 154
Mark my words, their next step will be to fire their sales staff and replace them with attractive females (that's not tongue in cheek, I'm quite serious).
I hope you are right, as that would be a great improvement on the current situation...
Comment Re:Lesson One (Score 1) 213
The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.
Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.
Structurally sound? Are you nuts? NT (and all the crap MS did since they abandomned Xenix) is unsound structure with unsound UI on top of it...
US Embassy Categorizes Beijing Air Quality As 'Crazy Bad' 270
digitaldc writes "Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the US embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was 'crazy bad.' The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an 'incorrect' description and it would revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above 500, its highest point and a level considered hazardous for all people by US standards. The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors."
Bookmark Disposable Underwater Camera Reviews (slrbest.com)
Submission + - DoD Takes Shots from Security Experts on Cyberwar (securityweek.com)
wiredmikey writes: Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn is being questioned by IT security experts who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon’s recognizing cyberspace as a new “domain of warfare” could have really happened as described.
In his essay, “Defending a New Domain,” Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by “a foreign intelligence agency.”
Critics such as IT security firm Sophos’ Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows “autorun” feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec.
In his essay, “Defending a New Domain,” Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by “a foreign intelligence agency.”
Critics such as IT security firm Sophos’ Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows “autorun” feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec.
Submission + - Fine-Structure Constant Maybe Not So Constant (sciencenews.org)
Kilrah_il writes: The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measure lately by scientist from University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: “This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it’s not simply systematic errors” in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that “it’s a competent team and a thorough analysis.” But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, “it needs more proof before we’ll believe it.”
The ramifications of this study are profound, if correct, because it might suggest that other constants, such as the gravitational constant, are not so... constant.
The ramifications of this study are profound, if correct, because it might suggest that other constants, such as the gravitational constant, are not so... constant.
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