I work in the HPC world, and there's plenty of interest for these skills outside of defense and financial. I agree that a lot of it is gov't funded, but locations like NCSA, which are in the process of finalizing acceptance of a huge system from Cray that has GPUs, some of the DOE national labs, or even NASA, are always looking for people like this and have mostly pure scientific agendas. Also, NVidia has been posting a lot lately looking for applications folks.

There's plenty of interesting work, it just takes a little to find it. Check out HPC specific job boards, like the HPCWire Job Bank, for example, or check out the jobs pages of places like NCSA, the DOE labs (LBL, LLNL, etc), NASA, or companies like Cray, NVidia, even Intel, since MIC is coming soon, and will likely be similar to a GPU in how it's programmed.

The article clearly notes (and shows screenshot) that the ads that will be displayed on your news feed are from pages you have liked

Actually, what it says is: "...you must have already Liked Ben & Jerry's Facebook Page, or one of your friends must have interacted with Ben & Jerry's Page."

So you can (and likely will) see ads from a page that your friend liked but you've never visited.

From the company's perspective, keeping you on staff costs a lot more than just your salary. Insurance, 401(k), employment taxes, tuition reimbursement, etc, are all "hidden" costs above what they give you on your paycheck.

It's not unreasonable for it to cost an employer 1.5 to 2 times the salary amount for an employee.

I don't like the idea of a contractor overcharging the gov't egregiously, but if their costs are 1.5x the employee's salary, then charging the gov't 2x means they make 1/4 of that amount in "profit," not 1/2.

Yes, any change to how the internet works could increase phishing. But at $185,000 per application for a new TLD, as well as having each application reviewed by a human or committee, this isn't going to be like automating the registration of .com addresses so that in an afternoon, you can register every misspelling of bankofamerica. By no means do I have blind faith in them, but I feel like ICANN will be pretty sure to not allow some random dude in eastern Europe to register .bank.

Yes, yes, everything can increase the risk of cancer in lab rats, and everything increases the risk of phishing, but the barrier for entry is set relatively high here.

PGI makes a CUDA Fortran compiler, but with GPUs, it's not as simple as just recompiling, the code has to be rewritten to take advantage of the accelerator and it's unique architecture.

They don't want to pay for anonymous models. They want all your friends to know you go to Starbucks in the hopes that subconsciously it will make them more likely to go next time they want coffee -- they are using the ads as a form of reference -- "I like Starbucks, you should check it out."

As for getting your permission, you opted in to Facebook, so you gave FB permission to do whatever they want with anything you put there. While it feels more intrusive because it's your face on the screen, it's not really much different (on a technical level) than a company selling your email and contact info to affiliates.

Those stories about the great privacy terms violations said that Zynga, via Farmville, was a big offender (the story linked to in the back link to the older Slashdot article says this, in fact).

I wonder if they say "anyone who grabs the UID is punished" b/c that freed up some of their biggest developers, like Zynga, who were doing other bad stuff, but not that bad (for some subjective definition of bad)?

I don't disagree that he has been an amazing manager at HP, helping to turn things around after the mess that was Carly Fiorina.

However, how much corruption is too much to overlook? Where do you draw that line? He falsified records to get expenses paid out to himself and/or this woman for $20k, and when caught red-handed, offered to pay it back. Ok, but what if he wasn't caught? Would he have kept doing it? Would he have done it with some other woman? What happens if he wasn't caught until the total was in the millions? Would that have still been ok, because a couple million is still less than tens of billions in market cap?

What is the value of corporate officers acting honestly no matter what?

Do you even know who Jonathan Corbet is? Among other things, he created LWN.net, has been a Linux kernel contributor for longer than that, and has written books on Linux kernel development (for example, the O'Reilly "Linux Device Drivers" book).

He's been on the inside for a long time. This is an opinion you should at least respect, even if in the end you disagree.

I don't think your analogy is right. Think of it more like the company that produces a car engine and doesn't necessarily make sure every person understands whether it's the engine spontaneously catching fire or the finish peeling. They say "this is the list of shit we fixed" and articulate everything they fixed and how they fixed it.

You bet your ass that Toyota will tell you if it's an exploding problem or a finish peeling problem. The distros, in every update, will tell you what bugs were patched, and their severity, as they should. Should it be up to the kernel team to notify every user, or the distros?

Some people can install their own engine in a car. Some people like to download their own kernels and install them; those people probably can read CHANGELOGs.

The summary was a unclear to me -- these weren't built for or affiliated with the movie in any way, these were simply built based on the specs of the models built for the movie.

Why is this unbelievable? Just because you don't play games on the site for 3 hours a day doesn't mean other people don't...