Sapere Aude
Category: Uncategorized
poindexter tried to build what the nsa has today. of course he was fired for it, but nsa still built it.
From 1983 to 1993 DARPA spent over $1B on a program called the Strategic Computing Initiative. The agency’s goal was to push the boundaries of computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics to build something that, in hindsight, looks strikingly similar to the dystopian future of the Terminator movies. They wanted to build Skynet.
Speaker of the House John Boehner has long denied that his perpetual tan skin color is the result of sunless tanning. He just spends a lot of time outdoors, the Ohio Republican is known to say. But despite his repeated denials of using tanning beds, Boehner has ties to the industry. Not only has he accepted campaign contributions from a group called the Indoor Tanning Association, Boehner actually lives in a D.C. apartment owned by a lobbyist for the American Suntanning Association.
i never understood this. is boehner from the jersey shore? does the orange-american constituency even vote?
there is 1.2 trillion $ in revenue up for the taking. here’s what we are getting for all that money: $100k / GB for SMS, bloatware, customer service from hell, lock-in, and government-enforced large scale spying. telcopalypse can’t happen soon enough.
if you liked cavendish, should have put some anti-fungal genes in it.
Scientists have long feared that Tropical Race (TR) 4, a soil fungus that rots the Cavendish banana, will reach Latin America. That’s where the vast majority of the multi-billion $ banana export trade is based, and the source of nearly all the bananas consumed in the United States. And now, there’s more reason to worry.
by this definition, nyc (37600 km²) is nearly the same size as switzerland (41285 km²) but has 23M inhabitants vs 7M.
Greater New York had expanded to somewhere between 19-23M residents, depending on the definition.
this is a slightly less depressing solution to the fermi paradox than social media solipsism: we’ll evaporate.
looks like the transsiberian railroad is getting some competition. i rode it in 2008 and it was very memorable.
Turns out that 18 years ago, PHP had ~100 functions. The function names got put in a hash map. The hash function chosen? Strlen. Thus, the function names were chosen so the hash collisions would be minimized (by creating a uniform distribution of function name length). Which means the origin of all those insane and inconsistent names in PHP is even worse than I’d always thought. I am literally blown away. I can barely conceive of a more mind-shatteringly idiotic thing.
Kai Kohlhoff carried out the world’s longest protein folding simulation using 100Ms of CPU hours on Google’s infrastructure. The protein is a primary drug target that plays a role in asthma, type-2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
Traditional German beers brewed on premises, one of the first in the us. Just opened.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 