A “global disaster” is unfolding rapidly in the Arctic as melting sea ice kick starts global warming feedback loops.
” three-quarters of the “permanent”, year-round sea ice in the Arctic has been cooked away in just 30 years. Over half of it has disappeared in just the last eight years. A vast expanse of ice larger than the European Union has vanished. What’s left is half the area and only half as thick.”
Working on upgrading an old 2008 laptop for someone from Vista to (also) run Linux, I ran into the most silly issue. Unlike “normal” laptops, the ACER Aspire 5315 does not control its CPU fan through its BIOS (ACPI) – the fan does run on startup, but stops as soon as you start an operating system. Vista then controls it again through a driver. So in a nutshell, unless you have something specifically controlling the fan, it doesn’t run. Obviously this makes the processor heat up considerably within a fairly short space of time (10 minutes or so) and causes the laptop to shut down (thermal protection).
It’s merely a hurdle and not a hindrance for installing Linux – it has a tool to handle this stuff, which needs to be installed and enabled before proceeding with the rest of the installation process.
My main point of this post is just calling out “how stupid” of ACER to design a laptop like this. It really doesn’t help at all. There are standard ways of doing this, and they just ignored it for this particular laptop. Other ACER laptops do things the standard way. Sigh.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/red-october-spy-campaign/all/
An advanced and well-orchestrated computer spy operation that targeted diplomats and governments for at least five years has been uncovered by security researchers in Russia. Focused on targets in Eastern Europe, the campaign appears to be aimed at gathering classified information and geopolitical intelligence.
And US govt is fussed about Wikileaks. My goodness do they have their priorities wrong. For instance, the insecurity of devices, operating systems and applications (mainly of US design) is staggering. But the response is consistently typical: they prosecute rather than deal with the underlying problem.
http://hackaday.com/2013/01/09/ben-krasnow-builds-a-ct-scanner/
After building a homebrew x-ray backscatter imager, Ben Krasnow realised he had nearly all the components to build his own CT scanner, able to make a 3D model of the inside of a frozen chicken.
[Uses Arduino as well.]
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/30064-ibm-accidentally-taught-watson-to-swear
IBM hit a snag when it was trying to train its Watson supercomputer to understand Internet slang. Brown said he tried to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary which included Internet abbreviations.
The problem was that Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and swearing. Apparently it picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia and started using terms like “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query.
And the problem is?
“He said that the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally.” – does he mean speaking with magic inclusion of beeps for American listeners, and censorship on access to data/information? Seems hardly natural to me.
If the Watson computer used the word “bullshit” in a sentence with correct grammar, that’s bloody (!) brilliant and quite natural. Equalling Billy Connolly’s expert use of profanity is no easy feat. Whether it’s appropriate in a specific context is an entirely different matter. But that’s an issue for additional learning, not removal of dictionary from the active vocab. To me, exclusion of this vocabulary also seems like a potential means to identify computers, thereby making them fail a Turing test. right?