In other news... (humorous news items)

[Sableagle]

Any surprise they gave us Trump?

Spoiler:

I've heard he was the product of bestiality.

He's a half-orc in a wig, isn't he?

[jewish_scientist]

As a kid growing up, I learned that the sign of the end times was rampant bestiality even among the animals. This is clearly proof that we are doing something wrong.

THIS is the sign that convinces you. I thought that it was pretty clear when Trump won the primaries.

[ObsessoMom]

Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists

That's the click-bait headline, which I followed to learn what scientists are doing to address the plight of deaf dolphins.

The article is actually about scientists' desire to protect the noisy fish from overfishing, so that there will be enough of them left to keep up this defensive behavior.

[addams]

Thank You, MaMa Bear.
The Guardian is pretty good.

Unlike many others they Don't have a paywall.
I wish I could do more to support Real News.

Even if, like Real Science, some Real News seems silly on the surface.
Underwater noise is a Real and very complicated conversation.

Do you know about the Narwhal and Noise?
ech..It's not funny.

It's too close to the winter solstice to have dark thoughts.
The Northern World will be dark all on its own, tomorrow.

[Sableagle]

Detectives say they have a number of ‘unanswered questions’ about the ‘unusual and complex’ incident

It was discovered after the driver went to a takeaway in Shaw , Oldham , with serious facial injuries.

He said he had been assaulted and his lorry had been stolen.

Firefighters were then called to a blaze on Huddersfield Road, in Newhey , between Wicken Hall and Cherry Top Farm.

Police say ‘a large amount of fumes’ were coming from the lorry and once the flames had been extinguished, and the truck had been moved out of the road, a ‘significant amount’ of cannabis was found in the trailer.

[Soupspoon]

Witnesses to the blaze were found to be very unconcerned about anything other than than backs of their hands.

[Sableagle]

I thought perhaps the "unanswered questions" included:
"Which is better, peanut butter and chocolate on toast or chocolate and peanut butter on toast?"
"How awesome is a cheese and pineapple toastie?"
"Which shop sells the best pain au chocolat in town?"
"Have you ever noticed how cows and clouds move in completely different ways?"
and
" ..... ..... ..... what?"

[Grop]

Last year A few years ago there was that article on someone being shot dead for asking a pain au chocolat in a city where they call that a chocolatine. http://www.legorafi.fr/2013/03/20/toulo ... -chocolat/

However le Gorafi is a fake news site. But it is often a fun read.

[Sableagle]

... and here I thought a chocolatini was a cocktail.

I wonder whether anyone's been shot yet for calling a panino "a panini" and panini "panini's" on their swing signs.

Does anybody remember the Italian chef who left Britain in a huff because we put pineapple on pizzas?

[Soupspoon]

Reminds me of the Pentium Bug. (Ok, so it's different at its core(s), but the whole software fix and recall thing…)

[ObsessoMom]

So, just how cold is it?

Earlier this week, king penguins at the Calgary Zoo in Canada's western Alberta province were kept in their indoor shelters to avoid the bitter cold.

That's pretty cold.

From the same article:

Is it cold everywhere?

No, it was actually colder in Jacksonville, Florida, than it was in Anchorage, Alaska, on Tuesday.

Several of Alaska's northern and central towns experienced some of their hottest months of December on record.

On Tuesday, the Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage recorded a temperature of 48F (9C) - higher than almost anywhere in the Lower 48 states.

Antarctica's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station recorded a temperature on Tuesday of -12 (-24.5C)F, just one degree warmer than Indianapolis, Indiana.

link, including video of kids making snow angels in Tallahassee, Florida's, first snow in 28 years

[Grop]

(Meanwhile in my part of the world, winter has been abnormally warm).

[Mutex]

Roughly 12C (low 50s F) here in London.

[Quercus]

Roughly 12C (low 50s F) here in London.

Hella windy though (assume you're taking England, not Ontario)

[CorruptUser]

Wasn't this the plot of day after tomorrow?

Now we need to watch out for CGI wolves, Americans illegally immigrating to Mexico, and Donnie Darko.

[idonno]

Reminds me of the Pentium Bug. (Ok, so it's different at its core(s), but the whole software fix and recall thing…)

Experts have said that the fix could slow down the performance of computers by up to 30% but Intel played this down, saying that "for the average user, performance impacts should not be significant and will be mitigated over time".

The flaw is also likely to affect major cloud computing platforms such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google, according to The Register, which broke news of the bug.

I'm pretty sure there is no way a 30% CPU hit to this list of cloud services isn't going to substantially harm services that the average user is using.

[commodorejohn]

I'm pretty sure there is no way a 30% CPU hit to this list of cloud services isn't going to substantially harm services that the average user is using.

That's a worst-case, of course, but yeah, this is a rather big deal.

[Sableagle]

Wasn't this the plot of day after tomorrow?

Now we need to watch out for CGI wolves, Americans illegally immigrating to Mexico, and Donnie Darko.

Also for cold air causing ice to form on warm buildings, storms to cause low pressure areas which suck air down from the stratosphere, a drastic decrease in the specific heat capacity of seawater, the suspension of the usual thing where compressing air makes it warmer, some guy drawing the Mason-Dixon line on a map and saying we should abandon everything north of it and an astronaut looking down on a Europe completely devoid of life and saying he's "never seen it cleaner."

[LaserGuy]

Apple is facing class action lawsuits for allegedly intentionally slowing down older version of the iPhone.

[Liri]

Apple is facing class action lawsuits for allegedly intentionally slowing down older version of the iPhone.

I don't think it's "alleged" any more. They copped to it and apologized.

[Xenomortis]

Reminds me of the Pentium Bug. (Ok, so it's different at its core(s), but the whole software fix and recall thing…)

There was speculation as to the cause going around for the past couple of days, but we have details now.

There are a couple of vulnerabilities here, but the "Intel specific" one (and the one everyone is worried about) got given the name "Meltdown" - the other vulnerability is called "Spectre", it's more general (affecting basically all modern CPUs) but is much harder to exploit (although I haven't read the paper yet).
Meltdown takes advantage of the fact that CPUs try to be really clever and execute instructions in parallel, even in a different order if they can, and caching.

Spoiler:

Normally, when you run a program, that program is only allowed read and write to memory that it's been given by the OS - breaking these rules can cause the OS to get very upset with you.
If a program tries to read from "protected" memory or other memory it doesn't own, that read will fail and the program will "segfault" (if you every have a program crash with "Access Violation", something like that is happening).

With the Meltdown exploit, the CPU is asked to read from a memory location it's not supposed to and, based on the read value, read from a different address that it is allowed to.
The trick is that, whilst the initial read will ultimately fail, because the CPU is so clever and executes instructions in parallel, it'll read from the address you're allowed to read that depends on the initial value you're not supposed to have read. Whilst all of these instructions "are rolled back" upon error, resetting the state of CPU registers where the read values are stored, the state of the CPU's cache is not. So now all you have to do is determine which "allowed memory location" is in the cache and from there, determine what the initial read value had to have been.

The Meltdown exploit has been proven to work with x86 processors made by Intel. It hasn't been "proven" that AMD processors are impervious to this, but AMD seem pretty confident (they submitted patch to the Linux kernel to disable the workaround for their processors, which has been accepted).
The workaround at the OS level is to remove (as much as is possible) the OS's kernel code from the address space of a user program, but this makes requesting the services of the kernel (syscalls) more expensive - this is where the performance hit comes from.

Consumer devices are unlikely to suffer noticeably from the performance penalty - typical code just doesn't make that many syscalls, video games won't notice at all.
Cloud services and databases are likely to suffer more (cloud services in particular - that's a lot of virtualisation and switching going on that the OS has to manage), unfortunately it is also cloud services that are at most risk from this exploit.

Intel have released a silly statement where they acknowledge nothing and pretend that the flaw isn't specific to them (despite nobody getting it to work for non-Intel CPUs yet).


TL:DR
A cool hardware-targeted exploit, given the moniker "Meltdown", leaves protected memory at risk to interrogation - operating systems are implementing workarounds that will penalise CPU's made by Intel, AMD appears to be in the clear for now.
A second vulnerability with the name "Spectre" that all CPU's are vulnerable to is being used by Intel to pretend they're no worse than everyone else, but this is much harder to exploit. I haven't read the paper for that one yet.

[sardia]

Damn it, I was going to cave, and get an intell for my next motherboard. Because AMD just can't compete anymore.

[Mutex]

Damn it, I was going to cave, and get an intell for my next motherboard. Because AMD just can't compete anymore.

Really? Since Ryzen came out AMD's been competitive for the first time in years. For the first time in a decade at least, I'd consider an AMD machine now.

[Quercus]

Damn it, I was going to cave, and get an intell for my next motherboard. Because AMD just can't compete anymore.

Really? Since Ryzen came out AMD's been competitive for the first time in years. For the first time in a decade at least, I'd consider an AMD machine now.

Now the conspiracy theorist part of my brain can't help but wonder about Meltdown as an intentional vulnerability planted by AMD as long-game industrial sabotage (it doesn't help that I recently read a book whose plot hinged on long-term high stakes industrial sabotage).

[elasto]

So I presume the next gen of intel chips will be vulnerable to this too, since we're too far down the manufacturing pipeline, but maybe not the one after that..?

[Xenomortis]

"Spectre", the other vulnerability I mentioned, has some interesting implications.
It doesn't seem as bad as Meltdown, it doesn't cross privilege levels, but it's also kinda worse. It's much harder to fix (there doesn't appear to be an OS level workaround at the moment), affects pretty much all modern CPUs (Intel, AMD, and ARM are all implicated) and allows some potentially scary things - process isolation can be violated (allowing a process to read memory from another process by training the CPU's branch predictor and employing cache timing attacks, however this requires analysis of the target program's machine code), and there's even a Javascript implementation that breaks the browser sandbox (one of the temporary "fixes" in place is browser's reducing the resolution of their timers, preventing analysis of the cache).

[ObsessoMom]

Thanks, Xenomortis. I appreciate the updates and analysis.

This isn't really a news, re: cold weather in most of North America (not my part, though), one of the art sites at which I hang out posted someone's photos of the nearly-frozen "Slurpee" waves off the coast of Nantucket. I thought some people might enjoy them.

[CorruptUser]

one of the art sites at which I hang out posted someone's photos of the nearly-frozen "Slurpee" waves off the coast of Nantucket. I thought some people might enjoy them.

I wish I was still in Rhode Island, just so I could check those out. I never knew that my bucket list contained "surf on a slurpee wave", but it does now.

[Soupspoon]

Made in Scotland, by slightly less sugary girders.


And, though month-old news (of the intention, at least) I didn't see Elon Musk's Space-Car mentioned anywhere, and I've just been reminded about it.

[Sheikh al-Majaneen]

http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon- ... ion-2018-1

My favorite line from the article:

For example, Mukhande Singh, the founder of Live Water, told the publication his startup's water expired after a few months — something he said was normal for "real water."

"It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery," Singh said. "If it sits around too long, it'll turn green. People don't even realize that because all their water's dead, so they never see it turn green."

[CorruptUser]

Normally I'm opposed to scammers, but at this point if you are suckered into these scams, you seem like a smart fellow, and smart fellows know they need a new bridge, and where better for a bridge than on Florida swampland? I mean, it's all water, they need bridges, right? I've got this couple from Connecticut looking to get in on this, but I like you, so if you act fast I'll let you in on this scrap metal deal involving an eyesore in downtown Paris...

[ucim]

For example, Mukhande Singh, the founder of Live Water, told the publication his startup's water expired after a few months — something he said was normal for "real water."

That is actually true. Water decays over several months into dihydrogen monoxide and hydrogen hydroxide. Hydrogen is an explosive, the hydroxide ion is highly reactive, and we all know carbon monoxide is a deadly poison. Do you really want to be drinking a mixture of reactive ions, explosives, and half of a deadly poison?

I'm working on a detector that can tell the relative quantities of water, dihydrogen monoxide, and hydrogen hydroxide, to give an indication of when water should be discarded. I just need a little more funding to get the first prototypes ready.

Jose

[commodorejohn]

I mean, of course this is happening in Silicon Valley.

[freezeblade]

I have a friend who is in the industry of water inspection and safty for the state of California, and she was so pissed at that guy. There are untold millions who don't have access to clean water, yet this guy is selling water which can easily become unsafe to consume in a matter of days from receiving, to unsuspecting idiots.

[addams]

ech...I come from the land of Water.
Fresh Deep Spring Water does taste better than Treated City Water.

But; (gack) Where are they getting that water?
Un-Filtered, Un-Treated Water? From Where??

Yep...Consenting adult idiots.

[morriswalters]

Fresh Deep Spring Water does taste better than Treated City Water.

My water company filters water through the alluvial beds lining the Ohio. I'm assured by a source that it doesn't really need treatment. They treat it anyway. I'll be damned if I will take the chance of drinking filtered cow shit.

[ObsessoMom]

All the museums are having a snowball fight

Surgeon's Hall Museums wins, I think.

[idonno]

Made in Scotland, by slightly less sugary girders.

Good thing this is in the UK because "vote with your pound" uses the most amusing currency for talking about sugar in drinks.

[Coyne]

For example, Mukhande Singh, the founder of Live Water, told the publication his startup's water expired after a few months — something he said was normal for "real water."

That is actually true. Water decays over several months into dihydrogen monoxide and hydrogen hydroxide. Hydrogen is an explosive, the hydroxide ion is highly reactive, and we all know carbon monoxide is a deadly poison. Do you really want to be drinking a mixture of reactive ions, explosives, and half of a deadly poison?

I'm working on a detector that can tell the relative quantities of water, dihydrogen monoxide, and hydrogen hydroxide, to give an indication of when water should be discarded. I just need a little more funding to get the first prototypes ready.

Jose

Your detector needs to detect hydroxilic acid as well. And oxidane. Those can also be found in water after it's been sitting around a while.

Spoiler:

The Wikipedia article Dihydrogen monoxide hoax has a good list of names:

Using chemical nomenclature, various names for water are in common use within the scientific community. Some such names include hydrogen oxide, as well as an alkali name of hydrogen hydroxide, and several acid names such as hydric acid, hydroxic acid, hydroxyl acid, and hydroxilic acid.

And...

The other IUPAC recommendation is oxidane, which is used by hoax industry groups promoting DHMO as a safe industrial chemical while hinting at dangers and government conspiracies.

[Soupspoon]

And nilahol…? (Bangs own trumpet/blows own drum.)