poulson

Academic research is funded through taxpayer money, and, as an academic, I can assure you that much of it has a much lower impact than many open source projects.

I have no idea who those three people were. I do agree that "unprofessional" is a good way to describe their behavior. I emailed a few colleagues about it but it was all too strange to speak publicly about. There was also a bit of a religious vibe to their questions, so there is a (small) chance that they were evangelicals claiming to be interrogators.

I had a somewhat similar experience the day shellshock was announced on a layover in Atlanta flying between two different universities. I had been browsing the news and coding for maybe an hour after dinner at the battery-charging station in my completely empty terminal, and three clean-cut men in their late thirties sat down on all sides of me and started joking about how I was in trouble.

Long story short, after a few minutes of awkward chit chat where they repeatedly try to determine whether I "believed in absolutes", they let me know that, yes, they were "professional interrogators". They then all immediately got up and left for what they claimed was their flight to Minneapolis.

Good point. So it would seem to be hard to find solutions for 6, 10, 12, etc. colors. Have you given any thought to how to solve those cases?

Thanks for the link! There is even a nice discussion of the explicit solutions for Inverter up to 7x7's on the page: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LightsOutPuzzle.html

Almost nothing about the solver would need to change in order to support computation over GF(p), which suggests that someone should create a version of Lights Out / Inverter which cycles through a prime number of colors rather than just off/on.

I've manually verified that the binary matrix printed out by the following Octave/MATLAB routine provides solutions to Inverter. (NOTE: You may want to use the gflineq.m implementation from http://lost-contact.mit.edu/afs/cs.stanford.edu/package/matl...)

  function M = Inverter(nx,ny)
  
  A=eye(nx*ny,nx*ny);
  for x=1:nx, for y=1:ny,
    i=x+(y-1)*nx;
    if( x ~= 1 ), A(i,i-1)=1; end;
    if( x ~= nx ), A(i,i+1)=1; end;
    if( y ~= 1 ), A(i,i-nx)=1; end;
    if( y ~= ny ), A(i,i+nx)=1; end;
  end; end;

  b=ones(nx*ny,1);
  
  s=gflineq(A,b);

  M=zeros(ny,nx);
  for x=1:nx, for y=1:ny, M(x,y)=s(x+(y-1)*nx); end; end;
  
  return

A more effective approach might be to maintain a peer-reviewed ranking of various large tech companies based upon their patent history and to semi-regularly publicly base your employment decisions upon said list.

Or, "Brian builds distributed-memory computers". Despite the misleading title, I think such a project would be a great tool for a parallel computing class. Such a machine would be roughly the same cost as a textbook and would be much more rewarding than running MPI on a multicore laptop/desktop.

Was there a typo in your message? Why would you be unable to afford a home that you could immediately put down a 33% down payment in cash for?

Even if one buys the (demonstrably false) claim that all real-world problems are sparse, most sparse techniques (especially sparse-direct, and, to a limited degree, Krylov subspace methods) boil down to dense linear algebra on smaller matrices. When executing dense linear algebra on accelerators, it can be surprising just how carefully one must organize the computation in order to make the best use of the memory hierarchy. When I was writing these types of routines years ago, it was often beneficial to pre-/post-process certain operations, such as A^T B^T = C, by explicitly transposing either the input or output matrix (in my case, to ensure that reads from global memory could be coalesced in one of the inner loops).

With that said, an example of efficiently transposing dense matrices was one of the CUDA examples five years ago...

The bug was apparently fixed on April 17. I was unable to reproduce the problem on my updated Ubuntu 14.04 installation.

What makes satellite communication special? Is it okay to monitor the CEO of every communication company? If so, is it any different for non-US governments to monitor the CEO's of US tech companies?

I stand corrected. Thank you for clarifying.

The second paragraph of the article claims that companies knew about "upstream" collection as well. This is, from my understanding, the main point, as the Google engineer Brandon Downey issued the very harsh statement, and I quote, "fuck these guys", when the infamous smiley-face slide leaked.

EDIT: Apparently the "upstream" collection does not refer to the third capture method in question, which exploited the fact that Google did not (at the time) encrypt its internal communications.

Making contributing code more fun will almost certainly lead to projects receiving more contributions.

According to the Fastmail webpage, they do support (optional) two-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

This makes me wonder how Greenwald, Gellman, and Poitras come to a consensus on what to hold back. Clearly they all have access to the data and it would be possible (read: very likely) for them to disagree on what should and should not be withheld.

Is there any legal protection for users' reading lists in libraries? Because it would be wonderful if someone could set up a legal online library which would extend such protections onto the internet.

Does anyone have a link to the transcript? The echo is really hard to ignore in the video.

I can't edit my original post, but, for what it's worth, I received a very real response from my colleagues.

I think that this leak will have the biggest effect. It bothered me enough that I emailed the entire college of computing at my university (I am a junior faculty member) to argue for setting ethical boundaries for big data projects, but, alas, I doubt that I will get a response.

Imagine how misleading advertisements can be on this platform: since your friends won't be explicitly attaching their names to their posts, you would never know if something was inserted by an advertiser.

Any idea what optimization flags were used? It's rather strange that they're not reported. I would be surprised if GCC 4.8 was that far from optimal with -O3.

Interesting. As an active (but young) researcher in distributed-memory computing, I wouldn't say that the funding has been turned off. I would instead argue that many-core/GPU/MIC and MapReduce approaches took over as the parallel computing topics du jour.

In this speech on the history of Linux from 2001 [1], Linus makes it clear that he views the viral nature of the GPL to be a crucial component of Linux's success. He likens it to allowing evolution to take place. I'm not sure when this viewpoint took hold for him, but it would suggest that he likes the most fundamental part of the license (though he disagrees with much of the politics).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTWCPoUt8w

This unfortunately doesn't support the use case of simply wanting to personally back up the screencasts sent to showterm.io.

I'm in the exact same position. It's quite frustrating.

EDIT: I turned my frustration into a $100 donation to his legal defense. I hope that more people do the same.

The fact that lavabit unexpectedly went down last night (and is still down) without them announcing it beforehand, or saying when it will be back up, is really annoying me right now.

Interesting. That isn't excessively large for distributed-memory Krylov-subspace eigensolvers (e.g., SLEPc). Do you have a good reference for the current algorithms used? And how large is the nullspace typically?

EDIT: I assume this [1] is what you're referring to, which draws from the following algorithms of Coppersmith [2,3].

[1] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0024379593...

[3] http://thales.doa.fmph.uniba.sk/macaj/skola/seminar/Coppersm...

Would you be willing to answer what sort of linear algebra is required in the function field sieve that the talk claims is difficult to parallelize? I write open source parallel linear algebra software [1] and would be happy to contribute.

[1] http://libelemental.org