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Heat Your House By GPU

Posted by turgid on Saturday February 10 2018, @02:10PM (#2983)
9 Comments
Hardware

GPUs make a lot heat. They also do sums very quickly. You can buy GPUS these days that do well over a trillion floating-point operations per second. Some crazy people like to donate the computing power of their GPUs to distributed science projects. Some like to mine crypto-currencies hopefully to make a profit.

Suppose you could make a very simple computer that basically consisted of a cheap CPU and a few GPUs capable of somewhere between 1 and 10 TFLOPS, and would output heat at a rate of about 1kW, you could use it as a fan heater. Such a device would cost between £0.12 and £0.15 per hour to run at current UK prices.

Could that computing power be worth that much money to someone? Could you heat your house for free?

John Kelly's standing in Trump admin. hurt; Navalny vs Putin

Posted by takyon on Friday February 09 2018, @02:53PM (#2979)
2 Comments
News

The Memo: Knives come out for Kelly

Kelly’s most vehement critics even suggest the episode could herald his demise within the administration.

“We’ll see this as an inflection point when he is fired,” said one source within President Trump’s orbit. The source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, blasted Kelly as “tone deaf and politically inept.”

A second source close to the Republican Party complained, regarding Kelly, that “everybody knows he limits access and information flow to POTUS on a daily basis; this could be the beginning of the end of that — and maybe Kelly as chief.”

Trump's self-imposed shackles are coming undone!

Banned From Election, Putin Foe Navalny Pursues Politics By Other Means

He said he doesn't have any doubts that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election because similar methods have been deployed against members of the Russian opposition: hacked emails, the publication of false personal information and attacks on social media accounts by armies of bots.

"Putin is conducting a creeping expansion into the Internet — extremely effectively and cheaply," Navalny said. "Of course he had fun hacking those servers and meddling, but it didn't have any significant effect on the elections."

Amid all the hostility between the U.S. and Russia, Navalny said the affinity between Putin and President Trump is inexplicable, especially considering that the Kremlin has based even its domestic policy on anti-Americanism. "This makes no sense, and there is no rational explanation for it. But maybe one day there will be a new Watergate and we'll learn a lot about these amazing ties," he said.

Beyond the personal relationship of presidents, Navalny said that the strategic interests of Washington and Moscow are largely aligned, and that instead of squabbling the countries should be pursuing nuclear non-proliferation and fighting terrorists together. A key move to bettering relations would be for Russia to stop its involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine, he said.

"We're a Western country," Navalny said. "Russia — based on its size, population, nuclear weapons and intellectual potential — should strive to be a leading European country."

Russia should aim to join the European Union and work on participating in a joint security system with NATO members like the U.S., Britain and France, he said.

Navalny's only job is to keep doing what he is doing now without getting assassinated, and eventually mount a real attempt at winning the Presidency after Putin retires from politics.

The actual Nazi on the Republican ticket

Posted by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:49PM (#2974)
43 Comments
News

A neo-Nazi Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for a congressional seat in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Sunday.

An Illinois-Nazi too. I hate Illinois Nazis!

Holocaust denier to become Republican nominee for Illinois congressional seat.

Jones’s Nazi costume and celebrations of Hitler’s birthday, his protest against a local Holocaust museum and his presence at neo-Nazi and white supremacist events have long been documented.

Justin Timberlake Not Woke Enough (or at all)

Posted by takyon on Wednesday February 07 2018, @02:28AM (#2973)
9 Comments
/dev/random

What's behind the Justin Timberlake backlash?

Timberlake must be wondering what went wrong. Because, truth be told, there's nothing egregiously bad about either Man of the Woods or his Super Bowl performance. They're just... slightly disappointing.

The backlash feels bigger than a commentary on his music. There's a mockery and a cruelty that feels personal - as though people had a lingering resentment towards the star, and they've suddenly been given licence to express it.

For some, it goes back to his relationship with Britney Spears. After they broke up, he made music and videos that traded on their story and told several interviewers he'd taken her virginity - a personal detail that wasn't his to share.

For others, it's about his failure to support Janet Jackson after exposing her breast to millions of TV viewers at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Timberlake's half-hearted acknowledgement of that moment at this year's show did not go unnoticed.

"He chose to perform the song Rock Your Body, during which the famous wardrobe malfunction took place, and yet he didn't mention Janet: He didn't shout her out, and he stopped the song right before the line during which he ripped off her costume," pop critic Ann Powers told NPR. "It was almost like he was trying to erase what had happened in the past, but that is just not flying in 2018."

"The Super Bowl performance invited people to reflect on the time Justin threw Janet Jackson under a bus, and what that said about race and gender," agrees Peter Robinson, editor of Popjustice.

As The Pop World Seeks Accountability, Justin Timberlake Seems Lost In The Woods

You say "not right for this moment." Explain what you mean by that.

Justin Timberlake's entire career and art is based on his ability to be smooth — his ability to be easy, to create music that seduces us with references to the past, with appropriations, with artful mixes, and never quite shows any struggle. But we are living in a moment of struggle, and we want our pop music to also reflect that struggle. And frankly, Timberlake now embodies that phrase so often spoken today: white male privilege. It's just not a good look for 2018. And it's really, in some ways, not his fault — it's just who he is.

Why Prince fans are bashing Justin Timberlake's Super Bowl halftime performance

In a 1998 interview with Guitar World magazine, Prince was asked directly about the use of digital editing to "create a situation where you could jam with any artist from the past." He was not a fan.

"That's the most demonic thing imaginable," he said. "Everything is as it is, and it should be. If I was meant to jam with Duke Ellington, we would have lived in the same age. That whole virtual reality thing ... it really is demonic. And I am not a demon. Also, what they did with that Beatles song (Free as a Bird), manipulating John Lennon's voice to have him singing from across the grave ... that'll never happen to me. To prevent that kind of thing from happening is another reason why I want artistic control."

Last one could plausibly form the basis of a tech-related submission, although it is a little late.

You have 90210 new messages waiting for you...

Posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:37PM (#2971)
8 Comments
Soylent

It's half past nine and, as enjoyable as schooling you lot is, I've got other things to do today. If I don't have tons and tons of messages when I get the time and inclination to argue some more, I'll try and get everything that warrants it a response. If there are too many though, I'm probably just going to mass delete them and watch some anime instead.

[ Update: You folks really didn't want replies, I take it. ]

Nunes can't handle 4 pages without getting caught lying.

Posted by DeathMonkey on Friday February 02 2018, @07:55PM (#2968)
33 Comments
News

It seems like if you're going to spend the time writing a partisan hack-job memo you'd at least make sure the publicly-verifiable parts are true. Not our boy Nunes! Stupid Watergate continues.

Amid all the excitement over the Devin Nunes #TheMemo, it is important to remember that it is a partisan summary of FISA warrant applications that we the People have not been allowed to see. And in determining whether you trust Nunes’s summary, it might be relevant that it inaccurately summarizes something that is public record: James Comey’s testimony in 2017 regarding whether the allegations in the memo had been verified.

A Significant Inaccuracy In #TheMemo Calls Its Credibility Into Question

UPDATE: A second publicly-verifiable statement of fact has been proven false.

Army Warns of Synthetic Cannabinoid Oil

Posted by takyon on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:34PM (#2967)
11 Comments
News

Army: 2 deaths, 60 hospitalizations blamed on vaping oils

The U.S. Army is warning about the dangers of vaping synthetic cannabinoid oil after about 60 soldiers and Marines in North Carolina and 33 troops in Utah experienced serious medical problems in January. In a Monday public health alert, the U.S. Army Public Health Center said military personnel have suffered headaches, nausea, vomiting, palpitations, dilated pupils, dizziness, agitation and seizures.

All the symptoms are associated with synthetic cannabinoids. Two Marines have died in accidents blamed on synthetic cannabinoid-induced seizures.

"This problem has the potential to spread quickly across the Army," the alert said.

Army regulations ban the use of so-called CBD oil or any products derived from marijuana, so some soldiers are using synthetic replacement oil.

Of course Trump needs to lie about State ofthe Union ratings

Posted by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:57PM (#2966)
10 Comments
News

@realDonaldTrump
Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

Meanwhile, back in reality:

But it was smaller than the 48 million who watched Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress last year and smaller than several speeches delivered by recent predecessors. Barack Obama's joint session speech in 2009 drew 52 million viewers; George W. Bush's State of the Union address in 2003 drew 62 million viewers; and Bill Clinton's joint session speech in 1993 drew 67 million viewers. (A newly elected president's first address to a joint session of Congress is not considered a State of the Union speech.)

Trump says his State of the Union viewership was the highest ever. The ratings say otherwise.

Remember when the President of the United States lying was considered a bad thing?

Smartphone with 10 GB of RAM

Posted by takyon on Wednesday January 31 2018, @04:11AM (#2961)
6 Comments

Navalny

Posted by takyon on Monday January 29 2018, @05:04AM (#2956)
2 Comments