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Almost 45 Million Tons of E-waste Discarded Last Year (apnews.com) 177

A new study claims 44.7 million metric tons (49.3 million tons) of TV sets, refrigerators, cellphones and other electrical good were discarded last year, with only a fifth recycled to recover the valuable raw materials inside. From a report: The U.N.-backed study published Wednesday calculates that the amount of e-waste thrown away in 2016 included a million tons of chargers alone. The U.S. accounted for 6.3 million metric tons, partly due to the fact that the American market for heavy goods is saturated. The original study can be found here (PDF; Google Drive link).
Open Source

New FreeBSD 11.0 Release Candidate Tested By Phoronix (phoronix.com) 61

"The first release candidate for the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 is ready for testing," reports Distrowatch, noting various changes. ("A NULL pointer dereference in IPSEC has been fixed; support for SSH protocol 1 has been removed; OpenSSH DSA keys have been disabled by default...") Now an anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Sunday Phoronix performed some early benchmark testing, comparing FreeBSD 10.3 to FreeBSD 11.0 as well as DragonFlyBSD, Ubuntu, Intel Clear Linux and CentOS Linux 7. They reported mixed results -- some wins and some losses for FreeBSD -- using a clean install with the default package/settings on the x86_64/amd64 version for each operating system.

FreeBSD 11.0 showed the fastest compile times, and "With the SQLite benchmark, the BSDs came out ahead of Linux [and] trailed slightly behind DragonFlyBSD 4.6 with HAMMER. The 11.0-BETA4 performance does appear to regress slightly for SQLite compared to FreeBSD 10.3... With the BLAKE2 crypto test, all four Linux distributions were faster than DragonFlyBSD and FreeBSD... with the Apache web server benchmark, FreeBSD was able to outperform the Linux distributions..."

Open Source

Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org) 273

An anonymous reader writes: Linux turns 25 this year(!!). To mark the event, IEEE Spectrum has a piece on the history of Linux and why it succeeded where others failed. In an accompanying question and answer with Linus Torvalds, Torvalds explains the combination of youthful chutzpah, openness to other's ideas, and a willingness to unwind technical decisions that he thinks were critical to the OS's development: "I credit the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. [...] The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. [...] I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."

Comment Re: "Is this what we wanted?" (Score 1) 260

You can't fully describe the longevity of a piece of music until it stops being played by any significant number of people. The Beatles records from 1965 have lasted fifty years and counting. Someone talking about 40 year old records might have bought Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" in 1975. At some future point, when people have stopped listening to that music in large numbers, only then can we really compare them to something like Mozart.

But if you listening to music whose relevancy has already passed by in a year or three, that's by definition disposable jingle music. And to many people that also makes it garbage. It's rather ridiculous to compare that to any music that's already lasted decades. A century from now, maybe the Beatles will be a forgotten little band, while people still listen to Mozart. But you'd have to be completely deaf to pop culture and popular musical history to claim bands like the Beatles or Floyd are listened to today only because people have happy memories from when they first heard them.

Comment Re:A giant pile of crap (Score 1) 76

No one who looked at the code has ever considered the programmers behind it "gods". The PostgreSQL developers for example have been complaining about it for years, including a major look at alternatives in 2011 because we hated the code's API and its license so much. However, that crappy API serves as a form of lock-in, making it harder to migrate to other libraries than it should be.

Comment Re: Count cards (Score 2) 89

That site doesn't understand what card counting is. When you count cards, it changes how much you bet on a hand you haven't seen yet. You increase your bet (or enter the game altogether) only when the player odds are higher than normal.

Counting "outs", the number of cards in the desk that will improve your hand, is not what's called card counting in casino games.

Comment Re:AI has great chances (Score 1) 89

People getting emotional isn't always an advantage for the computer; it's part of the complexity of playing against them. Some people will rampage where their aggressiveness ramps up after losing a hand due to luck (a bad beat). Some will bet less aggressively because they're stinging from the loss and worried about their stake. You can't just model the human opponent's patterns and expect them to be consistent.

Comment Re:You cannot do that (Score 1) 310

RCG would offer him say 100:1 margin, so he'd make positions as large as $100 million, and if at any point his unrealized P&L grew to close to his $1 million they would call his position and he'd be busted out.

I'd like to live in this wonderful fantasy land where all positions can be closed out at any time with a controlled loss. I'm sure that would work out great even in the most crazy and obviously theoretical example, like maybe a flash crash where prices might even change faster than a complicated position valuation method could track.

The last time I got a margin call was after a gap up in an equities short position, so no opportunity to trade a controlled close at all. But it was fine--my bet shorting SCOX was guaranteed money, only question was how long until the stock went to $0.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 310

And what if it turns out that the financial falsification was a rumor set off by a market manipulator to force the OP to execute his trade at an unfavorable price.

At a big firm, then they'd take that front running profit and put part of the proceeds toward lobbyists, campaign contributions, and the salaries of the former SEC officials who now work for them (after a few years of doing them favors). And then they'd budget for the hookers and blow. Sheesh, do you not know how Wall Street works at all?

Comment Re:wikipedia is self-correcting (Score 1) 186

There's a sampling bias issue if you fairly compare the site to a print encyclopedia. Encyclopedia editors have a job where they write about everything. On average, they'll have little personal connection to the articles they write. That's even part of the job description--the less biased you are, the more your writing will be judged as positive by that industry.

The universe of Wikipedia editors is self-selected. The people going to the trouble of editing.things is strongly correlated with people who have a personal interest in that subject. That's practically the recipe for getting more biased opinions than neutral ones.

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