Poster of the Day...

Randomness via Metastability...

Ordinarily metastability is something digital hardware designers go out of their way to avoid.  Intel has come up with a way to harness metastability for, of all things, generating random numbers.  If you're a digital geek, then you already know that generating high quality (in the cryptographic sense) random numbers is surprisingly difficult.  Intel's system, to my knowledge, hasn't yet been vetted by the cryptographic professionals – but knowing what its basis is, the notion looks pretty solid to me. 

High quality random numbers in every CPU.  Cool...

A Pleasant Fantasy...

Tony Blankley has some lovely ideas about what President Obama could say in his upcoming jobs speech:

He could decide to embrace all the major Republican, Tea Party, free market ideas: marginal business and personal tax rate cuts (leading to a net tax cut); big discretionary spending cuts to be implemented before the 2012 election; genuine long term reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security costs written into law now; major deregulation -- including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Dodd-Frank financial burdens and nanny-state consumer regulations; unlimited oil- and gas-drilling, and shale-fracking authorization; permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts, repeal of the double tax on American corporations' foreign profits, limits on unemployment insurance extensions; and withdrawal of his big union initiatives, such as the National Labor Relations Board's opposition to Boeing Co. building a factory in South Carolina. 

Of course, none of this is likely to happen.  Dang it.

Read the whole thing...

Catch 22...

Courtesy of your government, of course.  The latest: a trucking company can't refuse to hire a driver with a history of alcohol abuse – but if that driver causes an accident, the company is still liable.

At times like this, it surely seems that the socialists in charge of our country's government are trying to destroy us...