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Ok since the mods wants to mod up idiots today and mod down call outs of bad information, here:

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

Again: your understanding of the scientific method has not progressed beyond the oversimplified version you learned in the 2nd grade.

No, it is not always reproducible.
Reproduction is simply one possible avenues of peer review, but not the only one.

It's mind-boggling to me that anybody would use the word "Progressive" in any manner other than derogatory, anyway, given what the Progressives stood for 100 years ago.

It's part of conservative's culture war. I think I've heard it called "The War on Language". They redefine terms to that it is hard to even debate what they are saying. According to this article conservative think tanks are behind it. It's sad, because false debate only makes things worse.

"Our AI systems must do what we want them to do."

Then you probably shouldn't have chosen LISP then to indoctrinated AI students then, should you? Note: Stuart's and Norvig's AI book are one of the defacto references, I have read it cover to cover and anybody in CS should read it even if they aren't planning on working in AI.

What if...

Instead of a stupid troll you were actually interested in the answers. Interested enough to either take some classes on the subject, or expend some effort educating yourself.

We live in an age where the vast majority of the world's information is available for little to no cost or effort, yet you actively choose to remain ignorant.

Step 1: Understand what science is. http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/whatisscience_01
Step 2: Take a class or look it up. http://space.about.com/cs/astronomy101/a/astro101a.htm
Step 3: Keep digging

Hi, can you explain what you mean by this, "Government should not be concerned with redistributing wealth (which is almost wholly unrelated to the legitimate social responsibility of caring for the poor and needy)."?

Also, progressivity has decines quite a bit in the US over the last 40 years.
  http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/...

and there are good reasons to want a progressive system https://www.aeaweb.org/article...

Technology is neutral and amoral.

That opening sentence clearly reveals the bias of the author. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical applications. By definition, those are not neutral or amoral because that application is driven by whoever wants to create the practical application. Further, multiple studies have revealed how biased scientific research can be since humans by nature have biases that we often don't even realize we believe until we're confronted with overwhelming evidence. While this book sounds like it's worth reading, please don't fall into the trap of believing technology is somehow inherently neutral. It's a directed process. The beliefs and morals of those doing the directing invariably influence the technology.

Some links to research into bias in science:

• https://explorable.com/research-bias
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16505391
• http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~maccoun/ar_bias.html
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368108001155

3. [...]no moving parts. SSD for boot,

As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.

3. The article says that the supplier supplies power. Whatever cable they use for that can easily have a fibre built in for data.

That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on investment. So they will at most install a separate electric meter at the customer's premises, and then hook up their machine to a regular power outlet. So then this fiber you want to put in the power cable will have nowhere to plug into. And again, given that most houses/apartments don't have fiber yet it, requiring a fiber connection would limit them to just a fraction of the potential market, or would force them to lay their own fiber which again is incredibly expensive (but at least it would not be redundant if they manage to resell it to regular ISPs). But it's more likely they will simply reuse their customer's Internet connection (remember data caps are mostly a US thing). So really what this tells us is that they will limit themselves to workloads which don't require too much communication. The ideal case would be CPU/GPU intensive computations like Folding@Home, SETI, GIMPS, etc.

Again: smack yourself until all the stupid falls out.

Your 2nd grade understanding of the scientific method is the only thing that isn't science. It is however pure idiocy.

Do yourself a favor and read http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art... and its following pages.

The Scientific Method is traditionally presented in the first chapter of science textbooks as a simple recipe for performing scientific investigations. Though many useful points are embodied in this method, it can easily be misinterpreted as linear and "cookbook": pull a problem off the shelf, throw in an observation, mix in a few questions, sprinkle on a hypothesis, put the whole mixture into a 350 experiment — and voila, 50 minutes later you'll be pulling a conclusion out of the oven! That might work if science were like Hamburger Helper®, but science is complex and cannot be reduced to a single, prepackaged recipe.

The linear, stepwise representation of the process of science is simplified, but it does get at least one thing right. It captures the core logic of science: testing ideas with evidence. However, this version of the scientific method is so simplified and rigid that it fails to accurately portray how real science works. It more accurately describes how science is summarized after the fact — in textbooks and journal articles — than how science is actually done.

No, I'm just wondering why you have this bizarre viewpoint.

Evidently, you do not understand the viewpoint or for some deep seeded reason cannot allow it to be understood.

The evidence that the Sun came up yesterday is stronger than that it will come up tomorrow. If there is no evidence that the Sun came up yesterday, science simply doesn't work. A scientist looks at experiments in his or her field - and suddenly realizes he or she has no evidence that they ever happened.

Here is the problem, science cannot be used to rule out a non scientific argument. All it can do it present an argument that does not need to be unscientific. Mixing yellow and blue together to make green is scientific, some supernatural being willing something to be the color green is not. All science can say is that there is a natural reason why it is green, not that no supernatural being was involved. In short, science does not disprove religion or religious claims, it can only show they are not needed. The idea that the world is less than 10,000 years old is likely wrong, but science does nothing to prove it is wrong, only that it appears much older.

There is no evidence for the creation of the Universe. There is evidence that the Universe evolved over time. Therefore, believing in any creation significantly after the big bang is believing against the evidence, and is anti-scientific.

FFS, do you even understand what an unscientific argument is? There are parts of life that have nothing to do with science. That does not make it anti science, it only makes it unscientific. Science is not, I REPEAT- NOT a with us or against us field of study.

Maybe I should just allow some other people to explain this to you. It's such a simple concept yet I am failing in getting you to understand it. This is geared more to children than adults, maybe you should start from the beginning and go through the entire thing. It seems you have missed a few things throughout the years.

It seems a waste of programming effort that this distributed project, like many others, choose to use boinc. I also believe that this kind of image processing would be suitable for GPUs, right? That would be nice since there are note very many worth-while GPU projects on boinc right now.

DARPA Is Developing Implants To Heal Soldiers’ Bodies and Minds link
Verified case in courts of electronic harassment of targeted individual James Walbert with MRIs of implants in the neck and head youtube
NASA Develops System To Computerize Silent, 'Subvocal Speech' sciencedaily
Harold Holt Murder - Gary's CT Scan Images of device in throat (1979) harold-holt.net
Powering micro-implants using high frequency waves extremetech.com
Literal Smart Dust Opens Brain-Computer Pathway to "Spy on Your Brain" activistpost
Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind berkeley.edu
Who is Elisa Lam? (1 hour long) vimeo youtube
http://www.mindjustice.org/200...
Small implants to trigger muscle spasms for remote harassment link
Whats been possible since the 70's link
https://linux.conf.au/wiki/Tin...

The Republicans don't know the first thing about science. Though truthfully that applies to most politicians, the difference being that one side is at least willing to listen to scientists as experts, rather than assert that they have a right to the data so they can personally review and comment on it despite their thorough lack of qualifications.

The GOP chiefly understands the scientific method as a 5 step recipe they learned in 2nd grade, as evidenced by every time they talk about "the scientific method", such as when they try to impugn scientific research they don't like "because it didn't follow the scientific method". The scientific method they learned in 2nd grade is not a recipe that you can just take, add researcher, stir, wait 50 minutes, and out pops Science. It has been vastly oversimplified, and in their inability to go further and realize that that is NOT the end of the knowledge road, their ignorance holds them back from actual understanding.

It's like if they once learned that 2+2=4.
Then down the road someone told them that 1+1+1+1 also =4.
And their response is "uh uh, no way, that's wrong. Only 2+2=4".

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

Further, at-rest encryption means you can't search for shit.

Yep, that's a major issue we have with the encryption technologies we use at the moment. That's where the need for homomorphic encryption and other similar searchable encryption comes from.

Dan Boneh, Giovanni Di Crescenzo, Rafail Ostrovsky, Giuseppe Persiano: Public Key Encryption with Keyword Search. EUROCRYPT 2004: 506-522

Dawn Xiaodong Song, David Wagner, Adrian Perrig: Practical Techniques for Searches on Encrypted Data. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2000: 44-55

Eyal Kushilevitz, Rafail Ostrovsky: Replication is NOT Needed: SINGLE Database, Computationally-Private Information Retrieval. FOCS 1997: 364-373

Devil's advocate here. Life expectancy has steadily increased despite all that bad stuff. Both in the US http://demog.berkeley.edu/~and... and worldwide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

If you want to age gracefully and not take steps to repair age-related problems, then go for it.

I know that life is finite. But all things considered, I prefer to postpone death, and make the interim time as pleasant as possible. That's why I do things like exercise, eat properly, and go to the dentist. And if there is a fix to an age-related illness or problem, then I'm all for it. The hard part is figuring out what is real, and understanding the trade-offs.

Total disclosure: I've worked on Soft Walls.

There was discussion on Slashdot about the Soft Walls Project that did something similar for airplanes. See the 2011, 2004 and 2003 discussions.

I believe that there was a demo involving an airplane at some point. It turns out that one of the interesting things is how to you define a blending function that makes it harder and harder for the device to fly in to the no fly zone.

Yeah, drones are different, and I'm not sure of the value of having no fly zones for drones, but it will probably happen some day.

In this case, a no-fly zone in DC might have prevented drunken late night operation and crashing of the drone and we would have some other news item to discuss.

There is Soft Walls FAQ that covers common objections for airplanes.

Total disclosure: I've worked on Soft Walls.

There was discussion on Slashdot about the Soft Walls Project that did something similar for airplanes. See the 2011, 2004 and 2003 discussions.

I believe that there was a demo involving an airplane at some point. It turns out that one of the interesting things is how to you define a blending function that makes it harder and harder for the device to fly in to the no fly zone.

Yeah, drones are different, and I'm not sure of the value of having no fly zones for drones, but it will probably happen some day.

In this case, a no-fly zone in DC might have prevented drunken late night operation and crashing of the drone and we would have some other news item to discuss.

There is Soft Walls FAQ that covers common objections for airplanes.

You can enable click-to-play in firefox and chrome.

You can enable click-to-play in firefox and chrome.

But let's keep this in perspective, shall we? Let's even use that 75-year number, even though we know it's fairly arbitrary, I think it will be representative: http://demog.berkeley.edu/~and...

US life expectancy 1940, male: 60.8 years.* US life expectancy, 2014, male, 76 years. That's 25% more life. *if we go back to 1900 it would be an even more startling comparison - life expectancy for males was 46 years.

So clearly, being sedentary isn't healthy. If you can avoid it, great. But our sedentary lives (looking at them cumulatively) have ALSO given us a net "win" for the individual by 25% more life span. That's pretty great.

Those increases in life expectancy were largely due to decreases in infant and child mortality. We have also replaced short, high-intensity wars that killed young men by the tens or hundreds of thousands with a permanent war that takes fewer than a thousand U.S. lives per year. The increases for people who made it past young adulthood are less impressive.

But let's keep this in perspective, shall we?
Let's even use that 75-year number, even though we know it's fairly arbitrary, I think it will be representative:
http://demog.berkeley.edu/~and...

US life expectancy 1940, male: 60.8 years.*
US life expectancy, 2014, male, 76 years.
That's 25% more life.
*if we go back to 1900 it would be an even more startling comparison - life expectancy for males was 46 years.

So clearly, being sedentary isn't healthy. If you can avoid it, great.
But our sedentary lives (looking at them cumulatively) have ALSO given us a net "win" for the individual by 25% more life span. That's pretty great.

But still, it might be ok if the covered courses are useful

And thus begins the road to ruin. No, it is not Ok to force people at gun-point (which is how taxes are collected) to pay for other people's anything. It worked so well for the public schools, which now cost 4 times more per pupil, than in 1960-ies, we are dizzy with success, aren't we — even if 2/3rd of the nation's 8th graders can't be said to read "proficiently".

not just "community organizer" type courses

And that's the other evil of it — not only will taxpayers be forced to pay for it, the actual courses will be decided by our benevolent and omniscient rulers. Do you suppose, it will be possible to avoid taking "Womyn's Studies" or "Climate Change Mitigation"?

The top of my list is timing analysis of entered commands. You SSH into someplace and later type a password or something worth knowing. Timing between keystrokes can be used to recover information about what you are doing.

It can be done with microphones..
http://berkeley.edu/news/media...

It can be done with clocks..
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~dawn...

And a nice pdf paper illustrating this technique and its merits

Sure, anyone can get cancer no matter how healthily they live. But modern medicine is so absurdly and willfully blind to the role of nutrition that these conclusions can be largely dismissed by anyone who thinks for themselves.

Oh, hey, trace arsenic cuts breast cancer by FIFTY PERCENT.

What's that? Lithium in drinking water is also associated with a host of benefits? Say it ain't so..

Gee, getting some sunshine / vitamin D can lower risk of pancreatic cancer??

I could go on and on but what would be the point.. supplementation and the like is at best psuedo-science in the eyes of western medicine.. it's much more profitable to engage in "sick care" than to actually equip our bodies with the things it needs at some single percent of the cost.

It's not even logical to expect to prove God with science

It's not even logical for science to prove anything. Science either accepts or rejects ideas and theories based on evidence, and is always open to revise the previous acceptance or also rejects based on new evidence or new ways of looking at things.

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/tea...

Why the push to have touchscreens in the car in the first place? Use of a touchscreen demands that the driver take their eyes off the road, focus on the touchscreen, touch it in the right spot, and then they can return their attention to the road (hopefully without seeing a gaggle of kids, puppies, nuns, or whatever bouncing off the hood of their car).

Why don't we just put all of the car controls in an app on a smartphone and be done with it, making sure that the driver never focuses on the road?

Tactile buttons and knobs are much safer. You can feel for them, identify them by touch, and manipulate them without taking your attention off the road. Good control designs are unambiguous and easy to find and manipulate.

A machine can easily be given free will. Most advanced artificial intelligence actually has free will. Take the Overmind project. The AI can move its Mutalisks any way it wants; it chooses to move them in the most effective way it has learned to do so, because it is designed to want to be effective. Sure, it's never going to deliberately lose the game like a human might. But that's just a matter of its motivations. The Overmind lives in the game world, deriving pleasure solely from defeating its enemies and deriving pain solely from taking casualties. It has never learned any concept of dignity, nor does it derive any pleasure from arranging its buildings artistically. Does that mean it doesn't have free will? Not any more than my own complex network of desires (stimulation, expression, victory) and pains (hunger, thirst, pain, regret, loss, embarrassment) mean that I don't have free will. My choices in service of these abstract and not fully understood motivations are more complex than the Overmind's choices on how to use its Mutalisks most effectively, but that doesn't mean I have free will and the Overmind does not. Maybe we just don't want the Overmind to have free will because it doesn't look like human free will.

Here's a nice page on the two photon effect, which explains how the resolution was achieved. Two-photon imaging has been used for some time in the life sciences to achieve super-thin optical sectioning.

I worked in a computing department in a college that had a lecturer from a particular university co-located, sitting close to my desk. I was interested in plagiarism management, and was using the Moss system from Berkeley together with code I had written to manage plagiarism in an unofficial way in my programming classes.

Official paths were blocked at my college by a rule requiring expulsion and exclusion for a minimum of two years, so plagiarism "did not happen" there due to this "death penalty", so I was on my own.

The lecturer from that university told me about efforts to clamp down on plagiarism exceeding two-thirds of first year computer science students at his university. The head of the school at his university announced the initiative to punish those that were identified as guilty. The students demanded each have a proper hearing, and students from the law faculty offered to help in the representation of these hundreds of students. In the hearings, students were demanding compensation from the university for loss of their intellectual property due to the "obvious lack of security" of the assignment submission system. There were other, more complex and more imaginative defences. There were few lecturers and staff to represent the school, and unending numbers of students, each requiring a minimum of a 45 minute hearing, with appeals and other procedures demanded in addition. The lecturer told me that the head of school backed down, admitting defeat.

Let's hope Duke has a more positive outcome.

Yes. Fungal spores are most common because they are made of similar durable stuff like the walls of pollen and spores from plants, but sometimes you also find filaments and other structures when preservation conditions are right. There are even some mushrooms known from amber. There's also the totally bizarre Prototaxites , which is a metres-tall structure from the Silurian and Devonian that is suspected to be a large fungus and/or a lichen (a symbiotic organism with fungi and algae).

A genuinely interesting paper would have specific ideas for architecture capable of solving problems beyond the scope of current CPUs and GPUs.

A couple cool projects I've seen on making good use of dark silicon are GreenDroid and Chlorophyll, both of which are recent research projects on compiling for weird architectures that are specially designed to be energy efficient. If it's specialized for different applications that you want, then Anton is the closest I've seen; it's specialized for running physical simulations so it can do things like protein folding.

I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"

See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.

Copyright expansion is continually being pushed, most lately for fashion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/...
http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/...
"Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."

Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.

Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...

Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."

As it turns out, in all 50 states, whether or not you voted is a matter of public record among other things besides.

In California for example, all of your voter registration information is transmitted to anyone, anyone who asks.

:I didn't see anything in the article saying the woman could actually see again. The article noted she was " fine"

She can't. This was a test of the stem cell transplant, and didn't hook the new cells up to anything that would provide vision.

There's a gene therapy technique which would have worked, but she didn't get that:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu...

Ultimately what counts is economic output.

Is it? If the economy were to grow by 5%, but all of that extra money then went to a tiny slice of the population (less that 0.1%), does that growth really matter?

If the vast majority of a society gets poorer, while a tiny, tiny slice of the population gets vastly richer, has that society improved?

Indeed. Figure 1 in this article says it all. The 1947-1979 era saw relatively uniform growth in incomes across the whole range. Since 1979, the distribution is very heavily biased towards the top 0.5%, and by some estimates the share going to the bottom 90% hardly changed at all. Figure 2 in the same article indicates the successful rent-seeking of CEOs. Actually, the whole article argues that the increase in income share for the top 1% has resulted from rent-seeking rather than from well-functioning markets rewarding competitive behavior.

Or, if you want a different reference, try this one. So 95% of income gains since 2009 went to the top 1%. That leaves just 5% of income gains to be shared among the other 99%. Oh, and accoding to this article, almost half of that went to the top 10%, so only about 2½% of income gains would be left for the bottom 90%.

Why? Because we don't need training wheels any more.

Continuing the web analogy, back in the 1990s, we needed blue or purple permanently underlined text to indicate a link. Now we are more sophisticated and don't need to have it spelled out in the same way on every page. As a result designers have more scope for making pages look attractive. On occasions when you find a page that hasn't been updated since the 1990s, it's horrendously ugly.

On native UIs, it used to be the case that every toolbar icon had it's own box, to show that it was clickable button. But that was abandoned more than a decade ago, with no loss. No one wants that anymore. Here's reminders of button toolbars:
http://toastytech.com/guis/win...
http://lscr.berkeley.edu/advic...

You see it's been a long time since every clickable thing in a UI needed to be dressed up as a button. Yosemite is just another step towards a less fussy UI that accentuates the content rather than unnecessary chrome.

As to the save icon, I have't see a floppy disk icon for years. Not because it's been replaced by a different icon, but because on a modern OS it shouldn't be necessary for the user to initiate saving their data, other than the first time to give it a name. Closing a window autosaves, prompting for a filename if it doesn't already have one. And autosaves happen periodically inbetween times.

If you think UIs should stop, where do you think? Some people (particulary Linux fans) think they should have stopped at CLIs. Do you think they should have stopped at Mac OS 9? Windows 95? What makes you think that the UI as of 6 months ago was the perfect place to stop?

The reality is most people are a bit reactionary. They don't like change when it happens. But once they get used to the change, they look back at the old thing they wanted to keep, and realise it was worse.

At some point, I predict that someone high enough in the food chain is going to realize that the emperor has no clothes, and people actually like shine, gloss, transparency, gradients, and color schemes other than white on white (Apple) or kindergarten construction paper (Microsoft), and we'll see a return to those types of design elements.

Actually Yosemite introduces some transparency that wasn't there before. That is a mistake, and I predict that will disappear, along with all the other cheap embellishments you list. Part of the reason they were there is that gradients and shadows can pimp up relatively low resolution displays. The eye doesn't pick out jaggies so much if you blend colors. With new retina displays, beautiful design can come with accurate hard edges, both in typography and in graphical elements.

You seem to think it's just a matter of fashion. For sure there's some fashion in there, but there are other more real motivations that guide where that fashion goes. And there's no reason for it to go back to novelty lickable items and pseudo 3D.

-1, Troll is not your personal Disagree button.

Citation

Key findings are: (1) HSGPA is consistently the strongest predictor of four-year college outcomes for all academic disciplines, campuses and freshman cohorts in the UC sample;

As the Economist notes, due to German and other European solar government incentives, European utilities face an existential threat to their investment future and business model. Utility giants the world over have seen this and decided to fight back against Net Metering and other means whereby homeowners can feed back into the electric grid excess energy production from rooftop solar. Barclays, the British multinational banking giant, agrees that rooftop solar and net metering represent a threat to centralized electric production utilities.

The problem utilities face is that solar tends to maximize output at mid-afternoon, exactly the same time spot prices have traditionally been at maximum. So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.

OK, time for me to get on a soapbox. I think this is shortsighted. The real problem here is that government and electric utilities have agreed on a price structure and investment plan to build out gas powered and coal powered plants that now appear to be unsustainable due to disruptive shifts in the market from technical innovation in the renewable field. As is noted in TFA, solar is - or will soon be - already cost competitive even without government subsidy.

Market fundamentalists would argue, 'let the utilities die. Their investors bought into a dying technology, the market will decide their fate.' Except that they have an endless stream of money to buy lobbyists and legislators to warp law in their favor. Further, they have a good argument that intermittent renewables will only meet partial demand. You still need baseline generation capacity from central utilities. So the problem - from their perspective - is excess production by renewables.

Except: when has excess energy production ever been a problem?

The real problem is twofold: We want to move off of fossil fuels due to global climate change and they want to maximize their vast infrastructure investments. A real policy solution would meet both needs.

Rooftop solar should be maximized. During periods of excess, gas powered plants should funnel their energy to local raw materials ore processing facilities and manufacturing. This has the benefit of distributing labor where it's needed near mining sites, rather than shipping raw materials where labor is cheapest for exploitation as well. And it keeps utilities running for the next thirty years to generate a viable expected ROI. And government policymakers could then plan a rational transition period away from fossil fuels without the economic dislocation of utility giants imploding worldwide.

Thoughts?

The word "utopia" comes from the Greek "eu" + "topos", i.e. "good place". The English spelling "utopia" is supposed to preserve the pun of confusing eutopia with "ou" + "topos", "no place".

I don't know about modern Greek pronunciations, but in Attic Greek, "eu" wouldn't have been pronounced as 'oy', as in the enlish word 'joy'. At least not as far as I've ever heard. It would have been more like the "eu" in the english word "feud". My recollection is that the pun is used in Platonic dialogues, though I wouldn't be able to remember where it appears.

I think the term you are looking for is 'civil law', not 'letter of the law'. US legal system at the federal level is heavily influenced by common law, as it is in most states. States which cover areas originally colonized by France or Spain have a tradition of civil law.

https://www.law.berkeley.edu/l...
http://www.economist.com/blogs...

The history of common law in the US is why you'll hear in trial coverage or in shows like law & order, lawyers will use precedents when raising their objections or filing motions. This is usually called 'case law', as it is law which hasn't been written by the legislature, but which has come into common practice as a result of a judge interpreting a written law and setting a precedent. If subsequent judges agree to that ruling, eventually it because sort the way things are, until the Supreme Court weighs in, or the legislature spells it out (in a statute).

The link between salt and blood pressure is pretty clearly not the one your Dr. tells you, and this has been known for a really long time. Even the first study to show the "link" turns out to be bunk science:

http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~...

More recent meta studies have shown that about as many papers find a positive link as a negative link between blood pressure and salt - yes, eating more salt can lower your blood pressure (or, more likely, it's all just noise). Look it up on Pubmed if you want to read all the details. It's a good skill: you'll quickly learn more than your Dr. does about any topic of real concern to you, unless your Dr. is a specialist or obscenely good at his job.

What's sad is that simple to understand explanations that lead to simple to follow prescriptions (ie eat less salt) tend to stick around way longer than the scientific consensus behind them.

A search of www.merriam-webster.com returns: the word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. So you are correct, this is not an official English word.

But its de facto use is seen at:
http://gapp.usc.edu/graduate-p...
http://aws.amazon.com/training...
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~al...

Lookif selfie can be a word, why can’t we let architecting in?

They don't seem to be related.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/p...

So many poor assumptions there. The average life expectancy was a lot less 100 years ago: http://demog.berkeley.edu/~and... Consequently, people got married earlier because they died sooner; this goes back through the beginning of recorded history, and it was really only in post-WWI 20th century that marrying while a teenager became not just not the norm, but socially frowned upon. Also, look at the drops in life expectancy in 1918 and 1943; what you are seeing it the effects of both world wars and the spanish influenza epidemic in 1918. So life wasn't just short, it was unpredictably precarious in a very real, life-limiting way.

While there are definitely observable fetish aspects to the celebration of youth in our current culture, we no longer marry immediately post-pubescent because, for the very most part, we no longer need to as a practical necessity to be able to have family or an otherwise "full life".

You assumptions on economics are so bad they border on ridiculous. Up until the 1920s, 30 percent or more of the US population were farmers: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/t... And yes, as the percentage of workers in agriculture declined, those in manufacturing rose; however, the real economic differentiator remains education, and that trend has only been slowly improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

http://www.esm.psu.edu/about/w...

http://www.engineering.pitt.ed...

http://engineering.berkeley.ed...

Seems like a few known colleges would disagree with your assumption.

These are infrared array cameras mounted of space telescopes. How high tech do you want? http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/

If you watch the video at the bottom of the article, you'll see photos of several prototype FarmBots that do, in fact, exist.

Those are just tabletop gardening robots. That was done 20 years ago.

There's lots of real robotic agricultural machinery, much of it mobile. Building a gantry over a tabletop doesn't scale.

Here's a link to the actual article, rather than the useless link provided:

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/08/14/average-image-for-big-visual-data/

The video was pretty interesting!

This is a real pity for the TM community. This is not the first chip with transactional memory support in hardware: The Sun Rock was announced to have hardware TM support, and the IBM Blue Gene/Q Compute chip also supports it. Unlike other proposals for unbounded transactional memory, all these systems employ Hybrid Transactional Memory (ref, ref, ref), in which restricted hardware transactions are designed to correctly coexist with unbounded software transactions, so a software transaction can be started in case a hardware transaction fails for some unavoidable issue (such as lack of cache size or associativity to hold speculative data from the transaction, not because of a conflict). Note that, in any case, very large transactions should arguably be very uncommon, since they would significantly reduce performance (similar to very large critical sections protected by locks).

The problem with the hardware implementation of transactional memory is that they are not simply a new set of instructions which are independent from the rest of the processor. HTM implies multiple aspects, including multiversioning caching for speculative data; allowing for the commit of speculative (transactional) instructions, which could be later rolled back (note that in any other speculative operation such as instructions after branch prediction, the speculation is always resolved before instruction commits because the branch commits earlier); a tight integration with the coherence protocol (see LogTM-SE for an alternative to this very last issue, but still...); a mechanism to support atomic commits in presence of coherence invalidations... From the point of view of processor verification, this is a complete nightmare because these new "extensions" basically impact the complete processor pipeline and coherence protocol, and verifying that every single instruction and data structure behaves as expected in isolation does not guarantee that they will operate correctly in presence of multiple transactions (and non-transactional conflicting code) in multiple cores. There are some formal studies such as this or this, and the IBM people discuss the verification of their Blue Gene TM system in this paper (paywalled).

As some others commented before, the nature of the "bug" has not been disclosed. However, since it seems to be easy to reproduce systematically, I would expect it to be related to incorrect speculative data handling in a single transaction (or something similar), rather than races between multiple transactions.

Regarding the alternatives, Intel cannot simply remove these instructions opcodes because previous code would fail. I assume that the patch will make all hardware transactions fail on startup, with an specific error (EAX bit 1 indicates if the transaction can succeed on a retry; setting this flag to 0 should trigger a software transaction). In such case, execution continues at the fallback routine indicated in the XBEGIN instruction, which should begin a software transaction. Effectively, this will be similar to a software TM (STM) with additional overheads (starting the hardware transaction and aborting it; detecting conflicts with nonexistent hardware transactions) that would make it slower than a pure STM implementation.

If the richest 20% had all their annual incomes confiscated (100% tax rate at all levels) it would fund the government by itself for a year and a half. In other words, the rich are not the potential piggy banks Hollywood makes them out to be. If you want to fund just our existing government programs (not counting the welfare pipe dreams, etc) the non-rich are going to have to pay dearly.

Top 1% incomes grew by 31.4% while bottom 99% incomes grew only by 0.4% from 2009 to 2012. http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/...