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No. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf has more info. DPR got extremely sloppy with keeping his identities separate. The Tor part worked fine.

Giving a kid a powerful toy and then telling them not to play with it is the height of absurdity.

This reminds me of TI-83s in middle/high school. You weren't supposed to install games onto them, and teachers would often threaten to wipe them if they found stuff installed (tbf, the concern was probably mainly cheating tools), but everyone had Tetris and Galaxian and Dying Eyes and Hegemony.

I think the better question is why is AT&T holding call records for 26 years.

I don't know what they do with them; but, whatever it is, they developed a custom programming language to make it easier and more efficient.

"Hancock is a C-based domain-specific language designed to make it easy to read, write, and maintain programs that manipulate large amounts of relatively uniform data. Because Hancock is embedded in C, it inherits all the functionality of C. Valid C programs are also valid Hancock programs, and Hancock programs can use libraries written for C. But Hancock is more than C. In addition to C constructs, Hancock provides domain-specific forms to facilitate large-scale data processing."

What will happen if all fuel that is now in reactors will be washed out to the ocean and spread worldwide by currents?

That's a really good question! I'd like to know the answer myself. Let's try a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation.

According to this, the risky fuel pond 4 has 1.4e18 Bq of mostly Cesium 137 which decays by beta and gamma radiation, releasing 1.176MeV per decay, giving 264 kW total. If dissipated uniformly in the ocean, this would result in 264 kW/1.3e18kg = 2.0e-13 W/kg = 2.0e-13 Gray/s. Since it is beta and gamma radiation and uniformly permeating, we can translate this directly into 2.0e-13 Sv/s = 6.4 uSv/year. This can be compared to the natural background radiation, which is about 2.4 mSv/year.

However, Cesium may be subject to bioaccumulation. If we assume perfect bioaccumulation, then all the cesium at the bottom of the food chain will end up at the top (i.e. humans). This is a huge exaggeration (think many orders of magnitude), but let's see what we get. The total ocean biomass is about 2.24e14 kg, while the total human biomass is about 3.5e11 kg. So after all the ocean biomass has passed through humans, and if all the Cesium is retained (whch it won't be), then we would have magnification of 640, bringing us to 4.1 mSv/year, which is almost double the natural background radiation. So that might give measurable effects, but is still not dangerous.

So unless I have made any huge errors, it seems like Fukushima will not be able to threaten humanity. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be a local problem, though.

Yet another easy explanation for "this is why you're poor." Remember the studies that conflate household income and test scores? Or the ones that found that the more you read to your kids the more vocabulary they'll have and the smarter they'll be? The list of things that the poor cannot provide for their children is long and getting longer, and that has a permanent influence on their future lives.

This article is just more evidence of the same. The poor do not get (and cannot afford) sound financial advice. But what good would it do them? They have effectively "lost at capitalism" already by working for someone else.

Exede user here. Here's my typical experience with my satellite connection:

• Minimum latency: 700 ms
• Download speed: Paying for 12 Mbps. Real speed: around 20 Mbps. Yes, actually faster than advertised. However, due to the built-in latency, websites feel a little slower to load.
• Upload speed: Paying for 3 Mbps. Real speed: Usually 1 Mbps. They obviously put low priority on uploads.
• Data cap: 15 GB/month. However, data is unmetered between 12 AM and 5 AM.
• Internet access Essentially unfiltered. Bittorrent is throttled. However, enabling protocol encryption bypasses the throttling.

My main issue with Exede is that it's DNS is flaky and sometimes requires me to cycle my network connection to fix. Even worse, it uses a proxy to hijack all port 53 DNS requests, so you can't choose an alternate server with the standard port. Netalyzr's log info on this:

UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) appears to pass through a firewall or proxy. The client was unable to transmit a non-DNS traffic on this UDP port, but was able to transmit a legitimate DNS request, suggesting that a proxy, NAT, or firewall intercepted and blocked the deliberately invalid request. A DNS proxy or firewall caused the client's direct DNS request to arrive from another IP address. Instead of your IP address, the request came from [Redacted]. A DNS proxy or firewall generated a new request rather than passing the client's request unmodified.

But other than that, it's still a *vast* improvement over the dial up I had for 15 years.

So much ignorance, and so little interest in remedying it. You're 100% wrong, Wonderdunce. Here...educate yourself:

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Religion, by the way, is a system of delusions, no matter what kind of silly word games you try to play. If you can bring me hard, physical proof that some kind of supreme deity exists, I'll consider it. Until you do that...quit inflicting nonsense on rational people.

The radiation from the corium pockets underground is bad, but it's nothing compared to the mess is still waiting to make a disaster bigger (85 times bigger!) then Chernobyl..

In other words, it's yet another research paper where they claim to have dealt with an problem without actually having done so. For example, high precision results which are compared and fitted to an extremely poorly understood past.

The results are not fitted; the observation that the enzyme performs better under an acidic environment was spontaneous and unguided.

While I agree that this is an attempt to deal with my final concern below (about the biases that evolution puts into place) this is also a great way to introduce researcher biases into the final results. Recall that "time steps" are degree of change of the protein and have at best a vague positive correlation with the passage of time. So what "time steps" are important and how to group that high precision data? These are subjective choices that can influence the outcome.

The time steps are actually the most recent common ancestors of various clades, and are not arbitrary at all. There is nothing subjective involved in this part of the process, and no dates for these are claimed explicitly in the paper; only the roots of trees. The only claim to a specific date being made is that the last universal common ancestor lived about four billion years ago, which is an extrapolation based on a wide range of evolutionary and fossil-record evidence, not just the molecular clock.

For example, maybe they're actually reconstructing a much later period where universal selection pressure shifted all organisms a certain way. And there's the possibility that there were considerably more protein changes per unit time in the past (which had a more radioactive environment than today, both in background decay radiation on Earth and likely a higher cosmic ray background as well).

Fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field are so frequent and minor that they're already averaged out across the molecular clock, which greatly diminishes the potential for changes in cosmic ray impact. Geologically, it is evident that the magnetic field is at least 3.54 billion years old, which limits the potential range in which anything so dramatic could happen. It is perhaps possible that isotopic decay has had a significant impact on the global rate of evolution, and that DNA repair mechanisms took time to evolve, but an underestimate is more likely due to saturation of mutations. I'm not a complete expert on the molecular clock, and it's possible that the 4 Gya figure is a little controversial, but since we have evidence for 3.8 billion-year-old archaean fossils, which would have to be after the LUCA split by most theories, it's not an unreasonable figure.

The procedures you describe wouldn't have gotten around the inherent biases of evolution. In language where the technique started, there isn't an inherent survival value to how you pronounce "father". Tribes who pronounced words in a certain way weren't more likely to die off. I don't think such evolutionary biases would show up in this method because organisms exhibiting those weaker protein patterns would have billions of years to go extinct and hence wouldn't be around to be measured today. And no matter how detailed a reconstruction you do, you aren't going to reconstruct extinct branches from existing organisms.

There definitely are evolutionary pressures in tribal pronunciation choice, although they're not very common: on one extreme, you have the shibboleth, where intertribal pressure forces conservation of pronunciation, and on the other, a language can only tolerate so many homophones.

Extinct branches are of no interest to this reconstruction. They're trying to find the ancestor of the current surviving crop, not rediscover what all life was like at the time. A more serious concern is that some convergent mutation occurred in all descendants where

The description is confusing, but the picture is clear - it's a split-transformer system. It's not clear whether it's a continuous one for vehicles in motion or one that just recharges a bus at bus stops. Berkeley, California had one of those in the 1980s, built as a CALTRANS R&D project. That system had energy transfer efficiency of about 65%. They tried 400Hz (which induced annoying hum in metal objects) and 8500Hz (which didn't.) "Pedestrians who walk across the powered roadway inductor are exposed to 10,000 milligauss (10 gauss) at a height of 1 ft and about 1,000 milligauss (1 gauss) at a height of 4 ft above the center of the inductor's conductor slot."

ACGIH TLVs 2008 safety guidelines: "From 300 Hz to 30 kHz the ceiling whole or partial body exposure should not exceed 0.2 mT" (2 gauss). So the CALTRANS system did not meet current safety standards. Does anyone have the numbers for the Korean system?

> Today we know that the main nutritional problem is excess fructose

...

As for nutrition causing heart disease, wait a few years. I'm afraid the cause will be "discovered" to be something else.

To my knowledge, this is the only experiment that has shown direct observation: Differentiation of multipotent vascular stem cells contributes to vascular diseases. I haven't followed the research lately, so this may have been debunked in the last year.

That said, every other article I have read on the subject seems like purely correlational bullshit.

Globally, of course. Those first world countries aren't isolated from the rest of the world.

Here again you are biased toward competition. Competition is enforced by globalization. Globalization is a political choice, not a law of nature. If People want to have cooperation (e.g.: social welfare), they need some boundaries in which competition leaves room for cooperation.

How about since 1300? That long enough for you?

GDP grows faster than population, that is excellent news. But how does it tells us about how many people are employed? This was your point, IIRC

If one looks at it globally, you see a global increase in wages.

Wait, wait, wait. Growing GDP per capita does not means growing wages. You have to find another study that tells us the money does go in worker's pockets. And here I am skeptical.

Point 2 is more difficult to sort, as we have first to tell if we talk globally or in first world countries.

Globally, of course. Those first world countries aren't isolated from the rest of the world.

And do we talk about the last years or the last decades?

How about since 1300? That long enough for you?

On point 3 I am sure it is wrong because you look as absolute value of wages without taking inflation into account: if we consider the percentage of GDP that goes to workers in first world countries, it has only lowered in the last decades.

That's because once again, first world labor is competing unsuccessfully with developing world labor. If one looks at it globally, you see a global increase in wages.

It's foolish to extrapolate from the developed world and its self-inflicted labor inefficiencies and obstacles to some productivity oversupply crisis. We wouldn't make similar claims for some failing business (say for example, General Motors) that is steadily losing market share to more nimble competitors. We would just say that the business is failing to compete.

I have no numbers for third world countries, but I doubt the situation is better.

You would be wrong here. For example, Hans Rosling has given a number of talks on this issue. His relevant observation is that every country, whether poor or rich now, has followed the same trajectory of increasing wealth per capita over time with the same general features (such as declining female fertility as the population gets wealthier).

Right, school produces educated people.

RIght. And one sees that the students are doing most of the work.

Not necessarily. A lot of these smaller research teams would have to pay big bucks to get on a decent grid (within a reasonable research timeframe). BOINC affords them that with very little cost.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VolunteerComputing

Why is volunteer computing important?

It's important for several reasons:

• Because of the huge number (> 1 billion) of PCs in the world, volunteer computing can supply more computing power to science than does any other type of computing. This computing power enables scientific research that could not be done otherwise. This advantage will increase over time, because the laws of economics dictate that consumer products such as PCs and game consoles will advance faster than more specialized products, and that there will be more of them.
• Volunteer computing power can't be bought; it must be earned. A research project that has limited funding but large public appeal can get huge computing power. In contrast, traditional supercomputers are extremely expensive, and are available only for applications that can afford them (for example, nuclear weapon design and espionage).
• Volunteer computing encourages public interest in science, and provides the public with voice in determining the directions of scientific research.

I always thought those looked more like diatoms, though I guess that doesn't sell as well.

And "God did it" is still a reasonable (if unlikely) reason for the Big Bang happening in the first place.

Apples and oranges. Who (or what) is responsible isn't the same thing as "via what mechanism".

The absolutely best they can claim is that the devil

Most creationists don't believe that the devil was responsible for creation.

or maybe God himself, to "test" us -- ie: make sure we don't try to use the big old brains He gave us

Perhaps God did it to give us all something to do with our "big old brains" while we're here on this planet? Most people who "do science" seem to enjoy it. Figuring out how something was done is still interesting, even if you leave out the question of who did it. Why does it matter if "God did it" or "it happened from a random chance accident of random molecules" when one is studying how DNA works?

accuracy within 1% is a reasonable accuracy in many cases

Claims of accuracy require a known correct value. It is precision that deals with repeatability and consistency between numbers of unknown accuracy.

If you seek across the world wild web, you'll find places that give the age of the universe ranging from 16+-5, 12.0+-1.5, 13.7+-0.2, and 9-11 GYears. Over the last few hundred years of that process, scientists have told us that the Earth is 2 GY, between 20 and 400 MY, 22MY, 200 MY, 56 MY, 50-150 MY. Radiometric dating has given answers from 1.3 GY to 3.8 GY. And now, with dedicated certainty, 4.54 GY, ref here.

I don't see anyone having their "big old brains" limited by anything, in fact, lots of "big old brains" have been having a lot of fun working on this. And there is nothing inherent in the statement "God did it" that stops people from being scientists and seeking knowledge.

They really need to do more research. Listening to key boards to detect what's written was shown possible 8 years ago...

Ralf

A while back someone did some research and published it on keystroke logging via audio capture. They found they were able to reliably determine what someone was typing just from the sound of their typing. I have to imagine that would work here.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/14_key.shtml

Though, maybe they also run white noise generators in the office?

Threads are evil
When I first saw the link to this paper on SQLLite's FAQ, I though "what a silly statement, threads aren't inherently evil...people just don't know how to code them properly".

Then I read the paper.

I'm getting more and more convinced that languages need a new construct for writing parallel code. Threads are inherently non-deterministic, which is really the antithesis of computer programming.

I wonder if there is any opportunity for public participation?

seti@home
folding@home
GIMPS

cern@home ????

As this sort of thing is my day job, I find this sort of thing really cool, and I'd be happy to help if I can. I'd recommend looking into snpEff, it's pretty straightforward to use, and is available on SourceForge. (Feel free to track me down and message me, I think we overlapped at Cal.)

Actually, I'm quite skeptical of constitutional literalism. I prefer Souter's view.

My own interpretation of Madison is that the the constitution invites conflict as a means of thwarting would be tyrants. If the constitution gave clear answers to every political dispute, it could be gamed.

Here's the Lawrence Tribe's syllabus for his constitutional law course I don't think it promises the clear cut, fundamentalist political values that a lot of people seem to seek out. But would be lawyers might find it to be of practical use.

Teller could beat that anyday and he was conducting experiments with radioactive materials and nuclear devices in Project Chariot.

Let's also not forget he suggested using nukes do close off the Straits of Gibraltar to make the Mediterranean Sea rise, freshen and then irrigate the Sahara.

He did of course acknowledge that this would mean losing Venice and other sea-level cities along the Mediterranean.

Let's also not forget that it was his assertions on Lasers and orbiting Nukes that got Reagan thinking about Star Wars...

It was Teller’s misleading views on the potential of the X-ray laser that first roused Reagan’s passionate interest in Star Wars. The idea was straightforward enough. Put into orbit nuclear weapons – which would require opting out of the Outer Space Treaty. Faced with an attack, the United States would set off the nukes to generate multiple beams of radiation to demolish incoming missiles. Teller claimed that a single, desk-sized laser could strike as many as 100,000 targets all at once, something others scientists said grotesquely overstated the case.

When this professor gets his own Nationally funded lab, personnel, materials and access to the White House and Congress, then we start worrying.

Check the original news at http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/. The businessweek article and this summary are misleading.

From http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/ While Roman concrete is durable, Monteiro said it is unlikely to replace modern concrete because it is not ideal for construction where faster hardening is needed. But the researchers are now finding ways to apply their discoveries about Roman concrete to the development of more earth-friendly and durable modern concrete. They are investigating whether volcanic ash would be a good, large-volume substitute in countries without easy access to fly ash, an industrial waste product from the burning of coal that is commonly used to produce modern, green concrete. “There is not enough fly ash in this world to replace half of the Portland cement being used,” said Monteiro. “Many countries don’t have fly ash, so the idea is to find alternative, local materials that will work, including the kind of volcanic ash that Romans used. Using these alternatives could replace 40 percent of the world’s demand for Portland cement.”

It always amuses the hell out of me when people think there were these amazing ancient technologies so much better than anything modern.

There are. Concrete is one example.
The ancients also did incredibly complex things with ceramics and glazes that we haven't been able to recreate yet.

The reason for their "amazing ancient technologies" is that was all they had.
Improvements in materials science were mostly the result of accidents or brute force experimentation.
Now imagine if the combined intellectual power of the modern world was focused on perfecting only one or two technologies over the course of centuries.

I'm not a wine snob, but I know there are certain things that sometimes you *can't* replicate.

After decades of analysis, we still can't build a violin as good as a Stradivarius. We still can't fully replicate Damascus Steel (OK, maybe the lack of a living slave in which to quench the blade is part of that :-P). I'd argue that fine liquors -- wines, whiskeys, etc... fall into that category. I'd say it's almost an art form.

I'll admit it, I have no evidence for that last assertion/argument. But I'm a romantic at heart,

As a fellow romantic, I must tell you, that's your problem. I thought the same thing until I read The Wine Trials, in which the authors ran blind taste tests, with cheaper wines often winning. For example, Domaine Ste. Michelle ($12) consistently outranked Dom Perignon ($150). In the 2007-08 experiment, the 507 tasters "represented many different segments of the wine-buying world. . . . Some were wine experts, others everyday wine drinkers. They included New York City sommeliers (wine stewards) and Harvard professors, winemakers from France, neuroscientists and artists, top chefs and college students, doctors and lawyers, wine importers and wine store owners, novelists and economists, TV comedy writers and oenologists (wine scientists), bartenders and grad students, 21-year-olds and 88-year-olds, socialists and conservatives, heavy drinkers and lightweights."

As for Stradivarius, "the many blind tests from 1817 to the present have never found any difference in sound between Stradivari's violins and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis," so sayeth Wikipedia, but you can consult its citations at the bottom.

On the other hand, I recently read that there ain't nothing like Roman concrete.

If there was someone physically compromising my systems and installing keyloggers, secure boot isn't going to help that much.

Hardware keyloggers, cameras, and even microphones[1] will all bypass secure boot.

They could even replace the innards of my mouse or keyboard with what's inside this: http://pentest.netragard.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker-interface-device-hid/

[1] http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/09/14_key.shtml
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/acoustic-snooping-typed-information/
http://it.slashdot.org/story/05/09/13/1644259/keyboard-sound-aids-password-cracking

Potatoes are grown using commercial fertilizers. Fertilizer contains Potassium to promote leaf growth, which promotes bigger, healthier potatoes. Potassium naturally has a radioactive isotope, K40. There will be some uptake of K40 in each potato.

Here is a paper about theorizing that the lung cancer caused by smoking, is mostly caused by radioactive phosphates taken up by the tobacco plant due to heavy use of phosphate-rich fertilizers used to make bigger tobacco leafs, which also happen to contain Lead-210 and Polonium-210. These radioactive heavy metals build up in the soil over years of fertilizer use.

What more are people doing today than they were in 1970 that would justify them being able to have more purchase power?

We're almost twice as productive, that's what. Notice how productivity tracked with income until the 1970s? Now the rich steal all of that.

In reply to yourself and the AC above you, let me provide a decent snip of the conclusion of a rather detailed study from Berkley:

Full PDF link

There are many theoretical reasons to expect that education reduces crime. By raising earnings, education raises the opportunity cost of crime and the cost of time spent in prison. Education may also make individuals less impatient or more risk averse, further reducing the propensity to commit crimes. To empirically explore the importance of the relationship between schooling and criminal participation, this paper uses three data sources: individual-level data from the Census on incarceration, state-level data on arrests from the Uniform Crime Reports, and self-report data on crime and incarceration from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

All three of these data sources produce similar conclusions: schooling significantly reduces crim- inal activity. This finding is robust to different identification strategies and measures of criminal activity. The estimated effect of schooling on imprisonment is consistent with its estimated effect on both arrests and self-reported crime. Both OLS and IV estimates produce similar conclusions about the quantitative impact of schooling on incarceration and arrest. The estimated impacts on incarceration and self-reports are unchanged even when rich measures of individual ability and family background are controlled for using NLSY data. Finally, we draw similar conclusions us- ing aggregated state-level UCR data as we do using individual-level data on incarceration and self-reported crime in the Census or NLSY.

Given the consistency of our findings, we conclude that the estimated effects of education on crime cannot be easily explained away by unobserved characteristics of criminals, unobserved state policies that affect both crime and schooling, or educational differences in the conditional probability of arrest and imprisonment given crime. Evidence from other studies regarding the elasticity of crime with respect to wage rates suggests that a significant part of the measured effect of education on crime can be attributed to the increase in wages associated with schooling. We further argue that the impact of education on crime implies that there are benefits to education not taken into account by individuals themselves, so the social return to schooling is larger than the private return. The estimated social externalities from reduced crime are sizeable. A 1% increase in the high school completion rate of all men ages 20-60 would save the United States as much as $1.4 billion per year in reduced costs from crime incurred by victims and society at large. Such externalities from education amount to $1,170-2,100 per additional high school graduate or 14-26% of the private return to schooling. It is diffcult to imagine a better reason to develop policies that prevent high school drop out.

Highlights are mine.

You know, frivolous stuff like robotics research.

I understand that he may not understand everything, but a lot of what is in his list is frivolous. Here is another NSF-funded robotics research "project": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwBOBeDFHw If they want to play, then they can do it on the universities' dimes. The universities certainly charge enough to pay for this.

Referencing some more from here: http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.serve&File_id=2dccf06d-65fe-4087-b58d-b43ff68987fa

• How about this: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0909289 This does not benefit the U.S. society all that much. It seems like something that the travel industry should pay for.
• We even paid to research if terrorism affected John McCain's chances for the 2008 election: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/10/01_terror.shtml His campaign or the GOP could have researched that themselves.

And this "FFS", this is also a file system? ( :P )

Yes.

I was wondering about whether computing resources could be donated and you get a tax break. Found this related thread.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=7201
Key is as others have mentioned that your resources are most likely using minimum power when idle and increasing use will increase electrical fees, air conditioning fees, and might I suppose also wear them out sooner if it uses disk space.
Also imagined you might have enough scale to sell elastic computing services but there is a competitive market for that too.

I'd recommend looking at the World Community Grid and BOINC. You can pick any number of projects to contribute resources to from solving clean water problems to finding a cure for AIDS to processing massive antennae data sets to detect asteroids that may be on a collision path with earth.

You mention SETI in the post, but why not pick some distibuted projects that are useful to your company to help push the research forwards? Most big companies want to find ways to improve their public image, this is a great way to do it.

There are many options: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php

If you don't already you should look into getting a special deal for power consumption at night. It should cost much less than powering on in the daytime. In fact, if you could have your system off in the daytime and only run it at night you could likely get really good deals in certain electric markets.

I know everybody loves to bash Walmart, but is really justified? At the risk of greatly oversimplifying, you can help poor people by 1. getting them more money, or 2. making the things they need to buy cost less. Walmart is working very hard at doing thing 2. Do you think Walmart's margins are higher or lower than the retail industry average?

There are other sides to this, though, such as employment. It is taken as a given that Walmart's entry into a market places downward pressure on prices, and that there are benefits from this. However, their entry into a market also places downward pressure on wages. Making things cost less only helps if it isn't outweighed by reductions in pay. The price reductions from Walmart (generally a good thing) end up being distributed across the income scale, but the lower-income segments alone face the decrease in pay to low-paying jobs that accompany Walmart's entry into a market. Walmart is an income re-distribution machine, providing most of its benefit to people with higher incomes, and most of its downside to people with low incomes. See: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/research/walmart.shtml for (much) more on this. There may also be more of a wage-depressing effect than a price-depressing effect, which would make the bargain bad for the economy overall, let alone its redistributing effects. Let's also look at what Walmart's margins actually are, and whether or not they could be lower, as well as where they come from. This article examines those questions, and finds evidence that Walmart could both remain competitive and pay employees more: http://www.epi.org/publication/ib223/ .

This kneejerk fear that you are "being recorded" in public places is irrational and stupid, and only a matter of decades away from being shoved in your face by advances in technology that you are probably not aware of (see http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ for something thought-provoking). We forget or dismiss that we already are recorded, in a manner of speaking, by the human eye and the human brain whenever anyone else sees us, which is pretty much analogous to cameras and digital memory and is exactly what Glass does. I already refrain from acting in ways I don't want to be remembered by other people when I'm around people (or think I might be around people), and in my opinion this is no different. Personally I hate the idea of stationary hidden surveillance cameras or drones with cameras far more than I'm bothered by the notion that someone who looks at me can remember me tangibly or mentally, since in the long run I have no assurance that someone who's seen me can't someday have their brain imaged while remembering what they saw, and with hidden stationary cameras or drones I simply have no way of knowing that I've been seen in the first place.

I realize people will argue that memory is more fallible (then again, digital imagery can be manipulated) and currently can't be shared with other people (see prior paragraph) and somehow that's more comforting, but we will end up facing this issue as a species one way or another and as a result, Glass doesn't bother me in the least. If you don't want to be recorded, then disguise yourself or stay away from people you don't completely trust, because laws and feelings ultimately cannot -- and never could -- prevent people from remembering you or surreptitiously recording your image in the first place.

Coincidentally, just yesterday I got a pointer to this blog entry by a guy at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, noting that while cloud apps are great and useful and all that, cloud app providers are poorly prepared to deal with the academic sector's privacy concerns and needs (some of which may be demanded of the academic sector by law).

I believe Berkeley is in the midst of switching to Google Apps.

There should be a law requiring to pursue existing charges against everyone and not based on prosecutor discretion. That would cut down on ridiculous laws overnight.

There wouldn't be anyone left then, except perhaps newborns... who would promptly starve to death since any adult capable of taking care of them would be in jail. It would, quite literally, be the end of human life in this country -- there is no person alive who doesn't commit a crime deserving of jail every week in the course of his/her everyday activities.

And you don't need vague laws for prosecutors to go after anyone they want... it just makes it easier. All you need is a big helping of the just world hypothesis and a side of Milgram's obedience experiments to clean up anyone who doesn't get suckered by the first one.

This is the morality sieve in every culture that has allowed freedom and liberty to de-evolve into tyranny and abuse of power: Anyone hurt by it deserved it and anyone who disagrees vocally enough to start convincing others this is not the case will be punished, and naturally then, they deserved it too. As far as why people go along with things they clearly know are wrong or hurtful... it's because they're afraid of being punished by The Authorities. But here's the real interesting thing... when you add in a helping of Bureaucracy, then you can have an abstract authority where no one person is responsible. When you divide responsibility amongst even a small number of people, then nobody takes responsibility, nobody is at fault, and the process continues on its merry, eating people left and right. "I was just following orders."

I generally am skeptical of anyone publishing claims that are outside their field of expertise. As the rebuttal from Tomas J. Aragon, MD, DrPH, Health Officer, explained there are some serious defects in their study:

"The basic study flaw is that persons that use reusable bags frequently may not be the same persons that were diagnosed with gastrointestinal bacterial infections in their study. This is the reason epidemiologists will not use ecological studies to test causal hypotheses. At best, ecologic studies raise epidemiologic causal hypotheses but cannot test them."

It seems Berkeley have updated their timestamp for that article:

You tried going to http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/01/27/sleep-memory/, and it doesn't exist. All is not lost! You can search for what you're looking for.

The new link http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/01/28/sleep-memory/ points to yesterdays date rather than Sundays.

Slashdot editors, please update the summary.

Also, the study is about memory in old age in particular.

It seems Berkeley have updated their timestamp for that article:

You tried going to http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/01/27/sleep-memory/, and it doesn't exist. All is not lost! You can search for what you're looking for.

The new link http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2013/01/28/sleep-memory/ points to yesterdays date rather than Sundays.

Slashdot editors, please update the summary.

Also, the study is about memory in old age in particular.

I didn't know. So here's a Non paywalled copy.

Same deal with non-profits ICANN who oversee domain names: In theory non-profit but the people who run it are richly compensated. That JSTOR locks up publicly-funded knowledge to keep it out of the hands of the masses really sucks, and it was started by Princeton!
"Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world?" George Monbiot of the Guardian asks in a recent article. Scanning this week's headlines alone, one would find any number of viable candidates. Monbiot's answer: "While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers...Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities."
http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu/thl-administration/lab-blog/academic-publishing-one-big-racket
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/bad-science-academic-publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/31/real-cost-academic-publishing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

I've taken a look at the syllabus (http://www.uconline.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Math-1A-Syllabus-SAMPLE.pdf ) You see this in college ? (and 40 hours http://math.berkeley.edu/courses/choosing/lowerdivcourses/math1A ?) You don't have that kind of courses at 16-17 years in high school in the US ?
(to be fair, it was also part of the program at my European university, but in a more bigger analysis package, and that was seen in something like 10 hours in the start of the 80 or 90 hours course to be sure that everyone had the required level. But there was a math exam to pass to apply for the university. All that stuff was in the program of the exam)

The science is settled with this a long time ago from the vast majority of behavioral psychologists, but the media (who profits from this) and players ignore it, just like climate change... Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions (from the American Psychological Association)

Quote: Myth 1. Violent video game research has yielded very mixed results. Facts: Some studies have yielded nonsignificant video game effects, just as some smoking studies failed to find a significant link to lung cancer. But when one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency. Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. Average effect sizes for experimental studies (which help establish causality) and correlational studies (which allow examination of serious violent behavior) appear comparable (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Myth 8. Unrealistic video game violence is completely safe for adolescents and older youths. Facts: Cartoonish and fantasy violence is often perceived (incorrectly) by parents and public policy makers as safe even for children. However, experimental studies with college students have consistently found increased aggression after exposure to clearly unrealistic and fantasy violent video games. Indeed, at least one recent study found significant increases in aggression by college students after playing E-rated (suitable for everyone) violent video games. Myth 9. The effects of violent video games are trivially small. Facts: Meta-analyses reveal that violent video game effect sizes are larger than the effect of second hand tobacco smoke on lung cancer, the effect of lead exposure to I.Q. scores in children, and calcium intake on bone mass. Furthermore, the fact that so many youths are exposed to such high levels of video game violence further increases the societal costs of this risk factor (Rosenthal, 1986).

... and An update on the effects of playing violent video games (Journal of Adolescence), where they say...

Quote: Basically, the scientific debate over whether media violence has an effect is over, and should have been over by 1975 (Bushman & Anderson, 2001).There are a number of negative behavioural, cognitive, and affective consequences of exposure to violent entertainment media, in both the immediate context as well as developmentally across time (for an excellent and current overview, see Gentile, 2003). Three findings are particularly important.First, as more studies of violent video games have been conducted, the significance of violent video game effects on key aggression and helpingrelated variables has become clearer.Second, the claim (or worry) that poor methodological characteristics of some studies has led to a false, inflated conclusion about violent video game effects is simply wrong.Third, video game studies with better methods typically yield bigger effects, suggesting that heightened concern about deleterious effects of exposure to violent video games is warranted. The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming.The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig.2 ).This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer, and the effect of calcium intake on bone mass (Bushman & Huesmann, 2001).As a society, we have taken massive and expensive steps to educate the public about these smaller medical effects, but almost none to deal with the larger violent video game effects. I could quote more, but got my point across.

Go ahead and be like a climate change denier and say all those behavior psychologist studies are all wrong...

So, I just bought a new 4/8 core I7 Mac. Told Folding@home to use 50% of my cores. It persisted in using 100% of my cores, despite what I told it to do, until I uninstalled it. Is there a distributed project whose client will honor my request to only donate half of my resources? Bonus points for one which lets me say which hours of which days it can run. If none of them can, I'll let ElectricSheep provide the eye candy, I really don't care. But I'd rather help out a cause that behaves as I specify on my hardware. Anyone?

Last I checked the BOINC based ones do. You can join multiple projects and even allocate 1 core to one, 2 to another, etc. And yes, I believe it supports even hourly usage, and even has a "back off" protocol where if it sees the CPU busier than some amount (you specify) it won't even bother starting a task - it will sleep for an hour and try again later.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Preferences

Many projects use BOINC... including Einstein@home.

I think Folding@home uses its own specialized client. I've never used it, so I can't help you there. Most of the other distributed (grid) projects out there use the BOINC client. BOINC allows you to schedule processor time to when you want to run, allows the stoppage of distributed processes once CPU usage reaches a certain (user-definable) level, and all sorts of other things. I don't think Folding@home allows the BOINC client to connect, however.

I think what is happening (in your case) is the folding client is taking what you said quite literally, and treating the hyper-threaded cores as real cores. It filled up your 4 physical cores, causing your system to show 100% CPU usage while not utilizing your hyper-threaded cores. I think your OS and folding client are performing exactly as intended. If you truly want only two cores (plus their hyper-threaded cores) to fire, you'll either have to manually set your affinity on the folding tasks or simply tell the folding client to only use two cores.

You can try raising the issue in the help forums on Folding@home and see if they have a better solution.

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html

I got the idea earlier from someone's slashdot sig around then which I saw in passing -- wish I could figure out who. The sig was something like: "If it is intellectual property, why isn't it taxed?"

In the variant I proposed, anyone could pay the money to put the copyright into the public domain (not purchase it for themselves).

Lawrence Lessig proposed something simpler -- a small ($50) tax after fifty years to re-register a copyright. That way at least all the abandoned works would become public domain when the tax was not paid on them (which would be a matter of public record). So, even some simple steps could be a huge step forward.