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There is a recent paper with some evidence showing the Chicxulub impact caused the lava outflow from the Deccan Traps to increase. So without the asteroid strike it's possible that many of the species that went extinct could have survived the less severe volcanic activity.

“Now that we have dated Deccan Traps lava flows in more and different locations, we see that the transition seems to be the same everywhere. I would say, with pretty high confidence, that the eruptions occurred within 50,000 years, and maybe 30,000 years, of the impact, which means they were synchronous within the margin of error,” said Paul Renne, a professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and senior author of the study, which will appear online Feb. 21. “That is an important validation of the hypothesis that the impact renewed lava flows.”

The new dates also confirm earlier estimates that the lava flows continued for about a million years, but contain a surprise: three-quarters of the lava erupted after the impact. Previous studies suggested that about 80 percent of the lava erupted before the impact...

Now, with three times more rock samples from areas covering more of the Deccan Traps, the researchers have established that the time of peak eruptions was the same across much of the Indian continent. This supports the group’s hypothesis that the asteroid impact triggered super-earthquakes that caused a strong burst of volcanism in India, which is almost directly opposite the impact site, the Chicxulub crater in the Caribbean Sea.

It is a bit old, but this paper suggests that completing high school results in a significant drop in criminal activity - and that post-secondary education has little impact on criminal behavior (figure 1, page 32). Post-secondary education isn't a driver here - it's K-12, where we dump more than just about any other nation, and we still come well below the OECD average for graduation rates.

Adversarial examples raise security and safety concerns when applying DNNs in the real world. For example, adversarially perturbed inputs could mislead the perceptual systems of an autonomous vehicle into misclassifying road signs, with potentially catastrophic consequences. ...

We are still a long way from finding the optimal defense strategy against these adversarial examples, and we are looking forward to exploring this exciting research area.

Adversarial examples raise security and safety concerns when applying DNNs in the real world. For example, adversarially perturbed inputs could mislead the perceptual systems of an autonomous vehicle into misclassifying road signs, with potentially catastrophic consequences. ...

We are still a long way from finding the optimal defense strategy against these adversarial examples, and we are looking forward to exploring this exciting research area.

Well if Native Americans/Original Peoples were doing that, that's just as bad. In context I'm talking about the invention of agriculture, 12,000 years ago. So I guess that applies to everyone.

Look, there are very few things these days which seem to me to be actual global threats. Most stuff that is sold as "catastrophe" is just something to solve with technology and more brainpower. Which is why I was shocked, shocked I say, to hear about soil depletion. And the fault is agriculture itself.

This is the one which, to me, is really scary. And hence my rant. But I guess that like me, most people haven't heard about it. And many environmentally conscious people think that, focussing on climate change and CO2 reduction, will somehow fix all the big environmental problems.

But this one ain't one of them. This one cuts to the very core of our food production. At a time when we are all being told to eat more vegetables because that is what is "sustainable". So, ranty ranty post. And one can just start to search a bit. For example, in the first few random hits:

Steadily and alarmingly, humans have been depleting Earth’s soil resources faster than the nutrients can be replenished. If this trajectory does not change, soil erosion, combined with the effects of climate change, will present a huge risk to global food security over the next century, warns a review paper authored by some of the top soil scientists in the country.

Scientists warn that humans have been depleting soil nutrients at rates that are orders of magnitude greater than our current ability to replenish the soil. Fixing this imbalance is critical to global food security over the next century.

The paper singles out farming, which accelerates erosion and nutrient removal, as the primary game changer in soil health.

“Ever since humans developed agriculture, we’ve been transforming the planet and throwing the soil’s nutrient cycle out of balance,” said the paper’s lead author, Ronald Amundson, a UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management. “Because the changes happen slowly, often taking two to three generations to be noticed, people are not cognizant of the geological transformation taking place.”

Human security at risk as depletion of soil accelerates, scientists warn

Apart from continuously trying to add the stuff back into the soil in an artificial way, and I do say "trying" as in Yoda, "there is no try", there is no answer. It happens slowly over generations and all the while it looks like there is food on the table. Then one day there isn't.

No evidence? Then what do you call this?

http://news.berkeley.edu/2013/...

You could convince me with any evidence at all to suggest that extinctions are self-limiting - your claim directly contradicts the observed trend, and data overrules any pet theories you personally hold.

So your reasoning is based simply on extrapolating a graph. Sorry, but that's not valid science nor a rational basis for policy.

What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is,

If those were the "exact figures", then all the businesses in the world would already have switched. Since they haven't, those figures fail to account for many hidden costs.

Just completely wrong. This is economics 101, literally: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez... [berkeley.edu]

Sorry, but just because Berkeley economics teaches something doesn't make it true.

Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved

Whatever externalities climate change may or may not have, they are mostly many decades in the future. So, even all your economic arguments were valid, what you are proposing is decreasing prosperity now in exchange for increasing prosperity in the future, and future prosperity needs to be discounted at around 5-7% per year.

What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?

Using for what? I'm not trying to prove anything. Carbon taxes clearly make the cost of products go up and force me to switch from products that I like to products that I don't like for no tangible gain. That's why I and the majority of voters in all Western democracies largely refuse to go along with any meaningful carbon reduction mandates. If you want to change that, you need to up your gain in terms of making rational arguments.

So far, everything you have said is stuff I already know and have rejected. That is, I used to believe that externalities work the way you think they do, and that climate change was as serious as you think you do, and that we should weigh future undiscounted costs against current undiscounted costs; I changed my mind after looking at the data. I suspect you will do too if you spend the time to look deeper into it.

Well, since you haven't said what you believe the primary cause of the increased extinction rate is, I don't know what it would take to convince you. But for all the causes we have been talking about, they are either self-limiting or saturating.

Your claim: extinctions will slow down and stop on their own regardless of our action. My claim: the extinction rate is high and accelerating, with no evidence of it slowing down in the future. Another citation: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...

You could convince me with any evidence at all to suggest that extinctions are self-limiting - your claim directly contradicts the observed trend, and data overrules any pet theories you personally hold.

The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is.

What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is, which account for resource extraction, transport, generation and maintenance, land cost, and anything else that needs to be accounted for. If you suggest an alternate mechanism for gauging power plant cost, explain it and provide evidence for it.

Things that are massively harmful for society can be very profitable for an individual company.

I agree: they can be. In the case of climate change, I believe that's not the case; it certainly has never been demonstrated.

I form my opinions based on the best available scientific evidence. What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?

Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).

Just completely wrong. This is economics 101, literally: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez...

And even if you could do all that, it would still be a lousy choice: spending $1 trillion today to save $10 trillion (PPP) in 80 years would be irrational, and IPCC estimates of costs/benefits are substantially lower than that. You are impoverishing the world for no rational reason.

Wrong once more. Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved. And there are two ways of accounting for externalities: regulation, or taxation. Taxation is more optimal. The basics are spelled out in the same ECON101 slide deck I linked.

though actually you are also wrong there

Maybe not. A Seattle Times Op-ed counterpoint brings up issues with the study that seem worth considering:

Specifically, let’s look at all the workers who are simply left out of the analysis. By the UW team’s own admission, nearly 40 percent of the city’s low-wage workforce is excluded from the data: workers at multisite employers like Nordstrom, Starbucks, or even restaurants with a few locations like Dick’s. Even worse, any time a worker left a job with a single-site employer for one with a chain, that was treated as a “lost job” that was blamed on the minimum wage — and that likely happened a lot since the minimum wage was higher for those large employers.

Similarly, every time an employer raised its pay above $19 per hour — like Jimmy John’s did — it was counted not as a better job, but as a low-wage job lost as a result of the minimum wage.

That's an op-ed, of course, and not a study correcting perceived defects and presented in opposition. But that might not be necessary, per a Fortune Op-ed counterpoint:

It also stands in contrast to a massive trove of actually credible studies showing that raising the minimum wage is a boon for working class families and the communities they live in.

For instance, a team led by Michael Reich, an economics professor at University of California-Berkeley, looked at the impact of the Seattle wage increase on the food industry over the same period and found that wages did in fact go up for restaurant workers, and that employment wasn’t affected. These findings were, they claim, “in line with the lion’s share of results in previous credible minimum wage studies.”
[...]
Employers see big benefits, too. Workers stay on the job longer, reducing turnover and training costs. They’re also significantly more productive, according to researchers studying wage increases in the United Kingdom.

The op-ed continues with studies/references for other aspects of the increased min wage.

When I think of "Hacker"-- the thing that immediate comes to mind is the august usenet/bbs article known as "Smashing the stack for fun and profit", which details the finer points of identifying a section of code that can be used for a buffer overflow/stack smash attack, how to create a payload to get executed, and how to implement the attack-- in general terms, rather than specific instances.

You know, this lovely thing:
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley....

Very informative, but not for the novice. In many respects it is just as applicable today as it was when it was written, albeit with some caveats about heap randomization and some other modern features intended to frustrate this kind of attack.

Maybe I am just old and don't realize it?

I know, it became "Cool" (ahem) to become a "Hacker" in the 90s and 2000s, and now there are all sorts of people who believe (falsely) that they are real hackers. But they really are not. No, if you want to find those, (real hackers) look for the people who bust open game consoles, and who do the actual research and development of the tools all the kiddies use. Using the tools others made does not make you a hacker. Knowing how to make those tools, and how those tools actually work-- that is what makes you a hacker. You need to have the domain knowledge needed to have a firm grasp of a system and its architecture to identify and then exploit potential areas where "unanticipated" behavior can occur, then be clever enough to engineer reliable circumstances to trigger those "unanticipated" behaviors. Without that, you cannot perform the task, and so-- not a hacker.

It does not matter if you are hacking a payphone with a home-made bluebox, of if you are hacking your microwave oven to be able to produce high intensity plasma balls, or hacking a security system to gain privileged access. All of those things require domain knowledge that is not widespread, and is often controlled in its distribution. (which is why I used the word "obscure" in my definition.) Hacking can be enjoyable and easy, if you possess that knowledge. That knowledge is not easily obtained. It is at once difficult to obtain in the first place, and secondly, requires a specific kind of intellect to grasp fully. Hackers are basically masterful system users, that understand the systems they interact with better than their designers, and enjoy getting those systems to perform tasks the designers did not envision, or actively sought to prevent.

This whole "Life hack" stuff is a result of previously widespread domains of knowledge becoming obscure.

You know, like cooking. Can you produce a reduction glaze for your duck l'orange? Most people can't. For those people that know how to cook, it is a fun thing to make some time. Not something you want to do all the time, but if you want duck l'orange, you are not forced to go to a fancy french place and pay 200$. You can make it at home for closer to 15$. In this case, the "system" being exploited is the modern societal system, where the domain knowledge for being a good cook is becoming more rare, and the ability to gain the knowledge is becoming more difficult, (due to increasing time demands on people, so they lack the time or energy to develop the skill sets), and much like script kiddies using "quick and easy" methods produced by real hackers to accomplish tasks, there are "Life hacks" that allow people who haven't got a clue about something that used to be "ordinary to the point of banality", but are now the subject of ever more restricted domain knowledge and skill sets.

It is not so much that the word is diluted; It is that the scope of what constitutes a system that can be exploited has been expanded, as people's domains of knowledge become smaller and smaller, (and as such, more and more previously banal domains of knowledge become obscure), and the upcoming generations simply do not know how to do something, do not really know w

$10E6 would be useful for improvements to detect and identify radio signatures in various ways. It could be used for satellite dishes and algorithm research; I'd personally like to see it put towards improving BOINC, which helps a lot of projects, including SETI.

Yeah, any of BOINC projects would be better. Think of the benefit to science!

Saying that crocodilians are generally considered descended from dinosaurs doesn't seem to be correct. See here for instance. Crocodilians and dinosaurs are both archosaurs, sharing a common ancestor. Birds are descended from the dinosaurs, likely

Except there is *NONE* in our solar system or it's immediate vicinity.

Wrong.

The average density of dark matter near the solar system is approximately 1 proton-mass for every 3 cubic centimeters, which is roughly 6x10-28 kg/cm3. The actual density might be a little lower or higher, but this is the right order of magnitude.

Based on this number, we can work out the total mass of dark matter within the radius of Earth's orbit around the sun: for an orbital radius of 100 million km, we get a total of 2.3x1012 kg of dark matter within the Earth's orbit. This sounds like a lot, but the sun's mass is 2x1030 kg. All of that dark matter only weighs 10-18 as much as the sun does, so we cannot detect the tiny pull of dark matter upon the Earth's orbit. The same story is true all over the solar system: the gravitational pulls of the sun and planets are always much larger than that of the dark matter.

My wife and I were lucky enough to get tickets to see Dr. Stephen Hawking "speak" at the Berkeley Community Theatre. They were free, if I recall correctly, but demand for them was understandably high, since he had recently released his best-selling book A Brief History of Time, which was still on the NYT bestseller list at the time.

Great book, btw, if a tiny bit dated now. I recommend the illustrated, updated and revised edition to everyone with an interest in the work to which Hawking devoted his life.

Hawking was in town to present a series of lectures on cosmology and the physics of black holes at the University of California, and he graciously agreed to also appear at the BCT for a much more general presentation to a capacity crowd of almost 3,500.

ALS had, of course, long since claimed Hawking's ability to speak for himself - as well as almost all of his motor control - so, even then, the voice we heard was that of his voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, his personality came through in full force: by turns funny, professorial, wondering, and confiding. It was, no doubt, a canned presentation, but the man himself controlled the pace at which it unfolded - and his timing was absolutely masterful. He had the crowd hanging on his every word, and he received a standing ovation that lasted for a good five minutes or more at the end of his performance.

We'd had to park several blocks away, so, because of downtown Berkeley's proliferation of one-way streets, we found ourselves on Shattuck Avenue, headed the opposite direction from home, and looking for a chance to get turned around, when we passed the intersection of Shattuck and Allston Way. And there, on the corner, sitting all alone in his wheelchair, obviously waiting for suitably-equipped transport to arrive and whisk him away to his hotel, was Dr. Stephen Hawking, Lucasion Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, eminent physicist, bestselling author, and pop-culture superstar.

To this day, I still wish that we'd stopped, and offered to keep him company while he waited - but, sadly, we did not ...

HiThere pointed out:

The thing is, it's questionable how much of the change is already committed. There are a lot of lags in various feedback cycles, and if, say, the permafrost methane is already inevitable, then that may mean that a much greater temperature rise is already inevitable. Methane may have a half life of 50 years (?? not that long??) but it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and when it degrades, it degrades to CO2. Nobody's quite sure how much methane is locked up in the permafrost...but it's already starting to melt, so it may well be too late to stabilize things. How much mitigation we can do is uncertain. And the sun is now hotter than it was the last time all that CO2 was in the atmosphere (see carboniferous period http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/c...), so nobody's quite certain what will happen. There are models, but anyone who believes them needs their head examined.

FWIW, methane's half-life as an atmospheric gas is about 12 years - but, to your point, its effects on atmospheric warming persist for as long as a century. C02 hangs around for up to 50,000 years, so its effects on warming are more critical in the longer term. Other gases and aerosols also contribute to global warming (and thus climate change) to various degrees, and with varying amounts of persistence. It's a complex set of interactions.

What nobody seems to be taking into account is the rapidly-mounting evidence that glaciers and icecaps are complex, unstable systems, the continued existence of which depends on relative stability in base climate conditions (aka "chaotic systems"). Every year for the past decade, glaciologists studying the Greenland icecap have observed that melting there is proceeding - and increasing - far faster than their models predict. It's an asymptotic trend that leads to what I think is the inevitable conclusion that Greenland's ice sheet (which is three miles thick in the center) is going to collapse within no more than a few hundred years.

That's way, WAY faster than even recently-revised models predict - but those models are predicated on the notion that miles-thick icecaps are essentially reservoirs of cold that will preserve their integrity for millenia. The problem is that all the current evidence is that those assumptions are unwarranted. They certainly don't account for the staggering rate of surface melt, or for the destablilzing effect of all that meltwater eroding the integrity of the ice sheet beneath the surface as it drains, via moulins, all the way to bedrock.

The instability of the icecap surface (its so-called "rottenness") has led the government of Greenland to altogether ban scientists from setting foot on it during the warm season, for safety reasons. They're now forced to deploy and recover automated weather stations and other instrument packages from helicopters hovering above the ice, in order to comply with that prohibition. In fact, it's getting harder for glaciologists and climatologists to collect reliable, long-term, automated data from Greenland in general, because their instrument packages and weather stations keep disappearing into the moulins that unpredictably open underneath them.

The current climate change situation reeks to me of the Permian/Triassic catastrophe. That event was produced by natural causes (although exactly what triggered it initially is still not definitively settled) whereas this one was unquestionably precipitated by global carbon emissions resulting from the age of industrialization, particularly in the developed world.

We, as a species, can be forgiven for not realizing the consequences of causing such enormous increases in CO2 emissions back in the 19th century and the first ... let's be generous and say "eight

The thing is, it's questionable how much of the change is already committed. There are a lot of lags in various feedback cycles, and if, say, the permafrost methane is already inevitable, then that may mean that a much greater temperature rise is already inevitable. Methane may have a half life of 50 years (?? not that long??) but it's a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and when it degrades, it degrades to CO2. Nobody's quite sure how much methane is locked up in the permafrost...but it's already starting to melt, so it may well be too late to stabilize things. How much mitigation we can do is uncertain. And the sun is now hotter than it was the last time all that CO2 was in the atmosphere (see carboniferous period http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/c...), so nobody's quite certain what will happen. There are models, but anyone who believes them needs their head examined. We probably won't turn into another Venus, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.

The current state is bad enough that "launching a solar sun shade" is starting to look reasonable, even though it's effects would be uneven, and less than ideal. I'm not sure what the downsides of that one are, but the more feasible proposals for geo-engineering seem to have enough problems that it's worth serious consideration. If we'd started acting conservatively 20 years ago we wouldn't be in this pickle, but we don't have general (political) agreement even yet, so things are pretty much guaranteed to get a lot worse than the more optimistic projections.

A more nuanced position would be...

Enough conservatives pass on stories without fact checking them that demonstrably false stories proliferate.
Enough liberals fact check stories demonstrably false stories die out.

Some conservatives do fact check. But not enough (please fact check more if you are conservative).
Some liberals do not fact check. (please fact check more if you are liberal).

Snopes and Politifact are good starting locations.

Stay clear of Nunez new fake site.

Here's a list of fact checking sites.

http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu...

Here's another list
https://www.dailydot.com/layer...

âoeBe skeptical. Check the author. Check the publisher. Check the sources,â noted Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org. âoeYou have no idea how many people forward us emails that are anonymously written that made unsubstantiated claims with no sources. Same thing with some âstoriesâ(TM) and âreportsâ(TM) written and posted on partisan and advocacy websites. Who is behind the website? Whatâ(TM)s their agenda? How is it funded? How transparent is it? Does its articles and reports provide named sources of information with links to source material so readers can check the facts themselves? Reagan used to say, âTrust, but verify.â(TM) Iâ(TM)d say verify first, and then determine if the source is worthy of your trust.â

The best partisan fact-checking sites
Note: Partisan fact-checkers are those with a purported liberal or conservative bent.
For conservatives who want to start slow before using non-partisan sites:

NewsBusters

NewsBusters is a website that devotes itself to âoecombating liberal media bias.â NewsBusters was launched by the Media Research Center in 2005, the same group behind CNSNews.com. It has been criticized by Media Matters and others for its questionable fact-checking techniques.

For liberals who want to start slow before using non-partisan sites:

Media Matters

Media Matters is a media watchdog group that focuses on conservative news. Since its launch in 2004 in the height of the Bush administration, Media Matters has analyzed conservative media, including broadcast, radio, and print media for factual errors. Media Matters narrowed its focus on Fox News and a handful of other conservative news sites in 2011, in what Media Matters founder David Brock deemed as âoea war on Fox.â

Editorâ(TM)s note: This article has been updated for relevance.

Imagine if all the supercomputers in the world focused on cures instead.

Install BOINC and become part of the solution.

Sorry but criminal history is not a proxy for race*. Race predicts recidivism independently**. Community disadvantage is also an independent predictor**, so you can't just blame poverty either. There's deep problems that have led to this situation, and we're never going to fix them if we put on our social justice blinders and deny the reality that certain races commit more crimes than others in a lot of categories, especially violent crimes. It's critical to address the large scale societal mechanisms behind this (and while racism has its fair share of the blame, it's absolutely not the only factor), but in the mean time, it's reality, and you can't eliminate a valid independent variable just because it offends your sensibilities.

* https://gspp.berkeley.edu/rese... ** http://content.library.ccsu.ed...

Sorry, this link would have been better, and more specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r... [berkeley.edu]

This is precisely the first link you shared. There is no specifics there, just abstract statements and videos. With specifics, I mean calculations, proper technical analyses, validations, etc. Usually, what you put inside a technical paper, the one I linked from my post (a copy in sci-hub because otherwise you would have to pay to see it); this paper is the second one in their publications section. Anyway, I think that we have already talk enough about all this and our positions don't seem to get closer. It was nice. Bye.

Sorry, this link would have been better, and more specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r... [berkeley.edu]

This is precisely the first link you shared. There is no specifics there, just abstract statements and videos. With specifics, I mean calculations, proper technical analyses, validations, etc. Usually, what you put inside a technical paper, the one I linked from my post (a copy in sci-hub because otherwise you would have to pay to see it); this paper is the second one in their publications section. Anyway, I think that we have already talk enough about all this and our positions don't seem to get closer. It was nice. Bye.

Sorry, this link would have been better, and more specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r...

This specific system shows the 200lb value, and as you can see, this isn't a particularly large/complex machine. The legs could be much thicker, the motors could be much larger (and more powerful), and overall, this is one of the very earliest iterations of an almost brand-new technology type, so I expect that they've barely scratched the surface of what's possible.

Importantly, the question is what the main limitation here is in vastly improving the performance of this machine. Currently, it is very lightweight and minimalist in order to accommodate the capability for a human to continue walking in it after the batteries die. If instead, it was going to be constrained to a different role (doing work in a warehouse, for instance, where power is always close at hand) then it could become much larger, heavier, and stronger, and have more powerful and energy-hungry motors to boost the whole thing. A 5x or 10x improvement doesn't seem particularly challenging if you did away with the unpowered walking requirement.

I think it's important to make a distinction here, though: is such a suit technically feasible? Certainly. I don't think there's any doubt. Scaling up performance in an existing technology is usually fairly straightforward. The other, and entirely different question: is this suit going to offer economic and productivity advantages in the near future? There, I think the forklift, being a mature technology, will probably continue to dominate for the foreseeable future. But in niche cases, this could have a lot of utility - which is pretty much the case with any new technology. As it matures, prices will fall, capability will increase, and we'll see more cases where exoskeleton tech makes business sense.

Here's something specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r... [berkeley.edu]

This is a much better way to have a proper discussion! Thanks for sharing.

At first sight, this seems an on-going research which might have a more or less good funding and a long-term essence. So, this seems as an excellent sample of top achievements on this field at the moment. The page you refer doesn't describe in too much detail the specifics; just includes some generic statements and visually-appealing resources like videos. The 200 lb reference seems a bit too high already and, in my opinion, an excellent accomplishment in case of getting it under favourable enough conditions. It is quite difficult to tell for sure with so little/unclear information though.

In the publications section, there are quite a few papers although not precisely too new. The newest one, “Human Augmentation and Exoskeleton Systems in Berkeley”, is from 2007 and you can find it in sci-hub. If you go to page 12, you would see a quite clear picture of how a system on these lines might look like and its drawbacks seem evident: firstly, it doesn't seem to avoid too much mobility; secondly, there seems to be a minimum not precisely minor weight. This might be helpful under very specific conditions like walking long distances with a heavy pack; I have personally done things on these lines (traveling just for fun) and do know that, under these conditions, any small help is welcome. That paper refers to a maximum load of 34 kg (page 11) in the first version, but doesn't make any express mention to anything else. It does mention in various parts that this exoskeleton is expected to resemble a 165 lb person, what seems quite compatible with bearing that weight for a long time. The 200 lb value seems a bit off and, as far as there is no justification anywhere for that, I assume that is associated with either much higher constraints or more or less imprecise targets. Assuming that the maximum load which a human-size structure like this can bear is around the maximum that a person can seems a quite reasonable.

A very good reference which, IMHO, kind of proves my point: nothing even close to what you see in movies and, in any case, with lots of constraints, what makes the resulting products only relevant under very specific conditions. Additionally, this looks like a pretty tough-to-do-research field as far as there is likely an important pressure to increase the values as much possible; an issue which might explain that looking-like-too-much-already 200 lb value, at least under comfortable enough conditions. Anyway, there are lots of material in that site and it might even be possible to find other researches connected with all this; certainly a much better way to have a proper chat about all this.

Here's something specific: http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/r...

This is still pretty early in the development of this type of tech, but this machine is already providing a higher level of strength (carrying a 200lb pack is no easy task) and simultaneously reducing the effort required by a human, with concrete, measurable numbers in terms of strength increase and efficiency improvement for the human. It seems straightforward to me that arms, weapons, armor, or other useful tech that is usually too heavy for a single human to carry could be attached to this type of machine. So, while the infinitely articulating and energetic armor of Iron Man might be pure fantasy, something like the mech from Aliens, or the exoskeleton from Elysium, seems inevitable once the technology becomes more mature.

Indeed it is heavy! You would do it in small amounts at a time.. if rockets could be made reliable and powerful enough.. Having something dangerous near you, that has a half life of roughly 24,000 years is not cool. The other option would be to figure out a way to accelerate the half lives of plutonium. Then we would have a bunch of lead around. -- Decay chains: They all end up as lead. http://metadata.berkeley.edu/n...

Feynman spoke of the exponential simulation difficulty over 30 years ago:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf

To think of it another way: you can't simulate the entirety of physical processes, including quantum effects, classically, WITHOUT incurring that exponential penalty. If you could, then you could simulate a quantum computer classically and solve quantum algorithms as fast as you could solve classical algorithms. But you can't.

Only in a criminal case.

O Rly?

Under state and federal civil or criminal procedural laws, subpoenas offer attorneys a chance to obtain information to help prove or disprove their client's case. [...] Similarly, civil attorneys often subpoena individuals to obtain information that may help settle someone's claim.

A subpoena is an order requiring a person to attend a particular event or proceeding, such as a small claims hearing.

Subpoenas can be issued in criminal cases, in private ("civil") lawsuits; they may also be issued by government agencies conducting their own investigations and proceedings

You should ask DeVry for a refund if that's where you studied law.

Sadia Afroz is the main public-sector researcher on this topic (stylometric machine learning).

She gave a relevant introduction in 2013
stylometric analysis to track anonymous users in the underground and the corresponding video regarding darknet user tracking through stylometry.

She commented a while ago "Please do not ask me to deanonymize Satoshi." and gave reasons.

I bet you the POTUS has a unique style and only grade 8 students and below write at the same level.

Sadia Afroz is the main public-sector researcher on this topic (stylometric machine learning).

She gave a relevant introduction in 2013 stylometric analysis to track anonymous users in the underground and the corresponding video regarding darknet user tracking through stylometry.

She commented a while ago "Please do not ask me to deanonymize Satoshi." and gave reasons.

The idea of folding ADC's is to reduce the complexity of an ADC. The result however is potential data loss, and this article proves what conditions are necessary to recreate the original waveform from the samples. (See this for example for an explanation of ADC complexity and ways to simplify it.)

NumPy is built on the BLAS/LAPACK and is way more useful for doing true numerical work. You should check out William Kahan's website for a good critique on why Java is completely unacceptable for numerical code. https://people.eecs.berkeley.e...

This is only one of many studies done. It hit headlines because it's conflicting results are good clickbait. If the only employees used as data in this study don't even make the new minimum wage then how can the study be relevant? Here try this one. http://irle.berkeley.edu/files... There are more studies like this that include all minimum wage earners not just the ones that don't get the increase.

Actually, there's more to this article than that... or rather, there's more studies done of the same issue than this one, and they don't come to the same conclusion.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...

http://irle.berkeley.edu/seatt...

The bottom line is YOU believe that a minimum wage hurts workers and consumers, and you grasp onto anything that agrees with you and then push it as THE ONLY thing possible. How about you ask Kansas, that bastion of republican bullshit, if they'd like a 2.6% unemployment rate.

There is evidence that disputes these talking points. Rather than get into the nuance how about a flood of right wing confirmation bias for the first two pages of a google search? check. Just like climate there will ample well paid shills and posing-libertarian-right-wing useful idiots galore.

Thanks for the research and calculations.
My impression was that capacitors were not efficient and your calculations indicate that.
I guess they are using them because they have a capacitor factory.
This article confirms your calculations and has a nice chart.
http://berc.berkeley.edu/stora...

Funny, every study on minimum wage has seen negligible if any reduction in jobs. But you just state as "fact" the opposite.

We compare all contiguous county-pairs in the United States that straddle a state border and ïnd no adverse employment effects.

http://irle.berkeley.edu/files...

God do I feel like such an asshole right now for claiming that your rant on the minimum wage is ideological opinion based on economic theory not empirical study.

The study comes from the UC Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, which hosts a yearly "Othering & Belonging" conference.

So, yes.

Here is the original letter from the DOJ.

It includes the names of the two "aggrieved individuals", for those interested.

They already used "automatic text-to-speech software". The jackasses who sued said that isn't good enough (for a free video), and the court agreed.

IANAL, but to be "technical", the issue didn't get to a court yet, there was an *administrative* investigation and finding w/ remediation recommendations handed down by the US-DoJ (executive branch, no judicial). As with most administrative finding, if the remediation is not complied with, generally result in the US-DoJ bringing civil and/or criminal charges in a judicial court (which is often negotiated into a consent-decree before damages and criminal penalties are assessed).

Berkeley simply attempted to render the remediation recommendations moot by taking down the videos in the finding. This is probably helped along by the fact that the remediation included a requirement to "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II." , which is basically unlimited damages to random people as long as the material was up. Given the complainant was a professor attempting to use the free material to teach a class, it seems like anyone could claim to want to use the material in course and claim damages higher than any one person...

No, they have to make reasonable accommodations to their students. Seems a bit of a stretch to say that they have the same obligation to non-students as to students.

The US Department of Justice would be the one disagreeing with you on this.

The USDOJ apparently decided in favor of Stacy Nowak (a professor at Gallaudet University) who "would like to use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, including the UC BerkeleyX course, 'Journalism for Social Change,' but cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her lectures."

Including to "6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."

Berkeley *already* makes reasonable accommodations for their tuition-paying students by offering to caption any videos for them. The DOJ decided that if they make the material available to anyone, they must do this for anyone. As a result, they no longer make the videos available to non-students.

This is part of the reason why we can't have nice things...

From US DoJ letter :
"Title II mandates that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity. "

UC Berkeley plans to remove some content that is properly closed-captioned and accessible. This is in response to the complaint about related, inaccessible content.

Legally speaking, isn't this denial of services by reason of disability? Especially if removal is so onerous it'll take months to execute?

I think UCB should step back and rethink. Take the DoJ letter for what it is -- a lawyer's note, not a judge's ruling. A hasty response to its more strident points (i.e. pay compensation to the two complainants) is likely to get UCB into more trouble, not less.

UC Berkeley received $370 Million in federal grants (research dollars) last year. Of that $370 Million, $210.9 Million of those "research" dollars went to administrative costs and overhead (non-research, non-teaching activities). You're talking about an organization where people have an average salary above $200k with a guaranteed job for life. Don't cry for the universities, they're funded just fine. If they wanted to, they could have paid to do this right.

UC Berkeley received $370 Million in federal grants (research dollars) last year. Of that $370 Million, $210.9 Million of those "research" dollars went to administrative costs and overhead (non-research, non-teaching activities). You're talking about an organization where people have an average salary above $200k with a guaranteed job for life. Don't cry for the universities, they're funded just fine. If they wanted to, they could have paid to do this right.

Also before anybody points it out, I think it's fair to call a polite letter from the DOJ requesting co-operation "enforcing the law" -- because everybody knows what's next if they don't play ball.

Is closed captioning the only thing causing this decision? Youtube will automatically close-caption uploaded content, simultaneously eliminating any hosting costs.

The letter from the Department of Justice goes into ten pages detail on this; take a look at it: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-c...

The statement with respect to youtube captioning was:

"Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."

However, in response to your question, no, close captioning was one barrier mentioned, but not the only barrier mentioned.

I am not sure that I understand what you mean by "critical flaw size", and I am not sure what would be the relation with die size. A defect is a defect. Bigger dies don't have more redundancy, they have more functions.

If you are interested in yield model, this paper is a good read.

Or you can just check the influence of die size on yield in this basic yield simulator

And FYI, I work in the semiconductor industry.

The point of that is to see you implement a relatively simple algorithm, not for you to make something perfect.

Possibly, but the point people are trying to get at is that designing algorithms is not really what being a good developer is about. Most algorithms and design patterns have already been designed and exist in a standard library or catalogue somewhere; a good engineer (including SW engineer) is somebody who knows enough about the existing tools and techniques to be able to choose the right ones on which to base the structure they are building, whether this happens to be a building, a bridge or a computer program. If all you can think of asking a candidate about is algorithms, then you probably shouldn't be conducting the interview in the first place. A much bette rscenario would be to get them to talk about a project they know well from their background, and see what problems they identified and what they took into consideration in solving them. Or if that isn't an option, give them a problem you know well, and talk about how they would go about solving it - but it has to be something that looks and feels like a real-world problem. Asking people about technical minutiae is at best hit and miss; you may or may not know what "Dense Linear Algebra" or "Backtrack Branch and Bound" is off the top of your head (I don't - I just picked them at random from http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.ed...), but you can certainly look them up and learn to use them quickly enough.

How do we boost the strength far enough to eliminate cancer?

In short: you can't. Cosmic radiation is just a small part of the complex system that can trigger cancer. Other aspects include: genetic make-up, environment (carcinogens) and the inherent error rate in the DNA copying machinery (missense, frameshifts, slippage, etc) [to name a few off the top of my head - I don't treat cancer]. And before you go down there....those imperfect copies are what leads to genetic variation (important to fend off predators both macro and microscopic) and evolution. Cancer is just about inevitable in any DNA based system

Are there any similar tools that will run in a browser on a computer, without requiring third party software? I used to use Glasnost every now and then, but they just shut down this week. And Netalyzr requires Java which is a non-starter for me.