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I wonder if anyone technically competent and influential has recently left the company...

You are not the first person to suspect that. From the link:

Consider these three blog posts from three Mozilla figures, including Eich: [snip] Eich stood firmly in the way of Mozilla incorporating DRM into Firefox. Now that he's gone, and his technological authority with him, Mozilla immediately caved to Hollywood interests.

That's very timely---this week, I was researching what textbooks I should use for my CS courses (this is the time of year for semester-based schools to choose next semester's books), and I decided that the huge amount of work it took (there are a LOT of CS books out these days) should be amortized by sharing the results with many people. Except, I got curious, and repeated the process for every course. Here's my blog post from Monday listing what I decided were the best. I wrote the list in part to provoke debate, especially debate that might lead me to different choices for my courses, so please follow up with disagreements here!

http://casual-effects.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-computer-science-book-reading-list.html

My cousin used to spray water on his records before playing them. I have no idea if that's good or bad, but I assume it it probably really bad for the needle.

It's really good -- if you're about to make a clean recording or digitize them.

I kept a spray bottle with water and a tiny bit (few drops per bottle) of green Palmolive dish detergent. I'd place it dry on the turntable, use a velvet DiscWasher brush with a few drops of solution (isopropyl alcohol for vinyl only, for shellac 78s use water+detergent) and apply it gently, rocking it backward over a full revolution. Then as the needle descends spray the surface lightly. The tiny beads of water with a bit of detergent won't do anything for rumble but will make most HF surface noise -- and all clicks that are not actual damage -- simply disappear. Ten minutes into the recording you will want to mist again by lightly spraying the air above the record but not the record itself, direct spray on the surface is audible on the recording.

Wait for the DiscWasher brush surface to dry before brushing off with the plastic brush provided, to get dust particles off. Lean the record on its edge almost vertical to dry completely before re-sleeving, or mold will move in and sit belching on the couch drinking your beer.

Well Chris Okasaki's book is the first place. His thesis is still online: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/the... . The book which expands the thesis: http://www.amazon.com/Purely-F... . It has been 15 years since his book his blog has some new stuff: http://okasaki.blogspot.com/

Here is a terrific blog post of what came next:
http://cstheory.stackexchange....

Makerspaces are places where people--either the general public or a group of paying members--can gather together and make things. Makerspaces usually have an abundance of tools, materials, and places to work on hands-on projects. They typically celebrate open source, notions of hacking technology, and playful misuse of technology to do interesting things.

Think: informal, engaging, creative spaces where you can collaborate with people to make things.

Here's a blog I wrote with good pics: Quelab - a Community of Practice. Full disclosure: I'm on the board of directors at Quelab in Albuquerque. Drop by if you're in the area code.

Maybe not

Russian politicians

US politicians

Wonderful!
This service has even been certified : http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x__K...

There is a great video here of it handling an erratic bicyclist.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com...

It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.

Right on the money. Actually he does identify some job categories he thinks are BS at the end - an entirely arbitrary list that labels actuaries as having BS jobs, but poets not! Right, because insurance is so useless!

That said I agree it's useful to start interesting conversations, even if the article itself is largely nonsense. The question of why we aren't all living lives of idle leisure is an interesting one to explore. I can think of several explanations. One is that many of us are essentially idle. Unemployment figures exclude people who have stopped looking for work. If you look at raw data series (graph here) you can see that actual employment has been steadily falling since the 1960's in the USA, typically taking a dive after each recession, then regaining some but not all of the previous employment. This is not what futurists envisioned because this is a form of enforced idleness, but then again, in a world where machines do all the drudge work wouldn't we expect that to surface as unemployment? We'd only see this as a problem due to a hard-wired cultural expectation that unemployment is immoral and working is ethically superior. The transition to a world of leisure would require rewriting of that fundamental component of our psyche which clearly has not been happening.

Jobs a month in May 2014, and jobs on Thursday, 01/05/2014

qatar-marketing

"... Or do you support the notion of everyone being able to legal own a 20 Megaton nuke? Because that's the sort of firepower you really need to oppose the US government; ..."

Just wanted to point out in reply that in a democracy, people oppose the government in terms of existing laws all the time through voting, lawsuits, campaign donations, jury nullification, running for office, civil disobedience, writing to their congress person, moving, innovation that changes perceived economic imperatives, performance art, publishing books, writing newspaper editorials, buying different products, eating differently (like eating less energy/water-intensive meat despite government subsidies for it), creating new organizations as examples, fostering alternative communities, contributing to internal political pressures when working with government, and so on. These could be considered variations on the "boxes" of democracy: soap box (publishing), ballot box (voting), mail box (writing legislators), band box / pizza box (community), lunch box (eating and purchasing politically as I see it; social safety net as originally defined), jury box (jury nullification by voting not-guilty because the law is wrong), moving box (between states or between countries) -- all available before the ammo box.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Other countries oppose the USA all the time as well via the international laws, tariffs, subsidizing local industries, currency manipulations, making choices about whether to trade in dollars, setting standards of imported products, forming their own cartels (like OPEC), educating their own populace, investing in their own infrastructure, making stuff for the USA cheaply to make the USA dependent on the other country and to obtain its business and technological secrets, setting examples of alternative practices as successes, and so on. See also Noam Chomsky on "The Threat of a Good Example":
http://www.thirdworldtraveler....

As Isaac Asimov had a character (Salvor Hardin) say, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

And for a true-life example, consider Leon Shenandoah:
http://pathwayofpeace.blogspot...
"We are the spiritual energy that is thousands time stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy in the combined will of all people with the spirit of the Natural World, to be of one body, one heart and one mind for peace."

Or as I quote about him here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"Warriors are held up as heroes. They are praised for their gallantry, exalted for their conquests, and used as symbols to inspire patriotism. Monuments are built for them as reminders of past victories and to prepare citizens for the next campaign. Leon Shenandoah was no warrior, yet no warrior could stand up against his power. He carried no weapons, used no harsh rhetoric, and made no demands. His strength was in gentleness. When he spoke, those around him listened. His words were always soft, his kindness evident. He was a spiritual man."

I don't feel US gun culture or politics is likely to change anytime soon. The USA is what it is with a certain cultural momentum. And personally I feel if the USA took care of its economic and mental health issues better (like a basic income and medicare for all) the amount of gun violence would go down. Improving the environment helps too, given lead levels have been linked to violence:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

But what really bothers me is US gun owners who vote for politicians (of any party) who put i

In the short term. We should construct incentive networks that slowly migrate off fossil fuels while the costs are reasonable. We are not doing that, and it's going to be hazardous to our entire system.

Actually we very much are doing that, we've been doing it for a long time. If you look at the US consumption of oil over the last four decades, it has changed very little:

http://www.indexmundi.com/ener...

So why do I say we are doing the opposite of what you're saying we're doing? Simple, look at the population growth over that same period; it grows exponentially while the oil consumption remains relatively flat. Furthermore, as an overall consumption of oil based goods and services, we've been dropping them heavily:

http://politicalcalculations.b...

There have been several recent breaches in SSL/TLS that were mitigated by the ability to negotiate ciphers.

When the BEAST attack was published, the quick fix was to configure clients and servers to prefer stream ciphers like RC4.

Then when RC4 was shown to be broken (oops!), the fix was to prefer block ciphers again - and hope that most clients had implemented the more permanent BEAST mitigations by then.

Most of the ciphers supported in SSL 3 have been broken, yet the protocol is still supported almost everywhere. It's too risky to back just one cryptographic horse when they can suddenly and catastrophically fail for reasons beyond your control.

Cipher agility allows things like Google recently adding ChaCha20-Poly1305 support to Chrome. A great cipher for mobile devices.

They already do - didn't you see "Putin for President"? Note the second to last line.

http://reallysciency.blogspot....

Are you sure? https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HoJ...

It's making something like 3D printing accessible to people who aren't into CAD. I have had a 3Doodler for a few months, and it's been a huge hit with my daughters, who are very artistic but not CAD-oriented. Even though it's the same extruder and plastic, the experience of drawing with plastic is very different from 3D printing with a printer, and it appeals to different people.

For some examples, see: http://kickrev.blogspot.com/20... .

The 3Doodler exists, and people were making devices like that from spare 3D printer extruders for many years before that, so there's no doubt that you can melt and extrude ABS.

The only question with the Lix is whether they can convert power into melted ABS efficiently enough to do so from a USB port. Technically USB 3 can provide 100 watts of power, which is far more than is needed to melt and extrude plastic. So if USB 3, with its power budget, is their target, it's doable.

Where it's iffy is the "any USB port", which means going back to 500 mA @ 5 volt USB 1 ports, which is only 2.5 amps. If they are extremely efficient at heating the ABS (most 3D printers' extruders radiate significant heat, since power efficiency isn't the priority) it might be possible to do it. Though it might be pretty slow. The 3Doodler requires some patience, so if the Lix is a lot slower, I think they'd get a lot of complaints. Though "it's slow on very old USB ports, faster on newer USB ports" isn't a bad story.

To the people saying that you can't extrude plastic vertically - you can. I've posted pictures at http://kickrev.blogspot.com/20... . It takes some practice, and a steady hand, but it's very doable.

Pure meth is white/clear. But you could explain the blue color as the result of some additive they put into it, as a "trademark" of sorts.
Not entirely different from how some whisky makers add substances to make their product darker.

Deliberately hiding details because they confuse people is not a solid reason for turning everything into its fisher price equivalent.

Hah. The other day a friend showed me his Android phone. The screen was black, in the middle there was this dumb looking LEGO robot lying on its back, something like this. "You're the computer whiz. What does this mean?" I looked at it for a moment, jabbed my finger repeatedly on the unresponsive little screen that has no buttons like a bird bumping against a window.

Then I said,

"It appears that clever engineers have managed to make a full color megapixel display that is capable of showing a whole chapter of text say absolutely NOTHING. The machine knows something is wrong, that's why it retrieved the image and is showing it. It knows what it was trying to do, what did not work as expected. There are details and helpful hints inside, but they decided that you wanted to see this dumb robot instead. These people are messing with your mind. They think you are stupid. They think you are easily confused and need to see a picture of a robot and a red triangle when something goes wrong. They don't trust you with details. They don't think you can handle the truth. And you know what? When you call them the person you speak to will probably not know any more than I do, they'll tell you to push some secret reset button and hope for the best. Well here's what you have to do. But does it show a diagram indicating where the reset button is? No, you're supposed to look at a dead robot carcass instead. Because you're nothing to them.

You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"

While I was saying all of this, the robot disappeared and the phone rebooted.

People don't ask me for computer help much any more.

I am an avid biker and although I cant counter your points completely I must argue against them.

You can't carry as much luggage

Velobobiles have a surprising amount of cargo space. That is only the Orca, as it seems to have about the most of the production models I know but Quest has sufficient for my daily needs. If I need more I borrow a car (I would rent if borrowing wasn't possible).

and you can't easily have a passenger,

2 person velomobile prototype is under development.

rain and other inclement situations suck a lot more

While still true, I have a hood on my bike. This keeps rain out and makes the bike a bit more aerodynamic.
Cold isn't a problem, as cycling produces a lot of heat. One guy bikes the year round in Canada and even -14C(6.8F) doesn't need much extra isolation. I'd link to his blogspot but I don't know how Blogspot handles sudden heavy traffic. I wouldn't want to bankrupt the guy.

and it can be slightly more scary to ride one on the highway than the scion

That depends strongly on country. Here in the Netherlands most 80 km/h (50 mph) roads have separate bike paths and the car drivers expect bicyclists.
It is a typical bootstrapping issue: There isn't much use for bike paths if nobody rides bikes once they can legally drive a car. Most people don't ride bikes once they can legally drive a car if there is no infrastructure for it.
In the Netherlands biking has been default since horses stopped being common. When the cars became common they already needed to share the road with hundreds of thousands of bikes. When there became too many cars to be safe the bikes got their own paths. Currently intercity fast bike "highways" are under heavy construction across the country.

but bikes have a much better MPG*

And eating much food is a unhealthy hobby if you don't sport much. I like eating, the biking keeps my weight within sane limits.

significantly lower sticker price

Not as much if you lower the other disadvantages. My bike cost me E8500 ($12000) in total (quest + some upgrades like better suspension, hood and turn signals).
There are bikes in the E10K-15K range.

range

I have tried to bike 100 km(62 miles) daily as my commute. I am currently trying to get a place closer to my work as it is just to far. I need 3 hours a day just to get to my work and back and that takes too long.

when I was riding a LOT, was that I wasn't really saving any money because my calories cost way more than a gallon of gas, and my intake went up significantly.

While true there are a few points I'd like to make on that.
1. It levels after a while. In the beginning you eat for fuel + to build muscle. After two years or so the building muscle part is mostly over.
2. Many people like to eat too much. It is difficult for many to eat as little as needed.
3. ...
4. Profit!

According to some calculator I found I needed about 2000 Kcal as fuel to bike 100 km. (number depends on a lot) That is the same amount as my base calorie intake.
However, most of that doesn't need to be in the form of expensive meat (or meat replacement) or even vegetables. It needs to supply calories, not protein, vitamins or minerals. Potatoes or pasta is good enough.
2000 Calories is 4.1 large portions of French fries at Mc Donalds according to Nutritiondata.com. I can't find a price but that is only a couple of euro's here in the Netherlands. If you make the food yourself you save on that.

FYI: one of the shows creators has stated that Sheldon does not in fact have aspergers. Though he'd be hard pressed to explain that, because it sure seems that way to me.

http://cooperbazinga.blogspot....

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims has issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits United Launch Alliance from buying NPO Energomash RD-180 engines from Russia.

http://spaceksc.blogspot.com/2...

Here is a serious answer -> All iPads, iPhones and newer Macs don’t use Flash. You don’t even need a browser, but can download hundreds of games, many of them for free. Most of those free ones are far better than anything using Flash. Many of those games even work without an Internet connection, which none of the Flash-based games do.

Adobe quite writing Flash for android a few years ago, youtube works just fine, it breaks some sites but in the long run better for it.

February 23, 2012
"Adobe has published roadmap for its Flash Player and its desktop counterpart, Adobe AIR. Overall the company expects Flash to cater predominantly to gaming and premium video markets. And as stated before, mobile version will no longer be developed."

Some replied to me about not being on a Win8 system as it was different somehow, the above was posted before Metro: "Less clear is the path got Windows 8, as to if and how Adobe will be integrated with the Metro interface. "

"Mobile Support
Adobe will discontinue support for mobile devices and 11.1 will be the last version, though bug fixes could be released."... "This means that Flash will not have any presence in the fastest growing computing segment. "

All quotes from http://mobiletechpundit.blogsp... as posted nothing changed, I don't care for spelling lessons, but it's just badly written.

Adobe lays out the future for Flash: a platform for the next 5-10 years - as an Adobe PDF natch
http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www...

In high school, they taught us the "scientific method". They can certainly generally educate students to apply decomposition; in fact, the field of Project Management uses Work Breakdown Structures, which are defined by the PMBOK3e (also 5e, latest):

a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables. It organizes and defines the total scope of the project. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work. The WBS is decomposed into work packages. The deliverable orientation of the hierarchy includes both internal and external deliverables.

A work breakdown structure may look something like this. Notice the absence of verbs: all things must be on the WBS (the one shown is incomplete), all things are broken down to understandable and manageable deliverables. Project Scheduling further breaks down work packages (the furthest-decomposed deliverables) into tasks, which are actions and may be assigned to people.

The general method of decomposition of a goal (Project) to individual deliverables and then to tasks to create those deliverables is easily learned. Project management encompasses requirements gathering, negotiation, communication, scheduling, cost management, and so on; the small technical skill of decomposition of work is only a fragment of the whole of Project Management and, as you have astutely noticed, greatly applicable to engineering projects.

This isn't a STEM skill; it's a management skill that most STEM people don't acquire, but imagine that they have simply because they can pick out a task from a huge effort and say "Well I can do this part next." Shearing it off from Project Management and teaching it as an independent skill would be valuable; everyone does not need to be a project manager, but everyone would benefit from the skill of hierarchical decomposition.

Technology degrees are mostly airy and fluffy, and it's well-accepted that once you get out of college most of your vocational training having to do with computers is useless. Science degrees are for researchers; Engineering degrees are for people who create things which can be reproduced; and Mathematics degrees are a sort of jack-of-all degree that allows you to go anywhere with Science or Engineering and learn that. Management degrees are, unfortunately, in-vogue as Technology degrees and, consequentially, airy and fluffy in a field which has so many concrete needs.

Here's the one I grabbed the numbers from this time, more or less in line with what I remember them being from other sources: http://nucleargreen.blogspot.c....

Or maybe this is what they've found?

Who really killed pax romana?

has been the domain of the rich. This is because sharing was moderated by expensive middle men. If you own a castle in Britain, you are likely to regularly share some of the rooms perfecthacks/a> (short-term renting them out through an expensive agency). But it wasn't easy to rent out that extra room or your basement in your three bedroom suburban house, because there was no affordable way to efficiently access that market (the market structure was very thin for short term renting).

Now the rest of us can partake in the sharing economy, agency costs have dropped dramatically for the stuff that the rest of us own.

nice article, thank u but i kinda confused about it should it can be combine with other material for making monomolecul things r not..

That really isn't right, is it? You're abusing the notion of "backdoor." The evidence that a backdoor is possible is incontrovertible. But practically speaking to have access to that backdoor you have to develop the backdoor values as part of defining the curve for the standard / implementation. If you don't develop the backdoor values as part of defining the curve then you are essentially back to solving the original problem in order to get your "shortcut". In other words, it is no help at all if you don't do it from the start. An unknown "backdoor" that is as hard or harder to solve than the original math problem isn't really what you could call a backdoor in conventional terms, is it?

Conclusions about Dual_EC_DRBG

The bias in the output mentioned earlier is concerning, but there are no known attacks against Dual_EC_DRBG unless you have pre-existing knowledge of the relationship between P and Q. In other words, this backdoor (if true as alleged) allows the NSA to break Dual_EC_DRBG but does not make it much vulnerable to anyone else. This is much different than a backdoor password which would be immediately usable by any adversary who discovered it (e.g. by reverse engineering the code).

On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng

Even when the theories are totally wrong anything more than 0% dissent is too much. Or maybe that should be ESPECIALLY when the theories are totally wrong....

And who exactly is the H1-B police who come arrest the violators?

That would be:

= U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
= U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services - Fraud Detection and National Security Division (FDNS)
= U.S. Department of Labor - Office of Inspector General
= U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS)
= U.S. Department of State
= U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa

At least that's who it was for this case: http://exbay.blogspot.com/2009...

So perhaps you are an idiot for implying that these laws are unenforced and unpoliced, and it's a scaremongering tactic which actually has very little to do with the offshoring indicated by the original article, which in turn has very little to do with H1-B's at all, since off shore workers are in other countries, and don't require H1-B visas to be employed by a U.S. company, if they never leave their home country.

The "Great Stink of London" might offer a counterpoint. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...

Pursuant to your request that I enter into arbitration in place of a civil suit, I kindly refer you to the response proposed in Arkell v Pressdram

"Fuckin' A!"

Really?

http://financeandinvestments.b...

25 year average return numbers say 10% (+/- 2%) is probably a good a number as any.

No climate model of note considers CO2 to be the only variable of note. However variations in solar output are very well understood and no, they are not particularly significant at all. Yes, there is broad consensus on this.

Yet CO2 emissions have continued nonstop for the past 15 years while global temperatures remain essentially unchanged.

Something else is having a larger effect on global temperatures than CO2. Either CO2 is warming less than expected, or something weird is making all that heat vanish, which seems like rather magical thinking to me.

As I said, the current models include proper statistical modelling that lets us have a probability of being correct. They are getting quite accurate and the error bars are steadily going down. As I said, its not sigma-5 type stuff yet, but its certainly accurate enough to start making precautionary policy on.

Can you show me even one model from ten years ago that correctly predicted the temperatures of the past ten years?

I don't care how many models you have that "post-dict" correctly, i.e. if you give them the historical data they produce a curve that matches what was actually recorded for that period of history. I care about models that made predictions that came true.

Because from what I have read, the models from 15 years ago all predicted more warming than actually occurred. I gave you one link about this already; here's another two:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/7360901-robert-wagner/1870791-climate-change-consensus-bubble-burst-by-the-facts-at-near-95-percent-confidence-level

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-paper-falsifies-climate-model.html

This is obsfucation based on the fact that the effects of CO2 are measured in kelvins, not celcius. Within the ranges of temperatures required to maintain human life however, the effect is extremely dramatic.

No, it is you who is obfuscating here. The claim is that CO2 is already doing about as much "greenhouse effect" as it can, that it is already blocking nearly 100% of the wavelengths that it blocks, and that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere have progressively smaller effects.

I gave you a link earlier, here's another:

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/ed-caryl-modtran-shows-co2-doubling-will-have-almost-no-effect-on-temperature/

Could you please provide a reference documenting the consensus position on how CO2 affects global warming?

We havent had 15 years of non-warming. That is a trope that is constantly repeated by denialists that has no basis in reality. In fact we've had significant warming. Please actually read scientific research on this matter instead of garbage from denialists.

And yet, you provide no link to support your position.

Here's another three links about the "pause" in global warming:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/09/26/as-its-global-warming-narrative-unravels-the-ipcc-is-in-damage-control-mode/

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/observed-rate-of-global-warming-half-of.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/

[Global warming] might be [catastrophic]. It might not be. Try and not strawman

No climate model of note considers CO2 to be the only variable of note. However variations in solar output are very well understood and no, they are not particularly significant at all. Yes, there is broad consensus on this.

Yet CO2 emissions have continued nonstop for the past 15 years while global temperatures remain essentially unchanged.

Something else is having a larger effect on global temperatures than CO2. Either CO2 is warming less than expected, or something weird is making all that heat vanish, which seems like rather magical thinking to me.

As I said, the current models include proper statistical modelling that lets us have a probability of being correct. They are getting quite accurate and the error bars are steadily going down. As I said, its not sigma-5 type stuff yet, but its certainly accurate enough to start making precautionary policy on.

Can you show me even one model from ten years ago that correctly predicted the temperatures of the past ten years?

I don't care how many models you have that "post-dict" correctly, i.e. if you give them the historical data they produce a curve that matches what was actually recorded for that period of history. I care about models that made predictions that came true.

Because from what I have read, the models from 15 years ago all predicted more warming than actually occurred. I gave you one link about this already; here's another two:

http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/7360901-robert-wagner/1870791-climate-change-consensus-bubble-burst-by-the-facts-at-near-95-percent-confidence-level

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-paper-falsifies-climate-model.html

This is obsfucation based on the fact that the effects of CO2 are measured in kelvins, not celcius. Within the ranges of temperatures required to maintain human life however, the effect is extremely dramatic.

No, it is you who is obfuscating here. The claim is that CO2 is already doing about as much "greenhouse effect" as it can, that it is already blocking nearly 100% of the wavelengths that it blocks, and that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere have progressively smaller effects.

I gave you a link earlier, here's another:

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/ed-caryl-modtran-shows-co2-doubling-will-have-almost-no-effect-on-temperature/

Could you please provide a reference documenting the consensus position on how CO2 affects global warming?

We havent had 15 years of non-warming. That is a trope that is constantly repeated by denialists that has no basis in reality. In fact we've had significant warming. Please actually read scientific research on this matter instead of garbage from denialists.

And yet, you provide no link to support your position.

Here's another three links about the "pause" in global warming:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/09/26/as-its-global-warming-narrative-unravels-the-ipcc-is-in-damage-control-mode/

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/08/observed-rate-of-global-warming-half-of.html

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/

[Global warming] might be [catastrophic]. It might not be. Try and not strawman

I *am* always armed. People around me are nuts, they have weapons they can't use, or can't use in closed quarters. Pepper spray? I've had girls tell me they carry pepper spray for defense, and it ended in me taking it from them by force. Do you pull out your gun and carry it ready to fire when you walk around outside? If you get jumped, your most likely outcome is the muggers take your gun.

Hand-to-hand combat. Fists. Arms. Legs. Bodies. It's not just clenching your fingers together to form a makeshift rock; every part of your body is vulnerable, so you need to turn every part into a weapon. I deflect kicks by taking them to parts of my leg that are better able to withstand kicks. I shift my body to catch punches in areas that won't hurt as much, and that give me retaliatory advantage. My whole body is a weapon, it is a shield.

If you can manage this for THREE SECONDS, you can get your pepper spray out and END IT. If you can't manage this at all, you're going to have your pepper spray or your fire arm taken away from you, and possibly used against you. You don't need to be a fucking ninja god of war; you need to not fail the minute somebody grabs you.

Everyone around me thinks they can slap some kind of knife or firearm or can of juice under their belt and they're now "safe". Like the assailant is going to announce himself so you can get your weapons ready. The police are going to have a problem if you point a large firearm at everybody that approaches you. You're going to have to get that stuff out *after* you get jumped, probably while partially restrained, possibly while on the ground getting beaten. Think about it for a minute.

No.
Helicopter are not flying cars. They are a vertical airlift vehicle. Can you drive one around on the free way? take off where ever you want? go to a 30th floor McDonalds drive through?

This is what people dream of when the want a flying car:
http://justacarguy.blogspot.co...

When people want a flying car, they want this:
http://justacarguy.blogspot.co...

No props, no fans, not load noise.

>

Sounds good to me... I just want to see another Falcon fly... ;-)

And if I'm not mistaken, this next flight will also be their first attempt to recover the first stage by propulsive landing. Demonstrating such a capability would be a game changer in itself.

here you go

As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,

There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.

When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.

Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.

The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.

David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.

So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.

ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.

In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.

The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Until sustainable scalable fusion arrives

As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,

There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.

When we scale massive I think a ~300 year waste storage is doable and worth doing.

Is that LFTR operating temperature of 700 C supposed to be a scare-figure? Are we comparing a fluid fuel technology that achieves its negative temperature coefficient of reactivity from its inherent design, where the heat-density variation of the fissile maintains this equilibrium -- with a water reactor model where sudden loss of coolant invites solid fuel temperatures to rise to 2200 C under explosive runaway conditions? Now that's a scare-figure.

The folks maintaining our water reactors have done a professional and stellar job to keep the water flowing all these years. I think it's time they deserve a break.

David LeBlanc gave a great little lecture on LFTR design topics at TEAC3 outlining the one vs. two fluid approach. In it he alludes to what LFTR designers call "the plumbing problem", in which ORNL's two-fluid design with its multiple tubes of fertile and fissile through the core promised to be a daunting challenge of engineering, thermal expansion at the various barriers being a wildcard that may affect the stable temperature coefficient they were striving for.

So LeBlanc has continued Weinberg's work by simplifying -- he envisions a "single tube within a tube" design where the ORNL's short and squat reactor with its many tubes in core becomes taller and thinner with a single barrier between fertile and fissile. If those illustrations leave you wanting more, here is a 2011 whitepaper that covers its advantages.

ORNL all but abandoned work on two fluids after Weinberg's time in what I see as a series of compromises where diminishing budget, increasing proliferation concern and (I'm being a bit brutal) obviously less concern about single fluid long-term waste products. Or (less brutal) perhaps they have an optimistic view that as we push into it we will become far more adept with transuranics.

In addition to a refined two-fluid design, LeBlanc is covering all the bases. He took the stage again in TEAC5 to promote the Denatured Molten Salt Reactor, which he hopes may be a 'best-fit LFTR' for now.

The problem is that so many things that seem to be best fits turn out to be compromises that entrench themselves, as have water reactors. My personal sympathies are with Kirk Sorensen in his quest to realize Weinberg's two-fluid LFTR idea with its LOW ~300 year waste impact -- I believe it may be a best-fit for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

Until sustainable scalable fusion arrives

The exit rows don't have fold-down tables (for that very reason).

Not really true - Most exit-rows have fold-down tray tables in the seat in front of them, e.g.:

http://patstravelreviews.com/w...

Usually you only see them in the armrest when you have this situation:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_3TIF...

You are supposed to read it and think "people should act this way",

Yes, with the genocide and the slavery and the misogyny and the mock executions of sons by their fathers, what a fine world it would be if we followed the moral example of the Bible.

Sorry. I suck at Slashdot's markup.

Text version of the link (or autoformatted, whichever) http://picturedefense.blogspot...

There was a deadline. People put stuff off to the deadline, especially when it means it's going to cost them money.

For comparison, this page has a graph of tax-related Google queries. Big shock: they spike right before deadlines in January and April. (That's a proxy for tax filings, for which I couldn't find a decent source. I suspect that tax filings are probably even more spread out, since many people get money back and would rather do it early.)

Combined with problems that would have caused people who tried earlier to fail, it doesn't seem at all likely that numbers would go up by a factor of 2/3. If you'd told me it was an order of magnitude, I might have been surprised. IBD has a history of a negative view of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and so I'm not especially inclined to see their incredulity is anything other than ideology.

If you watch the trailer (ugh! I did), and listen critically, you'll notice that the soundbites were all fairly innocuous and non-specific. The quotes used were not in any way related to the premise of the film, they were general in the extreme: "We don't know what we don't know" or "Everything we know about the universe is wrong". I've heard similar quotes in almost every popular science-related film.

We'll see what the movie looks like. There is, however, no doubt in my mind that the two guys who made it, Robert Sungenis (Dr Sungenis, thanks to a mail-order doctorate from a "university" in Vanuatu) and Rick DeLano (his blog says it all: http://magisterialfundies.blog...) are grade-A, raving nutters. They are Catholic fundamentalists with an agenda.