Slashdot Mirror

here is an app from 2011 doing exactly that: video (there are a few): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAWQ-YT8BvE android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rdklein.radioactivity&hl=en iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/radioactivitycounter/id464004677?mt=8

here is an app from 2012 doing exactly that: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rdklein.radioactivity&hl=en

motorcycle helmets (which are much more effective but impractical for bicycles

Actually downhill mountain bike helmets are similar to motorcycle helmets. But they are indeed impractical for pedaling up because they are too warm.

British citizens are citizens, not subjects. It says so right on the passport.

In other British news, it's not foggy in London all the time, and no-one wears a bowler hat.

You're assuming that uneducated and unreasonable attitudes about helmets can't be changed. They were changed for safety belts, and (to a large degree) for cigarettes; why not for helmets?

I can think of a few reasons why bike helmets are different from safety belts:
- Wearing a bike helmets has been legally required in several areas for long enough to draw conclusions about their effectiveness, and yet we are still discussing if they work or not. Thus, it doesn't seem all that uneducated or unreasonable to decide not to wear one, for now.
- Mandatory bike helmets are incompatible with public bicycle sharing systems. There was an attempt to run such a system in Melbourne, Australia, and the requirement to wear a helmet was considered one of the reasons for why it failed completely to take hold. Since you're borrowing a bike, you have to lug an helmet around, so you can't leave it with the bike, and you can't borrow an helmet for hygiene reasons.
- On a personal note, I find bike helmets very uncomfortable. This is a very personal argument, but the same thing cannot be said of seat belts.

With that said, there are some ingenious bike helmets designs that are being worked on, which do not cover the head. They may prove popular, regardless of whether they are useful or not.

Isn't it strange how we hear about these types of 'services' going down, but we never hear about them going up? Am I missing something? By the looks of it, many people are like me in that they didn't know that this service existed at all. Is there a place that Google let's people know when they have a new service? It's not listed here anywhere (maybe it's been removed already since it's about to be dumped). But is this a complete list?

No shit. I tried to play a Euchre app this weekend and it required Google+ for online play. I promptly uninstalled it. Here is the offending app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.karmangames.euchre

I spent a good bit of time trying to explain this to laycreatures

Sounds like the blind leading the blind.

You can't naively apply Popper in this case (who in any case is by no means the last word on philosophy of science), because the situation is quite complex: the article describes a possible consequence of existing established theories, including quantum field theory, general relativity, and Big Bang cosmological models. As such, Popper's rules don't say anything about those theories not being science, or whatever.

While it's true that "the math does not lead only and exclusively to that conclusion", it's a valid possible conclusion. As such, given the status of the theories that it's based on, we can't avoid taking it seriously as a possible description of reality. The task then becomes to discover if there's any way to improve our certainty about its correctness or lack thereof, and that's why people like Linde write papers about this stuff. Rejecting this as "not science" or whatever based on one particular view of what science is, is terribly short-sighted, and it's lucky that actual scientists don't pay attention to such nonsense.

One of the interesting consequences of eternal inflation style theories is that in principle, it addresses questions of fine-tuning. One can take the "evidence of fine tuning" as an argument in favor of multiverses in some form. From that perspective, the idea that our observable universe that started with the Big Bang is the only universe is actually the more difficult theory to defend, since we don't know how some of the parameters managed to come out on the knife-edge of allowing the universe to expand to a useful size and have useful properties like the ability for matter to form.

Re Popper, you should look into Imre Lakatos, who pointed out various flaws with basing all of science on falsificationism. See e.g. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.

Gmail doesn't recognize dots as characters within usernames, you can add or remove the dots from a Gmail address without changing the actual destination address; they'll all go to your inbox, and only yours.

They are producing energy.
Tzz ... why do write such nonsense? 18% - 22% of daily energy production is nuclear IIRC.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ise.fraunhofer.de%2Fen%2Fdownloads-englisch%2Fpdf-files-englisch%2Fnews%2Felectricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in-germany-in-2013.pdf&ei=utjSUtDeNon9ygOLmoG4Ag&usg=AFQjCNFYBEBDQ-GV6MRMdv8dR9mn1DW6Rg&sig2=M6KdG7PO99PADeMWVVhsNQ&bvm=bv.59026428,d.bGQ

I'm hoping it's just ignorance of how EMV actually works that makes you say that. Some people are under the mistaken belief that EMV means account details are encrypted (yes their are private keys on it), or that EMV somehow protects your account details from being used to charge your account - and they're wrong on both counts.

You should read the EMV wiki page.

Wikipedia huh?

Maybe if I get bored I'll add a link to a paper recently published by, um, some Australian researcher showing much simpler techniques. Though I expect the industry shills will just pull it off Wikipedia (again) - it's the only way they can avoid losing in the courts as EMV isn't to protect you - it's to protect banks from liability.

And math skills aren't required - EMV can also be defeated with a paper-clip. I'm sure you can do your own reseach (clicking on Wikipedia barely qualifies as research). Replacing the merchant generated nonce with one embedded by the bank would be a step forward - as will the proposed one-time-key code display for Mastercard. Emue is even more secure.

Google says that's how it works. I've tested it as well (and use it for filtering). From their FAQ.

In my experience, automatic forwarding doesn't always work properly -- say you have firstlast@gmail.com forwarding to realaddress@gmail.com, an e-mail sent to first.last@gmail.com may not come over.

I wonder if "dots don't count" wasn't always their policy, and whoever has your doppelganger account was somehow grandfathered in.

#BadBIOS - BIOS Malware

#

- Copernicus: Question Your Assumptions about BIOS Security

http://www.mitre.org/capabilities/cybersecurity/overview/cybersecurity-blog/copernicus-question-your-assumptions-about

- "Seems to have a BIOS hypervisor, SDR functionality that bridges air gaps, wifi card removed."

https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/388512915742937089

=

- #BadBIOS

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BadBIOS

=

- "More on my ongoing chase of #badBIOS malware."

https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365/posts/9fyh5R9v2Ga
https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365

=

- Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care: Government & Stealth Malware

http://slexy.org/view/s2otvoDuKW

=

- Gpu based paravirtualization rootkit, all os vulne

http://forum.sysinternals.com/gpu-based-paravirtualization-rootkit-all-os-vulne_topic26706.html

=

- #badBIOS (and lotsa paranoia, plus fireworks)

https://kabelmast.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/badbios-and-lotsa-paranoia-plus-fireworks/

=

- Air-Gap-Breaching BIOS Rootkits with SDRs Inside (and smartphones, Snowden, NSA, Wikileaks)

"A little while back I covered a paper on FPGAs that could turn themselves into SDRs. I suspected this would be one way to breach an air gap.

It seems I was right on the money. If a little behind the times.

Researchers have found an incredibly persistent BIOS rootkit in the wild that includes SDR functionality⦠literally turning your computer into a radio transmitter to exfiltrate data even if youâ(TM)re not connected to the Internet." [..]

"The researchers were using a new tool, Copernicus, which sadly seems to be Windows-only. Nevertheless a number of you might be interested in checking it out.

There is one enduring mystery of this rootkit⦠how does it survive BIOS reflashes?" [..]

https://kabelmast.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/air-gap-breaching-bios-rootkits-with-sdrs-inside-and-smartphones-snowden-nsa-wikileaks/

https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/388511686744764416

- IMHO Copernicus is the most important security tool in recent history. Already found persistent BIOS malware (survives reflashing) here.

#BadBIOS - BIOS Malware

#

- Copernicus: Question Your Assumptions about BIOS Security

http://www.mitre.org/capabilities/cybersecurity/overview/cybersecurity-blog/copernicus-question-your-assumptions-about

- "Seems to have a BIOS hypervisor, SDR functionality that bridges air gaps, wifi card removed."

https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/388512915742937089

=

- #BadBIOS

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BadBIOS

=

- "More on my ongoing chase of #badBIOS malware."

https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365/posts/9fyh5R9v2Ga
https://plus.google.com/103470457057356043365

=

- Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care: Government & Stealth Malware

http://slexy.org/view/s2otvoDuKW

=

- Gpu based paravirtualization rootkit, all os vulne

http://forum.sysinternals.com/gpu-based-paravirtualization-rootkit-all-os-vulne_topic26706.html

=

- #badBIOS (and lotsa paranoia, plus fireworks)

https://kabelmast.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/badbios-and-lotsa-paranoia-plus-fireworks/

=

- Air-Gap-Breaching BIOS Rootkits with SDRs Inside (and smartphones, Snowden, NSA, Wikileaks)

"A little while back I covered a paper on FPGAs that could turn themselves into SDRs. I suspected this would be one way to breach an air gap.

It seems I was right on the money. If a little behind the times.

Researchers have found an incredibly persistent BIOS rootkit in the wild that includes SDR functionality⦠literally turning your computer into a radio transmitter to exfiltrate data even if youâ(TM)re not connected to the Internet." [..]

"The researchers were using a new tool, Copernicus, which sadly seems to be Windows-only. Nevertheless a number of you might be interested in checking it out.

There is one enduring mystery of this rootkit⦠how does it survive BIOS reflashes?" [..]

https://kabelmast.wordpress.com/2013/10/11/air-gap-breaching-bios-rootkits-with-sdrs-inside-and-smartphones-snowden-nsa-wikileaks/

https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/388511686744764416

- IMHO Copernicus is the most important security tool in recent history. Already found persistent BIOS malware (survives reflashing) here.

My GMail (and Yahoo! as well) username is (first name)(middle name)(last name), all fairly common [in fact at my current employer there are multiple matches of (first name)(last name), and my father has the same (first name)(last name) as well], and I have not had this problem with either service. Perhaps using initials instead of full names is part of it; or your last-name may have different demographic connotations.

I did, however, recently have that problem with a Comcast account. When the tech visited our home for installation, he created an account (first name)(last name) @comcast.net . I didn't actually give it out anywhere, yet within a few months it was filled with a hundred or so messages for someone in another state. I did try responding to one item that seemed moderately important, and whoever got the response [the help-desk of some organization] didn't seem to grasp that I had no connection with the intended recipient. Since I hadn't advertised it anywhere, it was easy to change the username, to (my first initial)(wife's first initial)(my last initial)(wife's last initial)(string of digits) @comcast.net. While this address appears to have been reused, apparently Comcast no longer allows address reuse; I tried using a previous ID that I had used a long time ago, and it was not available.

Since you ask for advice, I recommend two courses of action:

• 1. As long as you still have access to that address, when you receive anything that is clearly misdirected and potentially of high value, deal with it politely. Don't use a "form response", instead personalize the response to the content of the message. CC the intended recipient on the response, if you are able to divine who it is. Once you've dealt with the matter, delete the whole thread. For newsletters, try following an "unsubscribe" action, if that's not available mark as spam.
• 2. Consider an exit strategy from your current e-mail address, no matter how much is attached to it. See the Google help posting "Change your username". For the new address, try a long nickname or full first name instead of first initial; or maybe add a string of numbers, a city your contacts will recognize, or a title. Give your important contacts plenty of advance notice, post the new address with the reasons you're switching [perhaps with a list of the confusing other identities as well] on your "old" Google+ profile. After a reasonable time (say six months or a year), delete your old account. Make sure you change your address at all the "various sites" you've registered at before doing so, in case you need to use a password reset function.

My GMail (and Yahoo! as well) username is (first name)(middle name)(last name), all fairly common [in fact at my current employer there are multiple matches of (first name)(last name), and my father has the same (first name)(last name) as well], and I have not had this problem with either service. Perhaps using initials instead of full names is part of it; or your last-name may have different demographic connotations.

I did, however, recently have that problem with a Comcast account. When the tech visited our home for installation, he created an account (first name)(last name) @comcast.net . I didn't actually give it out anywhere, yet within a few months it was filled with a hundred or so messages for someone in another state. I did try responding to one item that seemed moderately important, and whoever got the response [the help-desk of some organization] didn't seem to grasp that I had no connection with the intended recipient. Since I hadn't advertised it anywhere, it was easy to change the username, to (my first initial)(wife's first initial)(my last initial)(wife's last initial)(string of digits) @comcast.net. While this address appears to have been reused, apparently Comcast no longer allows address reuse; I tried using a previous ID that I had used a long time ago, and it was not available.

Since you ask for advice, I recommend two courses of action:

• 1. As long as you still have access to that address, when you receive anything that is clearly misdirected and potentially of high value, deal with it politely. Don't use a "form response", instead personalize the response to the content of the message. CC the intended recipient on the response, if you are able to divine who it is. Once you've dealt with the matter, delete the whole thread. For newsletters, try following an "unsubscribe" action, if that's not available mark as spam.
• 2. Consider an exit strategy from your current e-mail address, no matter how much is attached to it. See the Google help posting "Change your username". For the new address, try a long nickname or full first name instead of first initial; or maybe add a string of numbers, a city your contacts will recognize, or a title. Give your important contacts plenty of advance notice, post the new address with the reasons you're switching [perhaps with a list of the confusing other identities as well] on your "old" Google+ profile. After a reasonable time (say six months or a year), delete your old account. Make sure you change your address at all the "various sites" you've registered at before doing so, in case you need to use a password reset function.

Yep.

No outgoing transactions yet, but lots of 0.000...1 BTC sends with attached messages that started like "FUK U I HAET FBI", but quickly devolved into "VISIT BEST BTC CASINO" and "IM POOR PLZ GIBE MONI MY BTC ADDRESS: ..."

Here is an article that outlines their plans:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iP4VHSEkqJnn_6xvHvC58umph8mw?docId=CNG.b1cf7bba53e09623c881384352cd6325.b81

Why was this even submitted and posted? I found those details in about 15 seconds. It is over a year old.

You can also plug "urban relocation" into Google or Wikipedia for more general information. What kind of slashdot user has problems doing a web search?

I like seeing good questions, but anything that be answered with basic search in under five minutes is just crap.

Oh yeah, sure. Perfect day for it, as we are having a light snow shower this morning, which turned the Mass pike into a parking lot. Before you start claiming unfairness, Google knows about it because it colored the I-90 the darkest red they have available. So let's commute to downtown:

Google directions: tells me to join the party on the Mass pike. It also tells me to get off at South station, which is grid locked even on a nice and sunny day. That route, at this time, would take probably an hour or more. (The alternate routes are just as bad, for example there's some construction on Route 9 in Chestnut Hills.)

So let's see if we can get there in half that time. Zoom in. See that straight line between the two points? There's even a label on it: Beacon St. Yeah. Scenic, too, right by BC. It would've been easy as that. But wait, if I put the same route into Nokia's map, I get that exact route!!! So there's light! Google should just buy Nokia! And Nokia did that with a fraction of data collected from its users (well, unless I missed the news that they started outselling Android handsets.)

Or as an alternative, Nokia could be working on a self driving car?

Ref: #6: You can make money without doing evil.
http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

YRS

Not even close -- low-level at best.

In this town a certain man, very wealthy, but, as it afterwards appeared, a great rogue, having been buried, after his death sallied forth (by the contrivance, as it is believed, of Satan) out of his grave by night, and was borne hither and thither, pursued by a pack of dogs with loud barkings; thus striking great terror into the neighbors, and returning to his tomb before daylight. After this had continued for several days, and no one dared to be found out of doors after dus, -- for each dreaded an encounter with this deadly monster, -- the higher and middle classes of the people held a necessary investigation into what was requisite to be done; the more simple among them fearing, in the event of negligence, to be soundly beaten by this prodigy of teh grave; but the wiser shrewedly concluding that were a remedy further delayed, the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of teh pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent; the necessity of providing against which was shown by frequent examples in similar cases. ...

It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the deat should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony. ...

Moreover, were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome

-- William of Newburgh in The history of William of Newburgh: The Chronicles of Robert de Monte

http://books.google.com/books?id=qtsTH7ekvVYC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=cesium+bioconcentrating+fungi&source=bl&ots=c3jVB_Jjnu&sig=5EL3MGtvaTsDohXkDtTHigiSsZM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=7BjPUvnUL9KlqQHQ2oGIDQ&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=cesium%20bioconcentrating%20fungi&f=false

So we're resorting to Google Fights? If you look at the results, many are about a single accident between a truck and a turkey on route 80 in New Jersey. Filter out results including "route 80" and they're almost all about aircraft:

https://www.google.com/#q=bird+through+windshield+-%22route+80%22&safe=off

On page 2 you can find incidents with a pelican and an eagle that penetrated a windshield...hardly common birds to see.

So birds won't pentrate a car's windshield. Unless it's a turkey, a pelican, or an eagle, and your car has a large pane of upright glass like a semi truck.

Yes, yes it is: https://www.google.com/search?q=define+meltdown

A bird won't penetrate a windshield, no driver intervention would be needed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=V-xoDBEO1EI#t=38

OK, Tip #1? Don't use Youtube as a reference, unless you like being wrong a lot.

I haven't seen the video you posted, A) because the firewall blocks it, and B) a simple Google search of, say, "bird through windshield" offers no shortage of evidence that you and whoever you got your info from is incorrect.

Take a wild guess which country the Internet's root DNS servers are located?

Sweden? Netherlands? Japan?

While the USA has a bunch of the root name servers, there's many of them elsewhere. Here's a lovely map of where they are, or at least where they were in 2007. Assuming it's still accurate, there's 4 root nameserver instances in Canada, two each of the F and J nameservers, located in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City.

It works in Firefox and Chrome on Linux, sorry. Perhaps try just http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15359095430199898378 which works for me

The one detailing the case of U.S. vs Bank of Nova Scotia.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15359095430199898378&q=%E2%80%9Csimply+cannot+acquiesce+in+the+proposition+that+United+States+criminal+investigations+must+be+thwarted+whenever+there+is+conflict+with+the+interest+of+other+states.%E2%80%9D&hl=en&as_sdt=2006

You overestimate the development required.

This above scenario is quite doable with modest amounts of your own code - most has already been written.
I would estimate a minimum cost for the above device - a device that holds say a SKS with a 75 round drum and can shoot an aimed round once a second at targets close to each other - at around $300.

Indeed

So if a website gives you only HTTPS with RC4 or HTTP in clear text as options - why would you choose clear text?

This is totally illogical. Yes RC4 sucks but it is better than clear text - ANYTHING is better than clear text. The only possible argument for this would be "false sense of security", but if you think average people pay any attention to that padlock in the status bar, you are delusional.

I agree with you wholeheartedly — in fact, I accept some questionable certs in my zeal to transfer ciphertext instead of plaintext.

However, I neglected to mention in my previous post that I also use EFF's "HTTPS Everywhere," and an extension for that extension called "HTTPS Finder" — the former forces HTTPS if the host is known to support it, and the latter forces HTTPS if an HTTPS connection is possible (and creates a new rule for "HTTPS Everywhere"), even with requisite security.ssl3. cipher suites disabled in about:config .

(I figured anyone knuckle-deep in their browser's HTTPS configuration would be aware of them (and hopefully, using them). I recommend both, emphatically — "HTTPS Everywhere" alone yields a vast improvement in security/privacy, and has the benefit of a very long, expert-managed list of defaults.)

Thus, if RC4 is needed and I have it disabled, I'll be presented with an "ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap" error page, then I enable RC4 and reload. The only weakness there is in my forgetting to re-disable RC4, but the two extensions I mentioned in my initial post help in this effort, alerting me in various ways if/when I connect to another host using weak security:

"CipherFox" displays the cipher suite (or configurable portions thereof) in use on the status bar (e.g., it shows me "AES-256 RSA-4096 SHA1" on DDG), as well as providing the "Enable RC4" check-item on the Tools menu.

"Calomel SSL Validation" displays (on my nav. bar) a color-coded shield that represents a percentage security rating based on weighted factors drawn from the cert and cipher suite, the breakdown of which is displayed via clicking the shield icon.

When surgeons set out to repair holes in the walls of the heart's chambers or in blood vessels,

There are already transcatheter VSD/ASD occulders that are minimally invasive (considering)and fairly well proven. They are used all the time to repair congenital defects. I am assuming that they are talking about repairing ventricular septal defects, or atrial.septal defects Since a hole in the free wall of the heart is going to kill you pretty damn fast, and will generally be caused by some type of trauma. In which case you probably have to have foreign material removed as well. I'm not as familiar with what is available for vascular repair once it's ruptured, so this sounds pretty cool. It looks like it may be more elegant than an occulder, but the images show a clamp being used. So using this, for now, means cracking the chest open. I'd say that going into the cath lab for a ASD/VSD repair is still a better option. But if they can shrink this down to the point they can fish this stuff up through the femoral artery, it will be very cool indeed.

google: https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+c+code+to+fpga

We've been a police state since the Nixon administration if not before: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_American_Police_State.html?id=1XWQolKIuokC

I don't think it's the problem with the language proper, just with the hopeless standard C library. Nobody is forced to use it naked, though. Either roll your own wrapper, or use something already made like Dave Hanson's code from C Interfaces and Implementations.

RE: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/the-1970s-ice-age-scare/

Nice link - it must have taken a lot of work to make that page, and it is good to see that someone has taken the trouble to gather actual evidence to support a position. Kudos.

The problem is that the wordpress page is a list of newspaper articles that talked about the "coming ice age",
It takes a side and says "look at these". What we would want to see is a list of all climate-related articles from the 1970's and then determine if there was a preponderance of one kind of another, and what kind of magazines/journals published each.

Secondly, these are not links into scientific journals, so it can hardly be considered a consensus of scientific thought, but it does serve very well to show how public opinion may have been influenced.
I have to agree that the press published be-scared articles, but as I recall (and I was an adult), there as a significant number of articles saying balderdash to popular press imminent ice age articles. The people that I knew at that time admitted to the possibility that we may be moving into an ice age eventually, or perhaps a period of cooling in the near future, and everyone was aware that ice ages come in cycles. I don't know anyone that thought the newspaper articles were compelling enough to be actionable.
Confession: my degree and work is in a sci/tech field so the people I associated with tended to be a good bit more skeptical and knowledgeable than the general public.

Here's some counter-examples to the belief that there was a universal ice-age scare, see the links at the bottom/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
However, the wiki isn't looking at both sides either, but it gives you another point of view.

As for the wordpress blog. It could be improved somewhat, though. here are some suggestions.

Starting with the first one, the NCAR graph from Newsweek.
It's NOT an article predicting an ice age. it's an article saying the minor cooling in the Northern hemisphere may severely impact agriculture output. Why did you not post the other graph in that article that showed warming in the Southern hemisphere?
What about the quote in the article: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions"

National Academy of Sciences graph. The graph shows Northern hemisphere temperatures. I don't see any prediction of an ice age. The link returns two non-weather articles from 2005.

The Milwaukee Sentinel screen shot of a fraction of a George Will opinion piece from 1992.
He is not saying that there is a coming ice age, he is saying the exact opposite. However, his stance is that some newspapers were using scare tactics, and he is using several newspaper articles quote fragments to show that the newspapers had got it wrong back in the 1970's.
You really should not use a 1992 opinion column's article to support claims that 1970's were having an ice-age scare.
BTW, two of the links in the Wordpress article point to the George Will article.

The Windsor Star article: Scientist Hubert Lamb, who also said "not for another 10,000 years"
Here's another contemporaneous article offering Professor Lamb views and some balance. That is, rejection of his position by other scientists
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19750908&id=jfJLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ae0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5280,2927204

Sarasota Herald-Tribune article:
Read the entire article on page 14A. This article is the exact opposite of an ice age scare - it says of the recent cooling trend "The first, which he said is held by the majority of weather and climate specialists, see trends originated in th

Here's a comment I made a while back about this same situation:

If I recall correctly it had more to do with some arbitrary and insane insistence on 'Consumer Imaging' being the business focus, which is why you got cheap consumer cameras (easy share), printer docs (with attempts to cash in on printer paper consumables), but little pro-sumer stuff, and the occasional/rare super high-end imagers/gear (like those used in telescopes, etc).

This is also why they sold off/spun off their profitable medical imaging groups, chemicals group, and they've tried to get rid of their profitable Document Imaging group (high-end, high-speed document scanners) several times. They've been constantly trying to push themselves into the most difficult and price-competitive market possible, cheapo consumer cameras. I think the ultimate goal was to maintain some kind of grasp of the photo printing business as their cash cow with consumable manufacturing/selling. To be fair, they still do a good job printing pictures, but people don't really want/need to do that anymore with rare exceptions. And people that still do prints do it in-house or have local labs that do the work.

Kodak's management has always been married to consumables and services as encapsulated by the mantra "You push the button, we do the rest." It's like some creepy love affair with George Eastman. Most of the outright wrong directions Kodak has taken can be traced back to trying to that philosophy. Being from the Rochester area made Kodak's fall a bit sad to watch, but it was still very predictable.

To those people saying Kodak wasn't a camera company; Kodak made the first and best professional digital cameras, as well as medium/large format digital camera backs and other digital sensors. It was management decisions not to aggressively pursue that tech in the consumer space with gear that didn't treat the consumer like a moron. Not to mention all the custom designed software/drivers using non-standard GUI interfaces which were expensive to build from scratch and horrendous to use. Every Kodak made product or service was focused on consumables and draining the customer of as much cash as possible and not about providing as much value as possible.

Incidentally Eastman Chemical (spun off several years ago) seems to be doing just fine.

Here, from the published book "US Government and Politics":

If we list a set of rights, some fools in the future are going to claim that people are entitled only to those rights enumerated and no others.

Thus, the 9th and 10th amendments. James Madison was a Genius.

Google has about a half a million results for dropped or thrown from overpass. Ever seen one of those? It doesn't always take a gun to accidentally (or deliberately) kill someone from a distance.

then how do you stop some bot taking many usernames every second? (doesn't say in the FAQ, and it could be a real problem if multiple bots try to generate many usernames each)

That's an interesting and insightful point.

I'm going to forward it to Miguel and the people over at the Twister forum (unless you'd like to do it - I'll hold off for a couple of hours in case you do).

This is exactly what they need. A nascent project looking for feedback from smart, informed, and motivated users.

From a Marine Major General: http://warisaracket.org/racket.html "Smedley Butler: War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

At length: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

Another quote by Einstein: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"

See also this essay by me on how that applies to all forms of modern weaponry, inspired by that Einstein quote, given a modern-day digital watch has more computing power than was used to design the first atomic weapons:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
----
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic:
A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openmanufacturing/8qspPyyS1tY/vZacyDL86DIJ
See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possibl

http://www.google.com/patents/US8162552

Try spelling JavaScript as one word and you will see something very different: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ruby%2C%20python%2C%20javascript&cmpt=q

You missed http://www.google.com/patents/US8162552 and http://www.google.com/patents/USD685775

You missed http://www.google.com/patents/US8162552 and http://www.google.com/patents/USD685775

The USPTO disagrees.

I prefer wolf girl Ai, or maybe just some of this

Simpson's Cannabis Oil

https://www.google.com/search?q=simpson+oil&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Hmm, well, maybe Microsoft might be interested in funding a new season of Firefly?
https://www.google.com/search?q=firefly+take+the+sky+from+me&tbm=isch

> I don't see how the DEFLATE codec used by, say, PNG can be parallelized.

That's because deflate is a crappy compression codec.

Try a compression algorithm like lz4 which is a) lossless, b) multi-core, and c) fast

http://code.google.com/p/lz4/

The best kind of war is one where the other side doesn't even know it's being fought...