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it will be legislated out of existence. I saw this http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-... article, kind of reminded me skydivers and hang gliders used their organizations USPA and USHPA to maintain some control. Otherwise FAA will step in and make it very difficult to enjoy these hobbies. Well I'm stretching this analogy and organizing RC hobbyists is like herding cats.

Got input from IBM, talked to Cringely, heard from lots of folks in the trenches--and came up with a few more numbers to consider, like 10,000 (Number IBM is now suggesting is accurate), 50,000 (number laid off second half of 2014 in India), 20,800 (26 percent of U.S. workforce, which some say is target) and others. See http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-...

Was a story about that last month.

Maglev Elevators Will Take You Up, Down, and Sideways by 2016
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

I wonder why the IEEE agrees with them? http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Ran across this interesting tidbit while looking up some stats for myself last time one of these articles got posted here.
Of the 7.6 million STEM workers, only 24% are women.

Of the 3.7 million public schoolteachers, only 24% are men.
I'll start taking all this gender equality stuff being reported seriously when I see at least half as many articles complaining about the latter as I see about the former. If one is a "problem", so is the other. Otherwise I'll take it there's an implicit assumption that women like to teach (or are better teachers) than men. And likewise men like STEM (or are better at STEM) than women.

Small sample - in my city there is IBM campus.
Field engineers - mostly males (and with few exceptions white)
Field engineers managers - as above
Software development - mostly males with larger share of females (and with few exceptions white)
Business Professional Services - (this is HR & accounting) - mostly females with very small share of males (4:1 or 8:1 ratio)
BPS managers - half and half males/females
As total gender ratio m/f perhaps 60%/40%

Perhaps humping disk arrays and servers at 2AM is not so interesting for females if they can choose job "under roof".

Ran across this interesting tidbit while looking up some stats for myself last time one of these articles got posted here.

Of the 7.6 million STEM workers, only 24% are women.
Of the 3.7 million public schoolteachers, only 24% are men.

I'll start taking all this gender equality stuff being reported seriously when I see at least half as many articles complaining about the latter as I see about the former. If one is a "problem", so is the other. Otherwise I'll take it there's an implicit assumption that women like to teach (or are better teachers) than men. And likewise men like STEM (or are better at STEM) than women.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

If socioeconomic imbalances caused terrorism, there would be much more terrorism, both in the past and presently. Your 'low pay' hypothesis doesn't take into consideration that a higher proportion of terrorists are engineers.

The more complete source article

As someone posted below, here is the forum post with some data, and here is the raw data with more plots. This is really awesome, but you have to temper your enthusiasm when you realize he knew exactly when to look and how much the brightness should drop, and he chose a relatively bright star (apparent magnitude +7.676, which is just barely too faint to see with the naked eye) with a relatively large exoplanet to image. There is some wiggle room there, but the data is pretty noisy, so it will be pretty tough to spot new exoplanets like this.

In comparison, Kepler-67b is a confirmed exoplanet 3610 light years away, orbiting a star with an apparent magnitude of +16. That is, take the light received from the star this guy imaged, divide it by 2000 (less than 0.05% the brightness), and Kepler can still detect exoplanets passing in front of it. The Hubble and Keck Telescopes have imaged stars with magnitudes of +30 or higher. So to answer the headline (in case it wasn't already obvious), we still kinda need NASA.

The more complete source article

from http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/bluray-discs-find-useful-application-in-increasing-solar-cell-efficiency :

This raised the panels’ power conversion efficiency by nearly 12 percent.

and http://phys.org/news/2014-11-blu-ray-disc-solar-cell.html

12% efficiency improvement is the figure they seemed intent on hiding behind a pay-wall.
Which presumably means your 20% efficient cell would be 22.4% now; if it didn't already have a random textured finish to achieve the 20% which is already a high end domestic figure.
But you might get upto12% more cash from your grid feed in tariff.

That's not what the original article says.

It's not the engineers' fault; It's rare that I've seen as big of a misrepresentation of an article outside of say Russian state propaganda that I've seen with this Register article. Starting with the title.

The original article absolutely, positively does not say in any way, shape or form, "Renewable energy 'simply WON'T WORK'" or "Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible."

The actual article says something very, very different. The engineers went into the project hoping that if we make the incremental improvements to make renewables as cheap as coal, then there will be a mass-switchover to renewables and CO2 levels will be held down. Except that that doesn't work. Why? Because of lead times. People who have existing coal power plants for example aren't just going to take them down because new renewables projects are cheaper than new coal plants. You need to get the price down well below that of coal to where it justifies them throwing their already-invested capital costs out the window. Without doing that, your switchover rate is limited by how fast power plants go offline, which is a very long time. So in their "as cheap as coal" scenario, they only get to a 55% emissions cut by 2050. They were hoping that'd keep the world under 350 ppm. But not only does the world still hit 350 ppm in that scenario, but it continues to rise. Hence, the hypothesis that getting renewables as cheap as coal is sufficient to prevent major climate change is suggested to be wrong.

What that DOESN'T say in any way, shape or form:

1) Renewables "WON'T WORK"
2) Renewables "don't help prevent climate change"
3) There's no scenario in which renewables can prevent climate change

What they call for are several changes.

1) They feel that focusing on preventing emissions with renewables isn't enough, that you need active CO2 scrubbing as well.

2) They call for renewables investment to adopt the "Google Model": 70% core business, 20% related new business, 10% risky disruptive new technology. This is versus conventional investment which is 90% core business (aka incremental improvements), 9,9% related, and 0,1% disruptive. They think this provides better odds for renewables or other technologies to stop climate change because incrementally improving down to the price of coal - while it'd have a big impact on CO2 emissions rates - still won't keep levels down below 350 ppm.

Does this even resemble the Register article? Nope. Not even a little bit.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo... Here, no such thing as a STEM shortage only the desire to suppress wages.

Having a brain-equivalent information processor that fits in the space of a skull and runs on the brain's approximately 20 W? It won't happen in your life time if you're old enough to be posting on this site.

"At a power density of just 20 milliwatts per square centimeter, IBM’s new brain-inspired chip comes tantalizingly close to such wetware efficiency." http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

> do they ever say when their classified system gets breached? no, of course not,

Yes they do.

> it would let people know how laughable their security really is.

They don't generally talk about what happens on a classified network because, it is a classified network.

Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...

Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,

I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."

Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."

And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."

The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.

Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a

The submitter, passed by the "editor":

Relatedly, an article at IEEE Spectrum explains why SpaceShipTwo's rocket fuel wasn't the cause of the accident.

Not.

It says this:

The company’s larger suborbital vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, also employs a hybrid rocket, which at the time of this writing did not appear to have caused October’s tragic accident.

"wasn't" != "does not appear to be".

Q - What's the best decade of a Slashdot editor's life?

A - Third grade.

No - this only happens in Windoze(C)(TM) boxes - never in a highly engineered server. Oh wait - with memory densities as high as they are in the large systems, maybe it does. These are once in a decade kind of problems. I remember hearing about Sun's early research on this problem... Defect started with Sunfire 25K servers crashing frequently in Denver (frequently was defined as more than once a month).

Indeed. I could not agree more. It's only been 4 days since the views of machine learning expert Michal Jordan were posted on /. Sounds like Elon musk lends too much credence to horribly reductionist cartoon models of the brain. As Jordan says in the interview, "... it’s true that with neuroscience, it’s going to require decades or even hundreds of years to understand the deep principles." (my emphasis) He's talking about the brain and the nature of intelligence.

We have the faintest pico–glimmer of a clue about how the brain works. How can we emulate it with a machine?

As a recent article in IEEE Spectrum discusses, Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons, such as those depicted in the movie Oceans Eleven, have become more capable. They can wipe out electronics with no visible signature. EMPs might be deployed either as portable weapons, dropped from a plane or fixed booby traps

This is a lesson that people have to keep re-learning. Remember that IEEE cybersecurity paper we read about here on /. just a few days ago? Here's a URL to the fifth recommendation, the particular one that's getting missed: http://cybersecurity.ieee.org/center-for-secure-design/define-an-approach-that-ensures-all-data-are-explicitly-validated.html

Captcha: cursed

I believe the differences between the two is mostly to the "no nonsense" approach to the Russians, and the fact that they like re-using designs and equipment that work instead of constantly re-inventing the wheel.

Except... they don't re-use designs and equipment. The current mark of the Soyuz (capsule) has almost nothing in common with the early ones other than a reasonably similar moldline. Soyuz has been modified and updated multiple times, not the least as it evolved from a general purpose Earth orbiter into a very specialized station taxi.
 

Sure, their spacecraft may look "ugly" (or at least, "uglier") than western or American ones, but they get the job done and they are reliable workhorses.

Reliable... is a very shaky claim given the number of near failures and almost disasters suffered by Soyuz over the years. It hasn't killed anyone in a long time, but it's come uncomfortably close an uncomfortably significant percentage of it's flights.[1] And speaking of flights and workhorses... even though it started flying over a decade earlier, it won't match the number of Shuttle flights until somewhere around the end of this decade at the current flight rate. (Last time I looked, I haven't calculated in a while.) In the same vein, while Shuttle suffered two LOCV accidents, it had zero complete mission failures and only one partial mission failure due to an abort-to-orbit placing it in too low of an orbit. Meanwhile, Soyuz had one pad abort, one failure to orbit, and at least two complete mission failures due to an inability to dock with a space station. (As well as several instances of either the orbital module or the re-entry module failing to separate properly.)
 
All of which is a roundabout way of saying the comparison isn't really as black-and-white as people would like it to be once you compare the actual Shuttle against the actual Soyuz (as opposed the largely fictional Soyuz the actual Shuttle is commonly compared to) and look at the actual numbers.

[1] Here's three accounts just covering reentry and landing failures.

Perhaps. IEEE Spectrum credits Maruska, as do several other histories of the subject.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Maruska seems to have made the first working violet LED. Some people claim that it doesn't qualify as a blue LED, but as far as I know there's no agreed-upon hard distinction between violet and blue. Maruska developed the right materials and process to make it, even if RCA pulled the plug before he had solved all of the problems necessary for commercialization.

The blue LED may have been harder than the red LED for the reasons that you give, but Holonyak did make some key accomplishments including the demonstration of a ternary alloy semiconductor and tuning the bandgap and thus color by varying alloy composition which has paved the way for achieving all of the different colors for LEDs in use today and is also used for the InGaN emission layer in the blue LEDs.

An alloy semiconductor instead of having, for example, one group III and one group V element in perfect 50% ratio in a uniform crystal structure mixes it up and uses two or more group III elements and two or more group V elements. In the case of Holonyak he used two group V elements: Arsenic and Phosphorous. At the time at least some people did not think that an alloy semiconductor would even work, and it is a little weird because the crystal structure is now non-uniform where a given group V crystal site contains one element or the other at random. In fact this randomness does slow down the electrons. Holonyak also showed that the bandgap could be tuned by varying the relative concentrations of the group V elements. You can read more about him in a nice IEEE profile.

I don't know enough about the history to say who should have gotten the Nobel, but certainly no matter who they selected somebody would have been snubbed.

IEEE Spectrum also has coverage, along with an excellent technical explanation.

It was written by a journalist who want to put his own 'touches' on it.

Better article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

Read much more coherent coverage from IEEE Spectrum.

Spectrum is great - important and well-written technological articles that 1) get their units correct and 2) don't get breathlessly hyped up like a press release. For a while, the print magazine was the main reason I kept my IEEE membership current. Now the whole thing is posted for free online.

A much better article on this device can be found at IEEE Spectrum. They, at least, are a news organization that can be trusted to get their units correct, and not conflate energy with power.

This comment is FUD. Is it "sponsored" by the oil industry?

"massive massive land area" - 0.1 percent of the US is "massive massive"?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

Standard conditions for efficiency measurements use 1.5 Air mass, which is about what North America has, so the crap about angles is all wrong.

Zuckerberg is also a traitor to the American tech worker.

Hey, Mark, MSFT just laid off 18,000 people; Cisco just laid off a bunch; MSFT just the other day closed its research center right down the street from you - filled with gifted coders and brilliance. Mark, there is a MOUND of studies showing NO shortage of STEM works in the US.

Some facts: The H-1B fiasco has cost Americans **$10TRILLION** dollars, since 1975. For anyone who wants to know the truth, read on.

One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1... Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...

Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...

Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...

How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...

There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...

Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...

Also, little known is the tactic of creating many different kinds of sub-visa categories to "fool the system". There are almost TWENTY different kinds of work visas. The whole thing is a sham and a lie, designed to drag down wages and keep from having to re-train Americans. Never thought I would see this day!

Some of the information presented in the following links will shock most Americans, because American corporate leaders don't want us to know the truth, and they are paying off policy makers with contributions to keep the truth from us. Bill Gates, John Chambers, Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and many, many others - including the principals of the most prominent immigration law firms, who profit from this outrage, are lying through their teeth. There is NO shortage of STEM workers in the US!!

Last, Zuckerberg has all out lied since day 1 about guaranteeing privacy on Facebook - just outright lied. Facebook has become something that teens shun and will soon go the way of MSFT, run by another deceiver, Bill Gates, on the H1-B issue.

As for free space twisted light, 32gb is slow: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-... Jun 2012 "Scientist in California and Israel say they've transmitted data through the air at a rate of 2.56 terabits per second using beams of "twisted light.""

Globalization has a fringe benefit: you can just make your products in countries where slavery is legal!

(For the uninformed, Malaysia and its neighbor Thailand make the majority of the world's hard drives.)

It's not a fringe benefit; it's a driving force.

Globalization has a fringe benefit: you can just make your products in countries where slavery is legal!

(For the uninformed, Malaysia and its neighbor Thailand make the majority of the world's hard drives.)

A google search for "terrorists are engineers" turns up a heap of relevant links, but here is one in particular from the IEEE.

My hypothesis is that working as an engineer in Pakistan (for example) is one of the most miserable jobs you can have, with horrible managers and only somewhat better pay to compensate. Having seen how it is, I would rather work as a farmer than an engineer in that situation, it's more satisfying and enjoyable.

Your post would be considerably more persuasive if you showed the price of uranium at which it became "unsustainable", and if you didn't throw out a random "well over 100x current cost" figure when your linked source only documented a 10-20 times cost using older technologies now being superseded described in the article. (Your provide no analysis to show that the even the 2007 price spike made nuclear power "unsustainable" - proof by unsupported assertion does not work)

At $130/kg the cost of uranium mining comprises a cost of 0.32 cents per kwh. So at $1000/kg this cost rises to 2.5 cents per kwh. The additional 2.2 cents is less than the estimated cost difference between advanced nuclear and more expensive future solar PV power, which I suspect you believe to be viable (I do). So the fearsome $1000/kg price still leaves nuclear power cheaper than solar. If more advanced technologies cut the cost (the normal pattern of things), and the topic of the Technology Review, this differential gets cut as well. A better article on seawater uranium extraction indicates that technologies under development should cost $300/kg, a price that drops the differential to only 0.42 cents per kwh, and making it a very minor component of nuclear power cost

They're not the only ones. The IBM mainframes have long been VMs implemented on top of various microcode platforms.

But the microcode implemented part or all of an interpreter for the machine code; the instructions weren't translated into directly-executed microcode. (And the System/360 Model 75 did it all in hardware, with no microcode).

And the "instruction set" for the microcode was often rather close to the hardware, with extremely little in the way of "instruction decoding" of microinstructions, although I think some lower-end machines might have had microinstructions that didn't look too different from a regular instruction set. (Some might have been IBM 801s.)

So that's not exactly the same thing as what the Pentium Pro and successors, the Nx586, and the AMD K5 and successors, do.

Currently mainframe processors, however, as far as I know 1) execute most instructions directly in hardware, 2) do so by translating them into micro-ops the same way current x86 processors do, and 3) trap some instructions to "millicode", which is z/Architecture machine code with some processor-dependent special instructions and access to processor-dependent special registers (and, yes, I can hear the word PALcode being shouted in the background...). See, for example, " A high-frequency custom CMOS S/390 microprocessor" (paywalled, but the abstract is free at that link, and mentions millicode) and "IBM zEnterprise 196 microprocessor and cache subsystem" (non-paywalled copy; mentions microoperations). I'm not sure those processors have any of what would normally be thought of as "microcode".

The midrange System/38 and older ("CISC") AS/400 machines also had an S/360-ish instruction set implemented in microcode. The compilers, however, generated code for an extremely CISCy processor - but that code wasn't interpreted, it was translated into the native instruction set by low-level OS code and executed.

For legal reasons, the people who wrote the low-level OS code (compiled into the native instruction set) worked for a hardware manager and wrote what was called "vertical microcode" (the microcode that implemented the native instruction set was called "horizontal microcode"). That way, IBM wouldn't have to provide that code to competitors, the way they had to make the IBM mainframe OSes available to plug-compatible manufacturers, as it's not software, it's internal microcode. See "Inside the AS/400" by one of the architects of S/38 and AS/400.

Current ("RISC") AS/400s^WeServer iSeries^W^WSystem i^WIBM Power Systems running IBM i are similar, but the internal machine language is PowerPC^WPower ISA (with some extensions such as tag bits and decimal-arithmetic assists, present, I think, in recent POWER microprocessors but not documented) rather than the old "IMPI" 360-ish instruction set.

The main differences between RISC and CISC, as I recall were lots of registers and the simplicity of the instruction set. Both the Intel and zSeries CISC instruction sets have lots of registers, though.

Depends on which version of the instruction set and your definition of "lots".

32-bit x86 had 8 registers (many x86 processors used register renaming, but they still had only 8 programmer-visible registers, and not all were as general as one might like), and they only went to 16 registers in x86-64. System/360 had 16 general-purpose registers (much more regular than x86, but that's not setting the bar all that high :-)), and that continues to z/Architecture, althoug

They "got to it" five years ago.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robot...

Obama has not done this and probably cannot do so. It is merely posturing.
The last EPA initiative for cleaning up power plants was passed as an ineffective set of regulations:
  http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/epas-toothless-carbon-regulations

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green...

"15 November 2012—Glass panels on rooftops and hurricane force winds don’t sound like the greatest of combinations, but solar power companies say their customers’ rooftop installations stood up very well to Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught."

Suniva panels are rated for 200 MPH winds ( http://www.suniva.com/document... ). The rest of the house would likely blow away first.

So what happens with those that change MAC address? I do that every few times a year with my wireless router, messes up some sites because for a few months sites that use MAC address for location through I was coming from Africa.

The fuck you say? Sites that use MAC address for location ?????

That isn't fucking possible on so many different levels. You are referring to sites that locate clients by their IP address (Layer-3) using a GeoIP database.

MAC addresses are 6 byte/48 bit addresses usually represented as 6 hex pairs. Every network device manufacturer applies to IEEE for a manufacturer code (first 3 bytes) and assigns the next 2^24 bits to devices in that class/production run. Because DECNET required the changing of the first 4 bytes of the MAC to "AA-00-04-00", the hard-coded NIC MAC address is a "HW recommended address", not a "hardware address" like so many Microsoft certified professionals (ok, and a fair number of *nix and network certified professionals) believe.

When people refer to changing MACs, they are talking about overriding the HW recommended layer-2 MAC address that does not propagate beyond the local LAN segment*, regardless of how large the local LAN segment is. For more on how the MAC address is (or should be) used in communications, google ARP/RARP. This whole fucking discussion is why netmask matters.

* Except when some application decides to expose the MAC beyond the "local area network" (think Appendix A of RFC 1001, DHCP with switch/router "helper addresses", any scripting language that allows enumeration of HW/SW (all of them), malware) or in any radio based protocol where the receiving antenna can observe layer-2.

Frank Malina: America's Forgotten Rocketeer

I think this is the intended artice:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aeros...

"While it was created for a TV show, it does really work, and it's quickly migrating into academia."

Somebody should explain that to Professor Tsachy Weissman and Ph.D student Vinith Misra, who specifically stated it doesn't really work, and then school them on it then.

The compression algorithm is fictional and does not work. That is what your linked article discusses.

This is about the Weissman Score.

"While it was created for a TV show, it does really work, and it's quickly migrating into academia."

Somebody should explain that to Professor Tsachy Weissman and Ph.D student Vinith Misra, who specifically stated it doesn't really work, and then school them on it then.

Real transformers dont die from EMP unless it is a direct hit by a megatron.

Please read this IEEE Spectrum article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...

Here we are years later and they're still asleep at the wheel.

Floating desalinization plants off the California coast use solar power to pump sea water through Nanoporous Graphene.

I am about to buy an external audio device. To my knowledge, this is the best device you can get for a similar amount of money... you can spend a lot more money to get something about as good, or spend less money and get something worse.

The device is called an O2 amplifier plus ODAC. It was designed by someone who went by the name of "NwAvGuy".

http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-vanished

The O2 is a really clean analog amplifier, and is actually open source hardware. You can get the parts list, order the parts yourself, solder everything together, and have your own O2. You can pair it with any DAC, but NwAvGuy also designed a DAC called the ODAC. He(?) said that he would have liked to make the DAC open source as well, but it wasn't practical.

I will buy mine from a company called JDS Labs. They sell a single nice integrated device with O2 and ODAC in one enclosure.

http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/

There are audiophiles who sneer at the O2 because it doesn't cost enough. At my previous job I spent hours listening to music on an O2 with Sennheiser 650 headphones, and I want to be able to listen to music with that level of quality again. I am willing to spend my own money to do it.

I thought about buying a really nice DAC but I always hesitated to spend the money because it can be hard to figure out what is worth the extra money, and what is just extra expense. I am friends with a world-class audio geek, and he agrees that this is a good quality audio device. If you want top quality and you are spending your own money, get or make an O2.

Why is it called the Lovelace test?

Maybe it's because Ada envisioned that the machines that would become computers would one day be capable of all kinds of useful things, as opposed to Babbage who saw them strictly as number crunchers.

Ada Lovelace was just someone that translated a book for the worlds first programmer.

Hardly. She didn't translate the book for a programmer, she translated the book for a machine. She was the programmer.

There's nothing mysterious about this. The problem is that if someone gets control of circuit breakers for large rotating equipment, they may be able to disconnect it, let it get out of sync, and reconnect it. This causes huge stresses on motor and generator windings and may damage larger equipment. This is a classic problem in AC electrical systems. A more technical analysis of the Aurora vulnerability is here.

The attack involves taking over control of a power breaker in the transmission system, one that isn't protected by a device that checks for an in-phase condition. Breakers that are intended to be used during synchronization (such as the ones nearest generators) have such protections, but not all breakers do.

Protective relaying in power systems is complicated, because big transient events occur now and then. A lightning strike is a normal event in transmission systems. The system can tolerate many disruptive events, and you don't want to shut everything down and go to full blackout because the fault detection is overly sensitive. A big inductive load joining the grid looks much like an Aurora attack for the first few cycle or two.

There's a problem with someone reprogramming the setpoints on protective relays. This is the classic "let's make it remotely updatable" problem. It's so much easier today to make things remotely updatable than to send someone to adjust a setting. The Aurora attack requires some of this. There's a lot to be said for hard-wired limits that can't be updated remotely, such as "reclosing beyond 20 degrees of phase error is not allowed, no matter what parameters are downloaded."