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Considering the 2010 Nobel prize in physics was won by a pair who made grapheme by simply cleaving graphite with tape, I'd say you really need to use your head.

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

CMX Consumer and/or Taggant SSV (price US $8,000.00)

        Access to CMX for 1 year
        Access to Taggant System IEEE Public Root Key, and blacklist for one year

http://standards.ieee.org/deve...

Most TI vendors at least offer some free feeds to suggest they have valuable content before asking you to pay up. Adoption of this new service isn't going to very good if no one can try it out/use it for free. *shrug*

This is why real professional reviewers, like Consumer Reports (and their nonprofit Consumers Union parent) don't accept advertising, and don't accept gratis review products. They go out and buy products from off the shelf from some random store. It also means they don't review vaporware products previews or pre-release samples that are typically cherry-picked before being sent to reviewers. They do auction or sell off products after review so as to reduce their expenses.

Hint, they've learned enough to being still in business of just reviewing products since 1936. Most review websites are increasingly obvious about how much of a shill they are. Personally I can't believe Extreme Tech to be so naive as to be surprised by this behavior.

Manufacturers typically don't advertise which controllers or brand of Flash RAM they use, because they are not willing to be held hostage to their suppliers. As far as they are concerned, as long as the product so do what the (brand) manufacturer claims, not what some reviewer claims from their sample of one testing, it is not false or misleading advertisement necessarily.

Then again I'm reminded that many tech enthusiasts websites rejected Bob Colwell's The Zen of overclocking (paywall; IEEE Computer, Volume 37 Issue 3, March 2004) as anti-overclocking drivel. Even though he was the chief IA-32 architect at Intel for of the Pentium Pro to Pentium IV processors.

The foreign countries might already have similar tech, maybe even years ago:
http://www.rslab.ru/downloads/...
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...
http://repository.tudelft.nl/a...
https://encrypted.google.com/b...

> this is at worst a covert communications channel that could be used to bypass network security controls in order to exfiltrate information from an otherwise secure network

Dude, you answered your own damn question. Covert communications channels for otherwise secure networks are a big fucking deal.

Complaining that this is not full-blown "bad bios" is to totally miss the point that something like this is absolutely necessary for a real life "bad bios." We've already seen a ton of other ways to get the software on the secure network in the first place.

It's not about intent at all - a MAC address is simply meaningless! A car's serial number is something that is officially alotted

IEEE disagrees with you to an extent. It is the registration authority for blocks of 16.7 million MAC addresses.

I'll just put this here: How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm.

Interestingly, I just received a link to an article in IEEE Spectrum, about How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm.

There is ample evidence that many American corporations have been actively discriminating against American Workers for well over a decade. This is especially true when it comes to STEM work skills. India, China, and Russia have been the main sources of off-shoring (and now, in-shoring). India is the absolute worst, with India's goovernment actively pushing for more H1-Bs because they would rather America hire them than India build proper educational and business infrastructure systems. Indian government is one of the most corrupt on earth (easily as corrupt as some of the worst African states).

Want proof? Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

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 aforementioned 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!!

I know this is an old article but the technology has not changed. The AI is just not there to differentiate objects yet

Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, it relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.
The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. When it's the autonomous vehicle's turn to drive itself, it compares the data it is acquiring to the previously recorded data, an approach that is useful to differentiate pedestrians from stationary objects like poles and mailboxes.

The AI is just not good enough yet to differentiate objects yet which leads to the third point I posted.

I am currently in graduate school for Biomedical Engineering and have looked into this a bit. Electroencephalography (EEG), ElectroOculography (EOG) and Electromyography (EMG) are all methods that can be used.

tl;dr version: Check out the EEG Based P300 speller system by Intendix. I think this is something you can buy and use right now.

http://www.gtec.at/Products/Co...

There is also a similar open source system based on OpenViBE (an open source Brain Computer Interface (BCI) platform) : http://openvibe.inria.fr/openv...

Here's a bit more detail:

There are several options, none of them extremely good. EEG or blink based systems are probably your best bet. The EEG based systems rely on something called the P300 Event Related Potential (ERP). Basically, the user pays attention to one object, waiting for an event (e.g., a letter on an on-screen keyboard). The brain's recognition of the event evokes an EEG signal that can be easily detected. These are kind of slow, but the tech has been around for more than a decade. This is the first kind of system to let a locked-in patient communicate with the outside world.

Blink based interfaces are very easy to build -- I've built one myself using a BIOPAC system, several electrodes, and an Arduino using a combination of EEG and EMG signals. You could probably do it using an instrument amplifier and an arduino alone. For a very similar system to what I built (currently unpublished), see "Virtual keyboard BCI using Eye blinks in EEG" by Chambayil et al at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...

There are also several invasive systems (i.e., those that require brain surgery) which have been tested. Most of these rely on Electrocorticography (ECoG), where an electrode array is implanted on the brain. Both computer cursor and wheelchair control have been achieved. This is probably not where you want to go.

Check out the Cortech Solutions EEG based spelling device: http://www.cortechsolutions.co...

Here are some scientific articles that are relevant:

“Bridging the Brain to the World: A Perspective on Neural Interface Systems” John P.Donoghue. Neuron 60, November 6, 2008 p511-521

(Chambayil, Brijil, Rajesh Singla, and Rameshwar Jha. "Virtual keyboard BCI using Eye blinks in EEG." Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), 2010 IEEE 6th International Conference on. IEEE, 2010.)

Good luck, and feel free to message me privately if I can provide more information.

Just a look at the U.N. education data (try http://www.gapminder.org/) and you will see 3rd world nations rising HUGE amounts. As everybody gets to the top, the relative differences are smaller and rankings should fluctuate more as it takes so little to decide between them. The spread is much smaller now. The difference between 1st place and 20th place is small.

Then you have metrics; that was just the distribution of the results and how it's glossed over completely, with metrics you have measurement issues like the demographics (does the top nation only test the top students?) what things you measure and how those differ (sometimes the test changes) and lastly, what should they know? If you teach concepts in math at a young age (which can include calculus and algebra) without technical drudgery until they are older (and better able to sit still) you are going to do poorly when the measurement expects you to learn in a certain prescribed order.

Mediocre is just fine. As long as most people are in the middle of the bell curve and that is "mediocre" which is enough for most jobs, then what is the big deal? We actually have much bigger problems than education that are not being solved. What good is it to have plenty of decent IT workers when industry will claim otherwise simply so they can suppress wage increases or perhaps they just want the best in the world and refuse to make do with mediocre? Even if that mediocre is better than the planet, they still can want more and for less. (In which case who says your top people will stay in the country? Especially when it is not going to be the best place for them to live? We've got a lot of brains here because they moved here and stayed here; so far.)

If you want to work at McDonalds, move to the EU where they make at least $20 and hour; with better healthcare. Middle income profession? Move to Canada, they make more than Americans + better healthcare + it's still a democracy.

The education system here for the most part, isn't so bad that it prohibits upward mobility for most students - IF THEY WORK AT IT. The culture will do them more harm than the education system. When kids get tried as pedophiles or jailed for nothing or shot or ...TV...games...food...legal drugs...consumerism... not to mention available JOBS... doesn't matter how good you teach them; they have bigger problems...

There is nothing wrong with a non-college educated half illiterate person doing construction work at a decent wage; or whatever - not every job requires the education and none should pay so little the economy is borked- which is what is happening among other things.

Yeah, that good STEM degree will make life wonderful and easy for sure! http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

Don't cell phones have GPS and Tower Tracking to get this information out?

Those things are nowhere near as accurate all the time as you might hope they were.

Good article in IEEE Spectrum on emergency calls (911, 999, etc.) and the impact of newer communication technology like VOIP and mobile.

Personally I found this an interesting read:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...

Quantum RNG based on off-the-shelf flash memory. It's not very fast (up to 10kbit/s), but it's quite simple and since you have flash memory in close to every device, it's probably a lot cheaper to do than using optical sensors.

This is interesting but to get the bits from flash
you do not have them for other things.

A camera because of the size of the array and speed is interesting as a source
of entropy in a system. Also they are not alike so it is very hard to model
a camera and generate the same result.

Part of the news here is that the crypto folk are worried that a TLA got in
bed with a five letter company and biased the built in sparkling new RNG
instruction hardware and silicon magic in ways that they like.

Add some additional entropy and mix it in then the TLAs of the world
have a more difficult path.

This is not exactly LavaRand or aquarium bubbles but the very fast
part has value.

It's really not that hard to design a provably secure random number generator without a backdoor. My colleagues at Waterloo did it. Here's another construction. And another. For that matter, you could even backdoor-proof Dual-EC-DRBG itself, by reducing the output rate by 16 to 33%, depending on the curve size (so that it's 5/6th to 2/3rds as fast as before). Any of these choices would be more appropriate than simply keeping the algorithm as-is.

But Human's don't match faces based on the entire population either. Just on the faces they know.

I don't know how many people the average person can recognise, but my guess is that it will be less than 13,000.

This anthropologist seems to have worked in this area, and he puts the number of people you can recognise and put a name to as 1500. (You'll recognise more than that, but you won't have names to go with them.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telec...

I don't like the looks of this:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...

.

See IEEE Code of Ethics (a simple, yet succinct and to-the-point code), and ACM's Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice. Even reading section 1 of the ACM code, it is abundantly clear it is not being legally enforced. In particular 1.03 & 1.06 jump out at me.

Problem is, professional ethics codes are generally not legally binding unless you are professionally licensed in a discipline by the state, and the licensing indicates the code of ethics that must be followed. Additionally, the ethics code might only apply if you are officially acting within your licensed capacity. (I error on the side of caution in that I assume everything I do professionally falls subject to my licensed discipline - just in case). Some states refer to professional organizations for the code of ethics (i.e. for Electrical Engineers, the IEEE code may be referenced), some states may provide their own code of ethics. I'm also unaware of any US states that professionally license software engineers.

I personally had one instance at my previous employer where my boss asked my to do something unethical, and illegal. I stalled for two weeks while I debated resigning or blowing the whistle to HR on my boss (and also possibly resigning). In the end, I didn't have to do either, because my boss was fired in that time for unrelated things and I was never asked by another manager to do the same action.

I used to receive Spectrum until I determined that my IEEE membership wasn't doing me much good. Thankfully, all of Spectrum's content is available on their website. It's not the same as a print magazine, but I still check it out.

(Link heavy...) I think you got the wrong end of the stick, there.

Some studies have been done that show a minimum 30% penetration is possible for *any* region (and this one stopped their modeling at 30%, so its likely higher)...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...

An earlier study from Europe (no link at moment) put the figure around 40%.

Another US study comes in around 45%...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

UK study comes in at >90%...
http://www.gizmag.com/uk-natio...

German study comes in at 100%...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
More on this...
http://www.renewablesinternati...

Some of these show cost savings from adding renewables, another one showed costs rising about 10-15%.

Iowa already got over 25% of power from renewables in 2013; not sure about the mix but I don't recall hydro being a big player there. The state has set a 40% target for 2015!

As for diverse power generation, that is a good rule of thumb, however the non-renewable generators cannot continue to operate in the long-term and nuclear in particular is even worse than variable renewables as the latter has a large correlation with demand curves. Anyone scanning the field for the past few years, however, is getting the idea that a diversity of storage will be at least as important. And there are a LOT of different options. The state of the art in this field has moved completely beyond the 1990s consensus that your post is predicated on.

Hydropower operating permits are up: http://grist.org/news/america-...

In Germany, they have closed a deal with Norway which has vast hydropower resources.

Batteries are considered the least economic storage solution, but I suggest you google "flow batteries". Here are some examples other storage types:

Zynth batteries
http://www.eosenergystorage.co...

Battery EV storage pilot in US
http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Ice bears (cold storage for hot nights)
http://www.renewgridmag.com/e1...

Undersea pumped hydro (you read that right)
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...

Power-to-gas
http://www.nasdaq.com/press-re...

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

The people that hacked Natanz would probably find it easier to get exclusive access to a zero day exploit on Windows 7 or 8 than XP.

When you're working for a government spy agency and have endless cash to pay off unprincipled 'security researchers' I think you can get into any OS whether old or new.

China can do the same thing. E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

http://www.symantec.com/connec...

If you look at Stuxnet it seems like the initial infection was done by leaving USB sticks around

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podca...

Ralph Langner: Yeah, that's true. So the distribution we see with Stuxnet is mainly done via infected USB sticks. So, in technical terms, it would be not appropriate to call Stuxnet a worm because Stuxnet does not distribute by self-replication over the Internet, but thisâ"it distributes mostly by infected USB sticks. This is the exact strategy that you would use when attacking an aero jet facility. So just like a nuclear power plant. In this case, it makes most sense to assume that the attack was carried out via the Russian integrator that built the plant. Because if you are familiar with the commissioning of such big plans, you know security in those situations is practically nonexistent, especially IT security. So engineers walk in and out with their notebooks, with their programming devices that they use for programming the PLCs. And those engineers that walk in and out, they easily be lured into picking up infected USB sticks, so this makes very much sense to assume that the attack was performed via the integrator just by making sure that some of their engineers accept infected USB sticks, plug them in their notebooks, go home with their notebooks to their company headquarters, and at some point in time, go with their infected notebooks to the target site. By the way, this also explains all the infections that we see in India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Because these are also regions where this particular integrator has business.

I've worked at companies where you were searched for removable storage going in. Hell I've worked at places where the USB ports where filled up with epoxy or disabled by group policy.

If you look at Bradley Manning air gap security is vulnerable to a single rogue employee. Also you need management that will enforce the policies - in Manning's case they should have stopped him bringing in CDs.

Well, maybe not totally different... It seems there are many stories about why IBM didn't secure CP/M from Gary Kildall. Reading this post conflicted a bit with the story I had read about the day Gary Kildall went flying. This link seemed fair... DOS heart stolen

The reprocessing canard has gone on long after plenty of information about it's future pitfalls has been in public record. See Here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ... "MOX is also three times as hot as spent uranium fuel, thanks to an accumulation of transuranic isotopes such as americium and curium, making it less fit for underground storage. Therefore, according to a 2000 consensus report on reprocessing prepared for France’s prime minister, spent MOX must cool for 150 years( in a water pool) before it can go into an underground waste repository... " A newer report : http://fissilematerials.org/li... says"Reprocessing has not led to a simplification or expedition of radioactive waste disposal;"..."France, which has the most extensive reprocessing and recycling program, does not attempt to recover the plutonium from the spent MOX fuel. In effect, it has exchanged the problem of managing spent fuel for the problem of managing spent MOX fuel, high level waste from reprocessing, plutonium waste from plutonium recycle, and eventually the waste from decommissioning its reprocessing and plutonium fuel fabrication facilities." As we are thinking about these issues and what the fire at WIPP means, we have no flip, easy answers. That doesn't mean the problems are insurrmountable, but we need to acknowledge their scope and work from reality.

Toyota's fine was not just about sticking pedals (and initially making deceptive statements about the safety of those pedals). Toyota's fine was in part for claiming that sticking pedals were the sole cause of unintended acceleration when in fact multiple defects in Toyota’s engine software directly caused at least one (decided by a jury) other crash.

An Update on Toyota and Unintended Acceleration Barr Code

U.S. Fines Toyota $1.2 Billion but Defers Criminal Prosecution Over Vehicle Safety Deceit - IEEE Spectrum

This is an important safety (and technology) issue that has flown mostly under the radar. I believe that is in part because journalists and the public believe they got their answer years ago, when in fact new evidence, expert testimony, and court verdicts have come to light. I think the issue is important enough that this misconception should be corrected whenever it's reported.

My opinion, not my employer's.

For an adult human, 400-600 is about the limit of what we can detect.

No.

For most average human adults, the limit is about 300 dpi.

Speaking as a graphic designer with over two decades of experience, there is a reason that graphic designers have always targeted a print resolution of 300 dpi for colour images.

How 400-600 entered the conversation is beyond me. The percentage of people who can visually tell the difference between a 300 dpi output and anything higher than that is very, very small. The number of people who can spot the difference at 400+ is not even a consideration for discussion.

When I was a graphic designer, I was told 300 dpi --- unless the image had type, in which case, 600. I've found some corroboration:

1. Experiments with Pixels Per Inch (PPI) on Printed Image Sharpness by Roger N. Clark
2. Guidelines for Author Supplied Electronic Text and Graphics
3. Digital Art Guidelines

Apparently the eye is more forgiving when looking at photographs than at text.

To encourage you to read the article, here are a few quotes:

• - "The situation [STEM compensation] is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.”"
• - "It [an over supply of STEM candidates] gives employers a larger pool from which they can pick the “best and the brightest,” and it helps keep wages in check. No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to “suppress” the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high."

Do read the IEEE Spectrum article.

oh god, those pictures! lolololololo! Definitely need to use one of those on my okcupid profile!

Plus, everybody knows, the proper pad placement is where the crease of you buttocks joins your thigh.

oh god, those pictures! lolololololo! Definitely need to use one of those on my okcupid profile!

Plus, everybody knows, the proper pad placement is where the crease of you buttocks joins your thigh.

oh god, those pictures! lolololololo! Definitely need to use one of those on my okcupid profile!

Plus, everybody knows, the proper pad placement is where the crease of you buttocks joins your thigh.

I just want a proper DAC without audiophile markup!

If you are spending your own money, you should buy the ODAC.

http://www.jdslabs.com/products/46/standalone-odac/

Also available built-in with an O2 Amp so you can use it with headphones.

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

This gear was designed by "NwAvGuy", and the audiophiles flamed him so hard he has never revealed his real name. He tested his designs against a commercially-available DAC costing over $1000 and found that they performed about the same. In double-blind tests, nobody can tell the difference, but that was to be expected given the results from the test equipment.

You also can buy a plain O2 headphone amp, or if you like to solder you can build your own. NwAvGuy released all plans and specs and gave advice on how to do the build. For the DAC, you must sign documents with the chip vendor and buy DAC chips in quantity, so the DAC isn't practical as a DIY project. But you can buy just the DAC board and build it in to your own O2 to make your own O2+ODAC.

I know someone who spent big bucks on an audiophile headphone amp. He lived on top of a hill that also had broadcast towers for local radio stations. His expensive amp picked up the radio broadcasts (not sure if its own electronics acted as an antenna, or if the AC lines in the house did and its power supply picked up the signal, but either way it was acting as a radio receiver). He bought an ODAC + O2 and despite costing much less, it offered clean audio without picking up the radio broadcast.

The ODAC only supports USB audio. NwAvGuy discussed his reasons and you can find them if you search his blog for FAQs about the DAC.

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

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...

The article mentions Parrot's Ethernet AVB connected systems. The carriage of audio/video media over AVB has been standardized by the AVB Transport Protocol in IEEE 1722, and yes, it is just Ethernet, no IP.

The theory is that your car is a LAN, and does not need to have Layer 3.

How can they keep earning money on government contracts when such contracts are resulting in lawsuits and getting them fired?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskf...

While I don't disagree with the notion that leaded gasoline is a major contributor to lead in the environment, I was a little curious how much naturally-occuring lead there is.

Uranium has a 4.5 billion year half-life, and the end-product of its decay chain is lead. Since the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, you should expect to find about equal amounts of uranium and lead in the environment overall (I'm not an expert on how minute quantities of these elements act in seawater). The trace uranium in seawater is about 3.33 parts per billion.

According to TFA (which didn't give exact numbers), "the lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what youâ(TM)d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools". An Olympic-sized swimming pool is about 2.5 million liters. According to Google, 1 teaspoon in 2.5 million liters is about 2 parts per billion.

So the amounts of lead they're detecting are about 0.01 parts per billion, or two orders of magnitude less than the amount of naturally-ocurring uranium in seawater. The charts linked in TFA bear this out. Clicking through random charts, lead concentrations are around 25 pmol/kg, while uranium concentrations are around 3 nmol/kg (3000 pmol/kg).

So (1) for whatever reason uranium dissolves in seawater much more readily than lead, and (2) the amounts of lead they're detecting are minuscule even by "trace elements" standards.

So there's a link, but it is a little disingenuous to say he's suing to stop fracking. His suit (linked from TFA) is about the water tower. He doesn't want a high-rise water tower across the street. He's actually ok with a low-rise water tower that he can't really see from his ranch. So, over-react much, headline writer?

If there weren't fracking to be done then the water wouldn't be needed, then there wouldn't be a water tower or the extra truck traffic, so it's not unrelated to fracking. Perhaps not about groundwater or earthquakes or whatever, but still an issue.

And this actually brings up a less-often mentioned concern about gas extraction -- the conflict between water and energy resources. You need water to produce energy (and energy to "produce" water). IEEE Spectrum had a good feature on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Thanks - didn't know about that one, and I'm grateful for the information .... It's been worrying me more and more that idiots (i.e. politicians) keep commissioning more and more nuclear power generation facilities without having any idea (and without even wanting to know) how we're going to clean up the aftermath. It's good to know that somebody has made at least one serious attempt to try it. Although ...

Still has the "what do we do with nuclear waste?" problem, but it was decommissioned anyway.

... as you noted, encasing the reactor vessel in concrete foam and burying it under 45 feet of gravel doesn't really cut it.

If you haven't seen it, there's a really instructive documentary ("Into Eternity"), made in 2010, about a nuclear waste storage repository ("Onkalo") being constructed deep underground in Finland, that is tackling - among other things - the extreme difficulty of figuring out how to construct signage ("Stay Away - Extreme Danger To Health") at the entrance to the facility, that will still be adequately durable, legible and understandable to descendant humans 100,000 years from now.

As the narrator says, "Onkalo must last 100,000 years. Nothing built by man has lasted one tenth of that time."

Another instructive documentary covers the herculean efforts made by the Russians/Ukrainians at Chernobyl to avoid a worse disaster than we already had.

It's a horrific story. They used soldiers to go up on the roof of the reactor building, each of whom could only risk being there for 45 seconds before getting their full dose for the year - enough time to chuck 2 shovelfulls of debris over the side, and then run away fast. In the end, they had to mobilise 500,000 (!) workers of all kinds to get the emergency cleanup done - and as we all know, even then it wasn't done very well, so much so that the EU is having to do it all over again.

I don't even want to think about how Fukushima's gonna go - it seems to be a worse mess than Chernobyl (albeit at a somewhat better designed & built power station). One fact that has stayed with me was how, at the time the tsunami took out the power, the on-site engineers had to go get their car batteries out of their own cars, bring them in, and wire them up in series so as to power up the control room instrumentation to find out what was going on in the reactors. We all owe those guys a beer.

It seems to me (somebody else coined this, not me) that our technological capabilities have advanced faster than we have evolved the ability to safely manage them, and we should just take a step back and do some very careful thinking. We can afford to reduce our lifestyles, wait a while, and revisit The Plan repeatedly until its perfect - we only have the one planet. It's the greedy short-termism involved in the rush to have it all that disgusts me.

Personally I imagine the way forward will involve giant solar panels in orbit collecting the Sun's bounteous energy and somehow transmitting it down to the surface. I have no idea whether that's just science fiction :-) .... it does of course require everyone to stop fighting wars, and divert all the money back into a proper space programme.

Division by zero is mathematically undefineable.

If A * B = C and C / B = A, you can't have B being zero without C being also zero (in which case the equation is valid for all values of A, a.k.a undefined). For every other value of C the equation has no solution. The only reason IEEE defined division by zero as infinity was to make errors easier to handle.

Yeah, the users/accounts affected data is the only quantitatively useful info so far. Here's a chart I made comparing users affected through Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Nuclear power has a larger carbon footprint than you might think: from the concrete used to build the stations, to the energy used in the mining, extraction and refining processes to produce the fuel. It can take more than 6 years to mitigate the energy used in building of the facility, let alone the actual construction costs.

On account of the fact that every utility scale fission reactor design is really nuclear steam power, every watt of power it produces requires two watts of heat dissipation using water. Of course this means the plants have to shut down if it's too hot, and that source of fresh water you were drawing on is not as cool as it was when the plant was built (eg, due to climate change).

It's also super expensive, because risks must be mitigated; some have pointed out this has led to a negative learning curve of nuclear power.

Much as it is kind of cool that people are using nuclear physics to make power, it really is very dated technology. Phasing it out in favor of cheaper, safer alternatives is a much better idea: with the advent of flow batteries, liquid metal batteries, you don't need to have peaking power plants paired with the renewables. You just need more renewables.

Programming. Not "using." Whoosh!

Don't hurt yourself lugging those goal posts around (that's not what you wrote). So you're still an idiot - can't make an intelligent argument, can't write what you later claim you meant. Most of the Linux kernel (80%) code is written by well paid programmers, and many of us make good money writing code for Open Source software (more than M$ pays their wave programmers, which I why I don't work there anymore). Of course - if you knew anything about programming and how to read employment ads you'd know that.

Here is an interesting article featuring the Hitachi Business Microscope:

Can Technology Make You Happy?

Given that they're already running trials of nerve-electronics interfaces I'd say your understanding is wrong.

Again.

Did you actually read the article you linked? It's about restoring function to existing nerves, not wiring new hardware to the cut-off nubs. Cool in it's own right, but obviously not what I'm talking about.

But please, don't let a little thing like facts get in the way of being a childish dick.

Given that they're already running trials of nerve-electronics interfaces I'd say your understanding is wrong.

Again.

TFS is not very clear, but if you read it closely (twice, in my case) it appears these guys are suggesting diverting the money collected from H1-B visa applications into "STEM" (how I hate that acronym) education for poor American kids. That makes a little bit more sense insofar as, if you stand on your head and squint, it looks like a token effort to tax immigration to pay for education in the US.

It's funny how everyone who makes his living on research or advocacy for a particular problem says the solution to that problem is to provide more funding for his organization. That is what TFS appears to be really saying - a bunch of people working on STEM education want more government funding for STEM education. Film at 11. ;-)

I don't know how much an H1-B visa fee is, but it must be less than the salary difference between an H1-B guest worker and the actual labor rate set by the domestic market. Otherwise no one would make money off H1-B workers and there would not be this constant clamor for more of them. This small amount of money, collected from a relatively small population of H1-B workers, will never be more than crumbs from the table anyway. It might be enough to fund a dog and pony show like FIRST, but not nearly enough to effect systemic change in the educational system.

In September 2013, the IEEE magazine ran a special series on the STEM "crisis," and based on that, I am now convinced that crisis is nothing more nor less than wishful thinking that high-tech industries can someday, somehow get skilled workers for less than the fair market rate.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/tools-toys/roundup-100wattequivalent-leds

Here's some 100w equivalents if you're interested.

Multirotors, quad, hex or octo are inherently less efficient and manoeuvrable, than the classic heli design. As much as 20% worse. This is much better and the standard helicopter design is still better. Find a quadcopter that can fly upside down.

Of Cows and Power Lines
Cattle seem to have an internal compass--one that's messed up by power lines
Posted 1 Jul 2009 | 4:00 GMT
IEEE Spectrum

A team of researchers from Germany and the Czech Republic has already discovered that, all factors being equal, cattle and two species of deer tend to align themselves along a north-south axis using some innate magnetic sense, and that this preferred alignment is disturbed when they graze under high-voltage power lines.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/of-cows-and-power-lines

Your search skillz must suck. Updated daily: http://standards.ieee.org/develop/regauth/oui/public.html

Your reading skillz must suck. That page contains no information related to the question being asked.

Robots made a comeback - on the moon, after a 37-year hiatus.

Apart from that, the article misses a bunch of very important trends and events in robotics. For example, industrial cooperative robots ( like Rethink Robotics Baster ) etc taking off.

A much better, video laden article here
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/video-friday-our-favorite-robot-videos-and-biggest-stories-from-2013

GPUs have already introduced half-precision -- 16-bit floats. An earlier 2011 paper by the same author as the one in this Slashdot summary cites a power savings of 60% for a "an approximate computing" adder, which isn't that much better than just going with 16-bit floats. I suppose both could be combined for even greater power savings, but my gut feeling is that I would have expected even more power savings once the severe constraint of exact results is discarded.