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http://www.math.psu.edu/sellersj/courses/math035/fa11/handouts/07_infinitely_many_primes.pdf

1) This proof is not a âoeconstructiveâ proof. We do not build an infinite list of primes in the process. This is a proof by contradiction.

well a quick google search for "laptop power consumption by component" first link is a PDF

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.87.5604&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Which is a fairly nicely done research paper, sure in idle the screen is the most, but under load the CPU dominates, and that is very true even in a lot of newer laptops..

In that case, I'd like to direct you to:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.57.7151

A genuine polynomial time, non-probabalistic test for primality, based off of Radhakrishnan's incredible proof.

Something which becomes incredibly freaking relevant if you're doing any type of modeling/cryptographic/simulation software very quickly.

You have fun with your elegant implementation

They'll kill any pollinator unlucky enough to be on the wrong plant.

Actually, Neonicotinoid residues are found in pollen and nectar consumed by pollinators such as bees and butterflies. The residues can reach lethal concentrations in some situations.

http://extension.psu.edu/plants/tree-fruit/news/2012/new-report-on-neonicotinoids-and-bees

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.344

"Specifically, if it is accepted that algorithmic complexity is an appropriate definition of the complexity of a programming project, then claims of purely objective estimation of project complexity, development time, and programmer productivity are necessarily incorrect"

The original PARCTAB, basically the first computer to roughly look and work like a modern touch screen device, used networking based on ceiling-mounted LEDs. A paper describing the system is here. Many systems used IrDA communications after that. Of course, it's probably been a lot of engineering work increasing the speed of the system, but it's not a fundamentally new idea, just the evolution of old technology.

You can't prove a negative.

Anyone who has studied math or theoretical computer science knows that that statement is untrue. Proofs of non-existence are not at all uncommon. There is no construction in Euclidean geometry for a regular heptagon. There is no algorithm that solves the Halting Problem. No cryptosystem can have statistical security unless the key is at least as long as the plaintext. These statements can all be proved and they are all famous results.

So, I did some more reading on timezones / DST this weekend. You might want to take a look at http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/DST.html as it seems to state outright that DST is a "bad thing" for farmers. The primary issues that DST addresses actually seem to be related to safety and energy consumption. I'm still interested in agricultural examples if you got 'em, but I'm definitely a bit more skeptical now.

Related to this, before time zones estimating what the time in another city was very hit-and-miss. Different municipalities simply set clocks according to the sun's position in the sky, resulting in utter chaos for railroads.

As railways and telecommunications improved, however, timekeeping became more baffling. Each railroad would use its own standard time, usually based on the local time of its headquarters, and their schedules were published in accord with their own time. Some railroad junctions even had a separate clock for each railroad. The main station in Pittsburgh, for example, kept six different clocks. In 1883, there were twenty-seven different local times in Illinois alone. Railroad users were inconvenienced and confused by the lack of uniformity. The difficulty came to an end in 1883 when U.S. and Canadian railroads adopted four standardized time zones which replaced the multiplicity of local times.

Daylight Saving Time: When, Where, and Why? The adoption of DST was an outgrowth of the experiences with time zone adoption.

I have no degree and get $20 an hour.

Wow, $20 an hour. Impressive. [/sarcasm] That's about what, $40,000 per year if you work full time? The average starting salary for an engineering graduate in 2011 was around $61,000

I'll skip the indoctrination and keep earning double what these college kids get.

You make barely more than an engineering intern gets while still in school. You're really showing them how it's done.

No. You seem to be applying some wildly incorrect, reductionist logic that if the total population size doesn't matter, then magically the sample size doesn't matter. The sample size is important. What's not important is how large the population that sample is drawn from. What dictates the sample size is how high you want your confidence and how large the effect size is.

Let's say you're measuring the fraction of tweets containing at least one happy word for a geographical area. If, in reality, 50% of tweets from that area contain happy words, you don't need a very large sample size to accurately measure that. If, on the other hand, 0.1% of tweets contain happy words, you need a much larger sample size.

Note that this is only really true for large populations -- which is most surveyed populations. For ludicrously small sample sizes, all statistics are bad, but then, statistics tells you that tiny sample sizes are very bad. So stop using that as an example.

A handful of trivially-found references.

Some schools have created entire Information Science Technology colleges that serve this exact need, one of the first and best is at Penn State, http://ist.psu.edu/. These do a much better job of preparing you to work with a range of higher level technologies (html, databases, VB or Java) with focus on business and real world application.

Most schools have an IT focused business degree option that gets you exposed to databases and programming, but you still get the whole business core block of Accounting/Logisticts/etc as well.

I actually dropped out of comp sci as and undergrad and did the business school IT focus before graduate school in comp sci. So glad I did, the business degree was far more useful as a programmer in the real world. I enjoy being able to specialize in a certain comp sci field, but the undergraduate part is horrible and completely useless in preparing people to actually work.

It's when I discovered that I am either not my mother's child, or that I have bombay phenotype, because my mom is blood type AB+, where I, and all my siblings, are type O+.

There's other possible explanations. I messed up my test in high school and didn't discover my true blood type for almost a decade, but even if the tests are right, it's possible your mother is a chimera. If she's a fraternal twin, I'd bet money on it.

Mann's data and methods are not hidden. You and anybody can find the information for the original hockey stick graph here.

Links please!

Conversely, for those interested in the other half of the equation -- namely understanding the spatial dimension -- a new paradigm such as bivectors, trivectors, antiscalar, wedge product is necessary.

A Bigger Mathematical Picture for Computer Graphics (Eric Lengyel)
http://www.terathon.com/wscg12_lengyel.pdf

A Unified Language for Mathematics and Physics
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.6311&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Clifford Algebra and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
http://www.montgomerycollege.edu/Departments/planet/planet/Numerical_Relativity/Geometric_Algebra/caiqm.pdf

The Unified Family of all physical quantities
http://www.naturics.eu/?page_id=1068

The Muslims are not worse than what Christians used to be with the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials...

Firebombing movie theaters, murdering abortion doctors, tormenting the families of dead soldiers...

Religions can change, the problem is that Islam largely haven't.

Just because you conveniently ignore the violence of modern "Christians," doesn't mean it's not happening. Pot, say hello to kettle.

Perhaps you should consider removing the 2x4 from your own eye, before you whine about the dust speck in your neighbors. - Matthew 7:5

You are confusing data that Phil Jones at the CRU deleted (which was a copy, the original data is still available from original sources) with Michael Mann. The data and methods for Mann's original "Hockey Stick Graph" are located here.

(Ed. note: I've been trying to post comments like this one since 2012-09-01, but they never appeared on my article at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. So I finally posted this reply at my website, Slashdot, and Mike Haseler's website Scottish Skeptic.)

Let's get the facts straight. Even doubling CO2, means its greenhouse effect would only rise global temperatures by 1C. That is half the threshold for action set by the IPCC.

But, this scam has nothing to do with their real science. These charlatans would be predicting the same nonsense if CO2's effect were twice as high or half as much, because the real contribution of CO2 is much smaller than the natural variation.

And let's not forget:

1. This scam is based on a rise in temperature from 1970 to 2000 which happens to be coincident with rising CO2. The overwhelming bulk of this rise has nothing to do with CO2 greenhouse effect.

2. Largely the same academics who cry wolf over this short term trend were crying wolf over the short term cooling before the 1970s.

3. It all stopped in 2000 (1998 to be precise). That's 14 years without warming, compared to the 30 year trend they say proves warming will continue till the earth fries (much like we were heading for an iceage)

4. And just to cap it all, it warmed the same amount, for the same period, before CO2 was measured rising between 1910 and 1940 and guess what ... we didn't end up global warming doomsday then either. [Mike Haseler, 2012-09-01]

0. Many diverse lines of evidence (paleoclimate, modern observations, fundamental physics) show that doubling CO2 warms the planet by roughly 3C.

1. Human CO2 forcing has increased dramatically since 1970, while solar irradiance, volcanic activity, cosmic rays, solar flares, etc. have remained about the same.

2. Even during the 1970s, most scientific papers were predicting warming.

3. Skeptical Science's "going down the up escalator" shows at a glance that this often-repeated myth about global warming ending in 1998 is wrong.

4. The rate of warming from 1910 to 1940 was about 0.13C/decade compared to about 0.18C/decade from 1975 to 2005. But scientists don't simply compare the rates; they examine natural and human radiative forcings which change the global climate's total energy, which is indeed an average over at least several decades. In the early 20th century there was a lull in volcanic eruptions which usually cool the climate by blocking out the sun over a few years. Early human CO2 emissions and a slight increase in the Sun's brightness also played small roles. Internal variability modes, which shift energy from one part of the globe to another (i.e. climate cycles) are also important. Temperatures measured in the 1940s were warmer than the models; this discrepency is thought to be due in part to Ar

The cited article is rather lame. But there's a real issue here that we're going to reach soon. What rights do mobile robots, like self-driving cars have?

As a practical matter, this first came up with some autonomous delivery carts used in hospitals. Originally, they were programmed to be totally submissive about making people get out of their way. They could be stalled indefinitely by people standing and talking in a corridor, or simply by a crowd. They had to be given somewhat more aggressive behaviors to get anything done. There's a serious paper on this: "Go Ahead, Make My Day: Robot conflict resolution by aggressive competition (2000) "

Autonomous vehicles will face this problem in heavy traffic. They will have to deal with harassment. The level of aggressive behavior that will be necessary for, and tolerated from, robot cars has to be worked out. If they're too wimpy, they'll get stuck at on ramps and when making left turns. If they're too aggressive (which, having faster than human reflexes, they might successfully pull off), they'll be hated. So they'll need social feedback on how annoyed people are with them to calibrate their machine learning systems.

I don't know if the Google people have gotten this far yet. The Stanford automatic driving people hadn't, last time I checked.

The sorting paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.52.7331&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Trilobites: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Punctuated_equilibria (see references)

I'm from Western Massachusetts and can tell you that global warming has been driving maple syrup production northward for half my life.

The family with the farm nearest the subdivision where I grew up made and sold their own syrup all through the '70s and '80s from a long double row of old sugar maples along the road. Some time in the '90s, production began to fall off. Now I don't think they sell syrup at all, don't even know if they collect/boil sap for personal use. Could be just the age of their trees, or the age of their family members who know the work, but there's also a trend here. And FWIW, the neighborhood I'm talking about has always been right on the cusp between the weather forecasts for the Connecticut Valley and for the "hill towns." It's in the hill towns where maple syrup is still produced in quantity in MA.

Here's an article noting Massachusetts production has been up and down in recent years and a prediction "that climate change over roughly the next hundred years will result in the loss of maple trees across much of New England." http://articles.boston.com/2012-03-07/metro/31132698_1_maple-syrup-syrup-producers-sugaring-season

And here's a PDF noting a climate-affected declining trend in U.S. syrup production generally with corresponding increase in Canada. The statistics admittedly don't all point the same direction but they're still sad. http://www.cara.psu.edu/about/publications/Maple_syrup.pdf

TCP/IP isn't really following the OSI layer model, as convenient as that model is for discussion purposes.

If you want to understand how assymetric speeds slow down TCP/IP, here's a paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.5293

The original article from Penn State is much clearer

http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2012-news/Wolszczan8-2012

Rather than speculate you could actually go read the report on Mann and see who the investigating officials were:

Composition of the Investigatory Committee:
Sarah M. Assmann, Waller Professor
Department of Biology

Welford Castleman, Evan Pugh Professor and Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science
Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics

Mary Jane Irwin, Evan Pugh Professor
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Nina G. Jablonski, Department Head and Professor
Department of Anthropology

Fred W. Vondracek, Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies

Research Integrity Officer:
Candice Yekel, Director of the Office for Research Protections

Penn State never did a formal investigation of Sandusky until the past year so it's unlikely that any of those people knew anything about it.

Garbage Collection, which kills User Experience due to unpredictable freezing of the whole program

Note that this is a product of a crappy garbage collector in the Java runtime, not intrinsic to garbage collection per se--there are plenty of well-known real time GCs that allow you to set a maximum latency on the collector.

See, for instance:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.4550
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/GC/Realtime/Realtime.html
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=604155

*What socialist governments* since LBJ? The tax rate pretty much dropped uniformly after the end of his presidency. It's the lack of socialism that has fucked the US up.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/sjh11/images/mtrgraph.gif

A larger and heavier aircraft must displace more air and create more lift to sustain flight, compared with small, light aircraft. Therefore, they will create sonic booms stronger and louder than those of smaller, lighter aircraft. The larger and heavier the aircraft, the stronger the shock waves will be.

source

Moreover,

The Air Force has restrictions in place such that sonic booms be produced over water at altitudes above 30,000 feet whenever possible. When impossible, aircraft may only fly at supersonic speeds in specially designated areas as dictated by the Headquarters of the United States Air Force, Washington, D.C., and the FAA.

source

The problem in Canada, I'm guessing, is that it's so far north that one is less likely to have a good enough view of the southern sky.

Maybe not. We have a small satellite dish at our cottage, which is at 61.5N - further north than any major population center in Canada (between Whitehorse and Yellowknife in latitude). It works fine, with the added benefit that its angle is steep enough that snow does not accumulate in it; apparently this is a problem in parts of the Midwest. The usual issues with satellite still apply, such as heavy rainclouds degrading the signal, and making sure the path to the satellite is free of trees and expected to remain so for a few decades.

Minor gripe: why does slashcode not render the degree symbol (° or °)?

For ten-fingered input, the maximum gains in typing performance brought on by a new keyboard layout are minimal; one or two percent at best. As long as your hands can reach the whole keyboard, the difference in time it takes for any given keystroke is negligible. The real benefit that comes from, for example, Dvorak vs. QWERTY, is a reduction in stress on the hands, and hence RSI. Saying that QWERTY "optimized" typewriter jamming would be overly generous; the improvement over the traditional alphabetical key ordering was only performed to a modest extent, and the typists of the day were not proficient touch-typists as we are now.

In the case of thumb-typing, however, great improvement is possible. The Metropolis keyboard, for example, was generated stochastically by optimising an energy function based on letter pair frequency, and provides a 40% typing speed increase over QWERTY.

Actually, OBDIII might require a cellular or satellite transceiver in every new vehicle. That would allow the car to immediately alert the government when your vehicle does not meet emissions requirements. They would then contact you and require immediate repair. That the system could also include GPS and could potentially be used for tracking is beside the point. http://lobby.la.psu.edu/_107th/093_OBD_Service_Info/Organizational_Statements/SEMA/SEMA_OBD_frequent_questions.htm

They can be read up on here:
http://tns.its.psu.edu/networking/timeReference.cfm

It's not "perhaps" I'm "now" limiting my argument to 48fps vs higher rates; this whole conversation started because I was defending 48fps against someone who was complaining it wasn't 120. Neither is this just "slightly less outrageous" than saying 24fps is enough; anyone can distinguish 24fps from higher rates with sufficiently quick full-frame motion, but that simply isn't the case with 48fps.

The BBC "study" you cited is an unscientific failure. It involved no blind testing; the viewers knew at all times what framerate they were looking at, meaning the results are almost sure to be dominated by confirmation bias. Also, they spent a good deal of time and effort looking at individual frames, looking at slow-motion playback, and complaining about the loss of detail in an individual frame caused by having non-infinite shutter speeds, none of which has any bearing on whether there's a difference in perceptible detail when played back at normal speed. On top of that, they used naive averaging of frames from their high-speed camera to simulate the slower speeds, which is a very poor approximation; their artifical low-frame-rate videos definitely looked worse than real 50fps capture. (You have to have a properly weighted average to get anything close to the right results; see this paper for some detail.)

Look at my reply to another poster regarding the other effects which come into play when you're considering the framerate of games.

There is next to no real evidence. Indeed, these puzzle piece programming languages are almost 30 years old, e.g., ancient paper.The puzzle piece idea back then did not do the trick. Why should it now?

Of course, syntax is only a very small part of the problem. Semantics is the real challenge. The idea that syntax alone makes programming simple would be like saying "an English sentence needs to have a noun and a verb [that is the syntax]" and then suggesting "now that you know the syntax write a best selling novel"

I have to disagree with your math. First of all, most people are grouped into population centers and fracking is not taking place very close to those population centers. So, if "only" 10% of the water is poisoned, then far fewer than 10% of the population will be affected. Take PA - 12 million population. Something like 9 million of those live in the top-10 metro areas. Lets make the ridiculous assumption that the remaining 3 million all live in fracking territory and all of them drink well water. 10% is 300,000 people affected by fracking.

The reality is that there are 1 million private wells in PA, which incidentally is the 2nd most in the nation if you like useless trivia. So it's a pretty good bet that those 3 million people are using well water. But look at the region with wells, and then look at the population map of PA. It is clear that most of the wells are nowhere near the populated areas of the state. Much of them are in state forests. I don't think we are talking about anywhere near 300,000 people in PA.

But even if we were, let's take your 10% number. We have some pretty shady operators here in PA. We have spills - even massive spills into the Susquehanna - of the frack water. Despite our crappy drilling companies with their amusing-if-it-were-somewhere else attention to safety, no one has been able to show even a short-term serious health threat, let alone some thousand-year superfund site.

What exactly is the mechanism you fear will make the well water undrinkable for thousands (or millions) of years?

Shills for the oil industry.

Well, they are funded by the fossil fuel industry (not just oil; that includes coal), or by billionaires whose money comes from in the oil industry. (For this campaign, anyway; they also work on other issues.) Whether this makes them "shills" is a value judgement.

What we learn the billboard, however, is simply this: the Heartland Institute is a policy advocacy organization, not a science institute. They are no longer even pretending to have any interest in actual science. Their only interest in science is to attack it in order to make policy points.

They have stated this before-- Joseph Bast, the president of Heartland, stated that the Heartland Institute's focus is "commitment to a free market policy agenda," and that the main motivation for the Heartland Institute being involved in this debate is to "prevent the U.S. government from adopting policies that favor renewable energy," which he claims would cause an "economic disaster for the country."

But, despite clear statements that their agenda is related to policy, not science, people have been taking their attacks on science seriously.

Some links:
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2012/01/ethical-analysis-of-the-climate-change-disinformation-campaign-introduction-to-a-series.html
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201107070016

Most scientists actually show their work. Mann did not. Heck he can't even reproduce it. He can't even show others his work. It took years of sleuthing by many to uncover the details and depths of Mann's frauds in his Hockey Stick Statistical Lies.

Here is the data and methods from Mann, et. al. (1998/1999), the "Hockey Stick Graph". Mann's temperature reconstruction is pretty much in agreement with at least 10 other reconstructions done since then by different researchers using different data sources and methods. His hockey stick is the blue line in this comparison graph of 11 temperature reconstructions.

I think when you say "he can't even reproduce it" you are conflating Mann with Phil Jones.

Full access to Michael Mann, et. al.'s 1998/1999 "Hockey Stick" data and methods is available here.

http://www.engr.psu.edu/awe/misc/ARPs/ARP_InfoSheet_Science.pdf

It's partly a question of relative interest in different sciences. Women are strongly represented in psych, sociology, chemistry and biology.

Here's a reference to a larger study.

Data collected thus far from various regulatory agencies responsible for enforcement of gas well drilling regulations indicate that more than 95 percent of complaints received from homeowners suspecting problems from nearby gas well drilling are instead due to pre-existing problems or other land-use activities, such as agriculture.

http://extension.psu.edu/naturalgas/issues/environmental/resources/water

If you go here: Data Sources

You will find a link to Mann et al (1998/1999) which has the data and code that Michael Mann and his coauthors used in the original "Hockey Stick" graph. If you want the original raw data I think you'll have to go to the original papers that Mann got his data from.

Just for your entertainment the link to Michael Mann's 1998 "hockey stick" data and methods is here.

Climate change denial is a Crime Against Humanity. That's a fact. Those who created this falsification of science and cost the world's peoples hundreds of millions of lives are criminals who will be pursued like criminals, prosecuted like criminals and hung like criminals.

No one cares what criminals think of the fairness of the process through which they're prosecuted. What matters is what society thinks of it.

Read history. Sociopaths always think they've hatched the perfect plan to use the law to evade the law. They think there's some clever legalese tactic that will just spin justice around and around itself so much that it will just have to let them go in the end.

This is exactly what Goring attempted in his trial.

"It was my honest opinion!!!".

"It was my religious belief!!!"

They told me to gas those Jews; I was under orders!"

"We were the law, so we broke no law!"

"The scientific evidence was inconclusive"

Yeah. You know what? You need to read history to see how this goes. Here's a good place to start.

http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2010/10/a-new-kind-of-vicious-crime-against-humanity-the-fossil-fuel-industrys-disinformation-campaign-on-cl.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/nov/01/climate-science-disinformation-crime

Here's some more: http://climateforce.net/2012/01/17/crimes-against-humanity-pat-michaels-serial-deleter-of-inconvenient-data/

Like just about everything done in perl.perl-considered-harmful

International characters are much faster for me on the Mac (link).

This is a gold mine of resources. There are a lot of great things going on with methane studies, from fuel cells to low energy conversion methods.

Sen and postdoctoral associate Minren Lin announced a breakthrough. By dissolving a powder of rhodium chloride in water, along with carbon monoxide and oxygen, they had produced acetic acid from methane directly. The reaction took place at a relatively low temperature (100 degrees centigrade), required little energy, and left no environmentally harmful solvents to throw away. http://www.rps.psu.edu/sep98/methane.html

Colleagues of ours created a highly porous carbon-nitrogen polymer, which we realised had very similar structural motifs to the Periana catalyst,' Schüth says, 'so we wondered if we could incorporate platinum into the structure.
If the mixture is then pressurised in an autoclave with methane, the methane is consumed and methanol formed at conversion rates comparable to Periana-based systems but with the solid catalyst easily recoverable at the end of the reaction. http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/August/10080902.asp

Dont know where you get your numbers from.

USA Today: In 2009-10, average published tuition and fees for in-state students at public flagship universities in the U.S. are $8,353, compared to $7,797 at all public doctorate-granting universities and $7,020 at all public four-year institutions:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-10-20-college-costs_N.htm

Annual in-state commuter student tuition at state schools in my area

Delaware - about 11,500. http://www.udel.edu/admissions/finance/
NJ Rutgers - $12,755. http://admissions.rutgers.edu/Costs/TuitionAndFees.aspx
NY SUNY - $14,750. http://www.suny.edu/student/paying_tuition.cfm
Pennsylvania - 15,000 - 17,500. http://tuition.psu.edu/tuitiondynamic/rates.aspx?location=up

I hope someone out there realizes that contact lens display will require an entirely new rendering paradigm for virtual reality (or 3D graphics in general -- but if you have a contact lens display with essentially 360 field of view, why NOT do Virtual Reality?).

The eye only sees about 2-3 degrees at once, and scans the scene so that your brain can create a 3D reconstruction. Instead of just pushing a high number of pixels at a high FPS, it will make a LOT more sense to track the eye and render what the viewer is looking at in very high resolution, and the rest of the scene in lower resolution. This needs to be done with both eyes while taking into account vergence and accommodation (which object each eye is pointing at, and where the eye is focusing).

If 3D graphics researchers are smart, I see a LOT of good research coming up in rendering paradigms made possible by this type of display which give an effective 100+ megapixel display while using only several megapixels of rendering capability...

If they are NOT smart, we'll see some heads-up display type of applications with annoying text which moves with your eye movement ...

There is some preliminary work being done which may aid this in Foveated Rendering.

And something I forgot:

and those just wanting to know what they were drinking to force the secretary to backtrack on the order.

There's no difference. How can you 'know what you're drinking' if its the same thing? It doesn't matter if milk comes from a cow treated with hormones or not. I mean, come on, you're grinking something that came out of a lactating bovine, there's going to be hormones already in it. A bit more isn't going to make much of a difference, and you'd have to drink massive quantities of milk every day for it to matter. It reminds me of the people who think crops should be pesticide free, but neglect to consider all the pesticides that plants naturally produce to defend themselves. The hormone free thing is just more anti-food science bullshit from uneducated foodies who think complaining is better than learning the science behind what they're protesting.

If you actually cared, every time you drank a glass of milk, you'd dump just a tiny bit of it out. Sound stupid right? What if you drank that amount of milk instead? Is the milk suddenly unhealthy? That little amount represents the tiny bit of increased hormones you might get with rBST treated milk, and even whatever you'd manage to dump would be an overestimate.

I was angry and still am angry that a state official was comfortable hiding what was in our food for the sake of lobbying interests.

No, you were mad about new technological contribution to the efficiency of the production practice, not an attribute of the end product. I'm not saying I agree with the labeling, if milk producers want to label it as such then that's fine and dandy, and maybe there was some lobbying involved, but lets not pretend it has anything to do with the milk itself. This comes to mind.

And something I forgot:

and those just wanting to know what they were drinking to force the secretary to backtrack on the order.

There's no difference. How can you 'know what you're drinking' if its the same thing? It doesn't matter if milk comes from a cow treated with hormones or not. I mean, come on, you're grinking something that came out of a lactating bovine, there's going to be hormones already in it. A bit more isn't going to make much of a difference, and you'd have to drink massive quantities of milk every day for it to matter. It reminds me of the people who think crops should be pesticide free, but neglect to consider all the pesticides that plants naturally produce to defend themselves. The hormone free thing is just more anti-food science bullshit from uneducated foodies who think complaining is better than learning the science behind what they're protesting.

If you actually cared, every time you drank a glass of milk, you'd dump just a tiny bit of it out. Sound stupid right? What if you drank that amount of milk instead? Is the milk suddenly unhealthy? That little amount represents the tiny bit of increased hormones you might get with rBST treated milk, and even whatever you'd manage to dump would be an overestimate.

I was angry and still am angry that a state official was comfortable hiding what was in our food for the sake of lobbying interests.

No, you were mad about new technological contribution to the efficiency of the production practice, not an attribute of the end product. I'm not saying I agree with the labeling, if milk producers want to label it as such then that's fine and dandy, and maybe there was some lobbying involved, but lets not pretend it has anything to do with the milk itself. This comes to mind.

There are several asymmetric protocols with very nice security properties, even against adversaries with quantum computers. My personal favorite is based on the Learning With Errors problem, which is in turn based on some lattice results. Wikipedia has a decent summary, and the original paper is here. The old McEliece cryptosystem might be secure against quantum attack. NTRU is commercialized but its security bounds make me very nervous. There also systems based on elliptic curve isogenies, but a new quantum algorithm comes somewhat close to breaking them. The main problem with these cryptosystems is that the resulting ciphertexts and signatures tend to be fairly long. RSA produces ciphertexts that are about the same length as the original messages and DSA produces nice, short signatures. ECC protocols are even better, but Shor's algorithm breaks them just as easily as RSA and DSA. The fancy post-quantum protocols, on the other hand, tend to produce large messages that are slow to work with.