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Another case of CS guys now knowing about existing EE research.

BB security is about more than email: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~enck/cse597a-s09/slides/security_blackberry.pdf

LOL you're such a shill. Try posting this again once Android security gets to approach this remotely: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~enck/cse597a-s09/slides/security_blackberry.pdf
By the way, don't forget to tell your users, if you really have any, that "if your phone is the entry point for an intrusion into the intranet you are fired and will be sued for the cost of fixing everything" and that "If internal email comes into the hands of unauthorized persons through your device, you are fired". A dire warning is about the only way you can secure Android from being the carrier of an attack vector into the intranet--by making your user so paranoid that he won't install any apps and will guard his phone like a madman.

BES is more important for security, not email. As another poster pointed out, any enterprise with a sensible security point should make it explicit that "If your phone is the entry point for an intrusion into the intranet you are fired and will be sued for the cost of fixing everything" and that "If internal email comes into the hands of unauthorized persons through your device, you are fired" Tell me any iPhone or Android that has a security framework as thought out as http://www.cse.psu.edu/~enck/cse597a-s09/slides/security_blackberry.pdf

Mod parent up and grandparent down! Android and iPhone security is still a joke compared to this http://www.cse.psu.edu/~enck/cse597a-s09/slides/security_blackberry.pdf

There's an overview here. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~enck/cse597a-s09/slides/security_blackberry.pdf
Basically, in a corporate network using BES, a proper configuration has the phones are in a sort of permanent VPN with the corporate network, aided by hardware features (not merely acceleration by hardware encryption, but hardware features that restrict reverse-engineering keys from the firmware and a number of other protections that make stolen/lost phones not a security risk), as well as flexible and detailed security policies for each phone that can be controlled by the IT department. The whole phone is really designed around this infrastructure. Non-corporate customers, of course, don't use BES and instead the other endpoint of the secured tunnel is at RIM's servers (this is what BIS is). So RIM only knows the keys of non-corporate customers. Note that there are many hosted BES solutions out there, so you have other options if you're not corporate but also don't trust RIM (given their aiding of spying by the Indian government, say).

For as long as it takes to develop an efficient extraction method.

Which is approximately 6 months ago: http://www.matse.psu.edu/news/ionicliquids

Unobtanium, a lazy sci-fi writers contribution to the element table that explains in one simple word how difficult it is to obtain the ore... except that they are able to obtain it.

To quote from the official scriptment:

"Pandora is blessed with a naturally occurring susbstance a million times more precious than gold. Its joke name of "unobtanium" has stuck, over the years."

The backstory to Avatar was actually a lot more fleshed out and interesting than used in the movie, and they stuck to real science more than almost any other modern sci-fi that I can think of. As for "unobtanium": it's a room-temperature superconductor (probably the most likely thing on Earth for scientists and engineers to jokingly refer to as "unobtanium"). There are hints to that in the movie, such as when one character sets a piece of it down over a magnet and it floats in place. The backstory is that astronomers' attention was drawn to this moon because of the tremendous magnetic fields it was generating. A lot of the "ORLLY?" moments in the world are actually quite plausible given the concept of large deposits of a room-temperature superconductor underground -- a planetwide communication network, floating mountains (superconductors strongly expel magnetic fields), highly intense and uneven localized levels of magnetic field strength and radiation (and thus communication disruption), and so forth.

They really went to a ton of detail with the latest in scientific paradigms on pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. The spacecraft, for example. It's dual propulsion. For earth departure, it uses a photon sail pumped by a laser array at Earth, to accelerate the craft without it having to carry extra propellant for said acceleration. For decelaration, however, there is no such laser array, so instead it needs to provide its own thrust. For this, they use antimatter-initiated microfusion. All parts of the spacecraft are sized in proportion to what they'd actually need to be sized as to actually complete the journey. The craft is laid out in a very un-sci-fi-like fashion using tensile structures rather than rigid structures. First the sail, then the propellant/engine system for deceleration, all lie *ahead* of the craft, with the craft hanging in tension behind them. This can dramatically reduce system mass. The first system I read about like that, although there may have been others proposed before then, was "Medusa", a more efficient alternative to the popular "Orion" nuclear pulse propulsion system. Behind the spacecraft lies a reflective shield that protects it from the lasers used during the initial boost phase. During interstellar travel, it is then rotated to act as a shield against grains of interstellar dust. For the return trip, the antimatter and hydrogen are topped back up from locally-produced sources and used to boost it back up to 0.7c. At Earth, the photon sail and laser array is then used for deceleration.

Similar level of detail went into creating the biomes and evolutionary history of the different species, and pretty much every aspect of the worldbuilding. Unfortunately, a lot of compromises were made in trying to wedge the plot in and make it appeal to the lowest common denominator :P. For example, the Navi were initially far less human-looking, in fitting with a realistic evolutionary development pattern. This was changed to help the audience bond with them better. One can only likewise expect similar compromises in the Na'vi speaking so much in English, the human being the "big damn hero", and other unrealistic audience-identification-with-characters aspects. I find it a shame that there's no way to get a "not dumbed down" version.

As a side note, I found it interesting to read that the visual similarities between the

No company would back any RnD they didn't have exclusive rights to.

However, right now we have companies scaling back their R&D way back and publicly funded projects are doing the majority of development. Academia has been developing all sorts of solutions to problems only to have them snapped up and monopolized by industry.

Here's an example: University of Wisconsin-Madison develops a way to make processors more efficient. Intel uses this in their Core 2 Duo processors. [1] Who paid for the research? Let's look at the citation in one of UW-Madison's publications [2]:

NSF Grants CCR-9303030 and MIP-9505853, ONR Grant N00014-93-1-0465, and by U.S. Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca under Contract DABT63-95-C-0127 and ARPA order no. D346.

Looks like you and I did.

Who profits from it? Intel and UW-Madison.

This pattern has been repeated endlessly and in all sorts of fields. Academia is on the cutting edge of drug and medical research using funding from the US taxpayers, but the pharmas are claiming to have spent billions of dollars researching their drugs. Yeah, billions were spent, but they were the American public's. Just another example of public risk with privatized profits.

Good game theory books I keep on my shelf:

Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology, and Social Science (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Lecture Notes)
by Joshua Epstein
Westview Press
ISBN: 9780201419887
(if you know enough math for partial differential equations, this book is a must-have, since it's directly applicable to mathematically modelling open source software projects)

The Evolution of Cooperation
by Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton
Paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.9644&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Book: ISBN 0-465-02122-2
Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems
Basic Books
ISBN: 9780195162929

The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration
by Robert Axelrod
Princeton University Press
ISBN 978-0691015675

Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 1: Playing Fair
by Ken Binmore
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262023634

Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 2: Just Playing (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
by Ken Binmore
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262024440

Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practice
by Michael C. Munger
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 978-0393973990

Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems
by Joshua M. Epstein, Robert L. Axtell
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262550253

See also:

http://www.santafe.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/user/santafeinst

The Brookings Institute is also active in this area (it was their math that led most of the U.S. Cold War policy and kept everyone out of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets).

-- Terry

Yeah, I think this is the most important part. Even if you aren't a technologist, it's a bad situation to be in the 21st century and have no understanding of how systems work, at least in principle, because you're unable to offer even commentary or suggestions about them, or think about how to interface with them, in a way that's grounded in anything approaching reality. This has sometimes been called "procedural literacy" [pdf] or "computational thinking" [pdf].

You want Mann's data and algorithms for the original 1998 hockey stick graph? They are here.

You want the updated data from 2008 and 2009? They are here and here.

More links to other forms of climate data and methods are here.

The arguments that climate scientists are not releasing their data and methods are no longer viable because they have now for the most part.

You want Mann's data and algorithms for the original 1998 hockey stick graph? They are here.

You want the updated data from 2008 and 2009? They are here and here.

More links to other forms of climate data and methods are here.

The arguments that climate scientists are not releasing their data and methods are no longer viable because they have now for the most part.

Here you go!

Arachnicillin

"I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good master cobweb... If I cut my finger, I shall make bold of you."
- The character Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

If you look in Michael Mann's original and follow-up papers, proxy records (coral etc.) show that eastern asia was cold at the same time Europe was warm. Note that Europe is tiny compared to Eastern Asia. (The other relevant papers are behind a paywall -- blame the journals.) This excellent essay shows the breakdown of temperature by region over time in Figure 2.

Onto the two papers you linked. You must have made a mistake with Stenni et al. because it is irrelevant to the MWP. As for Trouet, et al. (2009), this repeats the same North Atlantic current argument, which is really weak. Not just because you are better off going to China to get the temperature in China, but for other reasons that we could get into.

Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick. here is a list of myths about the hockey-stick.

If you look in Michael Mann's original and follow-up papers, proxy records (coral etc.) show that eastern asia was cold at the same time Europe was warm. Note that Europe is tiny compared to Eastern Asia. (The other relevant papers are behind a paywall -- blame the journals.) This excellent essay shows the breakdown of temperature by region over time in Figure 2.

Onto the two papers you linked. You must have made a mistake with Stenni et al. because it is irrelevant to the MWP. As for Trouet, et al. (2009), this repeats the same North Atlantic current argument, which is really weak. Not just because you are better off going to China to get the temperature in China, but for other reasons that we could get into.

Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick. here is a list of myths about the hockey-stick.

splitenz writes:

"Hoping to unify the growing but disparate market of NoSQL databases, the creators behind CouchDB and SQLite have introduced a new query language for the format, called UnQL (Unstructured Data Query Language — .PS). It has Microsoft's backing."

Then, FTA (right at the bottom of it):

This version of UnQL has no relation to an identically named unstructured data query language proposed by a University of Pennsylvania researcher over a decade ago, Phillips said.

I know it's slashdot, but c'mon. Just looking at the linked postscript file shows you a major WTF discrepancy. First the paper is from 2000, and then that paper's query language is based on algebras that do not resemble Codd's relational algebra at all. And that runs counter to this, also FTFA:

Like SQL, UnQL was built on the foundation of relational algebra, Phillips said.

The news are great. The coverage blows. It would pay to read the stuff that is being submitted as a story... just sayin...

Link to PDF version of paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.33.3465&rep=rep1&type=pdf

there are really two things that you can do with it... 2) Reverse engineer the code. However, you will NOT have anything that would help you do this, like net names or hierarchies. This will make actual reverse-engineering in order to change something or learn something very challenging.

I think you underestimate the difficulty of number 2. I know I guy who figured out the bitstream format of a particular FPGA type that he was using so that he could write his own synthesis tools for research. It took him a couple of months, but he did it. There are now published papers on this topic From the bitstream to the netlist, A library and platform for FPGA bitstream manipulation, so it should be somewhat easier. There was even a tool called "debit" that disassembled the bitstream back to FPGA tools format, but it got censored. This exploit is a big deal. Every system that uses Xilinx FPGAs is now vulnerable. If you can get the bitstream, then you can decrypt it, modify it, and deploy it onto real devices. Some possibilities:

• Pay TV hacking. Modify the bitstream to dump out the video encryption keys.
• Those secure encryption PCI cards and credit card payment terminals can be modified to dump data (keys, pin codes).
• Network switches can be modified to allow eavesdropping.
• Mess with safety critical systems in some way to induce failure.

  Basically, any system that used a Xilinx FPGA to perform some task, before this exploit the FPGA was considered tamperproof and therefore "safe" - it could be handed critical tasks and trusted to do them and not leak data. Now, someone with physical or remote access to the system can upload altered code and change the behaviour.. the functions of the FPGA can no longer be trusted. The only limitation is that you need physical access to at least one device in order to extract the symmetric signing key.

$16,000 to John McCain did quite a bit in the move to allow religious broadcasters "educational" class broadcast licenses from the F.C.C. It was one of the things that was revealed in a Penn State study on Lobbying.

http://lobby.la.psu.edu/065_Religious_Licenses/frameset_religious.html

Some may view it as another form of the great behind the scenes bandwidth grab.
There was a time when a pirate radio station in Berkeley started a "free speech" examination of the feasibility of a new class of low power broadcast stations.
Guess where most of the licenses went...

Warning, this pdf from 1999 called and wants its concept back http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.105.2403&rep=rep1&type=pdf

ethanol, which has already been shown to require more fossil fuel to produce that it can replace

citation, please?

A google search shows this paper , which claims the opposite. Of course, this paper is prepared for the Office of Biomass Programs, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy. The figures in the paper therefore may be biased, but if they did their homework properly, they are correct. I did not check deeper.

Except ... it will kill off honey bees and Monarch butterflies. (like some other perfectly "safe" genetic engineering)

You do realize that nobody believes that anymore don't you? Sure, GMO Bt pollen can affect monarch larva, but not all that much, and no where near as much as the alternative (pesticide sprays), but that study basically force fed the pollen to the caterpillars and, surprise, they died, and that's been blown way out of context by anti-GMO interest groups like the organic consumer's association and Greenpeace. As for bees, I was unaware that there were even poor studies that linked CCD to GMOs.

I have read the climategate emails that got all of the attention. I find nothing in them incriminating. If you want to talk about specific ones give me an example.

I just scanned through the MBH code (you can see it here in the multiproxy.f file. From the parent directory you can see all the the work for the 1998 hockey stick graph). I didn't find anything controversial. The comments in the climategate emails had nothing to do with MBH.

Maybe we are missing a major factor in solar dynamics but you'd think with all of the study over the past half century we'd at least have a hint that something big is missing. That can only be true if they are wrong in a big way about some other part of climate science. Of course you believe that to be CO2 but all I ever hear is "It can't be CO2!" and no good science to explain why it should react so differently in the atmosphere as it does in the lab.

Perhaps the solar system bobbing up and down through the galactic plane does affect temperatures but that only happens twice per galactic year (225-250 million years) so it's not likely to change things much on century or millennial time scales.

Last I heard it looks like then end of the current interglacial is estimated to be (if we don't prevent it) in 20,000 years or so from an examination of Milankovitch Cycles. Of course MC's themselves are not the whole story regarding the ice age cycles. There are feedbacks that reinforce the warming initiated by them, most notable probably being CO2 and water vapor.

Looking at this graph I don't see anything that makes me think the current interglacial is the longest or hottest (maybe) or that the end of it is imminent.

... what the Earth and Sun are doing is quite fascinating.

On that we can agree :)

I tend to think that climate scientists are reporting their findings honestly. I think that there is an enormous amount of knowledge yet to be learned about climate but it appears to me that we've got most of the big stuff figured out more or less and are filling in details for the most part. I could be wrong but I don't think so. GCM's are not built on correlations but on models of the underlying physics (the causality) with some parametrization where the underlying physics are not well understood.

As we agree, we will find out. I just hope I live long enough to say I told you so (that's rather juvenile of me considering I'm 60 years old, isn't it).

Here is some good info. Plenty of information from just about every government and university in the world. Just need to look.

Huh? The rBGH related WTVT/Monsanto affair? With the stupefying end of it: FCC policy against falsification (of news) was not a "law, rule, or regulation"?

I confess, I'm in horticulture, not meat production, so that is a bit outside my area, but I don't see how that is any different than business as usual for companies. Which doesn't excuse it of course, but it isn't entirely unexpected, and it isn't grounds to ignore what people who study it say about it's safety, namely that it is.

More than half a world refuses to import beef/diary from US because of that, but that's simply crazy because "no danger are known", isn't it?

It isn't crazy at all actually. I don't know how if it works the same in hormone treated meat (again, I'm a plant person), but I know with genetically modified crops they are rejected by many countries for a very good (sorta) reason that really has nothing to do with safety: trade protectionism. A lot of countries, particularly in Europe, don't want to open their farms up to global market forces because they'd be out competed. Here in the US for instance we are really good at producing corn, and could totally kill Europe's native corn industry. Now, WTO laws forbid protectionism, but if you forbid import of something under the guise of regulatory issues, like say a ban on genetic engineering, they you're free to keep your market protected. I was unaware of US beef exports being banned as a result of rBGH (I thought if anything it was related to BSE), but if that is indeed the case I would not be surprised. Food gets pretty political.

I know the example is not in the GMO topic, but anyway..., can I really trust Monsanto when saying "no known danger"?

No. Don't trust Monsanto. Trust everyone else. Among plant biologists, the consensus on GMOs on pretty darned favorable. Not trusting companies is not only understandable, it's pretty smart I'd say. But doubting them so much that you reject mountains of independent science, well, not so much. And don't forget that Monsanto doesn't own genetic engineering. If you really dig into it, you'll find that pretty much every university in the world, from the US to Brazil to Italy to Iran to Nigeria to China to New Zealand is doing genetic engineering. Don't trust Monsanto, trust them.

Whoa, back up there. Inhumane conditions are bad, that much is clear, and I totally agree that antibiotics are often abused, but factory farm != inhumane conditions Factory farming typically refers to CAFOs, and that has nothing do do with how the animals are raised, but actually just the number. It gets a bad rap, but no small amount of them are just family farms (even some of the big ones) that do, indeed, treat their animals fairly well. It's like the spinach E. coli outbreak; one jackass lets his cattle get too close to the irrigation source and the entire spinach industry takes a hit over it. Yeah, there is animal cruelty, a lot of it, but I don't think it's the norm, so don't blame factory farms in general any more than you should attack free range farming because some organic idiots treat treat sick animals with homeopathy (no medicine could also be considered inhumane). Factory farms are mostly about efficiency, and that is no vice, nor in producing less output a virtue. Sorry, they're not. You want to pay more for something that uses more land, fine my me, but unless every so-called factory farm is abusing their animals (hint, they're not) I'll take efficient and cheap thank you. Before you paint everyone with that big brush, maybe you should learn something about agriculture beyond some bullshit movie with all the credibility of Loose Change. That you are concerned about hormones and GMOs indicates to me that such films are your primary source of information and you know very little about modern agriculture and agricultural technology.

Especially GMOs, jeez, can we as a society get over that one? It's just a way of improving a plant, it isn't Frankenstein or Jurassic Park or Splice or whatever fairy tale people are believing over science today, and contrary to the perpetual moaning of unscientific denialists like Greenpeace, they are actually a gain for the environment (Bt GMOs reduce pesticide use and Ht GMOs prevent fertilizer runoff, reduces soil erosion and promotes carbon sequestering via no/low-till ag) and not dangerous to humans. And we can talk about the politics of Monsanto all day long, but that is not relevant to the benefits GMOs provide.or mean GMOs are dangerous any more than Merck or Pfizer's unethical decisions mean that vaccines cause autism.

And watching Food Inc. to get different perspectives on agriculture is like listening to Michael Behe to get different viewpoints on evolution. Different points of view are good, but sometimes they're just wrong. That movie made some good points, but was mostly foodie nonsense and bogus FUD. What's amazing is that all those foodie idiots lapped that up, but when a real agriculturalist talks about real farming then they just go into dismiss it. I truly love that society in developed nations runs so smoothly that we don't need to produce our own food, that labor is nicely divided that people like people can go on about something they've never done or been involved with, but people really should know a bit more about where their food comes from, how it's produced, and why farmers do it that way so that they won't go into panic mode every time some bored art history major throws together a few film clips.

Penrose's argument from Emperor's New Mind and the updated version in Shadows of the Mind has been formally refuted: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.260&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Beyond this, Penrose is refuted by physics. The holographic principle and its near-corollary, the Bekensten bound, guarantees that one cannot build a physical artifact more powerful than a Turin machine (finite number of distinguishable quantum states in a region of finite surface area => there are no arbitrary-precision real numbers in physics in a finite space => no super-Turing machines possible). Indeed, restricting ourselves to artifacts with finite spatial extent, any physical object can at best have the power of a mere linarly bounded automata (though non-deterministic one, due to QM, which is more powerful than its deterministic counterpart, but still less powerful than a Turing machine). Unfortunately, our brain happens to be a physical artifact. The mind is a collection of thought patterns and these directly map to physics by their neural correlates. Penrose's case is just a sad example of wishful thinking, the inability to admit that our minds are too subject to (likely unknowable) limitations, our own analogues of the halting problem.

I hadn't seen this article "refuting" Penrose but it's not particularly interesting or that convincing. It's like a bunch of school boys playing gotcha. I saw this a lot at University. People demonstrating how clever they are but putting nothing forward that is more interesting. That's one of the main reasons philocophy has stagnated over the last 70 years or so but I digress.

I am sure the formal argument is correct but as I am sure you know formalizing informal arguments is tricky business. I'm sure someone will or has quibbled with this formalization. These authors will quibble with the the quibblers and so on ad nauseaum. It's all rather shabby. It's almost not worth trying publish these kinds of papers because they provide nothing substantive to the debate.

As regards your physical argument it's confused from the beginning. Penrose isn't asking for a super-Turing machine, otherwise known as a hypercomputer, because a hypercomputer would have the same problem as a Turing machine. It can't compute the halting problem for hypercomputers of the same complexity class even if it can do so for less complex Turing machines. Penrose is asking for something qualitatively different, not something non-deterministic and not a quantum computer either. It's not clear what he is asking for (which even he admits) but it's not that.

It's interesting that you are so dogmatic about the issue. Are you threatened or jealous by Penrose?

Penrose has been _formally_ refuted http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.260&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Penrose's Shadows of the Mind argument fundamentally correct? How about fundamentally formally refuted! http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.260&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The only thing one needs to read about Penrose's theory on non-computable mind is the _formal_ refutation of it http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.260&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Penrose's argument from Emperor's New Mind and the updated version in Shadows of the Mind has been formally refuted: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.36.260&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Beyond this, Penrose is refuted by physics. The holographic principle and its near-corollary, the Bekensten bound, guarantees that one cannot build a physical artifact more powerful than a Turin machine (finite number of distinguishable quantum states in a region of finite surface area => there are no arbitrary-precision real numbers in physics in a finite space => no super-Turing machines possible). Indeed, restricting ourselves to artifacts with finite spatial extent, any physical object can at best have the power of a mere linarly bounded automata (though non-deterministic one, due to QM, which is more powerful than its deterministic counterpart, but still less powerful than a Turing machine). Unfortunately, our brain happens to be a physical artifact. The mind is a collection of thought patterns and these directly map to physics by their neural correlates. Penrose's case is just a sad example of wishful thinking, the inability to admit that our minds are too subject to (likely unknowable) limitations, our own analogues of the halting problem.

Bios, SMM. See Abstracts: http://corelabs.coresecurity.com/index.php?module=Wiki&action=view&type=publication&name=Persistent_BIOS_Infection http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.153.9106&rep=rep1&type=pdf (warning, pdf!)

I'm sorry if you still prefer your new and improved oil lamp over electric light, because you can't comprehend the value of creativity.

There's a reason Einstein said: "Imagination is more important than knowledge.â (He also said that oil lamp thing. :)

Not saying we don't need engineers. Hell yeah we do. But they wouldnâ(TM)t progress at all without us. (And we would get nothing made without them.)

I have to say Lockhart's argument is true for programming too.
It is ultimately a creative task. The actual fleshing out is something you automate away more and more, as it is mostly algorithmic work.. (Case in point: Haskell, QuickCheck, etc.)

Ok, I realize you might be might offended by this. But to be honest, we all are a bit, when we see that not only can the fleshing-out be automated, but it is actually really possible to automate the entire scientific process with algorithms [Automated abduction. See chapter 2.]

Because it sucks to realize that we too are only machines after all. But only because we have been so arrogant before. As if we had something special inside us. Some "soul" / god sauce.

Conclusion: We wouldn't have had the idea for a plane in the first place without creativity. (Not denying at all that we wouldn't have build that idea without engineering. But... you know what I want to say.)

At the moment, the global temperature anomaly is 0.1C BELOW the thirty year running mean (and has been for a couple of months now).

Using the Hadcru data, I get 0.058C above the 30 year mean.

Whose data are you using to get this 0.1 below?

So yes, global warming is real, but it is entirely possible that its cause is, and has been in the past, the Sun. Not CO_2.

There are vast number of independent ways by which it can be shown that the current warming is due to greenhouse gasses, and is not due to the sun.

For one thing the stratosphere is cooling. The sun warms the whole atmosphere, from above. However the greenhouse effect traps heat low in the atmosphere leading to this cooling.

For another the North Pole and the Antarctic Peninsula are the fastest warming parts of the globe. The sun's effect is strongest where it's light is most direct ... in the tropics. However the CO2 greenhouse effect overlaps with the H2O greenhouse effect so its effect is greater where absolute humidity is low.

For a third thing, the warming is happening more at night. The sun warms things when it is shining. However the greenhouse effect slows the rate of heat loss, without affecting the rate of heat gain as much, so the greatest effect would be seen at the coldest part of the day.

Similarly and for a fourth thing, winter temperatures are warming slightly faster than Summer ones.

For a fifth, the temperature response due to CO2 can be calculated, such as has been done in this paper. It turns out that the warming is anthropogenic.

Warm weather is good. Plants grow. People eat.

Already less than they would if there were no global warming:

Worldwide, the authors report online today in Science, yields of corn and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming.

You seem to be very full of misinformation. Have you been reading Wattsup?

It turns out scientific sources provide better information on this topic than popular interest ones.

Asking for "for loops" will make most functional programmers chuckle. Usually what you want is a fold (or a special fold like a filter or a map). Speaking of parallelization, the semantics of generalized for loops require that each iteration be performed sequentially. What if you want to perform each iteration in parallel?

As for number-parameterized types, I haven't dealt with it myself, but I'll just leave this here: Number-parameterized types by Oleg

T-Mobile and Verizon are way ahead of you.

Really? All kinds of kick-ass program names and acronyms in the Military's arsenal of weapon nomenclature, and the best you could do was..."Individual Gunshot Detector".

It's about as good as one of the research papers that inspired it: "Sensor Network-Based Countersniper System"

I live in Aspen, CO. There used to be a lot of silver mining here. With silver comes thorium, which is radioactive. Most of the western US is covered with the stuff.

Also, I live at 8000ft above sea level. I'm exposed to higher levels of cosmic radiation than people at sea level.

Finally, I spent about 10 years living a few miles from a nuclear reactor: http://www.campusmaps.psu.edu/buildings/breazeale.shtml

So a well designed, well managed nuclear plant with proper containment building is not a big deal at all.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.67.9407&rep=rep1&type=pdf

That paper, which is now going on 7 years old, is the very first link of a Google search. It doesn't magically recreate obscured objects, but the GP never claimed that was possible. It does describe the process of using examples from a scene to fill the area previously covered by a deleted object, which is what the GP claimed was possible.

  I bet there's an extension for Photoshop that implements that technique but, as you can't be bothered to do even the most basic research before spouting your uninformed opinion, I can't be bothered to search for it.

Curious. Couldn't find a recent publication, but here is an article from 2006 with the same title and subject. http://tanzanite.chem.psu.edu/pdfs/806_Optoelectronics%20Reprint.pdf

Then why are conservatives so against renewable sources and anything that helps to promote them (including cap and trade)? You don't get Mr. Fusion without trying and FUNDING something *new*.

They aren't, they've just been categorized that way. We just know that when some truly great technology comes around, it is usually because of some inventor in his basement, trying to either make a name for him/herself or find a way to retire early (although most, after succeeding, claim they did it for the people, as if they should be ashamed for trying to make a buck). Cap and trade is nothing but a scheme for reallocation of money by gaming the system, with no appreciable impact (as has been shown in Europe). Energy companies know that fossil fuel energy costs continue to grow even without any government intervention. The fist one to finds something that, to the end consumer costs 50% less to go a mile, will win. IRAD monies drive this, and when companies struggle, IRAD budgets shrink.

Most of the argument against conservatives is that they see oil/coal/natural gas/nuclear as the *only* options available. You won't ever get the new technology if you don't spend money *now* to invest. Couple that with the fact that, at least for oil, we simply don't have anywhere near enough to even make a dent in our current needs.

Again, I don't see it like that, we've just been painted that way. My main issue is that we're (gov't) going to do something to our energy costs to cripple our economy (even more). Poor economies don't really lend themselves to technological development when everyone is just trying to stay afloat. And, I agree that it will take something big to replace hydrocarbons. More than likely, it will be more nuclear or (hopefully) fusion reactors (in 10-20 years) coupled with efficient energy storage (the lithium batteries in a prius carry about 10% of the energy that they'll need to, and cost way too much). But again, we've vilified nuclear energy as Chernobyl waiting to happen when it is in reality a very clean alternative to coal (save for waste disposal, which presents other issues but doesn't have to be a problem if stored properly - we will eventually find a way for conversion to something safer).

Now take into account that even if we have lots of natural gas, Cheney and company completely exempted those companies from having to disclose what it is they are actually pumping into the ground to push out the gas. We literally have no idea what they are pumping into the ground to break up the rock formations that are near peoples wells. Funny how cracked rock tends to allow stuff to seep through. The videos of flaming faucets are hard to assume as just a freak coincidence.

We know exactly what is in hydrofracking fluid. And, before any drilling company moved into our area, we were informed that it would be best if we had our water tested by a 3rd party (our choice). They do this not because they think something will happen, but because people's water supplies already have contaminants, and they don't want them coming with a pack of lawyers later on to blame them. Look at the date on this publication: http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/pdfs/XH0010.pdf

Conservatives have a long long history of supporting the big established companies and taking those companies word for it when they say its 'safe'. Are Democrats somewhat accountable on these issues? Sure, but one party has clearly been the leader in terms of saying the energy companies know best so just let them do what they want.

We can't put every business on the chopping block at the first cry of foul play. We should also be careful to differentiate between hype, hysteria, and the facts. And there is a difference between negligence and honest mistakes - these businesses stand to suffer a great deal for any of their mistakes. It just so

Actually, to build a cryptosystem off an NP-complete problem would be a very bad idea indeed.
It is worth observing that while NP problems are believed to be hard in general, most of the `average' instances
can be solved quite easily. There are several papers (Levin84 was the first, but see also
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.8775 ) on the topic.
A further remark: people seem to assume that "NP complete" means "as hard as conceivable". This is utterly
false. A solution to an NP problem can, by definition, be verified by a Turing machine in polynomial time; this
is not the case for more general classes of problems (for example those in class PR or R).

This is incorrect for most of Computer Science.

Citeseer has rankings of publication venues for CS. All the top venues are conferences. BTW, the same is not true for Electronic Engineering though - in EE, journals carry more weight. This is always a bone of contention in fields that span both CS and EE.

Of course there are also plenty of useless conferences in CS, where no-one will ever read your paper, and you won't meet anyone interesting if you attend. The impact rating serve as a rough guide to where is likely to be interesting, but they're no good for new venues.

My citation count is currently around 25,000 according to Google Scholar or 7000 according to Citeseer, which uses a different methodology. So I'm probably doing something right. But I'm not in the top 100 most cited authors, so this also shows that there must be an awful lot of publications appearing somewhere. Have to assume most of those are rarely read.

You might also mention this:

Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction (PDF)

in which it was demonstrated that brain activity in dead salmon changes in a visualization activity.

However, the point of that study was to show that researchers need to correct for multiple comparisons in their analysis. (Basically, if you start comparing 8000 different regions of the brain, the odds of seeing a false positive is huge, since you're making so many comparisons.) The cell phone study did make corrections for multiple comparisons, however (Bonferroni correction), and so the results must have come from some other factor.

We'll see. I expect there will be more studies on this subject soon, some perhaps testing cell phones on dead Atlantic salmon.

IEEE compliance doesn't mean what you think it means. Not sure whether Java has changed in this regard since 1998, but it definitely was wrong then

Why are you telling the waiter your mum's maiden name

It's very very easy to find out someone's mother's maiden name just from public records.

Can the sarcasm it's really happening T-Mobile already cannot get enough addresses.

Reported by Derek Morr about a presentation by Cameron Byrne

Do you have any reputable citations showing professional climatologists engaging in groupthink or responding badly to reasoned criticism? I ask because, once again, your description of the climatology community sounds like a description of a cult... [Dumb Scientist]

You mean like how they circled the wagons around Phil Jones, even when actual bad behavior on his part was discovered? For example: [ShakaUVM]

“This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”.” [RealClimate]

Presumably you meant to say that scientists in general are circling wagons and responding badly to reasoned criticism.

Or you can just read the editor’s comments left in the response sections of RC.org. Just skimming through that above article, here’s an interplay between Pielke and Stefan. [ShakaUVM]

Coincidentally, Pielke Jr. had similar things to say about that interplay. That's the interplay where he asked a bunch of 'questions' like "Was it appropriate for the IPCC to make stuff up about my views?". Then Stefan replied:

Clearly there are different views on this, which is why we called this graph "debatable". But let's keep things in perspective: we're discussing Supplementary Material and a response to one of those 90,000 review comments now, not even the report itself. You've been working hard to scandalize your personal quibbles with IPCC here - how consistent is this with your self-proclaimed role as "honest broker"? Stefan

That link leads to an in-depth comment, and neither seem to constitute "responding badly to reasoned criticism." In fact, it's not clear that Pielke's rant counts as "reasoned criticism" in the first place. As far as I can tell, he's got

Venus is well outside the habitable zone, for obvious reasons. It's not near habitability. If you moved the Earth inward from 1 AU to 0.95 AU, the stratosphere would moisten and you'd gradually lose all the planet's water to photodissociation followed by hydrogen escape. This is arguably the inner edge of the habitable zone. If you moved the Earth in to 0.85 AU, you'd boil the oceans and produce a runaway greenhouse. Venus is at about 0.72 AU.

See chapter 6 of this book, partly based on this paper (PDF).