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Sounds like Dr. Fredric Wertham all over again.

http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/cmbk4cca.html

embarrassing, to put it mildly.

But it is my understanding that /. has a major problem wrt ipv6 since the slashdot engine is written in perl.
Compare http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2008/07/perl-considered-harmful.html

(hopefully typed this link right as /. won't let me copy/paste the url, at least not from debian/kde)

Modern TCPs use BIC or CUBIC, which produce much better utilization than a 'sawtooth'-type algorithm. See http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.4563&rep=rep1&type=pdf for details, in particular the graph at the top of page 2.

Relevant Paper

A placebo effect* doesn't fix anything,ever. It makes people feel better subjectively.

Not true. Human will & desire to live can have an enormous effect on the body.

In one of the more famous examples, Australians who died after a certain date paid much less tax. Death rates dropped dramatically before the deadline, much more than can be explained by keeping patients on life support.

Still not seeing any citations, but perhaps you should be reviewing your own examples. The hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple independent lines of evidence:

McIntyre 2004 claimed that the Mann 1999's hockey-stick graph shape was a result of the analysis method used (principal components analysis), and was not statistically significant. However, the National Center for Atmospheric Research reconstructed (Wahl 2007) the graph using a variety of techniques (with and without principal components analysis), and with some slightly different temperatures in the 15th century, confirmed the hockey stick. Furthermore, independent measurements from boreholes (Huang 2000"), stalagmites (Smith 2006) and glaciers (Oerlemans 2005) all confirm the same dramatic recent temperature rises. Mann 2008 combines these with ice cores, coral and lake sediments to confirm the same hockey stick shape over the last 1300 years, without requiring the disputed tree-ring data.

If you're referring to Steig 2009, perhaps you can point us to evidence that discredits this? You'll have to forgive us for not taking your claims that it is "unmitigated bollocks" at face value. Rather, measurements from the GRACE satellite (Velicogna 2009) show very clearly that the Antarctic land ice sheet has lost around 900 gigatonnes in the last 7 years, and this loss rate is accelerating, even in the previously-thought-stable East Antarctica (Chen 2009). The Antarctic sea ice sheet is actually increasing, however, for numerous possible reasons, but at a lower rate than the land ice loss.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair.

I do so love a challenge. Here's some examples of the theory:

• Beyond Best Effort: Router Architectures for the Differentiated Services of Tomorrow’s Internet (1998)
• The Impact of Active Queue Management on Multimedia Congestion Control (1998)
• Comparison of Tail Drop and Active Queue Management Performance for bulk-data and Web-like Internet Traffic (2001)
• Bandwidth Allocation for Non-Responsive Flows with Active Queue Management (2002)
• A Comparative Study of Active Queue Management Schemes (2004)
• PURPLE: Predictive Active Queue Management Utilizing Congestion Information (2003)
• The Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP (2001)

And here's some examples of the practice with CISCO routers:

• WRED
• DWRED
• ECN within WRED
• Hierarchical Queueing Framework

Other systems:

• Juniper's support for WRED and QoS in general
• QoS in HP ProCurve switches
• QoS in Nortel switches

Now, tell me again that only a Marxist would believe that it's possible to have pipe-based fair-service on the Internet.

You pay for a specific pipe already. If the ISPs and core routers enabled fair-service curve, each pipe would get a fair chance at the upstream pipe. Heavy users would then not swamp lighter users and lighter users would not subsidise heavy users. This eliminates all of the (somewhat technologically ignorant) objections raised by ISPs and by some of the posters here. Then you add in ECN, which instructs a machine to throttle back if it is behaving badly on the network (and blocks machines that won't play fair). Packet-dropping schemes like BLACK and PURPLE deal with

This isn't rocket science. Hell, these days even rocket science isn't rocket science. Neither of these suggestions would be difficult. They've been discussed in depth since the 1990 and have reached an amazing level of quality control that is fair to all users and equitable to all providers. Without raising costs.

Using public keys as addresses would be pretty sweet, but how do you route traffic through a network with randomly distributed addresses? Ad-hoc routing can work on small scales, but there'd be serious issues making a global network like that.

That's actually an easier problem, known as "location-independent identifiers". Most ad-hoc routing protocols tend to flood-fill the network, either when calculating routes or when routing packets. However, ad-hoc routing protocols do exist that avoid flooding, and those protocols can scale.

Virtual Ring Routing can handle Internet-scale networks by treating them like small-world networks, using the same mechanism distributed hash tables use: treat the addresses as a ring, and use a combination of your physical neighbors and your "virtual" neighbors on the ring to cross long distances. A later paper on VRR showed that it scaled quite well with the size of the network, both in the expected length of the routing path and the expected number of routing table entries needed on each node.

We got a team of students to develop an implementation of VRR for Linux, and Microsoft Research has an implementation for Windows.

So yes, we can solve the routing problem easily enough. We just need some way to handle naming that the general public will put up with.

Using public keys as addresses would be pretty sweet, but how do you route traffic through a network with randomly distributed addresses? Ad-hoc routing can work on small scales, but there'd be serious issues making a global network like that.

That's actually an easier problem, known as "location-independent identifiers". Most ad-hoc routing protocols tend to flood-fill the network, either when calculating routes or when routing packets. However, ad-hoc routing protocols do exist that avoid flooding, and those protocols can scale.

Virtual Ring Routing can handle Internet-scale networks by treating them like small-world networks, using the same mechanism distributed hash tables use: treat the addresses as a ring, and use a combination of your physical neighbors and your "virtual" neighbors on the ring to cross long distances. A later paper on VRR showed that it scaled quite well with the size of the network, both in the expected length of the routing path and the expected number of routing table entries needed on each node.

We got a team of students to develop an implementation of VRR for Linux, and Microsoft Research has an implementation for Windows.

So yes, we can solve the routing problem easily enough. We just need some way to handle naming that the general public will put up with.

So total thrust at liftoff = 34 million N. (7.725 million pounds). Entire stack (orbiter, external tank, and SRBs) weighs 19.57 million N. (4.4 million pounds)

link

The mass ratio off the pad gives the vehicle a relatively gentle acceleration. 34/19.5 gives 1.7g but 1g is used just to keep the vehicle in the air. 0.7g relative to the ground is pretty good (better than most cars for example) but much less than 3g which is the maximum acceleration of the stack.

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

Don't be ridiculous. "All Turing complete languages are Turing complete" is not an argument, its a tautology.
The question is how easily a concept can be expressed and reasoned about. By your logic, because diophantine equations can encode a lisp interpreter, they are a reasonable way to implement ... anything. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.6.7628&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Computer science loves to reinvent things. Haskell has this and this is an active area of research. Here is the original paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149.5907&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=185 (A library for light-weight information-flow security in Haskell)

This, previously mentioned fellow Researcher is on a hot trail - an update:

The paper was re-done in 2001.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA417629

Now, from a completely different team Researcher, same trail:

Another paper on that same line from the Navel Post Graduate School.
It makes reference to the Myers' thesis.

"A Demonstration of the Subversion Threat" by Emory A. Anderson

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.149.5898&rep=rep1&type=pdf

If you'd like to help, or know more (serious research only please):

hylas(a+)operamail(d0t)com

Me?
I got nothing.

(lately) ;-)

I'm still reading the paper.

As far as Chertoff, a Cold War means nothing when you're fighting Ghosts (and your own Computer).

I'd bet they used this, which is an OpenCV builtin. There are other methods for image inpainting giving better results on textured backgrounds, e.g. exemplar-based image-inpainting, albeit being way too slow for realtime video.

Which is exactly why you will never see anything more than an expert system in space. There is no way any space agency is going to punt hundreds of millions or euros/dollars/pounds into space without a full understanding of the decision tree in the spacecraft control loop. It is hard enough at the moment without introducing outliers into the system.

Insightful? This is flat out wrong, by over 10 years now! See: Planning in interplanetary space: Theory and practice (A Jonsson, P Morris, N Muscettola, K Rajan, B Smith). This group of scientists from NASA Ames and the JPL used AI planning as part of the Deep Space One mission.

From the very first line of the paper's abstract:

On May 17th 1999, NASA activated for the first time an AI-based planner/scheduler running on the flight processor of a spacecraft.

And note that since 1999, much more work has been done in using AI planning (and perhaps other techniques) in space.

"Researchers like Mann (as opposed to scientists who develop logical theories based on science)"

You have got to be fucking kidding, Mann is at the top of his field and lists well over 100 papers in his CV, many of them in journals such as Nature and Science. The only reason this crooked AG can get away with resurecting McCarthyisim is because useful idiots like you allow him to do so.

What about http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.7206? Seems that fits your bill; in essence, there are certain statistical biases in many of the encryption schemes that can be calculated quite quickly.

See http://eprint.iacr.org/2002/149.pdf.

What about http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.7206? Seems that fits your bill; in essence, there are certain statistical biases in many of the encryption schemes that can be calculated quite quickly.

As in http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.19.7206?

The study mentioned at the end of the NPR article with this quote: "In fact, there was one study where people who are narcissistic would say they are really spectacularly good at this and they were actually worse than everyone else" is referring to Unskilled and Unaware of It (scanned pdf). The Unskilled study covers regular people too, not just us narcissists.

There's some motivation to get the "pixels" to respond like the human eye, or the retinal response model, giving the most realism...although, this probably would be tweaked to give some effect since super real isn't necessarily the goal *cough* 24pfs video *cough*.

Here's a cool paper:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.109.2728&rep=rep1&type=pdf

They must not have access to the "raw" data stream for video, because these sensors have a pretty huge dynamic range, around +/- 2 stops. This is the reason pro's shoot in the "raw" format. It saves the pixel brightness data, each pixel in the Bayer pattern, as 14bit values, so you can adjust the exposure afterwords. This is what makes single image HDR possible. I imagine that the camera manufacturers will eventually do something like shown in that paper. Or, maybe they'll get the Super CCD (by Fujifilm) style sensor to work better.

18 months is waaaaaaaaaay to early to introduce stuff like that.

Let the toddler be a toddler. All that baby Einstein-esque crap has been proven to be nothing but trouble for your child's NORMAL development.

On the other hand, if it's a child with atypical development, 18 months may be bordering on too old:
These kids benefited greatly from computer access.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10/blogs/thinking/2008/04/how-bootylicious-got-into-the.html

and as we all know, Mr. Mann refused to provide any actual climate data and advised some to destroy data.

You're talking about Phil Jones in the UK, not Michael Mann. Dr. Mann's "hockey stick" data and methods can be found here. Please tell me what part of that is falsified. But Mann's work is a small, not terribly important in itself piece of a large body of data and theory. Even if you threw it out completely it wouldn't change a thing.

You mean this data?

Mann 1998/9

On the other hand, if you meant every email Mann sent in the past 10 years, go jump in a lake. We don't even get president's personal correspondence and notes until after they die! Why should it be any different for scientists?

More on this idea: Designing Personal Tele-embodiment by Paulos & Canny at Berkeley. In particular, see the "previous work" section.

See: "The IBM Personal Speech Assistant"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.6203&rep=rep1&type=pdf
"In this paper, we describe technology and experience with an experimental personal information manager, which interacts with the user primarily but not exclusively through speech recognition and synthesis. This device, which controls a client PDA, is known as the Personal Speech Assistant (PSA). The PSA contains complete speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialog management systems."

Seriously though, that was ten years ago on research hardware, and this is great progress for a commercial and affordable advice with a large vocabulary. It probably works better than what we built then. And I still think software patents are a bad idea. :-)
"Scalable low resource dialog manager"
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6513009.html

Now, if only someone would do in a big way an idea I was pioneering at IBM Research back then on using speech to interact with display walls built using a network of hundreds of otherwise obsolete laptop computers (I only tested using nine though). I hope Google comes out with that soon, too. :-) I wanted to create something like that to help design space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore. :-) The idea was that speech would be a good interface modality when you were walking around in front of a display wall, rather than trying to carry a keyboard around with you (although you might still want a pointing device). Anyway, it would also be a good use for all those soon-to-be-obsolete iPads and Android pads in a few years when the next great version of them comes out. I just hate to see an old computer go to waste, even if they are often energy hogs relative to the next generation.

Just so you know, first link, widely discredited. Bad methodology, cherrypicked data, and never once mentioned a scientific reason as to why GMOs would be dangerous (they never do). Second, I've heard of those, but never one endorsed by the scientific community, nor one that could point to a reasonable cause for the animals' behaviors. It would be a real surprise if animals could detect subtle genetic changes but would still eat everything else. Third, can't find the link right now, but I read that it is somewhere in the range of 1 out of 50,000 monarchs that would be affected by that pollen (given the range and spread and that sort of thing) even if we accept that report, which, again, I haven't heard overwhelming confirmation of, and keep in mind, even if we accept that, it is generally believed that Bt crops tend to increase nontarget insect biodiversity and reduce pesticide applications, so even if we accept the thing about the monarchs, it is a trade off situation, not a loss with no gain.

Genetic engineering is a very controversial area, don't be surprised if you read a lot bad science about it. I mean, there are dozens of studies 'proving' that homeopathy works, that doesn't mean it does. The general scientific consensus among biologists, botanists, horticulturists, zoologists, microbiologists, biochemists, geneticists, ect., is that they're safe and effective. Sure, there might be patent stuff to work out, but that doesn't effect the crops themselves, and there might even be environmental side effects (although, not using them could be worse), but it is generally beneficial.

Your last paragraph is way off though. Just because there is a dispute (largely between scientists and laymen, what should that tell you?) does not mean we should forgo them. There is an equally valid dispute over the safety and effectiveness of vaccination, and whether or not they cause autism, and pharma patents on them, and every now and again a bad batch makes minor headlines (or is used sensationally by bad or biased journalism); should we stop vaccinating too? Just because a small vocal group of scientifically illiterate cranks muddy the waters for people who don't closely follow the subject? There is a dispute, yes, but it is, by and large, a manufactured controversy, an ultimately popular debate but not a scientific one.

GM is not Monsanto any more than pharmacology is Merck. They don't own science and technology. And the problem with the pigweed was something avoidable, even Monsanto predicted it would happen. Using one chemical to kill things is always a bad idea, and even before the resistant weeds became news scientists were advocating the use of GMOs with resistances to multiple active ingredient herbicides. It isn't resistant to all herbicides, just Monsanto's herbicide, which is one of the most commonly used. Also, it may come as a surprise, but even GMOs that resist herbicides tend to, surprisingly, be a net gain for the environment. And look up nitrogen use efficiency technologies...people are working on GMOs that use fertilizers more efficiently to enable less usage of inputs. Don't know if Monsanto is, but it is happening.

As for biodiversity, monoculture has never been good. While we must not forget economies of scale, plenty of times extensive monoculture has ended poorly, like the Irish potato famine, the 70s corn failure, and the fall of the Gros Michel banana, none of which involved GMOs. Genetic engineering is just a means of altering a plant, how we use that is up to us, just like how we use breeding, tractors, or harvesters, which, need I remind you, rarely help biodiversity either.

I personally would love to see genetic engineering be done or more diverse crops to help them integrate to the larger food supply. 'New' fruits like salak, zabla, cloudberry, and safou, new vegetables like chaya, lotus root, and yacón, new grains like teff and quinoa, new spices like rosita de cacao and dorrigo pepper...there is a huge world of agricultural and culinary diversity out there, hundreds and hundreds of species, and we're not growing them, and it is a darned shame from both a scientific/agricultural view and a cultural/culinary/economic view. There is no scientific reason whatsoever why they cannot also be the recipients of genetic engineering to help them move along into the food supply. Just because it's not being done doesn't mean it can't be or shouldn't be. Heck, don't know about veges, you can't get any much, if any, pomology funding to do normal breeding on such underutilized plants, but that isn't an argument against breeding. I understand the concern about lack of biodiversity in the food supply, but understand, the current usage of genetic engineering is a symptom of that, not a cause.

And I'd like to see more meats used, but just try getting people to accept guinea pig, kangaroo, black iguana, or (heaven forbid) an type of insect on their plates...ha, not happening. People are slow to accept new plants too (how many years have kiwi and mango been widely available and many people still do not view them on the same level as apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas), so there is a big hindrance to expanding biodiversity there too, more so than any cultivation issue. Change the minds of people, and maybe genetic engineering will follow. And as for GE, don't forget that anti-GMO groups protested the Rainbow papaya too...made by universities, needing no additional input, worked flawlessly, and they were still against it. Don't kid yourself into thinking that all, or even the majority, of anti-GMO sentiment is about Monsanto.

Having said that, we really don't know enough to be certain of the long-term effects. Much more research needs to be done, but companies like Monsanto are forging ahead now, and from what I can tell, with little regard for consequence.

I gotta disagree with that one, because there has been quite a lot of research on GMO crops that have found no significant difference between them and normal crops. They are not known to produce any compounds that they're not supposed to, and the idea that the gene itself will hurt you (which is an argument I have actually seen) is just silly, considering that normal breeding and mutagenesis produces far more altered genes than GM, and besides, your body can handle everything from kepel fruit to kangaroo, and that's a lot more new genes than simple genetic modification. One could make the argument that the Bt protein used in insect resistant GMOs (also used in organic farming) is harmful, but I've never seen a shred of evidence to indicate it.

Could there be long term consequences of eating GMOs? Absolutely. They could kill us all tomorrow for all I know. I can't disprove the possibility that there is some sort of complex interaction via presently unknown mechanisms that will ultimately hurt us. But as Stephen Gould said, 'Apples may start rising tomorrow but such a possibility doesn't merit equal time in physics classrooms.' The smallpox vaccine might have some sort of sort of long term effect, so could cell phone and wifi radiation, but, like GMOs, we have no evidence to indicate that they do, and until there is, I wouldn't really worry about it. Yeah, there have been those 'smoking gun' type studies, they always turn out to be baloney. And keep in mind, when you reject scientific consensus to hastily over a single study, bad things can happen (remember the Wakefield study?). And of course, there is no reason to assume that all GMOs are good, they can be pretty complex when you're running a gene that produces a certain compound in one plant through entirely different pathways, as this potentially harmful GMO demonstrates, but notice that the problem was found and explained. No one has ever found, let alone provided a science based reason for the existence of, and causative agent for the harm that GMOs are occasionally claimed to cause.

Now, had you said ecological long term consequences, that is a much more complex issue, but there, if we use GURTs, genetic use restriction technology, which we are not currently using due to protests from the anti-GMO crowd, that can be kept to a minimum. And of course, there they do not need to be perfect, only a net positive over agriculture without them. For example, they currently provide known ecological benefits, so in the case of this escaped canola, it is not a matter of 'How bad is the canola' but of 'Is this worse than the damage that would be caused to the soil and water and local flora/fauna without GMOs.' I think we still come out ahead, as it isn't like this canola is some sort of 'superweed' or whatever just because it has an extra human inserted gene.

I agree with your first paragraph, just pointing out that human health is one of the least likely areas for GMOs to come back and bite us in the rear.

Same goes for optical interconnect to memory: the flood may be Biblical when it arrives

But it won't be - the system is fundamentally limited by all of the rest of the components. A top end front-side bus can already push 80Gb; scaling that upto the 400Gbit that this optical link promises will probably be practical within a few years, but the latency of encoding and decoding a laser signal and pushing it over several meters is going to be a killer for computational applications. It will be great for USBX, and for high end networking it will challenge Infiniband (which currently tops out at around 300Gb). Infiniband is already used for networking high-performance computational clusters, but nobody is using it for the CPU to memory bus because of the high latency. Even with high bandwidth, computation still has to be carried out on the data, and so it still makes sense to put the data and processor as close together as possible.

In the last decade there were many research papers proposing that co-processors would be placed on DRAM cards, or Embedded DRAM would allow CPU and processors to be fabricated on a single die (e.g. 1, 2). But if you have a processor and DRAM connected to similar units via an optical interconnnect, guess what - the architecture begins to look awfully similar to a regular network with optical ethernet. So, it looks likely that this will be just another incremental improvement in architecture rather than the radical shift that TFA envisions.

The wikipedia article is wrong. Most efuses are actually metal/Si antifuses or plain metal fuses These are not reversible. Flash MCUs may use flash bits as efuse bits, and occationally you se other floating gate designs used as efuses.

Strange... this IEEE paper describes eFuses as synonymous with laser-cut fuses, which are also used for processor binning, disabling cores, serial numbers, etc.

In any case, that also means they're one-time-programmable... which is the most significant difference from how they're described in the Wikipedia article. But it means that they're "programmable" via laser, not electrically.

Clearly there's no agreement on the terminology for these things.

You will never see 'tiny amounts of flash' embedded in CMOS logic as embedded flash requires a very significant one-off expense in Si area to enable.

You sure about that? The 2005 article that I linked, while short on details and clearly pushing a product, describes a process that's apparently economical for embedding 32-4096 bits of flash into a CMOS process.

Furthermore floating gate designs have an unknown state after manufacture so the device must have a method to clear the fuse in test, which implies it may be cleared later (It might not be easy though)

Sure, there's got to be a way to do it. I know from playing with PIC microcontrollers that most of these have a way to "permanently" disable read/write access to the onboard flash program memory. There are ways to unlock some of them, but they ain't pretty. Presumably the manufacturer has an undocumented way to do it electrically.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30.3183&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I was talking to one of the engineers that developed this system to replace the leading edges of the shuttle. It is similar to what the Germans are doing but it uses heat pipes to carry the heat from the most intense heating areas to relatively cooler ares. It worked like a champ but one of the problems with the Space Shuttle Program is that is was treated like it only had 5 years left for the last 20 years. If instead we kept upgrading them and fixing the high cost items we might have something that is a lot cheaper to operate. This report is from 1998. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30.3183&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Mostly it's humans.

http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/m/malaria.htm

http://www.itg.be/evde/02_Malariap2.htm

But there is some anecdotal evidence that "long pig" does taste pretty good.

really, there's no way around this that can't also be worked around by the spammers. Every single step is met by counter action and evasion. The only thing that works is jail time.

How about the idea of proof-of-work with price discrimination? Unknown domains start at a fairly high level, so it takes a long time to send mail. If the user or domain has sent a few good mails, it's "trusted" (but using a robust trust metric so that spammers can't just trust each other), and then sending mail is fast. If the user gets compromised, he drops on the trust network and suddenly it's expensive to send mail again.

It's kinda a hack because you're explicitly wasting processing (or memory access) power to limit something that's otherwise unlimited, but it could work. That is, it could work once someone waves his wand and establishes that distributed trust network.

Botnets would initially circumvent this, but the zombies would get their trust degraded and so would send spam very slowly, making them unsuitable. Thus the spammers would have to ever chase new hosts. The delay function can be structured so that "stop and go" (send some spam until at worst trust, then let the user get back to good trust, then send more spam) doesn't work.

Great post!

"After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid." - Oxborgh report.

The Penn state inquiry does not directly address tree rings.

The Muir report, (why wasn't it linked in TFS?), says - "We have seen no evidence to sustain a charge of impropriety on the part of CRU staff (or the many other authors) in respect of selecting the reconstructions in AR4 Chapter 6. [snip] We find that divergence is well acknowledged in the literature, including CRU papers."

Presumably, the misinterpretations were explained and people learned more about what was actually going on. This is a bad thing?

Yeah right, that's never what happens. These kooks latch on to whatever data you give them that they think proves their point, and none of your explanations ever budge them from their a-priori position.

That's why Mann didn't want to release his data; it wasn't the first time that that jerk McIntyre had asked him for it. The first time, Mann gave it willingly - and was then amazed at how it was misinterpreted, because McIntyre doesn't have the background to do this sort of thing. Seriously, look up his qualifications - he's got BS in Mathematics from the 1960s, and that's it.

That's why Mann was apathetic towards the idea of giving McIntyre (or really any of those people) his data - they just don't know what to do with it. Of course, now that this has become an issue, he's made the data publicly available, but for some reason you don't see McIntyre talking about that.

If you really want to know, check out the rationale of the folks building Linux clusters with Myrinet instead of Ethernet. Here's a link to a paper discussing one implementation from 2001: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.31.9270

Simply put, when working with high performance computing tasks using parallel toolkits like MPI or on problems that require inter node communication of intermediate results, latency really matters to performance. Minimum latency of Myrinet or similar communications frameworks is a small fraction of what ethernet's latency is.

So to answer your implied assertion, ethernet does not work perfectly well unless you consider "well" to cover the case where running a program takes 10x longer than it otherwise would for certain problems, IE the above mentioned timing-critical ones....

not to mention that it, like almost all sociology, neurology, etc. are essentially hedge wizards pushing pseudo science.

i think true understanding of how our brains work will come from bottom-up (atomic-to-molecule-to-cellular-to-organ-to-organism) modeling and/or from advances in human computer interaction for the disabled -- computer-brain interfacing.

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/17882844.html
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.118.9017&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface

some of these studies used animals, sometimes unto their deaths, but at least there is a credible research direction rather than trying to support simpleton broad generalizations of "what people are like".

and all that is driving this tripe is big pharma looking to push more drugs that we don't properly understand -- or even can make credible claims of therapeutic value about.

uggh.

Just exactly what the fuck is wrong with square pixels? They are the easiest to manipulate algorithmically.

There's no such thing as square pixels: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.79.9093

That memo basically makes the point that a pixel is an infinitesimally small point, a sample representative of the colour in that area. The sampling can be of any form, for example it may have a Gaussian shape, and thus when displaying an image made of these pixels (samples) we should spread the colour of those points to the surrounding area in a suitable way (eg. with a Gaussian).

If we're talking about PC monitors then we may presume that the display is made out of little squares, but we must think about the best way to map our sample of image colour (our pixels) onto that surface of squares. Doing a 1:1 mapping might be OK in some cases, but it's a very naive approach, especially if the pixels are further apart than the squares on the display.