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OpenBSD security is in large part overstated, and at worst, a myth.

Let us look at 3 main points, of which the last is the most important.

1. Secure by default. Yes, having services turned off by default is a good move. It also actually has nothing to do with the security of what you actually have running.

2. Auditing. Only the base system is audited. The ports are often quite far behind. Most attacks are not against "the base system".

3. Lastly...OpenBSD, by design, is not a secure system. A secure system is much, much more than just a lack of vulnerabilities. It is the ability to have controls and lock down things, to prevent unauthorized access. Instead, the OpenBSD approach does it's very best to assume that people don't get in, but does little to help when something does go wrong. Or, you know, if you even wanted to actually restrict access with more than just the user/group scheme. Hell, they don't even have a basic ACL. VMS was a secure system. Very recent editions of Windows are well on their way to becoming secure systems. OpenBSD is not.

In fact, as it stands, Linux is a far, far more secure system, because of access to things like SELinux and RSBAC. These frameworks allow you to lock down and control every aspect of your system. Anything you want to restrict and how, you basically can. It takes the "everything is a file" philosophy to the next step. These systems are more secure for one simple reason. You should be prepared in case someone does, not simply try to eliminate all bugs all together, which while noble, is a flawed attempt. Not to mention the inability to restrict legitimate users on the system in a limiting way...

Instead, if someone successfully gets root on OpenBSD..then they have root, This is getting better with privilege separated stuff, but Linux had this in 3rd party patches about 10 years ago. With SELinux and RSBAC, you can remove the concept of root. If someone hacks a webserver...well, the webserver does not need write access, except maybe to tmp, it won't need execute access, it won't need to initiate outgoing connections, and it won't need write access, only append access to /var/log. The attacker can't do anything, and you simply can't do something similar with OpenBSD.

In fact, despite Theo being staunchly opposed to such attempts, there was one. Systrace. It was nowhere near as powerful or flexible as the aforementioned frameworks, but it was a start. Instead, The developers decided to use an insecure technique, system call interposition, shown to be insecure. After this they gave up.

OpenBSD is an extremely quality codebase, and it is more secure for small stuff and does make a good router or firewall. It is by no means a secure system though, and should not be hailed as one.

You left out the rest like 16% 3rd degree burns, but oh well you must be a manager at McDonald's or something?

And if you think 16% is a small number, I suggest you light a match under your finger and see how long you can hold it.

Hey, I spilled coffee like that before and yeah it burned, but not to that level. It would have to be almost boiling to do that.

Burn info here:
http://www.hmc.psu.edu/healthinfo/b/burns3.htm

Yeah, that's what the media did, took out a small snippet and left out the rest of the story.

So the real deal is this is was partly her fault and partly(mostly) McDonald's. After all elderly people are people too and should be accommodated. They chose not to design a different cup, but put up a sign. Either way the lawsuit was probably figured in as a risk worth taking. $2.7 million was a bargain for them if a better cup for elderly people cost them just 0.02 cents to produce.

That's my issue with using only numbers to solve a problem like this.

The checksum used by TCP is several orders of magnitude more likely to match a corrupted packet than the checksum used by bittorrent. (citation)

More than likely these are transmission errors where the TCP checksum matched but the bittorrent checksum did not.

Yep. Penn State University offers a degree in Security and Risk Analysis with a specification in Cyber-security.

http://ist.psu.edu/prospectivestudents/undergraduate/sra/

Florida State University also offers a masters program in Information Security: http://www.cs.fsu.edu/current/grad/GradStudies/cs_ms.html

I'll be starting my junior year in computer science next year at FSU and I'm (hopefully) going to go into the InfoSec program. Also take a look at the IASP (DoD Information Assurance Scholarship Program). Personally I'm very divided on the idea of working for the government. Seeing as I have family in the middle east (missionaries), something as trivial as that may be enough for me to be denied a clearance...

Yep. Penn State University offers a degree in Security and Risk Analysis with a specification in Cyber-security. http://ist.psu.edu/prospectivestudents/undergraduate/sra/

Interestingly, people have used GPS to measure temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere. The idea is to precisely measure the Doppler shift of the GPS satellite signal. This is modified by the refraction of radio waves through the atmosphere. Atmospheric refraction is governed by the density of air, which in turn depends on its temperature. Thus, radio occultation measurements can be used to infer (a convolved integral of) the air temperature along the line-of-sight. Many such measurements can be used to extract spatial and temporal structure, and also infer information about atmospheric pressure and water vapor content.

Here is one early paper, and a review. This system is gaining increasing attention and may one day be a competitive alternative to existing ground- and satellite-based observation systems.

I see very little reason to suspect that the Steig et al 2009 study was wrong to say: "... significant warming extends well beyond the Antarctic Peninsula to cover most of West Antarctica, an area of warming much larger than previously reported. West Antarctic warming exceeds 0.1 C per decade over the past 50 years, and is strongest in winter and spring. Although this is partly offset by autumn cooling in East Antarctica, the continent-wide average near-surface temperature trend is positive."

If I wanted to buy a person. I would take the amount of money they would need in a life time to support a family, and multiply it by 10. That should allow you to find a naked woman to by. Beauty is subjective. Let's say for here: http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/counties/12086 (Miami-Dade, Florida). So about 3 million dollars. For 2.6 billion, you could have about 867 naked women MAX

For a minimum, I'ld look at what porn stars get paid. A good porn start can make about 750K/year. Assuming that you want top quality women for the rest of your life (50 years), you could have 69 women minimum (rotating the old ones out and new ones in as they age and your preferences change).

Doesn't matter. Not even for Apple fans

Read about it here

Regards,
K.T.

Not true, this is an opportunistic bacteria that lives in stagnant water. It can find the stagnant water without being introduced through the water supply (through air or other contamination). Since a person with dirty hair is only inches away from the shower, it's not hard to see how it might get contaminated. In the same way it can get inside your lungs (aerosol), it can also get inside your shower head.

The shower head is sitting idle most of the day, and since the chlorine in the water quickly dissipates in air, the water left remaining when you turn the shower off is quite welcoming to the bug. Yeah, it gets hit with chlorinated water at least once a day (you do shower regularly, right?), but the amount of chlorine in the water at-delivery is way too little to kill entrenched bacteria (that happens at the treatment plant, with much higher concentrations of chlorine, and UV treatments). You might kill a small amount, but the strong survive.

This is a real problem - it's already known that sources of stagnant water can be breeding grounds for Legionnaire's Disease, so why not yet-another lung infection?

Of course, as the authors of the original article (probably login required) themselves admit, the confidence intervals are very wide. This is inevitable for a sample of only 12 individuals. However it indicates, that mutation rate is about 12/10149085=0.000001 (rounded at first non-zero digit).
I would expect mutation rate to be somehow adapted to changes in the environment. But this rate does seem very low. It translates to very long timescales of change.
I think a mutuation rate this low, gives more force to arguments for genetic engineering.

Interestingly, in genetic algorithms, it seems from a recent review that people usually use mutation rates much higher at the orders of 0.01 or 0.001.

And your statements about reliability? In what sense can a logic circuit be "guaranteed" free of defects? Did Intel know about this method of quality assurance back when they were designing the Pentium? It seems to me that simple logic circuits can be guaranteed free of defects because the human mind can readily model the whole system and intuitively decide it is correct. When the system is complex, that is no longer true.

There is some progress being made towards "guaranteeing" the correctness of circuits, such as:

this. Centaur Technologies (VIA) uses theorem proving tools to guarantee the correctness of parts of the VIA Nano processor. I'm sure with a little digging more references to this sort of thing can be found.

Intel appears to be actively working in the area of formal verification also, e.g. this - although this doesn't directly deal with low level circuits.

So, it is possible to guarantee some correctness, although I suspect it rests on the correctness of the theorem prover you're using also.

Hilarious, but I'd like to show you this fun bit of trivia...

http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html

So, the death spiral will spin whichever way prevailing forces decide. I suppose this means the spin will be googly...

What's the big deal? A&T has long mined call detail records for marketing and fraud detection purposes. See, for example, papers on "Giga-Mining" and "Communities of Interest".

What's the big deal? A&T has long mined call detail records for marketing and fraud detection purposes. See, for example, papers on "Giga-Mining" and "Communities of Interest".

Even better, you can use a probabilistic sensor model and incrementally refine your position estimate of the RFID tag based on tag detection rates. If you're genuinely interested, look at this paper.

Yup, it's true: http://www.mne.psu.edu/edwards/projects/psbr/psbr.htm

Oh, how wrong this is.

You should look into the L4 microkernel project some time, and its follow-ups (e.g. Pistachio, Fiasco)

In a nutshell: The reason most "microkernels" have bad performance is that they are not anywhere near "micro" enough.

This makes it great for wireless networks in which routes are highly variable or not otherwise knowable in advance. Routing protocols already exist for such indeterminate networks, but if the protocol you're transmitting has too short a timeout, it's useless. You'd lose far too many packets and never get any work done.

So, for such networks, you'd need DTN. DTN would also be useful when using Mobile IP, where the two networks you're crossing between have a gap between them, so there isn't 100% coverage. Then, your connection can survive the transition, even though you don't have actual connectivity for all of that time.

This makes it great for wireless networks in which routes are highly variable or not otherwise knowable in advance. Routing protocols already exist for such indeterminate networks, but if the protocol you're transmitting has too short a timeout, it's useless. You'd lose far too many packets and never get any work done.

So, for such networks, you'd need DTN. DTN would also be useful when using Mobile IP, where the two networks you're crossing between have a gap between them, so there isn't 100% coverage. Then, your connection can survive the transition, even though you don't have actual connectivity for all of that time.

Why do you insist on posting your own fantasies as if they had anything to do with the truth?

Have you told Penn State College of Agricultures Diary and Animal Science you know more than they do yet?

The UMass link you provide says nothing about greenhouses gases. The closest it comes to the word "gas" is "gasketing". And though the other link does us "gas" and "carbon dioxide" it says nothing about whether greenhouse gases, which is not used.

You have provided no links to evidence to support your position but I have, including the Penn State link above which you obviously did not read or you're just acting like a troll. Just in case you're not trolling here are some more links:

• What is the Greenhouse Effect?
• Water Vapor Confirmed as Major Player in Climate Change
• Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change, and Energy
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Everglades: The Role of Hydrologic Conditions

Now unless you provide links to support your position I can only conclude you are trolling. And the 2 links you did provide did not do so.

Falcon

Growers also pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses to warm them

No, they don't. Why do you insist on posting fantasies? Greenhouses become hot since they're closed environments trapping sunlight.

You'd better tell the Penn State College of Agricultural Science you know better than they do what greenhouse gases do.

Falcon

You just unwittingly proved my point while displaying your own ignorance.

Yes, carbon is needed for plant growth, however that does not mean carbon dioxide doesn't need to be pumped into greenhouses for that. Soil and fertilizer does contain carbon. And CO2 is pumped into greenhouses in part to raise temperatures. Perhaps I should have included this link, "What is the Greenhouse Effect? which says:

"Although greenhouse gases make up only about 1 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, they regulate our climate by trapping heat and holding it in a kind of warm-air blanket that surrounds the planet."

"This phenomenon is what scientists call the "greenhouse effect." Without it, scientists estimate that the average temperature on Earth would be colder by approximately 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit), far too cold to sustain our current ecosystem."

It is very, very well-known in the science community that the term "greenhouse gas" is a misnomer.

It's well known in greenhouse gardening that greenhouse gases make greenhouses warmer than without them, because they trap heat. This is one way how growers are able to grow tomatoes in greenhouses in Scandinavia where it's too cold to grow them outdoors.

Seriously, just google "greenhouse misnomer" and you'll find many hits that explain it further. I will now accept your apology.

Seriously google greenhouses gases heat as well as greenhouses gases trap heat. Go further, add science From Penn State College of Agricultural Science "However, greenhouse gases trap solar heat in earth's atmosphere, preventing it from being reflected away and causing an overall temperature increase.". Now I'll accept your apology.

Falcon

I have always like the basic idea around Citeseer.

"CiteSeerx is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science. CiteSeerx aims to improve the dissemination of scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

Rather than creating just another digital library, CiteSeerx attempts to provide resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques, and software that can be used to promote other digital libraries. CiteSeerx has developed new methods and algorithms to index PostScript and PDF research articles on the Web. ..."

The basic issue for you would be that is was made to focus on Computer and Information sciences as it currently is implemented.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/about/site

In the short term, this is may not be valuable for you. In the long term, I think this can be the basis for most or any academic (or even non academic) research literature.

The purpose of VORTEX2, as some comments have questioned, is to test some theories about the evolution of tornadoes in thunderstorms and why some supercells produce tornadoes while others do not. In a very simplistic explanation of what's going on, vorticity about a horizontal axis is tilted to where vortex lines intersect the ground, thus tilting the rotation into the vertical and transferring the rotation to the surface. Part of the tilting is done by the rear flank downdraft, and part of the tilting is done by the updraft. However, if the rear flank downdraft is too cold, the updraft cannot lift the air in the downdraft too much, and the rotation isn't tilted into the vertical. Present theories suggest that warmer rear flank downdrafts favor tornadogenesis. Here's a link to a presentation by Dr. Markowski of Penn State about the current theory regarding tornadogenesis. VORTEX2 is an attempt to gather high resolution data sets for many supercells to test the current theory. Obviously there's much more to VORTEX2, including the testing of unmanned aircraft in storm environments. But one major objective is to test the current theory regarding tornadogenesis.

It's called jury nullification, and I'd think most judges won't let you argue for it, make juries swear an oath to uphold the law

While judges will prevent lawyers from talking about the jury's rightful power to consider questions of law as well as fact, in so doing they are the ones violating their oath to uphold the law. A juror who votes to acquit a defendant accused of a "crime" under an unconstitutional law in upholding the law of the land, the one that legislatures ignored in passing the statute, and that police and prosecutors ignored in enforcing it.

Criminal defendant have the right to trial by jury. But what is a jury? At the time that the Constitution was created, it was clear that "jury" meant a body empowered to dismiss charges brought under bad and unjust laws. As John Adams put it: "It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."

And John Jay, first Chief Justice: "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy."

This idea is still explicitly written into the state constitutions of Maryland and Indiana, and in implicit in that of Pennsylvania.

Akhenaten's reign was a period of great turmoil. The old polytheistic religion and the associated political regime was overthrown and a populist monotheistic religion was established with a more centralised political authority in the hands of Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.

The whole political project ended in defeat, though, and their opponents ensured that the monuments of the period were systematically destroyed. Recently quite a lot of fragments of images and text have been collected (they were sometimes used as fill in later buildings) and reassembled. See The Akhenaten Temple Project.

I recommend to anyone interested in the story of Akhenaten, the short novel "Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth" by Najib Mahfuz, the famous Egyptian novelist and Nobel-prize winner.

The Case for Virtual Register Machines, Brian Davis, Andrew Beatty, Kevin Casey, David Gregg and John Waldron, 12.6.2003, PDF

you'll find that BMS was given exclusive rights for marketing only.

No, BMS was give more than that, from wiki the NCI offered "its current stock and supply from current bark stocks, together with proprietary access to the data so far collected".

Neither the government nor BMS owned ANY data

The NCI owned the date it acquired in testing Taxol. Now they may of, should have, released that data so anyone could use it but instead they gave BMS exclusive rights to use the data.

The NCI did this to accomplish exactly what you said: reduce the production costs. That is important.

No, what is important is to lower the costs to patients who need whatever. If the dose could be lowered to less than a dollar, which BMS did, then it shouldn't cost thousands of dollars to be treated.

This is why you buy aspirin from Bayer instead of making it yourself.

No, I don't use aspirin, but if I wanted something like it I'd use wintergreen which contains a chemical related to salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Here' I even found a lab experiment for a college class to synthesize Aspirin and Oil of Wintergreen [pdf warning], we made aspirin in one of my chemistry classes. I could eat the berries or make tea.

If you don't like the drugs being cheaper because the wrong people make money

The drug is not cheaper, it's expensive and BMS is keeping it that way. Now if BMS were to make Taxol cheap I'd have no problem. If it cost $1 to make treatment shouldn't cost more than $10, maybe $100, but it cost thousands. Not only that but BMS tried to stop generic makers of Taxol, " BMS to pay $670 million to settle suits."

Falcon

Funny that this is modded funny. Here's how we use IRC at our internal consultancy at Penn State University to field questions from our 70-or-so clients. Combine with Mibbit and a copy of supybot, and you've got brain-dead-simple-to-use semisynchronous communication that also spits out Googleable logs.

It is interesting to look at that time. Cookies were not widely supported at that time. I can only find the paper here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.54.7317 Times really have changed. Patrick

At my 12-person (and 70-client) internal web consulting shop, we use the heck out of Trac's wiki. Here are some examples.

At my 12-person (and 70-client) internal web consulting shop, we use the heck out of Trac's wiki. Here are some examples.

At my 12-person (and 70-client) internal web consulting shop, we use the heck out of Trac's wiki. Here are some examples.

At my 12-person (and 70-client) internal web consulting shop, we use the heck out of Trac's wiki. Here are some examples.

If you're gonna link scientific literature, try to at least link the full article so people can see who funded their research. I'll do it for you: http://www.geosc.psu.edu/~kkeller/Kraepiel_est_03.pdf

"Tuna sampling and analysis was organized and paid for by the USTF (United States Tuna Foundation)"... They happen to be the guys who's job it is to whine when the FDA does its job by telling women to avoid types of fish which are known to have higher concentrations of methylmercury (like tunas): http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~acrobat/hgstak58.pdf
"Based on a United States Tuna Foundation (USTF) and National Fisheries Institute (NFI) joint evaluation on methylmercury in fish advisories, we believe it is premature to adopt the Environmental Protection Agencyâ(TM)s (EPA) reference dose (RfD) as a basis for consumer advice".

Yeah, they sound like a great source of unbiased scientific funding eh?

Is it any surprise that they chose to do their research off of Hawaii, when "Environments that are known to favor the production of methylmercury include certain types of wetlands, dilute low-pH lakes in Northeast and Northcentral United States, parts of the Florida Everglades, newly flooded reservoirs, and coastal wetlands, particularly along the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic Ocean, and San Francisco Bay." (http://www.usgs.gov/themes/factsheet/146-00/)
Notice Hawaii wasn't in there. Using exceptions to prove rules isn't usually a sound idea.

Sorry, mercury in marine fish does not come from coal fired power plants [cosis.net], or for that matter almost any other human activity (except in special cases like Minimata).

Ice core data disagrees with you: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Mercury_fremont_ice_core.png

Freshwater contamination by Hg is solely a result of improperly dumped industrial liquid waste.

Any reason you're trying to omit marine considerations when you selected the word "freshwater"? I mean, that is where we get our tuna isn't it? Not to mention most of the other contaminated fish.

Check this out: ATSV. It can two 2D and 3D plots, as well as adding additional dimensions via color, glyph size, glyph orientation, glyph transparency, stuff like that. It's pretty slick.

for completeness' sake http://cictr.ee.psu.edu/CICTRnews/White%20LED/Researchers%20Envision%20an%20LED-Powered%20Wireless%20Network%20%20PwC%20TelcomDirectNews_com.htm

The whole point of the GPL is to strengthen those who are materially sharing your ideals while diminishing those who are materially acting against them.

What kind of flawed logic is this? This isn't a game-of-life board, you know. There's nothing "the GPL" can do to "diminish those" who don't adopt it.

How bizarre that the same ontological mistake is made again and again: code is confused with living, thinking, entities (i.e., humans).

The GPL is an abstract entity that doesn't do anything, that has no power over anyone except for those who chose to throw that yoke on their shoulders. This isn't an algorithm that "starves" a cell.

People who don't want to use the GPL will just turn their backs on it and they have done so. The fact that there's no ecosystem for third-party vendors on Linux shows this. The fact the Qt was licensed under the LGPL reinforces this POV.

In fact, you look at the statistics for open source software and you see they are flawed. The majority of software is under the GPL - but they are little projects, short-lived. In fact, it's amazing how people who manage SourceForge and the likes are completely clueless it terms of making the site machine-readable and ready for information-gathering. See, for instance:

The perils and pitfalls of mining SourceForge
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.2.1175

The bigger projects, Apache, GWT, the web development stuff, languages, etc, all are under business-friendly non-GPL licenses. Why is that? Think about it.

You wanna contribute to a project in which someone can just take you code, dual-license it, sell it for businesses under a proprietary license while you must open up all your secrets, algorithms, etc, so the competition can crush you? Be my guest.

I will use this as an opportunity for self promotion. I have a published book about the topic of FOSS games (it was also my masters thesis). You can purchase the book at http://www.amazon.com/Can-Open-Source-Games-Compete/dp/3639100603/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230920840&sr=8-1 or read it for free at http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/theses/approved/WorldWideFiles/ETD-3146/Thesis_Final.pdf

Citation indices like citeseer distinguish self-citations from non-self-citations; if you pick some random paper that has both, you'll see a tally like "81 citations -- 7 self". Does Thomson Scientific not actually bother to do that in computing its impact factor?

No, the en-dash is a legitimate character and isn't a Microsoft creation.

Although only modern browser support it, there are HTML entities that should work with most of the "Microsoft" characters:

• en-dash: – results in –
• em-dash: — results in —
• double open quote: “ results in “
• double close quote: ” results in ”

For more information, see this page.

If that was the case, we wouldn't need Java and C#

Right, because Java and C# are new and improved systems programming languages. Don't say Singularity.

Down at the bottom, the fundamental problem with C and C++ is the "pointer=array" concept.

Of course, how stupid of them! All this work trying to support user-defined abstractions for systems programming and the problem was a tiny typing rule the whole time!!! Let me guess, the root of all Java's problems is the covariant array subtyping problem? The same with covariant argument subtyping in Eiffel too?

Perhaps you mean the ability to look at memory as a sequence of bytes... except that that's just a little bit fundamental to systems programming. So you think that the millions of lines of BIOSes, kernels, device drivers, and ROMs should be written in assembly? Trust me, although the specific memory models will change over time (certainly away from UMA), as long as there is systems programming, there will always be a high-level language (in the old meaning of the word) that takes you to the metal. Although clearly we shouldn't be using it to write e-Commerce apps, educational software, internal IT apps, and whatever you do.

I know it can still be used that way, but it seems to be more and more difficult to only code that way using C++, because you're going to have to use libraries at some point or another.

Yeah, those damned templated libraries with their: performance, type safety, design patterns, generic programming principles. I can't imagine why Java wasn't happy with containers of Objects and added Generics. C# definitely shouldn't have followed suit. All you need is void*, size_t, and int (*)(void *, void *), right?

Canonical GAs are never the correct tool for a problem. They combine a crude random local search (mutation) with the cross-over operator that is intended to splice partial solutions. The trouble is that even on problems designed to be exploited by GAs, like the Royal Road, a random restart hill-climber will perform better with the same number of fitness evaluations.

I'm not as familiar with GP, but given the minute number of attributes quoted and millions of fitness evaluations... I'd say a typical greedy tree learner would perform much, much better.

You mean we shouldn't use the RFID beermug, discussed here?

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.10.2165

Oak Tree Behaviour 101:

    Periodically, often in response to an unusually warm and wet period, oak trees will have a mast year. In the mast year acorn production is immensely increased; reports often say exponentially increased, but in my anecdotal experience I'd say about triple normal acorn production. It's normal for the mast year to affect a region rather than individual trees (though you sometimes see it in isolated specimens too) and that's the primary reason to believe this is triggered by weather.

Effects on predators of acorns are reasonably predictable and work to the oak forest's advantage; squirrel populations boom during the mast and then bust the following year when the oaks are recovering from their unusually high energy expenditure and produce little or no acorn yield.

So; in summary: while it's certainly possible that climate change has triggered this particular event, it's normal for oak trees to have occasionally high regional acorn production fluctuations, and it's normal for the squirrels to be starving and freaking out when acorn production is low or nil. No need to panic.

Posting as AC because slashdot frequently refuses to let me be myself. Login, not logged in, still forced to post AC.

When you say that the implementation of electoral college is "analog vs. digital" you're basically conceding that the ideal solution is to count all the votes, but you argue that it is just logistically too difficult to count all those pesky little votes. Nonetheless, you argue that states are too "low resolution". You want congressional districts because those are higher resolution.

You know what would be the highest resolution? Counting everyone's vote. This obvious solution is exactly what we do for elections of senators, congressmen, mayors, and every other elected office in the land except the presidency.

In the name of "smoothing things out" you are perfectly willing to introduce a huge amount of error into the vote. Not because it's fairer -- you seem to acknowledge that it's less fair -- but just because it's easier. Dictatorship would be even easier, which is probably why it was so popular back in the day. But there's a reason why have a Democracy and morally we need to count everyone's vote, not count some people's votes and give them all the votes of other people simply because they happen to constitute a majority in an arbitrary geographical region which was gerrymandered by the political class in the first place.

Here's an idea: instead of taking for granted that we have a flawed election system, let's fix it. Let's invest in our election system to make it reliable and secure. There are cryptographic methods to that can verifiably ensure a secure, private, and perfect tally. That would address all your concerns about the integrity of the tally without arbitrarily disenfranchising people.

When you say that the implementation of electoral college is "analog vs. digital" you're basically conceding that the ideal solution is to count all the votes, but you argue that it is just logistically too difficult to count all those pesky little votes. Nonetheless, you argue that states are too "low resolution". You want congressional districts because those are higher resolution.

You know what would be the highest resolution? Counting everyone's vote. This obvious solution is exactly what we do for elections of senators, congressmen, mayors, and every other elected office in the land except the presidency.

In the name of "smoothing things out" you are perfectly willing to introduce a huge amount of error into the vote. Not because it's fairer -- you seem to acknowledge that it's less fair -- but just because it's easier. Dictatorship would be even easier, which is probably why it was so popular back in the day. But there's a reason why have a Democracy and morally we need to count everyone's vote, not count some people's votes and give them all the votes of other people simply because they happen to constitute a majority in an arbitrary geographical region which was gerrymandered by the political class in the first place.

Here's an idea: instead of taking for granted that we have a flawed election system, let's fix it. Let's invest in our election system to make it reliable and secure. There are cryptographic methods to that can verifiably ensure a secure, private, and perfect tally. That would address all your concerns about the integrity of the tally without arbitrarily disenfranchising people.