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YES. Because it ACTUALLY HAPPENED BEFORE.

The QWest CEO/Chairman got 10 years in prison for refusing to wiretap his own customers.
Do you even remember seeing any news about that anywhere?

That's how easy it is!

And EXACTLY because people like you think "Naaah, that's *too* crazy.".
It's one of the two secrets for every successful con job too.

Fortunately things like this are coming into existence.

He could be talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-extinction-042710.html

For a while we didn't have coral.

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

The average worker in the USA in 1970 earned $19.20
In 2010 the average worker earned $19.70

The average worker's wage was under 10,000 in 1970.
http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median%20Household%20Income.pdf
http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php

The top systems today are approximately at the same capacity as a human brain.

Brain neurons perform an operation that's similar to a dot product. Their operation can be simulated by a weight for each dendrite that's multiplied by that dendrite's input.

In rough order of magnitude, a human brain has a hundred billion neurons, or 1e11 in standard computer language notation. Each neuron has an average of one thousand inputs, 1e3, and performs a hundred operations per second. That is 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 flops, or 10,000 teraflops.

According to Top500, the highest powered computer system in November 2012 had a capacity of 17,590 teraflops.

This doesn't mean it has the same ability as a human brain, because there's also the software involved. There is a project, sponsored by Google, that tries to implement a computer system operating close to what the human brain does.

When they tested that system presenting to it one million random screenshots from Youtube videos, the system learned all by itself to recognize objects that appeared on those videos, like human faces and cats.

There's a good technical tutorial on this system at the Stanford university site, and a more basic explanation can be found in several popular articles if you google for "deep learning".

There's also a great tutorial by Andrew Ng's group at:

http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Tutorial

There are two types of deep learning currently by the way:
- restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM)
- sparse auto-encoders

Google / Andrew Ng use sparse auto-encoders. Hinton uses (created) deep RBM networks. They both work in a similar way: each layer learns to reconstruct the input, using a low-dimensional representation. In this way, lower layers build up for example line detectors, and higher levels build up more abstract representations.

a lot of what is considered AI by the people that do AI has nothing to with intelligence.

No it has to do with automating reasoning. Intelligence is so vaguely defined that two people could have an opposite opinion on the importance of rational tough in the definition of intelligence and they would both be right be right depending on which school of thoughts you belong. I suggest you read a little bit in the following encyclopedia : starting at that page

Yes, this is just like a plenoptic (light field) camera. If you want to experiment yourself, all you need is non-moving subject material, a digital camera, and time. Take photos from slightly shifted viewing positions of a subject. Then use Hugin or Photoshop to align them on a chosen subject (or focal plane). Average all the frames together, and you'll have a synthetic focus image of your subject.

With some care and effort, you can even supersample the pool of images and get super-resolution output, where the result is more pixels than any source image (but far less than the sum of all the images).

I've been doing experimentation along these lines for a few years, and here are the resulting photos of scenes from the Chicago area. I was inspired by the work of Marc Levoy, and his Stanford Multi-Camera array.

Despite such evidence, the very existence of an IT labor shortage remains controversial.
...
Why is there such profound disagreement on this issue? In part, the problem comes from looking at the IT labor market in an oversimplified way, without considering the specific character of work in the IT profession. We believe that a complete analysis of the labor market in IT requires not only an understanding of conventional analytical techniques from sociology and labor economics, but also a detailed sense of what work in the IT profession involves.
...
We believe that the failure to reach agreement on the existence of an IT labor shortage comes from the following overgeneralizations in traditional analysis:

• Looking at the IT profession as a whole makes it difficult to understand the dynamics of particular specialty areas in which critical shortages exist.
• Individual workers in the software-development area are by no means interchangeable.
• Strategies adopted by the industry to identify and hire the talent they need are motivated much more strongly by the need to attract highly productive individuals than by a desire to reduce labor costs.

I like the Stanford approach better. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2007/03/fairy-use-tale

I agree: torrent can't really saturate a 10GE... for that you should see something like bbcp, which will quite handily flood a 10gig ethernet and then some. :-)

NC State University uses torrent to let students download some commercial software so they don't have to hand out DVDs... they distribute SAS that way for certain, probably a few others.

ibiblio had someone who developed sort of a "perma-seed" to use torrent for some sort of archive-like thingie. I know Paul Jones is probably reading this, perhaps he would like to comment? :-)

but they are a good way to transfer purchasing power.

In a number of aspects, no they aren't. Black-market money has no real protection.

Dwyer hopes his sensor aboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, will provide more data."

The "sensor" referred to in the article appears to be the main instrument on board the Fermi spacecraft: the not very imaginatively named Large Area Telescope,
or LAT. This was developed by a very large international team, including NASA and the DoE in the US. However, Dwyer, as far as I know, was not
a member of this large team. (And I don't think the article or Dwyer actually claim this.)
The data obtained from the LAT are made public as soon as possible, usually within much less than 24 hours,
after being obtained. Anyone in the world is free to download and analyze these data.
http://www-glast.stanford.edu/
http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/
The Fermi satellite also carries the GBM - gamma-ray burst monitor, which has provided the majority of the results on gamma-rays
from lightning. The data from this instrument are also immediately public.
http://gammaray.msfc.nasa.gov/gbm/

I don't know what the proper term is relating to what I think are "patent departments." I'd like to see if there's a breakdown in the acceptance rates across various lines of expertise. The reason is because I have a belief that much of this is indeed because of patent trolling. If that were the case, I'd expect that a number of departments would still show about the same acceptance rate.

Since the Comp Sci patent applications typically invent and redefine their terms in the patent application (after all, they're creating new "ideas"), they've found more effective ways to get their "inventions" defined in a way that appears more patentable. Also, it looks like some work at Stanford showed that rejecting patents really just increased their workload for a variety of reasons. Path of least resistance will eventually win you know...

http://siepr.stanford.edu/?q=/system/files/shared/pubs/11-014.pdf

forgive me for responding to an AC, but what an absolutely dumb response you wrote.

there are clear standards for 'fair use'. You can read about them at
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

your "you want your stuff public" argument is bullshit. everything in a bookstore, movie theater, etc is "public." This doesn't automatically give the right for others to republish those things, in their entirety, for profit, as google does. your claim of "absolute control" is bullshit. i never claimed there should be - i specifically referenced fair use, which is the mechanism by which creators and rightsholders dont have "absolute control."

However, I contend that what google is doing is pretty much as close as you get to "absolute thievery" - total republishing for money. so, this in my view is not some trivial marginal case at the limits of fair use. in many ways, as far as the sites are concerned, its probably about as infringing as you can get.

or, if not, i'd like to hear some argument why not without the special pleading legally nonsensical "you want your stuff public?" casuistic schtick.

and what's more (to reply to my own post), google's profitability is FAR from irrelevant.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

No, there is nothing whatsoever in my post in which I claim or insinuate that slashdot is illegal. Google republishes as much as the entirety of websites for profit and without commentary.

Read this page:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

Slashdot takes small portions of articles for the purpose of commentary, review, and education (and/or journalism). Its use generally have little to no effect upon the potential market. the amounts quoted are modest.

completely different from the google cacheing/republishing situation.

your "posted publicly" claim is bullshit. there is no theory in copyright law in which public performance, publishing, or aviailability somehow invalidate copyright. just because you hear a song on the bus doesn't mean that it's in the public domain or that you can therefore makes CDs of it and start selling it.

Knuth doesn't seem to be too bothered by the fact that his program is rendered in standard ascii characters as 'TeX', rather than how the name is typeset in his books, since his very own home page seems to do likewise.

Of all the comments I've read on here, including the OP I have failed to see one major issue with this. Probably since this site is more for 'computer nerds' than 'energy nerds' like I am ;) All issues with hydrogen aside, there is another 'issue' with this process, that of course the article fails to mention. They ALWAYS leave something critical out, because this of course has to be as 'exiciting' as possible. They never mention the downsides. The downside is the bottleneck in this process is not the hydrogen production, but the production of Xylose. They can't simply take biomass and turn it into hydrogen with this process. They must first 'break apart' the cellulose in biomass in order to obtain xylose sugars. THIS is the hard part, and therefore the expensive part. THAT is the part that requires the breakthrough. It's the same issue that cellulosic ethanol faces. They're both based on the same thing. Making use of sugars from cellulosic biomass. The problem isn't making use of the sugar (the so-called 'breakthrough' here) The REAL issue that needs a breakthrough is actually turning the cellulose into a mixture of sugars. Either using enzymes, heat, acid, etc. That's where a little bit of literacy on the technology can give a totally different view of these so-called 'AMAZING!!! STUPENDOUS!!' breakthroughs. The news is so dumb sometimes it makes me cringe. HERE is where a breakthrough is required to make this so-called amazing process viable: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/jin2/ Cost of breaking down cellulose is the barrier here. With current technology, it would be very expensive hydrogen, but that may change.... but if you can make hydrogen cheaply, you can make ethanol cheaply so why bother??? I can tell from the comments here that most ppl here are computer guys and may be very computer literate but not very 'energy literate'. This news caters to that.

Wish I had some mod points to mod parent up. It's bang on.

AMS confirmed (to much higher precision) the excess already observed by PAMELA and Fermi. This is interesting. It is also a long way from even an indirect detection of dark matter. Meanwhile, there is no evidence for SUSY. None. Nada.

Atheism is the negation of theism. The denial of the existence of God.

Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the topic.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/

And Dr William Craig, a well known theistic philosopher.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/definition-of-atheism

Atheism is NOT the same thing as not having belief in God.

Redigi's business model relies upon making copies. The Thai bloke was importing copies. He wasn't making copies.

What might be more interesting(if less practical, because of higher transaction costs and longer wait times), would be a service equivalent to Redigi; but with the legally-troubling copying handled by the end user.

According to the ruling, Redigi isn't covered by first sale because the item sold is the copy that resides on User A's HDD; but the item Redigi is selling is an unauthorized duplicate residing on Redigi's servers, created from(but not the same as) the copy on User A's HDD. So, while the number of copies in the wild hasn't increased(Redigi's software deletes the copy on User A's HDD after uploading to their server), the goods being sold by Redigi are not the goods covered by first sale(yes, it probably is a bad sign that philosophy is getting dragged in; but it seems most accurate to say that Redigi's goods are qualitatively identical; but not numerically identical with the goods covered by first-sale rights. They are bit-for-bit identical; but they are nevertheless a copy.

However, given that 'buyers'(scare quotes because it looks like a sale and quacks like a sale; but is generally alleged to be a 'licence') aren't usually restricted from doing things like moving their music library between HDDs, or making/restoring backups, or time/place shifting by means of mp3 players and DVRs and the like, I'd be curious to know what the judge would say about a service that handled all the copying at the user end, like the following hypothetical:

Redigi-like software allows the user to easily notify the reseller what tracks they wish to sell. If a buyer appears, the reseller sends out a netflix-style envelope with a cheapo flash drive inside. When the user receives it, they pop it in and the software looks at the manifest file and copies and deletes the appropriate files. When it is finished, the user mails the flash drive back. The reseller then rewrites the manifest(to reflect that it is now going out to the buyer, not the seller) and sends it to the buyer, who pops it in, and has the software read the manifest, copy and delete the files, and finish the transaction.

Such a scheme would be pointlessly convoluted(and the transaction costs would probably swamp any gains for goods cheaper than an entire album or similar); but it would leave the hypothetical Redigi-analog with totally clean hands in terms of copying...

Except that in this instance with what has become known it is hard to see any injustice at all. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.

50 years for trespassing? (*)

This is how the Feds stick it to you if you help terrorists and violent drug kingpings -- you know, fucking murderers -- launder money for a decade:

Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars [for terrorists and drug kingpins] will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? ... What was the Justice Department's opening offer -- asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213

(*) Quit with the 6 months plea bargain bullshit. A plea bargain is not a contract.

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. .... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

Care to back up that claim with solid data?

I suspect this claim comes from this page by the late John J. McCarthy. He summarizes the views of Bernard Cohen, which include specific figures for both the availability and price of uranium. (The cost figures presumably would have changed, as the article is 3 decades old, but the physics would not have.)

Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.

I completely agree about the speaker cables - and while I don't have enough money to spend $1000 on a bottle of wine to know for sure, I do think that there is a psychological phenomenon similar to a placebo effect that actually makes drinking the expensive wine more pleasurable. Here's some cool research: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/baba_wine.html
You're still probably right about stroking ego, but if I had billions of dollars, I might try the $1000 bottle. :)

Actually, they've already finished analyzing this backlog of data at Fermilab of which you speak. Although there is a bump in the data, it is not enough to claim a discovery, and certainly not enough to establish that the properties of the bump make it a Higgs. http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654 You can't "replicate" a discovery with a non-discovery, so that doesn't save the original statement.

While you're right that higher luminosity makes a difference in Higgs searches, and that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has a higher luminosity than Fermilab (about 10 times better in fact), higher center of mass energy also makes a difference. According to this resource, the higher energy results in better production cross section of Higgs at the LHC, also about a factor of 10 improvement. http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C020121/overhead/J_Womers.pdf

There's an intuitive reason for that. Namely, at a proton collider, the center of mass energy is spread out among the quarks which are themselves moving around within the proton. So although the protons are at 1 TeV (or 7 TeV at the LHC) and it seems like plenty to make a Higgs, the quarks don't individually carry the same punch, and it's the quarks that have to make the Higgs. Intuitively, higher luminosity translates into more opportunities to make a Higgs and higher cms energy translates into more ways that the quarks can make a Higgs per collision. Both are improved at the LHC, but my bias is to tend to favor the higher energy solution simply because background increases with luminosity too. But signal-to-noise ratio improves with better production cross sections from higher energy.

Not to belabor the point, nor to embarrass the original commenter, who was plainly hoping for some confirmation good news to come out of Fermilab. But the truth remains: Fermilab cannot replicate the discovery on the data they do have (otherwise they would have claimed discovery before the LHC), nor will they ever replicate the discovery as the collider program is shut down and even if it wasn't, the tevatron is simply not the right machine to do it. It makes me sad more than anything else.

And it makes me sad that the crowd sourced moderation system at Slashdot would upmod a false statement after a contrary true statement was offered in a matter-of-fact but friendly manner. Well, ok, not really. More like LOL! My friends at Fermilab will get a chuckle this morning to hear that some moderator at slashdot thinks there is an active Higgs program at Fermilab that is going to replicate the Cern results.

don't exist*

Freudian slip, of course. ;)

Actually, the self-contradictory definitions do exist; there are probably plenty of people who believe in a God that can literally do anything, even though "anything" includes "making a rock so heavy that he can't lift it", to use the example cited by the noted Irish philosopher Georgius Carlinus.

Whether the entity described by that definition can exist is another matter - a matter that probably ends up involving a philosophical shell game played by people trying to get out from under the logical consequences of the notion of omnipotence. (Not all ideas that can be formulated actually make sense when you follow them to their logical conclusion; see, for example, Russell's paradox.)

You could do something really exhausting for a short period of time.
Get a chin/pull-up bar and use it before work. Do 3-4 reps where you're about completely drained of energy after each rep.
Here you could see how GH and testosterone levels depend on rest length in between repetitions http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20555276.

For back and stomach you can do V pull-ups:
http://www.chunkfitness.com/exercises/back-exercises/lat-exercises/v-pull-up-calisthenics

Or; easier but less muscles (breasts, back, biceps, forearms):
http://www.chunkfitness.com/exercises/back-exercises/lat-exercises/pull-up-chin-up-calisthenics

(If you really need front shoulders and triceps as well, you could complement with push-ups).

That's about the whole upperbody if you put in some ear wiggling.

If you're really nerdy, you can build this one for recovery:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html
A cooling glove, that vacuum pumps the hand in order to keep up circulation from the hand, while cooling it, in order to quickly cool the core temperature after
exercise, without cooling the muscles. According to this Stanford article, this will give better recovery than steroids, for some very strange reason.

Here's something about high intensity training, where you do 3 minutes of really uncomfortable exercise per week:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/242498.php

Price gouging...
Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed)
Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

Sorry I work for an helicopter ambulance service that cover over 30 states and you 10k in way low. the average is between 30k and 40k for just the transportation with medical personal on board.

You jest, but have you ever read Ruddiman. W. F.: 2003. 'The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago'. Climatic Change 61: 261–293

The anthropogenic era is generally thought to have begun 150 to 200 years ago, when the industrial revolution began producing CO2 and CH4 at rates sufficient to alter their compositions in the atmosphere. A different hypothesis is posed here: anthropogenic emissions of these gases first altered atmospheric concentrations thousands of years ago. This hypothesis is based on three arguments. (1) Cyclic variations in CO2 and CH4 driven by Earth-orbital changes during the last 350,000 years predict decreases throughout the Holocene, but the CO2 trend began an anomalous increase 8000 years ago, and the CH4 trend did so 5000 years ago. (2) Published explanations for these mid- to late-Holocene gas increases based on natural forcing can be rejected based on paleocli- matic evidence. (3) A wide array of archeological, cultural, historical and geologic evidence points to viable explanations tied to anthropogenic changes resulting from early agriculture in Eurasia, including the start of forest clearance by 8000 years ago and of rice irrigation by 5000 years ago. In recent millennia, the estimated warming caused by these early gas emissions reached a global-mean value of 0.8C and roughly 2C at high latitudes, large enough to have stopped a glaciation of northeastern Canada predicted by two kinds of climatic models. CO2 oscillations of 10 ppm in the last 1000 years are too large to be explained by external (solar-volcanic) forcing, but they can be explained by outbreaks of bubonic plague that caused historically documented farm abandonment in western Eurasia. Forest regrowth on abandoned farms sequestered enough carbon to account for the observed CO2 decreases. Plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD).

Price gouging... Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed) Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

So much idiocy in such a short comment. For one thing, we didn't invade Iraq because of the 9/11 attacks. For another, we haven't "destroyed" any countries. We invaded Afghanistan because their malignant excuse for a government was hosting Al Queda knowing full well what the organization was up to. That's an iron-clad casus belli (let me get you started on that one). It wasn't the first time they attacked us, either. That was the second attack on the WTC, there was an attack on the USS Cole, and two of our embassies were bombed in Africa.

The mistake we made was turning a perfectly reasonable exercise in gunboat diplomacy into an open-ended "nation building" fiasco, where we pour billions of dollars into that third-world shit hole in the forlorn hope they'll behave like civilized people as a result. We should have flattened the place for a month or so and then dropped leaflets announcing our return should they continue to host anti-American terrorist groups.

Evidently we've all forgotten about http://folding.stanford.edu/...

This is much more akin to foldit. foldit is quite satisfying in its own way, but the learning curve is very steep.

Evidently we've all forgotten about http://folding.stanford.edu/ - scores, stats, levels, competition.... ? Let's kick some cancer ass, please. Too many family members fighting it at this very moment.

Stanford has an elaborate VR lab. The system is 120FPS, and the lag is low, but I'm not sure how low. There's full motion tracking of the subject in a 20 foot by 20 foot space. They have public tours every Friday. Sign up and try high-end VR.

This isn't a graphics lab. It's a psychology lab. Some of the results are scary. They've had kids go through a VR experience of swimming with sharks. A few weeks later, the kids are asked about it, and a sizable fraction of them believe they really did it, adding details that were not in the sim like what they ate while visiting the sharks.

They're always running psychology experiments, and looking for volunteers. Pays $15/hr.

Stanford has an elaborate VR lab. The system is 120FPS, and the lag is low, but I'm not sure how low. There's full motion tracking of the subject in a 20 foot by 20 foot space. They have public tours every Friday. Sign up and try high-end VR.

This isn't a graphics lab. It's a psychology lab. Some of the results are scary. They've had kids go through a VR experience of swimming with sharks. A few weeks later, the kids are asked about it, and a sizable fraction of them believe they really did it, adding details that were not in the sim like what they ate while visiting the sharks.

They're always running psychology experiments, and looking for volunteers. Pays $15/hr.

>

To my mind, provided that the algorithm doing the conversion is appropriately protected, pseudonymisation may be one good method of reducing the risk associated with the processing of personal data, protecting it in the event for a data breach, and thus be a form of security measure, but is unlikely to stop the data from being capable of identifying the individual, in the hands of the party carrying out the pseudonymisation.

With all respect, your mind and common sense are superseded by better minds:

Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets

Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary’s background knowledge.
We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world’s largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information

Deanonymizing Mobility Traces: Using Social Networks as a Side-Channel

Location-based services, which employ data from smartphones, vehicles, etc., are growing in popularity. To reduce the threat that shared location data poses to a user’s privacy, some services anonymize or obfuscate this data. In this paper, we show these methods can be effectively defeated: a set of location traces can be deanonymized given an easily obtained social network graph.

I know... series (scroll to the bottom of the page)

A LOT About Your Web Browser and Computer
The Country, Town, and City You Are Connecting From (IP Geolocation)
What Websites You Are Logged-In To (Login-Detection via CSRF)
I Know Your Name, and Probably a Whole Lot More (Deanonymization via Likejacking, Followjacking, etc.)
Who You Work For
Your [Corporate] Email Address, and more

De-anonymizing social networks

Network de-anonymization task is of multifold significance, with user profile enrichment as one of its most promising applications. After the deanonymization and alignment, we can aggregate and enrich user profile information from different online networking services and make the bundled profiles available for end-users as well as third-party applications.

Actually you know what? lmgtfy

Except that's not how it works. A plea deal isn't a contract in which you get what you want in exchange for what they want.

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. .... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

Despite his advocacy of the cloud and collaboration, he's also ambivalent about Wikileaks. 'It has made government and diplomacy much more challenging and ultimately less honest,' he writes at one point, 'as people fear that their private communications might become public.'

Not much more challenging. They just need a way to encrypt communications between two people. Like, say, PGP.

Come to think of it, why doesn't everybody have a PGP-enabled email system these days? Why aren't there common email clients - particularly web-based ones - that use PGP?

Note that this may not block individual attacks, but it should prevent mass cable intercepts.

Look I love me some Zeh. He and QIS can be credited to really bring back a research focus on decoherence, but these papers actually pre-date Zeh's most recent work and offer a very stringent mathematical framework (that Zeh apparently also isn't aware of).

Hence my posting here. The point is that this is very interesting stuff that essentially has been overlooked.

Can we at least put to bed the notion that decoherence and the correspondence principle are fully understood, as you suggested earlier?

Dr. Steven Chu brought authority and evidence-based science to the US Cabinet. Former professor of physics at Stanford, he shared a Nobel prize for physics in 1997 for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. he continued to publish science while serving as Secretary of Energy.

His very expertise and lifelong, professional interest were very lamely attacked by the right wing machine, typically accusing him of avocating raising oil prices and gas prices.

Having Dr. Chu there did more to forward the cause of science in the US Government in generations. How many administrations could walk down a hallway and access a scientist at the top of his game? He should be held and paraded around on slashdot's shoulders for his hard work.

Cite your sources.

There are plenty of sources you can read up on. Jennifer Granick is very sympathetic to Swartz, and even she admits:

For Aaron, with such a fungible numbers in hand and such a low burden of proof, the government could have argued for almost any sentence it wanted. Using just the base level of 6 and $70K in loss, Aaron would not be eligible to serve any of his sentence in a halfway house or on home confinement. He would be looking at 15 to 21 months of incarceration. That number could get higher quickly. Section 2B1.1 increases the base offense level to 12 if the conduct involved use of an "authentication feature" or "unauthorized access device". Alternatively, upwards adjustments may be warranted if the defendant used a special skill, abused a position of trust, or tried to obstruct justice. True, 35 years wasn't in the cards, despite the fact that's the sentence the government publicly waived over Aaron's head. Neither was a maximum of 50 years, which was what the government arrived at after its perplexing choice to get a superceding indictment. But Aaron could easily have come out to over a year in his guideline calculation.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

If you want to know the exact maxima, you have to look at the sentencing guidelines (I get 2-3 years as a maximum).

Do it again here. And further explain why he should have had to spend day 1 in jail for the 'crime' he committed.

The above reference contains more info.

Why should he spend time in prison? If a court finds him guilty, because he violated a law that clearly applies to his case, was passed by both parties, signed into law, and is intended to apply to these kinds of cases. I believe CFAA is a badly written law that should be changed, but it isn't the job of prosecutors or judges to ignore laws just because they like the defendant or his politics.

Oh, and you might consider being less rude, in particular if you simply don't know the facts.

Except that's not how plea deals work. You don't sign off on the agreement and then get 6 mos. It's not that kind of contract. The judge can ignore the prosecutor's suggestion totally. Note the use of the word "blithey" in the following explanation.

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. .... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

Update : Regarding the random source, this is the code they use, and it's from this project. It use mouse and keyboard events (not all, math.random is used to decide which ones), with rc4 as mixing function.

And it seems to be running since page load (started in crypto0001,js) - AES function is from Stanford Javascript Crypto Library btw, and RSA code is from this project.

Get off your Smug Horse because that's not how it works -- even with the "six month" plea agreement he could have spent years in jail, maybe decades:

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. .... More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

They may have offered six months, but that doesn't mean he would have only spent six months in jail because the judge can ignore the Prosecutor's agreement and give 5 years per felony. They wanted him to plead guilty to 13 felonies.

Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. Felons have trouble getting jobs, aren't allowed to vote (though that right may be restored) and cannot own firearms (though Aaron wasn't the type for that, anyway). More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

Point by point:

Re Reiser. Yeah, a lot of Slashdot readers need to get a grip. On the other hand, I remember more the Slashdot readers who were saying "we don't know enough" and "let the police do their job".

Re first mistake. Did Aaron see MIT's PTB as an ally, a neutral party, or part of the problem?

Re second mistake. You state, "Rather than take that offer (which would have given him maybe four to five months in a minimum security facility) and come out smelling like a rose for his act of civil disobedience". No. One, "would have" and "maybe"? Make up your mind. Two, felony records carry long-lasting social, financial and bureaucratic stigmas. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-losing-aaron-swartz-part-2

Re Hotz. Hotz was not facing federal prison time and a felony record. Sony vs Hotz was a civil suit.

Re decision. Yes, those were all Swartz's decisions. And those decisions did not occur in a vacuum. Federal prosecutors (one or more of Carmen Ortiz, Stephen Heymann, Scott Garland) decided to charge Swartz with federal crimes, decided to pursue jail time, decided to ignore JSTOR's objections, decided to escalate the charges, and decided to ignore the warning about Swartz being a suicide risk (despite Heymann being the prosecutor in an earlier hacking case where a suspect committed suicide).

Re ultimate irony. Feel free to visit your local public university library - and research the number of towns that don't have local public university libraries.