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How about Galaxy Game http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/galaxy.html it was the first Arcade game. The source is even available at http://code.google.com/p/galaxygamepdp11/

Price was only about $20,000 per unit in the early 70s. I guess that why it never really sold.

This *particular* area still needs study but the presence of fracking or other pumping into the ground under pressure AND resulting earthquakes doesn't raise *any* red flags for you? It's been documented in numerous other places that there is a relation between the two events.

here's proof

Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean the threats aren't real.

This seems to be one of those anglocentric popular culture references - where most of the rest of the world knows, or cares, very little about.
But since most native anglophones seldom speak fluently any other language, it's not easy for them to figure out what is or isn't relevant outside of their countries.
As in "Foreign language education: if ‘scandalous’ in the 20th century, what will it be in the 21st century?" by Eeon E. Panetta.

I try to listen to the radio, I really do, but I cannot for more than, maybe, an hour.

We're fortunate in Silicon Valley to have two good nonprofit broadcast FM stations: KZSU (Stanford University) and KCEA (Menlo-Atherton High School. Menlo-Atherton High School, for somewhat strange reasons, plays big-band music from the 1930s and 1940s.

The local broadcast stations are the usual crap, except that about half of them are the usual crap in Spanish.

Heh, I was rather flabbergasted myself to discover KCEA. Pleasantly flabbergasted, mind you. It's a nice change of pace whenever KFOG/KFOX are trapped in a "Classic Rock" stupor and the "Alternative" stations are looping the latest hits. Poor Mumford and Sons have been trapped on the air playing the same song for nearly three months it seems!

I try to listen to the radio, I really do, but I cannot for more than, maybe, an hour.

We're fortunate in Silicon Valley to have two good nonprofit broadcast FM stations: KZSU (Stanford University) and KCEA (Menlo-Atherton High School. Menlo-Atherton High School, for somewhat strange reasons, plays big-band music from the 1930s and 1940s.

The local broadcast stations are the usual crap, except that about half of them are the usual crap in Spanish.

...he'd have complained about silly "earthquake monitoring stations" and then gone and built a washaway sandbar under the Golden Gate bridge.

BTW, in case the article bores you, this is topical and a bit more fun.

There are no technological or economic barriers

Merely saying that there's no "barrier" (that is, something isn't impossible), doesn't make something a good idea. There's no technological or economic barriers to building replicas of the Pyramids of Giza every week either. But after you put up a few thousand pyramids, you might start to wonder if it was really worth the effort.

Throughout part 1 of the actual paper, you can read the biases that the authors bring to the subject (eg, page 4, emphasis mine):

Fusion of light atomic nuclei (e.g., protium, deuterium, or tritium) theoretically could supply power indefinitely without long-lived radioactive wastes as the products are isotopes of helium (Ongena and Van Oost, 2006; Tokimatsu et al., 2003); however, it would produce short-livedwaste that needs to be removed fromthe reactor core to avoid interference with operations, and it is unlikely to be commercially available for at least another 50â"100 years (Tokimatsu et al., 2003; Barre , 1999; Hammond, 1996), long after we will have needed to transition to alternative energy sources.

It's worth noting again that no one has demonstrated this need.

Table 4 on page 7 claims that the US needs 1.8 TW of electricity production. It's worth noting that in 2000, the US consumed on the order of 100 quadrillion BTU (looked like about 90 quadrillion BTU to me) in energy of all kinds including fossil fuels for heating and transportation. Most of that demand in a renewable world would be shuffled to electricity and hydrogen production. So if it had happened in 2000, we would probably be looking at an average demand of 3 TW or so. Now grow that for 30 years. 1.8 TW looks highly unrealistic, probably no more than half the actual demand in 2030.

Glancing through part 2, I see more unrealistic assumptions (page 2).

For example, the average coal plant in the US from 2000 to 2004 was down 6.5% of the year for unscheduled maintenance and 6.0% of the year for scheduled maintenance (North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 2009a), but modern wind turbines have a down time of only 0â"2% over land and 0â"5% over the ocean (Dong Energy et al.,2006, p. 133).

Maybe windfarms can achieve this fabled downtime, but that hasn't been true of the windfarms I've seen at the time I passed by them. I routinely see a mix of unmoving and moving wind turbines. A 2% downtime would mean that I would almost never seen halted wind turbines except in very large numbers (typically 50 or more). And we ignore the variability of wind power which is downtime of another sort.

On the following page, figure 1 has erroneous natural gas generation IMHO. The low to high power demand is roughly 25%. I simply don't believe that peak power demand on a summer day is going to be a mere 25% greater than power consumed at 4am. The second problem with those figures is the natural gas generators. Those have a relatively expensive operation, so they will be run as peaking power, that is, run at the peak demand times of the day, not continually as background power. Now if that demand curve had no natural gas generation at 4am, then it would have a reasonable trough to peak of a factor of 2.

In addition, we have the notorious variability of wind and solar. This is glossed over in the paper though they do discuss four typical ways of dealing with the problem. While geographic diversification and demand reduction at times of supply problems can help (though they exaggerate the benefits of these two approaches as well as the benefits of weather prediction), the two primary ways are complementary sources (such as natural gas and hydro), which

There are no technological or economic barriers

Merely saying that there's no "barrier" (that is, something isn't impossible), doesn't make something a good idea. There's no technological or economic barriers to building replicas of the Pyramids of Giza every week either. But after you put up a few thousand pyramids, you might start to wonder if it was really worth the effort.

Throughout part 1 of the actual paper, you can read the biases that the authors bring to the subject (eg, page 4, emphasis mine):

Fusion of light atomic nuclei (e.g., protium, deuterium, or tritium) theoretically could supply power indefinitely without long-lived radioactive wastes as the products are isotopes of helium (Ongena and Van Oost, 2006; Tokimatsu et al., 2003); however, it would produce short-livedwaste that needs to be removed fromthe reactor core to avoid interference with operations, and it is unlikely to be commercially available for at least another 50â"100 years (Tokimatsu et al., 2003; Barre , 1999; Hammond, 1996), long after we will have needed to transition to alternative energy sources.

It's worth noting again that no one has demonstrated this need.

Table 4 on page 7 claims that the US needs 1.8 TW of electricity production. It's worth noting that in 2000, the US consumed on the order of 100 quadrillion BTU (looked like about 90 quadrillion BTU to me) in energy of all kinds including fossil fuels for heating and transportation. Most of that demand in a renewable world would be shuffled to electricity and hydrogen production. So if it had happened in 2000, we would probably be looking at an average demand of 3 TW or so. Now grow that for 30 years. 1.8 TW looks highly unrealistic, probably no more than half the actual demand in 2030.

Glancing through part 2, I see more unrealistic assumptions (page 2).

For example, the average coal plant in the US from 2000 to 2004 was down 6.5% of the year for unscheduled maintenance and 6.0% of the year for scheduled maintenance (North American Electric Reliability Corporation, 2009a), but modern wind turbines have a down time of only 0â"2% over land and 0â"5% over the ocean (Dong Energy et al.,2006, p. 133).

Maybe windfarms can achieve this fabled downtime, but that hasn't been true of the windfarms I've seen at the time I passed by them. I routinely see a mix of unmoving and moving wind turbines. A 2% downtime would mean that I would almost never seen halted wind turbines except in very large numbers (typically 50 or more). And we ignore the variability of wind power which is downtime of another sort.

On the following page, figure 1 has erroneous natural gas generation IMHO. The low to high power demand is roughly 25%. I simply don't believe that peak power demand on a summer day is going to be a mere 25% greater than power consumed at 4am. The second problem with those figures is the natural gas generators. Those have a relatively expensive operation, so they will be run as peaking power, that is, run at the peak demand times of the day, not continually as background power. Now if that demand curve had no natural gas generation at 4am, then it would have a reasonable trough to peak of a factor of 2.

In addition, we have the notorious variability of wind and solar. This is glossed over in the paper though they do discuss four typical ways of dealing with the problem. While geographic diversification and demand reduction at times of supply problems can help (though they exaggerate the benefits of these two approaches as well as the benefits of weather prediction), the two primary ways are complementary sources (such as natural gas and hydro), which

The paper actually addresses just these kinds of issues. You might want to read it. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf

This Stanford PR piece has received a lot of "coverage" -- mostly cut and paste.

Here are links to the original papers.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf

We estimate that 3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines, 49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants, 40,000 300 MW solar
PV power plants, 1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems, 5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, 270
new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, 720,000 0.75 MWwave devices, and 490,000 1 MWtidal
turbines can power a 2030 WWS world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen for all purposes. ...
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.

I'm sure everybody will want to study the papers in detail. And hold on to your checkbooks.

This Stanford PR piece has received a lot of "coverage" -- mostly cut and paste.

Here are links to the original papers.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf

We estimate that 3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines, 49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants, 40,000 300 MW solar
PV power plants, 1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems, 5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, 270
new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, 720,000 0.75 MWwave devices, and 490,000 1 MWtidal
turbines can power a 2030 WWS world that uses electricity and electrolytic hydrogen for all purposes. ...
Barriers to the plan are primarily social and political, not technological or economic.

I'm sure everybody will want to study the papers in detail. And hold on to your checkbooks.

In the longer term, however, Freedom Boxes might also be useful for resisting wiretapping. In a post to the liberation tech mailing list (sorry, I can't link to the actual post since the archives are subscriber-only), Eben Moglen gave the following explanation:

On the question, how can personal servers deal with network non-neutralities, the answer is by tunneling among themselves. So Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice live in different places, maybe different countries, and have different upstream connectivity providers. If Bob's Freedom Box notices that he can't connect to port X at address Y, the box opens a tunnel to Carol's box, through the encrypted "route" they share, and asks Carol's box to proxy the traffic. If Carol's can't do it, maybe Ted's can. Alice's freedom box, which is located inside a country with a national firewall, uses Bob, Carol, Ted, and a hundred more of her friends abroad to lift her over the national firewall many times a day.

Clearly the same approach could be used to avoid surveillance as well as filtering. Now, of course, that still assumes your ISP allows you to have some kind of connectivity to some of your friends - NAT could be a major issue here, as other commenters have noted.

Don't bring utlity into what looks very much like veblen / giffen / experience goods / bandwagon effect. Into "touchy-feely" (nothing bad with that, that is the whole point of music, but...) artistic expression which we share to most striking degree with animals, even when diverged from our lineage 250+ million years ago.

In a world of loudness war, dynamics compression, bass boosts, or (a bit different area) over-saturated default TV settings. With reasons for choosing vacuum tubes also touching on Price tag can change the way people experience wine or Price of a Medication May Affect How Well It Works. Valued "natural" diamonds because of their...flaws.

Don't bring utlity into what looks very much like veblen / giffen / experience goods / bandwagon effect. Into "touchy-feely" (nothing bad with that, that is the whole point of music, but...) artistic expression which we share to most striking degree with animals, even when diverged from our lineage 250+ million years ago.

In a world of loudness war, dynamics compression, bass boosts, or (a bit different area) over-saturated default TV settings. With reasons for choosing vacuum tubes also touching on Price tag can change the way people experience wine or Price of a Medication May Affect How Well It Works. Valued "natural" diamonds because of their...flaws.

Hey, it's just a news article. Here's the more technical stuff: http://sing.stanford.edu/fullduplex/ Short answer is the fact that the two transmit antennas are at different distances means they need a power difference in order to match amplitude at the receive antenna. This in turn limits the depths of nulls at distance.

GPS and CDMA use something completely different. Spread spectrum techniques like GPS and CDMA take a signal with (for example) 1MHz bandwidth and spread that data over a 100MHz bandwidth. Now up to 100 people employing this technique can transmit over that 100MHz bandwidth simultaneously, but there is no gain in throughput because it's the same in the end as those 100 users transmitting in a 1MHz bandwidth with user 1 at 1.000GHz, user 2 at 1.001GHz, and so on. The benefit of spread spectrum is that it's hard to segregate each radio into such a small bandwidth without interfering with adjacent users. It could not be used for full duplex single frequency radio because the transmitted signal would still swamp out the received signal, unless it were combined with isolation/nulling techniques like these Stanford guys are using.

The research page for the work in this article is here: http://sing.stanford.edu/fullduplex/
They are using multiple techniques to selectively null out the transmit signal at the receiver. Their main novelty is spatial nulling of the antenna. Two antennas transmitting the same signal will have points in space where the signals destructively interfere and cancel. If they are spaced by an odd number of half wavelengths then this includes the entire line between the two antennas, so this is where the receive antenna is placed. Then they use existing analog and digital techniques to further cancel out the component of the transmitter which appear at the receiver.

Although the techniques for this are well known the trick is getting it to actually work effectively, because you need to achieve very high isolation from your own transmitter to receiver in order to avoid the transmitter effectively jamming the receiver. Their antenna nulling is apparently what gave them that extra isolation they needed.

How this actually works :
The Challenge in Achieving Full-Duplex

The problem that has historically prevented full-duplex is that, when a node transmits, its own signal is millions of times stronger than other signals it might hear: the node is trying to hear a whisper while shouting. The challenge is canceling the node's own transmitted signal (shout) from what it receives (whisper). Existing approaches, such as digital cancellation and noise cancellation circtuis, can cancel some of the transmitted signal, reducing its strength, but not enough to make a node able to receive.

Antenna Cancellation

Our design uses two transmit antennas one receive antenna per node. The transmit antennas send the same data and the receive antenna is placed such that there is destructive interference from the two transmit antennas, thus reducing self-interference. Offsetting the two transmit signals by half of the wavelength causes them to cancel each other, creating a null position where the transmitted signal is much, much weaker.

Combining antenna cancellation with cancellation through a noise cancellation circuit gives ~50dB reduction in self-interference before the RF signal is demodulated and sampled to the digital domain. Digital cancellation removes the residual interference.

For more information :
http://sing.stanford.edu/fullduplex/
The actual paper (PDF) :
http://sing.stanford.edu/pubs/mobicom10-duplex.pdf

How this actually works :
The Challenge in Achieving Full-Duplex

The problem that has historically prevented full-duplex is that, when a node transmits, its own signal is millions of times stronger than other signals it might hear: the node is trying to hear a whisper while shouting. The challenge is canceling the node's own transmitted signal (shout) from what it receives (whisper). Existing approaches, such as digital cancellation and noise cancellation circtuis, can cancel some of the transmitted signal, reducing its strength, but not enough to make a node able to receive.

Antenna Cancellation

Our design uses two transmit antennas one receive antenna per node. The transmit antennas send the same data and the receive antenna is placed such that there is destructive interference from the two transmit antennas, thus reducing self-interference. Offsetting the two transmit signals by half of the wavelength causes them to cancel each other, creating a null position where the transmitted signal is much, much weaker.

Combining antenna cancellation with cancellation through a noise cancellation circuit gives ~50dB reduction in self-interference before the RF signal is demodulated and sampled to the digital domain. Digital cancellation removes the residual interference.

For more information :
http://sing.stanford.edu/fullduplex/
The actual paper (PDF) :
http://sing.stanford.edu/pubs/mobicom10-duplex.pdf

Here I was, planning on moderating, but alrighty then.... In response to your concern about eggs...

A quick Google search to refresh my memory found that we already know how to turn stem cells into eggs/sperm. We have already used that technology to restore fertility in mice. And we know how to make stem cells from skin, which, because it regenerates, has an essentially limitless supply, as long as the subject is still alive.

You're right, we still don't have a viable artificial womb. You're also right about the sterilization of the females and males. But see the articles I linked above. If the technology pans out, then it doesn't really matter that the children born in space would be sterile, because we would be able to produce eggs and sperm from their skin, and use those to artificially impregnate them.

We still need to work on an artificial womb, but your concerns B and C have already been addressed by science. :)

the belief that people are inherently selfish

Well, there's your problem. It turns out that belief is wrong.

We are as altruistic as we are selfish. Altruism and empathy are beneficial adaptations, which allowed us to build the most complex social structure in the history of Earth (called "civilization"). The belief that we are inherently selfish and nothing else is pseudo-science, similar to the pseudo-science of the late 19th and early 20th century known as "Social Darwinism".

Btw, this is not pulled from my ass; this is old, accepted science going back to Darwin himself. Random link: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/. We're not even the only species that has it. If we accept your definition of Libertarianism, then Libertarianism is pseudo-science.

Good luck rebuilding your world-view. We all have to go through it at least once in our lives.

One of the best ones was the DEC Extended Static Checker for Java in the late 1990s. That project died after Compaq acquired DEC and shut down research. But it formed part of Microsoft's efforts for Spec#, which has a formal verification system.

Microsoft has had a huge success with formal proof of correctness - the Static Driver Verifier. This is a system which tries to formally prove that a Windows driver can't crash the operating system. All drivers for Windows 7 have to pass this verifier to be signed, It's an impressive system which works by symbolic case analysis. It yields a proof, a counterexample, or times out analyzing too many cases. About 3% of programs time out. (If your kernel driver has undecidable behavior, it needs work.)

I headed a team that did a proof of correctness system for Pascal back in the early 1980s. That was pushing the limits of what you could do back then; verifying a small program took 45 minutes on a 1 MIPS VAX. Today, with about four orders of magnitude more CPU power, it's a practical technology.

There have been many attempts to bolt some "design by contract" features onto various languages, but they're usually not very good. The problem is saying things about collections. The hacks that try to do design by contract at run time tend to avoid expressions which examine big data structures, since they have to run them over the whole data structure every time. Real verifiers prove or disprove such things at compile time. It turns out, though, that a few standard cases for collections cover many of the usual things you want to say.

Another big issue, which Spec# handles and this Google hack apparently doesn't, is the "insideness" issue for object invariants. Object invariants are supposed to be true whenever control enters and exits an object. But what if an object calls one of its own public methods, perhaps through a long chain of calls? Now, control is inside the same object twice. That violates the invariant rule.

This class of bugs is common in window systems, where all the widget, pane, window, and event objects are frantically calling each other. It also comes up in concurrency, which I don't see Google's hack addressing either.

Here's a video (animation) from Stanford explaining how the LCLC works.

http://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/AnimationViewLCLS.aspx

Netnews, or USENET, has that property. Netnews really does interpret censorship as failure and routes around it.

That remark was originally made about USENET, during an episode in the 1980s when Stanford's IT department tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". Whenever two USENET peers connect, each gets any messages the other doesn't already have. Any messages that are censored across some links will be efficiently restored if there's any uncensored link. Even a low-bandwidth uncensored link is sufficient if the number of censored messages is small.

In the Stanford case, while the main USENET feed was censored, a few departments had machines with dial-up USENET connections. That was enough to automatically circumvent the censorship.

Something length-limited, like SMS messages, over a USENET infrastructure could be useful to have around.

... I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia. [ShakaUVM]

I've never taken graduate-level elementary particle physics, so I don't know much about the Higgs field. My classmates who have taken those classes and moved on to work at the LHC tell me that most theorists consider the discovery of the Higgs boson to be very likely.

Personally, I'm not sure how to rule out the notion that inertia is caused by viewing zero point energy in an accelerating reference frame. I'm sure the Higgs field really is more likely to be the cause of inertia, but right now I don't have enough time to wade through the relevant literature to learn why.

Anyway, you're right to say that the "inertial mass" of an object can be measured by placing it in a container and determining how much force is necessary to accelerate the container. Or, rather, how much extra force is necessary compared to experiments performed when the container is empty.

Now imagine a one dimensional container with perfectly reflective inner walls. I claim that if this container is filled with photons having total energy E, then more force would be needed to accelerate the container after filling it. More precisely, the experiment would show that the container has an extra "inertial mass" E/c^2 compared to its empty state.

Here's why.

If the container isn't accelerating, the trapped photons will exert equal pressure on both walls of the container as they're reflected back and forth, just as with solar sails. Accelerating the container, though, will cause the mirror on the bottom to reflect those photons more often than the mirror on the top. Thus on average the bottom mirror will experience more pressure than the top mirror, and this pressure asymmetry will mimic an "inertial mass" of E/c^2.

In fact, I think any method of measuring inertial mass would conclude that photons have inertia. That's because active gravitational mass in general relativity is defined by the stress-energy tensor, which includes the energy (and momentum) in electromagnetic fields. Active and passive gravitational masses need to be equal to conserve momentum, and the equivalence principle says that passive gravitational mass equals inertial mass.

In other words, the container curves spacetime more when it's filled with photons. Therefore its gravitational mass has increased, and via the equivalence principle so has its inertial mass.

This depends on my interpretation of the equivalence principle (and the principle itself) being correct. It also implies that pressure has inertia, because pressure contributes to the stress energy tensor. Interestingly, that implies tension has negative inertia because tension is just negative pressure. Greg Egan uses this concept masterfully in a short

Didn't he stop sending reward checks? I think it had to do with some form of check fraud: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html

there's several erratas on his website, one of those is exactly about MMIX.

site
fascicle 1: MMIX (compressed postscript).

on the site he tells which parts of volume 1 are replaced by the fascicle.

there's several erratas on his website, one of those is exactly about MMIX.

site
fascicle 1: MMIX (compressed postscript).

on the site he tells which parts of volume 1 are replaced by the fascicle.

...and until Vol.1 is updated:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html

'As I continue to write Volumes 4 and 5, I'll need to refer to topics that belong logically in Volumes 1--3 but weren't invented yet when I wrote those books. Instead of putting such material artificially into Volumes 4 or 5, I'll put it into fascicle form. The first such fascicle is in fact ready now (see above): It describes MMIX, a RISC machine that is used in Volume 4A; MMIX will also take the place of MIX in all subsequent editions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3.

Download the 16 Feb 2004 version of Volume 1 Fascicle 1 (583KB of compressed PostScript) (this old version is however no longer being maintained)':

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc1.ps.gz

...and until Vol.1 is updated:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html

'As I continue to write Volumes 4 and 5, I'll need to refer to topics that belong logically in Volumes 1--3 but weren't invented yet when I wrote those books. Instead of putting such material artificially into Volumes 4 or 5, I'll put it into fascicle form. The first such fascicle is in fact ready now (see above): It describes MMIX, a RISC machine that is used in Volume 4A; MMIX will also take the place of MIX in all subsequent editions of Volumes 1, 2, and 3.

Download the 16 Feb 2004 version of Volume 1 Fascicle 1 (583KB of compressed PostScript) (this old version is however no longer being maintained)':

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc1.ps.gz

Volume 4 only took 28 years to create.

Imagine how long it would have taken him, if Knuth had an email account and had to read email every day!

There's indeed a 3SAT TV station. Not to be confused with the 3-SAT problem.

According to this analysis, the net effect of a hydrogen economy would be positive for the ozone layer.

Lockheed has championed the closed wing idea for many years. Their concepts usually have 2 engines. Here are other images some dating back to the '80s:
http://aero.stanford.edu/Reports/Nonplanarwings/ClosedSystems.html
http://www.airmailmagazine.com/closed-wing-aircraft-designs (4th picture down)
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=1986

Paul and his colleagues have been compelled to make two of them in an effort to counter the inaccurate information spread by Simon and others.

So Ehrlich says that "famines of unbelievable proportions" will occur, "hundreds of millions of people starving to death" "England will not exist in the year 2000". Then Ehrlich has the audacity to say Simon is spreading inaccurate information. I don't give a damn how smart you believe you are or how many "Genius Awards" are given to you. If you're wrong you're wrong. Ehrlich is so stubborn that if you read his page you would have thought that _he_ won the bet. He (or whoever wrote the page) makes no attempt to defend the idiotic (and now demonstrably false) statements Ehrlich made, but just goes into nuance of "how things could have been worse but for...". They were not, and that was Simon’s whole point, people react to the world they live in, we are not a growth in a petri dish. Ehrlich makes all these excuses as to "why he was wrong" without saying he was wrong, because he still believes that he was right. He still believes he was right and only because those damn snooping kids did England continue to exist past 1999.

Just read Ehrlich’s page, he does more disservice to himself than anyone else could ever do. The AGW people are cut from the same mold as Ehrlich. AGW cannot be wrong as a matter of pride. It has nothing to do with science, if it did there would be a way to falsify the theory. As it stands now, you cannot. Anything that points to AGW being wrong (e.g.: No uncontrollable warming) is always countered with “OH! Didn’t you know? That’s because of global warming!” It sounds more and more like Ehrlich.

But what speaks to the heart of this issue is that the AGW supporters don’t hope beyond hope that the skeptics are right. They hope the skeptics are wrong because it is a matter of pride.

The shortfall is the amount by which the debt is increasing each year. The total debt was just under $90bn at June 2010 (source http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/publications/2010dar.pdf Sect 2, p5, pdf page 13), and I guess it will be about $103bn now. That doesn't include pension liabilities, or municipal bonds. The unfunded pension liabilities on 1st July 2008 were $425bn and estimated to be $534bn the following year (source http://www.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi-bin/siepr/?q=/system/files/shared/GoingforBroke_pb.pdf p2). Who knows what the unfunded liability is now. I understand that municipal debt is around $400bn, but most of that is insured by federal government backed insurance companies so probably isn't relevant.

I don't think any of the billionaires you listed could afford to write a cheque for $25bn. They would need to sell their companies and other assets to raise the money.

If my statement above offends you, then you misinterpreted my intent. LISP has it's place as a powerful tool for creating domain specific languages and as a macro processor (as used in emacs), in AI and mathematics, but is not and was never intended as a general purpose programming language.

A quick wikipedia search indicates the CUDA SDK came out Feb 2007 and the Streams SDK v1 came out Dec 2007. Following links from Streams gets you to BrookGPU, an ATI project using the Close-to-Metal programming interface who's last major release was 2004.

Microsoft is only an innovator where it has a monopoly.

CUDA was announced November 2006, so Microsoft wasn't that far ahead. But mass-market GPGPU really got started around 2000, culminating in the Brook project in 2004. Microsoft didn't start this trend, though they did jump on it quickly.

"You're way is perfectly valid... " - by catmistake (814204) on Sunday January 09, @03:43AM (#34812866)

Thank you, however again: I always knew it was.

---

BIND vs. what the Chinese are doing to DNS lately? See here:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/29/1755230/Chinese-DNS-Tampering-a-Real-Threat-To-Outsiders

---

SECUNIA HIT BY DNS REDIRECTION HACK THIS WEEK:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/26/secunia_back_from_dns_hack/

(Yes, even "security pros" are helpless vs. DNS problems in code bugs OR redirect DNS poisoning issues, & they can only try to "set the DNS record straight" & then, they still have to wait for corrected DNS info. to propogate across all subordinate DNS servers too - lagtime in which folks DO get "abused" in mind you!)

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DNS vs. the "Kaminsky DNS flaw", here (and even MORE problems in DNS than just that):

http://www.scmagazineus.com/new-bind-9-dns-flaw-is-worse-than-kaminskys/article/140872/

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Moxie Marlinspike's found others (0 hack) as well...

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DNS provider decked by DDoS dastards:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/16/ddos_on_dns_firm/

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Ten Percent of DNS Servers Still Vulnerable: (so much for "conscientious patching", eh? Many DNS providers weren't patching when they had to!)

http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/08/04/1525235.shtml?tid=172&tid=95&tid=218

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DDoS Attacks Via DNS Recursion:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/03/16/1658209.shtml

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DNS ROOT SERVERS ATTACKED:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/02/06/2238225.shtml

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TimeWarner DNS Hijacking:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/2140208

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DNS Re-Binding Attacks:

http://crypto.stanford.edu/dns/

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DNS Server Survey Reveals Mixed Security Picture:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/11/21/0315239.shtml

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Photobucket's DNS records hijacked by Turkish hacking group:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/title/1285

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Halvar figured out super-secret DNS vulnerability:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/has-halvar-figured-out-super-secret-dns-vulnerability/1520

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BIND Still Susceptible To DNS Cache Poisoning:

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/08/09/123222.shtml

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Couple that list with DNSBL &/or DNS Request logs?

"configuring a single DNS is far less complicated than making sure 1000 computers have a the correct HOSTS file." - by catmistake (814204) on Sunday January 09, @03:43AM (#34812866)

Well, The REAL PROBLEM(s) HERE? DNS itself.

To wit:

NOW? Now, You may "get my point", on how HOSTS files are an EXCELLENT supplement to DNS servers (especially those set in recursive mode)... & I don't rely on HOSTS files alone.

See - I use

Actually, putting your poles on the right half of the s-plane gives you instability :)

(Reference)

Disclaimer: I work on this professionally, so I have a vested interest.

Cool. I'm a highschool student with a chemistry interest. Thermochemical engines were a subject I dug into a while back. I wrote a program using Gibbs free energy data from NIST to automatically balance and find the equilibrium constant of the reactions. I used this program to try to predict the outcomes of various reactions for cycle construction. I looked through the data and I found the following cycles to be interesting:
Fe2O3/Fe3O4
Sodium-manganese
Gaz de France (will explain)
Heat rechargeable batteries (will explain)

The Gaz de France (see slide show slide 26) runs as follows:
1. K2O2(l) + H2O(g) -> 2KOH(l) + O2(g) at 100 C
2. 2KOH(l) + 2K(g) -> 2K2O(l) + H2(g) at 725 C
3. 2K2O(l) -> 2K(g) + K2O2(l) at 850 C
Yes. That's potassium. All liquids and gases. No gas-gas separation. If this could really work, I'm sure there's a modification to it to produce elemental potassium. In that case, you can reduce mostly anything.

The idea with heat rechargeable batteries was as follows - using tin and iron as an example:
1. Fe + H2O + SnO -> Fe(OH)2 + Sn (aqueous battery - produces electrical current)
2. Sn + H2O -> SnO + H2 (corrosion of the tin - likely with heat)
3. Fe(OH)2 + H2 -> Fe + 2H2O

So it is an electrochemical heat engine. I know tin would likely make life more difficult by forming SnO2 but I left this out to illustrate the way the cycle works. You need two metals, call them A and B. A has to have as negative an electrode potential as possible but still be reducible by hydrogen. Iron fits the bill. Metal B has got to have as positive an electrode potential as possible but still be able to hydrolyze. Tin fits the bill. Copper would be better, but as far as I know, the reaction of copper with water to form hydrogen just does not proceed.

That said, I'm excited that if it's getting in the news, new or not, because it improves my odds of getting funding to use that tech.

Good. This tech needs a heck of a lot more funding. It's basically ignored - you read the news, you hear about EV's, fuel cells, solar panels, etc. But you almost never hear about thermochemical engines. The way I think about it, a solar panel is like a Ferrari. It's expensive and fun, but not a great way to cross Africa. A thermochemical engine is like a Toyota Landcruiser. It's durable, it's cheap, and it gets the job done. Have you heard of anyone getting VC funding for this thermochemical stuff?

... but if you have some spare computing power, PLEASE consider donating it to something that can help those of us who live on earth, like Folding@Home

I'm three links deep and I've yet to find anything really notable. But fine, I'm an idiot in need of explanation. Tell me what I missed.

Yes, these days it's tons of bullshit until you get to the real thing. Everything above the actual study is going to be full of infantile jokes and idiotic observations, as you've noted (personally it makes me sick to read any modern news articles, or much of anything, due to this). Here's the path I followed to get to the actual study:

Slashdot summary -> Hot Hardware version -> Stanford's news release about study -> Abstract of study -> Study itself (PDF).

In the study, they use the detailed interaction data to try various infection parameters, to see how it spreads. There are many interesting graphs, showing how it spreads in the various scenarios, and where there are sudden changes in how it spreads. They look at different vaccination strategies to see which are most effective.

Actually, if you follow links from TFA, you'll get to that same article. Kind of a waste to mod this up as informative.

In the past, before the web, leakers had to talk to journalists because there was no alternative to reach the masses, even though journalists have never been paragons of objectivity.

How is? If somebody tells me anything else but "I'll do my best to stay objective" I'll start doubting that person immediately.

But wikileaks is still a middleman. If there was simple free software that any would-be leaker (nongeek) could use to put raw information directly and untraceably on the web, then the ideal would be one step closer.

As the ideal is far from possible and you'll always need at least one middle-man to act between you (who want to know) and those who want to withold the information (unless you really choose to take the risk of obtaining the information by yourself), there always be the questions of:
1. How much you trust the middleman?
2. are you lucid enough to pick what you can trust and what is better for you to discard as dubious

Life will never offer a black/white choice between who you can and cannot trust. This is no reason to abdicate from living it as it is: just need to add the extra effort of constantly judging what you do and evaluate the consequences.

Now, speaking for myself: being offered between WIkileaks (with large/public dissemination of the information) and "OpenLeaks" (with dissemination restricted to other jurnalists), I strongly preffer the first... even if what is leaked may be incomplete (thus having a risk of a possible bias "by selection") at least I can pick the raw undigested information and deal with the possible bias by looking for other sources of info to counter-balance before making my mind.

Anyway, the more the merrier. And I need to grant Assange the merit of making restoring the "leaking practice" as an acceptable in/by the civil society (proof: others started to help, other started to open other "leaking" outlets). I do hope to see this continued and established as way to allow the citizens control over govts' power - much better than revolutions and the "right to bear arms" and certainly much better than "casting you vote in the dark". Maybe that's what democracy needed to be better and stop being the worst... except the others...?

Any thoughts about the feasibility of Clean Slate and other proposals to "remake" the Internet?

I'm not asking for predictions so much as informed thoughts about what the obstacles are to this actually happening. I used to think the Internet was perfectly anonymous, until I encountered (second-hand) the Chinese renrou sousuo yinqing "human flesh search engine"). Cyberspace is bound to physical servers and wires and antennas; can the majority of these be controlled? Is the political will now accumulating for it to happen?

Folding@Home has been available for the PS3 for years

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3

Distributed computing. Have a PS3 app that is installed if selected and when your not playing it runs distributed computing. Give the people whos PS3's are been used something in return like online credits for DLC.

Anyone got any figures on how much processing could be available if done?

Folding@Home did exactly what you are proposing. PS3s are a major contributor to the project:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

for a more thorough exploration of what is consciousness I recommend this site : http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

1. Clippy: Misunderstood animated pedagogical agent or spawn of Satan? - Invokes Sun Tzu

2. Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents. Impressive 65 Page PDF available from this abstract page.

3. People Who Hate Clippy, the Stupid Paper Clip from Microsoft Word (Wartburg Chapter). Emergency outreach

4. Meme:Clippy. Fanpic uploads @ end.

5. On Youtube.

6. How I Made Clippy Lovable. Stanford again. What is it with these guys? You know their mascot is a tree?

7. DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS. I think my nose just started bleeding.

8. Et tu DARPA?.

9. Senor Pedaso Molesto de Matal NPR transcript.

10. Back At'chya. Remember before they became inertia?

11. Hark the Herald.. Wait, DIE DIE DIE. Just sayin'.

12. Reflection.

Happy Clippymas! Hope the leaks result in a zillion times the cogitation invested in Clippy..