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Where are the Stanford 10x Li-ion batteries???

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

This ALONE will change everything. From an All day Iphone and netbook. To a Chevy Volt that costs 1/2 as much.

WHERE IS IT?

Not directly related, but I still find it absolutely stunning that by giving a cheque to someone you are giving them enough information to empty your account. If that's their attitude to security, I get the impression it's going to be an uphill struggle for improvement.

Physicalism in both the limited sense of identity theory and in a broader sense of the supervenience; and before that the reductionism, of Physicalism in regards to the philosophy of mind is an often broached topic nowadays.

If you have a GPS, then you also have a compass, because any GPS can compute North.

This is untrue. A GPS can tell you what your coordinates are but not which way your device is facing relative to north. If you're moving it assumes the GPS is facing the direction of travel, which is not always the case. When you aren't moving it gets quickly confused.

No, actually it is true. You just need multiple antennas in a known orientation.

Sources:

• GPS-based attitude and guidance displays for general aviation
• GPS-Based Attitude For Aircraft

We all know what the difference is between a GPS and a compass.

Apparently some of us are confused about the relative capabilities though.

In context of the iPhone, no, calculating attitude from the GPS data isn't possible due to its size. But calculating attitude using GPS is quite possible and has already been done.

The problem with that assessment is 1) No where near the same percentage of american were filing income tax returns, and 2) the income tax did not hit everyone like it does today. If you back it up to historical standards (correcting for inflation) You'd need to make $250,000 before you paid a penny of income tax.

I haven't checked up on your first point, but everything I can find about the second doesn't seem to support it.

A PDF I found on the Stanford site, for instance, indicates that those making the equivalent of $35,000 (and lower) were paying income taxes in 1950. Their source appears to be the Brookings Institution. Available here.

I found other, less-good sources that said essentially the same thing. Am I reading these wrong? Is there something else I should be looking at?

You further fail to understand the cause of the pending inflation. We don't really print money, but we monetize the debt, which means we sell it. The fed has bought the debt, effectively increasing the dollars in supply. This money has 2 places to go: either it is confiscated with high interest rates, or 2 it is left in the economy and causes inflation. If we choose the first, then we shoot ourselves in the foot of economic recovery. (Raising rates kills lending/spending). If we let it in the economy, we can pay our debts easier, but our savings are destroyed. We also have a drastically weaker dollar that will find its way to obsolescence in international trade, meaning that the US economy is no longer the price setter and we fall by the way side.

I do understand the causes of inflation. I agree that we are likely to have high inflation for a while. I don't agree that hyperinflation is likely. The only way I could see that happening would be if we trailed way, way behind the rest of the world in recovering from the current economic crisis, and I don't expect that to be the case.

I have never heard of philosophy being applied to computer science, but I'm interested. I was going to ask you for links, but I found this one, which seems like a decently broad introduction. Honestly, many of the questions in the summary list there strike me as pointless navel-gazing (What are the differences between programs and algorithms?) and others as foolish (Should programs be considered as scientific theories?), lending some weight to the nonsense called out by your parent troll, but there are a few good ones as well (Can the notion of computational thinking withstand philosophical scrutiny?).

I should also note that your list of the most significant philosophers is incomplete without the American philosopher William James, whose definition of truth as a process has had a very significant effect on most later philosophers; in it we also find the seeds of that modern virtue, pluralism. His desire to keep philosophy useful instead of merely academic was also very admirable, even if this view was ultimately discarded by others in favor of quibbling academic arguments couched in obtuse language and of no use to the vast majority of people interested in finding one to live by.

If James had had his way, you probably wouldn't have had to contend with your parent troll, but then again you probably wouldn't have forgotten that there is an American on the most significant philosophers list, either, negating your original post AND the troll's response :)

There's other ideas of friendship that don't demand one be willing to sacrifice so much so as to go to hell for others. Here's one from Aristotle.

Someone thinks they read Nietzsche. Might want to brush up on contemporary >thoughts on the matter.

Fold@home can use CUDA in linux, but you have to compile the CUDA driver first.

The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific papers published by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.

Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.

If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.

Why?

Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.

The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.

The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific papers published by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.

Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.

If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.

Why?

Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.

The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.

The field of AI is not comprised of a majority of researchers frantically trying to build an expert system that can pass a Turing Test. Visual data is complicated and building a system that can take that information and make use it in a very simplistic manner is non-trivial. Read some of scientific papers published by the authors of Acquine, and you'll see that their methodology (image processing, regression, Bayes' classification, decision trees, support vector machines, classification and regression trees, to name but a few) is anything but trivial.

Not only did they build something novel, but they built a system that does a good job of approximating human response to good/bad photography.

If you want to contest the true novelty of their work, through an academically-inspired claim that they combined existing technologies in a way that isn't terribly novel, rather than creating their own technology, then that's fine. However, the blanket statement that some researchers are trying to do "real work" and that Acquine isn't real work, is a giant red-flag indicating that you likely haven't got the slightest clue what actually goes on in the field of AI. Typically researchers like to tackle problems where the utility of their solutions isn't immediately obvious, the previous link to the RoboCup competition is a perfect example; who cares if you can build a robot that can play soccer? By your reasoning, that would be an incredible waste of time. Except, it's becoming the standard problem for multi-robotic systems research, and a large number of AI researchers are devoting significant time towards building RoboCup teams.

Why?

Simple, pick a real world task for a group of robots that "matters". Now decompose that task into all the subproblems that you would need to solve in order to have a robot complete the main task. Chances are, you're going to run into problems involving self-localization, team-work/cooperation, vision, data fusion, etc... All of those subproblems are being worked on and solved in different ways by researchers in the RoboCup challenge. And chances are, if you choose the methodologies used by the teams that win games you're likely to have chosen the most effective methodologies available in the field.

The true value of research isn't the end-product of each individual research-project. It's the end-product of many "useless" research-projects combined.

> Yahoo

Steve Ballmer just did a session at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar where he was asked about the Yahoo acquisition. He said something to the effect of "I still think it was a good idea". Who knows, maybe you're right...

Link to article

Both the Netwon's original and the 20th century work of the same name.

::sigh:: apparently the moderators never played _The Colossal Cave Adventure_. Hint, the standard ``magic word'' which would allow one to continue playing past the time limit imposed by some administrators was ``xyzzy'' (but usually sysadmins who imposed such time limits changed the magic word).

Fortunately one can read a Literate Programming commented version of the source code:

From:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/advent.w.gz

William

::sigh:: apparently the moderators never played _The Colossal Cave Adventure_. Hint, the standard ``magic word'' which would allow one to continue playing past the time limit imposed by some administrators was ``xyzzy'' (but usually sysadmins who imposed such time limits changed the magic word).

Fortunately one can read a Literate Programming commented version of the source code:

From:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/advent.w.gz

William

"Cameron himself believes 3D viewing 'is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2D viewing doesn't' and that stereoscopic (3D) viewing uses more neurons, which would further heighten its impact"

Anyone who has regularly played the current crop of First Person Shooter games experience the cinema as a bit of a lot down. It's not the act of viewing in 3D but interacting with the characters and moving about the landscape, so we are already familiar with the Cameron effect. Now if only they could get the AIs to behave as if they had some real intelligence. It does also get a bit boring blowing away aliens in the underground tunnels of the Black Mesa Research Facility.

Google, you should use it.

Very good catch. Maybe Lessig should Talk with this Stanford law professor about the rules and get some clarification.

Ugh, very well. They're referred to as "portion limits" and the safe range has always been 10%-ish. Check out what Stanford advises it's students (and this is in academia, mind you):

up to 10% or 1,000 words, whichever is less, of a copyrighted text work. For example, an entire poem of less than 250 words may be used, but no more than three poems by one poet, or five poems by different poets from any anthology.

up to 10%, but in no event more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work.

up to 10% or three minutes, whichever is less, of a copyrighted motion media work (for example, an animation, video or film image).

a photograph or illustration may be used in its entirety but no more than five images by an artist or photographer may be reproduced. When using photographs and illustrations from a published collective work, no more than 10% or 15 images, whichever is less. Or,

up to 10% or 2,500 fields or cell entries, whichever is less, from a copyrighted database or data table may be reproduced. A field entry is defined as a specific item of information, such as a name or Social Security number in a record of a database file. A cell entry is defined as the intersection where a row and a column meet on a spreadsheet.

I'm sorry but what Mr. Lessig did from 11:00-11:49 was in my mind a ballsy use of a song ... about 35% of that song was used. That's a big warning bell to me.

Good luck to him, I hope there aren't other infractions later on. Wikipedia uses the 10% rule, that's how I know about it. I'm not a lawyer and I'll punch you if you call me one but I fear he's going to run into trouble on this one.

Best of luck to you Larry.

The Influenza of 1918 Killed two to three times as many people as died in World War I, in just two years. Tens of millions of people died in 2 years.

http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

Do not be concerned about "restricting" your future options. The applied mathematics in financial mathematics involves all areas of probability, random variables, and stochastic processes. These topics in applied mathematics have wide application in many diverse areas: digital image processing, gambling (e. g., card-counting techniques in the casinos of Las Vegas), computer simulations of warfare outcomes, etc. A degree in financial mathematics will enable you to work in many fields outside finance.

Mathematics, in general, does not restrict anyone's options -- if you are smart and hardworking. Just ask William Perry. He received graduate degrees in "only" mathematics and eventually became Secretary of Defense of the United States. His most recent accomplishment was authoring an essay published in "The Washington Post". In the essay, he advocates using military force to destroy North-Korean military facilities. Mr. Perry is a smart person with the right solution for dealing with North Korea.

Do not be concerned about "restricting" your future options. The applied mathematics in financial mathematics involves all areas of probability, random variables, and stochastic processes. These topics in applied mathematics have wide application in many diverse areas: digital image processing, gambling (e. g., card-counting techniques in the casinos of Las Vegas), computer simulations of warfare outcomes, etc. A degree in financial mathematics will enable you to work in many fields outside finance.

Mathematics, in general, does not restrict anyone's options -- if you are smart and hardworking. Just ask William Perry. He received graduate degrees in "only" mathematics and eventually became Secretary of Defense of the United States. His most recent accomplishment was authoring an essay published in "The Washington Post". In the essay, he advocates using military force to destroy North-Korean military facilities. Mr. Perry is a smart person with the right solution for dealing with North Korea.

Why the blanket assumption that Hawkins is an Atheist?

Some of his quotes Imply that he is more of an Agnostic.

Which means we have brilliant scientists at all levels along the spectrum. Atheist, Agnostics, and Believers. (Don Knott), is at that other extreme.

OK: I had not heard of that. (I am not sure whether or not that applies in other countries.

Other countries have their own systems, of course.

Yes, that is what I mean. And yes they could be insignificant. I just want to know whether or not they get included in the figures people throw around !!

Generally they are, but as noted, the CO2 from a nuclear plant construction ends up being insignificant. I'm sorry, but the site I originally got the reference from is down, and I'm not going to spend the time to find it again atm.

On the strip mining - 'Open pit' is the closest I can see, but no comment on how common it is. Still, you don't actually need to mine much because the power density is so high, especially if you don't have to enrich afterwards.

Correct: we do not know how much it is except that if you look for a quote for the insurance either you do not find one, or it will be huge.

$2.3M-$22M per reactor year, depending on who's figures you accept.

Which leads to my Number One complaint about the Energy debate: how can anyone say that nuclear is cheaper or more expensive than other forms of power?

Given that a kwh of electricity is a kwh of electricity, it's actually one of the easier things to reduce to a cost-benefit analysis.

Construction cost A, Operating costs B, power production C, capacity factor D, plant life E, interest rate F, construction time G. Fill in the blanks for each one, out pops a number. Lowest one wins, as long as it meets standards. IE wind/solar can't be 100% because they're not on demand systems.

Disregarding F(for the moment), 1 GW nuclear reactor, $3B.
A: $3B, B: $200M, C: 1 GW, D: 90%, E: 5%
Annual power production: 7,884 Gwh(7,884,000,000 kwh)
Annual cost: 174M for loan servicing(40year@5%)+200M operating. $374M
Cost per Kwh: ~4.7 cents
Figure 3 years construction time, that'd push the loan up to 3.3B, 191M annual loan costs. 5 cents/kwh.

I'll have to come back later to compare it to solar/wind.

If we harvested ALL the wind of the entire planet at 100% efficiency. It would only produce 72TW.

No. The 72 TW figure represents only "global wind power generated at locations with mean annual wind speeds 6.9 m/s at 80 m [altitude]".

Global consumption NOW is 15TW

No. You're an order of magnitude off. Global consumption of electric power is about 1.6-1.8TW (same source as above).

According to the researchers behind the 72TW figure, if we could catch 20% of the wind power at the good locations, "it could satisfy 100% of the world's energy demand for all purposes (6995-10177 Mtoe) and over seven times the world's electricity needs".

The idea that windmills even get mentioned is embarrassing.

The idea that you'd spread such FUD about wind power is embarrassing.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/, has an introduction on philosophy of computer science which is far more interesting than this worthless drivel.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/, has an introduction on philosophy of computer science which is far more interesting than this worthless drivel.

99% of the time, if I'm not sitting in front of it reading Slashdot, my work PC is merrily chugging along folding proteins and using up company electricity.

Didn't know that project before. Just started an instance in a screen.

99% of the time, if I'm not sitting in front of it reading Slashdot, my work PC is merrily chugging along folding proteins and using up company electricity.

But that other 1% of the time, I'm using it from home, because I've gotten called up to fix some urgent client problem.

To save that $75 worth of electricity, my company would have to require that I drive in to the office every time a client has a hiccup that I can diagnose and fix in five minutes. I don't get paid by the hour, but I'm fortunate enough to work someplace that values my time -- including my non-work time. They would consider that $75 to be money well spent to keep me able, and most importantly *willing*, to take time out on a Saturday to fix a simple problem.

Well, it's useful to note that the major content of the article (boosting, sandboxing) wasn't actually the content or subject of the talk. They were, for the most part, crazy ideas I suggested when talking with a reporter after speaking. They should, accordingly, be seen as crazy ideas rather than serious proposals.

Energy is a resource like any other, yet perhaps even more challenging, as it is finite. Just as you want to institute disk quotas on users, you might want to institute energy quotas on applications. However, energy quotas are not sufficient, as they give no feedback on lifetime: you'd rather have power quotas.

Anyways, here are the actual slides of the talk.

-Phil

• Precise Bandwidth limitation at high speed required lots of CPU, powerful bus and quality network adapters (read: server class hardware)
• If you want to simulate a complex network and more than two nodes, you'll need IFB (or IMQ) in order to shape incoming traffic and yet some topologies would stay out of reach.
• Keep in mind that there are two types of latencies: the "serialization" latency that depends on packet size and link speed and "processing" latency that depends on packets rate and network hardware processing power. Netem simulates the "processing" one.
• Simulating "serialization" latency would be harder, require more CPU and as a "side" effect would also implement bandwidth limitation. As of today I'm not aware of any project that would accurately simulate "processing" latency in the Linux QoS framework.

All that being said in most cases having a rough simulation is sufficient to validate the behaviour of an application on WAN before deployment.
For those interested there is an excellent, 13years old but still relevant paper about latency: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

They sun spots have realized we were watching them and it turns out they are shy. They are just on the other side of the sun now.

Nope, we can monitor the other side of the sun, they are not there either.

This is done with Helioseismic Holography. Though there is apparently a new method being developed.

They sun spots have realized we were watching them and it turns out they are shy. They are just on the other side of the sun now.

Nope, we can monitor the other side of the sun, they are not there either.

This is done with Helioseismic Holography. Though there is apparently a new method being developed.

"Google" isn't meaning baby chatter... they had originally meant to call the website "googol", the number 10^100, but they misspelled it and decided that they liked it:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/~dk/google_name_origin.html

You're absolutely right - I did hint at such a system by mentioning purpose-built devices. When I first heard of the accelerometer thing I thought it was pretty silly - the idea is great, but it seems like someone got a laptop with an accelerometer and thought hey, what if I used computers with these to monitor earthquakes in real time - without stopping to think that maybe there's a simpler way. It's not hard to see the inadequacy of a system that relies on random laptops.

But silly as it is, it is costing pretty much nothing. If they can get enough volunteers to use the software, and can prove that its results are reliable, then they have built a monitoring network out of nothing. That's pretty impressive, and potentially useful as it is, or at least as a proof of concept.

They do sell a USB monitoring device so that you can join the network without having an accelerometer in your computer - http://qcn.stanford.edu/learning/requests.html. I would imagine they also have or are working on devices that are essentially just one of those monitors networked to the central server, that you could install in traffic signal controller boxes (which in most places here in Southern California are actually much more closely spaced than a couple hundred meters ;) ), or wherever - like, say, along the faults!

And you're right - the cost of this would be relatively small, but far from minimal. In any project like this there is more to it than it seems (though I agree with you that they should be heading more in that direction). When you have the choice between an already-there real-time network of laptops spread out all across the region, or setting up a not-un-complicated real-time system all over the place from scratch, for which unforeseen complications will surely crop up, the decision is pretty easy for at least the early stages of the project. I'm sure there are several graduate students working on aspects of this project, including working on dedicated devices and devising ways to quickly and accurately analyze the data and deliver the warning (connection to the warning devices - which would probably most easily be bomb-raid style sirens - would also have to be real-time).

This is purely speculation, but maybe they are actually having trouble getting financial support for the project. I would imagine it's not actually that easy to pitch a merely 10-20s warning based on an unproven system to city officials who could easily provide money to install devices.

The first part of your idea would work - you can get word of an earthquake out shortly before it actually hits areas not near the epicenter. However, the problem is that the amount of warning time is - in most realistic cases - not nearly enough for people to be able to get out of unsafe buildings and into safe ones. This would get you literally 10-20 seconds of warning - which is still useful, potentially giving you time to duck under your desk.

Some seismologists at UC Riverside are actually developing a system that uses data from the accelerometer in your Macbook or Thinkpad to map seismic events in real-time - seismometers have a 10-15s delay in reporting, which eliminates the 10-20s warning, but your computer (or purpose-built devices, obviously) can update in real-time. If all the computers in an area start shaking at once, you know it's not just someone bumping their desk, and can signal the warning immediately to give people that time to duck and cover. See http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=1806 for a news-type explanation, and http://qcn.stanford.edu/ for the current state of the project, which is developing into a world-wide network of monitoring stations.

The reason 10-20s is still useful is that the best thing you can do to increase your chances of surviving an earthquake while indoors is to stay indoors. Many people are injured or killed because they run outside after feeling the initial p-wave, thinking the building may collapse, only to get hit by bricks that fall off the building's facade (for example) when the bigger s-wave hits and the real shaking happens. Most buildings - especially if you live in an earthquake-prone area - will survive an earthquake (though obviously not in places with a lot of old buildings, like Italy). If you have 10-20s of warning, you can duck under your desk and avoid getting smashed in the head by the bowling ball you keep on your bookshelf (the shelf itself should be attached to the wall) which is the real danger of earthquakes while indoors.

(IAAG - I am a geologist)

OS X is a very different beast to a typical UNIX (or UNIX-like) system.

Amen to that. I'm guessing that out of all the Apple proponents who have hijacked this thread, not a single one of them has seriously tried to use OS X the way a Unix system is normally used.

Any sort of serious Unix user quickly encounters numerous differences and peculiarities that hamper the use of OS X as a Unix system. For example, the pathnames are different, leading to widespread breakage of shell scripts and (crucially) build scripts and makefiles. Of course, a well written program would be able to deal with this, but in the real world not all programs are perfect, and some programs just don't compile correctly no matter what you do. If the program that you're looking for is in DarwinPorts, then you're okay, because somebody else has already gone to the considerable trouble of fixing the package so that it works, but otherwise you're SOL.

A specific example is the PBC library, which works great on Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, and even versions of OS X prior to Leopard, but won't build on Leopard.

I've been a Linux/Unix admin for 12 years and as far as being a unix goes, even Cygwin does a better job than OS X of acting the way Unix users expect.

...he has a razor that is very useful in these situations. You have three choices: one and two are rather bizarre theories that require significant new physics (reflecting gravitational waves or Heim theory). Choice three uses conventional physics, and is therefore boring. But it explains the GpB data so far.

Until polhode effects can be ruled out, Occam's razor pretty much requires us to stick with this explanation. Don't use a complex experiment to make claims about new physics unless you understand the experiment really, really well. It is just too easy for the "new physics" to turn out to be some subtle effect in the experimental hardware.

It sounds like you've heard from these people before, and they backed down after you refused to comply with their request. This is probably due to their lack to desire to pursue a claim against you all the way in The Netherlands.

Unfortunately, past performance says nothing about the future. I am not a lawyer, but according to US copyright law, I don't see how this could be construed as a fair use. Consult an attorney or decide for yourself.

I am, however, a landlord, so I am familiar with the thinking that goes into whether or not to pursue action in court. Some questions to ask yourself:

1. How much damage are you causing them by posting so many questions from the test? It could be significant, as knowing the questions ahead of time could invalidate the test.
2. How many assets do you have? If you are "collectible" (i.e. the claimant could collect a judgment against you), they are more likely to pursue you because you'll be paying their costs.
3. How much would it cost for them to pursue you in The Netherlands? Personally, I have no idea. But if the cost is prohibitive, they could decide to just let the matter rest again (for a while, anyway).

So, is it worth it for them to pursue you?

So far, all they've done is had an in-house lawyer send you a notice at a cost of a first-class letter. Hardly a commitment of resources. But if you're costing them a lot of money, I would not expect this matter to just "go away", and from a fair use perspective, I think you have an exceptionally weak defense.

You know what's too bad? The anomalous effects in GPB have been explained, peer reviewed, etc, in the final report http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/final_report/GPB_Final_NASA_Report-020509-web.pdf

And, AFAIK, it was "expected" from build imperfections in the spheres, and has nothing to do with gravity waves. Maybe there's something hidden there, but it's probably a very small signal not the huge (compared to the target) wobbling due to the process described there.

Fair use is an affirmative defense, you can't just claim it as a right but have to prove your use was "fair" in court.

Mod parent up -- this quote is key. Popular folklore on the Internets holds that there is a certain percentage of material you can post that qualifies as fair use. That is bogus. Fair use is a judgment call based on a balance of four factors. From the linked Stanford Law site: "The only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court."

The copyright holders probably would argue that the amount of quoted material is excessive (one of the 4 factors) and that simply posting the items for discussion does not have adequate "transformative value" (another factor). Furthermore, they would probably argue that copying those test items will have a significant detrimental effect on the market for their product (yet another of the factors). On this point, they may well have the American Psychological Association backing them up. The official position of the APA is that psychological tests require careful protection because disclosing their content can invalidate the tests. If this went to court, judge would probably be strongly influenced by a friend-of-the-court brief from the world's largest professional society of psychologists.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer either.

If you have good teachers, they will recognize when this is occurring. It is well-documented by professionals as a risk.

If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be truth it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the structure of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world. But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences.

One way to understand logic is as the study of the most general forms of thought or judgment, what we called [a type of logic]. One way to understand ontology is as the study of the most general features of what there is, our [a type of ontology]. Now, there is a striking similarity between the most general forms of thought and the most general features of what there is. Take one example. Many thoughts have a subject of which they predicate something. What there is contains individuals that have properties. It seems that there is the same structure in thought as well as in reality. And similarly for other structural features.

If there is an explanation of this similarity to be given it seems it could go in one of two ways: either the structure of thought explains the structure of reality, or the other way round. An explanation of the latter kind, where the structure of reality explains that of thought, could go as follows: the world has a certain basic structure, being constituted by objects which have properties, which other objects can have as well. To properly represent a world like this the creatures from which we evolved had to develop minds that mirror this structure. Those who developed a different kind of mind died out. Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a structure which mirrors the structure of the world.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#4.5

I don't think they call it solipsism... yet. The source above is a good place to read about philosophy.

In my high school chemistry class we can run folding@home for extra credit as long as we join the school's team. We are assigned credit based on participation and the highest ranked member gets extra points.

Correct. And, perhaps the determinates include that humans must have arguments and discussions about free will. ;)

God* AKA the standard model AKA 3+1-manifold AKA math (okay, hush, I know Platonic realism is a form of transcendentalism) has a wacky sense of humor, indeed. "Ha! And they'll be forced to debate free will forever and ever! Man, I love making up weird reality TV show plots to watch."

* immanence may or may not be bliss but it sure beats transcendentalism (or transeunce, depending on context...) either way !!

Maybe. But there are possible answers to the seeming dilemma:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/#2.1

This speaks to the absurdity of standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, and nothing else. The only cure, which physicists strangely resist, is a return to the deBroglie interpetation that was greatly expanded by Bohm and Bell. More information from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It was the wishy-washy "primacy of consciousness" philosophy pushed by the likes of Bohr that got us to this dead end, and only a reality-based philosophy is going to lead to new insight. So long as we interpret the results incorrectly, we are destined to fall into the same trap.

Protocols exist (such as SRP, PAKE, EKE, etc) where entering a password not only verifies the user but the server as well, all while never transmitting the password to the server.

If browsers, banks, web servers, etc, were to adopt these then the importance of SSL certificates would diminish as the server would be proving prior knowledge of the user's password as much as the user would be proving knowledge of their password.

In the case of suspecting a banking website of being a forgery, assuming a proper implementation in the browser the user wouldn't need to worry about their password falling into the wrong hands since it would be useless to them unless they already had it.

SRP homepage: http://srp.stanford.edu/
SRP/TLS RFC: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5054.txt
PAKE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agreement

Plenoptic imaging or Wavefront coding methods can be used to achieve greater depth and lens speed by exploiting redundancy in the pixel count.