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INAP, but in the + / - particle example, until one of the particles is measured, both particles are actually both + and - (i.e. the cat is alive and dead). To say that one of the particles has a definite value, that we just don't know yet, is the hidden variables part I think. The problem with that is that there can only be hidden variables only if they are non-local (something like de Broglie/Bohm theory).

I do. I live in the US. We can place things in the public domain at will. All of it includes a "Public Domain" bit of gibberish in it. You can steal it (I guess) and sell it, you can change it, you can throw sticks at it. I don't care. It's not good enough to do anything worth paying for - often it's simply scripts to do something I needed. Hell, not even often, I've not done so in years. I'm a much more passive consumer than I used to be.

If you're curious about the legality, it's called "dedicating" and there's a little information here:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov...

Specifically here:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov...

The whole thing's an interesting read, though. I do have, well had, several patents and a bunch of internal code that was protected but that's not the stuff I release to the public. That code wasn't very good, either. That's why I hired professionals.

I do. I live in the US. We can place things in the public domain at will. All of it includes a "Public Domain" bit of gibberish in it. You can steal it (I guess) and sell it, you can change it, you can throw sticks at it. I don't care. It's not good enough to do anything worth paying for - often it's simply scripts to do something I needed. Hell, not even often, I've not done so in years. I'm a much more passive consumer than I used to be.

If you're curious about the legality, it's called "dedicating" and there's a little information here:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov...

Specifically here:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov...

The whole thing's an interesting read, though. I do have, well had, several patents and a bunch of internal code that was protected but that's not the stuff I release to the public. That code wasn't very good, either. That's why I hired professionals.

http://protege.stanford.edu/ Java Desktop Application.,Used to define/manage ontologies. Not sure if they have a web version meanwhile and if comes close to what you need. However it supports plugins, perhaps the frontend can be adapted to access a centralized DB. Oh, found it: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/We...égé.html

This is a info page with an overview about various tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Did you stumble over this: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki...? Dozens of various tools mentioned.

Another tool, I stumbled iver, but did not use it yet: http://oboedit.org/

And then there is https://jena.apache.org/docume...
But that is more a programming API to dynamically create classes to store/manage data in an ontology described database. (Did not use it yet, but looks promizing)

And then we have this: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/To...

BTW, I can offer remote programming/assistance in such tools.

http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

Let us see if one of these others suit your tastes, lazy idiot.

http://www.voltairenet.org/art...
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldw...
http://www.counterpunch.org/19...
http://web.stanford.edu/class/...

How many times will they make articles about this as if it was something new?

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

I know we are leading up to COP 21 in Paris and they feel there is a need to spread the propaganda thick, but this is getting ridiculous.

Contrary to what the media is spreading, Exxon and other oil companies have been funding both sides fro decades.
i.e. http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

Rockefeller has been behind this push and drive on climate alarmism from the get go. Funding research and organisations like 350.org.

Those that believe the fallacy that big oil is all alone and behind only the "denier war machine" are keeping their heads in the sand.

Besides, the governements of the west outspend the supposed denial money by 10 to 1.

Indeed, Ruddiman 2003 (PDF, 2013 AGU lecture) explored the effects of old-fashioned deforestation.

Reading between the lines, you sure seem to be insinuating that "computer as appliance" was Jobs's idea. It didn't just come to him, he had to be sold on it.

"What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down. ...For the first two years, Jobs wanted to kill the project because he didn't understand what it was really all about."

Raskin did indeed want the Mac to be a "black box" with peripherals but no slots.

If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements. Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo (unless to make servicing cheaper without imposing too large an initial cost).

Everybody else knew that you couldn't do bitmapped graphics on a consumer priced machine because memory was too expensive, except for Steve Jobs.

And Jef Raskin. He evidently believed you could produce a bit-mapped machine for under $1000. Ha!

I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).

Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.

I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.

I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/20/1548228/are-you-sure-this-is-the-source-code">this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).

Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.

I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.

http://davidappell.blogspot.ca... "Johnson's remarks arose from a 1965 report to his Administration, “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” by the Environmental Pollution Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which had a chapter on CO2’s potential to cause warming.

I don't know one developer that isn't paid for their work.

How much software does one have to write to be a "developer"? Is it just writing software, or is there some other criteria that makes a person a developer, in your eyes?

I've written several programs that I haven't expected to get paid for.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde... has plenty of programs none of the writers expect payment for. I could show you more, but that should suffice. Galleon who makes QB64 itself, does not get paid for it.

I doubt you speak to very many people who write software about whether or not they write any programs for free.
Also, you ignore the fact that the people writing software to break DRM usually do it for free, though I'm not sure about what your definition of developer is, so in your mind they may not be developers.

Indie devs are different as they put up the work up front hoping to get paid later (identical model to self employment).

No, that's never how I worked freelance. We agree on the payment up front. Sure, the agreed upon money is paid upon services rendered, but there are restaurants that work on the same principal, agree to the price first and then pay at the end of the meal.

I think's that's a valid way of functioning.

You seem to think that it is the only valid way of functioning, but on contemplation I don't think it is a valid way of functioning, because it says that copyright is not your problem when wearing a customer hat. I also don't think the value you place in ensuring obeying the law is not a valid way of thinking.
http://www.academia.edu/115138... is a relevant read, though it interferes with copy and paste. In it, he argues that people always have the right to disobey the law on two accounts. First obedience of the law does not follow as a necessity from the reasons we might choose to obey it and second the law infringes on our autonomy in making moral judgments.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr... says some philosophers now deny that law is entitled to all the authority it claims for itself, even when the legal system is legitimate and reasonably just.
I'm afraid the Wikipedia article on mercy does not explain how you connect mercy with paying someone a minimum wage for what they do. The article on an honor system is more illuminative on your way of thinking, but this line:
A person engaged in an honor system has a strong negative concept of breaking or going against it. The negatives may include community shame, loss of status, loss of a personal sense of integrity and pride or in extreme situations, banishment from one's community.
would seem to indicate that we are not on an honor system.
I did not say that mercy always has better outcomes than other things, just that it sometimes does and is always unfair. which is sufficient to prove your assertion, not playing fair = worst experience down the road false. I also said fairness is a broken concept, which you chose to ignore, but is more to the heart of the problem, which is that any decision making based on the concept of fairness is invalid.

I totally agree that copyrights are a huge issue

Except when you are a customer apparently.

If you don't agree with the companies practices you can avoid their products.

I'm trying to understand what makes something a company's product in your mind. If a company chooses to sell something after it has entered the public domain, is it still their product? A lot of food products completely wrapped get thrown in the dumpster. Is it still their product and therefore stealing to go dumpster diving? What about

Dimwit, I will explain. I will use smalls number so you can understand. There are 2 people majoring in CS, they genuinely like it etc. They are both men (duh). Now the salaries go crazy and the greedy show up, 4 men and 4 women join the program. What just happened to the skew?

So you are proposing that in fact the absolute numbers completely changed around in 1984, and that's what caused this? OK...so why didn't you actually go grab those numbers to prove me wrong?

Perhaps because the actual numbers don't show that? See, the absolute enrollment numbers for men and women went up during that period for a further 2 years, and then leveled off. There was a bubble there, but it peaked years after the share of women did, and the level on either side in absolute terms was roughly the 1983 numbers (whereas the delta afterwards has been steadily increasing). So no, there isn't really any relation between the absolute numbers and relative ones, and no, there was no huge drop off in enrollments in 1984.

Bah. Enough of doing trivial research for sexists with intellectual projection issues. Next time, do your own googling. I'm not interested in any more rectally-extracted theories.

The problem with the OOP philosophy is that it tends to encourage architecturing/designing for the uncommon case: 1 object. DOD instead designs for the common case: many objects.

DOD is the 3rd tier of optimization.

1. Low-level bit twiddling
2. Algorithm
3. Data cache access and usage patterns

> where there is not enough information to prove that they never need dynamic dispatch

The other mantra of DOD is "Know Thy Data. Instead of having a generic container (because one is under the delusion this is "symmetrically nice") where you need to use a virtual function simply because you want generic polymoprhic behavior -- this will _always_ be far slower then if you made homogeneous containers. It is simple putting in practice the old trade-off:

* rigid and fast vs. flexible and slow.

Games use TONS of dynamic objects. DOD is about asking the question: Why?

By "sorting by type" you remove X% of the branches of unnecessary RTTI. If _you_ don't even know your types then why would you make the compiler work for something? You _already_ know ALL the possible types before-hand. If one doesn't, then one has an incomplete design. Relying on the compiler to do your job -- when you have FAR more knowledge about the system -- means you will never be extracting maximize performance.

> it's usually possible to rewrite your app to sacrifice some readability to make it faster.

Who said anything about readability?? In contradistinction DOD tends to be smaller, cleaner, simpler, and MORE readable, along with allowing for deep pipelining simply because you are optimizing for throughput instead of latency.

Where DOD is huge is in Game Dev and High Frequency Trading -- they share a common #1 priority. Performance at all costs.

DOD has its weaknesses as well:

  * Inflexibility
  * Takes time to re-write traditional code from a L1 L2 D$ (data cache) POV.

The other weakness with OOP is that people tend to shoehorn a classification system over-top whatever problem they are trying to solve. Rarely does a class taxonomy 100% match the problem at hand. Abstraction is a very powerful tool. Its cost is performance.

Stanford researcher declares that the sixth mass extinction is here
Stanford Report
June 19, 2015

That is the bad news at the center of a new study by a group of scientists including Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ehrlich and his co-authors call for fast action to conserve threatened species, populations and habitat, but warn that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

"[The study] shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event," Ehrlich said.

-- Stanford Report, June 19, 2015

How about WEB then? (and no it is not HTML, Javascript or anything to do with the WWW!) It's the programming language used to write TeX which itself lies behind LaTeX which is widely used by scientists and engineers to typeset papers involving maths as well as for theses, text books etc.

How a plan becomes policy

In the beginning was the plan.

And then came the assumptions.
And the assumptions were without form.

And the plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the workers.

And they spoke among themselves saying,
"It is a crock of shit and it stinketh."

And the workers went unto their supervisors and said,
"It is a pale of dung and none may abide the odor thereof."

And the supervisor went unto their managers and said,
"It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it."

And the managers went unto their directors, saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."

And the directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another,
"It contains that which aids plant growth and it is very strong."

And the directors went unto the vice presidents, saying unto them,
"It promotes growth and is very powerful."

And the vice presidents went unto the president, saying unto him,
"The new plan will promote the growth and vigor of the company, with powerful effects."

And the president looked upon the plan and saw that it was good.
And the plan became policy.

This is how shit happens.

Right you are. Linus did a pretty good [well, succinct anyway :-)] job explaining this.

Here are a few more detailed reasons why you can't write a kernel in C++:
- C++ constructors [or destructors] can't return error codes. They can only throw exceptions.

- Leaving aside the fact that relying on exceptions (vs. checking error codes, which the kernel code already does at every step of the way) is largely unsuitable in a kernel [or an app even]

- The kernel has several modes/states: in ISR, in syscall, entering/leaving syscall, in kernel thread, in tasklet/ISR bottom half and most of those, if not all, an exception can't be used.

- Even you still wanted to try, the exception code that C++ generates can't be used in the kernel. It would have to be something custom.

- So, you can't wrap a lock acquisition inside a constructor [and release inside a destructor] because if you're in an ISR, you have to do "trylock" [and test the return code] instead of "getlock". Trying to wrap the trylock in a constructor requires that you be able to throw an exception.

- Nothing in C++ (inheritance, polymorphism, operator overloading, etc.) helps the kernel with the bulk of what it does (e.g. programming devices, ordering of FS writes with journaling, setting up page tables, etc.). A lot of things the kernel does are "dirty" jobs (e.g. some device interfaces are straight out of kafka, particularly for older devices).

- The linux kernel [and *BSD] are shining examples of how to program in C in a "clean" way, despite having to do a "dirty" job

- As to "object oriented" programming, the kernel already does a fair bit of it already, but without the fanfare/hoopla.

When Linus first introduced git, he gave a video talk. He said [paraphrasing] "It's all about the merging, stupid". To me, it's all about the debugging

Disadvantages of C++ over C:
- constructors can't return error codes, only throw exceptions. In C, you can choose what ever you want:
{
foo_t *new_ptr;
int errcode = alloc_and_construct(&new_ptr);
}
{
int errcode;
foo_t *new_ptr = allow_and_construct(&errcode);
}
{
foo_t *new_ptr = alloc_and_construct();
if (new_ptr == NULL) // error ...
}

- new/delete are operators and not functions [defective by design]. See http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~d... for a far better/in-depth explanation/condemnation than I could give.

- templates and stl -- they can simplify some code, but if the stl implementation has a bug, where do you put the breakpoint? Of course, the stl is like "Westworld" [1973] "Where nothing can ever go wrong ... go wrong ... go rong ..." :-)

- Try to explain to your boss that the reason you can't ship a product is because you used the stl heavily and you'll have to wait six months before the bug fix gets propagated to all the platforms you ship on.

- A simple "x = y" can generate a copy constructor [or two other things that I can't remember]. Trying to decide which one gets generated "at a glance" is problematic. The simple line may generate a lot of code that is slow. In C, there's little to no ambiguity (e.g. x/y are either simple types (e.g. int), pointers [to structs], or structs and the execution time is more easily predictable). There was a proposal a while back to come up with a C++ subset for realtime [IMO, why??? If you want realtime, just use C]. The one feature I remember was removing copy constructors [as evil].

- In C++, if you're trying to use some of the more advanced/powerful featur

Very different. For one thing there is a lot of research being done by people who are far more concerned with the welfare of the animals than they economics for the humans. These people are driving the animal welfare research agenda. People like Joseph Garner or Temple Grandin. Temple is world famous for her work on improving welfare in cattle slaughter plants. I met Joe back when he was a professor at Purdue. He has spent a lot of time working through the moral implications of various management techniques, cage size, environmental temperatures (performance ideal vs animal preferences), etc. His whole group at purdue were some of the most compassionate researchers I've ever known with regards to their research animals.

Your jaded view is just not consistent with the actual work being done by actual people I know in the field, or the actual changes I've witnessed in the last 15 years. I won't argue that we didn't need a kick in the ass, but there is a point where we should start to get credit for the progress we've made and the things we were already doing right, and I think that time has already come.

> First, we aren't feeling the impact of climate change. For all the fear mongering, the oceans haven't risen,

They have. http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/f...

> the weather is fine,

It's not. http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...

> and life has been carrying on.

'Struggling' would be a better word: http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

And we are just seeing the beginning of these problems. The predictions of the IPCC are actually quite conservative. The reality is likely to be much worse. This isn't fear-mongering; I'm not talking about fire and brimstone and mass anarchy. Humans can adapt. But we will have to deal with mass migrations, destruction of large areas of crop land, and a potentially very harmful loss of biodiversity. These are facts which we can state with certainty; the only uncertainty is just how deep the wound will eventually go before we actually do something about it.

Edward Geist received his Ph.D. in history....His research interests include emergency management in nuclear disasters, Soviet politics and culture, and the history of nuclear power and weapons.

Once again, Slashdot editors fail to do basic vetting of sources. The only qualification for something to be posted here appears to be whether it will work as click-bait. You also have to love how the summary refers to him as "Stanford's Edward Moore Geist". You hear dear readers? He's from Stanford! That means academic authority! So, is he in Stanford's computer science department? Or engineering perhaps?

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Oh, wait...

They're not reporters, though. They're 'News Entertainment Personalities', and they're paid to push someone else's opinion.

No, they are not paid to voice someone else's opinion, they are all believers in the US's dominant philosophy, Logical Positivism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.wisegeek.org/what-i...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...

Read this paper if you want to know how easy it is.

PC-BSD occasionally picks some patches to apply on top of a stock FreeBSD, but they try to keep it fairly small. I suspect that they're unlikely to pick up these for several reasons. First, there are still some random segfaults in applications caused by these patches that are not yet diagnosed. Second, the HardenedBSD team doesn't have a great track record for security, for example merging some insecure random number generator patches that were under review for FreeBSD and rejected over security issues and shipping them in production. Third, since the Blind ROP work from Stanford, ASLR is largely discredited as a security feature - it's a nice checkbox feature, but it doesn't really buy you much against a determined attacker. Fourth, the last iteration of the patches still had some very odd decisions about the interfaces for turning ASLR on and off (they also had a number of lock-order reversals, which are hopefully fixed in the latest version).

Just tolling, but it is unlikely you pre-date copy-paste (i.e. the clipboard), the mouse, or even video conferencing :-P
http://web.stanford.edu/dept/S... (ok,ok I'm just a fan of this demo... I've always found it amazing for the time)

More on topic: I agree, If you aren't adding something useful, or shortening the path to something I use, then most UI changes are a waste of time; but like someone else mentioned you get used to it same as when the car's brights are turned on by pushing and leaving the multi-function switch forward as opposed to clicking it backwards.

This is especially true with the OS, and at least for me, there is an additional level of frustration with any changes to control panel / system settings.... it frustrates me to no end when i know exactly the screen i want, but have no idea how to get there anymore. :(

You see, if you (the one who posted the question) were a numerical mathematician or a computational physicist and looking for adequate performance in a research setting at rock-bottom cost, I'd say:have a look at GPU's (see e.g. here http://www.nvidia.com/object/c... ) and e.g. the Navier Stokes solver from Stanford U. (see here: http://mc.stanford.edu/cgi-bin... ). For such applications, hardware based on GPU's tends to give a much better price/performance ratio than rigs based on CPU's. But they're s lot harder to use as well. So find a suitable solver and see what hardware makes it shine.

But you probably aren't, or you'd have known that already (or looked it up in the literature or figured it out yourself).

Err ... if you are (as far as I can make out) just a computing guy who doesn't know Navier from Stokes but wants to put a "FEA/CFD rig" together, I think you're simply not the right person to do that. Yes, you're probably capable a few PCB's together that can run a generic Matlab-based solver, and will then find that it gives you an abysmal price-performance ratio on your particular workload.

And why? Well, the problem with "supercomputers" is: they're much more powerful than a general purpose computer only on very *specific^ problems. Change the problem and watch the performance change as well.

So you've got to tune your hardware to your problem in order to get realy good price-performance. And your "problem" is your solver. You need to choose that as well. And for that you need yo understand a bit about what a solver does relative to the problem you really want to solve. And it sounds as if you haven't a clue. Sorry.

The alternative is to let other people (consultants, vendors) do the thinking, and buy a custom solution. That will work, and will give you reasonable (but not great) price-performance ratios at a reasonable price level. But make darned sure that your hardware-software combinations is a good fit.

My suggestion: talk to your team member who knows what the formulas look like, what solver you're going to be using, whether low-accuracy is acceptable (e.g. if the objective is to obtain a graphical solution) or whether high accuracy is a must (e.g. for engineering purposes).

If low accuracy is acceptable but you want the best speed, think GPU's. If not ... determine what the particularities of your problem instances are, what your solver grid will look like, and what type of computing resources you'd need for that and how much.

Simply saying "a CFD problem" isn't nearly specific enough. And getting to a hardware configuration that has truly good price/performance levels is something for a specialist (or a team effort).

It's called the Maunder Minimum for a reason. There is definitely a correlation with sun activity... and my guess is that it's better than the correlation with volcanism. I don't know that for sure, but that's my best recollection. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-07-15]

It is easier to believe the documented condition of the sun going quiet for a few hundred years was the major factor behind the cooling than it is to believe one or more volcanoes were going off constantly for a few hundred years creating an ash blanket over the Earth for the whole period and caused it. [dunkindave, 2015-07-15]

Miller et al. 2012 says the Little Ice Age "can be linked to an unusual 50-year-long episode with four large sulfur-rich explosive eruptions".

Of course, the Maunder Minimum also contributed to the Little Ice Age. Regarding other contributors, Ruddiman 2003 (PDF) says "plague-driven CO2 changes were also a significant causal factor in temperature changes during the Little Ice Age (1300–1900 AD)."

There's been some debate about Ruddiman's "early anthropogenic" hypothesis. He discusses the LIA in his 2013 AGU lecture at 38m29s. Briefly, plagues killed many people in Europe and the Americas during the LIA, and their farms were overgrown by forests. That sequestered atmospheric CO2, causing even more cooling.

End to confusion: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/

Yes. Many times. And my search results always show plenty of different ways that 100% renewable is possible, today (by today I mean existing technology, not the time to implement obviously).

Okay, I think I see where the issue is. While slashdot has it's own idiots, I think that it would be a relatively rare slashdotter that would disagree that we have the technology such that we could provide effectively 100% of our electricity needs via renewable sources.

I certainly think it's technically possible. But once you take a step back and look at the resources it would take to do so, the cost is the disallowing factor. Thus why I was careful to put 'economically' in my post, and I'll admit that I don't always remember it.

Back when it would have cost $120k to replace $1200 worth of electricity a year, it was technically possible, but economical suicide, to go with PV panels for electricity. Back then batteries cost so much, and degraded so quickly, that the wear on the batteries exceeded the cost of the electricity to fill them. As a result, they were very much special purpose devices used in remote areas.

But with the cost of that solar array having dropped to under $20k, with LiIon dropping drastically in price even as their lifespan increased(at least in large battery packs with charge management systems that treat them 'properly'), as I mentioned, the economics are changing.

Here is even a group that worked with scientists, engineers, etc.. to come up with 50 customized plans for 100% renewable energy for all 50 states. http://thesolutionsproject.org...

Noticeably lacking: cost estimates for the infrastructure - found it in their 'more information', but it's buried in a spreadsheet.
For example - they propose putting PV on 54% of residental rooftops up here in Alaska(Table 4), but only anticipate it providing 0.2% of our power needs. Table 6 shows that it'd cost $1k per person per year in climate-change 'benefits'. It'd cost the state over $1B(table 8).

Expanded cost results by state - $119B to change over, for the state of Alaska. That's 'only' $161k per person.

Funny: They show replacing a fuel burning truck with a 2 seat EV. I'm a single guy in Alaska. I wouldn't last a week in that thing in the winter. Though I do want to see a EV/Strong hybrid truck.

They also somehow figure we'd use 40% less energy by switching to electricity everywhere. Doing that would essentially require rebuilding 90% of our homes. I mean, I want a dome-home, but I can't afford to build one right now.

Finally, I'll toss your 'claiming it' back at you. Just change #4 to 'paid shills of renewable energy'. I support more renewable energy, but don't think we can afford to reach 100% anytime soon without major developments in the technology.

Heh - mythbusters, car on cliff tipped over by birds myth. We're at the point they've tossed a dozen chickens onto it. There's another dozen or so to go before the renewable energy truly tips over the cliff, but the mythbusters are getting impatient for their crash...

When Phrack republished the NSA Employee Security Manual to demonstrate how porous NSA was for its own security, it backed off.

This is just the same old crap with Edward Snowden or the OPM caper as a counter-example, rather than Phrack.

Garbage man has been a good union living wage job for a century.

Wait, no it hasn't. (Hell, Dr. Martin Luther King was *killed* during that particular strike...)

"Infinity does not exist. Real mathematicians (ie - NOT you) only speak of numbers APPROACHING infinity."

I don't think I count as a real mathematician (but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I did get a mathematics degree), so with that caveat:

As someone pointed out above, there is the one-point compactification of the complex plane; also points at infinity in projective geometry, the use of infinite numbers (and infinitesimals) in Non-standard Analysis, and the Surreal numbers, about which Donald Knuth has written a book "Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness".

In short, that's only the tip of an iceberg of actual infinities. Try searching for: Georg Cantor.

"The only constant is change" -- the late Robert Monroe

what an original thought!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...

FYI, the Big Bang Theory isn't astrophysics.

Really? That's odd, I wonder why it's covered in this book and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and... etc.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you wish to dismiss.

Please learn a teensy tiny bit about the fields of knowledge you're discussing before you correct people.

After a McAfee popup announced yesterday that my Windows PC passed security inspection, I felt like sending off a slightly edited version of Prof David Mazières' most famous paper to Adobe Systems.

I always felt that way about this demo from 1970... where our ai still hasn't caught up:

http://hci.stanford.edu/winogr...

Solar and wind are not the only sources of renewable energy.

100% renewables is perfectly possible and would highly likely be a lot cheaper than nuclear.

The world can be powered by alternative energy in 20-40 years, Stanford researcher says

â- Powering the World With Wind, Water, and Sunlight: Mark Jacobson at TEDxPaloAltoHighSchool - YouTube

Cost Of Solar PV Will Fall To 2 Cents/kWh In 2050, Says Fraunhofer Study

No I mean logic. There is a very rigorous framework everyone but the Supreme Court has to follow, and you have to be able to connect every decision you make to that framework. US Courts are not allowed to do common-sense solutions such as threaten to saw a baby in half to see which person loves it more. They have to base their decision on rigorous logic.

They can include some elements of "reasonable man" judgement, but the circumstances that require Reasonable Man's judgment are pretty well-known, and it's very unusual for anyone to read a Judge's opinion on what Reasonable Man would say and disagree. On the other hand, common sense is constantly debated.

In this case it's relevant because common sense would indicate that if he has the right to do it under Fair Use, so does she. But if you actually get into the legal tests it's not that simple. There are four. I'll go through them:

1) The "did they change the work enough to count as transformative?" test. He can make this case, given the change in format, the new context, and the art communities endless ability to rationalize ridiculous BS. She is selling her version as interchangeable with his work. Either her version is a replacement for his work (and not transformative) or it isn't. I give him a 50% chance of winning this test (at best), but she simply can't.

2) This is the test where they apply special rules to factual works, unpublished works, etc. It is irrelevant to this case.

3) The test of how much of the copyrighted work was taken for the copy. In both cases it was 100%. But it only applies if the other three tests are tripped. If he can skate on tests one and four he's fine, and we've established he might be able to skate on test one. She didn't pass test one, so the fact that her work includes 100% of his means she's fucked.

4) The test of the actual damage done to the original work's market. The work he copied is a Instagram post which she may not have retained copyright on. Even if she's making money off it, it's impossible to claim that her income from selling mas-produced copies of it on the internet would be reduced by him selling a single copy for $90k. And as I pointed out back in test one, her entire marketing pitch is "pay this $90 rather then the $90,000 that asshole charges," which makes it rather difficult for her to claim she isn't actively trying to destroy the market for his work.

The article actually describes a case in which he took somebody else's photos from a book, made some small (but noticeable) changes, and then sold them for millions. Once he convinced the Appeals Court he'd passed the first test, the rest were irrelevant, and he forced a favorable settlement. I suspect he'd have trouble proving the first test in this case, as he didn't actually change anything about the images themselves, but he's got the kind of money to hire some really good lawyers.

So yes, the Courts are 100% logic, and that logic could easily turn into an extremely unsensible verdict for our poor Suicide Girl.

You're missing about three assumptions: there are four tests, not one. Specifically they are:
1) Is the purpose of the new work different (ie: is it transformed?).
2) The specific nature of the work (you have more right to crib from a biography or a scientific paper then you do from a Novel).
3) The amount of the work used.
4) Whether the new work undercuts the market for the old work.

Test 2 doesn't come into play in this dispute because they're not arguing about the special works that count (unpublished works, factual works, etc.). If he's got a valid argument the work was transformed under Test 1 and isn't messing with the market for her work under Test 4 the Courts ignore Test 3. He actually won a case on this exact line of arguments before.

OTOH, her marketing is that she's trying to under-cut the market for his work, which means she has conceded test 4. It also means that the transformation under Test 1 is questionable, because you can't simultaneously claim that your art is so much like his art that they''re interchangeable and claim you've fundamentally changed it. Which brings Test 3 back into play, and she fails that one because 100% of his work is in her work.

Now all this is assuming he wins the point on Test 1. In the case I mentioned you could actually tell the altered Prince version from the original, unaltered, Cariou version, at a glance. He'd do shit like notice the dude in the black and white photo had his arms at the correct angle to be holding an electric guitar, and he'd add a purple guitar. In this case it's a lot trickier to tell the difference because you'd have to know the usernames he used for his comments.

Moreover the potential plaintiffs, who mostly seem to be pretty young American woman (at least one, SuicideGirls, run their own business, and the others are the kind of public performers who run their lives like it's a business), are the kind of people Courts go out of their way to be fair to. Cariou is an art-photographer obscure enough that he doesn't even have his own wikipedia page.

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

What does color have to do with it?

Really?

What does the pixel configuration of the recycle bin icon have to do with its functionality?
That's right, very, very little. Even if it were just a yellow square, it'd still have 'Recycle Bin' under it and the fundamental functionality would not be different. Just like a yellow polka dot hammer.

Also: http://stanford25blog.stanford... (reflex hammers)
And Google 'design hammer'. There are definitely hammers out there that look as stupid as all the flat UI crap we're dealing with today.

The big difference here is that switching away from Windows (or the flat design) isn't as easy as not buying a ridiculously looking hammer. I'm pretty sure that if MS would make the icon sets and a lot of the interface easily switchable, that many would indeed switch away from the flat stuff. Sure, a lot of people wouldn't know about it or even give a shit (I've see many an XP desktop with the hideously bloated blue look and the default desktop background) and sure, that would make MS say: "See! They LIKE it!", but for those among us with a brain, it would quickly show the collective dislike for the flat style.

WRONG.

I'm not going to retype this:

Some renewables are intermittent? Not a problem: Solutions to a 100% renewable and sustainable energy supply worldwide include but are not limited to hydro-electric and pumped hydro, geothermal, solar pv, wave-power, tidal lagoons and other tidal, onshore and off-shore wind in conjunction with better home insulation, heat pumps - ground source and air source, storage heaters, solar water heating, battery storage and charging electric cars whilst renewables output is high. Vehicles, ships and trains can be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells, aircraft could run on liquid hydrogen.

$500 Billion A Year In Fossil Fuel Imports Could Be Saved In US, EU, & China In 100% Switch To Renewables | CleanTechnica

China Government Study Sees 86% Renewables by 2050

New Study: 95% Renewable Power-Mix Cheaper Than Nuclear And Gas | CleanTechnica

The world can be powered by alternative energy in 20-40 years, Stanford researcher says

        German grid more stable in 2013 â" German Energy Transition

â- Powering the World With Wind, Water, and Sunlight: Mark Jacobson at TEDxPaloAltoHighSchool - YouTube

The storage necessity myth: how to choreograph high-renewables electricity systems - YouTube

"But CO2 is not the boogeyman the media and politicians are making it out to be" - why would anyone care about media and politicians? i prefer scientific studies similar to this http://news.stanford.edu/news/...

"Everyone seems to be on this bandwagon of reducing resources extraction, all the while not realizing its the building block of our modern societies." would you prefer to have just coal burning as a means of power generation or do you like to take advantage of more modern ways. Burning fossil fuel is old school tech, life advances towards better solutions.

The original building blocks of modern societies started with messy dirty coal, added not so dirty gas, added clean hydro, nuclear to the equation plus a few others, now we are taking advantage of free solutions, why waste free solar and wind? Welcome to the 21st Century

http://www.securityweek.com/fi...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/0...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/0...

http://labs.umbrella.com/2013/...

http://www.darkreading.com/per...

http://tech.slashdot.org/artic...

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

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/1...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/secu...

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/0...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/0...

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/securit...

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

* "Read 'em & weep" EVEN MORE are coming... & that's only SOME of the exploits DNS has experienced, I don't have them all but those will do!

(Simply facts supporting my former post as I promised in it, to show the RAMPANT EXPLOITABILITY of DNS vs. my program AND WINDOWS protecting hosts perfectly...)

APK

P.S.=> You can't win, accept it... apk

http://www.securityweek.com/fi...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/0...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/0...

http://labs.umbrella.com/2013/...

http://www.darkreading.com/per...

http://tech.slashdot.org/artic...

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

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/1...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/secu...

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/0...

http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/0...

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/securit...

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

* "Read 'em & weep" EVEN MORE are coming... & that's only SOME of the exploits DNS has experienced, I don't have them all but those will do!

(Simply facts supporting my former post as I promised in it, to show the RAMPANT EXPLOITABILITY of DNS vs. my program AND WINDOWS protecting hosts perfectly...)

APK

P.S.=> You can't win, accept it... apk

Zactly. Especially close email / other communication channels. Email is not IM. And IM is too intrusive when trying to concentrate, so turn it off. We've solved the problem of easy electronic communication. Now we need to solve the problem of how to minimize its abuse.

Donald Knuth, a guy who knows a thing about computers, and how to make significant contributions to society, famously stopped using email. In 1990. He taught the world many things about computing. There's an important lesson here as well.

Good job, the final copy was better than my submission.

It will be interesting to see how automated OTR trucking plays out vis-a-vis the various states' stance on self-driving vehicles, especially those which have outright banned them.