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I'm not the only one that understands:
http://www.technologyreview.co...

The issue is the right of way.

However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.

That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.

Regarding the demise of Moore's Law. I'd like to share with you a quote from a year 2000 paper entitled "The End of Moore's Law?"

The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”

Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amusing to read those types of papers with the benefit of hindsight. Even now you can find 2014 papers saying that 28nm is the last node in Moore's Law.

Most people suck at predicting the future.

[Backdoors are hard to find.] At this point with the exiting statement of the developers only a fool would trust Truecrypt with anything important.

Let's see: only a fool trusts things that actively lose data. (ie, bitrot, or email systems used by important people. If it's important, have 2+ independent copies)

So let's posit that TC is "sane", that it doesn't actively corrupt your data (Actual disk bitrot is another matter.)

Is it secure? (Ignoring keyloggers, CPU tampering, OS-file I/O interception, not to mention on-bus DMA controllers that have direct access to physical memory, and other out of band things? You could argue they need to detect this but they aren't an A/V vendor and you do halfway have to trust your hardware. Oh, visit CC PIN hacking via a IR camera to see your hardware "betray" you.)

Well, given a correct encryption key, things work correctly; given seemingly any incorrect key, things don't -- a very good start. So they need to protect the working in-memory key (because it's game-over if not.) They erase it if enough idle time has passed and try to keep it from being swapped out to disk. Process memory isolation is great, but in both cases the OS itself can do whatever it wants. So you have to trust the OS, at least a bit.

So, what everybody actually means: is the encryption secure? Can someone who doesn't know my password read my data due to stupid password handling, bad encryption routine choices (ROT-26), or leaky code of good routines? (Say perfect AES file encryption, but the unencrypted source file moved to the recycle bin, never mind about any corruptible buffer or stack overflows. [That's an example; TC doesn't encrypt single files.] ) Are there password collisions, ie password are actually case-insenstive? or silently truncated after 2 characters?

I suspect that you're (humans) the weakest link because of the XKCD wrench, an easily guessed password, or your likes/habits that could lead to your password. If you can't type your password it's not going to work, and you have to remember how to type it.

It seems to boil down to do you trust the vendor to act in good faith every step of the way? Let's see: -anonymous vendor, +access to source code that compiles to the released binary, +routine usage that makes sense, +updates over time, -weird final message. Personally, i trust them more than MS's native BitLocker, which is sane but has a (understandable) business-released AD key recovery function. (It's not your data but the companies, and they have keys to continue read it.) But is BL actually secure? Dunno, can't tell; we have to trust MS completely on that.

If it (TC v7.1) was good to use the day before sunset, it was good to the use day after too, until known problems arise or non-OS support kills it. But YMMV -- trust whom you see fit. So being curious: what are you using, if not TC?

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Knightscope may not outright replace many security guards soonâ"over a million of them were employed in the U.S. last year, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Laborâ(TM)s Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the estimated hourly wage these guards earned was more than twice the $6.25 that Knightscope says it will charge for its robots, which could tempt some companies and schools to at least try them out.

http://robotsecuritysystems.co...
http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/16/...
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/art...

Bones provide much more than structure. They are awesome! :D

My dog would definitely agree with you on that.

However, although the technique is still in its infancy, it does seem very promising; there is already work being done on using 3D printing to produce functioning organs like kidneys and lungs, using living cells instead of plastics. It does not seem unreasonable at all to extrapolate this to include an ever widening range of organs over time - the hardest part will be nerve cells, I expect, not least because the cells can be so incredibly long. I think we may see the first, simple replacement organs in the next decade or so; you could even say we're already seeing the first examples: skin grafts made from a combination of artificial material and the patient's own cells: http://www.technologyreview.co...

How much are a dozen deep-learning researchers worth? Apparently, more than $400 million to Google with their DeepMind purchase:
http://www.technologyreview.co...

Intracity deliveries in China usually costs around 8RMB (the exact type of deliveries that the drones are trying to replace in this case), which is around 1.20USD.
Meanwhile it is estimated that cost of drone deliveries costs around 20~70 cents for a 10km trip.

Though it should be noted that the 8RMB includes the margins for the delivery company, while the drone delivery cost doesn't include such margin. Thus, I think it is likely to be economical to deliver with drones even in China.

I'm not so sure about that. Tesla just announced and upgrade to the Tesla Roadster that gives it a range of 400 miles. That's 643 km for those using metric. That's a pretty good range if you ask me. Sure it won't be for everybody, but there's maybe only 2 or 3 times a year that I'd need to drive a car further than that in a single day. For those situations it might be better to just rent a gas car. Gas is low now, but it has nowhere to go but up over the long term. When the price of gas gets high enough, and electric car technology gets cheap enough, there will be a tipping point where people will choose electric over gas. And electric cars are much lower maintenance than gas cars. That will be a the major advantage.

??

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

and lots of similar stuff

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http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

and lots of similar stuff

You should pay attention to this technology: http://www.technologyreview.co... It might be able to eliminate the need for a generator completely.

All this material does is passively cool through radiation. If you want your house cooled all the time, and have no other need for electricity at all, then hafnium-shingling your house may work out for you.

You should pay attention to this technology: http://www.technologyreview.co... It might be able to eliminate the need for a generator completely.

Gladwell: I'm a skeptic. We've been replacing human labor with machines for getting on to 200 years now. Someone needs to convince me why the current automation revolution is any different from the numerous automation revolutions that have come before. A lot of the scare mongering that occurs over this issue seems to me to come from people who aren't reading their history.

I think he shouldn't rely on history so much - although, skepticism is warranted.

Technology changes history and historical patterns - computers, anyone?. Looking back on history and thinking the exact same thing will happen the same way is an over simplification of the complexities of economics and society. It is just as silly as the folks who say automation is going to replace all workers.

In the past in regards to automation, there were plenty of industries that were growing and needed human labor at all levels and more than compensated for the loss of jobs in the newly automated industry. The trouble with today is that automation is affecting all industries at all levels of employment. And new industries are automating as much as they can - and also many new industries are just not as labor intensive as old ones: for example, comparing manufacturing with social media. The Internet industry just doesn't need that many people to generate revenues as say the autmotive industry - even with their robots.

It has been estimated that to do the same amount of business that Amazon does with Mom&Pop stores would require 1 million or more people. Amazon does it with a little more than 30,000 - mostly temps.

The affects of automation is quite a complex issue and brushing it off as "nonsense! Look at the Industrial revolution!" or "The robots will make labor obsolete!" are both hyperbolic and do not reflect reality and what is actually happening in our economy.

Anyway, see here.

Sorry, but I think you're wrong.

This is an interesting article on how Google's Deep-Mind has managed to mimic how our short term memory works. This starts me thinking about how we might achieve a real AI. Perhaps we are closer than we think.

Right. You are smartest person in the world, and people actually building these things are idiots.
http://www.technologyreview.co...

Those retards at GE and Siemens sure would like your input, since you're clearly so much smarter than any of them. What would they know, being on the actual bleeding edge of the technology, when faced with you, a person "who worked in the industry with tens of years of experience [doing the marketing?]"

"Siemens’s plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system’s generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine’s blades and must therefore be much bigger–over four meters in diameter for Siemens’s three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine’s entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons–12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.

Much of the weight reduction comes from the use of permanent magnets in the generators’ rotor–a trick that GE is also using. Conventional turbine generators use electromagnets–copper coils fed with electricity from the generator itself. Henk Polinder, an expert in permanent-magnet generators at Holland’s Delft University of Technology, says that a 15-millimeter-thick segment of permanent magnets can generate the same magnetic field as a 10- to 15-centimeter section of copper coils.

Stiesdal says Siemens reduced weight further by inverting its generator’s design. Rather than a steel rotor covered with permanent magnets spinning inside a stationary doughnut-shaped stator (the design GE is using in its four-megawatt direct-drive turbine) Siemens’s rotor is a steel cylinder with permanent magnets on the inside, and this rotor spins around a column-like stator."

Sigh ... can't be so hard to google if you know not much.
Pretty dumb to bring random links and make wild claims.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://www.treehugger.com/rene...

Read a bit if you like ... will you?

Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world Are they? Of what? Wind turbines? Or by what metric?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Here they are number 2 in market share 2012, no idea how relevant that is.

You know: bringing one manufactor and then claiming because he is the biggest one ... that is not an argument. That is simply stupid. Sounds like the iOS versus Android war and claiming (rightly) that there are more Android sales than iOS sales when in fact Apple is the biggest smart phone vendor, or aren't theyÃY No idea, not important.

Sigh ... can't be so hard to google if you know not much.
Pretty dumb to bring random links and make wild claims.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://www.treehugger.com/rene...

Read a bit if you like ... will you?

Vestas is the largest manufacturer in the world Are they? Of what? Wind turbines? Or by what metric?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Here they are number 2 in market share 2012, no idea how relevant that is.

You know: bringing one manufactor and then claiming because he is the biggest one ... that is not an argument. That is simply stupid. Sounds like the iOS versus Android war and claiming (rightly) that there are more Android sales than iOS sales when in fact Apple is the biggest smart phone vendor, or aren't theyÃY No idea, not important.

Still need hot water don't you? Unless you're an office space too small to hold a restroom...but then why would you have a data-center cornered off? Granted, the idea is American Centrist from me being located in North America; but also by living in the Southern USA I can understand the desire to not add to the heat of the air. The best response I have to that is that maybe by the time I can start building this dream, adsorption chillers may be a viable solution. Aside from hope-tech, it's a design hole that I admit I personally haven't the solution for yet that may limit this plan for cooler climates at the moment.

Which is good enough if you are wanting to build hybrid wetware robots, like the rather famous "ratbot" from 2002.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

More interesting to me, is that these nanotubes seem to replace the myelin sheath on white matter neurons. If these researchers can make suitably long tubes out of this material they could 3d print the entire neuroconnective tissue of a larger neural structure, then grow grey matter outside that, like a normal brain is wired up. The artificial interface would be in the guided whitematter formations.

This could theoretically be used for some very interesting research.

Didn't get the links properly in:

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/ar...

willfully overmodel on the human brain

Gee... "Having created a biologically accurate computer model of a neocortical column scientists are now planning to model the entire human brain within just 10 years."

They're not goiung to be accepted until they're always better than human drivers. At the moment there are all sorts of minor issue that need to be addressed and dealt with, as well as a lot of real world issues that have yet to even be noticed.

MIT Technology review has some examples of this sort of issue.

It doesn't matter to the general public if the car is statistically safer. If a car *once* fails to spot a traffic light, even if no harm is done, this will be seen as a fundamental failure of the technology.

Good thing no-one could hack or clone your toll transponder or clipper card, right?

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-0...
http://www.akit.org/2012/02/ha...

For your proposal, how to do prevent someone from photocopying the "something on a letter or package which identifies me"? For my counterproposal, I suggested (above) that you scribble something unique and take a picture of it (uploading the picture using your account credentials as identification of the package), producing a one-time code that isn't allowed to be reused.

Or as another staffer said, "I find the whole rulemaking context almost hilarious in many instances, because you know you're reading something, and you know it's not true. And you're guessing, you know, the person is hallucinating." Ordinary comments were, in other words, prone to error and lacked truthfulness, in the eyes of many of the Commission's staff. They also represented one person's opinion or experience, whereas according to staff, comments submitted by legal or economic experts collated information in a more systematic way, and from a much broader population of consumers.

The FCC got three million responses, or almost one percent of the entire US population. And FCC staffers deride the public comment process as filled with 'hilarious hallucinations.' Because, according to this staffer, those comments submitted by 'legal and economic experts' prepared under the employ of institutions with a vested interest "collated information in a more systematic way" and "from a much broader population of consumers."

Think about this. Actual citizen voices don't matter because private interests have the money to hire people and staff time to organize large submissions with systematically collated information about the population of Net product consumers. Do you see how citizenship to impact public policy has been stripped from the process, leaving the public as nothing more than consumers of product in a rigged market?

They think we don't understand. That we're simply unqualified to understand the nuance of policy. But that's clearly not the case. As highly qualified Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig have been stumping for Net Neutrality for the better part of a decade. These people are not policy stupid. They've submitted comments with 'systematically collated information' by nationally and internationally recognized experts.

These FCC staffers quoted would have us believe the public is misinformed and uneducated. That is the spin they want to present to the press.

It's offensive. Regardless of what position you take on the matter.

There is a better write up of this theory at: http://www.technologyreview.co... I also think this ignores the possibility that civilizations do not continue to grow by leaps and bounds but at some point plateau in terms of their growth / energy & resource consumption, planetary departure. I.e. the jump to a Type II civilization (from linked article) does not necessarily preclude a Type I from surviving at that level until the sun it orbits dies.

This is bad news for humanity.

Are you sure?

While the cost of pumped storage is not going to change, battery costs can and likely will come down. One example http://www.technologyreview.co... would cost about $30,000 per MWh, 1/6 or less of current tech. That's $30 million per GWh, almost 10 times cheaper than pumped storage.

I know battery breakthrough stories are a dime a dozen, but progress in this area is quite likely since you don't have the power density constraint of small devices. The primary driver is material cost, not power density. The amount of energy stored is arbitrary as these batteries consist of components which can be individually adjusted (e.g. use larger tanks for liquids).

Nuclear generated electricity is expensive.
Thorium nuclear generated electricity is even more expensive due to the reactor design needing to be more robust.

Uranium recoverable at only $300-$400/kg.

Citation needed, the articles I've read claimed $1000 to $2000 per kilo.
http://www.technologyreview.co...

If these new designs are so great then why does the nuclear industry keep going with the old designs?

be cost effective to extract uranium from seawater,

Two things about that. #1 It is horribly expensive at over 15 to 30x the cost of current uranium. #2 The extraction process requires absurd amounts of oil based 'net' to extract the atoms of uranium.

Nuclear is already an expensive method of electricity production. Saying that this method of extraction is 'cost effective' is highly misleading. in 2010 Uranium prices spiked, the ocean extraction process would still have been over 7 times more expensive, not to mention there are only prototypes and estimates of cost at this point. Some of the estimates have put the cost of extraction at well over 100x current uranium cost.

The most advanced materials, which can be reused several times, can draw between three and four milligrams of uranium per gram of plastic each time theyâ(TM)re used, says Costas Tsouris, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who is working on that system.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Uranium obtained using the traditional process today would cost between $1,000 and $2,000 per kilogramâ"about 10 to 20 times the current market price, says Schneider. (The price of uranium did rise to around $300 per kilogram as recently as 2007, however.) The new process could cut that cost significantly.

Current price is around $31 per pound ($68 a kilo).
http://www.mining.com/chart-ur...

A sharp spike in uranium prices in 2007 had many people scared in terms of the sustainability of the nuclear industry, [at $100 per lb]

So if the nuclear industry is unsustainable with mined uranium then it is completely unsustainable with ocean extracted uranium, which realistically costs around 20 times as much.

How's that nuclear waste problem coming along? Perhaps the mafia can help.

Just make sure that nuclear waste doesn't leak. Oops.
Radiation leaks force transfer of nuclear waste from New ...
Nuclear waste leaking at Hanford site in Washington, again ...
After $40 Billion , America's Biggest Nuclear Dump Is Still ...
Radiation leak at nuclear waste dump raises questions ...
Ocean disposal of radioactive waste - Wikipedia, the free ...
Thousands of radioactive waste barrels rusting ...
Japan Times: Now 400 tons a day of toxic water is estimated ...

Because nuclear accidents stopped happening after Chernobyl right? Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

But hey, todays new breed of super-human won't make the same mistakes as those past

Carbon fuel cells and carbon dioxide capture can replace coal and biomass plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... Methane fuel cells can replace gas plants. http://www.technologyreview.co... Nuclear has no options and must shut down.

More:
http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r...

http://www.elp.com/articles/20...

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

http://phys.org/news/2011-01-p...

http://theenergycollective.com...

More:
http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.technologyreview.co...

http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/r...

http://www.elp.com/articles/20...

http://www.renewableenergyworl...

http://phys.org/news/2011-01-p...

http://theenergycollective.com...

More relevant links to asynchronous/clockless computing:
http://www.embedded.com/design...
http://www.technologyreview.co...
http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03...

Why do educators and parents think that just *having* these devices will be some sort of educational silver bullet?

Because kids are naturally curious and will teach themselves, given half a chance?

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Just sayin'.

Oh, stop acting like such a flaming drama queen. Worse comes to worst, we shoot up some sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. Kind of like how the globes temperature decreases when there is a massive volcanic eruption.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Yeah yeah yeah, I know, shouldn't have to geoengineer the planet. But there are ways of dealing with warming besides pissing your pants like a faggot and vowing never to reproduce and go all "woe is me! we're doomed"

...and continuing their missions without human intervention. The next step in drone automation will probably be using driverless ground vehicles as drone launching and control stations.

In the 21st Century, when a new enterprise is created, making everything as automated as possible is the goal. The less people the better.

Jeff Bezos did it quick with Amazon. It has been estimated that to generate as much business as Amazon does with Mom&Pop businesses would require about one million people at various levels: handlers, stockers, bookkeepers, managers, accountants, IT people, etc ....

Amazon does it all with less than 30,000.

How Technology is destroying Jobs.

Now, I am NOT suggesting we go back in time and eliminate automation or robots. Calling me a "Luddite" is asinine and completely inaccurate. And a cheap ad hominem shot

But we will have a problem of folks who cannot get work. Society only needs so many engineers and doctors and any other profession/work that has lower unemployment at this time.

For the first time in history, automation is replacing or lowering the demand for ALL workers. Why I was looking at the latest Visual Studio and what one programmer can do in a morning took four people a couple of weeks to do back in the win32/embedded SQL/write your own network communications layer days (early/mid 90's).

Automation has even effected programming jobs - it's not all off-shoring.

Folks have this very limited idea how automation effects employment - robots on the assembly line replacing unskilled workers - which is furthest from the truth.

It's affecting everyone - except the super rich (you cant automate capital and rents) - and we need to change our economy to handle what HAS come to pass.

Our unemployment figures will not get better - they APPEAR to get better because of the way our Government calculates the figure.

We have a severe structural problem that is caused not only by automation, but also by offshoring (all those folks exporting their poverty) and our aging society - I see MORE old people bagging groceries, waiting tables, and other min wage jobs than I have ever seen.

There are a lot of problems brewing and we need to get our heads out of our collectives asses because it is NOT like the Industrial Revolution were the displaced workers went somewhere else because there is nowhere else for them to go.

Things ARE different this time.

I thought that evidence was pointing to us being the product of about 9.5 billion years of evolution. Given that we live on a 4.5 billion year old world, life would have had to survive some sort of space-gap before getting to earth.

If sentient life takes 9.5 billion years to evolve, and the universe is only 13.5 billion years old, life would have had to start evolving relatively fast for it to get this far. The earlier you go in the universe's history, the more rare planets become. Even more rare would be a planet orbiting a star hot enough to fuel life, but also in continuous operation for that long. If it really does take 9.5 billion years for life to reach this level of complexity, and in our case it survived the destruction of a planet to spread to a new one, then the Fermi paradox all-but disappears and likelihood that sentient life is currently extremely rare, or even unique to our planet increases dramatically.

I do NOT want to buy cheap crap. Nor do I want to buy overpriced crap that is made in China or anywhere else - like paying too much or getting a shoddy product just because it says "Made in USA".

I buy cheap stuff because that is all I can get or I cannot afford an American or European made product.

I needed a miter saw because I couldn't get parts for my old one. After calling Stanley-Black&Decker-DeWalt-Delta-Porter&Cable (All the same company), they told me that my 12 year old saw is no longer supported and I should look at DeWalt because they are "very good tools".

DeWalt makes all their stuff in Mexico or China now.

never the less, I cannot afford DeWalt. I ended up fixing the saw myself and it's chugging away - an old USA made Delta.

See? I'm buying Chinese or more comonly SE Asian made shit because my real income has fallen. I cannot afford to buy American even when there is an American product available.

Cars? I have a 20 year old Chevy that I maintain myself because I cannot afford a mechanic. It is barely passing emmissions and I don't know when the particulates per million gets to high what i'm going to do.

Do you understand?

People - us peons - are buying cheap Chinese shit NOT because we want to, but because we HAVE to.

We see our neighbors get canned because WalMart insists that their manufacturers cheapen their products even more.

Its a sprial down to the bottom - all because of Globalisation, automation, and short-term thinking from our leaaders.

We don't know. The universe could even be infinitely large. But it is almost certainly much bigger than what we can see. Estimates range from 250x bigger to 10^23 times bigger.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

Most of that stuff disappeared from sight almost right away, right after the big bang, long before galaxies even formed.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

We will be alive when we have computers writing their own code. We will input the specs (speaking it in) and the computer would "write" the code.

The job as a programmer will disappear one day.

Better hope that you don't suddenly need more B-2s

Don't need any of them. Nor the B-1. I don't think the B-1 was ever used - except for scaring the shit out of the Soviets.

The B-52 is the bomber of choice.

I loved COSMOS (ep.11) last week and how the civilizations, like ancient Sumaria, who valued military conquest ended up destroying themselves.

It's a lesson from history we should take to heart.

See, all these wars we're fighting are slowing eating away at our economy - along with a few other factors like: offshoring, automation, and aging populace. Although, it is quite apparent that our way of life is a life of war - endless war it seems - and war mongering societies do not last very long and peaceful ones are the societies that thrive.

Most of us here are Trekkies or do like the idea of the society depicted in those series. The only way to get there is to stop this primitive non-sense of wars, tribalism and religion - religion is just another form of tribalism; also worshiping an Iron Age god in the 21st century is just ridiculous.

Just some thoughts at 4:55AM where I am.

What's empty is your straw-man argument. Of course most academics do excellent work.

What the original poster claimed was academics in the QC hardware business dismissing D-Wave. The most outspoken critic is a theorists. Is it too much to ask to get a link to a more hardware oriented academic going on the record with regards to D-Wave?

MIT included them in the list of the fifty smartest companies, so we know there are plenty of academics who think highly of D-Wave.

Neurons aren't even within several orders of magnitude as fast as transistors: linky1 and linky2.

However, a single typical neuron does a lot more work than a single transistor, computationally speaking.

Well, just look at the drug-trade.. They seems to manage quite good without being traced..

Bitcoin is much more traceable than any physical currency.. First hit on google gave this link http://www.technologyreview.co...

Getting rid of banks and their crazy transaction-costs is a good thing. Being able to transfer money in a secure way to anyone i want at any time i want is a even better incentive to use it.. And it could even be used as a rating system on how established (and in a way to be trusted) a store is by checking how many transactions that goes into it's bitcoin-address.

For taxes it could be a very nice too, at least for goverments. All transactions to and from a company must go via registered bitcoin addresses. All salaries must be paid to registered addresses.. This way they have full and absolute access to all transactions, even person to person, within their country and any country they chose to share the list of address->person.
But sure they would loose the possibility to confiscate accounts, but it would be easy to add functionality that would check a black-list of addresses if required in a country.. Sure people could use non-blacklist checking clients to get funds but those can be traced and blocked too. And the last part is the same as someone hiding tons of cash under their bed at home, but with the added feature of being fully traceable in the future.
You could even require stores to only accept bitcoins from registered addresses.

The thing that usually puts people behind bars is not being able to send money between each other but the paper-trace of how money flows..

Money-laundering in bitcoins is closly related to bitcoin-tumblers, and those can be easily be located by just looking at the block-chain and people that has or will receive money from it can be investigated..

Bitcoin != anonymous money
Bitcoin == non-regulated/non-blockable (for now atleast) cheap and fast transactions with secure escrow-functionality with more trace-ability than physical money.

Do you mean that making a graph using a temperature proxy measurement, tree rings, then switching to recorded temperatures only at the point they diverge rapidly, without mentioning this change, is proper?

Is it also proper to use one specific type of tree as the basis of the graph, if that one type is the least likely to show historic temperature changes? Wouldn't it be better to use results from trees that more accurately show historic temperature changes?

Mann's hockey stick wasn't to show that we are warming in the last 100 years. We all know the global temperature has warmed in the last century or so. That isn't in dispute. Mann's chart was specifically meant to eradicate the Medieval Warm Period, followed by the Little Ice Age. It was meant to prove that before we released vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, the temperature was static for a millennium.

And it was all a sham.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

http://www.technologyreview.co...

To say that Mann had "no intentional deception" is laughable at best.

As for recreating it with other proxies, how about this gem:

Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years. Anthony Watts sums up:

        It seems the uptick in the 20th century is not real, being nothing more than an artifact of shoddy procedures where the dates on the proxy samples were changed for some strange reason.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/a...

So, for all the later hockey stick results that prove Mann's original, how many of them are faked?

I could go on and on, providing links to stories you probably don't believe, and you could go on and on providing rebuttals I probably don't believe. So let's not.

It's not my fault Mann decided to start along the line of "Fool me once, shame on you."

the i3 comes with a internal combustion engine range extender, wonder what the efficiency drops to when that kicks in..

Care to show me the stats on the ICE range extender you speak of?

The range extender is an option. Maybe it is not offered in the US (although it is mentioned in reviews), but it is available in Germany: http://www.bmw.de/de/neufahrze...

It is a 2 cylinder engine which according to the BMW website increases the range to 300-340km total (about 200 miles).

2 cylinder engines were popular for motorboat outboards and jetskis. The industry switched to 3 cyl and 4 cyl because 2 cyl engines are less efficient and produce a greater amount of pollution. Granted, the electric engine reduces the total pollution amount, but still...

That being said, it does look like some research is being done to produce more efficient 2 cyl engines: http://www.technologyreview.co...

The universe is 14 billion years old. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Extrapolation shows that life has likely been evolving for about 9 billion years. We also know that very shortly (in geologic terms) after water arrived on our planet, green slime started spreading. I thought the current dominant theory was that life's origins are extraterrestrial and that somehow it jumped from wherever it started through space to a newly formed earth. If life traveled here aboard the shattered remains of the planet it evolved on, this would seem to indicate that we are the descendants of an extremely unlikely chain of events, which might make us the only life to have survived this long.

If you look at Comcast's income statement for 2013, you'll see rising profits. They made 6.816 billion dollars in 2013. I find it disingenuous (fucking bullshit) for them to claim these content providers are costing them money.

In reality it is likely the opposite, the content providers are increasing the demand for their product and allowing Comcast to charge more for service. Their relation to content providers is somewhat like Apple's relation to App providers.

Except Apple doesn't make 97% margins (it's no longer break-even, but it is way, way less than 30%).