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Depending on how you define "sophisticated", Stuxnet may or may not be very sophisticated. For example, a sophisticated program may be one that needs no documentation to be easily understood. Similarly, highly obfuscated code (such as http://udel.edu/~mm/xmas/) may be considered quite sophisticated.

So, where does exploiting OS bugs and writing USB malware lie on the sophisticated spectrum?

You don't even know what racism is. You have much less idea what a Nazi is.

What is racism? Why is it bad?
What is a Nazi? Why is it bad?

"because everyone is equal because some one said it's true and I'm poor and it makes me feel better about having to submit so humiliatingly to this society"

In reality there are differences between races based in genetics.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/got...
In reality people are happier in homogeneous societies.
http://archive.boston.com/news...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
In reality, up until literally one microsecond ago on our evolutionary timeline as hominids, everyone always lived in homogeneous communities.

How do you justify the change?
You can't, because you're so brainwashed you won't let yourself ask an honest question or even have an honest thought, you are stressed and anxious and all you care about is fitting in.
This makes you subhuman, not your race. This is what real Nazis think.

"So there is a genetic reason to have bias about hiring people - some people are just "born lazy and ignorant"?"

Not so much lazy and ignorant as a combination of factors. If you look at performance of individuals in western societies, factors representing success correlate pretty well with IQ, to a point. Generally, we see about 80-85% of performance being innate (genetic), while around 15-20% is environmental. We see the same thing in physical performance - no amount of work will make an Olympic athlete out of someone without the body for it.

Black culture is certainly toxic, but it's also a reflection of genetics. They feed back on each other. There has been a ridiculous amount of money spent over decades trying to solve the black-white achievement gap, yet it doesn't work. It can't work.

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/got...

There are population differences between the black and white population in the US that are compounded by the effects of poverty, malnourishment, and poor education.

Poor education, culture, and poverty feed back on themselves - it takes only a single student to disrupt an educational environment, so if you have a higher percentage of special needs students (or simply disruptive ones), there will be a greater percentage of classes where it's difficult for children to learn. The ability of a school to fund smaller classrooms is a function of its funding, which is often a function of where it's located and its taxbase. Poverty tends to concentrate individuals into areas where mass transit is an option, and so you get a perfect storm of a population that is already dealing with a lower mean IQ coupled with poorer education across the board.

This is also why voluntary busing can help with education, but only to a point. If you bus the non-disruptive students to better schools, they benefit from being removed from their disruptive classmates. If you bus the disruptive classmates as well, you harm the education of wherever they are bussed to.

I went to one of the former schools - black parents with above-average children who wanted their children to receive the best possible education would choose to send their children to my school. They were driven to succeed, and accountable to their families, and it did not adversely affect our education, but it helped theirs significantly.

So, no, it's not that they are born lazy, or ignorant. Those traits may be present as a class as a function of IQ, but like anything else individuals are individuals, who vary greatly. We can draw conclusions about a population, and estimate likelihood based on those conclusions, but you never really know what an individual will do until they are given the chance to do it.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe criminality is more closely correlated to socio-economic forces than race."

Ok, you're wrong. The hispanic population isn't significantly wealthier than blacks, but the crime rate is significantly lower, even at the same level of income.

Furthermore, poor white people commit crimes (especially violent crimes) at a lower rate than their black counterparts at the same income.

Most of the crime involving blacks is black-on-black.

https://2kpcwh2r7phz1nq4jj237m...

This has been going on for some time. For decades, researches have wanted to blame it on poverty, but the evidence is not there.

"When you adjust for income your argument completely falls apart"

No, it doesn't. When you adjust for IQ it does, but that's where the problem ultimately lies. A black person with an IQ of 100, and a white person with an IQ of 100 will tend to be rather similar, but there are significant differences in population distribution. There's quite a few reasons for disparity in income, but it's a symptom, not a cause.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gott...

"Despite repeated claims to the contrary, there has been no narrowing of the 15- to
18-point average IQ difference between Blacks and Whites (1.1 standard deviations);
the differences are as large today as they were when first measured nearly
100 years ago. They, and the concomitant difference in standard of living, level of
education, and related phenomena, lie in factors that are largely heritable, not
cultural. The IQ differences are attributable to differences in brain size more than to
racism, stereotype threat, item selection on tests, and all the other suggestions given
by the commentators. It is time to meet reality. It is time to stop committing the
“moralistic fallacy” that good science must conform to approved outcomes."

"Some people, not me, claim that genetics is involved too."

People have been trying for forty years to claim that it's not genetics. It's largely genetics.

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/got...

Culture is heavily influenced by genetics.

"iq tests are proportional to quality of education."

They can be. That's why they have developed tests specifically to address that. They do things like pattern recognition in order to take the language, cultural, and educational factors out of the equation.

The results are the same.

"so are sats, acts, psats....."

Thos are more so, but we're discussing IQ, not standardized testing. Some of those tests were specifically designed not to correlate so much with IQ, because it harmed certain minorities.

"so your logic for feeling superior can be overturned by giving simple opportunities."

No, no they can't, but people keep trying and trying and trying.

https://www1.udel.edu/educ/got...

We see this even in twin studies - white children adopted black families do better then their non-adopted children, with the same education, opportunities, and upbringing. Black children adopted to white families do not do as well as white children adopted to white families, regardless of whether they are in a majority white area, majority black area, the level of opportunities provided.

We see differences in intelligence levels between families being conserved, as well as animal breeds where intellectual differences are profound and acknowledged. Larger human families (races) have the same thing.

"but you are racist so you seek to hold power over other groups."

Not at all. I want to quit flushing money down the toilet on programs that don't work, I want to acknowledge observed reality, and to move on. That has nothing to do with holding power.

I'm Mexican. I freely acknowledge that all things being equal, Europeans tend to be smarter than Mexicans (population median), and that Jewish people and Asians tend to be smarter than white people. There's nothing wrong with accepting reality. We should do it.

"more to do with your own fear of being inadequate then the lack of potential in others."

What fear of being inadequate? I don't like crime, and if we're going to address that, we need to face reality and the intersection of culture and genetics.

People think the US has a gun violence problem. It doesn't. If you exclude black perpetrators, the US would be on the high end of gun crime for europe, per capita (despite having way more guns). Remove the hispanic population, and the US is on the lower end of the gun crime statistics.

The US doesn't have a gun problem, it has a black and hispanic people with gun problem. Nobody talks about that, though, so they go for other programs that restrict a lot of people's freedoms when the problem comes from a small percentage of the population.

How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather?

I assume you mean wind turbines? Here you go.

The higher you go, the higher the figure you can harvest. Effects at the surface are generally rather minimal, although there are some small effects. It's a shame, honestly, as I think most people in windy areas (at least speaking for myself) would like more of a reduction on surface wind speeds.

How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it?

Geo is generally locally, temporarily depletable. Over broad regions or over long periods of time, it's renewable. Nuclear decay inside the earth yields an average of 0.06W per square meter heat input. While that's far less than solar (even accounting for night, angles, inefficiencies, etc), it's particularly useful because it concentrates and stores. So if you drill a well into a particular hot water reservoir, you're harnessing the heat that flows up through that entire reservoir, not just immediately at the point of the borehole. And even if you're depleting it faster than it's being added (which is generally anticipated to be the case by significant margins, although these things are surprisingly difficult to assess), there's always other areas to move into; over somewhere between dozens and thousands of years (depending on the reservoir), the old site will reheat.

Note that this isn't always the case; sometimes you have "fossil heat". For example, in some places we tap heat from old lava flows or dikes. They're hot because they represent heat from another location (deep magma sources). They're hotter than their surrounding rock, and if you take the heat from them, they're never again going to be hotter than their surrounding rock.

Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem.

Climate does not work that way. Planet surfaces very rapidly equalize to their equilibrium temperature, as radiation increases relative to the fourth power of temperature. The only way to have a meaningful difference in the surface temperature is to change the radiation balance (which can happen in a wide range of factors, affecting both incoming and outgoing radiation), and thus the equilibrium. Simply having "something hot at points on the surface" is virtually meaningless.

The freeware ntpd at http://www.ntp.org/downloads.h... was extremely stable code. It's greatest problems have been with subtle configuration issues, not with the old daemon itself. Unfortunately, the service is now merged into systemd itself, which means that support for it from that large part of the Linux world will no longer apply to any other operating system.

The main codeline at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp... shows that it is in active development, mostly to support new operating systems and hardware.

In order to not fail catastrophically an advertising manager needs roughly the same minimum intelligence (as approximated by IQ, imperfect though it may be) as a research scientist. Like it or not, working with people is MORE difficult because we are such complex systems while "how things actually work" is really just saying "systems simple enough to be analysed perfectly or nearly so".

Don't take my word for it. Here's a rather famous paper: Why g matters. It's on pages 88 & 90.

For the last three-and-a-half years, Stenn said he's worked 100-plus hours a week answering emails, accepting patches, rewriting patches to work across multiple operating systems, piecing together new releases, and administering the NTP mailing list.

100 hours a week to maintain NTP? How much of that comes down to answering emails that maybe don't need to be answered? I have a ton of respect for Mr. Stenn, whose name, incidentally, I don't think I'd ever heard until today despite having two systems in pool.ntp.org for years and using NTP in or on nearly every device I've owned for two decades. But there's simply no way there's enough going on in NTP to generate 100 hours of work per week. I see the changelog is active and fresh, but I still can't imagine those releases driving a "crunch time" developer schedule, week in and week out for 3+ years.

I hope he backs away from the email before tossing in his hat entirely. Engaging random strangers in thoughtful discussion is probably consuming a lot more of his time than it needs to, and maybe more than he's noticing.

Seems like what the world really needs is a way to combine (excess solar electricity) and (excess atmospheric CO2) back into some kind of useful hydrocarbon fuel.

Then your "storage device" could simply be the underground tanks at the local gas station, which would partially refill themselves each afternoon by siphoning off the excess electricity to create gasoline.

Dunno if it will actually happen, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Regarding capacity factors and storage, there's a study from University of Delaware that concludes:

Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today’s electricity expenses, according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware Technical Community College.

If you're basing your remarks on capacity factors numbers from older tech, keep in mind that these are improving, e.g. offshore wind can easily have capacity factors of 50-55%.

But it's true it requires investments, and it probably won't happen until old plants need to be scrapped anyway.

The March 1989 geomagnetic storm destroyed a transformer at the Salem nuclear power plant:

http://neutronm.bartol.udel.ed...

The transformers can also be damaged and fail at a later time.

How about exfiltration via simple/differential power analysis by ramping up and down cpu, gpu, power supply usage, or even a more subtle control? The best dodge to RF detectors may be to avoid open air entirely, although if you can in any way modify the hardware of the target platform the normal rules of 'You lose' still apply. Motherboards have a pretty good flexibility these days about setting power and clock parameters, which might be another way to get a signal out of a system that you can't alter the hardware of.

Not an engineer though, so I've no idea what I'm talking about. Based on the recent acoustic cryptanalysis paper that's just coupling power to air vibrations, I can only imagine that having an electrical conduit makes things an order of magnitude easier. A quick google and here's one such paper from DEFCON 17 (Not too long ago) on this exact subject, although it appears to be dealing with direct signaling through the power network with hardware modifications. Intelligence agencies must be years ahead in this particular field, as electricity is already a prime target for distruption.

To be fair this isn't exactly a radio signal like you are talking about, but signal is signal.

OS400 !=Hinduism

Reminds me of "Wings of OS/400" and the other OS iterations from:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~zurawski/humor/new_os_air.html

This is an interesting point. I'm not sure if typhoon risk areas coincide with really top wind resources far from any grid. You'd have to use your judgement: http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/resourcemap/index-world.html I like the Aleutians, south of Iceland, and just north of Antarctica. The flow battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery would really just be the electrolyte aboard a ship that could maneuver out of the way of risky weather (as could the turbines with enough lead time). Obviously the Navy process for converting sea water to jet fuel does involve producing hydrogen. It would be tended by a tanker that could also maneuver. The efficiency trade off is between getting good use from the turbines (say 0.8 capacity factor) and taking a hit on the charge cycle efficiency which looks pretty good for a battery. For producing liquid fuels, it is more a matter of economics. Liquid fuels are not used efficiently but they are convenient. The Navy claims a $3-$6 cost per gallon using their rather expensive nuclear reactors. High capacity factor wind, even offshore, should be less expensive. Below $2/gallon production cost, such an effort should make money under current market conditions. Certainly, some fracking operations are running on a smaller margin.

As it turns out, typhoon risk is something that a solar island project has been looking into. They do well along the equator in this respect. http://www.solar-islands.com/

Even the most generous estimates show that even if we throw trillions we don't have at it with current tech renewables will only provide at most around 30% of the US power needs

Actually a few trillion into wind would cover half of global energy requirements, and solar has much much more potential. http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2013/sep/wind-energy-potential-091012.html

"Forming a fist and then extending a single finger" is not a very good gesture, so that is not a major concern.

A good variety of user interfaces can be developed without exact identification of all fingers in all possible positions. Identifying a finger in a touchscreen can be done if that finger is the thumb, in a natural resting position; then, the other fingers can be from their relative distance.

This in particular allows for chording gestures, the ones used for touch-typing and that could be used for other precision tasks.

Wayne Westerman, who invented the software technology later bough by Apple to become the iPhone, explains in his master theses how it's done (see chapter 4), and how they're used for reliable input (chapter 5).

You can't have nuclear power on any serious scale without storage. Why? Because you can't regulate generation up and down to match fluctuating demands. That means that if you were to go 100% nuclear, you'd have to have a huge really expensive plant only operate for 1 hour a day (peak). Today new nuclear plants are only barely competitive if they operate at full speed.

Also, if you combine solar and wind power on a large grid, you need surprisingly little storage:

- We modeled wind, solar, and storage to meet demand for 1/5 of the USA electric grid.
- 28 billion combinations of wind, solar and storage were run, seeking least-cost.
- Least-cost combinations have excess generation (3 x load), thus require less storage.
- 99.9% of hours of load can be met by renewables with only 9-72 h of storage.
- At 2030 technology costs, 90% of load hours are met at electric costs below today's.

High Winds in the area: http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/ResourceMap/sse_figure28a_rev.gif
Paper on effects of high winds on U-Shaped buildings: http://nargeo.geo.uni.lodz.pl/~icuc5/text/O_18_1.pdf

This is a nonsensical study in particular since we have no clear definition of what "intelligence" is (hint: its not IQ).

Yes, it is.

If I send a packet to 78.77.76.76 spoofed as 78.77.76.75, and my spoofed packet is the replay of a valid telnet login into that device and a command to FTP PUT PRIVATE.TXT to my server, how did my TCP spoof not get me what I want?

Go read up on the Mitnick attack. You are arguing that what has happened in the wild at least once is impossible. I have proof otherwise. http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~bmiller/cis364/2012s/readings/mitnick.html Someone has successfully compromised a system using TCP spoofing as one of the necessary parts of the the attack.

IQ tests are incredibly subjective anyway, and have innate cultural biases.

That is not true

Of course technology is going to improve in the decades between the early 1980s and late 1990s. The contention is that because Apple bought Fingerworks' patents, they own the foundations of multi-touch technology. Elsewhere in this thread it was argued even that capacitive in particular (the tech on most phones today) is owned by Apple.

This is just not the case, as these technologies existed for decades even before Fingerworks existed. In fact, in his thesis, co-founder of Fingerworks Wayne Westerman cites Bill Buxton's work profusely.

Fingerworks was an evolution of multi-touch, not its genesis.

I can tell you absolutely that not everyone in Occupy was demanding that. I'm not saying you didn't see someone who did, but if you were paying attention, you know that Occupy is a distributed protest movement that is heavily localized and focusing mostly on local problems. There is a lot of crossover because cities across the country are experiencing similar circumstances. Occupy Wall Street and Occupy NYC were just the most public showings. There in fact have been many many more Occupy protests which the national media ignored. I already said there were fringe positions being advocated; ending fossil fuels now is obviously one of them. It is a naive demand, and there are several more I can think of, but that doesn't invalidate the common complaints that Occupy has made which have also been made by average Americans and even the Tea Party at the opposite end of the spectrum. Should talk about the Tea Partiers' demands that we ban Sharia law from our courts?

Most Americans don't think Occupy is a crazy fringe movement. Actually, that attitude is mostly amongst Fox viewers who, like you, find it easy to dismiss Occupy's complaints by saying they should get cleaned up and occupy a job. I know a lot of pretty clean middle-class white people from midwestern suburbia that can't occupy jobs, and they're are conservatives.

Here's some research showing that Americans seem almost disinterested despite moderately agreeing with the movement, and that is only where they understand the movement. Other polls shows that a majority of Americans at least agree with Occupy that there is a very large gap that's widening between the very rich and the middle class, and that this has been unhealthy. Even the Tea Party agrees with this.

Again, Occupy is a distributed protest movement, so view each Occupy protest group separately in order to understand what that particular Occupy wants. There is no singular official list of demands as there is no official organization that speaks for the whole. Admittedly, that's not always easy, but I haven't seen the press jump through hoops to make sense of Occupy whereas even CNN gave ample attention to the Tea Party. Were you at Occupy UC Davis or Occupy Seattle and were asked to explain Occupy's demands and then talked about how they wanted an end to the fossil fuel economy, you'd be completely wrong.

UD Bartol Neutron Monitor program. http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/Welcome.html

Detects high energy neutrons produced by high-speed protons colliding with the Earth's upper atmosphere. TFA is that they have figured out the specific signal for high-energy solar flares.

(Last 30 days.)

Nopee. Zinc is recovered. you need to do another chemical process to make zinc oxide. gee, i wonder how green that process is, which gives us green hydrogen?

Go read TFA, or go directly to the University of Delaware's page from which the TFA was sourced:

http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2012/apr/solar-reactor-040312.html

It CLEARLY states:

One interesting feature of the reactor is that, in theory, the zinc oxide byproduct created during the reaction will be re-usable, making the project self-sustaining.

Zink oxide in, heated to drive off its oxygen, exposed to water where it scavenges oxygen, which frees hydrogen, and you get zink oxide back. Probably nearly pure.

the "keeping healthy" phrase in connection with animal feed.

Story is that continuous small amounts of antibiotics in animal feed are causing increased growth in animals.
(told verbally by a farmer relative I know) Internet search comes up with:

Quote from: http://www.udel.edu/chem/C465/senior/fall97/feed/present.html

"Antibiotics have been used in animal feed for about 50 years ever since the discovery not only as an anti-microbial agent, but also as a growth-promoting agent and improvement in performance. Tetracyclines, penicillin, streptomycin and bactrican soon began to be common additives in feed for livestock and poultry."

and:

" In chicken feed, for example, tetracycline and penicillin show substantial improvement in egg production, feed efficiency and hatchability, but no significant effect on mortality."

And yeah, the loosing jobs argument again further down in that. Reverse the argument, do something unwise, create jobs and buy medical services stock.

Steven Levy's In the Plex has a great quote about Google's prospectus and it's aspirational language:

Meanwhile the Securities and Exchange Commission was unimpressed by the charms of Page's "Owner's Manual." "Please revise or delete the statements about providing 'a great service to the world', 'to do things that matter', 'greater positive impact on the world, don't be evil', and 'making the world a better place,'" they wrote. (Google would not revise the letter.)

Everything I've read and heard from the Google founders indicates to me that money, in many ways, is a means to an end of bigger goals. Certainly money is driving factor - Page has referenced Tesla, who died in poverty despite his great contributions to the world, as an example of what he doesn't want to see happen with Google - but there are lot of things Google wouldn't be doing if it was a purely profit motivated enterprise.

That is absolutely in line with what I see inside of the company. Making the world a better place for everyone is the goal; money is the means to that end. Not that money isn't quite nice, mind you.

I would be much more skeptical of Google once the founder's are no longer at the helm. That's when companies start to mutate in profit creation beasts that have no relation to what its founders originally set out to do (e.g. Disney).

I agree with this as well, as do lots of other Google employees. A common sort of question that comes up in the weekly company-wide Q&A sessions is "Okay, this is fine, but what if Google changes in the future and does X?". And the answer is generally of the form "But we won't do that". It's a very unsatisfactory answer. You can be assured that the founders aren't the only ones with their eyes on bigger goals than just profit, a hypothetical future Evil Google would also have to have a very different culture.

Of course, that could happen. My opinion is that we just need to make sure that Google is legally obligated to follow the terms of the privacy agreements under which they collect data. As long as they're truly limited to doing nothing with the data other than targeted advertising, it's hard to see how they could do significant harm. I also wouldn't object to some real privacy legislation to limit the risks.

Steven Levy's In the Plex has a great quote about Google's prospectus and it's aspirational language:

Meanwhile the Securities and Exchange Commission was unimpressed by the charms of Page's "Owner's Manual." "Please revise or delete the statements about providing 'a great service to the world', 'to do things that matter', 'greater positive impact on the world, don't be evil', and 'making the world a better place,'" they wrote. (Google would not revise the letter.)

Everything I've read and heard from the Google founders indicates to me that money, in many ways, is a means to an end of bigger goals. Certainly money is driving factor - Page has referenced Tesla, who died in poverty despite his great contributions to the world, as an example of what he doesn't want to see happen with Google - but there are lot of things Google wouldn't be doing if it was a purely profit motivated enterprise.

I would be much more skeptical of Google once the founder's are no longer at the helm. That's when companies start to mutate in profit creation beasts that have no relation to what its founders originally set out to do (e.g. Disney).

Dont know where you get your numbers from.

USA Today: In 2009-10, average published tuition and fees for in-state students at public flagship universities in the U.S. are $8,353, compared to $7,797 at all public doctorate-granting universities and $7,020 at all public four-year institutions:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-10-20-college-costs_N.htm

Annual in-state commuter student tuition at state schools in my area

Delaware - about 11,500. http://www.udel.edu/admissions/finance/
NJ Rutgers - $12,755. http://admissions.rutgers.edu/Costs/TuitionAndFees.aspx
NY SUNY - $14,750. http://www.suny.edu/student/paying_tuition.cfm
Pennsylvania - 15,000 - 17,500. http://tuition.psu.edu/tuitiondynamic/rates.aspx?location=up

And don't bullshit yourself. Only one company used the word "multi-touch" before Apple did...Fingerworks. And apple bought them in 2005.

Such absolute bullshit. Not to mention all of panasonic's multitouch whiteboard products.

Have you heard the term tyrosine kinase inhibitor? Well people in cancer research know it. If some major cancer cures come out based on it .. it'll be a household term. Similarly people in the human interfaces business have been using the term multi-touch. Here is an example from 1999:

http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

Your arrogant attitude and dismissive comments do nothing to advance your points. I have not revealed my religions beliefs, I am taking an anthropological approach to this problem. Unless you have a problem with science there is no reason to be such a dick.

In fact, if you take a moment to examine your own desire to berate me, you will see it is a direct result of your own evolutionary instinct to be an alpha in this herd (Slashdot). Like it or not, you are a herd animal with a strong desire for hierarchy. Most primates are. So are all domesticated animals above 100 lbs, a direct reflection our ability to hack the herd instinct for our benefit. A link to Chapter 9 from Jarrod Diamond's Gun's Germs and Steel so you can read more about this: http://www.udel.edu/anthro/roe/diamond9.pdf

As a herd animal with a strong need for hierarchy, human societies go through 4 stages of religion: animism, polytheism, monotheism, then atheism. We start worshiping the elements, then assign gods to those elements, then a certain god becomes primary, then we discard god. The Greeks did it. The Romans did it. The Hebrews are still at stage 3 though some could argue that after WWII they may have transitioned to stage 4. Europe is at stage 4, America at stage 3.

In polytheistic societies each city tends to focus around a single god. Here is a good link that shows both the animism and patron gods of Greek cities: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?120692-Ancient-Greek-City-States-Standards
You can see from the photos how an animal or element is used to symbolize a god and each city in ancient Greece had a patron god. Athens was Athena, Sparta was Lacedaemon. As each city state became part of the larger Greek world their patron gods were added to the mix in a hierarchy that reflected the city states' relative power.

Polytheism was a brilliant religious invention that allowed these cities to coexist with different patron gods (different alphas) by imagining a herd of gods in the sky. As different cultures achieved prominence the primary god changed. As Greece fell so did Zeus, as a Rome rose so did Jupiter. In other words, the polytheism of Greece and Rome was key to their success. The same things still exists in India today where each family has its own patron god. The Catholic church has patron saints (mini-gods) and the triumverate (3 gods in one).

The point I am trying to make here is that we are herd animals and we use the concept of gods to hack our evolution. It provides stability for the herd because deep down we are all animals.

To the second point about atheists. What happens if you apply a selective pressure to an evolving system? The system will respond in way that those most adapted to that pressure out compete those who do not. For the last 7000 years there has been a selective pressure on humans: religion. Those who were most able to adapt to the selective pressure of religion had access to more mates and out breed those who did not. Your genes are shaped by that evolutionary pressure. If your ancestors had a genetic pre-disposition towards blind violence or raping they were more likely to be removed from the herd.

What happens when you remove a selective pressure from an evolving system? If there is no advantage to those traits, they quickly degrade from the population. Societies that remove themselves from religion remove the selective pressures of religion. Religion is a brilliant technique to get the individual to willingly submit their own needs to the needs of society. It provides an immense benefit for society and without it societies quickly degrade.

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Seneca quotes (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

But, also, there has been a lot of research in the area of Vehicle to Grid which allows also to return to the grid, not only to your house. I'd assume it will be safer to provide only local and then think about going further and return back to the grid.

See also: http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/ipin.html

bees pollinate 90% of the world’s food crops

This is not like tinkering around with a ton of fissile material for a lawn ornament, this is breeding bees to ensure we have food. Creating a second breed of killer bees is not a nightmare scenario. There have been 11 deaths in the US due to killer bees since the 90's. Imagine we create a killer bee variety that's worse, and that number rises a thousandfold. Compare that nightmare scenario to 90% of the crops worldwide failing to be pollinated.

Which would you rather risk?

If you're that paranoid that every article about biological research makes you worry about "I am legend" scenarios or clouds of murderous insects, I don't know what you're doing typing on a computer. Skynet and the matrix people! What could possibly go wrong?!?

So, why don't you trust Google to hold your data, out of curiosity. I'm biased for various reasons, but I think it's a fair question to ask. I trust my bank to hold my data, even though I'm pretty sure they abuse it (after calling to ask about a refinance of my mortgage, for example, I got 5 cold-calls about mortgages in 2 days). I trust my ISP with my private data even though I'm pretty sure they have a direct tap for warrantless wiretapping. I trust all sorts of entities with my data who I know to be lying bastards, but I've never known Google to be such.

Everyone I know who works for them honestly believes that they try to do the right thing as often as they can. My friends who work for Yahoo! don't say that. My friends who work for Amazon don't quite say that, though they think it's better than most. My friends who work for many large corporations laugh a little or just get real quiet if you ask them that...

So the evidence that I have at my disposal says that:

1) Google's S1 filing is fairly honest (go read it... it's fascinating)

2) Google is, at worst, an altruistic company that may well change over time.

3) Given the choices that you do make to share personal data (with banks, ISPs, etc.) Google looks pretty good.

I did something a bit like that before by walking around with a laptop, pair of headphones, and a clipboard (I didn't have a GPS unit at the time, so I marked each intersection's corner-points as I passed them and used interpolation; the laptop played a musical sequence through the earphones to give me the data to mark on the clipboard). If I find the map images I made, I'll link to them... of course, I was tracking the number of networks, since that was a better number to use in a highly-network university town.
here (9/22/2004) is one of the images generated from the data; I know I had other things, but I'm not sure where the datafiles and scripts are, now.
I don't remember what the color coding on the map means, other than the green dots are probably where an open network was available. *shrug*
That particular map includes network names, and I don't remember how I recorded those without a GPS (using festival to output a number corresponding to a sequence point that I could notate on the clipboard where I tracked my location, and saving iwlist scan's output to a corresponding numbered file?)

Don't forget the layered protocols: http://www.cis.udel.edu/~mills/ipin.html

How about blue?

http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/funfacts.html

Bill Buxton isn't just some random Microsoft employee, he's one of the pioneers of the industry, and has been working with multi-touch systems since back in the early eighties.

Contrary to popular belief Apple didn't invent multi-touch

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touchin 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

Microsoft borrowing ideas from Apple again?

It's probably the other way round. Nice troll though.

I've worked with NTP for nearly 20 years now, and the leap second adjustments isn't a real problem.

The crux of the matter is that we've insisted (in both Unix and Windows) on measuring calendar events in seconds:

The proper solution is to use Julian Day Number as the basic unit for calendars and (SI) seconds for any kind of short-term measurement. If you really need second/sub-second precision for long-term (multi-day) measurements, then you have to accept that the conversion is not just a matter of multiplying/dividing by 86400.

Calendar appointments and similar things should be defined by day number and some form of fractional day, not SI seconds.

NTP is somewhat to blame though: Even though it has full support for leap second handling (both adding and subtracting), the core of the protocol pretends that UTC seconds (without leap adjustments) is sufficient, i.e. NTP timestamps are defined to be in a 64-bit fixed-point format with 32 bits counting seconds since 1900-01-01 and 32 bit for the fractional seconds, i.e. sufficient to handle a 136-year block with a quarter of a ns resolution.

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/html/ntpd.html#leap

This causes small hiccups for an hour or so after each adjustment: The primary servers and those that either have a leap-second aware source or a cluefull operator keep in sync throughout the adjustment, while the remainder will slowly detect that their local clocks seems to be a full second off. Since this is way more than the default +/- 128 ms which NTP is willing to handle with gradual adjustments, NTPD will instead step the clock (backwards for an added leap second) and restart the protocol engine, after discarding all history.

Modern versions of NTP have been rewritten to use a vote between all otherwise good servers: If a majority claim that there will be a leap second at the end of the current day, then the local deamon will believe them, and thereby stay in sync even during the actual leap second itself.

Terje

You can :-)

Kind of small at 40 kW and 150 kW, but that's a good range for a small shop or plant. Plus they can be ganged together to aggregate up to the MW range. At that level you can join the markets for a typical grid operator.

There are a lot of storage technologies being researched and it's really the most exciting next step for the smart grid. I think I've already seen people talking about pumped hydro and CAES, which are well understood technologies. The problem with most of these technologies is they require natural infrastructure (e.g. correct ground topology) and/or are very expensive/long winded to develope. There are other technologies such as ice storage, or harnessing the energy stored in hot water heaters. Very geeky, very interesting. I think the main problem we have to match is to get people to understand it's never going to be a "one size fits all" solution.

By the way - remember that with your PEV, you can aggregate a few hundred of them up to suddenly become a resource that can sell into the local ISO/RTO frequency regulation markets

The amount of Ritalin consumed in America from 1990 to 1998 almost quadrupled (link to chart). Might that have something to do with it?

Yes, that is why it detects "specially" what comes from below the horizon (or from the northern sky). However, they have some sensitivity to downgoing neutrinos (coming from above the horizon, or from the southern sky), if they arrive with an energy so high that the atmospheric muon background at those energies would be negligible. Or, being more technically correct, they use an array of cosmic ray detectors in the surface to identify if an event whose energy is above a certain threshold and coming from "above" them (from the Southern sky) is due to a cosmic ray or to a neutrino.

They will detect orders of magnitude more neutrinos from the north, but (if the flux is high enough) we can expect a few events from the south. Since their energy has to be very high, their direction can be measured very well, so you get an "image" of the southern sky. Of course, KM3NET (when built in the northern hemisphere) will do a better image of the southern sky, but we have to take what we have right now.

Bill Buxton, Multi-Touch Overview :

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:

Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf

In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way.

...

Subject: Every computer hackable by Radio Freq?
- a global conspiracy?

This lady claims to have found some strange things on her Windows PCs and Linux!

Subversionhack Archive
https://tagmeme.com/subhack/

So, with modern blackboxed hardware components, are all of our PCs hackable via radio frequency / ham packet radio type of blackbox voodoo?

Dig deep, I've found no other site like this. Are Linux/BSD varieties vulnerable?

http://www.invisiblethings.org/code.html
http://www.invisiblethings.org/papers.html

AND

This talk explores three possible methods that a hardware Trojan can use to leak secret information to the outside world: thermal, optical and radio.

In the thermal Trojan demo, we use an infrared camera to show how electronic components or exposed connector pins can be used to transmit illicit information thermally. In the optical Trojan demo, we use an optical-to-audio converter to show how a power-on LED can be used to transmit illicit information using signal frequencies undetectable by human eyes. Finally, in the radio Trojan demo, we use a radio receiver to show how an external connector can be used to transmit illicit information using AM radio transmission.

http://www.cvorg.ece.udel.edu/defcon-16/
https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-16/dc-16-speakers.html#Kiamilev

fools laugh and cry tinfoil, others read and learn and decide for themselves

http://bluepillproject.org/

http://subversionhack.livejournal.com/1815.html

"I sincerely believe that Blue Pill technology will (very soon) allow for creating 100% undetectable malware, which is not based on obscurity of the concept. And I already stressed this in the description of my talk here (http://syscan.org/program.html) and here (http://blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-06/bh-usa-06-speakers.html#Rutkowska). The working prototype I have (and which I will be demonstrating at SyScan and Black Hat) implements the most important step towards creating such malware, namely it allows to move the underlying operating system, on the fly, into a secure virtual machine."
  - http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2006/07/blue-pill-hype.html

http://rayer.ic.cz/romos/romose.htm

"The ROMOS is a stand-alone x86 code allows you to load and run your own binary code or 3rd-party code. ROMOS rely on BIOS functions only so it can be executed directly without any operating system. The main purpose of ROMOS is to be placed in a ROM, from where it can load/run other software (e.g. bootmanager, HW diagnostics, special controlling software...) during POST (Power-On Self Test) while your PC is booting up. It can also load DOS-based operating systems (may be other OSes) such as FreeDOS stored in ROM together with ROMOS. This mean that any floppy/harddisk/CD-ROM drive is not needed. It may be very useful in various embedded diskless systems. Or simply as reserve OS for rescue use. Other applications are on you."

mark this offtopic while you browse for porn to satisfy one more rub-one-off session, despite it containing more than the OP.

Let's be more clear. There's high functioning Autism and there's low functioning Autism, and the difference between the two has to do with whether they can hold their own in intellectual settings, and whether they can live independantly. High Functioning Autism and Aspies have at least average intelligence, and can frequently be geniuses or experts in their fields.

As you go into a left turn, your hand wants to keep going the direction it was going, which is actually right from your frame of reference. Meaning you have to pull left harder.

It depends on what's more intuitive at the moment of building the system. I know that for example some robots at the University of Delaware have some controls for babies to drive them. When you push forward the cart breaks, when you pull towards you, the car accelerates. This compensates so when you are breaking, the momentum won't cause you to accelerate again.