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... is: never admit failure. Just talk about what a wonderful success whatever you're being asked about has been. If the product really is a failure, keep talking about its success until the people who make the decisions get around to canceling it. After that, if you're asked about it, dismiss it as yesterday's news and change the subject to what wonderful successes your other products are.

The Mac Cube, for instance, was a major stinkburger. Did Apple ever say anything to that effect publicly? Nope. They were always bright and sunny about how well the Cube was doing, until the day they killed it. At which point inquiries about the failure of the Cube were answered with glittering stories of how well their other Macs were selling.

In other words -- what a company's spokesperson says about the success or failure of something like a DRM system is meaningless. They will always say it is a great success. The only way to learn the truth is to watch whether the company puts more effort and money behind it, or less.

if you are getting hydrogen from water you are doing it via electrolysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

where you pump electrical power into water to split the H & O.. problem is.. it isn't very efficient. best being 50-80% of electricy into potiental Hydrogen chimical potiental energy.. then you have to use a fuel cell or other method to later turn that back into electrical power - ICE's are ~50% max (~25% actual) and actual Fuel Cells are ~60% max (~45% actual) for cars

put it together and you have

1000kwh *.5-.8 = 500-800kwh

500-800kwh * .25-.5 = 125kwh-400kwh (both worst - both best) for ICE's so total 12.5%-40%

500-800kwh * .45-.6 = 225kwh-480kwh (both worst - both best) for EV Fuel Cells's so total 22.5%-48%

put that on top of the extremely low energy density of Hydrogen storage - It does not make sense to try to make Hydrogen fueled cars and power them from Hydrogen generated from water & electricity.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Energy_density.svg

Compare Hydrogen to Gas.. Gas is the target - reality just doesn't let it work.

That's a long story. They *think* they have a license, but they really don't. According to Chris Paget's slides (slide 6), they believe that they are in the clear because they think they are operating in a ham band.

FTFA:

That GSM hack is based on a demonstration that security researcher Chris Paget performed at Defcon last year, showing that with a powerful enough antenna placed close enough to target phones, the victims’ handsets can be tricked into connecting to Paget’s setup instead of the carrier’s tower. Perkins and Tassey have implemented the same tools in their airborne hacking machine, and like Paget, used a portion of the radio frequency band set aside for Ham radios to avoid violating FCC regulations.

There's supposedly an overlap in the Euro GSM 900 band and our Ham band between 902-914MHz, but this is actually incorrect (just see every other GSM frequency chart online). The Cell phone (uplink) is actually in this band, and the tower (downlink) is 45 MHz greater. It's unfortunate that this little typo is cropping up like this.

Ah, but this would be a marvelous way to gather news!

Perfect reconstruction under the Nyquist-Shannon theorem requires the summation of scaled and shifted sinc functions, or the application of ideal Dirac impulses to an ideal low pass filter. Needless say, actual DACs don't work that way. The Wikipedia article on the zero-order hold function suggests attenuation of 3.9224 dB at half the sample frequency.

IICV (652597) I had a look at that graph you linked to on Wikipedia. Couldn't help but notice this about it : "This is a retouched picture, which means that it has been digitally altered from its original version. Modifications: Generated as svg. The original can be viewed here: Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png. Modifications made by Autopilot." So i had a look at the original graph at : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png , which has a downturn at the end of its 5-year average line in red, whereas the retouched SVG version now being used has an upturn. Curious. Just sayin' is all.

"The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth's atmosphere is approximately 391 ppm (parts per million) by volume as of 2011.." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmosphere So does that mean that CO2 is .03% of our atmosphere (That is clost to 4 one-hundredths of one percent.)? While I agree that we should not be dumping crap into the atmosphere I still don't see how "doubling" this particular gas over the medium o long term should have any real noticeable effect on our climate.

Federal tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is about the same now as it was in 1950: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg

It should be noted that in 1951 they responded to this by increasing tax rates. Also, that 35% rate only applies to income earned above $373k, so if you make $500k (after deductions), the 35% rate would only apple to $500-373k of your income ($127k). Your overall tax rate would be much lower than 35% in that case on your taxable income, and even lower when compared to your total income.

Plenoptic camera

So long as it does not substitute for fair use, I suppose I don't have any complaints, though I might differ as to the numbers involved, the types of works it's applicable to, etc. It generally doesn't seem too useful to me, though. Academic quotations might fall under this, but I don't think a good commercial review would.

(Incidentally, for a typical 3 minute song, you'd really only get 18 seconds, which is very low indeed)

Not sure why you are dismissive of sampling. While it really ought to be a fair use -- sampling is the audio form of collage, after all, and that is well protected -- the poor treatment of sampling in the courts really does warrant a strong exception for it.

Within these terms, I don't see any real room for usage to be unfair

You dealt with amount, but you forgot about
substantiality.

No wonder for they use the rare-earth superstrong magnets in there. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rare-earth_magnet#Common_applications

Since the democrats are the ones that borrowed well over half the money that the federal government owes, its not a very far stretch to blame them for the money we owe, or the mess we are in.

The score over the past 30 years is $7.9 trillion borrowed when the Democrats controlled both House and Senate, and another $3.6 trillion when control was split between Republicans and Democrats, with only $1.7 trillion borrowed when Republicans controlled both House and Senate.

Yes. That is exactly how unbalanced things have been, yet amazingly its those evil Republicans that are "known" to be the most irresponsible. More was borrowed in the first 2 years of Pelosi (House Speaker, Democrat) and Reid (Senate Majority Leader, Democrat) than the Republicans ever borrowed in the entire history of the country.

STOP LISTENING TO WHAT THEY SAY - The Democrats constantly tell us how bad the Republicans are...
START WATCHING WHAT THEY DO - The data is available. Dont listen to what they say. Take a look at what they actually do.

One graph is enough to get you to question things, but you have to take some of the steps yourself (don't listen to what I say either.. the data is available.. you don't need to trust anyones claims)

Bored of the Rings, I thought this parody is well-known enough so even the misleading "Hobbits" instead of "Boggies" is sufficient. I was wrong.

True, "exponential" is not the real problem. The problem is the rate. While computing power is the ultimate limit, right now the network growth is driven by increasing interest and adoption, and to a lesser degree, the ability of AMD to ship 6990s. The processing growth has averaged about 1000% yearly for the last year and a half. The actual inflation would be a bit less since it'd be diluted into the pool of coins from the last couple years, but you're still looking at 800% or so. That will continue as long as the BTC's reach is growing.

Yes and no. People holding a currency long-term is bad for everyone; savings are better off kept in stocks or assets. And it's not like the current mining-payout algorithm has kept the price stable.

I agree with both points. I'm not opposed to inflation; just hyperinflation.

People probably sold them for what they cost them to make, so that's not surprising. But to say that someone's watt two years ago is worth thousands of times what my watt is now doesn't add up.

Again, you have to compare the value of the asset at the time of acquisition, not the value gains since acquisition. Is it fair that someone's penny stock from two years ago is worth thousands of times what you can afford to buy in the no-longer-penny-stock today?

Someone who gets a penny stock buys it from someone else, on an open market.

And someone who held onto the BTC a year ago chose not to sell it to someone else, on an open market. As such, they effectively paid the fair market value in opportunity cost, IE, by choosing to not have those few dollars in their pocket, the same as you chose to keep a few dollars in your pocket rather than buy some bitcoins.

The early adopters of bitcoin are far more analogous to the issuers of a new currency - they've created a bunch of tokens and declared they're worth something. And back when private banks issued their own currencies, customers would insist that those banks held proportionate reserves of hard assets that they could claim from if need be. That's what's missing from bitcoins.

Mmmm, you're conflating two things there. One is the issuance of the currency, and the other is the backing of the currency.

When private banks issued currency, they weren't giving it away for free. It was in exchange for some other asset (gold being typical). And a little secret for you: even in antiquity, gold backed currency was not backed 1:1. But that's a whole 'nother subject. :)

The early adopters didn't spontaneously create 3M BTC, divide it among themselves, and then begin trading. It was always available to everyone to mine and/or buy. They just got there early. You could have been there too; so could I; we weren't.

Now, that said, I agree that to a degree, the early adopters were able to unfairly capitalize on their knowledge of the currency before it was widely publicized. The question is how much that is, and whether it's worth undermining the faith in the currency by using inflation to revoke a significant percentage of their wealth.

If you buy in now and two years from now it's trading at USD$1000, should your share be inflated down to compensate?

Paypal do have rivals.
It is called https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hawala

the idea of there being specialized areas of the brain is coming into disrepute,

No. There clearly are areas of specialized cortex, the visual cortex being one. That doesn't mean that other parts of the brain aren't involved in visual processing (for example). The trivial example of this is the homunculus. If you damage a particular area in the motor or sensory cortex, you will see the effects of that damage in very specific regions of the body.

Size of a particular region isn't necessarily correlated with the level or degree of function and lots of other things happen in various regions of the brain.[Long complex discussion on how the brain works. Lots of handwaving.]

I'm not sure where you picked up that concept, but it's not correct, unless I'm not understanding what you meant to say.

Wrong

lol, quite the distorted picture that paints. This pretty much means that all the war expenses and low tax benefits under Obama's watch are actually Bush's expense? There's a huge difference between a gigantic one-time giveaway (stimulus-esque handouts) and continued expenses that can be stopped at pretty much any time. If the Dems wanted to, they could have ended the Bush tax cuts at the start of Obama's presidency. They had the votes. Yet they did not...and yet you claim it's still Bush's expense? Moreover, claiming Afghanistan is Bush's expense is fairly ridiculous as well -- that exact war would have happened under _any_ president. Iraq, on the other hand, is totally Bush's war. Also regarding the Bush tax cuts, where does the 1.8 trillion number come from? All breakouts I see put the total far closer to 1.3 trillion (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/revisiting-the-cost-of-the-bush-tax-cuts/2011/05/09/AFxTFtbG_blog.html) And it's absolutely hilarious that they're claiming only a ~150 billion dollar expense from Obama's healthcare plan. All the "projected savings" from this plan are entirely fictional, yet are somehow being used to factor into discounting the program (entirely ignoring the actual cost of the program) And worst of everything, you're trying to compare 8 years of presidency (and expense) against 2.5 years. Even with the distorted facts, Bush is .63375 trillion per year and Obama at .576 trillion per year, far closer than the picture this tripe tries to paint.

At any rate, next time pick a less slanted source for your claims of expenditure. Like this one: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms#Federal_spending.2C_federal_debt.2C_and_GDP You'll note that federal spending with bush started at 2.011 trillion in 2002, steadily increasing by ~150 billion a year to a final total of 3.1 trillion in 2009. Then you'll notice a MASSIVE spike of nearly 900 billion dollars taking us to just short of 4 trillion in federal spending in 2010. In one year. Even if you completely disregard the 200 billion spike in unemployment costs from 2009 to 2010, that's a 700 billion jump in a single year. No president in history has spent that much. And his term isn't even over yet. Nor do we know what the final cost of his healthcare plan will be.

As for the whole "ride in the back" thing, you'd probably do that too if the people you had to deal with had a habit of comparing you to Hitler and Marx.

Like they did for Bush for 8 years? "Bush is the devil/Bush is Hitler" was very common if I recall correctly. By your logic, every president should be entirely one-sided and uncompromising because the other side continually derides and berates them. Oh wait, I think that's exactly the government we have now.

It's retarded to call him anything but a centrist.

He isn't a centrist. Centrists don't jack minimum wage or try to jack taxes on the rich, or push healthcare "reform" that is more concerned with giving everyone health insurance than is it actually lowering healthcare costs. Dems love to claim he's a centrist, because it gives them a perfect scapegoat to absolve themselves of the guilt of putting him into office. But it doesn't make it true.

He's continued a lot of Bush policies.

Continuing existing legislation does not make you a centrist. Passing new legislation that is somewhere in the middle would do that.

Quite frankly I've heard nothing constructive from either side of the abortion debate, they just want to drive the wedge deeper to fire up their respective bases. It seems to me at times that politicians on both sides would most profit if the abortion rate went up.

Skylab

Vs.

ISS

In other news: Apples != Oranges

Skylab

Vs.

ISS

In other news: Apples != Oranges

You can use a planet's gravity to alter the motion of a craft relative to the sun, but not relative to the planet itself - it still needs to come in at a speed greater than the planet's escape velocity. The Wikipedia article has a decent explanation, actually, if you're interested.

Practicalities aside, nice as it would be to see it drift off into the sunset, I rather like the idea that I might be able to find a hunk of the ISS while diving one day, however slim the chances are of it actually happening.

...plus have a look at this picture. Don't they just look like little Darth Vaders? So who owns the copyright to the Darth Vader likeness?

I like the behavior of KDE most of the time, but there is a irritating tendency to waste huge swaths of pixels. See: Dolphin_FileManager.png

From the Wikipedia article:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotics and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers.

That describes my reaction to watching politicians.

For geeks whose culture don't go beyond warp drives and Homer Simpson the title is an allusion to a popular 1960's musical.

While the article specifically calls out remote voting as a possibility for not having the privacy, look at the list of examples. All require actual polling places to affect and disenfranchise a number of voters. Doing that on the same scale with vote by mail is considerably more difficult and you're likely to get reported/caught.

Yes, single cases can still occur, so perhaps I was too strong with my initial statement. Large scale voter intimidation is eliminated.

I can imagine some countries would rather do all the snooping behind peoples back.

Like all the western nations - google ECHELON

Not all western countries do it (only) behind people's back ...
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention

Who chooses when the polls are open? Who chooses the polling places?

Uhhh... this guy. And it's fishy as hell that he happened to have been a huge Bush fundraiser in Ohio as well as a dyed-in-the-wool partisan Republican. I won't say he's a crook, I have no idea. You have to admit, though, it all smells pretty bad.

I'm talking about private debt, not the federal debt.

An introduction to how this works:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Money_multiplier

I think everybody has their own quasi-religious convictions about "how this works" - my personal spin is that private wealth outweighs government wealth by a large factor (on the order of 10:1), and whether intentionally, or by their whim, private money decides the fate of the economy the rest of us live in far more dramatically than the Fed or any other governmental controls.

I always felt that .com bubble #1 was a dramatic example of what happens when the rich get excited about something - the Dubai construction boom is probably another good example. Of course, at some point, the euphoria wears off and the conservative rich pull back in a power-play, giving those who pulled back first a leg-up in the next round.

I also feel that life is too short to worry much about how all that "really works" and what I might personally do about it, there's enough smoke, mirrors, indirection, and personal caprice built into the power structure that you might as well just identify how the gross contours of the current economic landscape affect your life and go with it. By the time you've completed a root cause analysis, you will have expended a lot of resources that could have better been used enjoying your life and/or improving the life of your children.

I'm talking about private debt, not the federal debt.

An introduction to how this works:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Money_multiplier

Technically interesting and probably feasible, but a non-trivial project to take on.

The UK public might have temporarily turned against the Murdoch right now and NewsCorp has suffered a setback with its BSkyB takeover, but they aren't even close to being seriously wounded.

Closing one Sunday paper (ie News of the World), merely makes room for the expansion of The Sun to Sunday see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Sun_(newspaper)#Speculation_of_a_Sunday_edition. Both sides of politics are in the pocket of the Murdochs. Likewise the police.

I predict the Murdochs and NewsCorp will apologise profusely, a few politicians will take very public swings to prove their independence, and in a year's time, everything will be back to normal.

I think as your grow beyond 40, it is better to shift your career towards https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sales_engineering

CDs are also lossy.
There is a reason why people download the last Metallica album as rip from Guitar Hero instead of buying the CD or downloading a CD rip: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Death_Magnetic#Criticism_regarding_production

Because "spic" is not specific.

It's a racial slur for hispanic people. Apparently derived from spig, which was a racial slur for Mexicans. Meanwhile, Wikipedia says 'Use of the word is often perceived as extremely offensive if used by a person not of Latino descent in any context.' Substitute black for Latino in that and you've got a sentence that would apply equally well to the word that you did censor.

I have heard everyone from Italians to Spaniards to Brazilians to Mexicans, Aztecs to Campesinos, referred to as "spics".

And nigger is just as imprecise - it's been used to refer to black people of any country, including Australian aboriginals, Americans, and people from any of the countries in Africa.

Rather than being a racial or ethnic reference, it seems to refer to anyone who has a spicy diet and is not from Southeast Asia.

Nope. Both are racial slurs, but somehow you feel the need to censor one but not the other. I wonder if you'd have censored cracker or kike.

And why do you assume that I censored any specific word.

Well, you said he used a different n-word, but that apart from that it was an actual quote. Maybe there are other n-words that you'd feel unable to type. If you're worried about offending people by quoting some racist idiot, I suggest that you consult this helpful list of things that you'll want to censor in the future.

Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.

Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.

Instant runoff voting is so strange that moving a candidate higher on your ranked ballot can actually make him lose, whereas if you had kept him lower when you voted, he would have won. It could also neglect to choose the candidate that would win a hypothetical top-two runoff against every other candidate. Give me actual runoffs any day, or for ranked ballots, the method Wikimedia itself uses.

Google staffers need to read this: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

The assumptions Google+ makes about "real names" don't even apply for that many people in Mountain View, California, let alone the full range of people in the global Internet culture. Just for one example, it's common for Javanese people to have just one name, not a first and last name, as in the case of an important figure in modern Indonesian history, Sukarno. That's his entire name.

He only gets to sign or veto bills written by other people.

Since his election, President Obama has enacted no fewer than 91 executive orders.

Hey, you guys ever wonder why "westlake is such an MSFT shill? It's because he is an MSFT shill.

Presumably, there should have been some kind of safety system in place to deal with a relatively common natural phenomenon...

That's for sure. The Japanese have done well with a much more complex safety issue, rapidly shutting down their high speed trains upon notice from their Earthquake Early Warning system.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japan)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Safety_record

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/earthquake-derail-japan-high-speed-trains.php

Your article talks about methylated bases - the basic DNA base pairs that have been modified AFTER replication. And you are correct, non of the sequencing methods (AFAIK) can determine the extent of methylation or demethylation of a given base. This is likely to be rather important although the mechanism and the level of importance has yet to be determined.

Just copy the downloaded Lion to a thumb drive and install it on all the corporate computers. If anything, it's easier than windows.

Hate to burst your bubble, but in the Windows world you can deploy pre-configured operating systems to bare metal from a central server on your LAN. See: Windows Deployment Services.

...all countries of Western Europe, with the support of NATO, the CIA, and MI6, had set up stay-behind armies as precaution against a potential Soviet invasion. While the safety networks and the integrity of the majority of the secret soldiers should not be criticized in hindsight after the collapse of the Soviet Union, very disturbing questions do arise with respect to reported links to terrorism.

There exist large differences among the European countries, and each case must be analyzed individually in further detail. As of now, the evidence suggests the secret armies in the seven countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, focused exclusively on their stay-behind function and were not linked to terrorism. However, links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed in the nine countries, Italy, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden, demanding further investigation."

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Irrelevant points. These occur decades later.

I understand that you are trying to ridicule my implication of causation by making frivolous correlations.

But the US Federal Income Tax is ratified in 1913, the same year as the creation of the US Federal Reserve Bank. They are corrolary actions.

Now, slink back to Jekyll Island.

"If it were to be exposed that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress."
-- Frank A. Vanderlip, Banker, 1935

Who cares, 108 is even better, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/108_(number)#Religion_and_the_arts :)

You can only perjure yourself if you "knowingly" make a false statement under oath

Not so. The State is quite capable of convicting you of perjury if you make the mistake of truthfully answering a question asked, instead of truthfully answering the question that they meant to ask https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bronston_v._United_States#United_States_v._DeZarn

If a sample does not match the suspect, then it can generally be shown that the sample did NOT originate from the suspect

It has recently be proven false in some cases, see human chimerism.

The GP is referring to the Physical (or "strong") Church–Turing thesis which says that all physical processes (including, say, any computation done by the human brain) are Turing-computable. I do not know if Turing or Church actually suggested that version or if only later computer scientists came up with it. It cannot actually be proven without a much better understanding of physics, but it is generally believed to be true.