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When I read "cracker-sized", I thought of petroleum crackers and was very impressed by the sudden audacity.

Oooops, first step to the Matrioska Brain! https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

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

Thanks for playing.

No, the key to your position, which is why you'll dismiss as trivial any part that disagrees, such as the fact that neither a computer system or a car can be reduced to pure math.

Sure, you can't drive math but you can implement it as software on a computer system, so your analogy is broken.

Yes, that's the basic idea. That's the legislature's job in writing the law. Judges aren't supposed to disregard laws because someone believes they're not beneficial. The judge simply cannot decide that a new, useful, and nonobvious piece of software that's tied to machine is unpatentable, even if they believe that all patents are harmful to society. If they want to do that, they can step down and run for congress.

A judge interprets the law and judges by it. If you're defining ultimate truth as the law of the state you might make a good lawyer but not a very good philosopher.

No, I'm defining the law of the state as the law of the state, by which the judge is bound. Although here, we're talking federal law. Nonetheless, a judge doesn't get to play a philosopher king and disregard the law in the pursuit of some unrelated policy argument.

I have not suggested this. I was criticizing your position that "patents are beneficial to society" because "no judge has ever bought that argument". I'm sure you can understand that "what's beneficial to society and not" and "the interpretation of law" is two unrelated subjects.

I'd recommend arguments which are not ad populum fallacies if you want to have an interesting discussion.

I'd recommend not confusing a question of the burden of proof in making the extraordinary claim that patents stifle innovation as an argumentum ad populum, if you want to have an interesting discussion. I can claim that I'm immortal, and it's not a logical fallacy for you to question that claim with a high degree of skepticism based on the fact that no one in history has ever been immortal.

I have presented some arguments on the issue. You can also read more criticism of patents here if you're interested. It's hardly a claim as extraordinary as "being immortal". Also you don't understand correctly why "ad populum" is a fallacy. The example you gave is not an "ad populum" argument... in that example the people are data points and you correctly come to the conclusion that since none of the countless data points is immortal, It's unlikley that anyone would be. However had the argument been "most people (in history) don't believe immortality is possible" or "it's an established fact in society that immortality is impossible" it would have fit in that category of fallacious arguments.

Should I refer to you as Dunning or Kruger?

I doubt that Windows is "insecure by design".

Microsoft barely tried to harden their OS until xp sp 2-3, and security is still far from their main priority (usability and being backwards compatible are, IMHO). Compare its track record with OpenBSD, which IS secure by design, and you'll see the difference even if you take popularity etc into account.

As fast as people work to build secure software systems there are those who work just as hard to break them and breaking something is always easier than building something.

Default deny

DEP is fully available in 32-bit Win7.

One thing to remember, though, is that you have to enable it, otherwise it will only apply to stock OS apps and services. This is the default because quite a few older apps don't work with DEP enabled due to the way they're written

If I remember correctly, on Win7 x64, it will also apply to any 64-bit app (under the assumption that any such app would be new enough that developer was aware of DEP and how to work with it). However, 32-bit apps running there would still not be protected by default.

In Win2008 server, all apps have DEP enabled by default, 32-bit or not.

Um....

Richard Stallman

Osama bin Laden

They really don't look that much alike.... I mean, sure, they both have beards, but....

> would the CIA cop to it if it was theirs?

I got the impression from Obama's talk that it was spec ops troops, which I took to be formal soldiers from a highly trained special unit rather than CIA. Could be https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Special_Activities_Division of the CIA, could be someone else.

CIA might cop to it if they did it, but that is a political decision. When the U2s flew over the USSR, the pilots resigned from the air force and signed up to be CIA so that we were on better international law footing--we weren't sending troops into a foreign nation in violation of its sovereignty under international law, but instead were sending spies.

Such a system already exists. It was developed by an irish company called Orbiscom which was recently bought-out by Mastercard.
It's got different names - disposable credit cards, one-time use credit cards, Controlled Payment Numbers, etc. Bank of America call's theirs ShopSafe, Citibank calls theirs Virtual Account Numbers. I believe PayPal and Discover have their programs too -- all based on Orbiscom's technology.

It works pretty much exactly the way you described - you log into your account, generate a new CC# with a maximum limit and expiration date that you specify. Then the first merchant account that posts a charge to the number becomes the only merchant account that post any more charges to that number. So even if the number does get stolen, it isn't any good to the thieves. Other than those limitations, for all intents and purposes, it is just a regular credit card. Most merchants can't even tell the difference.

I've been using ShopSafe for well over a decade now and have never had a fraudulent charge. The only problems I've had have been when the merchant is sloppy and double-charges with the intent of cancelling the first charge - Parts-express.com is the only merchant that I know which does that for all of their transactions and fixing it was simple enough - I just double the max limit on the CC#.

One I use for important recurring services and the other I use for every-day purchases and on-line commerce. That way if a fraudulent charge occurs on the second card I can just close it out without having to call people up on the phone to move the recurring charges (which is a hassle).

Always a good plan. However, may I suggest a layer of indirection? Controlled Payment Numbers, such as Bank of America's ShopSafe, provide a way to generate "throwaway" credit card numbers linked to your primary cc account on their backend (much like a pointer). As a bonus, they have a user-selectable fixed credit limit (or fixed monthly recurring limit), and each one can only be used for additional charges at the original merchant that charged that number.

The biggest win was when my primary cc account was changed due to a massive data breach at an "undisclosed third party". I had setup all my recurring charges to use individual ShopSafe numbers. They updated the "pointers" on the backend and even though I got a new cc number, all the recurring charges to the ShopSafe numbers kept going through without a hitch. No hassle.

I laugh at the specter of data breaches and attempted fraud. Have fun charging that stolen card number given that it was already exhausted because I set the spending limit == my transaction's value, and wouldn't work if you attempted to use it anywhere else but the original merchant anyway. This prevents sneaky merchant upcharges, too.

Unicorns

Exist.

magical beans

Thanks to the sufficiently advanced technology of the past few decades, the uses to which soybeans have been put do seem almost magical.

talking dogs

Exist.

The best way to build a guided bullet, methinks, is to build an unpowered projectile with with microscopic steering surfaces on the exterior

Excuse me, but what are you talking about? It's unpowered... but has the power to move steering surfaces? Also, what would these surfaces look like if they aren't fins?

with a very simple built in circuit that does nothing more than correcting to stay inside a laser guidance beam that's painting the target.

Have you taken physics? Bullets follow a ballistic trajectory. If you are suggesting that the unpowered bullet somehow selectively deform its exterior so it forms an airfoil of one type or another, please recall that any active point on the exterior will have to have to deform/relax at 311 KHz in order to create a stable form as presented to the fixed frame of reference. Also note that this approach would likely defeat the whole point of rifling in the first place, which is gyroscopic stabilization. Said stabilization is also going to fight against any steering attempts (cf. angular momentum).

(because light speed limitation becomes non-trivial at the time frames considered)

Uh, okay... no, that's not a concern. Let's say the bullet is aimed at a target 100 m away. That's 333 nanoseconds away by light speed. Ignoring the fact that bullets slow down from drag, even at the terminal distance, there is time for 303,150 messages to be sent. The larger problem would be processing & reacting to this in your unpowered bullet, not to mention the materials science.

While designing all these modifications to the bullet's interior and exterior, don't forget that the round has to have adequate penetrating power and terminal ballistics. If it's an antimateriel round, then it needs to have a large, dense, pointed solid mass coaxially located in the center of the bullet. If it's antipersonnel, then it can & should fragment upon tumbling and create an adequately-sized wound channel (as measured via both temporary and permanent characteristics). In either case, the round should have adequate penetrating power so that it doesn't disintegrate upon striking something like auto glass. So, whatever you pack into the round can't deleteriously affect these characteristics or the whole exercise becomes pointless.

Perhaps we can make the bullet slower -- provided we can correct for gravity, we can sacrifice speed in favor of accuracy.

That's already been taken to its logic & feasible conclusion.

In summary, I think the whole idea is untenable. That was the point of my post above.

So somehow you are linking the alleged mishandling of priorities at the FBI with that kook David Koresh burning down his own building rather than be demoted from his status as self professed mesiah? And then you are blaming it all on Reno?

I wish there were a way to mark you -1 "Kook". Have fun at the Creation Museum. Do I hear Dueling Banjos?

GP gave the wrong reason why Reno's largely responsible, but yes: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Janet_Reno#State_Attorney
Read from there through the Country Walk section.

The article says 80% improvement ... so, if solar voltaic cells are 20% efficient, then 80% more brings that up to 36% efficient. That's a big deal, provided it doesn't cost 80% more, but it isn't 80% efficient. There are already solar cells with about 30% efficiency, but nobody buys them because they cost 100x more.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency

In chemistry, a chemical substance is a form of matter that has constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. It can not be separated into components by physical separation methods, i.e. without breaking chemical bonds.

The way I look at this is Canonical/Ubuntu/Unity versus Gnome 3 and the companies and distributions which are issuing Gnome 3 desktops. The best methodology I can come up with to find marketplace penetration is web server logs for major websites. On that basis, Ubuntu currently has more than 13 desktops out there for every 1 of its closest competitor - Fedora. The SuSE's have less then Fedora, Debian less than he SuSE's and so forth.

The result of Canonical's shift is that the majority of non-mobile Linux desktop users were using Gnome 2, and will now be using Unity. They're still using Gnome nuts and bolts though. I am most familiar with the document displayer that both Gnome 3 and Unity use - evince, and the library it uses to render PDFs, poppler. Ubuntu has provided dozens of useful bug reports to these projects, as the large base of users has exposed bugs that people had just not encountered (or reported) before.

I have played with Natty (with Unity) and Gnome 3, and will probably wind up with my main OS on my multi-boot system being Natty running Unity, with a special user on Natty running Gnome 3 compiled from jhbuild (compiled off the latest git commits). A lot of changes on Unity I find less than thrilling such as close window moving to the left side of the window toolbar, and the rest of the window tool bars moving to the top of the screen. For both Unity and Gnome 3, I am unhappy that switching workspaces has gone from a mouse move and a click, to a whole rigmarole of mouse moves and clicks. There's a reason many of these things were the way they were for the last 20 years, or more. I have the command lines and shortcuts to fix some of these things - like shifting left back to right on Unity tool bars - but still.

"It's the main reason I will work for FooCo until it goes bankrupt".

Or "It's the main reason I will work for FooCo until I get a better offer (from say, Google!).

Most people swing back and forth between these two alternatives while the world continues to turn underneath their feet. It's a phenomenon known as FooCo's Pendulum.

(... explanation here for the humour-impaired.)

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, invested in Keyhole, which Google acquired and renamed Google Earth. All of this is well-documented.

If something truly fishy was going on, it wouldn't be this well-known.

So this is based on self assessment? Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect ? It basically says that incompetent people tend to over-rate their own abilities and vice versa (particularly true for North Americans, it's not so pronouced in Europe and even less so in Asia.). This actually gives me hope that at least some of the agents are aware of the immensity of what they are up against. If they rated themselves as being 100% up to the task then I'd truly worry.

Chernobyl is another excellent example, along with Union Carbide's leak and many other corporate disasters.

Is this possibly a thing humans do, as individuals and in various organized groups?

Sure, this does (roughly) generalize to the psychology individuals, families, and groups; as well as corporations. We're all familiar with dirty family secrets and the elephant in the room which no one talks about. The big difference being, of course, the scale of effects when dealing with environmental or economic damage--which, unlike families (unless they're Koch brothers-sized), large or multinational corporations profit from while the public pays the risks of.

No need, they've got all the cash they need, and no debt to hinder their development...

In 2008 an unauthorized version of Graffiti was introduced for iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices. An Android version was released in 2010 by ACCESS CO., LTD. of Japan, which acquired the rights to Graffiti when it acquired PalmSource, Inc. in 2005.

Source

Truecrypt volumes do work in Dropbox because it uses a block cipher(only changed blocks are synced, not the whole volume), ...

Either you forgot a part of that sentence, or you really need to read up on what a block cipher is and what a mode of operation is.

Yes - By all means, compare the treatment of a a U.S. Citizen who was placed on a list of people to be assassinated without trial or public review of evidence with a member of the Nazi's who, had he not killed himself, would have been placed on trial in full public view under the auspices of the Trial of the Major War Criminals.

Four of whom, because of civilized things like Standard of Evidence, Defense Attorneys, impartial judges, were acquitted.

Yes - certainly comparing assassinating a citizen based on secret evidence regardless of venue with a genuine war criminal that was to cowardly to stand trial at what would become the most highly documented trial in history is sure to make your point.

Pug

No.

Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, is open source, for example, as well as Webkit, Apple's browser layout engine used in most browsers today, including Google Chrome and Android. And Grand Central Dispatch. And FaceTime. I could go on.

I won't say that this argument proves much about Apple's attitude towards openness. Webkit is based on KHTML which is LGPL and authorship not residing with Apple, so they absolutely had to open it up to satisfy the license.

The Darwin kernel is based on other free software work (mostly BSD?), BTW. No, the BSD license might not force Apple to open-source it, but it doesn't hurt so much, open-sourcing code that's freely available anyways.

Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, is open source, for example, as well as Webkit, Apple's browser layout engine used in most browsers today, including Google Chrome and Android. And Grand Central Dispatch. And FaceTime. I could go on.

I won't say that this argument proves much about Apple's attitude towards openness. Webkit is based on KHTML which is LGPL and authorship not residing with Apple, so they absolutely had to open it up to satisfy the license.

The Darwin kernel is based on other free software work (mostly BSD?), BTW. No, the BSD license might not force Apple to open-source it, but it doesn't hurt so much, open-sourcing code that's freely available anyways.

I dunno, there's some bad stuff that goes down there. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c9/Doom-boxart.jpg

Why do we assume that IQ follows a Gaussian distribution?

That is not an assumption, it's a part of the definition of the term IQ. Read more here:

Almost sounds like, aptly enough, Quarantine by Greg Egan. Though I could have sworn there was another novel with a similar premise. (Herbert, perhaps?)

Interferometry is the short answer. The long answer is, no, it wouldn't be insurmountable to pick up Casey Kasem 50ly away with a good array.

I don't quite understand the long answer; can you give me the short answer, please?

Interferometry is the short answer. The long answer is, no, it wouldn't be insurmountable to pick up Casey Kasem 50ly away with a good array.

But I wonder if it wasn't too concentrated to make it a world class device, even if it did get built out to the full compliment.

Can't you do just as much with fewer dishes by organizing them into a very long baseline array?

> Maybe this troll and/or its lawyer can get disbarred by a Federal judge

I don't like copyright trolls.

But the idea of having an actual troll who has passed the bar...

is kind of awesome.

Maybe it's this one.

Actually, that's not necessarily illegal everywhere. In particular, it seems to be perfectly illegal in the land of the allegedly free.

zzz...1997...

What does the age of the technique have to do with anything? Hell, wheels were invented and used thousands of years ago and they're still in use even today.

zzz...256 colors...zzzzzzz....

Limitations in color representation again doesn't really say anything negative. Those GIFs look just great, and it tells about the skills of those who created them that you cannot spot any definite miscolourings in any of those images.

Please. Wake me up when we've invented animated PNGs.

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

I know is not quite the same as making GIF completely redundant but animated SVGs using raster graphics (PNG, JPEG (2000) and WebP) can now supposedly be done. Just not in IE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation
Though in the case of PNG they will have to resist purely vectorising it.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Soccer_ball_animated.svg

Fuck you! You should have been reading Heinlein in the 50s. Get off my lawn!

Their not involving people as much as they could goes beyond the foreign media and bloggers not being let into press conferences.

"Japan nuclear commission fails to send experts to Fukushima

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan has failed to send designated experts to Fukushima Prefecture to look into the crisis at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant even though a national disaster-preparedness plan requires it to do so, many of the experts said Saturday.

A commission spokesperson said problems following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami such as blackouts had discouraged it from sending any experts to Fukushima Prefecture, but many of the specialists and government officials questioned the claim.

The commission designates 40 nuclear accident experts including university professors and senior officials of relevant institutions as well as five others as members of its panel on emergency technical advice.

The disaster plan requires the commission to dispatch members of the panel to a location near an accident site.
(follow link for the whole story)

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110417p2g00m0dm009000c.html

They're looking into "the flow of retiring ministry officials to senior positions at the country's electric companies"

It seems like Japan isn't the only country that needs to prevent regulators from later taking jobs with the companies they were supposed to be tough with. They shouldn't be allowed to be paid lobbyists either.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20110419p2a00m0na012000c.html

To a great extent democracies depend on the media to put corporations and government in the spotlight for the public good. Reporters shouldn't be going to work for those they are reporting on.

But KSBY the NBC affiliate in San Luis Obispo county in California, home of the Diablo Canyon 2-unit power plant, has over the years had several of the newscasters hired by the utility P.G.& E. as PR people (including the one currently seen). KSBY is the only full power English speaking station in the county. Their reporting is very brief and lacks technical depth. They don't seem to do things like research NRC reports, mostly going . Although run by the same utility company, when the NTSB was starting hearings about the San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, all it got was a 20 second mention (Charlie Sheen got over 3 minutes the same day).
No details of the streamed hearings or mention anything from the related documents documents (on the NTSB site) was broadcast. They say the plants says it can handle a tsunami, but didn't mention that three of the plants radiation monitors were taken out by "heavy rain". There is talk about more earthquake studies, but no mention of a local tsunami in 1812. Nice people at the station, but should they be allowed to work for things like the power plant? Are they doing all that's needed in "Americas' Happiest City"? (in fairness, smaller market t.v. has a lot of other competition for a slice of a fairly small pie. No doubt resources are limited. They let a well liked newscaster go to cut costs.)

"On December 21, 1812, one of the largest earthquakes in California history completely destroyed the first Mission along with most of Santa Barbara. With an estimated magnitude of 7.2, and a hypothesized epicenter near Santa Cruz Island, the quake also produced a tsunami which carried water all the way to modern-day Anapamu Street, and carried a ship a half-mile up Refugio Canyon."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/History_of_Santa_Barbara,_California
LA Times article on tsunami (pdf)
http://www.usc.edu/

This post totally confused me, I instinctively thought of Bourbon biscuits....:
    * https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bourbon_biscuit

Yum!

There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.

Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.

There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.

Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.

I want my Gundam...

Massachusetts.

The only Chrome build on my system is Iron:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SRWare_Iron

Like Chrome but without the call home/tracking info.

This. Been rocking SRWare Iron on Mac OS and Windows VM's for some time.

It would be a fail to think they would store anything needed on such servers, other than os. The servers are probably linked to a harddrive farm by network or fiber-channel.

Wrong. Google stores its data all over the place, including on each individual server. They designed their own networked filesystem for the purpose. If they really didn't store data locally, they'd almost certainly PXE boot and avoid drives on each server altogether. I suspect the video just used some dated footage (from a training or other internal video perhaps?), as this article clearly shows SATA drives. Every server has two drives, and since no one node is critical for anything they also wouldn't bother with RAID1 for an OS boot drive as you suggest.

The only Chrome build on my system is Iron:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SRWare_Iron

Like Chrome but without the call home/tracking info.

There is no such thing as nuclear waste, everything that comes out of a used fuel rod is extremely useful, rare and precious and very expensive.

If it is really so useful in practice, why is so much in "temporary" storage after years and years with the amounts stored growing ever larger? Why have the U.S., Japan and many other countries "re-racked" their fuel ponds to make room for more at spacing closer than what the original designs required for safety?

As of November 2010, Fukushima Daiichi had 1760 TONS of spent fuel in storage, using 84% of capacity. (That's taking re-racking into account)

The linked .pdf report gives some idea what a big deal it is to deal with the fuel stored in Japan.

http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/6-1_powerpoint.pdf

Yes, they're done some recycling too. It wasn't many years ago that they had a criticality accident at such a facility. Even after bone marrow transplantation and experiment stem cell therapy, they still had workers die. And a number of non-employees living nearby got above normal exposure.

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

And when I said waste, I didn't just mean spent fuel. There are other contaminated materials to deal with. Flying insects that got into things left behind from the old Hanford Washington facility were so radioactive that 210 TONS of material later contaminated by the bugs at a regular landfill had to be hauled off as radioactive waste.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/1998/10/22/tec_242588.shtml

Radiation is still turning up from things that happened 40 years ago. Beware if cooking rabbit stew....

http://www.king5.com/news/environment/Radioactive-rabbit-trapped-at-Hanford-106761238.html

If there's technology to make ALL of that waste safe and useful, I haven't heard about it. Breeder reactors do turn some into more fuel (or weapons). While that may be a significant source for fuel, I haven't seen any citations showing a percentage and/or tonnage of total radioactive waste that actually gets recycled in that way. Citations please.

> What I don't understand is why RIM would launch a tablet or any
> mobile device without a calendar, contacts, or an email client.

Maybe they hired a bunch of ex-Palm people...