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Yes exactly. Here and here, Flight Director Wayne Hale describes the efforts of NASA's TopMgmt to halt further analysis, refuse any help from the DOD, insist that nothing could be done, and squelch any chance of rescue.

"Following your analogy, it does matter who you send. Because if the person who shows up is told "you're not my boss" and then has no real power to enforce that they are in fact the boss then who you send is a big deal."

It's only an analogy, but if we're really following it: I can give authority to negotiate contracts on my behalf to anyone I want.

According to the Supreme Court itself, the 16th Amendment actually gives no new taxation powers to the Federal government. So that argument doesn't fly. (Of course, this is just another example of the Supreme Court contradicting itself, which is another reason it was never given authority to be the "ultimate arbiter" of constitutionality.)

But as for "the reality" of the situation, again as the Supreme Court itself has ruled: the longevity of unconstitutional rule or situation does not make it any less unconstitutional. It could be 1000 years and it would still be wrong.

Elaine Huguenin did not want to take pictures at a same sex marriage because she did not believe in it. Vanessa Wilcock found another photographer, but decided to file a lawsuit, and won her case, and Elane Photography was ordered to pay $6637. Who is acting like the $%##? What about respect for others beliefs? Does that only apply to non-Christians now? Stupid cases like this is why Arizona feels the need to make bills like this.

http://winteryknight.wordpress...

Still, discretionary federal spending in general is falling even faster than defense spending.

At root, this is the Boomer Apocalypse everybody has been talking about for the last 40 years, and they never bothered to take care of.

It's akin to a lot of decisions these days "we need better hardware" instead of fixing/optimizing our software.

There have been several corrections made in this department, but so far it's just not enough.

Jim Gettys has been leading this charge since 2012. You can find a lot of good information on his blog:

http://gettys.wordpress.com/20...

And there are a multitude of videos on the topic as well.

While running fiber everywhere with proper hardware support would be "fast", fixing the bufferbloat problem would be a gigantic leap forward (and not just for the US).

The majority of Venzuelans voted for the government they have today. They stood idly while Chavez rewrote the constitution "for the common people". Now they get to enjoy the benefits.

Well, sure. But then, we can assume that Venezuelan democracy isn't so different from our own. Most likely they voted for it not because it was wonderful, but because it was the least bad choice on the ballot. Just because you get to vote, doesn't necessarily mean you get to vote for what you want.

Product page says "BoomerangIt Packs and Subscriptions are no longer available for purchase." I can't find anything written about it in the last seven years, except this: http://boomerangit.wordpress.c...

Even its offshoot the National Bike Registry seems a it moribund.

No, I said that religion is closest thing people have to hive minds. And I do not talk about muslims in particular - any strong reglion/cult is like that.
And no, I would not be a jihadi. I was raised in Catholic country, been indoctrinated from early age and when I was teenager I said 'it is bullshit' and never went back. I could be now picketing under abortion clinics, but I'm not. Because I made a choice. And if you are suggesting that I would not be able to make that concious decision if I would be born into fanatic muslim family... then you would be only proving hivemind theory.

http://sullydish.files.wordpre...
People are trampling each other to death each year there. Please tell me it doesn't look like hive to you... Same can be probably said about things like Woodstock even - but religions are a LOT better at this stuff.

79% of the AMS study participants self-identify as non-publishers of climate papers. link. That bears about the same weight as a slashdot poll on the subject. I rest my case.

You actually wouldn't see anything, as the spectrum of water swamps most of the IR spectrum. Hydrogen bonding is funny.

Yes, in some wavelength bands all you see is the water. In others the CO2 dominates. (It also somewhat depends on whether you're lookig up from sea level in the tropics, or from temperate zones).

But, overall, if you take the spectrum (especially across the CO2 band at around 15 microns), yes, you can clearly see the downwelling IR from CO2 emission.

I could show a dozen plots for you, but here's a nice one with the big CO2 emission labelled:
http://klimakatastrophe.files....

True "3D" climate modeling is still out of the reach...

Good, my model is still relevant then.

You're looking for a prediction of something that didn't happen?
"Zero warming" is utterly wrong. What could be said is that there was no "statistically significant" increase in surface temperatures where there are adequate measuring stations ie not the poles.

And even that isn't really true - https://tamino.wordpress.com/2...

Is there an impact on Linux, is the development being influenced by US Department of Defense and NSA?

Conspiratorial view on Linux security:

Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:

"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)

This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. IOW, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military - they have first say in its development. And the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.

Next, a reader posted this FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report. Well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end), to me this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!

If the data to support AGW is so overwhelming there would be no need to cook the books.

BTW, we are experiencing the Third Coldest Winter On Record So Far In The US

Talk about cooking the books. The contiguous US only covers about 2% of the Earth's surface so at best it has 2% to do with global temperatures.

If the data to support AGW is so overwhelming there would be no need to cook the books.

BTW, we are experiencing the Third Coldest Winter On Record So Far In The US

You do realize that with a colder planet, the weather tends to follow long nice circles around the latitudes, with some (but minimal) mixing. In planets that are too warm, the jet streams destabilize, wandering all over the place. Ever wonder why the polar ice caps are melting while we are having a record cold spell? It's because that cold air we feel should be rebuilding the polar ice caps, stupid.

If the data to support AGW is so overwhelming there would be no need to cook the books.

BTW, we are experiencing the Third Coldest Winter On Record So Far In The US

• If the present refuse to get warmer the past must become cooler
• Hiding the decline
• Just hit the NOAA motherlode
• USHCN V2 TOBS Adjustment Is Double What It Is Documented

• If the present refuse to get warmer the past must become cooler
• Hiding the decline
• Just hit the NOAA motherlode
• USHCN V2 TOBS Adjustment Is Double What It Is Documented

• If the present refuse to get warmer the past must become cooler
• Hiding the decline
• Just hit the NOAA motherlode
• USHCN V2 TOBS Adjustment Is Double What It Is Documented

• If the present refuse to get warmer the past must become cooler
• Hiding the decline
• Just hit the NOAA motherlode
• USHCN V2 TOBS Adjustment Is Double What It Is Documented

There are floods in Somerset, England? Funny; Somerset was bogland 1200 years ago, too.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

But they built dikes and drainage pumps. Which works fine, as long as you do routine maintenance on the pump system. Which they stopped doing....

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com...

So perhaps some flooding in Somerset isn't all THAT unexpected?

One more argument against democracy.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.

It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?

I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.

There's an interesting analysis from copyright lawyer Innocenzo Genna that suggests this may not be such good news for the Internet as it seems at first glance.

The copyright-controlled activity that was under discussion was "communicating a copyright work to the public". The court decided that hyperlinking was communicating the work to the public, but ruled that it was still permitted by way of exception, because the work has already been communicated to the same public. According to Genna, this still brings hyperlinking within the sphere of copyright law, which is dangerous for the future. It would have been much better if the court had decided that linking is not "communicating the work", but just pointing to somewhere else where the work is communicated; this would have left much less scope for more restrictive rulings in other hyperlinking cases.

What those quote are saying is that if the Swedish courts say he can be extradited, the Government can say he can't be.

However, that decision still has to be made legally; i.e. in accordance with the law. So the Government couldn't (I hope) refuse an extradition because it was one of their ministers and they liked him. They would need a reasonable ground (or whatever their legal equivalent is - I don't know much about Swedish extradition procedures, but I do about English ones). While I disagree with this article's conclusions, it has some stuff pointing out how the Government would have specific grounds for refusing an extradition request... but to me it seems perfectly reasonable for them not to give hypothetical guarantees - particularly if those guarantees are enshrined in law anyway (such as not extraditing people for political crimes, or in cases of discrimination and persecution). If they get an extradition request, they can dismiss it immediately if it is manifestly unfounded under one of these grounds (or any other ground) but until they receive a request, they can't know if that's the case.

Overhead lines are easier and cheaper to string up but can be taken out by vehicle crashes, trees (the main enemy of overheads) and ice. Plus they don't look as nice.

Raised in the country, I always found the poles and overhead lines reassuring and with a kind of rhythm to them.

Rose City Road

The problem is that the guy in that video apparently hasn't read the actual treaty. Nor, it seems, have the people who wrote this page on Justice4Assange which has the video embedded and even quotes the relevant passage of the treaty.

VI. If the extradition request is granted in the case of a person who is being prosecuted or is serving a sentence in the territory of the requested State for a different offense, the requested State may:

b) temporarily surrender the person sought to the requesting State for the purpose of prosecution. The person so surrendered shall be kept in custody while in the requesting State and shall be returned to the requested State after the conclusion of the proceedings against that person in accordance with conditions to be determined by mutual agreement of the Contracting States. [emphasis added]

Yes, there is a temporary surrender provision, but it only applies if the extradition has already been approved, i.e. if the Swedish (and English, and European) courts have approved it.

so were smiling each time one is sold :} or to that effect.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Archive for July 27th, 2011
The Microsoft/Android war: Which patents are at stake?

"You may already know Microsoft has forced five Android vendors to pay royalties each time they ship a device, and is suing Motorola and Barnes & Noble in cases that claim Android steals Microsoft intellectual property."

http://ineedinfonow.wordpress....
Describes nine patents Motorola allegedly infringes upon.
"Given that a deep-pocketed vendor like HTC already settled with Microsoft and is paying Redmond each time it sells an Android phone, it would seem Microsoft's lawyers can be quite convincing."

Googles' putting up it's own satellites and Microsoft is scrambling for a bit of the Android action, my how times have changed.
Microsoft invested in it's future through patents, being one of the larger patent trolls is an action befitting Microsoft.

I think that "us" evolved out of the ecosystem that was in-place roughly 50,000 to 5,000 years ago, and "us" would be best served by keeping that ecosystem more or less in-tact. I don't seem to have a lot of people who agree with me, but I'm trying:

http://5050by2150.wordpress.co...

In order to preserve their cherished notions about the "origin of mankind", creationists screw up pretty much everything about science. That's the "issue" you're not seeing.

Good luck testing the theory of evolution. Part of the problem is that, barring Elvish researchers entering the arena, we've got precious few observers qualified to attest to evolution of divergent species. Fruit flies shifting to one end of the bell curve is nothing like Darwinian evolution, it's more like breeding shorter Daschunds.

By your definition of "testable predictions" Darwinian evolution, Creationism and Intelligent Design would all seem to be in the same category of pseudo-science.

I just love the highly informative content of the message. What does "reasonable solar" mean? Take a look at page 16 of this document. Notice that in September 2011 the array generated 97,178 KWh while in January 2011 it generated 20,083 KWh. According to this the average Minnesotan electricity customer uses on average 802 kilowatt hours a month,. Taking the January low as the minimum the Minneapolis Convention Center could power 25 houses. That array has a 600KW capacity. To power one house with those numbers would require an array with a 24KW capacity. Approximately 10 Watts are produced per square foot of solar array which means that 2400 square feet of solar array would be needed to power the average house in Minnesota in January. I would not consider 2400 square feet of solar panel to be "reasonable".

http://nocachyblog.wordpress.c...

"You may have heard recently that news sharing/ranking website Digg had to lay off a third of its staff after a relaunch of its site flopped."

You know what? I'll take the new beta site when they stop

double spacing

all the lines

of text

in a little column

on the left

to make room for a giant column that has one ad at the top and is otherwise empty all the way down the entire comment section. I mean fuck, if they want to be all web 9.2 or whatever the version we're supposed to be on, they should have their "promoted" comments on top in their little colored boxes with their ads and shit on the side (just like the old fogey screen) then give us a working nested comment section that doesn't max out at 2 comments on the screen. Case in point: I went to http://science-beta.slashdot.o... and control-f'd your name and found this very comment. On the old fogey screen, your comment (including the quote) takes 11 lines (including the paragraph break after "now..." On the beta with the same screen size, your post takes 29 lines, not counting the fact that line spacing is set to about 1.5 or so. The first line of your post is

Yeah. Shows how out of touch the people in

That's all that fits. For the lulz, I hit reply over there and the reply box has a huge amount of padding on the inside. The first line of this comment before it wraps is

You know what? I'll take the new

This doesn't look like the new web, it looks like a 150 year old newspaper from back when editors said "fuck everything we're doing SEVEN columns of newsprint!" and a tiny font and that was progress.

Also, give us back abbreviated view, so nesting works right even if there's a -1 comment in the chain without mycleanpc taking up 50 goddamn screens each. I also feel sorry for the people who aren't in the first 20 or so posters because nobody's going to sit there mashing "more" over and over.

...can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them.

Don't wait, do it now. Download calibre and some plugin tools, and deDRM is just a drag'n'drop operation. There is no need to use it to manage your books if you don't want to, you can just use it as a "storage shed" for your uncrippled books.

Actually, I bypass the middleman and decrypt directly.

I know I'm the odd one out, but I never could get excited about Calibre. I have other tools, and they may not be drag-drop-drool simple, but they're easy enough and allow me to do just about anything I want to any format I want.

Incidentally, I just read that Adobe has dropped the "drop dead" deadline, although they're still pushing the new DRM scheme for the long term.

...can be decrypted if the provider goes belly-up or does an Amazon-style "1984" on them.

Don't wait, do it now. Download calibre and some plugin tools, and deDRM is just a drag'n'drop operation. There is no need to use it to manage your books if you don't want to, you can just use it as a "storage shed" for your uncrippled books.

Indeed. Democracy is broken.

Much has been made of the contributions of women in the open-source community. There have been notable contributions to documentation, wiki formatting, graphic design, community organization, translation, enthusiasm and bureaucracy.

yeah, that didn't work out too well...

Calibre is a god send piece of open source software. I don't really use it for stripping DRM, most documents I read don't have any DRM. But for converting between formats especially when the default formatting is crap for ebooks - fuck yes this is the shit.

Main website and for the sourceforge page in case you're are too lazy to Google search it yourself. Apparently this guy is hosting DeDRM the DRM stripping tool. I've never had to use it.

This thing runs on Josephson Junctions, how exactly does that not meet requirement (2)?

(And sorry, but I stopped going down the list at this point.)

That's an implementation detail. My laptop uses semiconductors, but that doesn't make quantum phenomena fundamental to its operation. I could replace my CPU with a marble track and it would not affect its computational class. Can D-Wave's device be replaced by a purely classical implementation? AFAIK the jury's still out.

This thing runs on Josephson Junctions, how exactly does that not meet requirement (2)?

(And sorry, but I stopped going down the list at this point.)

At this point having secured patents D-Wave does not hide their architecture.

For whatever reason, probably because they started out secretive, this meme simply doesn't go away. But it is completely false at this point.

Erm. The architecture of the D-wave core chip is sufficiently well known. . What is not know is if quantum effects are playing a role in the functioning. It is designed to encourage and at least allow quantum effects based on the Ising model. The question is of course, does the quantum magic actually occur?, and if it does, does it help?.

Or was that IC thing supposed to be funny?

Spiegal Online apparently did a full release of images from each of the two document leaks--far more complete than the Wikipedia pages.

Scroll down for the images and "straight from the horse's mouth" descriptions of capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Example---"NIGHTSTAND: Portable system that wirelessly installs Microsoft Windows exploits from a distance of up to eight miles" (I have a feeling it's been updated for Win7/8 by now)

http://leaksource.files.wordpr...

And....the guys developing and putting to use these capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Make sure to check out the links at the bottom of that last page.

Spiegal Online apparently did a full release of images from each of the two document leaks--far more complete than the Wikipedia pages.

Scroll down for the images and "straight from the horse's mouth" descriptions of capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Example---"NIGHTSTAND: Portable system that wirelessly installs Microsoft Windows exploits from a distance of up to eight miles" (I have a feeling it's been updated for Win7/8 by now)

http://leaksource.files.wordpr...

And....the guys developing and putting to use these capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Make sure to check out the links at the bottom of that last page.

Spiegal Online apparently did a full release of images from each of the two document leaks--far more complete than the Wikipedia pages.

Scroll down for the images and "straight from the horse's mouth" descriptions of capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Example---"NIGHTSTAND: Portable system that wirelessly installs Microsoft Windows exploits from a distance of up to eight miles" (I have a feeling it's been updated for Win7/8 by now)

http://leaksource.files.wordpr...

And....the guys developing and putting to use these capabilities.

http://leaksource.wordpress.co...

Make sure to check out the links at the bottom of that last page.

Total US non-govt public debt

Quarterly changes in US public debt

But I'm not saying that deleveraging by the public isn't good, I'm just saying that you have to have economic policies that understand the effect and protect the economy from the negatives. Just as you need to understand the effects of the original leveraging, and the effects of that; which people didn't.

Total US non-govt public debt

Quarterly changes in US public debt

But I'm not saying that deleveraging by the public isn't good, I'm just saying that you have to have economic policies that understand the effect and protect the economy from the negatives. Just as you need to understand the effects of the original leveraging, and the effects of that; which people didn't.

There was a time, before we all lost our minds to Pong, Asteroids and Zelda (yes, I go way back) where we also spent time taking our world apart and figuring out how to make it better.

Oona rocks! She should be rewarded somehow.

BTW - the end of the article finally explains how a megahertz signal found its way onto the audio track.

Too bad it's not completely original.

Back in the 80s, Star Trek IV was released. In it, a 3 second burst is heard that sounded a lot like HF packet. After much effort (this was the 80's, 90's, remember), and much filtering and adjustments (the noise was captured for effects purposes and processed), it was actually decoded as a real HF packet signal (ham radio). It required a Cray-2 to help with signal processing.