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Dude if you're taking 45min to make a coffee you need to get your technique together and you're missing out on a lot of good music which will never make it onto vinyl, BUT as far as not eating vomit-flavoured chocolate ... Well duh!

Your irony fails because you mistakenly assume that Hershey's is just normal everyday chocolate. In point of fact chocolate made form deliberately spoiled milk is way out there and practically inedible by anyone not exposed to it from early childhood.

An Australian, for example, would never suffer from your blinding cultural chauvinism by failing to understand why non-Australians find it really difficult to eat so infamous and "everyday" food as Vegemite on toast. Instead they make fun of the weak foreigners who choke on the stuff ... which is probably how you should approach those weak non-Americans who prefer chocolate that doesn't taste like puke.

You mean, "until you've spent five days without sleep, picking at your flesh until it bleeds,

You've obviously got a pretty gigantic axe to grind so I doubt anything so banal as logic will move you but how about when you catch your breath consider a couple of things. First of all, just to slay the unmentioned elephant in the room, the shit you see on "faces of meth" is the exception to the exception of meth users. It's propaganda plain and simple. The vast majority of even hardcore addicts wouldn't even be capable of the kind of transformations portrayed. It's argument from anecdote at its worst. But, hey, if it keeps the kids off dope, right so the lies must be a good thing, right? Personally, I'd be much more apt to pay attention to statistically significant information or even, heaven forbid, empirical data reproducible by a competent practitioner and able to base predictions on.

and thinking that you coded something coherent, which you only notice after the dope wears off is nothing but an incoherent 50 page scribble about everything from soap to the cockroaches that live under your skin.

I don't know if you're projecting or if you are just that hard up for some bullshit to throw at the conversation but you sound like one of those raving evangelical lunatics dishing out substanceless talking points when actual debate and facts are too much trouble for your tiny little mind to bother with.

As someone who has spent his entire life in the (now former, thank gawd) meth capital of the US, I can say this with confidence

Your collection of anecdotes do not constitute data, dumbass and you can't say a damn thing with "confidence" based off said collection. You are a clueless moron who thinks you know something until your socially acquired opinions get confronted by expert knowledge at which point you fold like a house of cards. You know nothing but have fun waving your dickbeaters over your keyboard as fast as you can, dumbass.

If there were, the Nazi's would have won WWII.

You idiot, that statement doesn't even make sense. Read some history, dufus. There wasn't enough methamphetamine on the face of the earth to win the war for Germany so they would have lost either way and it had nothing to do with how much dope they were on. Furthermore, get your facts straight as meth was used by both the Axis and the Allied forces. How clueless can you be that you can't even get your own bullshit right?

you filthy fucking dopehead

A filthy dopehead from which you just got manifestly served. Now go bitch about that you consummate prick. HAhahahahahahahahahaha

A lot of rural phone companies have gotten government subsidies to build out broadband service. It may not be available in the boonies yet, but the nearby villages have it. The goal is to get broadband to everyone eventually (government's version of ASAP), so we can get rid of the old, expensive behemoth of the telephone network. Paying to run room size computer/electronic systems to route calls for 1000 people seems a little foolish in 2012, when the possible traffic would fit on a 100Mbit duplex ethernet. You can also run VoIP using 3G broadband, where available. I've never tried on anything slower, but 2.5G well exceeds the 8kbps (each direction) that VoIP can be compressed to, as does good dial-up.

Fixed line broadband penetration map from end of 2010: http://virulentwordofmouse.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/broadband-us-map2.jpg

A look at the twitter feed of the submitter and his associated web site--"Farlight Elite Hackers Legacy"--does not give the impression of responsible disclosure. But this is the same guy who released the 2010 “Apache Killer”; calling attention to problems with exploit code is this guy's method. I'd rather see that than no disclosure at all. He does appear to be a professional penetration tester at work, who does things like speak at conferences on his methods too.

And very successfully so, too. With more than 8 million copies monthly, it is the third-largest magazine in the United States.

In the olden days, when the dollar coins were a dollar worth of silver, you would make change by snapping or cutting the coin in half. In fact, I believe there were score marks on some coins to facilitate that. The half coins could be snapped into quarters, and the quarters into pie shaped bits. A quarter was literally a quarter of a dollar. Whole dollar coins are the "Pieces of Eight" of pirate lore, because they are a piece made of eight.

Here's the geekiest solution for that.

Whoa now, you're not one of those people that thinks we need to bring back manufacturing are you?
Because it never left.

That's right, robots, computers, and better manufacturing processes have automated away the manufacturing jobs. And that's a good thing. We may not be able to have a society without people, but we can certainly have a manufacturing industry with a lot less people then we did before.

So if you talk about "bringing jobs back", you're going to have to look somewhere other than manufacturing. (Same goes for bean counters and secretaries. We have computers now. While there will ALWAYS be some paper-pushers, not every company needs a mail department, and not every boss needs a secretary.)

My argument for these kind of questions (Why are the surroundings exactly right for life?) is always:

If they weren't exactly how they are now, there would be nobody to ask this question.

The universe itself is like a huge laboratory. There are an uncountable number of suns and an uncountable number of planets surrounding them.

The way I grasped just how huge the universe is was when I looked at this image made by the Hubble telescope closely. Remember our galaxy, the Milky Way? The star closest to our solar system is so far away that we couldn't reach it in our lifetime. When looking at an image of our galaxy, our sun is just lost in the huge sea of stars anyways. Now look at that picture Hubble shot. How many galaxies can you count? Every single galaxy of these is about the same size as ours (for human proportions anyways). They are just hanging around there randomly, and those are just the ones we can see with our current technology.

Every single planet in all of the galaxies has unique properties that might or might not be suitable for life. For the tiny number of planets of these that are suitable for life (which probably is still an uncountable number), there is a tiny tiny chance that life will actually happen. For those where life actually happens, on only a tiny tiny amount of them a species develops that is sophisticated enough to actually ask these questions. However, since there is such a large pool of potential planets, this is still a viable number (just how large this number is, is still under discussion in science).

For me personally, alien life is a fact (based on my knowledge of statistics). The only question is whether we can actually communicate with any of them, due to the huge distances.

http://en.wordpress.com/cities/. Its as easy to use as anything out there. There are more ways to extend it (without writing code) than anything else out there.

1. 1. The design was critiqued by committee...move this picture here; have links this colour; can we have this scrolling etc. Indeed I was asked by separate members of the committee to do contradictory things!
2. 2. The content became my responsibility: I was handed paper photos; old documents and asked to get them online. The few things I was emailed were in Word documents and when I tidied them up I was challenged about why my fonts had been lost
3. 3. Whenever someone saw something on another website, they wanted it on ours: picture scrollers, Flash animations, user accounts, personalisation, weather forecasts you name it!

Since, in a gig like this, you can never enforce your own conditions (like saying you won't amend the design on every whim) you have to let the tools enforce this for you.

If I was ever to try this again I would opt for an easily user-editable, hosted solution. Wordpress will be ideal: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/wordpress-for-cities/ You can cast your role as advising them on how to run it: information architecture; doing the limited number of graphics and showing people how to use the editor. Your role is not to continually re-design (just customise the template), nor to populate the whole thing. You'll also not have to put up with a 2am phone call from the Mayor to say your site is flagged as having malware and is littered with anti-city comments. Wordpress will deal with that for you.

I have used Drupal (and CiviCRM) for other sites and they are phenomenal tools...I just think for a 6,000 grouping they are overkill. And remember if the city wants personalisation, user accounts, billing, consultations etc. online then they really should be paying for someone to develop it for them (perhaps using those tools).

Hosted Wordpress will also help you see whether they are ready to run their own online affairs.

WordPress recently started a service specifically for municipalities: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/wordpress-for-cities/ Even with their paid upgrades, you would probably be saving money on development and you are paying for hosting or (bandwidth/power) anyway.

They do, even the definition of what is bloatware changes from windows to linux.

The irony is that there is no convincing evidence that the global climate is actually warming.- Fred Singer

"The atmospheric temperature record between 1978 and 2000 (both from satellites and, independently, from radiosondes) doesn't show a warming. Neither does the ocean." - Fred Singer

Yeah Fred Singer isn't a skeptic he's a denier and one of the worst ones at that.

The attempt to portray him as some sort of reasonable doubter is a PR move, initiated by himself, and nothing more.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/singer-criticises-deniers.html

He's been so dramatically wrong on so many issues where the evidence was incontrovertible and always in the favor of the industry that was paying him, it's hard to conclude that he's a just liar for hire. He's been called out for stating falsehoods so frequently, displayed so little remorse or contrition when caught and about things of such great consequence - the life and death of millions of people- that it's hard not to conclude that he's a textbook sociopath.

http://www.desmogblog.com/s-fred-singer

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer

The list of scientific facts that Fred Singer has denied over the years doesn't paint a pretty picture. He's denied CFCs were responsible for the hole in the ozone, something he termed the "ozone scare".

He's denied that second hand smoke causes the spectrum of diseases second hand smoke does indeed cause.

He's denied that acid rain was a problem or what caused by industry emissions.

He's denied human caused climate change.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2008/01/20/202297/unstoppable-disinformation-every-15-minutes-from-fred-singer/

http://climateinsight.wordpress.com/editorial/merchant-of-doubt-s-fred-singer/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer

and so on ad naseum...

1) The US starts the clock one a breath is made by the child. Other European countries use weight, length, and some other factors to determine when life starts. With the US saving so many premature and all of them counting when they die from being so premature it lowers the US numbers. Also death counting is different, US counts all people who die on its soil for other countries they don't count non-citizens.

I see this over and over from those defending the US position. It's just not true for (at least) the western world. If you prefer, use your own CIA's normalised statistics for "life expectancy at birth": (ie: all these are accounted for in the same way, mainly because there's no point in having statistics in the same database that aren't comparable)

USA: 78.49 years
UK: 80.17 years
Germany: 80.19 years
France: 81.46 years

I have experience with the UK's system and with the US system. I would take the UK system in a heartbeat. If you want a *much* more nuanced and in-depth overview from a US-born writer, I suggest you look here. Spoiler: She comes to the same conclusion; there is a lot to be had from a healthcare system that is ubiquitous and free at the point of need, not to mention that it's not tied to any employer, and that there is no such thing as "recission" (a true evil if ever there was one) and there's no such thing as a "pre-existing condition".

We all get sick or injured. Leaving the decision over whether you'll get treatment to a company that now regards you as a drain on profits is not a good idea. Where I come from, healthcare is a right. The idea that someone would not receive treatment because they're too poor, or that they have to choose which finger to have sewn back on because they can't afford both is repulsive to me. Seriously and utterly horrifying.

Simon.

They're designed to operate on controlled, private networks.

WRONG. Their designed WITHOUT security whatsoever. Period. http://twittech.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/industrial-automtion-news/

The LAN is getting better, but SCADA itself is hardly being looked at. I wrote about this myself in April: http://twittech.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/industrial-automtion-news/. It doesn't help when SCADA providers are the culprits.

Islam and islamic countries won't take over the world by conventional means. How it will happen is the same way it happened to Rome. At the moment there is a creeping process of islamicisation, under the guise of "niceness", "political correctness", "promotion of community cohesion" and other nice-sounding but basically appeasement terms.

Take a look at Britain. They are further along this path than the US. In Britain school cafeterias only sell halal meat. In Britain sharia courts operate in parallel to the normal courts. In Britain protesters take to the streets and openly chant death to Britain. If we switch countries there was a man beaten by muslims in Australia for drinking beer (beer is a core part of being australian, far more so than most countries). In France we have muslim zones of cities that even the police dare not enter. In the US we have universities (that should be bastions of Free Speech) change their rules so that people cannot shake hands, because muslims said they would be offended. In the United Nations it is becoming a crime to make statements that offend religion (meaning, you can't criticize Islam for the inhuman and barbaric death cult it is) - which is a loss of Free Speech (as Free Speech includes the right to offend, otherwise there is no Free Speech). Then we have mainstream new media afraid to report true events because of the violence that would be perpetrated against them by jihadis. Then we have the United Nations denounce Israel for human rights violations when it is defends its sovereign territory against violent jihadis trying to commit genocide and remove all unbelievers from the region - meanwhile the UN does nothing against the war criminals who deliberately target civilians (as as I write, have new rockets being shipped from Banda Abbas in Iran because satellites have already picked the rocket loading into the ship and it leaving port bound for Sudan, where they are smuggled to Gaza).

So, our laws and customs are slowly being islamicised by the 'political correct'. There is no need for the jihadis to physically conquer the US, because islamic law will already be in place before they get there. And very very few people are even awake to what is happening. Those that are warning of the danger are often silenced, read this article for some facts (although the article itself is hyperbole): http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/obama-admin-pentagon-islam-expert-fired-for-telling-the-truth-about-islamist-infiltration-in-white-house-and-caliphate-plan/

The words you want to look at in Google is: "Caliphate" and "Salafism". The troubles in the world become less random once you are aware of these :)

Not quite as useful as Amazon, but WordPress accepts Bitcoin. That's probably the closest to a household name that accepts it. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/

Tell you what, I'll see your armchair "science"/layperson opinion and raise you commentary from an actual psychologist:
Narcissism: A Fad Diagnosis that Lacks Scientific (Empirical) Support

...oh, and what do we have here?
Online and Other Distance Diagnosis of Mental Illnesses

Go online on any given day and it is easy to find laypeople and worse, even licensed mental health professionals who should know better attempting to run to the media and proclaim that some celebrity or even some ordinary person who did something they did not like, has a mental illness.

You are deluded if you believe you are competent to diagnose personality disorders via posts in an online forum. Licensed professionals—those who deserve the "gravitas" you extol—do not engage in online/distance diagnosis, especially from a single data point. You, on the other hand, rush in where experts fear to tread.

Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? You may find this to be an enlightening read:
When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Classic Dunning-Kruger Effect

Tell you what, I'll see your armchair "science"/layperson opinion and raise you commentary from an actual psychologist:
Narcissism: A Fad Diagnosis that Lacks Scientific (Empirical) Support

...oh, and what do we have here?
Online and Other Distance Diagnosis of Mental Illnesses

Go online on any given day and it is easy to find laypeople and worse, even licensed mental health professionals who should know better attempting to run to the media and proclaim that some celebrity or even some ordinary person who did something they did not like, has a mental illness.

You are deluded if you believe you are competent to diagnose personality disorders via posts in an online forum. Licensed professionals—those who deserve the "gravitas" you extol—do not engage in online/distance diagnosis, especially from a single data point. You, on the other hand, rush in where experts fear to tread.

Have you ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? You may find this to be an enlightening read:
When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Classic Dunning-Kruger Effect

The last comment at the bottom of the article is a post by one of the project team, linking to a FAQ written in response to the comments.

http://hydroice.wordpress.com/

No maybe about it. *OF COURSE* they know Latin letters, to read embossed lettering on signs where no one's bothered with Braille.

I never saw Braille until coming to the US. Now, I see it in elevators, select train station support beams indicating the station's name, and some entrances to buildings. It's magical enough seeing blind people move about freely crossing streets, and navigating their way around a city. Consider that the danger of edges in train platforms is exponentially higher to them, as well as the more mundane uncertainty on what TRAIN they are boarding, as well as the exact number of stops they must count before getting out --to a station where they don't normally ask for confirmation from a sighted passer-by.

Seeing how that seems fairly advanced, I wondered how it is that the blind are expected to know EXACTLY where those Braille plaques are supposed to be. I'm sure with smartphone GPS apps similar to talking clocks, they are living in a better world. Maybe civilization will move away from those randomly placed tags* and using RFID so that the same smartphones can alert them.

* Braille in public signs, ironically, is not much larger than 1/4 inch. Even with latin characters, at that font size, we ourselves would need to come real close to read the message. Speaking of complexity, it's interesting to just find out that there's Braille in Japan, and it looks simpler than their Kanji. Hilarious that they care enough to put a "Sake" label atop aluminum cans so they won't fall into the wrong hands.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible
https://sueliz1.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/catholic-church-no-longer-swears-by-truth-of-the-bible/

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran should also be amended accordingly.

That way each one individually get to spend their current share without overloading the planet.

Thing is, increased consumption and population growth are inversely correlated . There's something about living in a modern industrialized society which makes people want to have fewer kids. Nearly all industrialized countries have close to zero population growth, with a few actually shrinking in population (Japan is the biggest one). The countries with the highest population growth are the undeveloped poor nations - agricultural with people living on subsistence diets.

So if you want to slow down the world's population growth, simply encourage industrialization of undeveloped countries. And the way to do that is more cheap energy, not less. The idyllic vision of everyone living on their own plot of land, working their own fields, and growing their own crops to eat results in the high population growth its proponents think the lifestyle will prevent.

Actually while the media (and Janet Napolitano) like to make terrorism look like a right wing thing that was a bomb just waiting for a match in spite of no evidence to support that, the majority of terrorism is committed by mexican drug cartels and left wing groups, such as animal liberation and earth liberation movements.

http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/janet-napolitano-right-wing-extremists-pose-national-security-threats/

(Interestingly enough, there was a rise of blogs trying to exonerate her a few months back because some nutter shot up a bunch of Sikh's, though beyond that, there's nothing of note.)

So there is no particular reason that a "left" policy cannot be democratic and successful.

The reason had been discovered, and it's not a secret. To build a socialist society you need a socialist man. Without that a handful of hardcore socialists will be toiling day and night to feed the less-than-socialist men. That was one of main reasons of decline of USSR, and the same is the reason for decline of the society in the USA. I don't know about Denmark, but thousands of successful entrepreneurs ran from Sweden in 1970's because Swedish socialism was powered by their money.

In the end it's all about economy. Your society has to produce enough additional product to feed for two years those who do not work. In the USA those two years translate into "forever" because no politician dares to leave the crowds of inner cities hungry. Not only the society has to produce that additional product; it has to produce it easily, under reasonable taxation levels - not under the Pomperipossa taxes. The USA is teetering on the brink already, with taxes being so high and so numerous that a small business owner would do better by boarding it all up and applying for social security. You have to earn money hand over fist if you want to live even at a poverty level. I partly own a small business, and it is not too rare that we cannot pay salaries to ourselves.

There is a national healthcare system available to anyone without payment, good public transit,

USSR had all that and more. That is not enough to keep people happy. Good healthcare is infinitely expensive. The society cannot spend $1M per day to keep an old man marginally alive. However if that old man has a billion dollars in his personal account... why not - he is welcome to it. Most of the money will be spent on labor, so it stays in the economy.

The most important fact here is that people are different, and they are differently productive. Socialism sweeps those differences under the rug; if you work well you will get $x of healthcare; and if you work poorly you still get $x of healthcare. Implement this equality in enough places (apartments, vacations, bonuses and salaries) and you destroy the will to work. I remember when I came to work and my coworker asked me why I did that; well, I had an interesting code to write, honestly - but the coworker said that he is not going to do a thing, and nobody can do anything about it. And he did. A few years later the Soviet economy crashed for good.

Mountains of books are written by very wise men of all centuries about advantages of teaching a man to fish vs. giving him the fish. And nevertheless politicians of all sorts, all over the planet, are screaming from the rooftops that they are distributing fish to all takers. This cannot end well.

The rag-heads do the same to non-muslems all over the region. I see you didn't mention that.

Here is a link to demonstrate: http://commentisfreewatch.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/tourist_traps-mecca.jpg

Stop whining, the palestinians often try to blow Israelis up. They need to be separated to remove this terrible temptation because they can't control themselves.

BUT, the problem is, that China does NOT have the R&D into it

R u sure?

They have production, but that is from cheating

And... bottom line: why would one care if a tonne of CO2 emission is eliminated by "cheating" or "fair"?

IIRC, by the year 2018, China will account for over 1/2 of CO2 emissions of mankind.
By 2022, it is expected that China will account for 1/2 of all CO2 that mankind has emitted.

As for your IIRC... you sure is not the extrapolation leading to bulk wedding cake rates? I'd be grateful if you could find the orig link)

http://cannabisculture.com/articles/4131.html

http://weedpress.wordpress.com/science/in-the-news/australian-driving-study-says-cannabis-is-safe/

http://www.ccguide.org/driving.php

The Met Office made a post on their blog repudiating the Daily Mail report, noting that this is the second time this year that this reporter has published misleading information on this subject: http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

Can you back that up with something more substantial? I found this in depth article and it paints a very muddy picture. PayPal suspended their account and then re-activated it again, but that sort of thing is par for the course with them. The banks that were interviewed all seemed to say either, "decisions are made by local branches, we don't control it" or "VISA and Mastercard forbid businesses selling obscene things" (ok) but also that the banks have ethical policies and may "refuse to engage if it would damage the brand".

Pff, your loss.

UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!

One caveat:
Artillery rockets are so called because they essentially act just like artillery: straight (as in nominally, not linearly straight) ballistic arc. They reason they aren't called "ballistic" is because that word is typically applied to larger, more preciesely targeted, strategic level weapons rather than smaller, tactical scale, primarily untargeted/unguided rocket warheads.

and "ballistic missile" trajectories, even unsophisticated barely targeted ones like the scud, tend to have more vertiacl than artillery rockets; artillery rockets tend to have a more "artillery" like, ie, flatter, less vertical, trajectory. it's still ballistic (scientific term) in nature, but not "ballistic" (military term).

So still using a ballistic trajectory simplifies the math. Big difference from a scud is, being a shorter range, more tactical scale munition, there's less time for the intercept computation.

(scud was considered a tactical scale ballistic missle, but its considerably larger than the ones used in the past week, using .
scud: http://notesfromamedinah.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/scud3a.jpg
fajr-5: http://varifrank.com/images/mrl-iran-thumb.jpg)

No. Simple computer math error due to imprecise representation and rounding. See http://autarkaw.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/round-off-errors-and-the-patriot-missile/ and http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html for details. Interesting problem solved by rebooting the system periodically until a real correction was implemented.

There was a huge problem with the Patriot system early on where the tracking computers lost so much accuracy even after only running continuously for 8 hours that the system would fail to intercept threats. The short term solution was to reboot the system at regular intervals.
 
  GAO Report: Patriot Missile Defense (Official report)
 
  Patriot Missile Software Problem
 
  Round off errors and the Patriot missile

Anyway, with all due respect. I think you are doing things you shouldn't be doing. If I understand it correctly, you are somehow creating RAM disks, and moving all data there upon boot in order to speed up access times, correct? It's the ancient way of doing it from the days yonder where operating systems didn't know about caching. Well, modern operating systems, all of them, including Windows XP, have adequate to very good caching. It's only the first time you load an application that the data is transferred from disk to RAM, close the application, and restart it, it will be next to instant. Why? It's been loaded to RAM, and the machine "knows" that and isn't going to bother to redo all the I/O it required.

Now, I'm not familiar with Windows, but on a Linux machine, a default desktop with some applications will use 1 to 1.5GB truly used memory ("active"+"wired", read up on the terms here). All the rest is available for caching ("buffers" in Linux lingo). Even then, the RAM is often not used, if you're not actually taxing the machine much, which normal users like my mom won't do.

Personally, I am very skeptical about having such huge speed differences. Have you actually measured application startup times with 8GB versus 4GB RAM? You're initial move from platter to RAM-disk must be counted in, keep that in mind. Sure, it's at bootup, but it still is time doing I/O. You're right that the market segmentation Intel does with the Atoms is pretty stupid, but then, with Intel you get what you pay for. Don't pay much... Don't get much.

Indeed.

And this is why there's an essay on how OpenBSD is insecure. Because security breaches do happen. You need to lock your systems down against internal attackers as well. Defense in depth and all that. Not just hermetically sealing your system by abstaining from running any services at all.

Uformia wants to save the world from polygons, which reminds me about Euclideon (Unlimited Detail, Geoverse). There is another common point. By looking at the wiki page of "Digital materialization (DM)", we see that among the attributes of a DM system is "infinite - ability to operate at any scale and define infinite detail".

All this makes me wonder if there is a deeper relation, namely if an "unlimited detail" algoritm may use 3D data compressed (by an algorithm akin to fractal image compression) in a function representation (FREP) style, which already gives "3D who's in front information", then use a sorting algorithm exploiting the tree of the FREP to associate to each pixel from the screen a visible "3D atom". Explained in more detail here: Digital materialization, Euclideon and fractal image compression.

One of these, then: https://rickoshea.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/smart-car-redesign-kits-anyone/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

The Richest Man in the World: A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.

The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254

http://thechive.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/wtf-funny-18.jpg?w=500

And Madoff was the exception because he stole from people who can afford lawyers.

Greg Cochran over at West Hunter has a pretty damning critique of this paper.

Cochran's review:
In two recent papers, Gerald Crabtree says two correct things. He says that the brain is complex, depends on the correct functioning of many genes, and is thus particularly vulnerable to genetic load. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “genetic load”, probably because he’s never heard it. He goes on to say that that this is not his area of expertise: truer words were never spoken!

His general argument is that selection for intelligence relaxed with the development of agriculture, and that brain function, easier to mess up than anything else, has probably been deteriorating for thousands of years. We are dumber than out ancestors, who were dumber than theirs, etc.

The first bit, about the relaxation of selection for intelligence in the Neolithic -. Sure. As we all know, just as soon as people domesticated emmer wheat, social workers fanned out, kept people from cheating or killing their neighbors, and made sure that fuckups wouldn’t starve to death. Riiight -it’s all in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the online supplement.

Why do people project a caricature of modernity back thousands of years before it came into existence? Man, he doesn’t know much about history.

Nor does he know much about biology. If he did, he’d understand that truncation selection is what makes such complex adaptations possible. If only the top 85% (in terms of genetic load) reproduce, the average loser has something like 1 std more load , so each one takes lots of deleterious mutations with him. But then, he’s probably never heard of truncation selection. I’m sure they never taught him that in school, but that’s no excuse – they never taught me, either.

If his thesis was correct, you’d expect hunter-gatherers to be smarter than people from more sophisticated civilizations, which is the crap that Jared Diamond peddles about PNG. But Crabtree says that everyone’s the same – stepping on the dick of his own argument. Of course, in reality, hunter-gatherers score low, often abysmally low, and have terrible trouble trying to fit in to more complex civilizations. They do a perfect imitation of being not-smart, amply documented in the psychometric literature. Of course, he doesn’t know anything about those psychometric results.

Which reminds me of secret clearances: it used to be that having a clearance mean that you were entrusted with information that most people didn’t have. Now, it means that you can’t read Wikileaks, even though everyone else does. In much the same way, you may have the silly impression that having a Ph.D. means knowing more than regular people – but in the human sciences, the most important prerequisite is not knowing certain facts. Some kind soul should post the Index, so newbies won’t get themselves in trouble.

He doesn’t even know things that would almost support his case. Average brain size has indeed decreased over the Neolithic- but in every population, not just in farmers. He might talk about paternal age effects, and how average paternal age varies – but he doesn’t know anything about it. He ought to be thinking about the big population increase associated with agriculture, and the ensuing Fisherian acceleration – but he’s never heard of it.

He even gets the peripheral issues wrong. He talks about language as new, 50,000 years old or so – much more recent than the split between Bushmen/Pygmies and the rest of the human race. Yet they talk. He says that the X chromosome isn’t enriched for cognition and behavioral genes – but it is (by at least a factor of two) , and the reference he quotes confirms it.

Selection pressures and mutation rates can vary in space and time. Intelligence could decrease – it

Pick someone with a tax plan that adds up, low spending, little war-lust, and who understands what a disaster the "personhood" amendment would be, and then you'll have a race.

Someone like that would be branded a screaming liberal by the Tea Partiers and Fox News - and never get the nomination. You need to start your cure a few paces back from that position.

Clean your house.

Ditch the Fox news. Dump the Tea Party. Stop allowing these fundamentalists to tell you what's what. Take your party back. Push for your values (the good ones) like small government. No political party that wants to criminalize abortions can possibly with a straight face tell you that they are for small government.

Stop talking about rape. Just stop it.

Embrace diversity. There is more to the world than 50-something Caucasian southern Baptists. You want to win? Start by representing America, not just your favorite part of it. And by that I don't mean "fake it to get votes", I mean tell the other half of America how you can change the world for the better for them.

And pick better role models. Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Rush Limbaugh are all morons. Sorry, but they are. And we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, and Bill Maher. Find some intelligent people for your side. Start with Colin Powell and build from there. Ditch the ones you've got. They're not helping.

Stop with the anti-intellectualism. Science is real. It's why we can read this on the internet. If you had to pick a single reason why the Republicans lost, I feel it is best contained in this graphic. That's your problem in a nutshell right there. Fix that.

Fix your house, dust yourselves off, and come back as someone we can respect and even occasionally admire (which hasn't been since Reagan), and then you guys will see some results.

Your graph sucks. Hard.

For one, that graph has no scale on the vertical axis. That alone makes it completely worthless. For two, that's delta-T, not absolute temperature. Why not compare delta-T to delta-CO2? For three, those curves are far too smooth. As you can see in the above chart, actual data is pretty damn noisy.

Honestly, you're right that there are long-term trends that we can't do shit about. We really don't give a shit about the climate over a period of hundreds of millions of years. The Earth will adjust, humanity and co. will literally evolve over those time scales. It's the current rate of change that has everyone worried, because CO2 has spiked on a scale normally associated with the larger volcanic eruptions the planet has seen. These volcanic events have also been associated with mass extinction events with a high degree of correlation.[pdf, highly interesting]

Troll with data next time. Or at least a graph that has both axes labeled.

Indeed, what if it's all a lie? Our lives will be worse?

http://climatesanity.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/cartoon-from-trenberth-ams-paper.jpg

There are good reasons for much of the whining. Read this article for more information: GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes

That is nonsense.
Trees are not considred biofuel, how retarded is that?
However there is a booming market for wood heating in houses, either simply with wooden logs, ore modern pellet bases central house heating.
Trees are not burned in 'coal plants' ... perhaps you shouldmonce visit a coal plant to get a clue how they work? If you had you did not come to such braindead ideas.

Those are not ideas, those are facts. EU coal powerplants get "clean energy" subsidies (ridiculous amounts, same as for wind and solar) when they burn wood. It is economically feasible right now to import expensive wood from America just to pretend old coal plant is now Eco.

Germany might look good on paper, but in reality they didnt build any new infrastructure, they just changed legal wording to save face while closing down Nuclear.

Example google link
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/10/27/save-the-coal-kill-and-burn-trees-instead/
http://www.resource-media.org/guest-post-biomass-is-the-new-coal/
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-6572461.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15756074

They'll be replaced by other free services from new companies that will abide by the rules and still think they can make a profit, by doing what their customers want instead of what they don't want.

Will they? I suppose it's possible, but so far the only effective and scalable free-service business model we've found is advertising. Radio, television, web services... everything is ad-supported. I suppose the companies you're theorizing could use untargeted ads, but that's going to lead us back to what we had in the late 90s -- massive blinking banners everywhere, and lots of them, because that's what had to be done to make them sufficiently effective. I would much rather have discreet, carefully-targeted ads that may actually be interesting enough to make me want to look at them. Or maybe there's some other business model, but I don't know what it might be.

Moreover, if open source has taught us anything, it's that high quality free stuff still gets made by people who just want to be proud to help advance the human race.

Open source hasn't taught us that at all. It has showed that Internet-enabled collaboration can do startlingly good things with spare-time efforts from people who do something else for a living, but "startlingly-good" only by comparison with what we used to expect of hobby projects. Open source efforts become really successful when people are paid full-time to work on them. But even ignoring that, no matter how good the software is, hardware of the scale needed to provide the kind of high-quality services we're accustomed to isn't free, and won't be. The public estimates I've seen say that Google has at least one million CPU cores, because that's what it takes to operate Google web search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, Calendar, Drive, etc. In a video I saw the other day, one of the guys in Maps said that Google now has over 20 petabytes of map imagery, between satellite, aerial and ground-level data. This analysis puts YouTube storage growing at 76 petabytes per year, but that obviously understates the number because it ignores the redundancy needed to make sure stuff doesn't disappear when drives die.

No matter how altruistic you are, you don't buy, deploy and operate that much storage without some revenue source. You can't. Then there are servers, and bandwidth, and buildings to put them in, and people to deploy them, fix them, manage them, replace them, etc., etc., etc. It takes a lot of money to be able to do all of that.

And, actually, as a Google employee I'll tell you that the attitude within Google, from the CEO on down, is that helping to "advance the human race" is the goal. Ads and the other revenue sources are just what you have to do in order to have the resources, including not only all of that hardware and bandwidth but also tens of thousands of highly-capable engineers, needed to be able to advance the human race. If there were a way to accomplish the real goals without advertising, Google would do it -- in fact Larry and Sergey tried really hard to find any other approach early on, or so I read (I've only been working for Google for 18 months, and have never spoken with either of them). Maybe Google Fiber will be wildly successful and profitable and Google can shift from advertising to being the world's ISP, or maybe Google will become a huge device manufacturer, making phones, tables, glasses and computers, or maybe the self-driving cars will be hugely profitable, but I suspect that none of those will be able to fund the level of free services and progress that advertising does.

The dataviz in this one is pretty cool (with links to source data and R scripts): http://beechplane.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/the-95-confidence-of-nate-silver/ Basically, missed three (which is in line with expectations)