A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com: "Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Not only is this novel a celebration of the monastic life of scholars, but it is also a series of lessons about science, math and philosophy. A group of young researchers first discover, then analyze, an object that has arrived in orbit around their planet, and we learn with them about the most rational way to approach that which is truly alien. Theories of mind and matter are the subjects of entire chapters in this story about the struggle between logic and superstition

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions

The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions: "An Electronic Passport is the same as a traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit (or “chip”) embedded in the back cover. The chip stores:
The same data visually displayed on the data page of the passport;
A biometric identifier in the form of a digital image of the passport photograph, which will facilitate the use of face recognition technology at ports-of-entry;
The unique chip identification number; and
A digital signature to protect the stored data from alteration"

Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery

Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery: "I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.

Peter da Silva

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Intel’s McAfee Deal: A National Security Nightmare - The Firewall - the world of security - Forbes

Intel’s McAfee Deal: A National Security Nightmare - The Firewall - the world of security - Forbes: "When I read the news Thursday that Intel is buying McAfee for $7.68 billion, I was stunned by its national security implications.

Intel has had a cozy relationship with the Russian government and its Federal Security Service (FSB) since 2002 with its sponsorship of a laboratory on wireless technology at Nizhny Novgorod State University (NNGU).

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

There's something about macro

There's something about macro: "Finally, sticky prices play a crucial role in converting this into a theory of real economic fluctuations; while I regard the evidence for such stickiness as overwhelming, the assumption of at least temporarily rigid nominal prices is one of those things that works beautifully in practice but very badly in theory.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes - WSJ.com

Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes - WSJ.com: "Austrian school of economics that opposes government intervention in markets and decries federal spending to prop up demand during times of crisis

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Sailing faster than the wind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sailing faster than the wind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "On July 2, 2010, the propeller-powered land yacht Blackbird set the world's first certified record for going directly downwind, faster than the wind, using only power from the wind. The yacht achieved a dead downwind speed of about 2.8 times the speed of the wind.[46][47][48]

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age: "The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.

The Real Bozo Attempts to Atone: Why the DDWFTW Car Works : Good Math, Bad Math

The Real Bozo Attempts to Atone: Why the DDWFTW Car Works : Good Math, Bad Math: "And the answer to that is 'Yes'. This thing does do it. It's not magic, it's not perpetual motion. In fact, it's really astonishingly simple, once you realize that the behavior of things moving through air is quite different from the simple rigid system that it appears to be equivalent to"

Internet2: IDEA Award Winners 2010

Internet2: IDEA Award Winners 2010: "Shibboleth
Shibboleth® Federated Single Sign-On Software is developed and supported by a growing international community. Nominated by Jack Suess, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, an institutional user of the software, Shibboleth is a standards-based, open-source solution for Web-based single sign-on across and within organizational boundaries. Implementing widely used federated identity standards, principally OASIS' Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Shibboleth simplifies the management of identity and permissions by allowing sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner."

Beware the smart phone data plan con - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com

Beware the smart phone data plan con - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com: "So, how much will your smart phone cost? Forget that number between $0 and $299 that you pay up front. The number you should focus on is the total cost of ownership, which for smart phones is usually around $2,000. (Regular 'dumb' phones with unlimited text messages generally cost half that over the same period.)"

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
Part of the copyright code, Section 1201 of the famous Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, makes it illegal to break digital locks to get at copyrighted works. But that doesn't make unlockers criminals. The reason is an explicit exemption for personal unlocking issued by the librarian of Congress in 2006. As the librarian wrote, the locks "are used by wireless carriers to limit the ability of subscribers to switch to other carriers, a business decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with the interests protected by copyright." If that's good enough for the librarian of Congress, that's good enough for me

Some more comments... : On a New Road

Some more comments... : On a New Road
It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of "good" is really twisted:
Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse. They maximize the stock price, within the bounds of the law. Corporations like Oracle and Exxon tend to be perfectly rational. They "buy laws" because it's perfectly legal to spend money on lobbyists and political campaigns. While you and I might think that it is morally reprehensible to buy elections, like the recent case with Target, it is nonetheless totally legal. Given the rules of the game, it would be bad for a corporation to not buy an election, if failing to do so would negatively impact their stock price. I could rant for a long time on this one, but not today… The whole modern concept of a public company is deeply flawed. But the game is what it is.

Windows DLL-loading security flaw puts Microsoft in a bind

Windows DLL-loading security flaw puts Microsoft in a bind: "The peculiar thing about all this is that this vulnerability has been known for a long time. The order in which directories are searched is documented, and has been documented for many years (that documentation dates back to 1998, and there are likely references that are older still, if one has any decade-old developer documents handy), and the dangers of using the current directory for loading libraries were explicitly highlighted a decade ago. As well as warning in the documentation about the dangers, Microsoft bloggers have also written about the issue in the past, telling developers how to avoid the problem"

3-sat phase and hardness

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1002/1002.0217v1.pdf

It was observed early [4, 17] that plotting P[UNSAT]
against shows a sharp threshold behavior at some critical c. Furthermore,
around this c it also takes various algorithms the longest time to solve random
3-SAT problems, i.e., the problems are hard. To quantify the hardness, either
the number of distinct steps of the solving algorithm is counted, or simply the
time measured until the problem is solved. The divergence of the hardness together
with the sudden jump of P[UNSAT] at some critical resembles a phase
transition-like behavior [9, 21]. The numerical analysis of this sharp threshold
behavior resulted in c = 4.15 ± 0.05 [10].

The Daily Mash - OUTRAGE OVER PLANS TO BUILD LIBRARY NEXT TO SARAH PALIN

The Daily Mash - OUTRAGE OVER PLANS TO BUILD LIBRARY NEXT TO SARAH PALIN: "PLANS to build a state-of-the-art library next to Republican catastrophe Sarah Palin are causing outrage across mainstream America.

Intel-McAfee: Horseless Carriage Vendor Buys Buggy-Whips | Forrester Blogs

Intel-McAfee: Horseless Carriage Vendor Buys Buggy-Whips Forrester Blogs: "Intel doesn’t understand software. Perhaps the most troubling part of the McAfee deal is the prospect that they will mismanage their new division into irrelevance. Intel’s track record with deals further up the stack are patchy at best. In 2005, Intel bought Sarvega, a hardware-and-software play in the XML processing segment. Today, it is irrelevant. In 1991, Intel bought LANDesk as the centerpiece of its DMTF strategy. Remember what DMTF stood for? (No penalty for not remembering: it stands for Desktop Management Task Force.) LANDesk was sold at the height of the dot-com boom, and it has been bought, spun off or sold three times again. Now Intel wants to get back in the software game again. Again, how will this be any different?"
....

Contrast that with the highly sandboxed, compartmentalized, digitally signed “apps” model of the BlackBerry OS and Apple’s iOS. With these two operating systems, you don’t need on-board anti-virus, or HIPS, or anything else — and if you do, it is because Apple or RIM have screwed up. Both of these vendors are taking responsibility for their platforms in totality in ways that Microsoft never did, or could have. Neither iOS or BlackBerry OS depend in any way on hardware capabilities Intel or anybody else could bring to the table, other than the root-of-trust embedded in the handset. All of the security differentiation is in the OS. And that, frankly, is where it belongs.

Intel Plans to Acquire McAfee for $7.68 Billion - NYTimes.com

Intel Plans to Acquire McAfee for $7.68 Billion - NYTimes.com: "McAfee’s revenue rose 20 percent last year to $1.93 billion. Intel’s revenue fell 7 percent to $35.1 billion. At 80 percent, McAfee’s gross margins surpass Intel’s, which tend to be around 65 percent."

Michael B. Thompson Profile - Forbes.com

Michael B. Thompson Profile - Forbes.com
Michael B. Thompson has served as a director of the Company since May 2004. Mr. Thompson is currently the VP of R&D and Information Technology for Kersh Risk Management in Plano, Texas. Kersh is a B2B Company focused on helping employees and dependents make behavioral changes to improve health which benefits the employee while driving significant health care cost savings for employers. In 2007 and 2008, Mr. Thompson was the COO of Mediaport Entertainment, Inc a digital media kiosk company that provides automated fulfillment and point of sale solutions for music, movies, eBooks, audio books, and other digital media. From 2003 to 2006 Mr. Thompson served as President, Chief Executive Officer and director of Setpoint Companies, an industry leader in lean automation that fully designs, assembles, tests and delivers automated assembly and test equipment. Mr. Thompson was integrally involved in Setpoint?s hub?and-spoke growth initiative starting (4) new companies while directly managing MySchedule.Net, Setpoint Spectrometers, and Rocky Mountain Testing Solutions. From 1986 to 2003, Mr. Thompson was the Vice President of the Planning and Logistics Solutions Group of Brooks? software division. Brooks Planning and Logistics Solutions Group's primary market focus is to provide simulation, scheduling and material handling automation and software controls to the semiconductor and related high technology industries. He was the President of AutoSimulations, Inc., which was acquired by Brooks in January of 2000. Mr. Thompson has been involved with automation, modeling and scheduling manufacturing systems for over 25 years. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Engineering Sciences and Technology at Brigham Young University

dallasnews.com

dallasnews.com: "'As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,' Obama told an intently listening crowd gathered at the White House Friday evening to observe the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

'That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances,' he said. 'This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.'

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

AVP - AVP suspends operations

AVP - AVP suspends operations: "The AVP Tour today announced it has closed its doors due to financial hardship, cutting short the 2010 season. AVP ownership is not funding the tour and the AVP has been unsuccessful at finding new investors.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Traveler to the undiscovere'd country - Roger Ebert's Journal

Traveler to the undiscovere'd country - Roger Ebert's Journal: "'The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called reverend. Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishmen -- if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?'

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Page 2 - Oracle Outlines SPARC, Solaris 11 Plans - IT Infrastructure from eWeek

Page 2 - Oracle Outlines SPARC, Solaris 11 Plans - IT Infrastructure from eWeek: "Oracle will only focus on Intel processors, which offer the best per-core performance, which is important given that Oracle licenses its software on a per-core basis, rather than a per-socket basis like Microsoft, Brookwood said"

Oracle Charges Into Desktop Virtualization With VDI 3.2 -- Virtual desktops -- InformationWeek

Oracle Charges Into Desktop Virtualization With VDI 3.2 -- Virtual desktops -- InformationWeek: "Desktop applications run on central servers under the Oracle VM hypervisor, a version of the Xen open source hypervisor"

Origin of Species: A History of O'Reilly Animals - O'Reilly Media

Origin of Species: A History of O'Reilly Animals - O'Reilly Media
When I was first approached by O'Reilly to propose new covers for their books, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment Corporation. I had heard of UNIX, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I had never met a UNIX programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. All of the terms associated with vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few, sounded to me like words that might come out of a popular game called "Dungeons and Dragons." I developed a mental picture of the UNIX programmer as a "Dungeons and Dragons" player. As I started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX programmer type to be.

IB-InnovativeStrategies.pdf (application/pdf Object)

IB-InnovativeStrategies.pdf (application/pdf Object): "-When this second stage calculation is taken into account,
married couples may often find that it’s beneficial for
the spouse who is eligible for the lower Social Security
payments to start collecting his/her own worker benefits
early—while delaying the other spouse’s benefits

Emma Larkin | FiveBooks

Emma Larkin FiveBooks: "The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap"

Chris Abbott | FiveBooks

Chris Abbott FiveBooks: "liddism. It’s basically a trend whereby Western states attempt to control threats to international security by military means, rather than understanding the nature of the threats and countering them at source. So, you can compare this to a pressure cooker where every attempt is made to keep the lid on, instead of turning down the heat."

Why Your Phone Can’t Really Replace Your Credit Card | Epicenter | Wired.com

Why Your Phone Can’t Really Replace Your Credit Card | Epicenter | Wired.com: "Meanwhile, the likelihood of an upstart disrupting the existing credit card industry is virtually nil, regardless of any switch to pay-by-phone. Instead, MacPherson says, start-ups should continue focusing on areas where they can gain ground — municipal parking systems, public transportation, vending machines and the like — because all other attempts to disrupt the credit card status quo have failed miserably.

“A lot of people from outside the payments industry have seriously underestimated how durable Visa and MasterCard’s franchise is. [America Online co-founder] Steve Case is one of them. [His] RevolutionMoney was … to be a new card network that would underprice the associations, and it totally cratered and was sold to American Express. Then you have DebitMan [a debit card network backed by merchants, rather than banks, which DebitMan's COO accused of raising rates unfairly and keeping 80-90 percent of resulting revenue]. It totally failed to take off — now, they’re Tempo Payments, and they’re selling to banks

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Judge Walker's decision to overturn Prop 8 is factual, well-reasoned, and powerful. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

Judge Walker's decision to overturn Prop 8 is factual, well-reasoned, and powerful. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine: "'[I]t would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse,' quotes Walker. ''[M]oral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest,' has never been a rational basis for legislation,' cites Walker. 'Animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate,' Walker notes

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Audience Picks: Top 100 'Killer Thrillers' : NPR

Audience Picks: Top 100 'Killer Thrillers' : NPR: "* 1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
* 2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
* 3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
* 4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
* 5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
* 6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
* 7. The Shining, by Stephen King
* 8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
* 9. The Hunt tor Red October, by Tom Clancy
* 10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Embedded Security Subsystem - ThinkWiki

Embedded Security Subsystem - ThinkWiki: "Using the TPM in Linux
This section is very incomplete, but here are some pointers to get you started:
Compile a 2.6.23 or later kernel with the driver for the tpm chip in your ThinkPad model enabled;
You need to enable CONFIG_SECURITY to get securityfs, and CONFIG_KEYS to use eCryptfs TPM support;
You need to enable tpm_bios to access the TCPA log;"

Marv's Grand Page Home

Marv's Grand Page Home

RM:0.0 - LEE'S FERRYRM:1.0 - Paria RiffleRM:8.0 - Badger Creek Rapid (5-8)RM:11.2 - Soap Creek Rapid (5-6)RM:12.0 - Salt Water WashRM:14.3 - Sheer Wall Rapid (2) Tanner WashRM:16.9 - House Rock Rapid (7-9)RM:20.5 - North Canyon Rapid (5)RM:21.5 - 21 Mile Rapid (5)RM:23.3 - 23 Mile Rapid (4-6)RM:24.2 - 24 Mile Rapid (6-8)RM:24.5 - 24 ½ Mile Rapid (5-6)RM:24.9 - 25 Mile Rapid (5-7)RM:25.3 - Cave Springs Rapid (5-6)RM:26.6 - Tiger Wash Rapid (4-5)RM:29.2 - Silver Grotto and Shinumo WashRM:30.0 - Proposed site Redwall Dam (1920s)RM:31.8 - Stanton’s CaveRM:31.9 - Vasey’s ParadiseRM:33.0 - Red Wall CavernRM:34.8 - Nautiloid CanyonRM:35.0 - The Bridge of SighsRM:37.6 - Tatahatso Wash/CampRM:43.0 - Point Hansbrough & Anasazi BridgeRM:43.7 - President Harding RapidRM:46.6 - Triple AlcovesRM:47.0 - Saddle CanyonRM:51.9 - Little Nankoweap CreekRM:52.2 - Nakoweap AreaRM:56.0 - Kwagunt Rapid (6) (Marble Canyon)RM:61.4 - Little Colorado RiverRM:64.7 - Carbon CreekRM:65.6 - Lava Canyon (Chuar) Rapid (3-5)RM:68.4 - Tanner Rapid / Furnace FlatsRM:72.3 - Unkar Delta Puebloan dwellingsRM:72.5 - Unkar Rapid (6-7)RM:74.8 - EscalanteRM:75.5 - Nevills Rapid (6)RM:76.8 - Hance Rapid (8-10)RM 77.2 - Upper Granite Gorge/ End MarbleRM:78.7 - Sockdolager Rapid(8-9)RM:81.1 - Vishnu/GrapevineRM:81.5 - Grapevine Rapid (8)RM:83.5 - 83 Mile Rapid (3-5)RM:83.8 - Lone Tree C/HRM:84.0 - Clear Creek CampRM:84.6 - Zoroaster Rapid (5-8)RM:85.0 - 85 Mile Rapid (2-6)RM:85.8 - Cremation Camp – Above PhantomRM:87.5 - Kaibab Bridge/Phantom RanchRM:87.8 - Bright Angel Rapid and BridgeRM:89.0 - Pipe Springs Rapid (4-5)RM:90.2 - Horn Creek Rapid (8-10)RM:93.5 - Granite Rapid (9)RM:95.0 - Hermit Rapid (8-9)RM:96.8 - Boucher Rapid (3-5) CRM:98.2 - Crystal Rapid (10) RM:99.2 - Tuna Creek Rapid (6)RM:101.3 - Saphire Rapid (7)RM:102.0 - Turquoise Rapid (3-6)
RM:103.9 - 104 Mile Rapid (5-7)RM:104.6 - Ruby Rapid (6-7)RM:106.0 - Serpentine Rapid (6-8)RM:107.8 - Bass Rapid (3-6)RM:108.2 - Beach and trailhead for Bass’s CampRM:108.7 - Shinumo RapidRM:112.2 - Waltenberg Rapid (6-9)RM:112.6 - 112½ Mile Rapid (1-6)RM:114.4 - Garnet CanyonRM:116.5 - Elves ChasmRM:116.9 - Stephen Aisle (End Granite)RM:119.8 - Salt DepositsRM:120.1 - Blacktail Canyon & Conquistador Aisle (Middle Granite)RM 121.7 - 122 Mile Rapid(4-6)RM 122.8 - Forster Rapid (3-6)RM 125.0 - Fossil Rapid (3-6)RM 126.6 - Middle Granite GorgeRM 128.7 - 128 Mile Rapid (3)RM 129.0 - Specter Rapid (5-6)RM 130.5 - Bedrock Rapid (6-8)RM 131.7 - Deubendorff Rapid (5-8) Stone Cr.RM 133.7 - Tapeats Creek&Thunder River(4-5)RM 135.5 - Granite Narrows CampRM 136.2 - Deer CreekRM 137.0 - Pancho’s Kitchen CampRM 139.0 - Fishtail RM 143.5 - Kanab (start of fast flow on river)RM 147.9 - Matkatamiba CanyonRM 149.9 - Upset Rapid (6)RM 151.0 - Ledges Camp Above HavasuRM 153.0 - Mt. SinyellaRM 156.7 - HavasuRM 164.5 - Tuck Up Canyon/Rapid RRM 166.0 - National Rapid/CanyonRM 168.0 - Fern Glen Canyon/Camp/FirewoodRM 171.2 - Gateway/Mohawk CanyonRM 174.0 - Cove CanyonRM 177.1 - Honga Springs Camp LRM 177.7 - Above Anvil Camp LRM 178.0 - Vulcan’s Anvil Camp RRM 178.9 - Above Lava CampRM 179.2 - Lava Rapid! (10)RM 179.3 - Lava Well (Water)RM 180.0 - Little Lava Falls CRM 188.0 - Whitmore WashRM 198.5 - Parashant Camp / Book of WormsRM 202.0 - Camp/HikeRM 205.2 - Canyon, Spring CampRM 206.6 - Indian Canyon/Camp RuinsRM 209.0 - Granite Park Canyon L ShadeRM 211.6 - Fall Canyon RRM 212.0 - Pumpkin SpringsRM 215.6 - Three Springs Canyon WaterRM 215.9 - Lower Granite GorgeRM 220.0 - Camp RM 220.4 - Granite Springs LRM 222.0 - Canyon - No Shade CampRM 226.0 - DIAMOND CREEK takeout

How to create a Balloon Tooltip in C# and Windows Forms

How to create a Balloon Tooltip in C# and Windows Forms: "To create a balloon tooltip, we just need to set IsBalloon property of ToolTip control to true. The following code snippet create a balloon tooltip and attaches it to a Button control.


ToolTip buttonToolTip = new ToolTip();
buttonToolTip.ToolTipTitle = 'Button Tooltip';
buttonToolTip.UseFading = true;
buttonToolTip.UseAnimation = true;
buttonToolTip.IsBalloon = true;

buttonToolTip.ShowAlways = true;

buttonToolTip.AutoPopDelay = 5000;
buttonToolTip.InitialDelay = 1000;
buttonToolTip.ReshowDelay = 500;

buttonToolTip.SetToolTip(button1, 'Click me to execute.');"

Mind Hacks: From on hayo

Mind Hacks: From on hayo: "24 of anthropologist Wade Davis' magical book on the ethnobotany of ceremonial chemicals, One River.

In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

MeeGo: Meaningful or Mediocre?

MeeGo: Meaningful or Mediocre?: "Former Maemo project and application developers are timid to fully embrace MeeGo, mainly because the newer system has chosen to use Moblin's Red Hat-derived RPM package manager over the Maemo Debian apt-get software manager.

ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments Form New Company to Speed the Rollout of Linux-Based Devices

ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments Form New Company to Speed the Rollout of Linux-Based Devices: "# ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have created the not-for-profit company, Linaro, committed to providing new resources and industry alignment for open source software developers using Linux on the world’s most sophisticated semiconductor System-on-Chips (SoCs).
# Linaro will invest resources in open source projects that can then be used by Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » What Does the Proof of the “CAP theorem” Mean?

Dan Weinreb’s blog » Blog Archive » What Does the Proof of the “CAP theorem” Mean?: "the fact that DNS has been able to scale up so much is an huge engineering success that I feel is under-appreciated. We take DNS for granted, but it’s quite amazing how well it works! Since it went into service, the Internet has grown (in number of hosts) by a factor of roughly 50,000, and it still works. Not many other systems can say that.

5 Ads Gone Hilariously Wrong « Dream Factory Productions Blog

5 Ads Gone Hilariously Wrong « Dream Factory Productions Blog: "“We took a young woman with severe memory loss
and helped her forget she ever had it.”

Juniper buys into enterprise tablet security - Rethink Wireless

Juniper buys into enterprise tablet security - Rethink Wireless: "trend for individuals to carry high end mobile devices for combined business and personal use, replacing many of the functions of a PC - and so requiring heavier duty security.
The software runs on Android, Apple IoS, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, protecting devices from viruses, spyware, identity theft and other threats, and allowing the central enterprise IT department to manage the policies and settings."

Standardization comes to the Cloud? - DDJ

Standardization comes to the Cloud? - DDJ: "OpenStack is a new open source cloud computing platform, initially supported by RackSpace (the second largest cloud provider, next to Amazon) and NASA. It aims to make cloud interoperability easier than ever. To kick off the new initiative, RackSpace is open-sourcing the code behind their cloud files service and their compute provisioning technology, and donating it to the project. NASA is also contributing some of the technology behind their powerful Nebula computing platform."

The top 20 countries on the Internet, and what the future might bring | Royal Pingdom

The top 20 countries on the Internet, and what the future might bring Royal Pingdom: "Out of the top 20 countries, the five with the highest Internet penetration (not users) are: United Kingdom (82.5%), South Korea (81.1%), Germany (79.1%), Japan (78.2%), United States (76.3%)."

Northrop Grumman opens Advanced Technology Research and Development Center

Northrop Grumman opens Advanced Technology Research and Development Center: "Northrop Grumman officially opened its new Northrop Grumman Innovation Institute in Linthicum last week. The center will serve as the focal point for the sector's advanced technology development activities.

The five-story, 156,000 square foot leased office building is located on West Nursery Road in the West*Quest Technology Park where Northrop Grumman already maintains the headquarters for its Electronic Systems sector. The new facility is home to more than 450 current engineers, scientists and support personnel who had previously been housed in several nearby leased and company-owned buildings"

Donald A. Hicks - SourceWatch

Donald A. Hicks - SourceWatch: "'Prior to his appointment as USDRE, Dr. Hicks was Senior Vice President, Marketing & Technology, for Northrop Grumman. He joined Northrop in 1961 as Vice President-Technical for the company's Ventura Division. Four years later, he formed the Applied Research Department of the Nortronics Division of Northrop. In 1967, this department became a major part of the newly formed Northrop Research & Technology Center, with Dr. Hicks serving as Vice President & Manager. In 1970, Dr. Hicks was promoted to Corporate Vice President of Research & Technology, a position he held until his appointment as Senior Vice President-Technology in November 1974. This position was expanded in 1979 to include corporate marketing"

There will be blood: why Apple and Intel are destined to clash

There will be blood: why Apple and Intel are destined to clash: "There's no way that Apple is going to sit idly by while Intel builds a hardware/software platform to compete with iOS, and then gives that platform away to Apple's competitors. And there's no way that Intel is going sit idly by and watch Apple's ARM-based products rake in billions in revenue without trying to take them down."

Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” review : The New Yorker

Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” review : The New Yorker: "I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Apple Tells Congressmen It Batches, Encrypts Location Data - Web Services Web 20 and SOA from eWeek

Apple Tells Congressmen It Batches, Encrypts Location Data - Web Services Web 20 and SOA from eWeek: "However, this only happens when users have toggled their device to turn the services on and only when the user runs an application requiring location information.
At that point the device 'intermittently and anonymously collects cell tower and WiFi access point information from the access points it can see, along with the device's GPS coordinates if available.'
Web services that leverage location such as Google Latitude, Google Buzz, Twitter Foursquare and Gowalla are becoming increasingly popular among users. Google, Yahoo and Bing are negotiating with Foursquare to use its location-based check-in data in their core search results."

Thoughts » 2010 » May

Thoughts » 2010 » May: "I reset TPM ownership data (which on my machine takes two reboot cycles, one to clear owner data and another to activate the TPM again). After this, sudo ./jtt.sh take_owner -o tpm -e ASCII succeeded.
Successfully defined an NV_RAM space using:
sudo ./jtt.sh nv_definespace --index 0x00011128 --size 20 -o tpm -e ASCIIWrote to the space using:
sudo ./jtt.sh nv_write --file rand.key --index 0x00011128 -o tpm -e ASCIIwhere rand.key is the result of:
dd bs=1 count=20 if=/dev/urandom of=rand.keyReading it back out succeeds as well, when we use:
sudo ./jtt.sh nv_decode --index 00011128 --rawit matches the output of hexdump rand.key (if you account for transposed bytes). Finally, I successfully deleted the space using:
sudo ./jtt.sh nv_releasespace --index 00011128 -o tpm -e ASCII"

RIM co-CEOs pull no punches responding to Apple's antenna statements -- Engadget

RIM co-CEOs pull no punches responding to Apple's antenna statements -- Engadget: "'Apple's attempt to draw RIM into Apple's self-made debacle is unacceptable. Apple's claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public's understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple's difficult situation. RIM is a global leader in antenna design and has been successfully designing industry-leading wireless data products with efficient and effective radio performance for over 20 years. During that time, RIM has avoided designs like the one Apple used in the iPhone 4 and instead has used innovative designs which reduce the risk for dropped calls, especially in areas of lower coverage. One thing is for certain, RIM's customers don't need to use a case for their BlackBerry smartphone to maintain proper connectivity. Apple clearly made certain design decisions and it should take responsibility for these decisions rather than trying to draw RIM and others into a situation that relates specifically to Apple.'

A Trusted Ticket System for Kerberos « Kerberos Blog

A Trusted Ticket System for Kerberos « Kerberos Blog: "There are a number of ways that a Kerberos deployment could make use of the TPM on a Client machine or on a KDC machine. The most obvious is to seal the client-side keying material (when not in use) using the TPM, such as the keytab and the credentials cache. Note that currently these are located on the client machine hard-drive, and thus subject to various attacks. In this sealing scenario the TPM is used in its most basic usage-mode, namely a key storage device. The Kerberos client could simply command the TPM to seal its keying material using a TPM-generated internal key. The resulting (encrypted) blob is returned by the TPM/TSS, and simply placed on the hard-drive or other storage location (e.g. flash)."

You're 65: Welcome to Medicare - Personal Finance - Health Care - SmartMoney.com

You're 65: Welcome to Medicare - Personal Finance - Health Care - SmartMoney.com: "Medicare Part B is basic medical insurance that covers services ranging from doctors' visits and outpatient hospital care to some physical and occupational therapy and even some home health care. For 2008, people who file an individual tax return with $80,000 or less ($160,000 or less for joint filers) will pay $96.50 a month, or nearly $1,160 a year, for this coverage. (You'll pay a higher premium if your income is higher.) That's a remarkably good deal: Consider that a 64-year-old woman living in New York City would pay an average of $4,425 annually for an individual policy, according to a recent quote provided by eHealthInsurance. Medicare is the best buy in the country, says Irene Card, a Medicare expert and owner of MIC Insurance Services. For $96.50 you have phenomenal coverage, she says."

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) « Identity Mixer

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) « Identity Mixer: "The solution first developed by TCG uses a trusted third party, the so-called privacy certification authority (Privacy CA), and works as follows. Each TPM generates an RSA key pair called Endorsement Key (EK). The Privacy CA is assumed to know the public parts of the Endorsement Keys of all (valid) TPMs. Now, whenever a TPM needs to authenticate itself to a verifier, it generates a second RSA key pair, called an Attestation Identity Key (AIK), sends the AIK public key to the Privacy CA, and authenticates this public key w.r.t. its EK. If the

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR

In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don't Matter : NPR: "Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's claim that law enforcement agencies found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that had been beheaded.
Mr. MILBANK: Yes, I think Governor Brewer lost her head on that one in particular. Now, there's a huge problem with violence on the border, but virtually all of it happens to be on the Mexican side. And what happened in the case of this claim is a news organization out there called the Arizona Guardian called all the coroner's office, the medical examiners in those border counties, and they could not think of a single instance of an immigration-related beheading."

Real World Technologies - Home Page

Real World Technologies - Home Page: "PhysX is a key application that Nvidia uses to showcase the advantages of GPU computing (GPGPU) for consumers. PhysX executing on an Nvidia GPU an improve performance by 2-4X compared to running on a CPU from Intel or AMD. We investigated and discovered that CPU PhysX exclusively uses x87 rather than the faster SSE instructions. This hobbles the performance of CPUs, calling into question the real benefits of PhysX on a GPU"

Dana Milbank - Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona

Dana Milbank - Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona

Two months ago, the Arizona Republic published an exhaustive report that found that, according to statistics from the FBI and Arizona police agencies, crime in Arizona border towns has been "essentially flat for the past decade." For example, "In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Last year, despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes." The Pima County sheriff reported that "the border has never been more secure."

FBI statistics show violent crime rates in all of the border states are lower than they were a decade ago

Hard Cider

Hard Cider
until the mid 1800s, hard cider, known simply as cider, was the most popular beverage in North America. In early America, cider gained popularity because -- unlike milk at that time -- it was plentiful, inexpensive to make, and stable.

CIDER: An interview with a Magners Irish Cider scientist | Bottoms Up

CIDER: An interview with a Magners Irish Cider scientist | Bottoms Up
The difference, she said, is Magners in Ireland has a carbonation level 50 percent higher. Higher carbonation in bottles sent here would put Magners in a much higher tax bracker, she said.

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist

First replicating creature spawned in life simulator - physics-math - 16 June 2010 - New Scientist: "See Gemini in action
You can run Gemini on your own computer: just follow these simple instructions.
First, install Golly, a Game of Life simulator, by downloading and unzipping this folder from SourceForge. This will give you a folder called golly-2.1-win, which contains a number of sub-folders.
Next, get a copy of Gemini by downloading and unzipping this document from Google Docs. Save the resulting file, which is called gemini.rle, inside the golly-2.1-win/Patterns"

My Way News - BP comment about 'small people' causes anger

My Way News - BP comment about 'small people' causes anger: "We care about the small people.'"

Libertarian - Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia

Libertarian - Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia
Libertarian = Republican - Jesus + pot + hot sexy gun-toting naked chicks.

infite loops

http://www-user.slac.stanford.edu/jimstan/Infinity.htm
Utilizing Infinite Loops

to Compute an Approximate Value of

Infinity

Jim Stanfield, co-founder, The Institute for Further Research

People criticize Al Gore for claiming to have invented the ‘Information Superhighway’ but we do owe him a debt of gratitude for inventing one of the most important concepts in all of computing, the Algorithm. But again, I digress.

Jesus statue fire damages estimated at $700,000

Jesus statue fire damages estimated at $700,000
“I can’t believe Jesus was struck,” said his brother, who noted the giant Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was untouched.

MeeGo Needs Intel Investment To Succeed -- Operating Systems -- InformationWeek

MeeGo Needs Intel Investment To Succeed -- Operating Systems -- InformationWeek: 'From the perspective of most third-party developers, MeeGo remains an unknown and unproven quantity that is entering an already highly competitive and crowded landscape,' Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said in a report released Wednesday."

Distributive Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Distributive Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Distributive justice is not an area where we can say an idea is good in theory but not in practice. If it is not good in practice, then it is not good in theory either.

Modern History Sourcebook: The 25 Points

Modern History Sourcebook: The 25 Points

The 25 Points 1920:
An Early Nazi Program

Gov. Brewer would no doubt approve...

4. Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently no Jew can be a member of the race.

5. Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners.

6. The right to determine matters concerning administration and law belongs only to the citizen. Therefore we demand that every public office, of any sort whatsoever, whether in the Reich, the county or municipality, be filled only by citizens. We combat the corrupting parliamentary economy, office-holding only according to party inclinations without consideration of character or abilities.

7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich.

Brewer tells conflicting stories about dad's war effort

Brewer tells conflicting stories about dad's war effort

Gov. Jan Brewer said in a recent interview that her father died fighting Nazis in Germany. In fact, the death of Wilford Drinkwine came 10 years after World War II had ended

Patriotism, Baseball, And An Atheist

Patriotism, Baseball, And An Atheist

Once again the conversation changed to current day when I asked how many celebrities we could name who enlisted for the current wars. Sadly, only one name could be answered by all in the room. Pat Tillman. Tillman turned down a $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals to enlist in the Army. That patriotism is so rare. He offered and eventually gave his life for his country.

Why is Pat Tillman so amazing? He was an atheist. For those of you who do not comprehend what is so special about that, he offered and gave his life, the only life that he believed he would ever have, to defend our country.

Linux: Linus On The Extensible Firmware Interface | KernelTrap

Linux: Linus On The Extensible Firmware Interface KernelTrap: "And don't get me wrong - the problem
with EFI is that it actually superficially looks much better than the
BIOS, but in practice it ends up being one of those things where it has
few real advantages, and often just a lot of extra complexity because of
the 'new and improved' interfaces that were largely defined by a
committee.

I think a lot of the 'new standards' tend to be that way. Trying to solve
a lot of problems and allow everybody to add their own features, instead
of just saying that it's better to just standardize the hardware.

For example, instead of ACPI, we could just have had standardized hardware
(and a few tables to define things like numbers of CPU's etc). It would
have been simpler for everybody. But no, people seem to think that it's
somehow 'better' to have wild and crazy hardware, and then have a really
complicated way of describing it - and driving it - dynamically."

Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Intel Kills Larrabee GPU, Will Not Bring a Discrete Graphics Product to Market - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News: "Intel wasn’t able to make Larrabee performance competitive in DirectX and OpenGL applications, so we won’t be getting a discrete GPU based on Larrabee anytime soon. Instead, Intel will be dedicating its resources to improving its integrated graphics. We should see a nearly 2x improvement in Intel integrated graphics performance with Sandy Bridge, and greater than 2x improvement once more with Ivy Bridge in 2012."

Texas board approves social studies standards that perceived liberal bias

Texas board approves social studies standards that perceived liberal bias
The new standards say that the McCarthyism of the 1950s was later vindicated -- something most historians deny -- draw an equivalency between Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses, say that international institutions such as the United Nations imperil American sovereignty, and include a long list of Confederate officials about whom students must learn.

Q&A: Illegal Immigrants and the U.S. Economy : NPR

Q&A: Illegal Immigrants and the U.S. Economy : NPR

There are places in the United States where illegal immigration has big effects (both positive and negative). But economists generally believe that when averaged over the whole economy, the effect is a small net positive. Harvard's George Borjas says the average American's wealth is increased by less than 1 percent because of illegal immigration.

The economic impact of illegal immigration is far smaller than other trends in the economy, such as the increasing use of automation in manufacturing or the growth in global trade. Those two factors have a much bigger impact on wages, prices and the health of the U.S. economy.

Book of Odds

Book of Odds
your odds of dating a supermodel would be somewhere around one in 178,100. That’s not so good.

RAMMap

RAMMap: "Have you ever wondered exactly how Windows is assigning physical memory, how much file data is cached in RAM, or how much RAM is used by the kernel and device drivers? RAMMap makes answering those questions easy. RAMMap is an advanced physical memory usage analysis utility for Windows Vista and higher."

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X
At the time of this writing (October 2006), the newest Apple computer models, such as the MacPro and possibly the revised MacBook Pro and the revised iMac, do not contain an onboard Infineon TPM. Apple could bring the TPM back, perhaps, if there were enough interest (after all, it is increasingly common to find TPMs in current notebook computers), but that's another story.

Creativity linked to mental health - Startpage - Karolinska Institutet

Creativity linked to mental health - Startpage - Karolinska Institutet
"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullén about his new findings.

InfoQ: Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended

InfoQ: Microsoft’s Experiments with Software Transactional Memory Have Ended
I eventually shifted focus to enforcing coarse-grained isolation through message-passing, and fine-grained isolation through type system support a la Haskell’s state monad.
...
I took this path not because I thought TM had no place in the concurrency ecosystem. But rather because I believed it did have a place, but that several steps would be needed before getting there.

Analysis: Why SAP Is Buying Sybase for $5.8B

Analysis: Why SAP Is Buying Sybase for $5.8B: "“With Sybase Unwired, the mobile apps can be written once and deployed on multiple mobile platforms” and “gives SAP the opportunity to develop new types of business applications for mobile devices.”
Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone points out “the fusion of cloud computing, application mobility and social media to transform the enterprise mobility space. This deal now gives SAP 2 out 3 in a single purchase.”"

Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life? | Reuters

Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life? | Reuters
Ellison says he learned that Sun's pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

Ezra Klein - Galbraith: The danger posed by the deficit ‘is zero’

Ezra Klein - Galbraith: The danger posed by the deficit ‘is zero’

EK: You think the danger posed by the long-term deficit is overstated by most economists and economic commentators.

JG: No, I think the danger is zero. It's not overstated. It's completely misstated.

EK: Why?

JG: What is the nature of the danger? The only possible answer is that this larger deficit would cause a rise in the interest rate. Well, if the markets thought that was a serious risk, the rate on 20-year treasury bonds wouldn't be 4 percent and change now. If the markets thought that the interest rate would be forced up by funding difficulties 10 year from now, it would show up in the 20-year rate. That rate has actually been coming down in the wake of the European crisis.

So there are two possibilities here. One is the theory is wrong. The other is that the market isn't rational. And if the market isn't rational, there's no point in designing policy to accommodate the markets because you can't accommodate an irrational entity.

The Governator at Emory: 'I was going to speak in Arizona, but I thought I'd be deported' | Political Insider

The Governator at Emory: 'I was going to speak in Arizona, but I thought I'd be deported' | Political Insider

Why AMD's notebook prospects are looking up

Why AMD's notebook prospects are looking up
The first quarter of 2010 saw the dawn of a new acronym and the start of a major shift in the PC hardware market—the move from integrated graphics processors to integrated processor graphics. In the former, the GPU is integrated into the chipset's northbridge, while in the latter, the CPU is in the same package or on the same die as the processor (e.g., Intel's Clarksdale and Arrandale 32nm parts, with in-package GPUs).
AMD doesn't have an IPG offering yet, but it doesn't yet need one. The thing that's making AMD attractive, apart from price (and price is a major factor), is that Intel's IPG just isn't that great. It's a lot better than it once was, but it's still no match for IGPs from NVIDIA or AMD.
The problem with having a not-so-great GPU in the same package as the processor die is that if you want to buy Intel's latest and greatest mobile CPU, you have to buy its GPU along with it. So you have to pay for this GPU that isn't very good and that you may not want, and then if you want real graphics performance you have to then go out and pay for an NVIDIA GPU to go with it (via Optimus or Apple's proprietary solution).
NVIDIA's Optimus is definitely a win-win for Intel, NVIDIA, and Intel users, because it gives Intel's customers the option of a better GPU that and a platform that can dynamically optimize its graphics performance to fit the running workload. But if you stack it up against a traditional CPU + IGP combination, like that which AMD offers, it's hard to imagine that all that all the shuffling graphics data back and forth between the GPU's private pool of DDR3 and the framebuffer that sits in system memory doesn't burn extra power.

Too Much | A Historic Breakthrough for U.S. Billionaires

Too Much | A Historic Breakthrough for U.S. Billionaires

In 2010 America, schools, students, and teachers share the pain. The heirs to our mega rich, meanwhile, don’t have to share anything

Announcing 500 billion digits of e...

Announcing 500 billion digits of e...
On February 20, 2010, I have sucessfully computed and verified the constant e to 500,000,000,000 decimal places.

PLoS ONE: The Newcomb-Benford Law in Its Relation to Some Common Distributions

PLoS ONE: The Newcomb-Benford Law in Its Relation to Some Common Distributions
An often reported, but nevertheless persistently striking observation, formalized as the Newcomb-Benford law (NBL), is that the frequencies with which the leading digits of numbers occur in a large variety of data are far away from being uniform. Most spectacular seems to be the fact that in many data the leading digit 1 occurs in nearly one third of all cases. Explanations for this uneven distribution of the leading digits were, among others, scale- and base-invariance. Little attention, however, found the interrelation between the distribution of the significant digits and the distribution of the observed variable. It is shown here by simulation that long right-tailed distributions of a random variable are compatible with the NBL, and that for distributions of the ratio of two random variables the fit generally improves. Distributions not putting most mass on small values of the random variable (e.g. symmetric distributions) fail to fit.

Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites

Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites
Katherine Myronuk once told me, “All complex ecosystems have parasites.

The Moral Life of Babies - NYTimes.com

The Moral Life of Babies - NYTimes.com
The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature.

255 National Academy of Sciences members, including 11 Nobel laureates, defend climate science integrity « Climate Progress

255 National Academy of Sciences members, including 11 Nobel laureates, defend climate science integrity « Climate Progress

there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:
(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Meet the New Frontline Bloggers: Security Contractors | Danger Room | Wired.com

Meet the New Frontline Bloggers: Security Contractors | Danger Room | Wired.com
“Our fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that we are fighting on behalf of a central government which is not considered legitimate by a vast majority of the population,”

Performance problem in AMD's Phenom II X6 under Linux - The H Open Source: News and Features

Performance problem in AMD's Phenom II X6 under Linux - The H Open Source: News and Features

Turbo Core and Turbo Boost interact with a system's power saving features, which clock down individual cores or the whole processor and decrease the voltage to reduce power consumption when a system is idle. Herein lies the problem with AMD's new processors in current Linux kernels: when their "Cool'n'Quiet" feature is enabled, Turbo Core processors no longer step up to their nominal speed, but operate at a slightly slower frequency.

The simplest workaround is to disable the "Cool'n'Quiet" feature. This requires users to fully disable the function in the board's BIOS set-up, or to instruct the kernel not to adapt clock speeds via cpufreq – the Fedora Linux distribution allows users to do this by stopping the "cpuspeed" daemon, while other distributions require users to blacklist the powernow-k8 kernel module, which is responsible for cpufreq in modern AMD CPUs. However, disabling the power saving features can increase an idle system's power consumption by 10 to 20 watts.

Why Intel Will Be a Mobile Loser

Why Intel Will Be a Mobile Loser
The mobile ecosystem is pretty much the same — trying to go against the ARM ecosystem is trying to reinvent the wheel. ABI Research says that ARM-based ultra-mobile devices will surpass x86-based devices by 2013 because, as Stacey wrote, “ARM has always had an advantage in mobile because the chips based on the instruction set were designed to sip power rather than glug it. That translates into a longer battery life and presumably a smaller form factor for the battery and end device.”

How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable

How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem undecidable

Geoffrey K. Pullum, Scooping the loop snooper: An elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematics Magazine 73.4 (October 2000), 319-320.

No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can’t predict whether a program will stop.

U.S. Mobile Culture Still in Stone Ages, Survey Says - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

U.S. Mobile Culture Still in Stone Ages, Survey Says - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
Overall, the survey highlighted a growing interest in next-generation mobile services. More than half of respondents said they want mobile-to-voice-over IP, 40 percent want emergency alerts, and 30 percent want mobile banking. Countries with a progressive mobile culture are already reaping the benefits. In Austria, for instance, people can pay parking meters via text messaging

If you can take a VDI instance "offline," then why don't you just always run it offline? ("Madden's Offline Paradox?") - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com

If you can take a VDI instance "offline," then why don't you just always run it offline? ("Madden's Offline Paradox?") - Brian Madden - BrianMadden.com
So my central question is "In what circumstance is the View client mode useful?" Can anyone provide an example of why I want a datacenter-hosted VDI infrastructure that is also available offline? Can anyone tell me why I should do that instead of just running everything on the client? (And don't tell me it's for users who want to occasionally go offline, because again I'll say those users should use the client-based VM solutions 100% of the time and only run a much smaller datacenter-based VDI for the specific apps or connection scenarios that need it.)

SANS: Malware FAQ: Microsoft Windows UPnP vulnerabilities

SANS: Malware FAQ: Microsoft Windows UPnP vulnerabilities
UPnP provides a specification called the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) that allows devices to dynamically discover the services offered by each other. SSDP works on top of IP networks and is implemented using UDP. Walking through a typical scenario, the first step after powering on a device will be (per specification) to obtain an IP address. This is done either through DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), where a central server in the network is assigning IP addresses from a pool, or via AutoIP, if no DHCP is available. Using AutoIP, there is good change that the device will end up in the same network as the other, unmanaged devices. [ UPNP 2] Once an IP address is obtained, the device can talk via IP to other devices in the same network.
The next step for the device is to advertise its presence to the network. This is accomplished through SSDP Advertisements. These are UDP packets multicast via the 239.255.255.250:1900 multicast address. In this case, the protocol is called HTTPMU (HTTP Multicast over UDP). The target can of course be a unicast address as well, in which case HTTPU (HTTP over UDP) is spoken. There is an Internet Draft available that explains these HTTP [HTTP] extensions in more detail [GOLAND]. The number 1900 specifies the port that other devices need to bind to in order to receive these multicasts. The multicast address is assigned to SSDP by the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) and therefore essentially hardcoded. The UDP packet contains a simple HTTP header with the NOTIFY HTTP method and the type of the SSDP message, which in this case is the header field nts: with the value ssdp:alive . The header has more interesting fields, but within the scope of the discussion, only the Location: header is of interest. It specifies a location from which any interested party can download more information on the device sending the announcement.

Microsoft Education Competencies: Humor

Microsoft Education Competencies: Humor


Has a positive and constructive sense of humor. Can laugh at him/herself and with others. Is appropriately funny and can use humor to ease tension.

Immigration and Social Security — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Immigration and Social Security — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Although the magnitudes cannot be precisely determined, the actuary has estimated that unauthorized immigrants paid as much as $13 billion in Social Security payroll taxes in 2007. About $1 billion in benefit payments were made based on unauthorized work (for example, survivor benefits paid to U.S. citizens who were dependents of deceased individuals who had made payments into the Social Security system while performing unauthorized work). Thus, undocumented immigrants improved Social Security’s cash flow by an estimated $12 billion in 2007.

Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition - robertfortner's posterous

Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition - robertfortner's posterous
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognized it yet.

My Way News - Apple shutting Lala; `Cloud' music on horizon?

My Way News - Apple shutting Lala; `Cloud' music on horizon?

Apple has been hiring staff for its North Carolina data center, and in early April advertised on its website for a chief operating engineer.

Only about a dozen data centers in the world are larger than the 500,000-square-foot facility Apple has under construction, said Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, a website that tracks such centers.

Other companies that have built structures of the same size are "major cloud computing players" such as Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., he said. Apple currently has one data center in Newark, Calif. That facility covers about 150,000 square feet and is believed to power its MobileMe service of pushing e-mail and calendar events to devices

Number of Illegal Immigrants Plunges by 1M - CBS News

Number of Illegal Immigrants Plunges by 1M - CBS News
The Department of Homeland Security reported that illegal immigrant population dropped to 10.8 million in 2009 compared to 11.6 million in 2008. It was the second consecutive annual decline and the largest in at least three decades.

Louis Brandeis - Wikiquote

Louis Brandeis - Wikiquote
Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution-an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state. The typical business corporation of the last century, owned by a small group of individuals, managed by their owners, and limited in size by their private wealth, is being supplanted by huge concerns in which the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and the property of tens of hundreds of thousands of investors are subjected, through the corporate mechanism, to the control of a few men. Ownership has been separated from control; and this separation has removed many of the checks which formerly operated to curb the misuse of wealth and power. And, as ownership of the shares is becoming continually more dispersed, the power which formerly accompanied ownership is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few... [and] coincident with the growth of these giant corporations, there has occurred a marked concentration of individual wealth; and that the resulting disparity in incomes is a major cause of the existing depression.

• Dissent, Liggett Co. v. Lee, 288 U.S. 517 (1933), at 565-67