We get the same thing at bird dog field trials from popper loads (which can travel a couple hundred yards in a good wind) -- it's kinda like being spattered by light sleet.

The government should be =restricted= by the Constitution, as the Founders intended: government can or must do *these few things*, and all other actions are forbidden.

Well, your hair doesn't want to be free, but it falls out all the same...

Hey, maybe they can put their money where their mouth is -- get their DNA sequenced and torrent it to the world!

> It does limit the functionality though since you don't get emergency calls where someone you know had to borrow a phone and such.

Those people can leave a voicemail message. Most telemarketers and robocalls don't. When I get a mystery calling number, I let it go to voicemail. If it's important they can leave a message, and I can call them back.

> I wonder what the fastest possible chemically-propelled-rocket probe is?

Slower than a Nuclear-ion probe. Nuclear in this case means a small nuclear reactor, say in the 1 MW power range. Plasma thrusters have an exhaust velocity of ~ 50 km/s, and it is reasonable to reach 3x exhaust velocity, thus 150 km/s. The mass ratio (propellant to empty mass) would be 20:1 in that case. For any kind of chemical rocket to reach that velocity, it would need a mass ratio of 10 trillion, which is seriously impractical.

150 km/s = 31.6 AU/year, therefore missions to around 300 AU would be reasonable (10 year trip time). 1 MW reactor with radiators would mass ~ 20 tons. 300 AU probe would mass ~ 5 tons. Propellant load would be 25x20 = 500 tons. Propellant flow rate is .57 grams/sec or 49 kg/day. So thrust time is 28 years, which is a bit long. It would help if the reactor could be made lighter.

However, internal combustion engined vehicles require fossil fuel to run

Internal combustion engines can run quite well on hydrogen, ethanol, methane, and any number of other non-fossil sourced flammable gases.

In addition, plug-in hybrid vehicles offer a possible path for oil demand to drop drastically, without requiring any more improvements to battery technology. The vast majority of trips can be powered by electricity, while only longer trips need consume any oil. They need only drop in price.

There are already lots of inexpensive community colleges (last place I lived it was $25/credit). There was a huge expansion of the program back in the 1960s, and it has continued to expand -- there are now over 1100 such schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And in Montana, the state university is entirely free to seniors.

Deer will also eat themselves out of house and home, even in areas where they are native.

And looking at the history of the Sahara (which during major warm periods has not been a desert), and the difference between grazed (vibrant) and not-grazed (desertified) -- it appears that climate changes and disuse are the culprits, far more than anything humans do.

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

Bah, pikers. I have WinXP installs with over 10 years of heavy use, with zero reinstalls -- and no issues. What on earth are some of these people doing??!

Prove that he doesn't have evidence. Your saying so doesn't make it so.
Also, I want to know *why* is it so important for you to have a perfect validated model? YOU are the one who seems to be making this political.

TSX was disabled in Broadwell and early Haswell chips due to a bug. Do these new Broadwell-U have the TSX fix?

I have an experimental workload for which TSX would be very helpful, due to a need for atomic reads and writes of unaligned 10-byte data items. As far as I can determine, x86 provides no other way to guarantee atomicity of an unaligned 10-byte read or write.

> The hard part is getting up to speed, and slowing down at the destination.

The diffusion method I call "slow interstellar" doesn't require that. If you already live in the Sun's Oort Cloud, and another star gets close enough that the Oort Clouds overlap, you only have to match velocity, which is on the order of 50 km/s. After that you drift along with the other star, spreading to fill their environment, until another close stellar encounter happens. This method requires more patience than humans possess, though.

>English will remain the dominant language because it is so versatile and malleable.

Malleable, this language is

On the other hand, with the rise of real-time voice translation, the need to all speak the same language may go away.

> We know (or can know) which bitcoins were "lost" in MtGox

No, we can't, because those were not block chain transactions. They were funds transactions internal to Mt. Gox's account books. Let's assume Mt. Gox had 500,000 bitcoins in "cold storage" (the private keys printed out and stored in a safety deposit box, where no hacker can get to them). Some of those 500,000 coins belong to Mt.Gox itself, from accumulated trading fees. The rest belong to customers. Who owns what is kept track on their internal database. By fiddling with the database, they can move ownership between accounts without ever touching the coins in cold storage. Being able to trace what shenanigans happened to the database depends entirely on available backups of the database *before* the shenanigans happened.

> So couldn't the top 5 or 10 players in the network, who collectively have something like 75% of the computing power, collude and simply invalidate the transactions out of MtGox?

If by that you mean transactions from a Mt.Gox owned address to one outside Mt. Gox, again no. Blocks from 9 months to 3 years ago (when Mt. Gox was presumably messing around are linked to every block afterwards (that's why it is called a "block chain"). The linkage is by including the hash value of one block as part of the data in the next block (along with new transactions). If you change an old transaction, the hash of that block will change, and no longer match the value stored in the next block. You would have to recalculate new hashes for every block after the one you want to change. This is basically impossible, as it took the whole network's combined power to generate the existing series of block hashes. If 75% of the network gave up working on new blocks, they would lose future income *and* past income, as a different set of people would get the coins generated in each recalculated block. In turn, all the people who spent all those block rewards, or parts thereof, downstream of the miners, would have their balances invalidated.