The Demon Conservatives of Slashdot are paradoxically both in favor of a powerful, racist, homophobic state clamping down on any free thought, and an anarchic, eternal war where gold is the only value.

While I do identify my political leanings as conservative, I believe that it is an individual argument, not the political leanings of the speaker, which should be addressed in debate.

As I said, I believe that life was better in the society of the past few hundred years than it would be under a martial law imposed with the power of a modern state. I do also believe that life is better under today's society is better than it was under Napoleon. It is this improvement that I referred to as the measure of our modern civil structures.

Although a war with Britain/Canada seems implausible in hindsight, it was not always considered so unlikely. A decade prior to WW1, many British strategists considered rising American naval power to be the biggest threat to their empire. And they assumed that in a 20th century conflict with America, they could always rely on their historically ally, Germany.

My experience with cyanogenmod had been that they can't do a release until the manufacturer updates, because the drivers are closed source and cm needs updated binaries. You might catch something when your device has compatible hardware with a nexus device or something, but otherwise cm is more "ditch sense/touchwiz/blur" than "get security patches".

The probability of a secret being kept is proportional to the reciprocal of the square of the number of people that know the secret.

We survived for centuries with the number of people and level of industrialization that would remain after a widespread, devastating war, without resorting to these measures. In fact, we have measured the society that this plan seeks to "protect" by the rights and freedoms that the average citizen has gained.

I don't know what "society" means to you, but to me it's the structure by which we all agree that other people exist and have rights; martial law means that society has already fallen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/...
"In our Seneca Tradition, the Field of Plenty is seen as a spiral that has its smallest revolution out in space and its' largest revolution near the Earth. This shape could be likened to an upside-down tornado. When our Ancestors assisted the Pilgrims in planting Corn and raising crops so they would not starve, we taught them the understanding of the Field of Plenty by bringing the cornucopia baskets full of vegetables. The Iroquois women wove these baskets as a physical reminder that Great Mystery provides through the Field of Plenty. The Pilgrims were taught that giving prayers of gratitude was not just a Christian concept. The Red Race understood thanksgiving on a daily basis.
            The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Because it wouldn't get as many views as you think.

Because it's not as juicy as you think.

OTOH, air pressure at sea level is a variable which can change significantly in even a short period of time. Still, dramatic changes don't happen, but it's better to measure it in .... sorry, I should be metric, but I only think in PSI (pounds / square inch).

I suggested this at IBM Research around 1999, and built a proof-of-concept speech-controlled 3X3 display wall of old ThinkPads otherwise destined for "the crusher". Wow, was my supervisor surprised (to put it mildly) when he got back from a two week vacation, as I had built it when he was away so he could not say "no". :-) Another contractor in the lab described his reactions to me though, and helped calm him down. :-)

A couple regular employees associated with the lab had helped me get the equipment. Every laptop had to be officially tracked with an owner and even locked down to comply with IBM policy, even though they had been discarded/scrubbed and were heading for destruction. Ignoring time costs, the laptop locks were the most expensive part of the project in a sense given pretty much everything else was recycled, and a regular employee coworker got them for me out of his own budget (thanks, David!). Another regular employee helped with the networking aspects and tracking (thanks, Mel!).

The people are IBM who dealt with old equipment were very interested in the idea. Who wants to see useable equipment get scrapped? And there was so much older equipment from such a big company, plus from leases and such. But I guess, within Research itself, the project then was not that exciting to people focused on "new" things.

I even wrote up a mock commercial for such display walls with a female executive mother working from home in front of a huge display wall, and her little daughter came by to say hello, and the mom had programmed something fun to show up on the wall for her daughter.

Before we got treadmill workstations, my wife also liked the idea as a way to keep fit -- that you would be walking around all day in front of this display wall you were talking to, rather than sitting in one place and typing.

ThinkPads were interesting in that they could fold flat, so you could layer them on top of each other. However, I also suggested back then that ThinkPads could eventually be designed for reuse in this specific way.

But as just a contractor, and about then hitting the 1.5 year limit for contractors at IBM Research (a rule to prevent them being ruled as employees), the idea sort of fizzled. There was some preliminary negotiations about hiring me as a regular employee, but I probably asked for too much as I had mixed feelings then about the all embracing IP agreements that IBM had and similar things (although I really liked the speech group -- great people), and I also had hopes to even then get back to educational and design software my wife and I had been writing. I did go back a couple more times at IBM as a contractor, but it was for other groups unrelated to speech. Anyway, so that idea faded away.

The display wall looked a bit like part of a Jeopardy set, and you would tell it what specific screens you wanted to do what with. Another speech researcher asked me to set it up in a new lab when I was leaving. So I can wonder if, indirectly, the idea floating around sparked something at IBM Research eventually related to Watson and Jeopardy? :-)

My major use case for the wall was to use as a design tool to make complex engineering projects, like a self-replicating space habitat. However, I also tried to get the IBM Legal department interested in using such a speech-activated display wall for reviewing legal documents and tracking cases, with using such systems backed by a supercomputer becoming a perk for IBM lawyers, but also did not get far with that.

I'm now past the expiration of my non-disclosure agreement on such things that I did or learned at IBM Research back then, thankfully! :-)

Anyway, one could probably do much the same with discarded cell phones...

Well....sort of. The CMB is modified by galaxies that are too faint to see, though I don't know by how much. It's filtered by intervening dust clouds moving WRT both us and the "origin of the signals". Etc. I normally assume that this is taken account of as best we can, but it's not unmodified signal. If you look at the raw (uncorrected) observations, I don't know how much noise is present, but clearly that are signals too weak to be recognized even though detected.

OTOH, I am not a cosmologist. But I do recognize that error bars are important, and that they tend to get left out of popular articles.

More wordy?? Hey, you have to cut it off at around 1,200 pages. Printing presses can't handle much more!

A comment by me nine years ago on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"... So, what is a bottleneck is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory, or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology) a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice, despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible) in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure for sustaining human life in style in space (or on Earth).
    So that is why I think billionaires like Jeff Bezos spending money on CATS [Cheap Access To Space] is a tragedy -- they should IMHO be spending their money on DOGS instead (Design of Great Settlements). But the designs can be done more slowly without much money using volunteers and networked personal computers -- which was the point of a SSI paper I co-authored:
            http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... 2001_web.html
or a couple other sites I made in that direction:
        http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
        http://www.freevolution.net/
My work is on a shoestring, but when I imagine what even just a million dollars a year could bring in returns supporting a core team of a handful of space settlement designers, working directly on the bottleneck issues and eventually coordinating the volunteer work of hundreds or thousands more, it is frustrating to see so much money just go into just building better rockets when the ones we have already are good enough for now."