Too bad the operators of coal plants don't have to take all that into account.

Any idiot knows you have to do it a million and one times.

Nope. Consider doubling your password size from 64 to 128 bits. While it would take twice as long to check all the bits and make sure they're correct, brute forcing now has to guess among 2^128, rather than 2^64, possibilities, which is enormously more difficult.

This is a gross simplification of how any real-life security scheme works, but it illustrates the concept.

When did "News for nerds, stuff that matters" disappear from the Slashdot homepage?

"Stuff that matters", indeed.

God, you blinkered, jackbooted, establishment thugs disgust me. You pretend to be open-minded while you mindlessly oppress anyone who dares to think outside the approved mainstream.

Just because this guy is a convicted felon (for fraud) doesn't mean he's committing fraud now. Just because he's been caught lying about this exact thing before doesn't rule out the possibility that he's discovered some genuinely revolutionary new physical process since then that makes the thing he was lying about before work for real now.

You mainstream scientific establishment sheep make me sick. If everyone was like you we'd still think the Earth was flat like everyone before Columbus did.

Thank you for this. Here's a particularly damning excerpt from the introduction:

- Considering the fundamental and crucial importance of the measurement of the input
electrical power, it is rather surprising that the report is quite brief on the details of the
electrical circuits and measurements. The lack of a clear circuit diagram has already been
mentioned. Other concerns not discussed in the report are the possibility of DC power, the
waveforms of voltage and current at various points in the system, the possibility of power
through ground leads or other ways that undisclosed electrical power can be supplied to the
device.

- Previous tests have reported important discrepancies between the electrical input poweras
claimed by Rossi and those actually measured by specialists with proper electrical
measurement equipment, to the extent where no excess heat production could be inferred
[2]. With the knowledge of such critical observations a much more thorough reporting on the
electrical measurements should have been provided.

- To be more specific still, since the results of the expert measurements referred to in the
previous paragraph seem to have deviated from what was claimed by Rossi by a factor of
about 3, which happens to coincide with the excess heat observed also in the March test, we
would have expected a clear description of how the risk of such inconsistencies was avoided,
and even an involvement of the specialists from the SP institute.

- In view of these severe inconsistencies, the fact that the control unit providing the electrical
power was “not available for inspection, inasmuch as they are part of the industrial trade
secret” (pg 15) is even more disturbing.

Did you mean "undo"? I honestly can't tell...

Simple: with unlimited energy, we can run every air conditioner on the planet 24/7, fixing global warming as a side effect!

Not all that well in Python's case, but if 2.6 sucked as bad as PHP does now, there might be more urgency. And Perl 6 might get a bit more traction when and if it starts existing.

I know, motherfuckers act like they forgot about DRA.

You're right of course. I took the AC to mean that negative quantities don't exist objectively, which is a different issue. I may have misunderstood.

Uh, yeah, we can measure -1. The charge of an electron. The distance along the x-axis that I travel when I walk one meter west. The effect on a wave when it encounters an identical one 180 degrees out of phase.

And if negative numbers worry you, this will blow your mind: by all indications, the way things really work, at the quantum level, is unavoidably governed by complex numbers. Don't let that "imaginary" label fool you...those bastards are really real, too. Sorry.

Put down the Left Behind novels and step slowly away.

I think you've taken a valid point and stretched it a little far here. If we'd had eight years of Gore starting in 2000, do you think Iraq would have played out exactly the same? If we were on our way to eight years of McCain starting in 2008, do you think the trends in health insurance would be what they are?

Whether you approve or disapprove, you have to agree they'd have been different.