Reminds me of the Steven Wright line:

"In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, "Cut it out.""

There isn't one word in the referenced article that is specific to energy delivery systems.

These guys are asking for the silver bullet to solve any cyber security problem in any system from any threat. The reward:, a measly 20 million.

Why do we have a compelling reason to care why these future prediction markets behave?

You chose to devote a big chunk of your life to debunking rather than just ignoring those people. You must feel that they do a lot of harm to make it worth your efforts.

Aside from the obvious, stealing money, please elaborate on the kinds of harm these fraudsters cause.

I didn't mean to list them in any particular order.

However, I believe that Multics deeply influenced all following O.S.s including Unix. Simply trace the careers of the MIT students who worked on Multics to trace the influence. It was not so much that Multics design was great, but that the students learned the ins/outs pros/cons difficulties/benefits and obstacles to O.S. design.

IBM's FORTRAN compiler, ditto COBOL.

Eliza, the fake psychiatrist.

Texas Instrument's Speak and Spell

Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple ][

On board control software for Apollo 11, ditto for the Voyager space probes.

MIT's Multics O.S.

The Xerox Star office workstation

OS360

Unix and C compiler

Dartmouth Basic

General Electric's time sharing O.S.

I speak English and Swedish. I find it easy to concoct "Swinglish" words and phrases that are invalid in any language yet easy for me to remember.

I think that ought to be secure.

So it would jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.

We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say agree to a change it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard terms or you are denied access to health care.

During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.

In the USA, the only choice is to opt in or die.

So it wold jam things up to treat some patient's information different than other's? I think that proves the deceptive fallacy in the patient opt out of the original HIPPA.

We have all seen the HIPPA privacy disclosure forms they give you in the doctors office. Part of that form says that you have the right to request changes with respect to how your data is handled. But as coldwetdog points out, if they say yes it could require new software, maybe even new sort fields in their databases (horrors!). So of course their reply is no. You accept the standard term or you are denied access to health care.

During the original debate over HIPPA much was said about opt in versus opt out. That is all a deceptive smokescreen if the providers are allowed to design their software assuming that the privacy handling of 100% of patient records is identical to all others. As long as that is true, not even one patient in the nation can opt differently than anyone else, because that would require special software and maybe more DB fields.

In the USA, the only choice is to opt in or die.

Pumped storage hydro is a superb way to store and retrieve electric energy. Indeed it is the only proven way to do it on a massive scale.

Power engineers love pumped storage facilities because of a long list of desirable properties they have. From the power grid point of view, they blend well with everything ever done in the past or contemplated in the future.

USA slashdotters may be interested to hear that the Blenheim-Gilboa pumped storage facility has been aiding the reliability and affordability of electric power in New York State and New York City for decades.

The innovation in the Belgian case is to do it using a hole in the water instead of a lake on a mountain top. I'm sure that it will present it's own engineering challenges, but nothing insurmountable comes to mind. We should all wish them good luck.

Is it possible in the USA to sue for damages due to the nocebo effect (I.e. the flip side of the placebo effect)? The harmful effects are very real.

If yes, then victims could sue sensational journalists. Lawyers who told women they must be sick because of breast implants could be sued by those women who actually suffered because of the nocebo effect. Purveyors of end of the world scenarios and global warming fear mongers could become defendants.

On the other hand, does the first amendment protect all speech no matter how harmful? It is not hard to imagine causing serious harm and even death by speech.

You don't need pics. It was donated to The Smithsonian and is on display in D.C. (I think) in one of the Air & Space museums.

That's no joke. The superfund law (i.e. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980) makes current owners or leaseholders responsible for cleanups even though a prior tenant did the pollution.

My company almost got nailed by this on a property owned by New York State but was used by the federal governement for rocket research in 1947. We even found a V2 rocket wreck hidden in the bushes. Spilled rocket fuel was the contaminant. In the end, EPA had mercy on us because we were truly innocent and too poor to pay anyhow, but they could have nailed us.

Now the site has been taken over by a brand new billion dollar semiconductor foundry. I sure hope the owners of that have made their peace with EPA.

Any potential tenant of NASA land could have the same problem. IANAL so I don't know if NASA can grant them immunity to EPA's demands.

HIPPA only applies to health care providers. Anyone else who gets your data by any means, is not restricted by HIPPA. Notable examples are life insurance companies. You sign a waiver to give them access to your health info to qualify for a policy. After that they can do whatever they want with the data. They can, and do, routinely pass it along to a medical information clearing house in Massachusetts (I forget the name of it), which is a third party. The clearing house dishes out the information (including personal identifying information) to anyone who wants to pay for it.

Americans imagine that they own their personal data. Data (information, facts) are not property and can not be owned. Intellectual property laws bestow some rights but not "ownership" You can own the rights but not the facts. If you could own facts, then you could prevent police and courts from using facts about your behavior against you.

Records, on the other hand are ordinary property. Whoever owns the records can treat them like any other property, regardless of the information they contain (exceptions for national security, for parties covered by HIPPA, records under subpoena and so on). There was once a notable case of a hospital in Las Vegas. They rented a warehouse to store paper patient records. They failed to pay the rent. The landlord sold all property stored in the warehouse to recover money owed to him. Neither the landlord, nor any subsequent owner of those paper records was restricted in any way as to what they could do with them.

Kudos to Gary Marcus for raising such a provocative point. I sneer however at his suggestion that we bring in the legislators and lawyers to help us to deal with the problems. That is a naive/liberal view as opposed to a libertarian/cynical view.

I cynically don't expect enlightened laws ever in our future. Instead we will depend on the courts to once again try to apply laws and principles of centuries past to the problems of today. You could say that's the American Way.