I didn't RTFA, but TFS says she used sox, which I wouldn't classify as "SDR software" (though as a rather versatile DSP package, of course it can be used as such), and which is installed by default in a lot of Linux distros.

You probably could have voted for Gary Johnson last presidential election. (If you were in Michigan, he was a write-in candidate, not on the ballot. If you were in Oklahoma, you couldn't vote for him at all. In the other 48 states, he was on the ballot.)

He has said:

On one hand, that's not exactly the same as calling for complete abolition of the TSA, merely removing them from "airport screening and security" -- it leaves unstated what other TSA missions (new or extant) he might support. On the other hand, it's a lot more like abolishing the TSA than either the R or D candidates proposed... (I haven't followed his campaign closely; maybe he made a less ambiguous statement at some point.)

It's not clear to me that the president has the power to abolish the TSA without congressional involvement, but AFAICS there's nothing stopping him from downsizing it to one guy who sits in an office and eats Skittles all day and updates the terror threat level to the color he just ate.

So in some sense, I believe GP is correct that we tolerate it. If enough Americans were angry enough about the TSA that they were willing to put up with any of Gary Johnson's positions they don't like, and let go of the differences between the Republican and Democrat candidates that make them fight for the less-bad instead of a vote "wasted" on a third party candidate, they could all have voted for Gary Johnson, and the TSA might well be effectively neutralized by now. (Or yes, maybe Gary Johnson would have turned out to be corrupted by power, just like every other candidate who makes good-sounding promises in his campaign, and reneges on them as soon as he's in office.)

But of course there's a long way between "acceptable" and "so unacceptable I'll put it ahead of all other issues combined", so his equivalence of "Americans tolerate [the TSA]" with "we have said ... the TSA is acceptable" is pretty bogus.

Forces in cables don't work like that. If the cable has negligible mass (for this application, that's not a bad approximation), the tension at every point is equal, so the tension is 50 tons everywhere. If the weight's not negligible, the tension is highest in the center, because the mass of the cable adds more tension, but this could be greater than, less than, or equal to 100 tons depending on the cable (in fact for reasonable cables it will be much closer to 50 tons than 100 tons).

To get acceptable speed/radius, I used Theodore Hall's SpinCalc, and set the rotation rate to 3 RPM. This yields a radius of 100m. (Most sources suggest 3RPM is ok, one source suggests 2 RPM, which would not about double the material requirements.)

So for actual numbers for actual materials (sorry, I can't be arsed to get numbers for carbon nanotube, because we can't make serious cables of that at present), we need a steel cable* that can support 50 tons. Actually, we want more like 50 steel cables that can support over (let's say 10% over) 1 ton each, so we can make a cross-linked structure, to reduce vulnerability to meteoroid strikes. (I'd think something like a hyperboloid tower would work nicely, where you have 25 lines slanting to the left and 25 to the right, and they're fastened everywhere a left and a right line cross.)
Casting about the internet for a suitable cable, we find this, with 2240 pound working load and weight of 0.18 pounds/ft. We need 50x200m = 10km = 33000 ft., so 6000 pounds. Adding in something for the fasteners to make the cross-linked structure, maybe 4 tons.
Given 4 tons of cable etc., it should be obvious the extra tension due to the cable structure's own weight is less than 2 tons (2 instead of 4 because half of it is on each side of center) -- after all, the centripetal acceleration is a maximum of 1g at the outside, but drops off to zero at the center. In fact, since acceleration varies linearly with radius, the average acceleration over the cable is 0.5g, and tension varies from 50 tons at each end to 51 tons at the center.
(Of course one would need to analyze the actual layout of the cable structure proposed, to ensure that cutting any one segment would in fact redistribute tension among the intact cable segments such that none exceeds the working limit -- the 10% (now diminished by the 2% increase in cable tension) margin was just a guess. If we need more strength, use more strands and/or heavier cable.)

*Why a steel cable? Of course NASA can do much better, with a cable of Kevlar or some such fiber, and save valuable mass. But boring old steel cable is what I'm most confident estimating with, so it's what I ran the actual numbers with as well.

While it lacks the advantage of the author plugging it in his /. sig, I think Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy might be a bit more widely-read, and it presents substantial evolution on short timescales (single-digit generations), which I think your book doesn't. (Based on your comments above, and on the first chapter taking place millions of years hence -- I haven't read beyond that, though I plan to read the whole thing once the epub is available.)

These days the computer I spend most time touching is my TF700T. Though sold as a "tablet" with dockable keyboard, I keep it docked all the time (more useful + more battery) and use it as what I wish my Eee netbook had been -- a lightweight, low-power machine with just enough juice for the common stuff, and let a server(s) handle all the routine heavy-lifting that would be annoying and/or would kill battery life on the laptop (e.g. torrents). (The Eee fell down for two reasons -- mainly battery life, but also the 1024x600 screen proved more annoying than I'd expected. 1920x1200 on a 10" display is much nicer.)

I still use a desktop when I want more screen space, for apps only available for x86 (most notably Bricscad), and for some games, but the laptop sees a lot more use, and is completely silent.

While I get the connection to Rule 34, I'm pretty sure Google Glass in its current form doesn't help you catch glimpses up strangers' skirts.

/.ers are supposed to be technically knowledgeable, at least within our own areas of expertise. (Though we're always loudest and most confident when speaking outside our areas of expertise.)

However, /.ers don't RTFA. No, not even the abstract.

Hell, you're lucky if we read the summary.

YMBNH.

Or as neither.
I like Sven-Ola's debian kit which takes advantage of the (mostly) disjoint directory structure of Android and Debian (or rather LSB) to run Debian and Android in the same root. The benefit over chroot is that you can plug in a USB drive, SD card, etc. and instantly have access in /Removable/Foo for both Android and Debian apps, as well as the ability to use Debian programs (e.g. text editor) in the Android hierarchy. You can get the same functionality with enough bind mounts, but debian-kit makes it a lot simpler IMO.

I'd also recommend zshaolin for those looking for a friendly *n*x environment without installing a whole distribution, or if they don't have and can't/won't get root access.

I did say "Unless/until we invent some SF tech like ... onboard AIs capable of autonomous combat". I do agree that that's likely to happen, someday, but I think handling the job of a fighter pilot (with a low enough failure rate to be politically viable) is more "SF technology" than "a few incremental advances" -- but of course I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong in a few years.

The difference between a car and a fighter jet is not merely one of degrees of freedom and speed, but a more fundamental one: a car works best if it kills nobody, and worst if it kills everybody. A fighter jet is a failure whether it kills everybody or nobody -- it must kill the enemy and not kill friends to be useful.

Fallback behavior for situations the AI doesn't understand is pretty easy for cars, and relatively harmless even if somebody figures out how to reliably trigger it, since it'll be designed to be the safest course of action, but an equivalent for a fighter jet is a serious liability one way or the other, since it's either a danger (trying to keep working in the face of spurious or contradictory input risks misidentifying friendlies as enemies) or a liability (enemies win if it renders your drone temporarily harmless).

Of course the same double bind applies to human pilots, as any number of friendly-fire incidents demonstrate, but as with self-driving cars, the (computer-augmented) human solution is already entrenched, and superseding it with a humanless solution will not require merely matching the rate of errors that is excused/accepted among humans, but dramatically reducing it.

This is a fuel cell, not a secondary battery. You recharge it by putting more fuel (in this case, sugar) in. Of course it has better energy density than secondary batteries (as a rule, fuel cells do), but it's mostly not very applicable to the same uses.

Comparing it to Li-ion (as in TFS, and I presume TFA) rather than to existing fuel-cell technology is not only not useful, but harmful, as it causes people to get the entirely wrong impression about it, as evidenced by the questions you ask. But that's tech journalism for you.

By having a local pilot whose not nearly as subject to hacking/jamming as current drones' up- and down-links?

Of course the hacking problems, the not-even-bothering-with-encryption problems, etc. can all be fixed, eventually, but jamming remains impossible to completely prevent with current tech.

Of course one can take measures to reduce susceptibility, but that's just an arms race with the jammers. Unless/until we invent some SF tech like quantum-entangled transceiver pairs or onboard AIs capable of autonomous combat, drones will have jammable communication links, and that disadvantage may or may not outweigh the advantage of high-G maneuverability.

I didn't try to explain it, or to blame it on anything*, but merely pointed out your bogus argument. You've blatantly misrepresented my post -- do you not realize that anyone reading this thread can scroll up and see exactly what I posted? -- and shifted the goalposts from "there was no shortage, therefore price rises weren't the result of Econ 101's 'invisible hand' at work" to "if Econ 101's 'invisible hand' had worked, there would have been no shortage". Congratulations on that mindbender.

Regarding my previous statement, "... revealing a serious failure in competence and/or honesty. (I wouldn't claim to know which.)", a failure of honesty it is. Thanks for the clarification.

*In fact I specifically disclaimed such a statement, to wit:

Natural gas? Cheap and abundant.
Natural gas in pipelines flowing to New England power plants? Not so much.

If you don't understand how that would make a difference, it's likely you never took this Econ 101 you speak of. (That, or perhaps you think pipelines work by magic, and any mass flow rate through any size pipe is feasible from both engineering and economic perspectives? To put it in Ted Stevens-like terms, pipelines are like the internet, not like a truck.)

Not to say the natural gas market in New England is, or bears particularly close resemblance to, the elegant, efficient resource-allocation method modeled and taught in Econ 101, but your attempt to use the practice of gas flaring as evidence that there wasn't a genuine scarcity of usable natural gas in a certain place and time discredits you by revealing a serious failure in competence and/or honesty. (I wouldn't claim to know which.)

Actually, snapchat's captcha is so incredibly computer-friendly that writing a program to break it is probably the cheapest/easiest way for once. Seriously, it's like some sort of homework assignment from a computer vision class.

Of course it is. Judges, like everyone else human, have a tendency to zealously guard what they perceive as their own turf. But it should be obvious that one party to such a turf dispute cannot be trusted to give an unbiased answer, so I'm not sure why you'd bring it up.

Maybe in your state. In Indiana, Section 19 of our state constitution says:

Now of course that's not the same as a constitutional right to jury nullification -- the law here is placed in the same situation as the facts, so it's no more or less acceptable to ignore the law in the interest of rendering a just verdict than it is to ignore the facts in the same interest. (Of course how acceptable that is, or under what circumstances, is endlessly debatable.) However, just as a jury's right and duty to resolve contradictory or ambiguous evidence gives them considerable power to ignore the facts altogether, and there's no effective way to strip them of this power without compromising their proper role, any jury with the right and duty to resolve contradictory or ambiguous law does have the power of jury nullification, with no practical way to stop it without removing the law from their purview altogether.

You're getting your standard anti-nullification example all wrong. What you meant is "... you get mostly bad results, as in all-white juries finding white defendants not-guilty of crimes against black victims on the basis of race rather than guilty on the basis of evidence."

And supposing a juror is swayed by your argument, and decide not to nullify an unjust law, in what way does that prevent your all-white jury from committing the same perversion of justice anyway? If it doesn't, then that's not much of an argument.