Especially since he's co-founder of "Intellectual Ventures," which is a HUGE holder of patents.

Yeah, I don't know that a $5,000 oven that cooks a bit faster than the one I already have and has all of these points of calibration that can go wrong is going to be better than a straightforward metal box with a heat source and a thermostat.

"Just because it's their job doesn't mean it's okay."

Um...WHAT?

"And the data taken is used in ways it as not intended on citizen from all over the world."

Citation? I don't know of any reference to this, even in abstract. Can you please define the intended uses of COMINT and SIGINT, and the ways that are forbidden in the context of espionage please?

"Can only hope you are one of the first when they come and take people away."

You don't sound any better than the demonized version of the NSA you speak of.

When most of these corporations first formed, the form of contraception being discussed in this case didn't exist. So...you're saying that if anyone incorporates, they should be willing to accept the consequences of anything that technology may come up with in the future? Um...no. That's not how rights work, and starting a business does not deprive someone of their rights.

I actually interpreted it a slightly different way, but the difference is important.

They specifically stated that "closely held" corporations could hold this exemption. To point, these are corporations that have a very small number of owners indeed. The way I see it, the intent is this: the people who own the corporation do not wish to have the resources of that corporation...which they themselves own and govern...used for purposes that conflict with their moral views. We're not talking IBM or Google here, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of stakeholders. We're talking corporations that are held by a handful of people whose views of such things align closely with one another.

As it stands today, 85% of corporations proactively supported paying for contraception ahead of Obamacare or any other mandate from state or federal government. But the stalwarts were those that fit the above description. Me, I'm not at all aligned with the pro-life crowd...but I can at least see the logic here. Just because I own a corporation doesn't mean that I can't care about what the money produced by it helps support, even indirectly. It's one of those fine lines that makes America challenging, because of the incredible demands that freedom and the citizenship that goes with it place on us all.

And I think it's cool as shit that we are debating it. The fact that we all care, one way or another, is absolutely, utterly, and incredibly beautiful.

Having just spent 4 days driving a new Cadillac, I beg to disagree. To GM, I have this to say: faggots, faggots, FAGGOTS. Let's see, where to start. Touchscreen controls that hide themselves until your finger gets near the touchscreen. Touchscreen controls that have the volume control set up in the exact same region as the play/pause/rewind/fast-forward controls so that if your finger moves at all while touching the controls, you end up with a volume bar across the bottom instead of what you wanted. Below the screen, all of the controls (for climate control) are both touch-sensitive (no tactile or audio feedback) and close enough that your fingers brush against them without you realizing...and since there's no information for climate control displayed whatsoever except when you're in the process of changing the settings (and that information auto-hides shortly thereafter) you won't realize that you just cranked the temperature on one side of the car to 78 degrees until you wonder why the air conditioning seems to be fighting itself. The touchscreen was enormous...but very little of that real estate was actually put to use. No audio settings control on the steering wheel at all, save for volume. All in all, an abysmally bad user interface on what GM considers one of their nicest cars. I had to spend way more time looking at the display than I was comfortable doing just to change tracks on my iPhone, or just check to see if the temperature was still what it was supposed to be.

Detroit needs to have a Coke and a smile...and then shut the fuck up so that they can listen to Google.

"Orange is the New Black"

Point #1 is a generalization, and incorrect. When you get into a lot of the higher-level work in cyber, you have to deal with background checks anyways, even outside of a government clearance. While the highest of the high clearances (like a TS/SCI for the NSA) will be like walking across hot coals, the overwhelming majority of clearances are not that hard a process to endure. And the report functionally states, "lower the amount of clearance bullshit and more people will be hireable." So yeah, Point #1 is just plain wrong.

Point #2 is kind of right. Jessup isn't a great place, but you don't have to live there...just work there. You can easily work at Jessup but live in, say, Takoma Park or Columbia or any of the other really nice neighborhoods that are within 30 minutes. Where you work != where you live.

Point #3 is dead-on right. Cyber people who are excellent are all autodidacts, in my experience...and the rapid and violent nature of change in the industry demands such.

It ain't that easy to throw away 25Mw of generation at the drop of a hat. And even if it was, that only covers generation spikes...which are relatively easy to deal with compared to generation drop. How do you deal with the generation drop when you've got 3 minutes to avoid an overfrequency event...but it takes 20 minutes to spin up the demand CT asset because some cloud cover just moved in over Oahu?

Sorry, but I think that the power company knows better than you how to manage a power grid. And nobody in the industry faults HECO for how they're handling it.

Not a red herring at all.

One...China doesn't have a power grid that's about a century old...they built most of theirs in the last 15 years. So it's a different architecture entirely. Ours looks a lot like extension cords plugged in, running north-south.

Two...the Chinese power grid is still wildly unstable...go there sometime and see for yourself.

Three...you're totally far off in your statement to begin with; China is not only more than two orders of magnitude more dirty than the US per watt in terms of all emissions (carbon, sulfur dioxide, heavy metals, etc.), they are also nowhere near getting to anything like Germany has. They may make a lot of PV equipment, but they don't use much of it themselves.

Or have you not noticed that every Chinese city is totally covered in smog?

It looks like about 2 percent of total generation capacity in the United States (which has a bit more than 1,000 GW).

And this is something that makes me crazy when talking about Germany's initiatives. I think what they're doing is fantastic, and definitely the way of the future, don't get me wrong. But there are posts in Slashdot that are the equivalent of, "Oh, let's just do the same thing here to...it looks easy!" And nothing could be farther from the truth.

Issue 1: Geographic size.
Renewables are great in that they *can* be cheap and are, almost always, quite clean. But in the US we have a couple of challenges. One, the best place for wind farms is not too close to large population centers. Sure you can put a few wind turbines here and there, but if you want meaningful amounts of power, you need to take advantage of lightly-populated regions with lots of reliable wind...and these aren't exactly close by to cities. Given the amount of area that a solar farm takes up, the same holds true there as well, though not always to the same degree of distance. Now, enter VARS. Without voltage support, the power won't travel these long distances. T. Boone Pickens made this mistake...he got ready to build out large wind farms, and then suddenly discovered that the distance over which the power had to travel to get to the people who needed it was a nightmare.

Issue 2: Balancing.
Power grids must keep generation and load in balance. Otherwise, you get multiple bad things, including underfrequency and overfrequency events. I won't go into the full details of that (it's a rabbit hole) but suffice to say that it is very very bad. And the balance doesn't just have to be within X power company, as they are interconnected with their neighbors. Entire groups of such companies themselves are organized into managed groups under the control of a Balancing Authority. In some markets there's energy trading, and in others it's more tightly regulated so that such speculation isn't permissible.

But I digress. Under the old way (nuclear, hydroelectric and fossil fuel generation) load was variably predictable and uncontrollable by the power companies, but generation was something they had solid control over. If load went up, they either increased output at a plant or spun up reserve capacity...if load went down, they went the other way. But when you have renewables, you lose a degree of that positive direct control. The wind slows down and your wind turbines suddenly push less power. The sun comes out and you suddenly have more watts on the grid than you want to have. In Hawaii, HECO has issued a moratorium on new solar panels on homes, because it's so bad that it's threatening to destabilize their grid...the only grid on the planet where one single modern power company has control of the whole thing. (Hawaii isn't interconnected because, well...see above over 'nightmare of pushing power over long distances'.) And just the number of people who have their own photovoltaic panels on their homes is causing them grief. Because of how unpredictable sunlight is...in Hawaii. Yeah, it really is that freakin' bananas. It was expected based on their ideal combination of zero interconnectivity, steady weather and fairly stable power consumption levels (not having industrial facilities makes load prediction pretty easy) that they could support 20% penetration of distributed power generation using PV. They're at 10% now, and in trouble.

So, yeah...in short: Germany's done a great job leading the way. But their power grid is 1/20th the size of ours in terms of power generation/usage, and their nation is also a fraction of ours in size. So what they did can't just be copied and pasted into the US to get us to the same proportion of renewable generation.

Yeah, but Intel and AMD will go bankrupt if they make chips just for "some of us." And if you look at where Intel has gotten their speed increases, very little of it in the past decade has been from clock speed. Ghz is no longer where the performance boost is to be found.

I'm a little confused as to why you're citing the chip's low low price of "less than $200" if you need liquid nitrogen to get it to perform the way you want it to. You do realize that cooling systems cost money, too...right? There's no point in being able to use a cheap processor to get to X performance benchmark if the required additional support systems cost thousands of dollars more than a more powerful and more expensive processor that can do it out of the box. Not to mention the fact that liquid nitrogen cooling isn't exactly hassle-free, especially in a household environment. And it's worth noting that even if you boost Ghz, you eventually run into choke points related to pushing data to and from the chip anyways. You can give the most important worker on an assembly line all the crystal meth they can eat, but they can't work any faster than the conveyor belt in front of them.

The "bullshit math" you refer to is known as Symbolic Logic. It provides a mechanism for reducing statements and concepts into operands, effectively...and by doing so you can more easily detect things like non-sequiturs, circular logic, self-contradiction, empty statements with no real meaning and the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" bullshit that is the basis of many knee-jerk legislative actions. The real beauty is that by sticking to the symbolic operands of a statement rather than the contextual content, you can strip away information that triggers an emotional response (terrorism, child porn, etc.) and recognize when someone is just plain full of shit.

And I agree greatly; teaching this is an excellent idea. It's a cornerstone of critical thinking, which in turn is a cornerstone of good citizenship in a democratic society. But if you don't seek it out as a college course, you'll probably never hear about it. That should change.

There's another layer to this, however. If you look at the practice exams for the AP CS course, you'll see that it's not computer science that's being tested as much as how to program in Java. Useful, yes, but not exactly as broad as the title would suggest.

It seems to me that if there's a desire for greater CS knowledge in high schools, then teaching things from an architectural level first would be a smarter choice. Much like driver's ed; you don't learn how to design an engine, but you learn that a car has one, and how it relates to the transmission, tires, brakes, etc. I would think that for the computer literacy purposes of most people, knowing how to finish an incomplete java applet is nowhere near as useful as understanding the way different parts of the architecture interact when they browse a website or set up a wireless network at home.

Why is it a bad thing that an organization tasked as the primary conductor of electronic surveillance of other nations is conducting electronic surveillance of other countries? And why is it a surprise? You are right: everyone expected them to do this, and they should. It's their job. If you read their charter, this is plainly clear in the first page. And that goes back to 1952, over 60 years ago.

Don't get me wrong, I think the NSA has gone too far with regard to American citizens. But spying on other nations? Who else SHOULD they spy on...they're a spy agency, for fuck's sake. Why is everyone acting like it's news that spies are spying? There are absolutely zero prohibitions with regard to this in our country...not in the Constitution, not in law, not even in policy. And when you really look at the complaints of other nations, it boils down to objections over how damned good the NSA is at it, since the complaining nations either have their own capabilities or are so primitive *cough, Afghanistan, cough* that they couldn't even dream of attempting it at this time, but are hardly squeaky-clean in their behavior in other areas.