I always liked the working electromechanical telephone exchange.

If you're ever in Seattle, try the Museum of Communications. Fairly large old telephone exchange with colossal amounts of powered-up electromechanical telephone equipment - place a call on a phone and hear it rattling through the machinery until another phone next to you starts to ring. Loads of old teletypes, UNIX boxes and miscellaneous other hardware to look (and often poke) at.

Basically nerd heaven, yet surprisingly few people round here have heard of it. Makes the equivalent display at the London Science Museum look a bit silly.

Nuclear Resonance Imaging (NMR) was changed because people were afraid of word Nuclear despite it describing the process, unlike its replacement term.

Also, if you arrived at a hospital saying you were there for an NMR, you might have received something other than what you were expecting.

I checked out that link and it looked like I was stepping back into the 90s. That image on the home page looks like it's a 256 colour GIF! Where's the specular mapping? Everything in those shots looks dead, like a bad phong highlighted raytrace.

There's much more impressive stuff going on with path tracing on conventional GPUs - something that, at least for me, is making a definite case for ungodly improvements in processing power for GPU hardware.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) would like to speak with you about how your health can enjoy the benefits of herbal supplements!

Unless there is dope residue in the car, there is no way that any prosecutor would ever charge this because there is no way they could prove the intent element.

Because the opportunity cost for the prosecutor to file charges is so high, and innocent people never plea-bargain to avoid the threat of trumped-up charges that could put them in jail for the rest of their life if the trial goes badly because their overworked public defender is unable to mount a successful defense.

Prosecutors will happily charge anything that they think will work as leverage for a plea-bargain. That's their job, that's how the system works, and that's how all of the incentives are set up.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

No, legal fees are not 'taken care of if you win'. The system doesn't care if you are innocent, the system cares about the system, and obviously anyone who ends up in court has to be a scumbag, right?

  For criminal defense cases, you may choose to be represented without charge by an overworked, underfunded public defender who has every interest in resolving your case as quickly as possible via plea-bargaining... regardless of guilt or innocence.

Or you may hire an attorney who is actually being paid to represent your interests, where the cheapest option available is typically in excess of a thousand dollars, substantially more for serious charges or if the case actually goes to a jury trial.

The vast majority of defendants in the American legal system do not have the financial resources to hire an attorney, which is why the vast majority of all criminal charges are settled by plea bargain. Prosecutors have every incentive to pile on the threat of every imaginable charge and use the uncertainty of the outcome of a trial as leverage to coerce a plea bargain, guilty or not, because it works, and because they are almost never held responsible for their unethical conduct even when they commit egregious acts like concealing evidence that would exonerate the accused.

Add in unconscionable levels of police malfeasance and corruption on nearly every level, and the result is a criminal justice system that is anything but just. Unless you've got plenty of money. Which is kind of the point.

I've got a very-first-generation, USB-hobbled-by-polyfuses-until-I-performed-surgery-on-the-thing 256MB Raspberry Pi. The thing's part of my time-travelling Radio-4-Matic and thus transfers a few gigabytes a day over a little USB WiFi adaptor by streaming radio over the intertubes, buffering it for some hours then playing it back.

Uptime? Right now:
19:12:14 up 52 days, 15:46, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.09, 0.12

Last reboot was for a system upgrade of some description; the things are pretty stable now. (There have been many improvements to the firmware and system software.) My other Pi (a more recent 512MB model) is busy being a tiny home fileserver and virtual server backup device (remote stuff rsyncs over ssh to this thing) - I could easily use a spare PC for those tasks, but the result would be a lot less near-silent and much more power-hungry. Plus it can saturate 100Mbit ethernet with file serving - faster isn't much use when most of my stuff is on WiFi.

Make sure you've got a decent power supply. Apparently voltage drops can be a big source of instabilities. Power for my midget fileserver is via a Samsung cube phone charger; the radio's got a hacked-together DC-DC converter running off a mains-to-12V-DC adaptor. (I'm surprised the thing is as stable as it is, what with it solely relying on my impromptu electronics hackery!)

But in the end, it's all nothing but quarks and electrons, bound together and moving in various combinations and patterns, interacting via strong force (gluons) and electromagnetic force (photons).

Actually, below that it's mostly Perl.

The per-capita homicide rate in NYC is actually lower than in any other major city in the USA, barely above the national average.

Chicago roughly comparable to Atlanta... and even Detroit is still safer than New Orleans. You can argue the reasons, but you can't argue that the deep south has more than its share of social problems.

I'm using Mail.app with Dovecot as the IMAP server - I upgraded to OS X 10.9 a few days ago, and haven't seen anything weird going on (yet). I sent myself a test email a few minutes ago while watching the Mail Activity window, and numbers appeared sensible. dovecot.index and dovecot.index.cache files on the server aren't ballooning - at 178KB and 11MB respectively.

The Fastmail article mentions Cyrus as the IMAP server. Is it Cyrus-specific, or have I simply not been bitten by this yet? (I get loads of spam, but it gets pre-processed by Spamassassin so Mail.app rarely gets to see any in the main inbox itself.)

Human drivers are bad at following safely because their reaction times are:

- Subjectively difficult to estimate accurately.
- Wildly variant from moment to moment dependent on the situation.

People are bad at realizing how fast they can respond. People are easily distracted, and are not capable of continuous full attention to more than a small fraction of their visual field even under ideal conditions. If you're looking at the radio to change the station, you are not physically capable of perceiving many changes in the peripheral view you have of the road, no matter how your brain fools you into thinking "Oh, I can still see everything", when your actual reaction time has just jumped by an order of magnitude.

Robotic reaction times are easy to measure objectively, and are situationally invariant. The the only relevant factors in following distance are the expected stopping distance at speed in the current conditions, and avoiding situations where the vehicle could potentially be unable to avoid a collision if whatever it is following stopped at maximum decelleration. This is EASY compared to most of the problems involved in navigating an unpredictable and changeable landscape.

I'd be much happier with a robot car following me than any human driver, the Stig included. It doesn't take a lot of distance to be safe with 50ms reaction time and rangefinders that are capable of discerning relative acceleration on a millisecond basis to form decisions with.

Yes, they should! And investments need to demand more money/refund you money if they go up/down on their markets. Oh, you bought Google stock when it was $5/share? Well, it's $1015 today, so pay up, buddy!

Then there won't be any more Wall Street crises and everyone will be happy.

The Koch brothers, aka Tea Party, don't really care about science as such.

Actually, one of them makes pretty hefty donations to science-related stuff, including big exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. Human evolution, and all that.

(The socialist in me wonders if the latter is revealing some belief in social darwinism - survival of the fittest, and all that. Eek.)

If we're throwing away definitions, why not call it mass genocide, detonating WMDs, or even worse, patent troll?