The whole antibiotics thing that's post-industrial revolution was pretty nifty, IMO.

I'll agree that they're a bit scattered in scope but they are doing interesting things. I've been following the group fora few years now and it seems that the overall aim is moving away from a 'rebuild civilization' kit towards open source, low-cost farm equipment for smaller farms and developing nations. There's a strong emphasis on low cost, modular design where the metalworking is all very simple. That alone is definitely worth the cost of admission.

There's no shortage of very technically savvy people in the military and other branches of the federal government as well as academia. All of those pay well below the industry average. Not everyone is solely motivated by money.

You seem to think that the military is solely composed of 18-year old recruits from the ghetto. I seem to recall that digital computers, the internet and even the space race all have their roots in military R&D. One might make an argument about the relative creativity/research productivity per $ of private industry vs academia vs the military but it's a silly argument to think that the military is incapable of this sort of work or that people wouldn't accept lower pay to do something they believe in.

Ummmmmmm...
Have you just not been reading anything at all about the pervasive SCADA security holes that keep popping up everywhere? Hooking industrial control hardware to the internet to centralize monitoring, control and update has been a huge industry movement. Combine that with a mindset in the SCADA industry and end users that is much more focused on reliability than security and you get the equivalent of thousands of pieces of hardware on the internet with the security equivalent of a wireless router with the default admin account and password.

The SCADA security holes have only recently come to the attention of the industry. I can assure you that there's a giant collective brick being shat over it but fixing this stuff takes time.

And foaming at the mouth about honest mistakes isn't going to solve anything.

Fair 'nuff, you hadn't mentioned the personal nostalgia angle and that's worth something. However drawing form my experience at another Paul Allen museum (the EMP/Sci-Fi museum), the average Slashdotter is probably going to have a far better and more interesting time at the MoC.

If you're looking for a place to visit in Seattle, I think your time would be better spent here:
http://museumofcommunications.org/

Their hours are really weird but it's the best museum (and one of the best kept secrets) in Seattle. They've got a gigantic collection of old (early 20th century) telephone switching gear that is operational and available for viewing. The oldest is a nearly completely mechanical computer that Babbage would have probably been at home working on.

The best part of the MoC, though is the docents. It's staffed by a bunch of *old* school engineers in their 70-90s that were all Ma Bell lifers. I've had one of them walk me through the use and repair of an old crossbar switching system and the sheer volume of knowledge that those engineers had to have is mind-blowing. The docents are more than happy to spend a few hours one-one one with you and I guarantee you'll get far more out of your time at this place than Paul Allen's museum.

Dude, I think you forgot your tinfoil hat this morning.

Would it make you feel better to know that Sojourner from the Pathfinder mission tried to return to it's base station after we lost contact with it?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20070111_prt.htm

Wait, no? Why are you sobbing?

OK, so wow. Just wow.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt since you seem to mean well but that post was seriously fucked up on many levels. I kind of want to tear you a new one but I'm going to try and refrain since you seem to at least have your heart in sort of the right place.

First, social engineering skills != social skills. Not even close. Actual social skills that actual healthy adults have are a combination of understanding the motivations of others and having respect for them as individuals. People are not a set of walking stimulus/response sets for someone to manipulate. A failure to distinguish between the two is very common amongst intelligent, socially awkward types. Hacker types *are* socially awkward on average. The thing is that most people in hacker circles manage to learn actual social skills at some point. Sadly a portion of them never grow out of the mindset that crude, non-consensual manipulation of others for entertainment or gain is somehow indicative that they have learned to interact with other people on a meaningful level. Also, the ability to trick an over-trusting secretary out of a password on the phone hardly makes one the next Machiavelli, just FYI.

Second, yes poor social skills *are* the heart of the matter. I've been around plenty of social settings (including many hacker/geek social settings) where there were drugs, alcohol, hot women (sometimes hot men and women in states of undress and sometimes having sex) where people managed to not be immature douchebags and treated each other with respect. This is a cultural problem and needs to be treated as such. Yes, it's sometimes kind of annoying when a girl acts all slutty and shows off her body because she wants attention but that in no way entitles everyone in eyesight to groping her uninvited any more than a guy wearing an expensive watch or driving an ostentatious car deserves to be mugged/carjacked for doing so. And it *DEFINITELY* does not excuse other people from degrading and intimidating women as a group because a few of them chose to act a certain way any more than I should feel entitled to walk down the street, punching random guys in the face for the actions of a few sexist idiots.

Third, I definitely agree that everyone at such an event should feel safe and it's heartening that you bring this up. However you kind of fall flat on your face in the next sentence. You think people should feel safe so that the 'most attractive females' will keep showing up? Excuse me? I thought Defcon was about hacking and computer skills, not so that you can eye hot girls. There is a whole internet full of naked, hot girls you can ogle to your heart's content and plenty of hot girls in Vegas you can go out and hit on and lots of hot prostitutes in the greater state of Nevada you can pay to sleep with if that's what you are interested in. Also note how your rationale is conspicuously missing any reference to making female computer hackers feel welcome or any indication that women can be something other than 'attractive young fangirl/cheerleaders'.

Lastly, the community definitely needs to shoulder some of the blame. Yes, Defcon should implement some sort of comprehensive policy towards harassment that is clear and well enforced. But that is only half the solution. Human culture is *not* a clean set of equations that a few rule changes can reform like tweaking the code for The Sims. Rule changes are pretty useless - ultimately, they have to find an impossible sweet spot between being toothless and draconian and rules by themselves will never change the minds of people any more than all those DARE ads convinced us all that drugs are bad. That you seem to think so is not surprising given your attitude towards social engineering.

However, you need to get through your head that the larger Defcon community is partially at fault for tolerating a hostile environment and that a broader, self-initiated social shift is required if any meaningful change is going to happen. When a woman has someone run up and grab her crotch without consent and that person blends into the crowd, there were a room full of witnesses that stood by and did nothing to stop it. Every time some jackass does on an anti-woman/anti-gay/anti-man/anti-whatever tirade and the rest of the room stands around uncomfortably quiet or nodding their heads to smooth things over, they are part of the problem. What it's going to take to solve the problem is a combination of the hacker/Defcon community in general making it clear that sort of behavior isn't OK. You need people in both the community as well as the con staff that see people acting like asses and engage them:

"Hey man, I know that you're a little tossed and that girl is really hot but she's not into you at all. And she isn't going to get any more into you from you telling her what you want to do with her tits and groping her."
"No man, she's not a cunt because she's not into you. You're not a shit because you're not interested in the gay guy at the end of the bar that's been eyeing you for the past 20 minutes."
"Yes, that dude's into you. And no, that's not a reason to punch him, settle the fuck down."
"Why? Because it's natural to want to look at people you think are attractive and he's not being a giant dick about it like you were to that girl."
"C'mon, let's get a round and talk war stories and I'll give you some pointers on pickup lines and I'll be wingman while you find some girls that are actually into you that you can hit on. Deal?"
Followed by:
"Awesome man, where doing this, where making this happen!"
or
"Huh, too bad you still feel that way. You're free to be an asshole but I and my friends will be keeping an eye on you and if you keep acting like this, we're going to rat you out to security."

If you can head off bad behavior before it escalates to the point of assault and harassment, you not only save the victims of said behavior but also save the potential perps from becoming perps and suffering the eventual punitive actions. You're only going to have that happen when the community at large takes responsibility and steps up to let people that do this sort of stuff know that it's wrong and why it's wrong.

Yes, genetic drift can remove previous beneficial mutations but not always.

Some resistance mechanisms carry little to no negative effect. Take, for example chloramphenicol resistance in E. coli. One of the common resistance mechanisms is a mutation in one of the ribosome subunits. (I forget which one and am too lazy to look it up right now) It has a small deleterious effect but prevents chloramphenicol from covalently attaching to and inactivating the ribosome. It has been observed that many bacteria under selection them develop mutations in other areas of the ribosome that help to offset the deleterious effects of the resistance mutation.

Once that happens, the resistance mutation is not only neutral outside of selection but are often locked in as well. The compensatory mutations that helped the ribosome relieve the distortion from the resistance mutation now prevent it from being lost. A single mutation that eliminates the resistance mutation now reintroduces distortion in the ribosome and is negatively selected.

So it's a bit of a stretch to say that beneficial mutations are exclusionary to each other. That is often the case but you should always be careful about making generalizations in biology. Often, you can get beneficial mutations that are locked in that don't revert when the selective pressure is off. This especially applies to mutations that have had significant amounts of time to be refined by subsequent evolution.

Bunnie's go a fairly good blog that has a number of entries on the Chumby manufacturing process that goes into a lot more detail than the interview.

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=7

The concept of licensing goes back much further than that. Early wax cylinder recordings from 100 years ago came with the equivalent of EULAs that stated you were merely buying the rights to play the music contained thereon. While I haven't read up on it myself, a friend of mine once told me that this can be traced another hundred years to the sheet music industry.

Basically, any medium where the final product is easily copied or mass disseminated has tended towards EULA style business models for a while. It's just recently that we've seen a greater move towards physical gadgets being EULA'd up.

Eh, the truth is somewhere in middle as usual. The high bypass turbofans made the 747 possible from an engineering standpoint but it was Trippe's initial commitment that made the 747 development financially tenable.

If you haven't already, you should read Joe Sutter's book about the design of the 747.

Beat me to it. According to Sutter, the 747 was a clean sheet design. I'm sure some of the military plane engineering was incorporated but the 747 was very much its own beast.

Actually, the 787 represents a similar leap of faith. Boeing has basically bet the farm on its success.

Actually, in terms of fuel used per passenger mile, modern aircraft have nearly reached parity with trains. It's just that plane flights tend to cover such long hauls that they are associated with large amounts of fuel consumption.