Considering all the other stuff Dubai has built, how does this mall rate more than a passing mention?

You can't fix politics, until you fix the people voting for the politicians. We get exactly what we deserve as an electorate. However, there are signs on the wall (CANTOR), that given enough crap, voters will out vote incumbents even as they spend millions to hold onto a seat. I see more potential in the (R) side right now in outing politicians who deserve it. However, I don't see ANY such on the (D) side. There is no (D) grassroots with any power, including OWS (noisy, but otherwise ineffective) threatening Harry, Nancy, or any of the others who need to go as much as Cantor did.

But I actually blame the liberal mentality for this, because they like abusive power of Government butting into everyone's business and telling everyone how to live, rather than leaving us the hell alone. Liberal fixation on people like Sarah Palin (who doesn't hold an elected office), because she talks funny, while accepting Sheila Jackson Lee (a complete loon) is a prime example of duplicity that is amazing.

Reading the summary, I thought this would be about actual hacking... say, making the car do something awesome it couldn't do before. Maybe, like adding a special performance mode, improving its charge rate, or adding features to its entertainment system. I see it's really all about pwnage. I'll pass.

It wasn't a sensible comment for anyone who could see the writing on the wall. If you weren't in academentia, you could see that it wouldn't be long before personal computers would have more than one process active at a time.

It is short sighted indeed. It is way more expensive to replace good workers than it is to retain them. But they don't teach this in Business school any longer.

That is not how money laundering looks like. Here is what Money Laundering Looks like

Illegal gained money is given to a Legitmate enterprise (Gambling) and is returned as "profit" or whatever from the enterprise. In a very simple case, mob money is put into a slot machine, and 98% of it is returned when the jackpot is hit. The gains, now washed (legitimate) are taxed and are clean for use elsewhere (deposit into a bank). Where if you just stuck the gains in the bank would trigger all sorts of investigations. This is part of the reason why deposits of $10,000 or more in banks are automatically reported to treasury, for an audit of the money trail.

The trick in money laundering is to hide the input (initial gains being laundered) well enough that it doesn't trigger the reporting requirement of transactions of 10K or more. A series of 5000 "high risk" transactions where you lose most of the time, but win big occasionally, is typically how money is laundered. The inputs are not traceable, and the earnings become legitimate.

The goal is always to hide the initial input, obfuscate the long trail of transactions and end up with legitimate money on the back end. The transaction you describe is used to obfuscate the buyer and seller from each other, and the authorities, not the transaction. Money laundering still has to occur with the seller, as the bitcoin to currency exchange still has dirty money written all over it.

How about Microsoft/IBM screwing Gary Killdall out of DOS

Uh... he didn't create DOS. He created CP/M. You could say MS screwed DR out of a _deal_ with IBM, but it's likely he did that to himself.

No, that is not a show stopper for Bitcoin. It is what is going to drive Bitcoin to full currency status faster, where people trade money for the more usable Bitcoin.

Here is the issue, anything that makes something less utilitarian and causes restrictions will fall into disfavor eventually. Laws and Restrictions and fees and taxes all have the unintended consequence of driving economy deeper under the table. There is a whole class of people who now work off the books, bartering and trading and whatnot, and they don't pay taxes on anything they earn, simply because the government cannot track their activities. They work very hard at staying under the radar, dealing in CASH and trades, and as a result, have a better income than someone that is legitimate.

If I earn 2000 under the table, it is worth 3000-4000 in legitimate earnings that people pay taxes on. And as more people realize how much the government seizes in taxes, even on the "poor", this will start happening more and more. Bitcoin(and similar), has the ability to really change this equation faster than it is happening now.

The more they squeeze their fists, the more people will slip through their fingers (paraphrase of Princes Leia)

The problem is, it is going to be really hard for the Government to trace money laundering with Bitcoin, if the people take a few simple steps.

1) Use unique wallet for each transaction
2) Use a washing service every time one acquires new coins in a normal transaction.
3) ???
4) Profit

The government is going to try to regulate "coin washing", but since it is a decentralized currency, with no government boarders, it is going to be really hard to pull off well.

Close. GF wants the IP and people for chip making. IBM wants the IP and people for chip designing.

He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.

"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.

Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.

The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions

If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.

No need for a second display. Just ssh -X develsystem and have everything display on the Solaris machine.

First, that's a paper from 2010. How was a paper from 2010 supposed to be "predicting" anything about what scientists in the past thought?

Secondly, and more importantly, I had been responding to Archangel Michael, who was talking about the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet, not Antarctic sea ice. So your link about pack ice is totally irrelevant.

But hey, let's switch topics totally and talk about sea ice, since you seem to want to. Here's how the IPCC sums up all papers on the modelling of antarctic sea ice, including this one:

Whereas sea ice extent in the Arctic has decreased, sea ice extent in the Antarctic has very likely increased. Sea ice extent across the Southern Hemisphere over the year as a whole increased by 1.3– 1.67% per decade from 1979–2012 with the largest increase in the Ross Sea during the autumn, while sea ice extent decreased in the Amundsen-Bellingshausen Sea. The observed upward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent is found to be inconsistent with internal variability based on the residuals from a linear trend fitted to the observations, though this approach could underestimate multi-decadal variability. The CMIP5 simulations on average simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent , though Turner et al. (2013) find that approximately 10% of CMIP5 simulations exhibit an increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent larger than observed over the 1979-2005 period. However, Antarctic sea ice extent variability appears on average to be too large in the CMIP5 models . Overall, the shortness of the observed record and differences in simulated and observed variability preclude an assessment of whether or not the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent is inconsistent with internal variability. Based on Figure 10.16b and (Meehl et al., 2007b), the trend of Antarctic sea ice loss in simulations due to changes in forcing is weak (relative to the Arctic) and the internal variability is high, and thus the time necessary for detection is longer than in the Arctic.

Weak trend, short observed record, and high internal variability in the simulations. Which shouldn't be surprising, sea ice is a lot harder to model than ice sheet thickness, which really only has three main parameters - snowfall, melt/sublimation, and outflow, and the short observed record is due to how few people historically have navigated antarctic waters vs. arctic.

But again, to reiterate the primary point: the conversation you jumped into was about ice sheet thickness, not sea ice.

"the server sucked my job right in"