Why is there an obsession with getting the the results of an election within hours/minutes of the polls closing?

In the USA elections are in early November, POTUS isn't sworn in until mid January. Take a week or two to count the votes.

I can see that once the police had the phone, that looking at the address book is equivalent to looking at an old style rolodex. Looking at received texts is like the precedent cited of looking at received messages on an old style pager. But *sending* texts seems like something new. Are there precedents where a police officer who is a skilled voice mimic answers a seized phone, or starts making calls from a seized phone and impersonates the true owner of the phone?

We seem to have a highly vocal minority that believe the "radiation" from smart meters is destroying their lives. They've managed to convince PG&E to offer an opt-out plan to let them keep a non-transmitting meter. Surely a few of them live in the 1.5 square miles covered by this. Waiting for lawsuit to stop this in 3 ... 2 ... 1

I remember the days when my laptop would only run for a couple of hours on battery and then die. Back then seats next to electrical outlets at airports and coffee shops were in high demand as the road warriors clustered around them.

But now I have an "eight hour" battery (which I am sure will run for 5+ hours, perhaps more). So I don't care any more. A few days ago I was in a meeting with the projector connected to my laptop running on battery. A colleague helpfully passed me a power cord - and I literally stared at it for five seconds thinking "Why? I don't need this, the meeting will only run for another hour at most and I'm 100% confident that my battery will last."

So there might have been a market for this up until 2010/2011 or so, but that market is disappearing fast. If your business model is to charge people $5 for $0.005 worth of electricity at airports ... you may need to rethink how much demand there will be.

When Newt has established his moon base and is picking the 13,000 people he says he needs to petition to become a state, what do you think will be the first question on the application form?

But unfortunately the legislature and the courts have not given us any clear description on what is and is not fair use. The only way to find out is to take a case to the courts and have a judge evaluate the evidence and issue a ruling.

So Romley needs to do exactly that ... have his ad pulled by a DMCA takedown. Appeal that. Have NBC sue (and get an injuction to stop him using this video until the case is resolved). Go to court. All this could easily be resolved by mid-2013 (unless the loser appeals to pregressively higher levels of the court system).

Wait - you say you need this ad now, while the primaries are going on? Sorry - that's not how it works.

Mitt: Time for a campaign promise to fix these damn laws so that they provide clear guidelines for fair use - I'd certainly take notice if you did that (you'd have to drop a bunch of other stuff before I could be persuaded to vote for you).

Perhaps considered - but rejected. www.kernel.org now says:

"We have currently taken boxes off line to do a backup and are in the process of doing complete reinstalls."

Presumably Google developed "plus" to avoid losing the whole world to Facebook. But how can any verification process scale to hundreds of millions of users?

"Corporations overcharge"

Shuttle flights worked out at about $1.6 billion each - if these overcharging corporations charge $1B to get the same mass into orbit, then we are $600M ahead.

My smart gas meter produces one data point per day in units of whole therms. Usage for the last few days looks like this:

1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3

Good luck doing the data analysis on that to tell what time I take a shower.

If I had a smart meter for electricity (I don't, PG&E won't give me one because I have solar panels on my roof) there might be more of a problem as I understand that these provide per-hour data - not sure of the resolution. I'm certain that you'd be able to tell when I run the clothes drier - but smaller appliances are going to be difficult to spot in hourly data.

I'll actually be seeing clouds ... forecast says no supermoon for us, just rain and more rain.

'SSDs are going to fail just like hard drives will'

Yes they will fail, but the failure modes will be different. No heads to crash into the spinning surface damaging the oxide layer and spreading bits of junk across the rest of the surface of the drive.

People will still fail to take adequate backups - so there will still be a market for data recovery from failed SSDs - I wonder what it will look like. Pulling the raw flash chips out of a failed SSD will most likely allow an enormous number of bits to be recovered. But unless the drive manufacturers cooperate with the data recovery companies to provide low level details of the wear leveling algorithms, then it will be astonishingly hard to turn those raw bits back into files.

Are any data recovery companies advertising recovery services for SSD yet?

I'd think that any company that advertised "internet access" and then blocked access to BBC iPlayer in favour of Youtube (or vice versa) would run into a wall of lawsuits from dissatisfied customers - who would win as U.K law takes a dim view of companies posting false or misleading advertisements.

Say you want to give a 50 question multiple choice test. First make up two or three questions of similar difficulty for each "slot" on the exam. Now use a pseudo-random number generator to generate a "unique" test for each student by picking just one of the candidate questions for each slot, also use the random number generator to shuffle the answers so the correct one differs from one paper to the next. Include the seed for the random number generator on the test paper and have the student enter it onto the scantron answer sheet. Then you just need a smart scanner to check the answers based on which set of questions the student was given.

Cheating is still possible, but much harder because students can no longer send simple "Q23:B" messages, instead they need to send the complete question and answer (which may be a waste of time as that question may not even be on the recipient's copy of the exam).

The 10240 core system is a 20 node cluster with 512 cores on each node (Columbia cluster at NASA).

These big SGI systems prove little about the general scalability of Linux as they are all running HPC (high performance computing) workloads - read in some data, crunch floating point numbers for several hours then printf("42\n") at the end of the run. I.e. not stuff that will stress the scalability of the operating system.

Take one of those systems and have it run a workload where all the cpus are trying to create/write/read/close on a bunch of small files, and you'll soon see how poorly they scale for general purpose workloads.