I wondered if that's what he was proposing, that all defense of property be funded by property taxes. Property tax isn't really a tax on property rights, though. And in any case property tax does end up being a tax on economic activity also, or at least on economic value, which is determined by economic activity. So I don't see the point.

How do you tax property rights?

The guys I know working on the Google cars disagree. Oh, they have plenty to do, but it's mostly because they've set an extraordinarily high bar for themselves.

That just means they haven't gotten to that yet, not that they expect it to be very hard.

It will also vary depending on the performance of the vehicles immediately ahead of, oncoming-and-passing, or crossing ahead of the street view vehicle. Especially the first: The sensor will be running in the exhaust plumes of the vehicles ahead of the street view car, so the map will be a very non-random sampling.

On the other hand, the partculate and "volatile organic compounds" sensors will produce some very interesting data. The latter is what the federal standards call "unburned hydrocarbons" when emitted from an engine, and the output of modern engines is vanishingly small. But many species of evergreen trees emit them in enormous quantity, as part of their ongoing chemical warfare against insects that eat trees. That's what the blue haze around pine-forested mountains (such as "the Smoky Mountains") is about. You can literally destroy (by extreme and long-term contamination) an automotive conformance test cell (the room where they test the car's emissions), requiring it to be torn out and rebuilt, by placing a Christmas tree in it overnight.

I expect some towns in remote, forested, mountain areas, where people move "for their health" and "for the clean, fresh, air", to get a rude awakening. B-)

But I doubt it will affect the extremely tight standards for automobile engines - except maybe to cause a flap that tightens them further. These days many engines are so clean that running then can IMPROVE the air quality in some places (such as portions of Los Angeles, with topography that created such a thermal inversion that a single settler's campfire could leave the whole valley filled with smoke for a day or more) by inhaling and burning far more hydrocarbon and particulate pollutants than they create.

Of course it's cheaper than DRAM; DRAM is expensive. TFA says it will be more expensive than NAND and cheaper than DRAM. So, it just adds another point on the continuum... the more speed and write cycles you need, the more it costs. Seems reasonable. And TFA says nothing about availability; not sure where you got that from.

There's no reason to conclude it's magic. There's also no reason to start designing new architectures around it until we see it in the real world.

For that matter, it would be a pretty good cache for NAND SSDs. I could do with most of my writes being 1000X faster.

My SSD is 1 TB. The other one is 256 GB. SSDs today are a lot larger than you seem to realize.

I own a LEAF in a similarly spread-out area, with little charging infrastructure. What do I care? The car is a commuter and I have a charger at home. It's always full whenever I go anywhere. Charging isn't cumbersome, it's practically zero-effort.

The lack of accidents and crime are more likely related to a general trend in crime going down from before they started turning off the lights. ... Give me at least one full year worth of data so I can compare it to the prior year, and have half of the country keep their lights on so It can be compared to the same time frame as well.

Hear, hear!

There's lots of room for methodology errors. Here's another:

Comparing murder rates between Great Britain and the US is complicated by differences in reporting. The US bumps the murder stat when there is a body and evidence of foul play. G.B. bumps it when they have a conviction.

Do they do that with other crime? If so, stable stats in the absence of street lighting might mean that any rise in crime is compensated for by a fall in identifying, apprehending, and convicting the criminals responsible. (Indeed, turning off the lights might easily result in LOWERED crime statistics at the same time it was causing a drastic increase in actual crime.)

When you say "1024-bit encryption" you're talking about RSA, which is a completely different problem. 1024-bit RSA are too small to be used today and should be replaced.

2048-bit RSA keys, however, are roughly equivalent in security against brute force to a 112-bit symmetric key, and will be secure against anyone for quite some time. 3072-bit RSA keys are equivalent to a 128-bit symmetric key. Excascale, even yottascale, computers won't touch them.

But everyone really should be moving away from RSA anyway. ECC is better in virtually every respect. To get 128-bit security (meaning equivalency to 128-bit symmetric key), you only need a 256-bit EC key.

Range suffers a bit, not so much because the batteries are affected by cold, but because you use some juice to heat the cabin. As far as performance on snow, they're great. Their center of gravity is low, front wheel drive and the power applied to the wheels is finely controllable.

I drive my Nissan LEAF to the ski resort almost every morning during the winter.

What complicates this is that whether or not an electric car is cheaper depends heavily on your driving -- and whether or not an electric car is feasible depends on your driving. TOC also depends on the cost of fuel and electricity. When I ran the numbers for myself a few years ago my break-even for a Nissan LEAF was three years, with the federal and state tax credits, or eight years without. That was without taking into consideration the difference in maintenance costs since I didn't know how to estimate them. I did not, however, predict the drop in gas prices. I haven't re-run the numbers, but I expect the lower price of gasoline would push those break-even points out 2-3 years.

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.

Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?

ASICs, FPGAs and GPUs are all utterly, utterly inadequate to attack today's encryption and hashing algorithms. Unless you have not only tens of billions of dollars but also don't mind waiting millions of years. http://tech.slashdot.org/comme....