I actually went to a talk last night by someone from the Ohio State University that has been working on autonomous cars for ~20 years.

He talked specifically about licensing in Nevada - they have licenses available now but only for testing purposes: http://www.dmvnv.com/autonomou...

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

Huh. That sounds like a good idea. Take a little from everyone and use it to benefit people as they need it. You might not need it now, but others will, and when it's your turn it'll be glad it's there.

Nah, probably too crazy to work.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

I'm a paying Dropbox customer.

I would love a feature that lets me client-side encrypt my files before they go to their server; one where the keys never left my machine - being aware that if I lose them, I lose all my data.

I would want the client software to be open source though and suspect that might not be in their interests.

Ultimately though I think they've made a conscious choice to not offer a feature like this not because they don't want to or because NSA, but because they see it as a support nightmare.

I tried a few of the alternatives that do client side encryption - Wuala and SpiderOak. I found them completely painful compared to the simplicity and elegance of Dropbox.

The 1% are just playing the game that US politicians were happy to sell to them. I can't fault them for their scummy behaviour. I can't hate them for taking advantage of a system that is broken.

Your elected officials are supposed to be standing up for the citizens, not selling out their office - and their country - to the lobbyists that basically seem to control the fate.

The really sad part is everyone feels stuck in this two party system, this horrible false dichotomy that has been carefully manoeuvred by interest groups to accomplish basically nothing - except preserving the status quo. Well, and sending it on this downward spiral into a scary police state.

I wish I could contribute to Lessig's Mayday campaign, because it is one of the few genuine attempts at reform, but I'm not a citizen or permanent resident (though I currently live in the US). I volunteered some time to help their technical team and wish I could do more.

His biography First Man is a great read. Armstrong seemed like a classic "Right Stuff" guy; I'm sure the book paints him in a positive light but after reading it I couldn't think of anyone else I would want to be the first person to set foot on the moon in the name of humanity.

I think a better tribute from NASA would be to get us back to the moon. Maybe they could name the first permanent settlement there after him?

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.