Irreversible damage, to me, from a systems engineering perspective, means an unstable system or a system that trends according to a power law. No system that I can think of that involves climate or the earth behaves in that manner - rather, they all follow logarithmic or inverse power laws to trend to a steady state. And yet, somehow, you're telling me that all of the sudden we're going to see e^x where something like that hasn't existed for millions of years? Maybe there's a good reason I'm still skeptical.

Please read up on the potential for positive feedback of carbon release through the melting of permafrost and the reduction in albedo through the melting of polar ice.

1) Permafrost contains a lot of sunk carbon. As the arctic warms, the potential exists for this permafrost to melt and release this carbon. This will create a positive feedback that further warms the arctic, etc.

2) As polar ice melts, the albedo (inverse of reflectiveness) of the polar seas decreases, leading to more heat being trapped (less heat being reflected into space due to lower albedo) thus warming the ocean such that polar ice melting increases. A second positive feedback cycle.

I would describe these systems as unstable: once pushed (past some stable zone, perhaps) the effect grows: see "reverse pendulums" (regular pendulums are stable). This damage (damage defined as climate change antithetical to comfortable human existence) to is likely to be irreversible on human timescales absent some pretty awesome technology.

I believe that I'm going to get to experience these effects first-hand. China will not get clean in time and the United States lacks the will. I don't expect to die (given current trends) until the 2060s at least. As an upper-middle class white male in the United States, the impacts on me will be more survivable than for almost anyone else on the planet, but I believe that things will get "interesting", in the Chinese sense of the word.

I'm not gonna go through and do a feature check, but there is Ceph. It's still pretty early in the development, but looks pretty promising. It uses btrfs as the underlying filesystem.

Someone put together 1.2PB of Glustre (with dual replication) at my company and it's been problem free so far...

I worked in defense for a number of years right out of school. As with a lot of technology companies, it is male dominated. However, the person I worked most closely with is among the first (or perhaps second) generation of female electrical engineers (in her early 50s now). She is pretty used to a male-dominated technology program. For awhile we worked on different contracts, and when she came back she said she'd hated it because there were too many women and "too much estrogen". I guess there was too much discussion and general moaning and not enough curt decision making. Or something along those lines. I guess with men there would be more yelling and anger, but ultimately progress would be made in a more timely fashion. Or so I understand her complaint.

I disagree. The function is important: the need to subsidize them by tax dollars is separate. I believe opening things to competition under the oversight of a rabid inspection service would lead to the same or better service for the same money: I think it likely there's a lot of waste that can be cut.

Fedex and UPS are my precedents here, though they of course are not exactly analogous.

The only way this would not be proof is if the mechanism by which a chemical like BPA can cross the placental boundary is different in rats vs humans. Is that your contention? Because unless rat fetuses can internally generate BPA (in which case where is my rat fetus water bottle?), then BPA being found in rat fetuses is *absolute* proof that BPA was transferred from mother to fetus.

Closing velocities on these impacts are in the kilometers per second range. The impulses must be tens of thousands of gees: no rocket motor imparts these velocities, nor can I imagine does reentry (otherwise the thing would decelerate to 0 within the first few feet of reentry: maybe the sideways jolting is severe...). So it seems unlikely to me that warhead designers would have incorporated sufficient ruggedness in the warhead to survive these kinds of hits. Maybe they are now.

And of course now whatever didn't vaporize is spinning.

And I'm sure the work to refine aimpoints hasn't ended. But with Postol it's like, "Oh my God, you missed the warhead by 1cm and only turned the missile body into plasma: what a piece of shit!". As if the work has stopped or people are resting on their laurels. Welcome to technology development and gradual refinement, Doctor. You should try creating something rather than just being a critic.

And checks are only "at the edge": you can choose whatever place is easiest to breach (like your small town airport), and then you are inside security. So you bring in your 20kg of explosives at Podunk Airport with a flight (however indirect) to New York and from there...

I think you are confused. What the grandparent comment said was correct: the budget deficit was $1.7 trillion: cutting out the roughly $700 Billion spent on defense leaves a $1 Trillion dollar deficit. That means the budget doesn't balance. Subtraction, okay? I don't understand how you think you can reduce $700 billion dollars to $350 billion (from 6x to 3x the next-biggest country's spending) and that somehow balances the budget. $1.7 trillion - $350 billion is not $0.

You are wrong.

Military spending has not "been increasing at an unsustainable rate for at least the last 30 years". In inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, it began rising in the late 70s and peaked around '86 or so and then fell until 9/11. It's been going up since then. A slightly older web page shows a fairly similar picture as a percentage of GDP. It's just that the headline dollar number gets more and more impressive as the U.S. economy as a whole gets bigger. Compared to the rest of the world by percentage of GDP, the U.S. is 27th.

And remember, the biggest components of the defense budget are operations, maintenance, and pay: roughly 2/3rds. About a third is procurement and R&D.

Also remember that military spending in Europe is lower than would otherwise be the case because they offload that expense onto the citizens of the United States. The benefits associated with being the world's only military hyperpower likely makes this a worthwhile trade. Apparently the political powers of the country think so.

Not anymore, but I did. I would do it again. I worked on both purely defensive weapons and on the tank-and-people-evaporating kind.

My position was/is this: I created capabilities. My work helped make is such that when a situation arrives where it is "Us vs. Them", that the outcome is *always* "Us".

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems from a number of the documentaries and such that I've seen (less so from my personal experience) that a lot of the enlisted army is poorer, lesser educated folks trying to escape from a trying life: trying to find something better. I felt it was my duty to ensure that they always come home, that our obligation is to provide them with the tools it takes to properly execute the missions with which the American people have tasked them. I refuse to accept that we would rely on an Army in which many of us wouldn't even consider serving and then not provide them with the best that we can.

So yeah, I'm down with burning every other country to the ground if it brings back the boys and girls of my country. Even if I would never associate with them while they're home.

It led me to wonder whom, actually, pays the full amount? Then it struck me. The uninsured do.

I don't know that that's true. I worked with someone who told me that, when she was uninsured, she could get huge discounts by paying cash at the time of the appointment: doctors were very happy not to have to go through an insurance company, etc. etc. I think the discounts she quoted were 50-60%. So presumably doctors inflate everything knowing they're going to discount.

There's a robotic scientist called ADAM that investigates yeast genetics (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dcswww/Research/bio/robotsci/). There was a pretty cool paper in Computer a few months ago. The robot actively tried to devise new theories and produce experiments (it's hooked up to a bunch of yeast-genetics-investigatory stuff) to investigate those theories. As I remember, most of the theories turned out to be true and were pretty novel (function of various genes). The researchers double checked several (or all?) of them.

Secondly, many appliances can *really* do with 220V (actually, it's even 230V). For example: tumble dryer, oven (electrical), washing machine, dish washer, electrical stoves and basically anything that needs to heat water. Nearly all of those are manufactured to draw about 2000-2500W maximum, which makes for a current of about 10A (at 230V). Ovens and stoves may even draw much more - induction stoves can often draw about 7000W. Good luck doing that at 110V...

There are separate 220V circuits for these in U.S. homes. In my apartment, I know that my dryer is on a 220V circuit, and I presume the same of my electric oven and dishwasher. I don't know if these share at all. I'm pretty sure I've had the oven on while drying clothes and running the dishwasher at some point in my life (maybe just once or something...).

I would agree that this is pretty close to the truth: innocent rich people can provide a much better defense than innocent poor people who typically cut deals. Due to the volume pressures (mostly due to incredibly minor drug offenses clogging up the courts), judges typically apply a "trial tax" where if you don't plead out, you get hit with a stiffer sentence (for taking up more of his time and lowering his "clearance rate"). Poor people who have to rely on overworked public defenders (who are also part of the court system more than private lawyers and also feel the volume pressures) are less likely to want to chance it.

I would encourage you to read Courtroom 302 which is a look at a year in a Chicago Superior court. It's pretty disheartening. :(

Why don't we just buy a television transmitter and have it broadcast this kind of video 24 hours a day? I dunno how well sheepfucking plays with the locals, but if there's any kind of personally identifiable info, maybe we can ridicule some of these guys to death. Uhm, if there're TVs. Otherwise we could distribute leaflets with choice video stills on them.

Or not. Mostly I just thought the title of "Afghanistan's Funniest Home Sheepfucking Videos" was really catchy.