Maybe Sparkfun can ask Fluke for an event-based waiver in an open-letter. This gives Fluke the option to show themselves as a "good guy" in a very public way and not waste good tools or resources of a decent company.

It is an moment of humility to ask a question.
It is a lifetime of shame not to ask.

Did you read your own article? Try page 113 where it says:
"An EMP attack will certainly, immediately disable a portion of the 130 million cars and 90 million trucks in operation in the United States. Vehicles disabled while operating on the road can be expected to cause accidents. With modern traffic patterns, even a small number of disabled vehicles or accidents can cause debilitating traffic jams."

What about page 115 with "The ultimate result of EMP expoure could be triggered crashes that damage many more vehicles than are damaged by eMP, the consequent loss of life, and multiple injuries.

If there was WWIII then el gran fromage would be powerless and unprotected where he was the moment it hit.
If there was the right, wrong time of solar storm, then el heffe might be getting an unintended suntan while waiting for combustion engine vehicles.

There might be a security issue.

And he doesn't own stock in Tesla, so he isn't going to be buying one.

I wonder how much the explosion in computing budget, something not precedented by any actual increase in opportunity in the market or the technology ecosystem, is driven by a desire to enable NSA data-collection, something that our "freedom loving" president aggressively supports.

The only recent "big" thing is big data, like Hadoop/Couch/non-RDBMS.

What is the DOE going to do with all that budget? They are going to buy big computers, and do thing with them.
Is in investment in big data going to have a higher chance of payoffs for those folks who are spying on grandma? I don't see why not.

Are they spying on grandma? Of course they are. Of course they are. They can't not spy on grandma. When they say "they have protections" and "rule of law" they might, possibly, be talking about yesterday or today - but they have the data for tomorrow. They have no right and no substance when they talk about what might not be done to the data tomorrow. Like all weapons too horrible to use - it is only too horrible to use until it isn't.

The IRS would never target political parties, or religious groups, right? the NSA arguments come from the same source and report to the same powers.

Engineering jobs are offshored (and subsidized) much more extensively than visual effects artists. The number of engineers in the world dwarfs the number of visual effects artists by at least 1000x to 1. Offshore STEM work is subsidized by foreign governments. I wonder if this can lead to tariffs on works thus derived overseas. iPad tariff, anyone?

1) Without a measure of goodness there is no way to determine "best", "worst" or even "better" or "worse".
2) The previous can be reversed to determine actual measure of goodness given a valuation of "best" or such.

It sounds like MTA director is about revenue, so good for him. He is not, however, qualified to make good decisions for startups in Silicon Valley. If he was, then he would be making Billions at Facebook instead of Pennies in civil service.

Perhaps he could investigate the root causes that drive the decisions, things like huge costs, poor infrastructure, and a low-quality work environment - and address those to get the start-ups back into downtown/old-town/urban restoration.

So it runs slower, and its open. This sounds like a honeypot server. Is there end-to-end encryption or is this an invitation built to enhance informed oppression?

They make that money - because they can.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

They don't like wikileaks, or its peers. They also track things like visits to cryptome. They look for risk by people who go to sites that teach the substance of the anarchists cookbook. There are "finger-prints" or eigenvectors of site visitation that they associate with higher and lower risk. If you visit sites a,b, and c, then you are just a harmless teenager making a prank. If you visit sites a, b, not-c, and d, then you might be a threat.

You aren't suprised that the evil empire doesn't like that Snowden aired its laundry, are you? This is the entirely expectable reactive reaction to attempt to "close the barn door". These folks have not read "Godel, Escher, Bach" and understood that the system of themselves is a "sufficiently complex one" and there are axiomatic holes. Either they have to refute the fundamentals of the fundamentals of mathematics - things that drive why 1+1 actually equals 2, or they have to deny they are sufficiently complex, or they have to have a non-lawyers approach to the problem. Their boss and his appointees are lawyers - they can't step outside that box, so they can't actually plug the holes, but they can make a plausible case before a jury of technical idiots that the holes are closed. Sad. Expectable.

A better question is the cadence of the next disclosure. There is a cyclicity to the phenomena. They haven't asked why, because they haven't spent much time looking at cyclicity.

And yet these folks are given trillions of dollars and tasked with the responsibility of keeping the world a good place and making it a better, healthier, more life-full place. Irony. That right there, is irony.

it is the beginning of AI-science, not the end of human science.

Science requires testable, provable, repeatable. If a human cannot understand the proof then he cannot participate in the science. This is likely to be referred to as an "early" version of machine-exclusive science.

Nothing is random. Humans are crap at random. Makes me wonder why we think we are intelligent. We are good clocks - that makes our thought mechanistic.

We are consistent. So the "get someone elses version of normal and play it yourself" is really a good way to hide. When tested against computers which make okay random, or some advanced/expensive stuff that makes actual random this approach makes us look nearly exactly like a real human.

Instead of looking like a needle in a haystack - and needles look nothing like hay - it either makes our activity look like a piece of hay in a haystack, or turns the haystack into a needlestack. Either way - isolating an individual is exceptionally harder.

I read through about 75% of it. It is not a great read. It takes a lot of time to get to a little meat.

It relies on "social pressure" to stop conspicuous spending. Lets see that work for real in womens shoes and I might believe it possible. Otherwise there is a substantial bit of anthropology that the author is hand-waving his way past.

Reproductively speaking, the minimum cost of reproduction is much smaller for the male than the female. For the female the time-cost is 40 weeks, while for the male it can be around 4 minutes. That is a 100,000 to one ratio. Although females have oestrus cycle times that are 9x less frequent than optimal cycle-times for males, this does not establish a reproductive cost equality.

This high asymmetry in cost drives different general normative behaviors.Game theory says that when the costs are so asymmetric, and so much larger, then you will see radically different optimal strategies. For women they have a huge vested interest in maximizing the input the man gives - they are selective in partners, and selective in frequency. This also drives a strange phenomena of "Costly but worthless gifts facilitating courtship". (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...)

The most archaic, currently used, globally useful, non-worthless gift that can be given is not gold, diamonds, cash, or camels - it is footwear. If any commodity is hard-wired into female brains through the selective processes of 10,000+ years of recorded history of civilization it is a candidate such as this.

If your "social pressure" to stop "conspicuous spending" can actually apply to womens footwear, then it has substance. Don't just stop sales, show that the desire has been resolved. It has not been resolved in Europe - this means that the fundamental forces are still extensively at work in that culture. It also means that the Star Trek economy, while worth considering, is still a work of fiction.

Best regards.

It worked in the 1960's, but it is unlikely to work now.

They can detect the "random" activity, and isolate it. You are not making the right fog, and they have ways to see through it.

A better way would be some protocol that works like bitcoins to share someone elses anonymized queries, and makes you look exactly like them for a little while, then switches it up. They might "poison the well" but if even a medium sample of people is using the method, it will make a fog that makes automated clustering and classification substantially less meaningful. Something that randomly clicks into google ads might also interfere with classification, by fogging the google classification of you. The two "bucketings" are both read by NSA, but google doesn't get to read what the NSA does, and at least publicly has an interest in appearing to resist being informative for things like targeted executions of American citizens without due process of law.

You have lots of faith in politicians, it seems. While they believe they are qualified to make the best decisions for you, decisions in your best interests, they are not actually working in your best interests. They are working in their best interests.

There are some consistent political agendas. If you watch the news, nationwide, across nations, then you can see it. Immunization. Stopping population growth. They are common. What are the common trends in weight? What is on the horizon?

Politicians are great at addressing root causes behind why fat people become obese, right? They are qualified to provide help, to change the fundamentals, right? No. It isn't their area of expertise. It isn't their expertise, but it is their interest. What makes it the area of their interest? Why are they putting tax money into solving that particular problem? If it were an actual solution, there would be a company that makes money from doing it. Texts are so cheap they are nearly free. Imagine a business that was paid real money for something that was effectively free. It is a great business model if it worked. There is a fundamental economic reality behind why it isn't a business - it doesn't work. Fat people (and I'm overweight, I'm the target audience) pay millions a year because they don't want to be fat - go ask Jenny Craig. It is a huge industry, taking money from fat people after convincing them that you can make them human again.

It is weight-ist. Opt in or not, it is a stupid politician being weight-ist.

How secure are text messages? How about the vendor? Are they securing the information? This is medical information. This associates particular medical conditions with a phone number and a persons identity. Is it secure? No way. It is broadcast unencrypted publicly. People are unable to get jobs because of weight. They are considered higher medical risk, and so get less pay for the same job. If you sign up for that list, it is going to go into a HR database somewhere and, God-forbid you ever lose the weight, it is going to be considered against you in the future. It has legal and ethical implications, career spanning implications, that the politicians likely didn't consider.

I'm sure you didn't consider those either.

In my personal opinion there is a lot of junk out there that is not worth its price. I really don't want to know about the Justin Bieber sex tape, and the world isn't a better place for anyone knowing that.

The few places that seem to do great work, in my personal opinion, work that has value worth paying the price for, include the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, sometimes the New Yorker, and then peer-reviewed published journals. I look through many abstracts free and then select the papers relevant to my work or interests and can have my work pay for access to them.

I think that the model of "associated press", where one organization provides 95% of the nations news, is effectively a monopoly. There is a profound lack of journalistic integrity because the journalistic marketplace and the fundamental value of the discipline are both compromised. The value of journalism in the eyes of the public has plummeted in the last 30 years. If someone said the LA times or the Arizona republic is closing shop, all the news they carried would be carried elsewhere. The same stories would be there. An honest modern-day Clark Kent would never be a reporter, because journalism is not the freedom creating and empowering enterprise that it was at the birth of that comic book hero.

When I consider the Economist, for example, nobody has equivalent depth or quality. Psychology today is also not bad. All of the *daily or *times - 90% of their content is not original. To me that means that 90% of their content is not valuable.