"...of course - forgot all the social constrains of a new technology"

This has been the biggest cryptocurrency experiment in history. Successful beyond most people's dreams.

"...at least in the given example, neither current grid power nor wind power is capable of doing the stated job..."

Not sure where you live, the grid is very reliable where I am.

Gas, coal and nuclear are today's technology for meeting demand.

If you take out nuclear, you're not helping fossil fuel emissions.

Depends on the company. They can also disappear leaving you without support, decide to abandon the product as non-strategic, or ask you to upgrade when you don't need to.

Which FOSS project you adopt is equally important. A while ago I was looking for a simple FOSS file upload utility, I found one, installed it, read through the sourceforge site, used it for a good year. Then when somebody was looking for a similar utility, I searched for the utility and found a 5 year old CVE which allowed arbitrary files to be overwritten. The project was still being actively downloaded and there was no mention of it in the forum. I tested my site, found myself vulnerable, and notified the maintainer... no response.

In hindsight, the vulnerability in the code was glaringly obvious. I *assumed* that a popular project would use basic input validation, or would update the code when a CVE is released... but no.

Just because there are no patches, negative comments in the forums, and it's a popular project doesn't mean that here's not a major, *glaring*, well-known vulnerability.

Same applies for closed source I suppose, but if the company is active, there's an incentive to disclose major vulnerabilities to subscribed customers, else they could be sued out of existence.

You would submit a problem ticket. If enough people submit them, it becomes a priority for a paid developer to address the issue.

It sounds like you don't have an example. Nuclear, Coal and Gas have been doing it for decades. Hydro has been doing it for longer.

Rejecting nuclear for wind and solar means burning oil, gas and coal until wind and solar are able to handle baseloads. Nuclear plants are being replaced with coal, oil and gas plants as we speak.

Note that "renewable" in this graph goes back to the 1950's and includes hydroelectric. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Electrical_Generation_1949-2011.png

I don't see renewables replacing anything any time soon. Only nuclear can reduce the carbon emissions significantly.

"We need more power storage, yes. So what? We're building it, and we know how to build more of it"

[citation needed]

70 years of nuclear history show that it is fully capable of meeting the requirements.

Can you smelt aluminum with solar and wind?

That was my first thought, but It's close though, they didn't have an IR thermometer and ovens aren't very precise.

If they didn't preheat, the oven would have run hotter until the temperature sensor triggered. It's quite possible the heat on the board from radiation was much hotter until the air reached 340F.

We should declare Dec 25 a national holiday!

The birth of the man for whom the unit of mass was named.

Bush Sr. wasn't successful at not invading Iraq.

Do you mean that he made a decision not to remove Iraq's head of state?

"Conservatives are hesitant to change things, so they don't screw things up."

Your description would paint Bush as a liberal. What with his pet project to fix Iraq, bailouts for failed corporate ventures, trying to sovle all the problems in the world through big government military, spying and toruture programs, expansion of American powers in the bedroom, and bolstering the profiteers of a nearly wiped out American milddle class.

Liberals like Bush should mind their business, focus on domestic affairs like the failures of healthcare. Conservatives like Obama, with strong focus on small government, reduction in military, long term thinking for healthcare, prudent fiscal policy and expansion of jobs and the economy once again kickstart a broken economy, and lead the U.S. to record job creation and growth.

You just need to look at the DJIA to see who's got the right numbers.

UDP is stateless.

Given the list of ntp servers is generally known based on your OS type, and the ephermal port range is somewhat limited, it doesn't take a lot to guess the sourceip:sorceport->destip:destport combination which would allow you to spoof a packet which will traverse your firewall. UDP packets are cheap so you can send a lot of them over time and wait until you observe an indicator of compromise.

e.g., 1.rhel.pool.ntp.org:123->victim:[32768-61000]

You can't do this for web browsers because TCP is stateful.

It's a perfect metaphor when you're working for a company which produces crappy products and forces you to use them in front of customers.

Sales demos become the customer watching you eat dogfood.

I never regret quitting that place.

First, the government already seized that land. Any claims to that land by returned exiles will probably be met with the same attitude as claims by Canadians to lands that their Loyalist ancestors lost after the US Revolution.

Second, the land is probably now reserved for use by higher level Party members; they won't be moving.

Ah, but this is all up for negotiation as the U.S. holds the embargo, and many of the former landowners are powerful American political families. The land wasn't ceded to war, it was Cuban land before and Cuban land after.

It's just the cynic in me. The good news I guess is that Obama doesn't have to worry about re-election, so he can make political decisions which aren't in his self-interest.

Trick is what to do with all the big U.S. families with claims to beachfront resorts and casinos?

Kick the Cubans off the land and re-employ them as card dealers and prostitutes?

Yay freedom!