One technology for batteries that could be developed is for a charging station to replace your electric car batteries with freshly charged ones. You could potentially be in and out faster than refueling by gas. That would be one solution to overcome the lengthy recharging.

I imagine there are still a lot of hurdles to jump over to get such a system working:
- How to design batteries so they can be replaced easily and quickly. Perhaps each car might have several sets of batteries, some of which can be easily removed, but not others. This means replacement technology can only refuel your car partially.
- Who owns the batteries? It would certainly not be the car owner under such a system - probably some sort of lease with whoever runs the charging stations.

It is a MITM vulnerability detector for TLS/SSL among other things, if I understand the intention of the tool correctly. If so, that's fantastic. For example, most TLS/SSL environments are susceptible to a large class of MITM attacks simply because their website exposes both HTTP and HTTPS so then you decide to enable SSL only (perhaps with HSTS) - but did you do it right? Perhaps this tool can tell you. How about testing out a new Certificate Pinning implementation that your lead developer claims will prevent 99% of MITM attacks? Most IT admins or enterprise developers do not have the mindset or sufficient know how to setup an environment or build a system that would slow down a determined hacker much at all.

In so far as detecting MITM attacks... I think we'll get that for free when quantum crypto arrives. But I haven't read much literature about what you're going to do about if you do detect a MITM attack on your data - if you simply stop using that channel or any other vulnerable channel then it seems you're now a victim of a DoS attack. Not saying detection like this isn't useful - on the contrary I think it opens up a whole new field of countering such threats, but right now it is much more useful to so many of us to have a good tool that can tell us whether we're indeed vulnerable to MITM attacks and ensure we setup our TLS/SSL environment properly.

Yes, according to https://github.com/google/nogo...

The best way to go about hiring is to find the best people you can for whatever salary you're offering, based solely on merit. Do so by ensuring all interviewers have undergone training on non-discrimination - they should know what questions they can and cannot ask. When interviewers discuss a candidate, they cross check one another's opinion to help minimize subjective bias. The evaluation should never involve the candidate's gender and race, among other things.

After that it shouldn't matter what the composition of your workforce is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

PPE was developed by Oxford back in the 1920s because they thought a largely humanities driven syllabus centered around ancient history wasn't very practical. Many universities offer it these days, and is one of the best non-STEM courses around.

Just curious how many people have read Robert Pirsig's book(s) and subscribe to his ideas?

In a nutshell his conclusion is that the irreducible factor of life and the universe is a creation force he calls Quality. Another way to look at it is if everything is a state transition diagram, the mysterious factor is something to be found in the transitions (dynamic Quality) rather than in the states (static Quality). Akin to some aspects of Zen and Eastern philosophy. He goes on to develop these ideas to say that you can build up increasingly complex static Qualities like atomic elements, compounds, even life, from what seems like nothing... but that intangible creative dynamic Quality is there, and yet not so easy to pin down. It isn't so much a thing as it is a force.

Right or wrong I find an odd sort of comfort in this understanding.

We were taught Miranda (very similar to Haskell) in my bachelor's program. It was the primary language for most of our exercises across many courses. It is an effective lnguage for teaching many fundamental aspects of programming like recursion, and algorithms - expressing quicksort in a functional language is not only more elegant and considerably shorter when compared with c or Java. That was over twenty years ago, but to this day these functional programming abstractions have been invaluable in shaping my designs, and thought processes involving any kind of programming whatever the actual language I'm using.

There's a huge difference when IT is considered a competitive advantage as opposed to a cost. Generally speaking when IT is simply a cost, then it'll always be short staffed and barely able to keep up with what it needs to do - and will often be targeted first when costs need to be cut. While the idea of turning IT into a competitive advantage sounds good, it isn't easy to execute because they often need to expand their roles and need an objective means of measuring their contributions, but the basic idea is to get IT involved in the company's bottom line - in this case to find out what can they do to improve manufacturing processes.

In practice, today we can solve any control logic problem with existing programming techniques as long as we can specify all the inputs, states/transitions, and outputs. There are techniques to formally verify these programs so you can trust them for mission critical systems - they do exactly what they're designed to do, nothing more, nothing less.

I don't see this approach changing anytime soon. An AI designing a complex system is for the foreseeable future, science fiction. However what's interesting about The Human Brain Project is that it doesn't make any claims about AI, which is actually a good thing. If they start emphasizing AI research I seriously doubt they'd get very far. From what we understand about neural networks and machine learning, which incidentally have very little to do with AI, often turn out to be very good at solving very hard to describe problems like image recognition.

I think if The Human Brain Project focuses on better understanding our neurons and how they work, and are able to translate it to advanced neural networks - these systems could turn out to be adept at solving certain problems. That's a good thing.

Still, I'd like to stress that picking the right language for your task can greatly reduce problem complexity.

For instance, algorithms are much more compact and easier to understand using a functional programming language. E.g. compare quicksort in Haskell and C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.

Complex concurrent programs remains challenging even with an excellent (IMO) concurrency library like the one in Java 1.5+. But switch to Erlang, and you'd find many concurrency patterns are expressed more naturally.

According to the article Slashdot uses an HTTP cache called Varnish, which uses the B-heap. Can any /. ed/admin comment on how effective it is?

Also, this idea seems similar to the locality optimizations proposed in algorithms like merge sort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort#Optimizing_merge_sort.

Indeed! Identifying what proxies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_%28statistics%29) to use is one of the trickier aspects in the soft sciences and statistics. If you read the Economist, you'd see proxies for just about everything (e.g. http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/), and a lot of research is required just to show what a given proxy measures.

I disagree as it depends on what you're teaching. Concepts like recursion and algorithms are best taught with functional languages. E.g. quicksort is a lot shorter and easier to understand in Haskell than in C - see http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction.

We generally agree that you need to pick the right language for a given task - the task of teaching various computer science concepts is no different. Also, a good curriculum should impart students with the ability to pick the right language for a given task too.

If you're interested in pursuing a computer science degree at university, you might be better off without a background in a imperative/procedural language. Many students who knew C/Pascal seemed to have a tougher time grasping functional languages than those who didn't know anything at all.

As you already suggested what you need to do is you need to separate the core engine and game content.

I agree that content development is hard to open source and seem best developed by an individual or a small group.

The successful open source projects you mention all have a plugin/module system. Ensure the game engine supports a good scripting language for content creation, and plugin system that can modify any aspect of the game, and I expect it will do well in the open source world. Your game in effect should just be a plugin/module to your engine.

You want a game engine that is able to foster development of plugins that can completely change the game's underlying mechanics (e.g. Oblivion), as well as plugins/modules that can tell rich and complex story lines (e.g. Neverwinter Nights).

Getting a bit off topic here, but you raise an interesting issue.

I bet that the frequency of certain searches can predict whether a company stock will increase or decrease, e.g. lots of searches for " problems" is a precursor to that company stock crashing.

I wonder what policies are in place regarding usage of such aggregate information within Google (or other search companies).