Something like this would be a nice coating for:
  - Windshields
  - glasses
  - solar panels
Unless, of course, it attracts grease...

Do you really think the problem in 1984 was the telescreens?

Telescreens are "an enabling technology". I see no reason to leave them, and thus any hypothetical government-or-other spy, enabled in my personal space.

I think most of us geeks grew up terrified of the very idea of the Orwellian Telescreen. However, it's not the technology that's evil (many of us have plenty of devices with a camera integrated with a display), but the threat of its use without consent.

My latest laptop came with a built-in, user-facing camera.

I immediately put a piece of opaque electrica tape over it - even before swapping out the hard disk for a fresh one and installing Linux.

The tape isn't coming off until I have a removable shutter to take its place.

if you bring back the passenger pigeon in some sort of wildlife preserve and they outgrow their food supply, how are you going to get the flock out of there?

You DO know that they fly, don't you?

Like in flocks of millions over continental distances?

Back in ny early days as a lab techie I was running the optical processor that did the image-making post-processing for what I believe was the first "flyby" / "rotating target" synthetic aperture radar. (No significant intellectual contributions: I was running the machinery, rather than contributing to its design. Adjusting lenses, exposing and developing film, etc.)

Back in those days the computers weren't up to the amount of crunch needed. (This technique is essentially a two-dimensional fourrier transform with tweaks.) So we used laser light and lenses for the fourier transform, and photographic film for the input modulation and output capture. The original data was captured using a one-dimensional CRT with a solid row of fiber-optic light-pipes built into the faceplate. This was in actual contact with the recording film, transferrig the light from the phosphor inside the CRT without geometric distortions from lenses and such. The film was about four inches wide, and the servo capstain that advanced it was a critical component for accurate signal processing, as was the circuitry that linearized the sweep of the beam. The input plane of the optic processor held the film in a xylene solution between two optical flats, to eliminate phase distortion from roughness of the film's surface.

The nice thing about synthetic aperture radar is that the resolution is related to the radar frequencies and the relative motion of the antenna(s) and target, and is not dependent on the beam width of the antenna. (Well, wider beam width means you illuminate the target from a larger virtual antenna, sharpening the image.) Except for deltas, distance doesn't matter, either. You get the same resolution at tens of feet or interplanetary distances. Distance only comes into the pricture in terms of keeping the oscillators from drifting during the transit time of the beam, so you don't introduce varyimg phase errors when down-converting successive returned chirps.

Yes, that worked. Switching it to 2 brought the behavior to about the same as disabling "Load images automatically" - or close enough not to matter for this purpose.

THANK you once again.

Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?

Yes, that's it. (I couldn't remember the exact wording and with it gone I couldn't look it up. B-) )

The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as: // 1-Accept, 2-Deny, 3-dontAcceptForeign

Geez! No WONDER I couldn't spot it. Didn't they ever hear of mneomincs?

Thank you. I'll give it a try.

I'm at my Nevada vacation/retirement place for the first time since migrating my laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. This dragged in Firefox 29.0 ("... Canonical 1.0").

The place only has dialup Internat at about 38Kbps. (Somewhat higher speeds are available at substantial cost, which doesn't make sense untlil we're here for more than a couple weeks a year.)

Web browsing was barely usable at this speed by using a few tricks. The most effective one was to configure Firefox to not load images until/unless I wanted to look at them.

When I got out here last Friday I discovered that firefox 29.0 no longer has the radio button in the preferences/configuration menus. An hour or so looking at about:config didn't turn up anything likely-looking, either.

Without this feature, "surfing" the current image-heavy web pages is essentially impossible. Even trivial pages may take a couple minutes to a half-hour to load. PER PAGE.

Did the Firefox crew restore the feature for 30.0? (Or does anyone know where it was hidden, if it still exists on 29.0 and 30.0?)

Developers breaking important features (that THEY don't use) while "improving" products is a real problem.

The Anti-Corruption Act would go a long way towards helping. Lobbying is the major way that corporations influence legislation, and it needs to be completely stopped. It needs to be criminalized.

It will just get struck down, like every other anti-lobbying and campaign funding measure that has finally gotten to the courts.

This is because lobbying is a Constitutional Right. It is called "Free Speech" and "Petitioning the Government for redress of Greviances".

People do NOT lose their free speech and (especially) political activity rights when they are acting in a group, regardless of whether the group is a club, a political movement, or a business.

But such measures, once passed, can do enormous harm before they finally make it to court and being struck (after which another is passed and the cycle repeats). The rich and connected can hire lawyers to find their way through the latest maze of regulations, fill out the bales of forms correctly, defend themselves in court if challenged and bring suits to finally get the laws overturned. Meanwhile we little guys are hosed.

These laws may be well intentioned. Or they may be intended. from the start, to paralyze grass roots efforts while appearing to block undue influence by the rich. But they always give the advantage to big-money and big-connections and always penalize us little guys.

but changing MAC is like filing serial# off a car! At least according to the prosecutors...

Not any more. The Bluetooth Sig just spent four years in heavy sessions to plug the privacy leak from the MAC address tagging every packet with a device "serial number". This was rolled out in Bluetooth 4.0, especially in the Bluetooth Low energy addition.

If the option is turned on, the "MAC address" that labels the packets is pseudo-randomly chosen and constantly mutating. If the other device trying to communicate has a special relation it can access the true MAC address and/or share the secret so it can predict the pattern of mutation.

Apple went one further, though. Even when the remote device has the option turned off and is using the real MAC address for the link label, their stack doesn't export this info to apps over the API. The apps have to have to negotiate with the far end of the link to get it (or find a way to work around the stack, and risk Apple deliberatly breaking it, or removing them from the app store, if they find out), even though it was already "in the air".

I think Apple is sensitive to accusations of privacy violations and is making it hard for independent developers to put them in legal hot water.

Now, where the heck do the blonde jokes come from?

Probably from the genetic metabolic disorder Phenylketonuria (PKU). This enzyme failure, if untreated by a phenylaline-restricted diet, leads to a constelation of symptoms that include mental deficiency, blonde or light hair, and blue eyes.

Interestingly, one of Hitler's pre-war programs was an attempt to breed more blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Germans. The main result was a drastic increase in the prevalence of PKU in the German population.

On the other hand, very pretty women tend to experience a social environment where they are rewarded for interacting with others, regardless of how they are behaving otherwise. If consistently rewarded for any statement, whether right or wrong, they have no incentison learn to use and demonstrate intelligence.

So it sits there. Unpublished by anyone. I'll never know if nobody likes it until I hit the go button. But I'm also scared to learn that I suck at something I enjoy doing.

I went through a similar process to yours, with agents liking (but not taking) my novel. My wife has won literary awards for works agents wouldn't take because they couldn't see her stories becoming best sellers. Not just doing well (which they admitted they would do), but becoming best sellers! The entire publisher/agent thing is a bad joke on creative talent. These self appointed gatekeepers of our culture often miss the next big thing and are rarely looking for a new, different voice despite what they claim, but rather the next celebrity ghostwritten tripe where they can make a quick buck.

I can relate to your fear of rejection...I share it...but I'd encourage you to go for it. Make sure your book is professionally edited and proofread (this is absolutely critical, and far too many self-published authors don't do this). While you're doing that, figure out a promotional strategy. For example, line up bookstores in your area for signings, create a presence on goodreads, participate in book fairs, lit fests, and conventions applicable to your genre, etc.

Don't be too disappointed if you don't sell a ton of copies (it is very hard to get noticed), and don't measure yourself on that...measure yourself on how well people enjoy your work. That is the real metric on how well you write, and how good your work is. My novel Autonomy received all kinds of good reviews (from people I've never met!), but it's still not a "best seller." Just put your edited, polished work out there and if those who read it love it, then you don't "suck at something" you enjoy. Quite the opposite.

... according to the article there has been a three-decade pattern of fires getting worse in the West:

And the reason for that is well known, and has nothing to do with global warming.

It is caused by environmentalist interference in land management. The major factors are;
  - Fuel load: Logging is stopped, or delayed for decades by lawsuits, even of diseased and fallen trees, which are left to rot. Brush clearing, deemed "unnatural", is also stopped. LOTS of little trees and weeds grow up between the big trees. When a fire finally starts, it soreads rapidly and burns big and hot, and is very hard to control. The hot burning sterillizes the ground, killing many types of seeds that would otherwise have fueled a post-fire recovery.
  - Access restriction: Loggers and other visitors to the area are the main source of reports of fires when they're still tiny. With logging stopped and most recreational uses banned the woods are essentially deserted. A fire that would have been spotted in tens of minutes might have as much as days to grow before it is discovered. Once it IS discovered, the lack of roads and lack of clearng of those paths still there impedes fire-fighting: Regular equipment, or even four-wheel-drive SUV-based, fire equipment can't access much of the area, and must leave those areas it can access early, to avoid being trapped.

I think it's ludicrous that the blame for the anthropogenic forest fire severity increase is being deflected from the policies and policy-makers that caused it and simultaneously being used as additional "evidence" for global warming. It's tactics like this that cause people to distrust global warming claims.

I remember, during the Cold War (and the start of the Drug War), when "cruise missles" first came out.

There were two designs - a short-range one, with an engine that destroyed its bearings during the run, and a long-range one, with better bearings so the engine could be stopped and restarted. They both used terrain-following, as well as inertial navigation, with onboard radar and a computer that could figure out the drone's location and path from the topography. VERY advanced computing for the time. They could fly at treetop level and thus avoid ground-based radar until it was too late to do anything about them.

The long-range one could carry a payload of about 2/3 ton (suitable for a substantial H-bomb). It navigated well enough that it could be flown into a larg doorway or window (though it would, of course, go out through the far wall...).

I remember thinking that the range was substantually longer than the distance from Columbia to the southwestern US and that 1,350 pounds is a LOT of cocaine. B-)

The downside, of course, was that if it WAS detected, it would look JUST like a cruise missile flying into the US over the Gulf of Mexico...

What has keep it going all these years?

As I understand it (I DON'T study this, but just recall previous articles):

The Great Red Spot is a big storm. It happens that the dynamics of storms on Jupiter is such that they move east/west at different speeds, and when they collide they combine. So Jupiter usually has a big Borg storm that has been growig by assimilating little storms more than it has been shrinking by "blowing out".

I have also read that such storms, though very long-lived, have died out even in the geologically-short period Jupiter has been observed, and new ones grown up later - not necessarily in the same hemisphere.

I haven't heard of a situation where there have been two or more of them - either one each in the northern and soutern hemisphere or two in the same hemisphere at different lattitudes. But observation of Jupiter is young in terms of the length of its weather cycles.

Similarly, Earth's ocean currents are also apparently "weather" - exhibiting positive feedback and chaotic behavior, not just a constant response to heat sources, sinks, and seabed geometry - but with an even longer time scale than Jupiter's storms.