I don't think the Mandelbrot Set itself persay is all that useful, but its 3d relatives like Mandelbox, Mandelbulb, etc sure generates some amazing landscapes... I could totally picture that used in games or movies. It's amazing the diversity it can do with some parameter changes - steampunk machinery and evolving spacescapes, reactors / futuristic computers, art deco, extradimensional beings, alien cities, floating viny landscapes, transforming robotics, things hard to describe, etc.

I'd love to have a house / secret supervillain lair that looks like this one ;)

It's a breath of fresh air to a dying industry.

Because psychologically torturing someone for the rest of their life, on the off chance that new evidence eventually proves them innocent is so much better?

And if we let them out again, then we can pat ourselves on the back because they're not dead, and totally ignore the fact that we ruined their life, and ignore the probability that they would have been found innocent if we had applied the higher standards and automatic appeal they would have gotten had the death sentence been on the table. My opinion? Life in prison should be treated as a death sentence from the legal perspective, invoking all the usual legal protections granted to those facing the death sentence.

I lived in Aptos, CA when the Loma Prieta earthquake happened. My home was about 10 miles from the epicenter.

My home came through it okay. Our cats were pretty freaked out but I don't think we even had any broken windows. (I've heard that the waves increase in amplitude as they get further away from the epicenter, so perhaps we were lucky to be so close.)

We were without power. I think phones were down but I'm not sure.

We didn't have much else to do, so we spent a lot of time listening to the radio. We learned some useful stuff:

* stay at home; the roads should be clear for emergency services.

* Cook and eat the contents of your freezer and fridge before things go bad.

* don't drink the water without boiling it, but it's okay to flush toilets.

* (Later) Okay, the water lines tested out, so go ahead and drink the water.

Also, we heard updates about the freeway bridge that collapsed, the destroyed buildings in San Francisco, etc.

But for the most part, the people talking on the radio didn't have anything too important to say. They filled a lot of airtime with repetitions of the above points, comments like "oh this is terrible", etc. So we stopped listening after a while and read books.

Still, in any future emergency, I will want a radio. The Internet could be down but the radio will still work. Lower-tech old-fashioned solutions are great in an emergency.

Just get a low-tech radio, rather than relying on a radio feature in something complex like a smartphone. Bonus points if you have solar cells and/or a crank to power the radio.

Experts inherently favor the interests of those who pay them. The FBI doesn't get paid to find people innocent. In a world where the FBI can choose to hire this expert or that expert, it will rehire the ones most likely to make a finding helpful to a finding of guilty.

Courts are masters of deciding truth between opposing parties. Where one side possesses more resources than the other (the U.S. Attorney General's Office vs. the local public defender) the criminal court is crippled to find the truth of guilt or innocence.

The same holds true for the experts reporting to the IPCC...

Well, if you had to choose on moral grounds (as opposed to just siding with the most powerful), which would you rather worship:
1) A beautiful angel of light, reputed to have been instrumental in mankind acquiring morality. However, this entity is less powerful than his rival YAHWEH.
2) A powerful entity self-describing as being vengeful and jealous, reputed to have forbidden mankind from acquiring morality, then cursing them, their descendants, and the entire planet when they did anyways. Also reputed to eternally torture people, and to require a blood sacrifice to forgive even the smallest offense against him. Also reputed to have such a holier-than-thou attitude that he will kill any who look at him. Also reputed to violate people's free will by hardening their hearts, so that he can show off his might.

On the other hand if there aren't any silly laws in place preventing your from selling your goods at 10X the normal price, maybe you will only keep aside what your family really needs and sell the rest, thus making important goods available to the public when they're really needed. But if that's illegal, yeah, might as well keep them for yourself. When things get back to normal you can continue selling whatever you didn't use at the normal price -- same as you were able to sell it for during the emergency, but without taking the risk of selling something you might need.

Restrictions on scarcity pricing are a bad idea and serve only to create even more scarcity.

Assuming the copyright owner can be found, and is willing to sell.

The basis for Eldred v Ashcroft was that the celluloid of many old films is rapidly degrading but because the copyright ownership is muddled it's impossible to find anyone from which the right to republish the films can be purchased, so the films are being lost forever.

For that matter, it seems perfectly reasonable to require the homeowner to install such a meter as part of a solar installation, as a condition of being able to sell power to the utility -- or even to push power into the grid at all.

Yeah, keep in mind Apple recently bought "Beats by Dre" which is a music streaming service (in addition to the headphones by the same name). Apple Radio (Apple's music streaming service) has been in the iPhone for a while. There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want their users to be able to listen to free radio on their iPhone.

The majority of major, targeted hacks (rather than just sweeping the net for vulnerabilities) - aka, the kind of stuff that the US military cares about - involves sending emails or making phone calls and introducing yourself as Bob from IT, and sorry to bother you but there's a problem that we need to discuss with you, but first a couple questions...

They don't need script kiddies, they need social engineers. Question number one in the job interview should be "Is your native language Russian, Chinese, Farsi, Korean or Arabic?" And even as far as the more traditional "hacking" goes, rather than script kiddies they're going to need people who are going to custom analyze a given system and assess it's individual vulnerabilities, people with real in-depth understanding. One would presume that in most cases that the sort of targets that the US military wants to hack are going to keep themselves pretty well patched to common vulnerabilities.

AIs doing hacking? What are you talking about? This is the real world, not Ghost In The Shell.

I disagree. To me there's at least one really compelling reason: To push universal encryption. One of my favorite features of QUIC is that encryption is baked so deeply into it that it cannot really be removed. Google tried to eliminate unencrypted connections with SPDY, but the IETF insisted on allowing unencrypted operation for HTTP2. I don't think that will happen with QUIC.

But there are other reasons as well, quite well-described in the documentation. The most significant one is performance. QUIC achieves new connection setup with less than one round trip on average, and restart with none... just send data.

True, but TCP is very hard to change. Even with wholehearted support from all of the major OS vendors, we'd have lots of TCP stacks without the new features for a decade, at least. That would not only slow adoption, it would also mean a whole lot of additional design complexity forced by backward compatibility requirements. QUIC, on the other hand, will be rolled out in applications, and it doesn't have to be backward compatible with anything other than previous versions of itself. It will make its way into the OS stacks, but systems that don't have it built in will continue using it as an app library.

So improve and use those protocols. You may even want to look to QUIC's design for inspiration. Then you can figure out how to integrate your new ideas carefully into the old protocols without breaking compatibility, and then you can fight your way through the standards bodies, closely scrutinized by every player that has an existing TLS or TCP implementation. To make this possible, you'll need to keep your changes small and incremental, and well-justified at every increment. Oh, but they'll also have to be compelling enough to get implementers to bother. With hard work you can succeed at this, but your timescale will be measured in decades.

In the meantime, QUIC will be widely deployed, making your work irrelevant.

As for using TCP without encryption so you don't have to pay for something you don't need, I think you're both overestimating the cost of encryption and underestimating its value. A decision that a particular data stream doesn't have enough value to warrant encryption it is guaranteed to be wrong if your application/protocol is successful. Stuff always gets repurposed and sufficient re-evaluation of security requirements is rare (even assuming the initial evaluation wasn't just wrong).

Only for restarts. For new connections you still have all the TCP three-way handshake overhead, followed by all of the TLS session establishment. QUIC does it in one round trip, in the worst case, and zero in most cases.

There was much valid (IMO) criticism of SPDY, that it really only helped really well-optimized sites -- like Google's -- to perform significantly better. Typical sites aren't any slower with SPDY, but aren't much faster, either, because they are so inefficient in other areas that request bottlenecks aren't their problem, so fixing those bottlenecks doesn't help. But QUIC will generally cut between two and four RTTs out of every web browser connection. And, of course, it also includes all of the improvements SPDY brought, plus new congestion management mechanisms which are significantly better than what's in TCP (so I'm told, anyway; I haven't actually looked into that part).

I'm not saying the approach you prefer couldn't work. It probably could. In ten to twenty years. Meanwhile, a non-trivial percentage of all Internet traffic today is already using QUIC, and usage is likely to grow rapidly as other browsers and web servers incorporate it.

I think the naysayers here have forgotten the ethos that made the Internet what it is: Rough consensus and running code first, standardization after. In my admittedly biased opinion (some of my friends work on SPDY and QUIC), Google's actions with SPDY and QUIC aren't a violation of the norms of Internet protocol development, they're a return to those norms.