Are these the same school buses that the same NTSB gives authority to bypass seat belt laws? I say its time to strap those kids down.

I was thinking about how the energy of chemical rockets is just barely sufficient (given fuel mass) to make chemical rockets that can escape Earth's gravity well. I'm not sure of the exact headroom but my understanding is that it is fairly tight. From what I have read on the strength of nanotubes, they too are theoretically just strong enough to barely make a space elevator a possibility (if we could manage to weave them into a macro-fiber without significant losses.) If this turns out to be the case I wonder if there is a connection between these two methods and the strength of chemical bonds to overcome the gravitational potential of our planet. Need it be so that these two very different ways of utilizing bond strength achieve a similar maximum gravitational field that they can overcome?

Going further, obviously the strength of a planet's gravity is important for the development of life, it may be that it is required for the development of intelligent life that the planet's gravity be close to this value (earth's gravity).

Along similar lines but related (in a way)...

I have been wondering why data centers don't use more optimized hardware that basically packages CPU & memory on a single chip (multiple dies until they can fit on one) so that basically all the pins go to either power or to a network adapter, no local disk or video adapter or anything else, just a black box with power, network i/o and heat dissipation. The thing would boot up over the local network by a controller and use other data nodes (dumb but fast NAS front end to disk drives) for storage beyond the locally cached memory.

This is essentially what I proposed in my paper in 2005, only it adds a level of indirection to reduce the amount and volatility of data being added to DNS.

Current protocols that agree on a public key do so via certificate chains signed by a CA, which we don't necessarily trust (or wish to fund) and we would like to have the option to remove them from the chain, but then we need somewhere else to root trust. DNS is the natural place to do that in today's internet (who has the authority to assign me a gmail.com address, why the owners of that domain do of course, if they wanted to give that name to someone else only they could, once you own a registered domain you have rights to subdomain it to whomever you please and they have to trust you not to revoke it).

The proposal is to have this certificate chain rooted at a per domain CA (or the domain can choose to use an existing CA) so that both the fingerprint of the CA's signing key and the authority of the CA to vouch for this domain are both leveraged from DNS not some arbitrary out of band trusted party. The protocol would agree on keys just as it does today but when the certificate chain is being validated it would then verify the CA with the proper domain (for e-mail, ftp, http, ssh etc the owning domain is well understood from context) before accepting the key. No real change is needed to the underlying protocols (although the implementations need to be changed slightly just as they would for accepting a CA's new signing key), essentially every key validation would end in a couple additional DNSSEC resolution queries.

Of course this is a chicken-egg problem in that it then ties back into DNSSEC and root level trust in DNSSEC needs to be solved (through CAs for now) but it decouples the problem and leverages the architecture of DNSSEC (we really do need it anyways) to provide arbitrary certificate trust without putting undo burden on DNS. If we are going to have to have DNSSEC to fix DNS we may as well use it for more than just name to IP resoultion. There is no reason to solve the trust problem more than once since and as long as we use DNS based hierarchies to specify machines or end users (e-mail accounts) we have to trust DNS. The fact that today pre-DNSSEC we blindly trust unsigned DNS replies is the only reason the parallel certificate hierarchy exists at all.

In 2005 I published a paper that proposes essentially this, along with providing an entry for DNS to delegate key query for a domain to a secondary key server (so that only a small number of key fingerprints need to be added to DNS for a domain) and key certificates are signed with these keys and available along with key metadata in an XML format.

The uneducated immigrants take jobs Americans are qualified for.

The educated immigrants, take jobs (enough) Americans aren't.

FTFY.

They are averaging the results of many collisions, which are presumed to be independent and identically distributed of finite variance. Thus the central limit theorem dictates that the measured average is normally distributed about the mean of the true distribution of the statistics of a single collision. As they repeat the experiment n times the variance of the mean reduces at order n (hence std dev. the square root of the variance reduces at order sqrt(n)) Once they have repeated the experiment sufficient times the observed mean will be resolvable from a theoretical calculation (that is, if the theory is in error). They are waiting to verify that the expected (theoretical) result differs from the observed (measured average of many experiments) by at least six standard deviations (more experiments will lower the standard deviation while keeping the difference between theory and observation relatively static, or not). Then they will be certain that the theory is in error by however much they measure, then it is time to revise the theory to match the observation (without breaking any other observations and being able to predict new results that can be tested experimentally).

We look everywhere else in the universe and observe mixtures of heavy and light elements. Thus how do we explain this observation of clouds (already from the early universe) where there is an unexpected lack of heavy elements (unlike the rest of the observations)? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to hypothesize that since these clouds had avoided being mixed with heavy elements from supernovae and thus they have avoided the usual stellar evolution cycle that is prevalent.

$50k is more appropriate for the effort required to build a better shredder that defeats whatever scheme they come up with.

Rather than electing by majority rule, I believe a representative system where each voter / citizen elects their own federal representative without regard for geographic boundaries would be more effective. Representatives would carry the weight of their backers in voting and at any time they can gain or lose backers. More engaged voters could even back different representatives for different issues or vote directly on issues (if they do so during mandatory 24 hour voting times). A representative would then require a threshold number of backers to participate in debates (to limit cranks) or propose legislation. This system would be followed by both the Senate and House but rather than voting on the same general issues the Senate would be specialized into dealing with laws, pacts and foreign affairs while the House would be specialized to deal with taxes, business regulations and federal department management (Education, Energy, Interior). The president would be elected by simple majority rule for a 4 year term, but limited to military decisions (requiring legislative approval), judicial selection and appointing department leaders in the executive branch.

The discussion board problem is a basic twist on a puzzle from Lewis Carroll, to determine if person x and person y are in the same group you ask one what the other would say to a simple well known fact ('what color is the sky?) if both are truth tellers or both are liars they will answer correctly ('blue') so they are in the same group (but you can't determine which) if they answer badly ('red') than one is a truth teller and one is a liar, and you can't tell which.

The development of a seat selection algorithm is less gimicky, but probably a greedy algorithm will work.

When talking about 'real 3D displays' I always think of simulating a window pane. Current displays represent each small area (pixel) by a constant color that emits photons in a basically directionless fashion. We would commonly refer to this as a raster display, but I'll call it a raster-scalar display to differentiate it from a raster-vector display (the difference being analogous to the difference between scalar and vector fields). A raster-vector display would then represent each small area by varying color intensities by emitting photons in quantized unidirectional directions so that receivers (eyes) at varying locations will pick up varied signals for the same (x,y) location on the display. (It is unfortunate the term 'vector display' is already used, hence the new terminology.) A raster-vector display would only provide depth beyond the pane of the 'window' but the type of display in the article is inverse of this, using holography to produce a kind of virtual 3d model above the plane of the display (or generally inside a cubical region of space). We can imagine that 6 raster-vector displays oriented in a cubical fashion (or less if we neglect the floor) could simulate the type of display in the article (think of a virtual 3d model enclosed in a cube of glass). I don't see an obvious way to simulate a virtual window pane with the holographic model display. In actuality, I'm not by any means sure that a raster-vector display can be built that reasonably approximates a real window-pane, while high dpi raster-scalar displays are certainly able to accurately approximate a sheet of paper.

If banks can write off fraud as an undisclosed loss without disclosing the truth I don't see why Sony can't do the same.

I will never understand the need for college educated knowledge workers to need union protections. This isn't a coal mine or dangerous factory job. I also don't see the need for unions for any government employee even dangerous jobs like Fire & Police. When you combine the two, high-education government employees it is insane.

Disclaimer my wife is a Ph.D. working part-time lecturing community college Chemistry courses and fully supports online courses when she sees a whole class of students whose combined course fees don't cover half of her own salary, much less all the other expenses involved in running a college. This just isn't sustainable.