IMHO Romney could have won it if his supporters hadn't cheated the Ron Paul supporters so blatantly, publicly, and sometimes violently, that they alienated, not just them, but many of the other factions of the Republican Party as well.

Many Paulites (and others) will never again vote for Romney, or any candidate supported by the Neocon machine (alias the "GOP Power Structure) or at least by a number of major figures who were involved in the corruption. The thinking is "If that's the way they treat their own party members in a primary/caucus, they can NOT be allowed to control the mechanisms of the Federal Government."

There are five states that Romney lost by substantially less than the number of people who actually voted for Paul in the primaries/caucuses, with an aggregate number of electoral votes to give him the win. If you assume that these Paul people would have voted for Romney if he'd won the nomination without massive cheating (as he probably would have) and instead sat it out (or enough other Republicans behaved that way to make up for Paulites who didn't) it would have been President Romney.

On the other hand, if Paul had managed to win the primary he'd likely have trounced Obama. He can pull support from much of the Democratic Party's base and enough of the typical Republican voters to make up for any that might have sat out HIS run.

Because "High Fructose Corn Syrup" rolls off the tongue slightly better than "a 50%:50% ±10% homogeneous mixture of fructose and glucose with >0.5% residual corn proteins and cellulose."

Not to mention bacteria enzymes.

My personal problem with HFCS is that I'm allergic to corn, and food-grade purification processes don't clean out enough of what I'm allergic to for ANY corn-sourced food ingredient to be safe for me. (As I understand it, antibodies are THE most sensitive detectors of particular molecules / molecular sites known to man, and it only takes four molecules to trigger an allergic reaction.) Fry it (ALL!) brown and it's safe, else forget it.

But I hear that HFCS is an obesity issue because it doesn't trip the appetite regulation as strongly as sucrose, so people tend to eat more of it.

$100+/bulb is VERY pricey. (Lots of LED bulbs already have TI radio/processor chips - usually the otherwise-identical ones with zigbee rather than BLE - for substantially less.

Adding a battery and related circuitry to do operate-over-power-failure is nice but not that much of a cost. Adding a speaker/microphone, a suitable processor to drive it, and some network and security software, may justify a substantial boost. But software amortizes to "almost free" over large numbers of units. So it seems to me the price point is too high. I expect this will die from competition.

... apparently you managed to find your way here in order to post this so it cannot have been much of a problem for you.

But how many people didn't figure it out. And how many valuable comments were lost as a result?

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. re-optimized for low leakage, of course.

When a substantial fraction of the target applications are intended to run for years on a fractional amp-hour lithium button or harvested ambient energy, power saving is critical.

If the CPU in the IoT Device is powerful enough to make offloading actually worthwhile, isn't that CPU way overkill for the IoT Device's primary function?

Not at all. The CPU is fast to reduce latency. This not only meets response targets, but it also means the CPU can shut down after a very short time, saving power.

This is especially important on battery powered devices. If the CPU is off except for a couple of milliseconds every few seconds, a battery can last for years.

The CPU is also fast because it's made of small components close together. It's built using current large-chip fabrication technology. Making it physically small means many chips per die, which means low cost per chip. If that makes it fast, so much the better .

As long as you're not using extra power to increase the speed further, there's no problem with a processor being "too fast". That just means it can go to sleep sooner. In fact, slowing it down can be expensive: Slower means not only that the power is on longer, but it also usually means bigger components which require more electrons to change their voltage. The more electrons delivered by the battery, the more if it is used up. Oops!

Granted that the processors are powerful and cheap, and have a lot of computation potential. But there are other downsides to trying to use IoT devices for a computing resource.

One is that the volatile memory, which uses scarce power just holding its state is very small, and the permanent memory, though it may be moderately large, is flash: VERY slow, VERY power consuming to do a write (and the processor stops while you're writing flash, screwing things up for its primary purpose).

Much of the current generation IoT devices run on either the Texas Instruments CC2541 (8051 processor, 8kB RAM, 256kB flash) and its relatives, or the Nordic nRF51822 (32-bit ARM® Cortexâ M0 CPU, 32kB/16kB RAM, 256kB/128kB flash) and its family, and the next generation is an incremental improvement rather than a breakthrough. You can do a lot in a quarter megabyte of code space (if you're willing to work at it a bit like we did in the early days of computing). But there's not a lot of elbow room there.

The tiny memories mean you don't have a lot of resource to throw at operating systems and extra work. In fact, though the communication stacks are pretty substantial (and use up a LOT of the flash!), the OSes are pretty rudimentary: Mostly custom event loop abstraction layers, talking to applications that are mostly event and callback handlers. Development environments encourage custom loads that don't have any pieces of libraries or system services that aren't actually used by the applications.

Another downside is the lack of bandwidth for communicating between them. (Bluetooth Low Energy, for example, runs at one megaBIT per second, has a lot of overhead and tiny packets, and divides three "advertising" (connection establishment) channels, in the cracks between 2.4GHz WiFI chnnels, among ALL the machines in radio "earshot".) Maybe they can do a lot of deep thought - but getting the work to, and the results from, all those little guys will be a bottleneck.

Maybe Moore's Law and the economic advantage of saving programmer time may make this change in the future. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for "smart" lightbulbs to have large, standardized, OSes making that "wasted" CPU power available to parasitic worms.

if you have any sense whatsoever, you'll have a suite of regression tests to run on your software already. You can use that to validate the new environment when you compile a baseline. I've been involved with several projects that migrated from one platform to another.

Such tests might convince YOU (the developer). But would they convince REGULATORS? If not, you have to go through a whole, horribly-expensive, regulatory approval every time you migrate tool versions.

Regulators don't get dinged for insisting on more costly work by the regulated and withholding their approval. They DO get dinged if they approve something that then does harm.

That's why the FDA caused something like 400,000 extra deaths by delaying the approval of beta blockers for prevention of secondary heart attacks until the European research had been repeated in the US under US rules, rather than accepting the data and allowing the use. After the Thalidomide mess they're not going to approve ANYTHING quickly or easily. The same principle applies to other fields.

[Spys] won't blackmail you to the intelligence companies, they will blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife, or creditors, etc.

Your reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired. That's exactly what I was talking about.

1) To get the clearance you need to tell the US government everything the foreign spooks could use to blackmail you - by threatening to tell wife, creditors, media, etc. Then you need to convince the US spooks you don't care - even if you do.
2) If you left anything out, the US is likely to revoke your clearance. So your confession form has all the juicy stuff about you.
3) Now ALL the confession forms were stolen by the foreign spies. Oops!
4) Next step: The foreign spies get to test ANY of the people with clearances they want to test, to see if they REALLY don't care whether these things are revealed to their wife, creditors, ...

The clearance process includes finding out if you're blackmailable into turning over secrets. So of course they question you about everything enemy spies may use as blackmail material. They're often willing to approve you if you confess all your sins to them - because the spies can no longer use the threat of revealing them to the intelligence agencies to pressure you.

It behoves you to confess ALL of it, because if you leave anything out they'll pull your clearance when they discover it. On the other hand, if YOU don't care if its revealed, THEY don't care either. So to get the clearance you tell them everything and claim you don't care.

Of course that means the intelligence agency files includes pretty much all the juicy blackmail material there IS on you. So if there's something you really DO care about, and you were bluffing the agencies, you ARE subject to blackmail threats.

Of course you also expose your life history, to prove you're not a mole. And THAT is everything an identity thief needs to completely replace you. SS number and mother's maiden name are a drop in the bathtub compared to this info.

The agencies should have guarded this MORE TIGHTLY than they do nuclear secrets. It's the key to ALL the people who know ALL the secrets.

Highly evolved animals such as humans have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to seeing into the future. The problem does exist that some if not all of us have evolved enough to plan adequately into the long term.

Highly evolved animals such as humans ALSO have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to constructing money- and power-grabbing scams, and detecting such scams when they're being perpetrated upon them.

Unfortunately, the Global Warming Solution Advocates, regardless of the merits of their concerns, used something that has the form of a gigantic scam when promoting their proposals, and promoted proposals that involve massive transfers of wealth, increases in government intervention in private lives and businesses, and reductions in standards of living. This has created substantial skepticism (which moneyed interests that would be harmed by the proposed actions have, of course, gleefully promoted). The failure of the climate to follow their predictions and discoveries of their fudging of the data doesn't help their cause, either.

There are a number of steps between "I think the weather is getting warmer, and people are causing it." to "We must drive the developed world's population down to third world standards RIGHT NOW, to prevent a couple degrees increase in world average temperature, or we're ALL going to DIE!"

Because it looks like a scam, about all they've gotten any substantial traction on is that the temperature is changing a bit (as it has for all of geological time - we ARE coming out of an ice age, after all - and whether the change is actually human-caused is immaterial beyond indicating that we could change it the other way if we tried). But they haven't convinced the population that they have a correct model.

And they haven't even STARTED on the NEXT of several steps: Is global warming, bad, indifferent, or even good? (The geological and historical record seems to indicate that substantially warmer than what we have now - by more than the amount they're concerned about - is actually better for both civilization and life in general.)

With the population unconvinced that there IS a "Grave Threat To Humanity", it's premature to assume that "Our Brains Can't Process" it.

But speaking as if the thing to be proven is already proven IS another technique of scammers. And making such a claim is an obvious prelude to a move by governmental people, who believe "their brains ARE capable of processing it", to go ahead and impose wealth-transferring, power-grabbing, population-impoverishing solutions, "for their own good", whether the populations want to be reduced to serfdom (rather than be killed by what they perceive as the allegedly falling sky) or not.

They can isolate and concentrate it, maybe stimulate production, but full synthesis? I don't see that happening yet.

Huh?

Human monoclonal antibodies have been grown by culturing gene-engineered mouse cells since at least 1988. They're already in use treating a number of diseases and more are in the approval pipeline.

From Wikipedia:

Building on the work of many others, in 1975, Georges KÃhler and César Milstein succeeded in making fusions of myeloma cell lines with B cells to produce hybridomas that made antibodies to known antigens and that were immortalized.[2] They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 for the discovery.[2]

In 1988, Greg Winter and his team pioneered the techniques to humanize monoclonal antibodies,[3] removing the reactions that many monoclonal antibodies caused in some patients.

Monoclonal antibodies have been generated and approved to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory diseases, macular degeneration, transplant rejection, multiple sclerosis, and viral infection (see monoclonal antibody therapy).

In August 2006 the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America reported that U.S. companies had 160 different monoclonal antibodies in clinical trials or awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

This disease process looks like suitable candidate for this approach, as well.

A few antibody PRODUCING cells, harvested from the same donor(s) as the antibodies, would be an ideal starting point: The antibodies have already been proven to cure the disease, so only a production mechanism is needed. Once a suitable cell line has been constructed, tested, and its product approved, the donor can retire, secure in the knowledge that his genetic material will continue to save mothers' and babies' lives, even long after his death.

Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?

In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.

If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.

With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.

how could such an advanced culture (as Rome) have staged such bloody spectacles?

How could such an advanced culture (as ours) have prominent media people who confuse "advanced" with "non-bloody" (or "squeamish")?

Answer: Freedom of speech and of the press. Even the clueless can be read and heard by millions.

Meanwhile, our culture seems to be decaying in much the pattern of Rome's. Let's hope that, if we can't fix it, it takes as many centuries to fall, rather than going down "in internet time" or "as we approach the singularity".

... not letting me delete my account.

Slashdot is like the Mafia, CIA, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society: Once a member, ALWAYS a member.

As LASFS says: "Death Will Not Release You."

Fundamentally, not all communications are speech, because some communications have explicit direct non-speech results.

According to the Supreme Court, not all communications are PROTECTED speech. (They're still speech. They just don't enjoy the First Amendment protections because they're ALSO parts of crimes for which one can be punished - and in some cases (such as threats or criminal conspiracy) the speech is all it takes to commit or be a participant in the crime.)

Because speech is explicitly mentioned as protected in the First Amendment (and anti-government speech is also specifically a necessary part of another protected right - petitioning the government for redress of grievances), the court sets a very high standard for laws making some kind of speech a crime: Such laws may be overturned just because they have "a chilling effect" on protected speech, by making people avoid such protected speech out of concern that it might be prosecuted.

Regardless, Congress doesn't get to pass laws that preemptively muzzle people or block publication. They just get to pass laws to punish them AFTER they speak (or print, ...) some explicitly illegal content.

Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater isn't speech.

Funny you should mention that. The phrase "FALSELY shouting fire in a crowded theatre" originated in a WWI Supreme Court decision declaring that distributing anti-draft leaflets to people of draft age was not protected speech.

My favorite approach to "Fire in a Crowded Theatre" was Abbie Hoffman's (when being interviewed in a crowded theatre):
    Interviewer: "But surely you don't advocate shouting fire in a crowded theatre?"
    Abbie: "FIRE!"