Yeah, because nobody knows how you could run the grid without them. You certainly can't run it just on solar+wind+some measly storage capacities on the same scale as today's. If Germany were to run on solar+wind plants alone all the time, they'd need the ability to store one or two weeks of electricity consumption, which amounts to 10..20 TWh -- that's at least 200 (two hundred) times as much capacity as is installed nationwide today. Which means you'd need totally different storage technologies, some of which you may have to invent first. Nobody is sure how (and whether) this might work.

Which doesn't change the physics. And, what actually "enjoys broad support" is getting rid of all the nuke plants. So the only date that was fixed early on in this whole effort is the day when the last nuke plant would be shut off. Because not doing that would've cost Merkel her reelection. Everything else isn't nearly as important.

She is fully conscious, so she can tell him. "Telling" doesn't require verbal communication ability.

It's not a direct help, but I can tell you that it's certainly possible these days to communicate and control external actuators using brain activity only. What they're doing (AFAIK) is record the 2D electrical activity on the brain's surface (using EEGs on the scalp or -- for even greater accuracy -- below the skull bone), analyze it statistically and deduce what the person is thinking of doing, e.g. move a mouse pointer in some direction and choose which of several buttons to press. It requires a learning phase, but then the accuracy is quite high. I'm not sure about the actual bandwidth that you can achieve when communicating using this method only, but it's much better than what was possible only a few years ago, and it's improving further.

Brain-Computer Interface-The HCI communication channel for discovery

brain-controlled Pinball

(the links refer to a Berlin-based research group -- but that's just a coincidence because I live there a saw a presentation a few weeks ago. I'm sure there's even more research on the subject in the US).

It seems the real remote drawing / display technology these days is HTML/CSS, carried via HTTP. It even supports running client-provided code locally on the display server, as did NeWS and DPS 20 years ago, to render animations and depressed beveled buttons without incurring a server roundtrip (and Javascript is generally much nicer than PostScript -- you can even run the whole program on the display server if you want). And the protocol is a bit backwards in that the display server (aka "web browser"), rather than the client (aka "web server"), initiates the protocol requests.

[scnr]

Just for reference, this appears to be a Google TechTalk presentation by their chief scientist about the subject. It's 7 years old no less.

Focus Fusion: The Fastest Route to Cheap, Clean Energy

Uh, a plasma contains charged particles, but is neutral overall (normally). And the particle motion is undirected. What they claim to get out it is a pulsed, directed beam of multi-MeV 4He ions (and only those -- the electrons fly away in the opposite direction), which could be converted into electricity directly (via induction).

I hardly understand a goddamn word of TFA and have never heard of the "Integrated information theory", but I know that TFA's proposition must be false because the brain is based on the laws of physics, which are computable. Q.e.d.

Eh, terminal velocity in the lower atmosphere is abound 250 km/h. Not that it would make much of a difference though.

You're trying to make stuff up. The probablity not being 0.5 stems from the fact that there will be some years in which more than one storm occurs, and this must be "balanced out" by there being no storm at all in more than 50% of the years (and thus, a probability < 0.5 of a storm occuring in a particular year). If storms don't happen independently, but come in "packs" as you suggest, and you're still holding up your scenario of one storm every two years on average, then the chance of a storm occuring in a particular year will be even lower than 0.393.

Right.

Imagine you're throwing a 100-sided dice 100 times in two years (i.e. 50 times a year). Then you statistically throw a particular number (say, 1) once every two years. The chance of throwing that number in one year (i.e. in 50 throws) is 1-(99/100)^50=0.395 (=the inverse of not throwing that number 50 times in a row). There you go. If you transition from discrete to continuous probabilities, the number of dice sides and throws approaches infinity, and lim_{x->infinity} (1-1/x)^x = 1/E.

Umm, actually that would be p=1-(1/E)^(1/16)=0.0605869 (about 1-in-16.5052).

The real question is, why even have the whole heartbeat TLS RFC in the first place, when the underlying TCP layer already checks for timeouts all by itself (you can run TLS over UDP, but hardly anybody does, and then you'd specify the heartbeat stuff only for that use case).

You could start with killing somebody else -- the odds of *two* murders occuring would be even lower!

Wait...he really meant that. It's kinda creepy when Colbert makes out-of-character statements. And now there's gonna be a whole show full of those? Ugh...

Apparently OpenSSL uses its own allocator on top of the libc's (malloc). I.e. it only occasionally allocates a large chunk of memory from the C heap and then does its own allocations/reallocations in that (without anything like ASLR or guard pages of course). And apparently the particular sequence in which the OpenSSL library code allocates bits of memory using this allocator leads to a situation where the private key is always deterministically located behind the heartbeat packet space in memory. AFAICT this is why this bug is so remarkably portable and "works" reliably on all platforms.