If you are a Tor programmer, and if there are really NSA/GCHQ insiders who actually help you to correct bugs... For Pete sake, just keep quiet about it!!!

Now, both agencies will have to initiate a mole-hunting operation, and you will lose these valuable insiders!

On the other hand, it may paralyze these agencies for months, maybe even years, while they try to figure out who has been leaking invaluable bug information back to the Tor project.

So it might be a wash. Either way, it also probably means that people inside the Puzzle Palace and the Donut are beginning to realize that enough is enough, so that is also encouraging.

Instead of potentially dangerous experiments, may I suggest the oldest known and proven solution to global warming?

This is extremely complicated, so please bear with me for a minute or two:

Plant. More. Trees.

Don't believe me? Fine, don't take my word for it. Heck, even that bastion of free enterprise, The Economist got behind that idea!

So, why is not implemented on a large scale? Because planting trees is not techonologically "sexy" - it is well known, has been well known for centuries, and, for maximum effect, would require rich countries to invest serious money in poorer countries, to save the rainforest (which is where tree-planting would have maximum impact). And we cannot allow these natives to get money to do something as simple as plant a tree, right?

In other words, the wealthiest have decided it is a lot more fun to throw money at dangerous or even foolish and ineffectual solutions rather than provide for jobs and development in the poorest countries of the world -- precisely the countries that will suffer the most due to global warming. Make of that what you will.

What is mind-boggling is that anyone takes a virulently anti-science organization like the dishonestly-named "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" seriously as a source of news about anything.

All you have to do is look at the source, and dismiss the claims as hysteria and lies.

This is not to say there might not be a story here, or something worth discussing, but until it is sourced from something other than an outlet for anti-science, anti-technology political shills it is all noise and no signal.

Yup, and such things belong in novels, not scientific papers: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...

Asteroids are believed to be aggregations of relatively loosely bound matter. They have likely experienced some local melting due to collisions, but it is very unlikely that they ever were entirely melted into a single mass. As such, they are quite peculiar bodies, much less akin to a mountain than a pile of rubble, and they likely aren't even all that close to a pile of rubble because the individual components they are made from were never part of a larger, more coherent body.

If you think about asteroid formation, you have to start with dust that accretes into small pellets, which then collide to form semi-melted rock-like-things, which then clump into asteroids (all the while suffering more collisions which produce local melting but not whole-body melting of the kind planets experienced.) This is all a consequence of the collisional statistics and dynamics in the early solar system.

So the proposition "Asteroids are loosely bound" is pretty plausible, and ones with high spin are therefore interesting because require us to revisit that plausibility, and who wouldn't want to do that?

There's nothing at all wrong with that explanation. It is neither better nor worse than any other explanation that is less than a full solution to the Navier-Stokes equation, and it provides a naive and surprisingly practical guide to interacting with airfoils, which the vorticity explanation, for example, does not.

Newsflash! Slashdot already has been targeted by NSA!!

Don't take my word for it: Link 1 and Link 2.

Typical conservative knee-jerk selfish ego-centric reaction right here.

What is wrong with serving one's own country and being concerned when a shadowy agency deploys a digital net over everything?

Except none of your points applies to climate change.

The effect is robust: there was a whole independent project to determine if the thermodynamically meaningless "global average temperature" is increasing. It is: http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

The threshold of measurement is around 0.5 C for a single station, and we have an effect that is about 1 C over the past 100 years. Not as big a margin as one would like, but difficult to ignore. And growing.

No one has produced any results that show the instrumental temperature record in the past century is not real. There are debates about causes, but the reality of the phenomenon is not in doubt.

Everyone who has looked at the question agrees that there is about a 1.6 W/m**2 addition to the Earth's heat budget from anthropogenic CO2, so clearly when taking the "positive cases" there is still good agreement.

There are large and legitimate areas of disagreement with regard to climate change (far more than the moron, anti-science, "the science is settled crowd" would have you believe) but the basic phenomenon, unlike the EMDrive, is not just consistent with but actually required by the laws of physics.

Finally: the summary is terrible, even by /. standards. The article does not point out any errors in the experiments. Rather it points out that reporters have been lying about the experiments, pure and simple. That is not the fault of the scientists, who honestly reported their null results.

More frequently than you might think.

I highly recommend Lisa Randall's "Warped Passages" as a fairly recent meditation from a working physicist on the strengths and weaknesses of multi-dimensional theories, as well as some of the background on what motivates them.

The short story is that higher dimensions make it easier to generate universes like ours, which are almost flat gravitationally and have this ridiculous difference in scale between gravity and everything else. Regular 3+1 dimension Standard Model physics requires a ridiculous level of fine-tuning for this to happen, so it is interesting to look for deeper theories where these features arise naturally.

The problem with String Theories in particular--and as other posters have pointed out it really is a family of theories--is that they are almost useless for "model building", which is the activity of generating simplifications we can actually calculate with to describe the world as it is today vs the world as it was a few Planck times after the Big Bang.

So while string theory is neither "untestable in principle" nor "designed to resist testing" it is "naturally test-resistant." Some simpler variants--including a rather elegant heuristic model that Randall herself co-created--have been killed off by the LHC, but the diversity of possible low-energy models enabled by String Theory is so large and heterogeneous that in practical terms they cannot all be falsified.

In the meantime, String Theories continue to take up an inordinate amount of theoretical physicist's time and effort, and there have been fairly senior voices raised in concern about this, particularly because it has been going on for so long that we may end up with a generation of theorists who have never done anything but string theory and have come to the conclusion that it won't work.

Rather than waiting for this Big Reset, it would be nice if we started spending more time looking at non-stringy alternatives.

So in your view von Braun was an amoral, self-agrandizing liar who was willing to actively engage in the selection of slave labour working in death camps to build rockets that killed thousands of strangers just so he could play with cool toys? Because that's what you're describing.

I say "self-agrandizing" because everything that von Braun wanted to do would have been done without him, without the 12000 dead slave labourers, without the 9000 dead British civilians.

I've had some pretty extreme scientific and technical ambitions in my time, but have somehow been able to realize many of them without killing people, and have given up the rest because: killing people. So I'm willing to pass judgment on von Braun in this respect: if he faced a choice between following his dreams and not killing people I'd have to say the latter is the far better choice.

Even in those cases where you get a good service provider (which will depend on the specific people you've got working on your project much more than the company they work for, so anyone who says "Oracle = good" is missing the point) you still run into one of the most fundamental human problems: we suck at communication.

When you outsource something the degree of clear, concise, validated communication required is many times what is required for in-house development (where communication can still be a major problem). Capturing user needs and implementing them in a useful and user-efficient manner is hard enough with a high-bandwidth internal-communications channel. With outsourcing it is almost impossible for the people designing and building the system to get the information they need from the end-users.

So one question I would ask the OP is: how often do your provider's developers talk to your end users? (not your end user's managers, who don't have a clue what the system requirements actually are). If the answer is "never or hardly ever" then in-house is definitely the way to go, because your in-house team will have at least some chance of building a system that will serve end-user needs.

Which large reptiles are those? And which dinosaurs are they descended from? And how did dinosaurs, which were all killed at the KT boundary, manage to have descendents?

Dinosaurs are reptiles with their legs under their bodies. This makes them distinct from other reptiles (the kinds we have today, which are not descended from dinosaurs) which have their legs off to the side.

Mammals also managed the legs-under-the-body trick, and birds (which are descended from dinosaurs, unlike all modern reptiles, none of which are descended from dinosaurs, what with dinosaurs all being extinct without issue at the KT boundary.)

Most of which is not done by the surgeon. I've worked a lot with surgeons, and can assure you they are used to having other people do almost everything but surgery for them.

Surgeons are the equivalent of the "master programmer" team, which is a now mostly-obsolete team structure where there is one (or a very small number) of expert coders surrounded by a larger group of admin/build/whatever types who make sure the master programmer has nothing to do but code. It works on certain problems, but unlike surgery, the scope of what we expect software developers to do has grown far beyond what one person can handle in almost all interesting cases (I say this as a team of one who does everything from firmware to UI, but it is on a very narrowly defined embedded application that I've worked extremely hard to keep more-or-less within scope for a single very senior person.)