Troll? - Who moderated this troll?

If Obama actually defended the constitution from domestic enemies, he'd be dead within a month. Don't kid yourself about this. We live in an oligarchy, at best.

Well said. It seems that watching "lets play" videos on YouTube is the way they get interested in a game, then go off to play it themselves. Minecraft seems to be the current hit of my sproutlet, with an occasional burst of Spore. She spends more time watching than playing, however... which strikes me as bit odd, but hey, she's interested in something relatively safe to do.

They should have used Hugin, an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.

They need to visit the Vignetting page to learn how to fix things.

I had this idea for an FPGA design back in 1981... after reading Gilder's call to waste transistors... and I wonder if you think it might be worth doing even today? I believe that the design space for FPGAs may not have been adequately explored, and as a result we're all living with sub-optimal solutions.

It's very simple.. an orthogonal grid of 4 input, 4 output look up tables, wired to look like RAM to a host, and connect such that each output bit goes to one neighbor, and each input comes from a neighbor. Any logic function can be implemented in this manner (like all modern FPGAs). They could be clocked in A/B/A/B over B/A/B/A to eliminate race conditions, deadlocks, etc.

Bad cells could be routed around almost trivially... the big waste of course, is that without any dedicated routing fabric, all cells in the path of a given bit of data would have to handle it... and the propagation times would be long... but consistent. The advent of memristors makes this an extremely interesting idea to me, once again, as they make LUT costs almost zero.

So.. worth pursuing at all?

So, none of this mentions the lack of a proper security design in the Operating System. When someone says run a program, it let it use this much ram, this much cpu, and this folder.... that should be it.

But no existing commodity OS lets you do that, does it? Until capability based security becomes the norm, this will never be fixed, and information security jobs will flourish.

Let's go back to the way God intended it to be... local solar noon. Let the computers sort it out. ;-)

Capability based security is rooted in the principle of least privilege. The user decides what they wish the operating system to give the program access to, at run time. Just like you decide how much money to hand to a cashier at the checkout line, instead of giving them well defined limited access to your wallet and paypal account.

Trusting software is stupid, the only thing we should have to trust is the kernel of the operating system, and nothing else.

Progress is slowly being made in the use of capability based security. This will eventually (15-20 years from now) mean that computer security will be a solved problem.

Additionally, computer security can be outsourced and managed remotely, so it is likely to be commoditized, in much the same way as IT Administration was.

I would welcome limiting Comcast's ability to upload content to the internet. This would allow all the other content providers to blossom. 8)

Capability Based Security lets a user decide what resources a program is to be allowed to access at run-time. Unlike Windows, Linux, Mac, it doesn't automatically just trust programs with everything on your system.

This will eventually (10-15 years from now) allow for computers to be actually secure, assuming the NSA doesn't backdoor them.

Everyone seems to think it's snake-oil, hand waving, or just a dumb idea... so I figured I'd post it here.

Atomic hydrogen torches have been around since the 1940s... here's a GE training film about them. They produce insane amounts of heat and a reducing atmosphere, perfect for cutting almost anything.

In Illinois there are 2 seasons, Construction and Winter, and they overlap.

Anything without ice and slush is a plus.

The Orion project was to be the successor to Apollo, once we got done playing around with toy rockets. Imagine being able to launch 1300 TONS of cargo to Interstellar space. The technology was worked out in the 1960s, the engines were tested at full power, we just lacked the political will to do it.

With modern materials, we could do a better job now, and a launch would only result in the fallout equivalent of a single 10 Megaton bomb. Considering the stream of badness coming our way from Fukushima, this isn't really a bad trade off.

I wouldn't dare use this "map" for any serious purposes. It appears all they did was add the fine details from a topographic map to the rather low resolution results of other surveys. There's no high resolution direct measurement of gravity here.

That's only the #4 pool, and there are others that will go if there is a "gamma shine" event.... it could be worse than that. The article mentions that they believe 1/2 of Japan would be uninhabitable after that.

There's plenty of scare to go around in Fukushima, without any mongering