They need to fork Wikipedia, and add some directed tree flags to it. Skill META can be considered to belong to multiple parent categories, and has multiple meanings because of the vagaries of language META.

Any attempt to shoe-horn this into a tree is going to fail. Oh... and their search function is dead.

Yes, you can use almost 100% of the silicon, if you use a BitGrid to process information instead of Von Neuman architectures.

Changing clocks twice a year is nuts, nuke this insanity from high orbit.

The recurrent weakness in US military thinking (and procuring) is that small numbers of fancy, high tech stuff can beat large numbers of low tech things.

This is also the same reason the Nazis tanks lost their battle against he Russians... most of them failed due to mechanical problems, only a smaller amount of them were destroyed in combat. One might almost think that all those scientists from Project Paperclip infected us with the need to do fancy things.

If there were thousands of little generating plants, we wouldn't need a big heavy duty grid... but solar is not a generating plant. It is a sometimes available source of energy which perturbs the balance of the grid over the time frame of seconds.

The Grid is a system designed to reliably deliver power from a set of fairly reliable constant power sources. Those sources were designed to go online and stay at design load for many months at a crack, then have a scheduled maintenance outage. and then do it again. There are stresses associated with each transition, which are cumulative, and result in finite lifespans for things like generator shafts.

Yes... a generator shaft is a big dumb piece of steel... until you start to think about it and dig deeper. It was probably cast in a spinning mold with a vacuum applied to cause any defects to be located in the center of the shaft. Those defects are then bored out, and thus you have a nice, strong, reliable piece of steel good for 5 decades of service, with a huge margin of safety. This huge margin considered 12 outages and/or unit trips per year, a safety factor of probably 20 for good measure, and an outrageous 50 year service life.

Since the 1950s... plants now cycle far more often thanks to big cheap nukes.... cutting that margin way back. Now you want to cycle them every time a cloud passes through the neighborhood of a large solar installation? They won't last 5 years at that rate.

The stresses on the whole grid from crappy politically special flowers will eventually collapse the grid unless some heavy, HEAVY upgrades are done... which just ain't gonna happen.

Solar/Wind is going to kill the grid... just wait and see.

Who is going to replicate these experiments? It's not science until someone can do it, and then someone else... and then someone else...

The Republic of Texas has its own power grid. I've heard rumors in the distance past that they have the ability to isolate their phone lines. I see no reason to doubt that they kept up with the times when it comes to the Internet.

Of course... it's just a rumor.

How fittin' it is that this tail comes on talk like a pirate day. The lubber has no idea what the crew has ready, once we host the jolly roger.

How the heck did ISIS make it up into orbit to attack the space station? You can't trust the Russkies, can you?

Next thing you know ISIS will be on the moon, and we'll have to bomb them. ;-)

I completed the Stanford AI course, recently did a course in communications from the University of Amsterdam. In both cases, time management was a problem for me, I simply had other things to do, and drifted away... catching back up in the nick of time. Trying to fit distance learning into the regular schedule of campus life seems to be the problem here... it is definitely not the depth of material that is any kind of a stopper.

I think that guided deep dives into topics we would otherwise not understand, is going to be how we keep accumulating knowledge as a species in the future. Deep diving takes time, and unlike the real diving... it doesn't all have to happen in one shot.

On a side note... it is worth at least $20 to me... possibly much more... if someone can give me the deep dive that results in me understanding the Higgs field, and the Higgs particle. A true understanding... not some vague notion of mexican hats and potential.

It is utterly offensive to me that the State Department gets to decide who and what groups are "terrorists". Free Association is one of the key tenants of a functioning Democracy.

I find the associations between lobbyists and government officials to be a clear and present danger to our country... but what can I do about it?

You do mean 616, don't you? Its bad enough when governments break their promise to pay money for currency.. the ability to take all of your money and your identity in one fell swoop seem to be the ultimate tool for sorting out Serfs and Lords.

Instead of trying to harden an OS, why not use a system designed to be secure from the start, one that supports multilevel security. The technology was created in response to data processing demands during the Viet Nam conflict, and perfected during the 70s and 80s.

The root cause is that the security model of Unix that everyone copied isn't compatible with the modern world. The OS never asks what resources you want to allow a given program to access, instead it ass-u-me-s that it should have full run of everything, and just trusts the program to do the right thing.

So antivirus programs were invented to serve as a "no-fly-list" type system.... only programs on the list are stopped. This worked well until methods for changing the signature of programs got up to speed. Imagine a terrorist being able to make up a name before trying to buy/board a flight... this is where we are now.

Until we get the OS to ask what resources a program should be allowed... things will keep getting worse.