Basically, this method of searching for aliens returns a positive whenever there is something producing heat which we don't see/understand. I have a feeling that the universe is quite full of such things. But maybe explaining these will help us make scientific advances. When astronomers first discovered a pulsar, they labeled the signal LGM for "little green men". But since then, we learned a lot about astronomy. Explaining apparent anomalies is good for science, and if you want to make the process sexier by talking about possible alien civilizations, I don't see much harm.

It's a lot easier to get caught when breaking into the padlock than when driving by with an RF device.

As if global warming isn't scary enough.

Thank you for an insightful post. No discussion of this will make sense without the point you made. IMO, it only makes the whole situation seem that much more tragic.

"There is no free speech without anonymity"

Can't disagree more. All anonymity does is protect people from consequences or having to stand by their opinions. In certain cases, this is useful (a protected source for a news story), but in most cases, if you can't say something without the cloak of anonymity, you shouldn't say it. In a lot of cases, it's cowardly.

The First Amendment just established the right of free speech, not that you shouldn't suffer the consequences of that speech. And if you are worried about being monetized, create your own forum.

I was using the last pre-MS version of the client, which had the "ring all speakers" option. I have several sound devices in my computer, and when my headphones are plugged in, they on their own don't ring loud enough to hear an incoming call. Luckily my HDMI monitor has speakers that don't get any use, except that Skype could make them ring with the "ring all speakers" option. They were loud enough to hear calls. That was until about an hour ago.

My client just stopped working, booted me off the network, and after messing with it for a while, I finally got the message that my Skype version is too old, and that I either get the new crippled client, or I can't Skype at all.

Many people have petitioned to have the "ring all speakers" re-implemented. It worked great. But Microsoft's answer has been: Fuck you, we will never do that. Stop pleading, we don't care. It didn't bother me too much until today. I just thought I'd stick with version 5.10.116 forever. Oh well. So thanks, Skype, for making my life shittier today. Boy am I happy I pre-paid a year of unlimited Skype Out!

Listen, for the rest of MIT's history, the experience for the core students on campus will remain the same: Dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc.. Why am I so sure? Because MIT is an elite school, and elites will want their kids to get the classical education which made them elite. It's just as much about soaking in the culture, encountering other people, putting together a study crew, a party crew, having a shared experience that includes a bit of hazing, etc.

Sure, MIT will also have a mass education system for the plebs, and they'll brand it with their elite name. But that stuff is not for the "real" MIT kids, except as a supplement. I'm confident that if they design the modular multimedia tutoring system well, many plebs will learn a lot from it. But the only effect of this will be to learn the material. They won't be transformed into MIT elites, even if the letters "MIT" appear somewhere on their diploma. For better or worse, rich parents will always want to send their kids to universities with dorms, semesters, course sequences, grades/evaluations, professors in classrooms, papers, projects, parties, etc. - in hopes that they will osmotically absorb something like culture. The more it reminds them of Hogwarts, the more money they'll be willing to pay. MIT would be stupid to get out of that business, and they're not stupid.

It's also a pretty tough negotiating strategy. If the governor A doesn't match the bid of governor B, Musk actually fires a lot of governor A's constituents, and the whole thing is egg on his face. Since governor A doesn't want that, he might decide to offer Musk some terms that are actually bad for the state, but will cause less personal blowback for the governor than the mass firing would have. But then there's governor B has the same incentives, and also doesn't want headlines about mass firings in his own state. He might actually decide to accept an even worse deal for the state, so as to avoid the bad headlines and instead look like a hero. So this sets up a race to the bottom which could easily save Musk more money than he spent on the cancelled construction project.

It is possible that this is just an interruption of work, while Musk brings in new contractors who can actually keep deadlines. According to the article, the fired construction crew missed all their construction milestones. That could be the reason for the layoffs, not a cancellation of the plans.

This is a good point. The book certainly didn't feel that way. The problem is that for the Hobbit movies, Jackson started with the original material and then decided to overdo everything about 5x beyond how Tolkien wrote it. So they can't just ride in barrels down a river - an incredibly perilous thing to begin with.

Here's how I picture Jackson deciding to "improve on" the original. They can't just ride in barrels, they have to ride in inexplicably stable barrels that don't take in water, down a river with some crazy fucking rapids, yeah!, while ... let see, why not make them be shot at by elves who otherwise never miss, but this time each shot will miss by like a milimeter, and then some other fuckers are gonna come attack them and come within a milimeter of killing them like a million times, and then good-guy elves will start shooting at those other fuckers, doing acrobatics and other bitchin elf shit, meanwhile the dwarves will be all "hoooo noooo! OOOooooo!" and we'll just keep doing that for like 20 minutes, and then more shooting and swiping and rapids, and by the end, each dwarf will almost-die like 200 times, because, you know. Tension.

You know that if Tolkien sees this he'd be like "Duh, I totally should have written it that way to begin with, it's waay more radical and gnarly!"

I feel an explaination may help. This project is based on a formal specification (in Isabelle/HOL) about what should be true about the microkernel. This specification rules out things like buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences and other properties by recasting these ideas in terms of higher order logic and uses automatic theorem proving tools to verify the proofs and that implementations match the specification.

There's even a binary verified version for ARM, so you don't even have to trust that your compiler works (but, there is progress in verified compilers, so hopefully an x86_64 version is on the way). The value in this is in using the tool chain and creating new, formally specified abstractions and implementing them in an verified manner to implement more secure, robust programs on top of this kernel. Of course, the microkernel makes assumptions about the hardware, boot loader, but formal verification is used more often in hardware, and you have to trust something at some point.

This opens a whole set of possibilities to the community as a whole. As a random example, you could formalize the Arduino language (or a kernel for that language) and create a verified version of that system that runs on this microkernel. This would be a big effort, but you could do it.

Overall, this is a positive step in lower the costs of verified co-designed systems and I hope it attracts more interest in software formal verification.

They would be wise to get a celebrity D&D campaign. Just imagine an evening with Cory Doctorow, Stephen Colbert, George R. R. Martin, Matt Groening etc, all sitting around a table, trying to lawyer rules and hold off a raid of hobgoblins! That would be a "reality" show that I could watch!

When the Germans go back to those as well, they might as well all get pilot goggles and go 100% steampunk.

To be fair, minting Thor as a superhero that, though a series of cosmic macguffins, teams up with Captain America and Ironman, is a deeply stupid idea to begin with.

If you use rechargeable batteries, four AA will be about 4.8v. Which may be close enough.