"As a side note.... you thought global warming was bad with coal plants and such, just wait until everybody is turning out gigawatts of energy on a personal basis and wondering where all of that heat is going after it has been used for something else!"

Simple. It gets radiated into space just like the terawatts of heat the sun bathes the earth in. The problem with coal plants isn't the heat they generate but the CO2 which is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases trap heat within our atmosphere. Think of it as insulation.

That was the old joke. Tell the user the token fell out the back of the computer and is behind their desk somewhere.

Cell, not packet.

I looked through the comments and the articles and I think the question I answered was based on inside information. Nowhere did I read in any of the articles that there were two possible routes considered, only down the coast and up the Mississippi. There is this snippet from the PopSci article: "He didnt seem fazed at all by the prospect of getting the huge muon ring from New York to northern Illinois. We have the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, after all." notice how he said Great Lakes, lakes being plural which includes Huron and Erie which happen to provide a waterway between western NY or PA and IL.

If you read both those sentences and the question asked it sounds like this: Why didn't we move the magnet through NY/PA to the great lakes and barge it to IL? It makes perfect sense because even if the magnet is moved through the Chicago river to Lake Michigan, it still needs to go up the Mississippi which is fed by the Chicago river. And going a bit up north on Michigan means they are travelling on one of the great lakes.

Wheezy is a GNU/Linux operating system based on the Linux kernel. GNU/Hurd is the GNU operating system based on the Herd kernel. Commonly people simply call GNU/Linux "Linux" but Linux is the kernel which GNU runs atop of.

If you do a bit of research on Hurd the benefits are quite intriguing. One interesting bit is since Hurd is a microkernel, the concept of kernel-space and user-space disappears as everything runs in userspace. The kernel only worries about memory management, process/thread scheduling and message passing. Services are provided by "servers" running in userspace and talk to each other via messages. Users no longer need root access to do simple tasks like installing software, mounting disks, accessing hardware or other tasks which require root access or sudo because they live in kernel space. Instead they talk to the servers directly. The idea is that by moving services to user space, the need to grant users any type of root access (setuid, su or sudo) is removed. There is still a security hierarchy with a "root" user who has full control of the system, but users never need access to that user or group. No need for root access means less chance that the root account can be compromised. Imagine the problem of "privileged ports" disappearing because those services (ftp, http, etc.) no longer need any sort of root access. They are simply allowed to read/write certain files/directories and access the network. If that service is compromised, it can't gain root access.

Some have said microkernels are not necessary or that they impose a larger overhead in the form of message passing. That argument was valid ten plus years ago but today we have quad core 1.5GHz cell phones and PC hardware that is so fast that its stagnated the market. Linus Torvalds famously argued against the microkernel with Andrew Tanenbaum (Minix creator who inspired Torvalds) who is in favor of them. Eric S. Raymond once said about Plan 9 (The planned successor to Unix that failed) "There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.". Hurd may never see production use and like Plan 9 be relegated to a research or pet project of a handful of developers interested in operating system design. I hope it succeeds.

Just ask yourself this question: How does a trigger lock stop a criminal? How does it stop a psychopath who already has the "key" to the lock? The main point about this discussion is that electronic locks will not stop crime. It might cost a few more lives when a legal gun owner finds the gun wont unlock when they need it most because of a malfunction.

Its a silly bill that does nothing to solve the gun problem.

It is a lot easier to move 600 tons by barge than by land. The size and weight makes it impossible to go over bridges and most roads. Not only is the weight highly concentrated, 1.2 million pounds for the magnet and probably another 300,000+ for the modular platform trailers & tractor but the width is nearly 50 feet. At that weight your speed is severely limited, always below 5 mph and you are limited to moving at night only. From the map, I would guess it might make its way south on floyd then onto a barge in the bay. I don't see how they could get it anywhere on the north shore unless they go up floyd to 25 and take lilco rd to use the docks at the power station (if it fits up those roads). From there its an easy trip on water. No bridges, narrow roads or worries about weight. Its open water until the Mississippi.

You also have to take into account the cost and process to apply for permits. You have to plan the route in advance and have it approved by the DOT. By law you need a police escort for a load that large in NY, more money. Imagine planning a route for hundreds of miles involving police escorts, road closures, moving only at night, slow speeds and having to deal with routing around bridges (if possible) and maybe needing to reinforce bridges/overpasses. It can and has been done many times but its costly and time consuming. It can take upward of a year or more to plan a move that big.

Thank you for the links and information.

Reading the /. summary does not at all sound alarming or sensational. They are merely reporting a story that in all likeliness has been sensationalized and over hyped in the general media. Droves of average joes are going to freak out at declare that wifi and cell phones make your sterile, give you cancer or turns your children into autistic ironic hipsters. Sadly the general populace will not be smart enough to realize these students could have made a simple mistake in the experiment or not have been thorough enough.

I read the article but the translation leaves a lot to be desired. Here are my questions:
-Wifi and GSM are on different bands so why speculate cell phones could also have the same effect?
-Did they repeat the experiment using the same plant seed type more than once?
-Did they note the temperature, humidity and sunlight available in each room at regular intervals or used any data logging equipment?
-What kind of rooms, and were they in the same home? Were they the students bedrooms or what?
-Were both testbeds receiving the same amount of sunlight for the same amount of time?
-Did they try other plant seeds? Or buy the same plant seeds but from different vendors to compare?
-Did they try to repeat the experiment with the router off to isolate the possibility the rooms environments played a role?
-What kind of routers were they? What make, model, transmit power, antenna configuration, a/b/g/n etc.

this paragraph, copied verbatim from the dutch translation, blows me away:
"The five aspiring researchers would examine mobilsignalers effect on them, but had not equipped for it. Therefore, they used instead 12 trays with a total of 400 karsefrÃ. They were divided into two compartments with the same temperature and the water with the same amount of water over a period of 12 days. The six trays in one room were located next to the two routers that should emit more or less the same type of radiation as cell phones."
More or less! What the fuck, really?

How would people feel if the guy or gal coming into the bathroom has a camera mounted to their head which is recording? How would glass be treated at movie theaters or live music/theater shows? I would imagine quite a few businesses and other establishments would not want people walking around with video cameras.

I assume you might start seeing "no glass allowed" signs at venues, theaters and other establishments where privacy would be of concern. That or there would be a transmitter or even GPS data which glass reads to let it know it is in a private or camera restricted area and disable the camera. If such privacy barriers were to be implemented I would imagine people selling glass-jammers to shut off glass devices in the surrounding area. But transmitters can break and glass devices can be hacked.

I don't want google glass and I don't want to live in a surveillance society. Glass might be considered too geeky but give it time and Apple or some pop star will make it hip and cool. Then everyone will be lining up around the block to buy one. Reminds me of the newer futurama episode where fry accidently records an embarrassing secret of leela's while in the locker/bathroom and tweets the video to the whole world to gain more followers.

Tightly packed people are more likely to have lower casualties. Suicide bombs can only be so powerful. Humans are quite "squishy" and the people immediately around the bomb will absorb most of the blast energy and the people next to them may or may not survive though they will have severe injuries. Just look at how many people died in the Boston attacks vs how many were injured. Three people died yet nearly 300 people were injured by two bombs.

OT but what the hell.
Amen. After self teaching myself C and then C++ I found C++ to be a dog to code in so I never bothered to actually learn it. Then I started working with C# but I didn't like the idea of tying myself to .net and other MS stuff (there is mono but it didn't interest me enough). My primary interest now lies in D, but like you said, it lacks library support. But if you contribute to D and show its benefits to others, it will help the language grow. Though that is easier said than done.

I also am investigating Go, Erlang, Ocaml and Ada. One interesting aspect about some of those languages is concurrency. I like how threading is built into the language and not a clumsy library or API. Ada's task and Goroutines are so much easier to work with than say pthreads. Erlang is both a pure functional language and is concurrent which makes things interesting. D supports threading via the actor model and has built in parallelism. C++ should have been taken out behind the barn and shot along with Java a long time ago.

Instead of switching distros I simply switched desktops by first moving to Xfce and then to my present choice, Mate. Simply because Canonical makes dumb desktop decisions does not mean I have to abandon my distro.

No, I have observed this behaviour before. It has nothing to do with mass. I was stuck in traffic so bad we put our cars in park and walked around the road for two hours. Turns out they closed the highway to close a lane for road work, PenDOT style. The Fedex semi two cars in front of me pulled to the side to block the assholes riding the shoulder. When we started to move, slowly, a semi a few cars behind me stayed put for about 30 seconds to let a large gap open up and then began to move slowly. We stopped again for a few minutes and the semi was still far up the highway plodding along with cars going around him trying to fill the gap.

My friend was one of those lucky winners who won a chromebook when Google was giving a bunch away. He used it for all of two hours until he shelved it and I think he sold it. In his words "It was useless" and "What the fuck is it even for?" I wonder why Google even decided to create a chromebook in the first place. What market is ChromeOS trying to fill? Netbooks? Dead market. Laptops? People use them as desktop replacements and want to run a real OS, not a toy OS. Why would anyone want a Chromebook when tablets are almost as cheap and run most of the apps that people want? I don't get it. I mean I get that web apps are gradually becoming as featureful as desktop applications and in some cases just as good but why ChromeOS? WHY!

Here is a thought:
If anyone can pull off a "Windows 8" it would be Google. I am not an Android expert but I believe most apps are cross platform as they are running on a JVM. Some I hear are tied to or call binary ARM libs outside of Dalvik so they are tied to ARM only. Google should have developed a version of Linux similar to Windows 8. It can run Android apps in a Dalvik VM that is displayed through X. If the user wishes, they can drop to a regular Linux X desktop and do some actual work. It could also be possible to display more than one app at once and possibly have windowed apps. How cool would it be if the same damn laptop that can run android apps like a tablet can also be a development platform as well? Bonus points if the reference design is similar to the Asus transformer or the Intel Ultrabook (or whatever its called) with the screen that opens 180 degrees to become a tablet. Oh, and give the user ROOT for christs sake.

That to me is the ideal combination of desktop OS + mobile OS. Allow it to run both at the same time. I believe Microsoft wasn't too far off their rocker with Windows 8. But it was too little too late and the UI changes were too drastic, confusing and made no sense. Then to top it off MS taking 30% off the top for an app sale.