Credited in the titles as "55MPH Briefcase", but I don't think Jittlov ever got it going that fast.

Didn't he call it "killer" or something like it, because it was so difficult to control, especially on that down-the-hill run?

(I thought of it, too, buit posted following up something early in the discussion before seeing the WoSaT posting.)

I want a flying car that folds into a briefcase like George Jetson.

Me, too.

Other "prior art" occurs in the 1988 feature movie version of Jitlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time.

See 1:05:25 throug 1:11:10

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.

Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.

It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?

The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.

As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".

My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.

The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.

Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)

[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]

Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"

I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.

I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).

The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.

There was that.

Compared to the next most "successful" water landings I know off, I would still call it practically intact :)

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.

Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.

Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.

To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).

Instead of SHAing each entropy source individually, I would simply concatenate all the entropy sources together and SHA that. It saves the hash initialization, finalization and intermediate "folding" steps.

Intel uses a phase noise amplifier to generate a random bit stream, passes that stream through a hash algorithm to cancel hardware bias and fill/refresh an entropy buffer, hashes parts of that buffer to produce the RNG output and that output also gets hashed back in the entropy buffer to provide a high-bandwidth RNG stream.

Basically, it is a low-bandwidth true hardware RNG (something like 1Mbps) continuously seeding a high-bandwidth PRNG to amplify its bandwidth.

Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,

Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.

While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?

Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)

Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)

If you want a secure PRNG, use a decent seed source with whatever other entropy sources you want and use that to start a recursive hash loop, using the hash's output as your random number. Good hash functions have characteristics pretty close to a true RNG when used this way and many true RNGs use hash as an intermediate step to cancel input bias.

How often have pilots successfully landed large aircrafts on water? AFAIK, the Hudson landing is the only time pilots have managed to pull off a perfect landing where the plane stayed in one piece and everyone survived - they did not call it the "Miracle on the Hudson" for nothing and the only reason they managed to pull that off is because the river was perfectly still at the time. All other water landings I remember seeing footage or reconstructions of had various degrees of severe disintegration either on impact or soon after - hitting water at over 200km/h is almost like hitting a brick wall; anything that sticks out (like engines, wings, instrument tubes, antennas, landing gear and doors if deployed, etc.) gets ripped out and creates more areas where drag will rip even more stuff off. I do not remember any other water landing where the plane still had both wings attached.

BTW, the cabin is only designed to keep 100kPa inside the cabin. Keeping the 100MPa from crashing into a wave outside would require something drastically different.

Another problem with your theory is that it is unlikely the wiring between hypothetical batteries and the satellite radio would have both survived the crash and remained afloat within communications depth assuming the transmitter was and remained water-tight: SLA and NiMH batteries would readily sink while Lithion-based batteries violently react with water if their shell is compromised.

Nearly all the electrical power in a plane goes through the cockpit's breaker panel... even the toilet's pump. As some reports have explained, the ACAMS actually has separate breakers for the monitoring systems and the transceivers and only the monitoring system got shut down presumably because whoever turned that off did not know there were two and the transceivers ended up continuing to transmit empty frames - that second breaker is supposedly in a non-obvious location on the panel.

If a plane is in such a bad shape that it has to rely on battery power instead of its APU or RAT, I doubt it could spare battery power for systems that probably won't help them: if you simultaneously lose power from both engines and cannot start the auxiliary power unit to restore power, you have issues well beyond anything ACAMS can help with. And that battery power would still be going through the cockpit... no cockpit, no power. Cockpits also don't float too well so it would drag the transceivers down to the bottom with it if the wiring survived.