The standing ovation was inappropriate. At the low partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2 would not precipitate at -78C. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/results-lab-experiment-regarding-co2-snow-in-antarctica-at-113%C2%B0f-80-5%C2%B0c-not-possible/

And the magnitude of the seasonal oscillation demonstrates how powerful this uptake of carbon by plants is in relation to the 400ppm of CO2. Recovering a significant amount of the carbon uptake from seasonal plant growth and sequestering it into soil (thereby improving soil fertility), as can be accomplished with Biochar processing, is one of the very few technologies that could be employed to bring Earth back to the relatively safe levels of 350ppm that climate scientists have recommended as a goal. See http://venearth.com/ , http://www.biochar-international.org/ and http://350.org/ for relevant information.

Are you serious? Do you really think I could corner the market by buying ten textbooks at the usual unit retail pricing? Besides - I made it clear that the books were to be donated, not "scalped."

I recently attempted to purchase multiple textbooks for a donation to a teacher offering a non-profit course, and was blocked from purchasing new textbooks because, according to Amazon.com, multiple purchases of a single book are forbidden by the publisher. Amazon.com had plenty of copies available, they just weren't allowed to sell them to me.

I contacted Elsevier on their website, and they were unavailing.

My response was to purchase used copies instead, for which the teacher was very grateful, but I had wanted to do better for her.

The end result was zero direct revenue.

So, if there 80 million of these Apollo Asteroids, and 500 known, there's 160,000 unknown asteroids for every known one. I'd presume that there's recording of prior observations of the Apollo Asteroids, and it would be interesting to discover whether this asteroid has been observed in the past. We hear all this publicity about near-hits (near-miss is a term that makes no sense) that have been tracked, but this was a hit that wasn't tracked. This high ratio of unknown Apollo asteroids suggests that reliably tracking asteroids to determine which will hit is a tough problem.

Unless hits can be tracked with high probability, coming up with ways to adjust the orbits of planet-killing hits is not worth worrying about. We won't need to send in the drilling team if we can't see them coming. Michio Kaku went to the trouble of telling us that if the orbit was a few seconds different, it could have been a big catastrophe, but how is that relevant if we can't track them?

++points. Thank you.

The car was adapted to accomodate his disability so he could operate the basic controls of the car, presumably not including the handbrake.

Saving the transmission is secondary to saving the human being at the wheel.

He was at a "regular" charging station, not a supercharging station. It was an unscheduled stop and he charged it for an hour, which he says Tesla support staff told him would be enough to get back to the supercharging station. Reportedly, they said that the lost range would be recovered as he continued to drive, warming the batteries. It would have taken as much as five hours to fully charge the car at that station.

This overnight loss of range had been previously reported by Consumer Reports, and Tesla reportedly told them the same story- that the range will recover as driving is resumed and the batteries are warmed up. This was also in the vicinity of the Milford supercharging station.

http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2013/01/rapid-charging-at-a-tesla-ev-supercharge-station.html

"The night before my voyage back to work, I had 88 miles left, according to the car's computation. I knew that would be cutting it pretty close, so I planned on a 30-minute supercharging session in Milford to gain some juice and added peace of mind. But while parked outside my house overnight, the temperature dipped and so did the indicated range, which now read only 58 miles. (Yes, a little range anxiety began to set in.) How can 30 miles evaporate just like that? According to Tesla, the car's computer takes into account the freezing temperature and readjusts the remaining range. The company also said that, upon restarting, the battery warms up and the computer once again updates the range. I didn't notice it adding miles to the range but the range remained steady for most of my 28-mile drive back to the supercharger. I connected to the charger with 50 miles on the meter and after 30 minutes, I was back to 150 miles—more than ample range to get back to our East Haddam test track."

kill -9 doesn't work when the process is stuck on an I/O operation such as a read/write to an NFS or failed md (RAID) device. Plus when it happens on an md device, you can't fix the md device (such as by doing an mdadm --stop and mdadm --assemble --force) because the device is marked busy. Reboot time.

So, why model against TCP w/o SACK? Isn't that just beating a paper tiger? SACK allows TCP to utilize all the packets after the lost packet(s) without retransmitting them, and requires no more memory in the transmitter and receiver than coded TCP, and with proper tuning of window size with regards to round-trip time and loss rate, should work just as well, and its been around for 25 years or so.

Well, then the coded TCP researchers excluded technology that's in modern TCP that makes their work redundant. In colloquial terms, they slayed a paper tiger. Is SACK used in current smartphones, or does a 2% or 5% erasure rate (the rates indicated in the benchmark figures of the paper) somehow prevent it from working? Omitting SACK from a cellphone's TCP implementation (or implementing it poorly) would be a cause of low transfer rates and wasted traffic in the airwaves.

Yes, it would.