It's a good idea because magstrips are easy to erase and contacts are easy to destroy. It's unfortunate that this implementation is so crap, but that doesn't invalidate the concept.

Thanks for the heads-up! I will, in fact, wait. (I am getting an Ouya for the living room, but that's something else...)

So, what you're basically saying is that a code plumber is the sweet spot of employment in the current job market?

I think that most of us would also gladly trade your liberty for a better and safer world, since that would kill two birds with one stome. :-)

The capital S was not unintentional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaria

In short, it's a symbol for a future utopia (or dystopia, depending on who you ask) where isolationism is taken to the extreme, and privacy laws are absolute. What you present to the outside world is what you want to present, and what you want to hide, you have the full right to hide. As long as you stay within the borders of your home and property.

As any Trekkie knows, it'll be transparent aluminum anyhow.

On the plus side, the erosion of an illusion of privacy in public will accelerate Solarisation. Our homes will eventually become our bastions, which we will rarely leave. There will be no need to, and too many privacy implications if we do.

And we should also all have better password management. If all we're providing now is a very small token (password) then we could be providing a larger token (uniquely generated certificate per machine login) as well and really getting something in the bargain. But if the user has to do anything to enable this, they won't. It ought to be in the browser. I'm not talking about SSL, which is good and all, but about the reverse basically.

The San Francisco plumbers' union was (is?) famously a Mafia operation. What's it like out there? Is he getting any kickbacks? Etc.

You're not reasonably going to make casings, because where will the stock come from? But you could instead make a black powder rifle, from towards the end of the era when they used bullets rather than balls, and had decent rifling. There were also revolvers. Then you only need to worry about primer caps, which are cheap and small and easy to stockpile and relatively easy to manufacture.

Actually I think that the first 2 years of high school should focus on things you will need to survive: money management, how financing works and why revolving credit is not a good thing; reading and writing.
The second 2 years should allow either continued academic *or* tradescraft. fo you go the tradescraft route you'll get two years focused on only the stuff you need for a particular field. Plumbing: math and geometry (drain slopes), chemistry (solvents and glues, interaction with metals), and of course hands on.
-nbr

You may be laughing, but the behavior of plumbing at relativistic speeds is actually quite difficult to predict. Plumbing around black holes is even worse, although the upside is that at least EPA won't nag you if you happen to be releasing toxic chemicals into the black hole: it all ends up as mere mass, charge, and angular momentum anyway. (Bilingual bonus: in my native tongue, "illegal dump" translates as "black dump".)

That is an interesting article. But it bothers me that qPCR is the only assay they used. I'd really like to see those microarrays they talked about, it's been over 5 years and they already had the RNA from the qPCR. Either someone didn't think it was worth funding, or they didn't find anything worth publishing. Also, calmodulin is involved. There are techniques to measure and visualize calmodulin activity. Showing that calmodulin-Ca++ binding actually increases in those timeframes would be much stronger evidence for their claim.

So, no I'm not quite going to fuck myself yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there's nothing extraordinary here.

It's quite obvious that any distributed system is inherently parallel (unless you decide to do only synchronous message passing, which would be stupid). And if that cluster is comprised of isolated nodes passing messages over a network, then it's a distributed system - by definition.

I guess the issue is that building this cluster for accurate testing of the behavior of distributed algorithms was probably cheaper than trying to build an accurate simulator for it running on a desktop workstation would have been.