People, this is one forum where I would have hoped we would all be familiar with the political compass and could read at least the abstract and conclusions of papers like Merlo2011.

That said, the Republicans are in a civil war between the "statists" and the "liberals" (in the european sense of the word). The Dumbocrats (sp?) are similarly torn, but they are miraculously immune from questioning by the Media-ocratic press. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet (~6B not in Europe or US are basically killing themselves, us, and anything else as they squabble over whose imaginary friends are the most potent (sorta like a real-world extension of the Friday night fights between StarWars fanboys and Trekkies, but with real bullets and real bombs).

When I taught military strategy, I often asked mystudents if they thought rational societies could win out over irrational ones. The mathematics of mutual assured destruction (the context for my question) fail in the absence of a form of rationality on both sides. In the 60s and 70s there was a form of that rationality as required by the assumptions. I fear that in the present world there is no such bi-lateral rationality, at least not between the Western European styles of government and the theocratic forms we are confronting.

Good luck with all that. Myself, I don't live near a ground zero during these time. Welcome to World War IV.

I wish I had not already commented, I'd much rather have modded this up!

Just once I'd like to see comparative statistics on how many Chinese (percentage-wise) believe in AGW. At a recent Climate Change Summit the experts were all about two things.

(1) It does not matter what you or your politicians think, the real measure is the insurance industry. At the summit, a spokesperson for a large insurance company pointed out that wind insurance in Florida is now like flood insurance. Too big for insurance companies to cover (because they are not too big to fail), so the government is forcing coverage (because the government IS too big to fail (Hurrican Windstorm Insurance). Uhm, ignore Greece and Iceland, please).

Then (2) there is no silver bullet. Removing all the cars or removing all the coal fired power plants (worldwide) won't solve the problem. We need "silver buckshot" hitting multiple targets.

It will be interesting to see if commercial projects can compete with "state-capitalism" projects (like China is running). State-capitalism being the media name for the sort of national socialist (fascist, though that term is often overloaded to unusability) economic system China is using.

I was a PhD student with background as a mathematician in the AF, who had worked on ballistic missile codes (boost, sub-orbital and reentry). I had been writing a sci-fi story that followed almost exactly what happened (SRB blow-through failure), except that my SRB failure was away from the main tank, the shuttle just failed to achieve orbit (I had done the calculations) and the story was about the attempt to rescue the cargo (the story was all about the precautions you'd take if the cargo was so dangerous that it could not be allowed back into the atmosphere). Needless to say, after this I never was able to open that folder again, it is still in my stack of unfinished short stories.

Item 17 was missing from the list of challenges.

It reads

• Find if there are any expressions of the form
  • gsub("([3-9][ 0-9]*)","n","[[0-9]*[1-9]^^n + [0-9]*[1-9]^^n = [0-9]*[1-9]^^n")

that are TRUE. I have an elegant solution, but it requires Perl and more space than Slashdot allows for its comments.

They ate tiger nuts, and they went extinct. Coincidence? I think not.

Unless you are building and maintaining your own systems off the grid, you have effectively forced society to support your habits, including using wasteful bulbs. An alternative to having cheap incandescent bulbs might be to have a carbon-tax like surcharge for the extra infrastructure ... then your "cheap" 40 and 60 watt incandescent bulbs would also carry a hefty excise tax that would make them less competitive. Of course, we all know that infrastructure is free, at least in the minds of the typical Walmart shopper.

Unless you use other people's vehicles to kill the deer.

Is the use of the term "hologram" designed to imply that an n-dimensional function can describe an (n+m)-dimensional object? The (n+m) dimensional object being a perceptual illusion similar to a hologram?

This gets to the right question ... how long will we have keyboard-mouse and big-screens for doing real work? As long as I am alive I hope. Point and click is okay, but touch and tap sucks.

We like to think that libertarian philosophies will save us ... it is not a shortage of libertarians in the West that is the problem, it is that they spend their time trying to stop the West from waging war rather than trying to stop the rest of the world from fighting dirty. But we are working on it (Syria DID back down, no?)

Prior to WW-I we were headed down a path that made warfare the province of specialists who only killed each other. This was the result of Western civilization slowly coming to terms with making war a set-piece event, primarily between armies on the field. But then ... (some examples only)

• * the USofA Americans showed how to use that set-piece mentality against a tyranny (ca 1776-)
• * Shaka Zulu converted from stylized tribal warfare methods to a similar guerrilla form of war (ca 1790)
• * Gen. Sherman applied a scorched earth strategy through the South to end slavery (go away if you want to argue revisionist histories) (ca 1860-s)
• * British and German forces in WW-I continued that tradition, declaring means of production to be valid targets. (ca 1910s)
• * Everyone came on board in WW-II, though there was debate over day-light precision bombardment (in daylight, targets=factories) vs carpet bombing (at night, targets=cities). Nukes made the distinction irrelevant. (ca 1940s)

Along the way, things like the Geneva conventions have been struggling to make doctors and engineers part of the solution by making some of their products illegal (as war crimes), so we have a precedent for this idea.

BUT

The hegemony we saw in late 1700s in Europe has stopped spreading (because colonialism is evil). So the Euro-centric model of limiting war by rules is confronted by a genetic algorithm based solution that is right now trying to find out which system is better. At the extremes: the Western trended "rules of war". A the other extreme, the guerrilla tactics and all's fair models of the new tribal societies. Hooray for science, we know how to model the question of which will win (see Prisoner's Dilemma ). The bad news is that the genetic algorithm does not reward "fair", or "just" or "peace". It rewards fecundity (see Idiocracy) whether genes or memes.

Really?

"Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle."

Add ... But far too many just piss in the fountain.

No, this just sets the precedent that outlets are not invitations to charge devices unless they are clearly marked for that use. It is simple courtesy that if someone puts out a bushel of apples with a sign that says "Free, take one", then you take one. Not two, not ten. RTFM