What the Romans found out about was lead acetate.

They discovered that lining their wine storage containers made bad or old wine turn sweet, rather than sour. This is because the acetic acid of the vinegar reacted with the metallic lead of the lining, becoming and extremely sweet - and extremely soluble, bioavailable, and toxic - compound (nicknamed "sugar of lead"). This, far more than the metallic lead in the pipes, is currently believed to be the main source of lead-related poisoning in the Romans (especially among the upper classes, who could afford the wines in the fancy containers).

The NRA's point is that metallic lead is enormously less of a toxicity issue than water-soluble lead compounds, and that anti-gunners and anti-hunters are (in its opinion) using "junk science" claims to push for yet another piece of legislation restricting guns, ammunition, and hunting.

The obvious counter would be to bring up NON-junk-science research establishing that metallic lead from shot actually is a significant problem and quantifying the problem. That only works, of course, if such non-junk-science results exist.

That doesn't say poisoning from lead shot is NOT a problem (or not a significant one). But given the number of scientists looking for such an effect, I'd consider a lack of such papers (if, indeed, there is such a lack) would be an indicator that toxicity from shot is so low as to be buried in the noise, rather than that nobody has gotten around to documenting it.

(Now its lack in the POLITICAL DEBATE, of course, could just be a matter of the anti-lead-shot faction going with the most lurid claims as a political tactic.)

I would presume that while the field is quite robust, that the rate of alternation will be either absurdly fast, or very slow.

RTFA - or at least look at the pictures (it's in the caption of one): Feed to the coils in the road is 20 kHz, 200A.

... it wouldn't take a high school education to understand how to sap power from the road for free for powering your cell phone, laptop, or for the real inventive some parts of your house

A horsepower is 3/4 kW. Braking down from 50 MPH turns enough energy into heat to heat a snowbound house with only moderate insulation, in the dead of temperate-zone winter, for half an hour.

Running your laptop or charging your cellphone, like the incandescent lights in cars, is a very tiny drop in a very large lake.

Running about ten households on it is comparable to running an extra car continuously. (Cruising at highway speed takes high teens of HP - it's getting up to speed in a reasonable time that requires those big engines.) But it would also require enough of a pickup to constitute a traffic hazard, which would bring you to the attention of authorities.

Those buried conductors are what make repaving an intersection in US a bit more expensive than say the straight road

Note that they are talking about powering patches of the road (5% to 15%), not the whole thing. The car stores the power for the stretches between the patches. Such patches can be on straight sections where vehicles don't do things that cause extra wear. Also: A few dead patches don't kill the road - they just mean the car pulls a little more out of the battery before the road brings it back to full charge.

As another poster mentioned: Repaving a road with a concrete slab base only tweaks the top inch or two. The slabs can last a half-century or more. If the coils, cores, and local wiring can be embedded in or below the slab, with a couple inches of extra gap between the top of the core and the surface of the road, it can last a very long time.

With the "hot" sections of reasonable size and modular, I imagine a dead one could be replaced, slab and all, in an overnight or over-weekend operation, scheduled for when the road is not too busy and lane closures or detours are available.

Back in the days of netnews, store-and-forward email, private dialup BBSes, and a far lower proportion of script kiddies in cracker circles, there was concern that the government would be able to monitor (or already was monitoring) a larightrge amount of the Internet - netnews, mail, BBSes, etc., - and handle the volume by using keyword-searching software. (Snowden's recent revelations show their concerns were correct - through PERHAPS a bit early.) So some among the computer underground began obfuscating their text communications to try to stymie that approach to surveillance.

In addition to using slang (which, of course, would quickly be figured out), the approach was to distort the spelling of words in ways that (with a little effort) would be recognizable by a human eye but not by a straightforward word matcher. Misspellings (common, adjacent-key, adjacent-character substitution, etc.), homonyms, substitution of letters that looked similar, digits and punctuation for similar-looking letters (such as 3 for E, dyslexic style), building typewriter pictures of letters, etc. were typical. The idea was to pile distortion upon distortion until it was somewhat difficult to read, and constantly mutate the distortions, perhaps settling on a style but NOT on something that could be easily built into a pattern-matching.

Thus was born leet-speak (always, of course, spelled in its own form, such as "133t" or "I334".) Of course the constant-mutation was quickly lost in favor of more stable use of certain attractive forms, thus turning it into an ordinary slang and defeating the purpose.

At the time "owned" was already a slang term applied to systems which were cracked and controlled by a tacker, or the owner/operator of such systems. "pwned" falls right into the pattern on two rules: adjacent-key misspelling and "little p looks like little o" visual pattern matching. So I assumed, at the time, that it was just another instance of the form.

Now that does not say that it DIDN'T originate as an in-game typo that grew into an in-joke. But gaming and cracking circles have overlapped substantially since the breaking of early attempts at computer-game copy protection. So the two explanations are not in conflict:. A typo that fit right into the form would be immediately seized and used.

Only a moron would believe that.

Yes, yes I read that. Don't make mobile web *apps*, make mobile web *sites*. Performance for mobile web sites is, or can be, fine.

Of course they should not have an app. Use the goddamned web site! That is what we invented the web for! And we fought long and hard for web standards, so it works on any platform! But everyone wants to throw that away and have native apps for *every* *single* *site*, just so we can have more animations or whatever.

Exactly!

Personally, I wish all mobile apps for websites would die horribly. Mobile web works, and works pretty much everywhere.

People are the most expensive cost to most businesses these days. So the marketing battle between languages focuses less on performance and more on how experienced and expensive your developers need to be. What I see being missed with this marketing is that by lowering the people quality and marginalizing your language and code quality, you are setting yourself up for maintenance, improvement, and performance costs down the road.

Also for catastrophic failures, when a relatively inexperienced programmer does something that someone more seasoned would know to avoid and it makes it through QA to deployment before being triggered.

At the end of the day with C/C++ you have to deal with memory management and that's just one additional piece of work that you don't have to be so concerned with with Java.

You're funny.

I think we have about a dozen calls to new and free in a few hundred thousand lines of code in our server. The vast majority of memory allocation in C++ is hidden in libraries like STL, which we presume have been debugged.

It usually turns out that there's an obvious place to free the memory algorithmically. C++ has helpful tools to let you build your memory management into the objects themselves, so it happens automagically.

It's only when you have to generate persistent mutating structures that things get complicated

C++'s paradigm is that the programmer, who understands the algorithm, is usually more clueful about when the memory should be freed (or examined to see if it should be freed) than a general purpose component which, while it always gets it right, has to look at EVERYTHING rather than just the problem objects.

Having said that, it's quite possible to build garbage collection into into C++ objects. (The Xanadu project was able to do it in the late 1980s, when C++ was still in diapers.)

But a bit of personal sour grapes: It would be a LOT easier if the standards committee would fix the member object constructor timing issue (as I asked them to do in each of the first two rounds of standardization.) Then heap-allocated, garbage-collected, classes could be as general as other types, including all their related components in a single block of allocated memory, rather than being limited to not having full-blown object members with error-throwing or garbage collector triggering constructors, leading to the necessity of replacing such members with pointers to another heap-allocated class instance.

What if it's a software bug?

Most automobiles these days have their wiring harnesses drastically simplified by replacing enormous numbers of point-to-point wires with a digital bus, conforming to one of a small handfull of standards. These control everything from the engine to the seat adjustments to the outside rear-view mirror angles, to the door locks.

If you can inject your own packets on such a bus, you can command the car to open the doors and start the engine.

Now it may be possible to inject commands directly by using strong electromagnetic fields near where the bus, or a component on it, is not well shielded.

But there are a number of devices on the bus that are also radio receivers, with control computers which both parse radio inputs and interact with other parts of the car's electronics over this digital bus. If you can compromise them you can get them to inject commands for you.

Of course the key radio-fob receiver is the most obvious target. A protocol stack escape might get you directly into the code that unlocks the door. Another obvious target is a remote accident-assistance/monitoring system, such as OnStar. This is essentially a cellphone that deliberately issues such commands. (One thing they do as a service is open your car doors if you lock your keys inside.)

But there are a number of others where it may be possible to inject malformed packets and exploit a flaw in the radio-side network stack to take over enough control to issue automotive bus commands and achieve the same effect, even if the device wasn't intended to unlock the door. Candidates include:
  - Entertainment systems.
  - Bluetooth "hands free phone" features.
  - GPS navigation systems.
  - Tire-pressure monitoring systems.
and I could go on.

You can find such flaws by purely software-driven probes, using stock techniques like "fuzzing" to find a bug that crashes the device, then working up from the known flaw (and perhaps a general knowledge of the processor involved in the component and its typical development environments) into an exploit.

I have seen a proof-of-concept where one of the above HAS been exploited in this way by a security research team.

I have also heard news reports of security-camera recordings of carjackers using a box that causes the passenger side door lock of the victim car to unlock itself. So SOME such exploit is already in the wild.

Any bets on whether Garcia, or the carjackers, got in this way, rather than by electron microscopy?

Any bets on whether, even if they both DID "do it the hard(ware) way", there is, or will be within the year, an exploit that didn't involve either such pricey techniques (or a data leak from a manufacturer)?

Given that, to be a threat to Earth, such asteroids would have an orbit that almost intersects Earth's at Earth's position at the near-intersection, and risks being perturbed onto a collision course, I hope they're really careful when "carving off a chunk".

It would be ironic if, in the process of trying to avoid a potential "rifle shot" of the whole asteroid, they perturbed the rest in exactly that way, or broke it up into several large "shotgun pellets" and ended up hitting the Earth with one or more of them when the original would have missed.

It would be a good idea, as well, to be sure the towing orbit of the sample, had no points where (if the tow vehicle lost power or the load broke up) it was on a collision course.

Thorium is a solution looking for a problem, basically -- there's lots of uranium around, it's dirt cheap, ...

The big point of thorium reactors is that they don't produce plutonium. This made it less attractive during the Cold War, when producing plutonium for building bombs was considered a plus. Thus they were what was developed before opposition to nuclear plants made designing and building new ones uneconomic - at least in the US.

In the current age of avoiding nuclear weapon proliferation, this potentially makes such designs less expensive to build and operate due to lower regulation and less need for defense against interception of spent fuel by budding bomb-makers, to convince the bureaucrats to let things proceed.

Such lower regulation and lower costs might make it possible to proceed with the necessary research, design, and deployment and still hope to make a profit.