If you watch the video, you can see that the CME happens before the comet hits, and actually vaporizes the comet on the way out.

Obviously the large corporate machinery at Facebook has caught and chewed up some very nice researcher, and the community once again comes in to right the wrong.

The problem is, by third parties paying him, it sets a precedent for rewarding Facebook's bad behavior. Make no mistake - the same idiots that refused the payout and who whitewashed it by claiming a ToS violation will be the same ones watching this effort and wondering how much more they can get away with.

Ultimately, this is bad business practice for Facebook because this strategy will devolve into grey hats and black hats going for the jugular every time, and less white hats trying to do the right thing. Or maybe this just means people will realize on their own what I keep telling them - avoid using Facebook wherever possible. That will, unfortunately, be found out the hard way during the next big publicized data breach.

Sarah's Google+ post has an update:

Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue.

You can go anywhere in the world and tell someone you're from Oakland, and people will respond by saying "oh, you mean where the Raiders play"

You couldn't do that where I grew up unless you happened to be talking to a rabid professional sports fan. "Oakland" was Oakland MI, a large, and often newsworthy, suburb of Detroit.

Why? We switch units all the time, even when doing this "science" thing that so many seem to think only uses SI: eV, barn, torr, atm, etc. Suck it up, and learn to do conversions....

I don't think it is "inverse square from the projector to the screen and inverse square back". I think the inverse-square law for light is radiation from a point source, i.e. it describes the drop-off in illumination as the light spreads out, rather than attenuation per se.

The inverse square law is related to light spreading out from a point source. If you have an infinite line source you get inverse first-power. For an infinite plane source it doesn't get dimmer at all.

(That's why the hubble expansion of the starfield and the resulting red shift is important: If the stars were all hanging in there rather than receeding, just about any way you looked you'd see the un-red-shifted surface of a star, which would make your black-body temperature about the average solar surface temperature, rather than a compromise between 4 degrees absolute plus the heating from the sun and the radiant tempreature of the Earth's surface, atmosphere and clouds.)

However, a movie projector is a close approximation to a point source located a few inches behind the projection lens aperture. So it's inverse-square going out to produce a given brightness on any patch of screen.

For any given patch of the screen the light coming back is also inverse-square. If the distant screen were the same size as the close one it would be inverse-fourth-power, as I claimed.

However, the screen in a drive-in is a lot larger than the screen in a theater. Any given retina cell gets the light from the same solid angle regardless of the distance to the screen. This goes up with the square of the distance, exactly canceling the inverse square of the light coming back (assuming both screens use coatings with about the same optical scattering properties). So the effective rule is actually inverse-square, not inverse-fourth-power.

(Inverse fourth-power DOES apply to radar, where the target is the same size regardless of distance and thus doesn't do the cancellation of the inverse-square term on the returning echo.)

After all, wearing a mask of the president might get you accused of racisim.

DMCA notices are unconstitutional and nobody is obligated to obey.

DMCA notices give service providers who obey them a carrot (actually, the avoidance of a stick): Immunity from being included in the infringement penalties of the case goes to court and the party issuing the DMCA notice prevails.

If we're going to have (I wish we did not... they're bad news) DMCA take-down orders, we also need a law WITH TEETH that criminalizes the abuse of same.

Criminal penalties are junk in cases like this. To get any action you either have to convince a prosecutor to take your side (fat chance!) or win on a civil RICO suit.

On the other hand, statutory civil penalties, similar to those claimed by copyright trolls, seem like just the ticket. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander: Hit them with exactly what they're threatening YOU with.

In the absence of that (which would require passage of a law - though you might try to get such a law at your STATE level...) you might try suing them for damages (including lost income - your estimate, pain-and-suffering, lost of reputation, etc.) resulting from their commission of fraud.

Once you start seeing actual damages for filing false notices, watch them stop.

We're on the same page there. B-)

Why add another layer instead of running it under the native OS?

Because:
  - you don't have a port of the service you want to run to the native OS you want to use,
  - the native OS you DO have a port to is a P.I.T.B. from a reliability, cost, security, and maintenance standpoint, but
  - you DO have an API adaptation layer (i.e. the application's code runs "on the iron" so there's no emulation penalty there) that runs on the OS you want to use and does a darned good job of supporting the parts of the API used by the service's code.

When oxygen is running out AND the body (I think it's the back of the neck) is cold,

Face is cold. (Specifically, regions innervated by the Trigeminal nerve.) No other region triggers the reflex.

(It does other things besides the valve thing, too.)

Have people been resuscitated after say, 30 mins or even an hour, and managed to have their brain functions relatively intact?

Absolutely. Look up "Mammalian Diving Reflex".

Brain damage from short-term clinical death happens primarily after revival. The valves routing blood to the parts of the brain that need it stick in the state they were in when the oxygen finally failed.

Muscles contract with stored energy and require metabolism to relax. "Valve off" is contracted, so when blood flow and oxygen is restored, the valves for regions of the brain that were turned down don't get oxygen and can't reopen - and without the blood flow they can't get oxygen, in a viscous circle. Raising the blood pressure to try to force them just blows the vessels, causing a stroke. The
nerves die over a half hour to an hour (and kill each other off through glutamate cascade, as dying nerves release glutamate that causes others to fire, deplete their remaining energy reserves, and die in turn.

Mammals, though, have a reflex related to deep diving. When diving deep, the increased pressure increases the partial pressure of oxygen, keeping things running until most of the oxygen is used up. Then coming back back up lowers the pressure further and can leaver the brain oxygen starved for long enough to produce the "valves stuck" phenomenon. To prevent this, mammals have the following reflex: When oxygen is running out AND the body (I think it's the back of the neck) is cold, the valves all open up, so any that get stuck are in the open position. Once oxygen is restored the blood flows, the nerves survive, the muscle gets repowered, and all is well - if thing hadn't been shut down long enough that too many cells died meanwhile.

This was discovered when some victims of drowning in cold water recovered just fine, with no brain damage, after half an hour or more of clinical death. I think the time before damage sets in is something between 25 and 45 minutes.

I don't know how CI's current protocols work. But ALCOR's are designed to include activating the diving reflex, if possible, so the brain's valves stick in the open position.

(This is more to encourage better perfusion of cryoprotectants than to try to make the brain restartable: As of the last time I looked the thought was that brains preserved - even by the best techniques available at the time - would require rebuilding by nanotechnology, so the idea was to preserve as much as possible of whatever might encode memory and personality.)

Running such software [which had been ported from UNIX to Windows but not to Linux] under Linux either meant running Linux on RISC hardware and using a compatibility layer or running the Windows version in Wine. Neither was particularly appealing.

It was a server! What's wrong with running the apps under Wine? What were they running that Wine would have caused them problems?

Take-home pay is not the only expense. Flying people back and forth to the other side of the world and keeping them supplied is not free, especially in a place with minimal infrastructure. Whatever profit Nepal is making, I doubt it's over $1M/month.

Also, to be that bright, these don't use LEDs of course: they use very hot bulbs that need to be cooled down with very loud and large fans and cooling systems.

Very hot bulbs? Maybe these days. But the ones I'm familiar with, from a few decadesback, used carbon arcs. Same technology as the WW II antiaircraft spotlights. Incandescent carbon in a pit on the end of a quarter-inch or so carbon rod, being slowly vaporized by electron bombardment. VERY bright. Lots of ultraviolet, too. Plus a little bremstrahlung (thought he voltages are low enough that X-rays aren't all THAT much of an issue).

You BET it needed fans. They also carried off the carbon vapor, as the positive rod vaporized a few inches per reel, along with the nitrogen oxides from heating air that hot and letting it cool.

It's inverse square from the projector to the screen and inverse square back, for a total of inverse fourth power. Increasing the projector-screen distance from a desktop projector to a theater rig to a drive-in, at inverse-fourth-power, means you need a REALLY bright light. A quarter-inch rod with most of the end hotter than the surface of the sun is about right.