A lot of /.ers are pointing out that this is the logical tradeoff for the gains that smart-metering promises us. Some are suggesting that we do without. I say it makes far more sense to strengthen our privacy laws, so that this kind of thing is so clearly off limits from data sharing that no non-criminal consider it.

For example, I'm a member of a local (ballroom) dancing club. I'm organizing a Thanksgiving Dinner, but the privacy laws here are so strong that it was made to me very clear that I *must* delete the club's (snail-)mailing list from my computer after I send out the invitations.

There are indeed tradeoffs between any level of internet-connected progress and our privacy, but it's shortsighted to think that the only response can be "get your gov't hands off my...!"

Quite neat. Especially the Vanderbilt photos of the Whole-room Indirect Calorimeter Activity Measurement System. Thanks for elucidating this topic for me.

So maybe my urine and feces are far more energetic than the average person's. (I'm not interested in testing this concept). While that doesn't change the fact that I shed more heat than someone of equivalent skin surface area but lower temperature, it does certainly make the problem more interesting.

That sounds a little hard to shit... err... swallow. Unless you mean caloric intake in the sense of long-chain starches, etc. that are undigestible by the human body. I'm guessing these don't figure in to the daily calorie allotment.

Could you please give a reference or link for your claim?

I know a lot of people are going to talk about CoE. After all, that's the driving equation here. It is absolutely correct, but can we not glean more insight into the problem?

IWAHTE (I Was A Heat Transfer Engineer), so my guess is that what's going on is that people spend the vast majority of their calories maintaining body temperature. If you eat less, your body's first reaction might well be to reduce skin temperature, maintaining core temperature. This theory links the fact that women eat less then men by 20% with the observation that women are complain about being cold earlier than men. Less calories burnt to keep skin temperature high.

In the case of someone who is overweight, they have an additional layer of blubber (yes, basement /. denizens, you are coated in blubber) that insulates them and maintains their core temperature for free. Maybe there's a hysteresis? First the body weight comes down, then the body learns it can waste excess heat maintaining skin temperature, and then, and only then, the body is free to consume additional calories.

Now, I don't do human anatomy, so a doctor would have to chime in and confirm just how much of the body's caloric consumption is lost to heat, vs. other bodily functions.

A personal example: on an average day, I eat some 3500 calories. But I am athletic, and only weigh 70, so this is a "good" 3500 kCal. What I notice is that my skin temperature is always warm, especially compared to women. In fact, I am very comfortable when the temperature is around 15deg inside. I go outside on a 5deg day in nothing more than a sweater and a top hat. I routinely mock my friends who wear a sweater, coat, and scarf when I'm sitting around in short sleeves. Certainly, my body is horribly inefficient, and if society falls in some sort of catastrophe, I will certainly be one of the first to starve (if my 20/800 eyesight doesn't make me walk off a cliff first). However, in a society that has mass amounts of overconsumption, it seems to fit me just fine.

A second personal example: I dated a German doctor who as a 16-year-old doing a year-abroad in Minnesota, had been anorexic. After she came back, she put on a lot of weight: obviously her body reacting to the extreme abuse she had given it. Now as a 25-year-old, she was in the Bundeswehr (German army), and this girl could RUN. She ran marathons. She ran 2 hours with 25kg of weight attached to her. And yet she was always, always overweight by 8kg or so vs. her pre-American anorexia bout. Not a lot, but she was... pudgy. She'd been to doctors, etc, and could do nothing to get her weight down. I lived with her for a while, I can guarantee she ate nothing but healthy food, and only somewhere around 1600-1800kCal/day. However, she liked her rooms warm.

So I am less physically active, yet consume twice as much. The only thing that can explain this is that physical activity just doesn't use that many calories, not compared to maintaing body temperature. Since I go outside without a coat, I burn more calories than she does to maintain the same core temperature.

My two cents, but I certainly welcome other /.er ideas, though.

Not only the Chromium nightlies, but there's also a Google Chrome for Mac, http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac

I'm not quite sure what the difference is. Right now, Chrome is a couple versions behind the absolute latest Chromium nightly, but I have no idea what is different. I don't even know if Chrome for Mac is just the Chromium nightly from a few builds back, or if some things are and will always be different.

One thing I noticed right away is that in Chrome my bookmarks are poorly formatted to the tab screen, whereas the latest Chromium nightly fits the bookmarks quite nicely.

There's no car you can buy today where you cannot overpower the engine with full braking force. Try it: stand on the accelerator with your left foot for a while, then stand on the brake. Push both down as hard as you can; your car will slow down and stop. It won't be happy about it, but it will. The drivers in this case didn't do that: they panicked and didn't press the brakes hard enough.

Unfortunately, you are categorically wrong.

In fact, it might not be far off to say that there is not ONE SINGLE car that can be stopped with brakes alone when at full throttle. Read http://spectrum.ieee.org/blog/computing/it/riskfactor/how-hard-should-it-be-to-stop-a-runaway-car

As for hitting the brakes to slow a car down, another issue pops up, says the Times. "The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle [like in a runaway car situation], the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal, the power assist feature disappears."
Tests indicate that a person would have to exert 225 pounds of pressure on a brake pedal to stop it - a mean feat for almost anyone, let alone a person trying to keep a car on the road while avoiding hitting anything as it is traveling at 176 feet per second.

While what you said makes sense (and I believed the same myself until I started looking into it), it unfortunately is not the reality. You lose your power brakes at full throttle, and it seems that people are paying with their lives in these circumstances.

I know the tendency at /. is to believe that most people are nitwits-- most of all policemen-- (a belief I tend to share), in the case of the Lexus police officer, he was trained for high speed pursuits, and witnesses say they saw smoke coming out of the brakes. Sometimes, you have to hang your beliefs at the door and examine the facts.

Said as a true non-pilot.

Being out of contact with ATC is how the vast majority of flights are done in the US. And there are very, very, very few midair collisions.

Nontheless, at those altitudes, EVERYONE is under ATC, so ATC is not going to route someone else into the path of the airplane. ATC assumes that you're going to do what you confirmed you are going to do, until such time as you confirm something different.

How fitting that the /. icon for this article should be a warcraft picture. God, I miss the time when there were two types of gamers in this world: C&C and Warcraft II.

I'm not sure which part of France you saw, but the part of it I lived in for years and years never looked like that. Nor did anywhere I've visited, which has been pretty much all over France. Not anywhere. In fact, French cities are remarkable in the way in which they just end, very abruptly. Very often, there's a city limit, and after that there's nothing else. Nothing. Just farms. Not even farm houses.

Are you perhaps from the future, telling us about how France will be a hundred years later?

Clearly the OP has a chip on his block. Clearly the /. editor (kdawson, what a surprise!) didn't bother to read the article AND the one paragraph blurb, to see that they're completely orthogonal. In fact, the OP misses the fact that in Europe these systems have been used for a decade or more, are incredibly reliable, very efficient, don't clutter up the street, don't have lines (come on, how many people are waiting to park at any given second?), are installed close to parking spots (yes, that 50m "half-block" walk to and from the car. Twice. Horror!), and seem to have general public acceptance.

Now, the article itself raises some very interesting points. Most of all the privatization of parking meters. Do we really want private entities being responsible for public punishment? Is it acceptable that a profit motive is behind causing people pain (fines and/or lost licenses). Is this in any, way, shape or form compatible with our ideas about government and responsibility? Are we not taking things too far, when we forget that punishment is to cause pain in response to flagrantly bad behavior, not just an incidental breaking of the letter of the law?

Perhaps someone who has some good links to these subjects could repost this story, in hopes that a real editor gets it this time.

Because of course the SEC (a sports conference of American Universities, many of them public) couldn't possibly have games in private stadiums that were largely subsidized by public money and university stadiums that were almost certainly paid for with public money.

Yep, another clear case of we the public unfairly demanding our fair due.

I'm calling B.S. According to The Register article from the time, he was arrested at a hotel in Santo Domingo.

You're getting this somewhat mixed up with David Carruthers, who *was* arrested at Dallas Airport, but while changing planes. Moreover, wikipedia reports that it happened while he was flying from the UK to Costa Rica. If this had been a CIA/FBI plot, like you insinuate, they would have picked a better spot than Houston, and there wouldn't have been a lay-over.

I'll agree that the US is overstretching it's bounds here, but injecting misinformation and hyperbole into the conversation doesn't help anyone.

The only question I can think of is,

"Are you hiring?"

I see lots of posts saying that the reason people don't like the Segway is because they're "like wheelchairs for people too lazy to walk."

So what does that make cars, then?

He'd rented a sound system for 17 friends in a field? Well, I'm not going to judge before all the facts are in, but it seems a little excessive. And considering that local residents had complained about raves in the area before, it seems a little suspect.

However, the fact that the police shut down the party before they had anything more than suspicion is still wrong, I think. If they had the guys assurances that it wasn't a rave, wouldn't it have been enough just to send someone back at 8PM and someone at midnight?