The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has many examples of slick-looking graphics going back decades, long before computers were any good at graphics. How to Lie with Statistics is even older than that. Newspapers and news magazines have always been infamously bad at showing data. It's a rare data graphic that doesn't focus on decoration over content, and that's ignoring the ones that are deliberately distorted.

That being said, most software (I'm looking at you, Excel) is way too helpful about creating bad data graphics.

The brain as miraculous as it is can only handle a single lifetime of information.

And you have how many multi-lifetime old samples in your research to support this claim.

Come up with a way to give me multiple lifetimes, healthy as I was in my late teens, to see if my brain crashes due to "filling up", and I'm willing to be an experimental subject.

I'm already in my late '60s. I'm also studying for a college degree and getting 4.0 (much better than when I was trying to work my way through college and avoid the draft during the Vietnam era.)

Psych research has shown that intelligence, as measured by I.Q. tests, increases with age. ("Senile dementia" is a handfull of specific diseases, which only a fraction of people get, and eliminating THOSE would obviously be part of "curing" aging.) Meanwhile, the brain's capacity for both memory and processing is very large (as shown by the amount of info people with eidetic memory accumulate, and are able to index and retrieve without apparent problems, over normal life spans.)

So you think there's a limit to how much the brain can handle, a wall we might hit if we cured aging? Let's find out. Bring it on!

The summary links to both a guy who writes on DailyKos and a guy who writes on Free Republic, and they agree with each other. Apparently vinegar-spraying chemtrail nuts are, in fact, the key to world peace. Or at least 1990s nostalgia.

Can these tubes also be used to carry the innernet?

Yes - by running fiber along their rights-of-way along with the tranport tube.

Which is exactly how SPRINT got started.

The name is an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications, and dates from the time they upgraded their own along-track communication from microwave to fiber and took advantage of the recent demonopolization of long distance telephone, driven by MCI, to enter the long-distance phone service. But they were already selling other messaging service along their microwave network, as Railroads have been doing since the initial deployment of the telegraph.

Power companies occasionally do this, too.

When you already have a right-of-way and your own communication along it, adding more bandwidth to sell is FAR less expensive than setting up a communications-only standalone company by buying signal-line right-of-way and installing equipment from scratch.

It was thought that the pneumatic tubes could be used for large scale postal delivery, ...

There were plans to do this. But the US Postal Service (then a government department with a legal monopoly on delivering sealed "first class" mail) blocked them, as it had shut down other competing private-enterprise postal services in the past.

Under the current legal regime it might once again be possible. But given the expense of building the infrastructure in the midst of built-up cities (without existing steam tunnels and the like) and the relative cheapness of electronic communication, it seems unlikely to be profitable.

Another flaw is that Jam Secure isn't either in the audio or the hypothesized radio implementation.

A signal being jammed by another of comparable strength and nontrivial spacial separation can be received by TWO or more microphones, or antennas, also with nontrivial separation, and the signals sorted out in postprocessing (at "line speed").

This is how MIMO works: Two (or more) transmitting antennas send different signals, two or more receiving antennas receive sums of them - which differ because each antenna "hears" different time (phase) offsets due to the slightly different delays in the paths to each antenna (or microphone). The receiving end sorts out the signals. In MIMO this is used to send, on the same bandwidth, up to N times the bandwidth of a single antenna pair (where N is the number of antennas on the fewer-antenna device). But it can also be used to sort out a particular transmitter from spacially separated devices.

When a cell tower does it, using N antennas to sort out a desired cell phone from N-1 interfering transmitters (and maybe doing it N times to hear N cellphones at once) it's called things like "steerable null". When a human does it, to sort out one speaker in a crowd, it's called "The Coctail Party Factor".

It should not be difficult at all to do the same with a pair or more of microphones and a good DSP or a fast processor. For audio, where wavelengths are measured in one to two digits of inches, the separation of a pair of handheld devices (even if nearly on top of each other) should be more than adequate to do MIMO tricks successfully and without obvious eavesdropping equipment rigs.

But the heavy-handed irony of a guardian of British cultural heritage censoring the greatest work of British literature is just too blatant to be ignored.

So, we got the story about Hamlet, then they start talking about censoring Blackadder and provide no link.

I'd bet they just "adjusted" the nannyware to pass Shakespeare. So The Bard's work will be seen, but any new talent whose work's quality might approach or surpass his will not.

(Not to say that Blackadder and Hamlet are even in the same league. But that IS something to be decided by tens of generations of readers and viewers, not a piece of software written by a handfull of people from this one.)

I've always found it interesting that "modem" and "modern" are so easy to confuse in most fonts....

But if you tried to predict the last election based on Twitter, you would either be thinking there was massive fraud or there somehow was a huge amount of the US population that never heard of the Internet.

In the 2012 election there WAS enormous fraud in the Republican primary/caucus process, most of it perpetrated by Romney's supporters against Ron Paul's. Some of it was violent. Much of it was transparent.

You don't hear about it in the mainstream media, left and right, which was blacking out anything related to Ron Paul. Look at archives of www.dailypaul.com, or any of several other campaign-related sites, for info on such events, and links to both online reportage and the few places they were reported in mainstream - usually local - media outlets. They also changed the party rules (in a process that also involved massive cheating - including diverting several buses of delegates) to make it virtually impossible for future non-mainstream primary candidates to win the nomination.

The result was that a lot of Ron Paul supporters - along with other Republicans appalled by the behavior of Romney's supporters, stayed away from the general election in droves. (One opinion was that, if THIS is how they handled rule enforcement within the party, they couldn't be trusted to hold the reins of governmental power.) There are five states, with a total electoral vote that would have swung the election, where Romney lost by a margin substantially less than the number of primary votes for Ron Paul.

Romney's people could probably have won the nomination honestly (especially given the media blackout on Ron Paul). Had they done so, Romney would probably have been president now.

On the other hand, had Ron Paul won the nomination, he almost certainly would have defeated Obama.

It's somewhat more difficult when you waste three years assuming the Republicans are going to win big in 2012 and repeal the whole ACA. You gamble, you lose.

Snark aside, the real answer seems to be in the article:

So insurance companies outsourced different parts of their work to different companies that don't talk to each other. It's not "the computer's fault", it's an administrative problem within the insurance company itself. That text was right above the paragraph quoted in the summary, but curiously the submitter felt the need to ask a rhetorical question instead of including the most important piece of explanation in the entire article.

(Also, have you ever heard a story about a giant years-old financial/billing system that was clean, well-implemented, and easy to maintain and modify? I sure haven't. Not sure why we'd expect anything to be a trivial change in one of those...)

There would be no need to pirate it if everyone knew that it would be on TV. How many knew that this was the case?

Not everyone has the same motivations as you. "Pirates" often have setups similar to TiVo's "season pass" feature. You type in the name and all the episodes are downloaded automatically, and with higher accuracy than PVRs (ever had a favorite show preempted by a politician or sports program you weren't interested in?). They end up in a uniform location with all the other shows the user is interested in, and with a common interface-- be it XBMC or just VLC.

Fixing one TV show doesn't fix the entire problem. Personally, I was terrified to download anything ... until suddenly there was no legal way to get my TV show of choice. I was in the US, couldn't get cable, my satellite provider wouldn't (or couldn't) provide the local networks -- a problem long since rectified -- and despite my satellite and affiliate's insistence, I was unable to receive that station with any antenna. Once I realized how easy it was, I realized that it was easier and more accurate to download than it was to DVR shows. That spread to even shows I received over the antenna and satellite because of the convenience and accuracy.

I look forward to when the entertainment industry realizes they're not catering to my type and there are a lot of us out there.

What's really sad about this is that the act of frisking anyone without any fact-based suspicion is not considered a violation of the constitution.

What's DOUBLY sad about this is that a court found it unconstitutional and LET IT CONTINUE!

The Supreme Court has said that unconstitutional laws are void from the start and do not authorize anything. Government functionaries claiming to operate under such laws and interpretations have no special standing - they'reperforming the act as a private citizen.

If *I* stopped and frisked somebody it would be several felonies - which means it is if the cops do it, too.

The problem with pigeons is that they're susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

I thought they were susceptible to cat-in-the-middle attacks.

What's worse is that they are AND they aren't susceptible to Schrodinger's-cat-in-the-middle attacks.

... [on the] wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. [...] the videos you have to watch [when going through authorization/configuration steps] are all dog slow ...

Which got me thinking...

Lately (at work with a company-IT-mandated Chrome browser and thus no flashblock/noscript/...) I've noticed that advertisers on many services I look at (typically due to following news links from Slashdot) are feeding multiple, self-starting, full-motion videos per page.

Videos require ENORMOUSLY more traffic than text, or even fancy (but non-moving) graphics. This trend ENORMOUSLY multiplies the bandwidth requirements to browse such pages.

Combine that with the fact that WiFi is essentially a collision-based protocol, which means it goes 'WAY inefficient when approaching its "theoretical" bandwidth maximum.

Perhaps this, rather than more users or decaying infrastructure, is the (or a major) explanation for the deteriorating service in Mountain View.

You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled. Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?) I haven't been to the Dominican Republic, but American standards of living in 1980 were far from third world, even by today's standards. As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.

Here's average CO2 emissions in tons per capita for each of the G7 nations (plus Australia for fun) in 2006, the last year before the financial crisis:

Nation CO2 GDP
U.S. 18.8 44623
U.K. 9.1 40481
Canada 16.8 39250
Australia 18 35992
France 5.9 35457
Germany 9.9 35238
Japan 9.7 34102
Italy 7.9 31777
[Slashdot formatting sucks :-( ]

If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia). But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower. France and Germany have nearly indistinguishable GDP/capita but France's emissions are 40% lower. (They have similar population sizes and are right next to each other, too!) Australia has 20% lower GDP than the U.S. despite having similar emissions. None of these countries are bad places to live. If you look at the full list you'll see some of low- to mid-tier countries in the top 20, and some nice developed nations further down.

On top of that, you have the complicating factor of wealth distribution in the U.S., so while GDP per capita has gone up, income per capita for most of the population hasn't. That's mostly an orthogonal issue, but also has a big effect on standard of living.

We could impose limits through regulation or ramp up a carbon tax over time, but the methods for reducing fossil fuel dependence are left to the private sector, just like they are with e.g. car mileage standards. Governments should set and enforce the goals, but stay out of the details.

North America and Europe account for a third of world CO2 emissions. Making a big cut in that would be a big start, at the very least. Also, the U.S. and Europe are best equipped to develop sustainable technology, so the rest of the world can ride along on our coattails as we figure things out.

Calculable risk might increase gradually, but it's perception of risk that drives the markets. When it comes to disasters, awareness tends to change very suddenly and result in panicked overreaction. (See also: 9/11)

Because they go together. Burning fossil fuels produces both CO2 and various gasses and particulates that are directly harmful to humans. Addressing one problem implies addressing the other. Air pollution is causing immediate harm to individual people today, which is a very good reason to fight it.

Could, but hasn't. Which is my point -- the ability means nothing if the short-term incentives for doing it are wrong. (By "wrong", I mean distorted by the fact that the long-term harm to other people is not accounted for.)

I agree with you about the MIC causing problems, but despite some high-profile failures their hardware does regularly push the bounds of e.g. aerospace technology. NASA did get to the moon. ARPA did sow the seeds of the internet. That being said, I'm not advocating any open-ended commitments. There need to be quantifiable goals with deadlines. And again, the private sector would do most of the development work, with basic research aided by government funding.

We disagree on the causes, of course. (GDP growth varies wildly independent of the regulatory regime, regulations were loosening for many years prior to the financial crisis, job losses are due to inadequate stimulus, reducing regulations won't help Americans compete with people who live 15 to a house on pennies a day, etc., etc.) But I'm sure you've heard all that before, and it's really a separate conversation.

Whether it's environmental catastrophes, epidemics, or network security breaches, if people do their jobs right, the doom-and-gloom never happens. The goal is prevention, after all. So far, many predictions of doom have been avoided because people have taken action -- acid rain, the ozone hole, (more) massive air and water pollution, endangered species, take your pick. Where people have been complacent, there's been a lot of damage to show for it.