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?

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.

It most certainly does not - where did you hear such a thing? There is a steady decline in scores on IQ tests after age 20 or so.

That's what they thought for decades - that intelligence ramped up about linearly until the late teens to early twenties, kneed over, and declined about linearly (though more slowly) until death.

But after IQ tests had been used for a few decades there was a substantial population who had taken IQ tests several times in their lives. Somebody got the bright idea to track the trajectory of individuals as they aged, rather than using different cohorts for each age's scoring, which conflates IQ changes due to aging with IQ difference between generational cohorts.

The results were surprising, and very clear.

The trajectory for individuals was the linear ramp up, knee over, and a gradual, linear, change for the rest of life. But the ramp went UP (about a third as fast as they had previously thought it went DOWN). And it was far more linear than the previous estimates.

Turns out the apparent decline with age was due to a much larger trend of higher IQ scores with later cohorts. Much of psych research since this work has been looking for the causes of the lower IQ in earlier generations: Candidates include improved nutrition (especially eliminating dietary deficiences), better treatments for or prevention of childhood diseases, and so on, better education (in what scores on IQ tests), etc. (One big one turned out to be the elimination of thyroid deficiency by iodizing salt.)

Detailed examination of the effect shows that the high scores aren't rising substantially, but that the lower scores are coming up to approach them - another sign that it was mostly a matter of eliminating brain-harming pathologies rather than a general increase in IQ.

This has been known for decades. Where are you getting the old model? Is it still being taught, after all this time? Or did you see it long ago and miss the later breakthroughs?

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!

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.)

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.

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.