Change in the jet stream might also be climate change

See here. I think this is still not too far past the "look what popped out of our simulations" stage (haven't followed the literature yet) but it sure has heck dovetails nicely with what we've been seeing lately.

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/slowing-rossby-waves-leading-to-extreme.html

Re: MBP/Air differentiation

Taking the Air to retina resolution might have an issue with power consumption. Have you seen the MBP Retina teardowns? Despite having flash and not a hard drive, it has a huge battery. Same issue as the recent iPad -- a display box with a big battery in it, and a little bit of logic and storage tucked in on the side. An "air" with a retina display would probably have to be just as thick as this new MBP.

Re: The only green tech that has really worked ..

Numbers I've seen (sorry, link missing) suggest that the whole-life energy consumption of a hybrid auto nicely beats that of a similar internal-combustion alternative. Don't forget that used lithium batteries are recyclable (and are expensive enough that one would do so), so it's also unfair to ding them for their entire refining cost. Here's one discussion: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2759/are-electric-cars-really-more-energy-efficient

That said, the dollars don't work so well, unless you expect the price of oil to spike, or perhaps if you have an "optimally" long commute (i.e., round trip is 90% of the one-charge range, or even better if you get to charge at work and round trip is 180% of the one-charge range).

There IS other green tech that works. In many places, bicycles work for transit and transportation, and with very sensible assumptions about diet (i.e., not making up the extra calories with 100% beef protein) they net out to a huge energy savings. Green building practices (typically, loads more insulation, and control of air exchange) also work. In some parts of the world this is simply "the building code", though here in the US it is common for a new building to still be relatively underinsulated and leaky. In both cases, however, you don't see near the rah-rah-gee-whiz advertising these useless step-energy tiles get. An energy-saving bicycle is a Raleigh rescued from someone else's trash and repaired, fitted with a Wald basket for your stuff.

Re: Are Americans that much more energetic than Brits?

There's got to be a screwup in the MIT crowd farm thing. A somewhat fit unit American (a remark I resemble) can pretty happily produce 100 watts on a bicycle for an indefinite amount of time, but that is ALL the energy, and a moderate sweat results. 200 watts for "a while", and much more sweat results. 300 watts for a minute or two. Anything that is harvesting "spare" energy, as opposed to annoying the energy producers, has to be at the rate of 10 watts or less (at 60 steps/min, 10J/step, at 120, 5J/step). 120 watts might be the entire energy expended in purposefully walking.

If you need unsigned in Java

If you need unsigned, there are libraries that provide it. I wrote one years ago, and I am pretty sure it is BSD-licensed. I'd be surprised if I was the only person to do so.

Main thing to note is that there is no difference in the bit-pattern behavior between 2s-complement signed + and unsigned + at the word length. The trick comes in describing the operations that are not punned -- comparisons, division, widening multiplication, conversion to/from float and string.

The other half of the trick is to be sure to use idioms (where you can) that will be recognized by an optimizing JIT as equivalent to the unsigned operations. That probably works for comparisons, but not for the others.

I also wrote a library for packing and unpacking bytes and shorts into ints and longs, not sure whether we released that or not.

Re: Why do we care what the hippies think?

At least in the US, the DFHs (Dirty F***ing Hippies) have a better track record on foreign affairs and economic prediction than the upstanding people in clean suits and ties.

Re: Is the tide turning?????

I don't know the details of the data, but the hypothesized mechanism for warming leading to ice cap growth is that warmer (offshore) water puts more water vapor into the air, and as long as the antarctic proper is cold enough to squeeze that water vapor out again, you get a local increase in ice cap volume. Deposit more than melts/runs off the edges, and you get a net increase. No big mystery, and no big gotcha -- climate scientists were writing about this in papers written decades ago. The arctic is a lot closer (warmer) to freezing than the antarctic, so there warming can lead to shrinkage instead.

A recent hypothesis (supported by simulation) links a decrease in arctic ice (and a warmer arctic) to the weird weather we've had lately: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/slowing-rossby-waves-leading-to-extreme.html

Re: Consideration

If room on the roads is scarce, logic suggests that cars should be discouraged, because they take the greatest amount of space to transport (usually) a single person.

The focus on rules-of-the-road is also a mistake, unless you think that following the rules is more important than minimizing the number of people hurt or killed. Despite the (alleged) care with which they are driven, cars in the US and UK are about (at least) 15 times more deadly to pedestrians than bicycles are. Unless you think that results don't matter, cyclists are the safety experts.

Re: "Getting female USB sockets is hard"

And that right combination of resistors puts 2 volts on D+ and D- for a 500mA charge. E.g., 75k and 50k between 5V and GND. See http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html for more details.

Some older Motorola cell phones expect to see something special on the "X" pin: http://pinouts.ru/all/razrv3_charger_pinout.shtml

This is rather annoying, since the USB cables I've dissected don't show any wires from their X pin; I have to buy a plug and hack it myself.

I followed the ladyada instructions in a buck converter for bicycle use, and it worked fine; 500mA by 5V is 2.5 watts, with an efficient converter a hub dynamo can keep up, and various iDevices declared that they were in fact charging when I hand-spun the wheel. But it turns out that there is an affordable pre-built alternative (no idea if it works, just found it googling): http://bikeusbcharger.com/

Re: Preconceived agendas, etc.

"Ocean depth predicted to increase by as much 0.1% this century." (3790m x 0.001 = 3.79m)

CO2 lags *natural* warming

@Armando123 - in the natural cycle, CO2 lags warming because "warming" takes us from huge-glaciers to not-huge-glaciers; more land is exposed, and CO2 is converted to plants. In addition, the warming ocean can hold less CO2. That's the natural cycle. All that CO2 also warms the planet, which drives further warming and further CO2 release.

We're in a different situation now. We're not at a particularly interesting place in the Milankovitch cycle, and we're not covered in glaciers. We ARE dumping a mess of CO2 in the atmosphere, and a good fraction of that mess is accumulating in the atmosphere (some is dissolving in the ocean, driving down the pH). That excess CO2 is generally warming the planet and apparently making the weather more "interesting" (though we cannot link any particular drought or hurricane to global warming). Most glaciers are shrinking; the arctic ice cap is shrinking (especially in volume); the globally measured temperature is slowly rising; plant zones are drifting north (in the northern hemisphere); more all-time highs than all-time lows are being set.

Less lethal means exactly what it says

Kills you less often than bullets and grenades, but more often than comfy chairs and fluffy bunnies. A woman in Boston (Victoria Snelgrove) was hit with a "less lethal" round in the eye, and ended up dead.

How much less lethal has a whole lot to do with how the weapon is used. A little pepper spray drifting into your eyes is one thing, a shot down your throat is something else. Shots to the head with any projectile are generally a bad idea.

I think you're being a tad arbitrary

I manage to not be obese, mostly by exercise, some by diet, but I am still overweight (220lbs, weighed as little as 175 in college -- at that point I was dense enough to not float). Losing ten more pounds would be very difficult, because my body has found its happy-weight-place. The exercise (bicycle commuting to work on nice-enough days) goes up in the summer, at which point I lose about 3 lbs and get ravenously hungry ("mmmm, look at that roadkill.")

So on the one hand, just as the very-tall are offered extra leg room at more cost, so should the very fat be offered extra-wide seats at more cost.

But it would also be nice to cut everyone just a bit of extra slack. After all, look at all the "carry-on" luggage that people are incapable of actually carrying, and all the time wasted at departure and arrival as they struggle to heft their too-heavy-for-them bag in and out of the overheads. For some people, being that weak is a medical condition, but everyone knows that with regular exercise and an active lifestyle ....

Made a huge difference

Whether it works for you, depends entirely on your project size, I am sure. It's the Micawber principle at work:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Adding two gig made the project fit. Another thing that has helped has been de-Flashing the browsers (standard hack on the Mac: delete Flash entirely, install Youtube5 for Safari, and use Chrome with builtin Flash for the stuff that YT5 doesn't handle).

Depends on your baseline, of course

Don't forget I'm posting from the US; if we cut our per-capita CO2 output by 50%, we'd be stuck with English standards of living. Clearly, the end of civilization as we know it.

What-I-imagine for getting gasoline consumption down that much, is much smaller cars, and much smarter cars. Over here, every second car is a fatty-McFatMobile; cut those down to size, you probably get 10-20% right there. Hope that we can use smart/self-driving cars to make "mass transit" look a lot more like automated point-to-point carpooling, you can probably get another 30%, also cut traffic jams and time wasted looking for parking. Do more with hybrids, maybe do more with formation-cruising at highway speeds.

Also assume some bicycling, where appropriate (dense places -- about 1/3 of the US lives in places dense enough to convert a few dozen miles of travel each week to a bicycle).

Delivery trucks ought to be something a lot more like robots; if you're not paying a driver, speed and size are not quite so important (won't need to amortize the cost of the driver). Reduced speed and size means less energy wasted, also less scary to people in their newly shrunken cars.

And yes, detail city, lots of caveats and quid-pro-quos -- as if massive-scale algae-farming were a solved problem.

Unfortunately also suggests

that we'll need to be constantly on the lookout for genetic drift in our tanks towards "fitter" algae that does not waste so much of its energy creating oil for us.

What's amusing is the use of the phrase "end timers"

To describe non-apocalyptic changes like "eating less beef", "drive a smaller car", "carpool", "use a bicycle for short trips", and "you should upgrade your home's insulation". Oh, teh horror!

So, yeah, it's totally within our abilities, if only we were willing to contemplate the tiniest changes to how we do things. We probably will end up using this bioengineered oil, but it's a heck of a lot easier to cover out consumption if we first cut it by 50 or 75%. And surely, you don't think that this stuff will be cheap, do you?

I think that's old info now

At least from US 110/60 Hz, I can run 9+ watts of LED from 11 watts at the wall (with a somewhat crappy power factor, but it's an old converter). If you're willing to live with welding-arc blue ("cool white") you get about 125 lumens per LED watt; derating by 20% still gives you 100 Lumens/watt, which is well above standard fluorescent. "Good" light (with better CRI) is probably at or above fluorescent efficiencies, with much better quality. White LED spectra are not spiky; white LEDs use phosphors just like fluorescent tubes, but the starting color is a range of frequencies, not a single color spike.

I've played with this some at home -- for me "good" light is a mix of warm/neutral/cool LEDs. You do have to heat sink them a bit to keep them in their happy place. Higher efficiencies at lower currents, so to get more, you need to spend more.

Follow-up on above

There's a lot of "David Johnson"s working for the "University of Texas" (has many campuses; traditionally "UT" means "UT Austin" but it might refer to others). Looks like this guy:

"David Johnson, Ph.D. 2008

Currently: postdoctoral scientist with Dr. Craig Tweedie, UT-El Paso

Dissertation topic: role of mammalian herbivores in determining arctic tundra plant community structure"

So apparently not a hoax by the Yes Men.

According to some quick search and click

Variant of Linux/Slapper, which uses an OpenSSL exploit:

http://www.mcafee.com/threat-intelligence/malware/default.aspx?id=99733

And this is how Slapper does it. Probes port 80, looks for Apache, goes after SSL on port 443.

Is this really still a vulnerability? This is an old attack.

http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2002-091311-5851-99&tabid=2

I think you're missing the point

They're not anarchists, since they tend to want more government intervention (bankers in jail, higher taxes on wealthy, more regulations on banks, "something" to fix underwater mortgages), not no government. And "middle class" is completely consistent with "we're the 99%".

You don't need to "wonder"

There's history. It didn't start like this. I'm a lot more troubled (in the US) by anti-immigration laws that allow the police to harass you if you happen to "look like" an immigrant (from where? in whose opinion?) and aren't carrying your "papers".

It's also interesting to me how the recent status quo is accepted as a great thing, and the change would be dystopian. Our use of cars is not cost-free, and they have enough externalities (pollution, hazards to other road users, wars and corruption associated with obtaining their fuel) that a "free market" approach to their use is not at all guaranteed to be welfare-maximizing.

Don't think it needs to be "mindset", simple economics/game theory does it

Figure that those who (think they) drive carefully will want these so that they can save a little money. Pretty quickly, they'll find out if they DO "drive carefully" or not, and those that don't, will quit being monitored.

No nefarious intent involved, insurance rates for the unmonitored will go up because they are the less safe group. As more people try this option, the customers will sort themselves out into two pools, one that is monitored and more safe, the other that is unmonitored and less safe (because all the safe drivers are off being monitored and saving money).

Two things would enhance this effect. One, is (near-) real-time feedback on safety, where the computer lets you know about safety mistakes (and maybe sounds an alarm for big ones) so that you can learn. Two, is real-time charging. If you can save money by driving less (at least in the US, auto insurance costs a big fixed fee plus a low cost per self-reported mile). This gives a larger group of people an incentive to try it (and will also cut driving overall, since it raises the incremental cost per mile).

In addition, the correlation between what that black box thinks is safe, and what IS safe, will go up, because the insurers will have a mess of data to work with. It's never going to be a strong correlation because most speeding, most tailgating, and most stop-running does not result in crashes; my personal theory is that you need at least two things to go "wrong" at the same time.

No need to get to the engine.

I direct your attention to the most-critical safety component, "brakes".

Which is to say, to increase security, do the following:

Apple logo -> System preferences -> Sharing

By default, uncheck all but "Remote login".

ALWAYS, uncheck "File Sharing" and "Screen sharing".

Do I have that right?