WIMP out on this, I will

Unfortunately with the LHC eructing nothing beyond the Standard Model and all WIMP experiments so far coming up with nothing, this could become a great null experiment.

It's a desert out there...

This is gonna be peachy

Seeing how the electrical grid is still in a dilapidated state after about 20 years of constant moaning and bitching while nothing happens at all.

Sure, step up FCC. What's that? No price increase to customers but more resilience? Obama wills it? Uk, okay.

SOCIALISM!

> There are no fridges or freezers for food on the ISS

WHY! Jesus Christ with all the 30 billions or so spent, one would expect a lousy freezer to be around. Most of the ISS is probably thermal control and tinfoil anyway.

Also.,. Bah "Thanksgiving":

<blockquote>

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

</blockquote>

Yes, Mr. Bond... our new headquarters. Soon the preparations will be complete.

I'm sure the cellars will hold torture devices, shark tanks, fanbois converted to supersoldiers kept under control by permanent morphine injection (until the time is right), finger-of-god orbiting laser platforms in their launch tubes, large meditation spaces with transdimensional prayer mills and saunas full of eager females.

jobs_gendo_pose.jpg

CAP theorem - not a blocker in the practical world

"CAP theorem clearly poses a theoretical problem for cloud computing, where services are being founded on massively distributed servers for their compute and storage."

In Overcoming CAP with consistent soft-state replication, we read:

"The CAP theorem has been highly influential within the cloud computing community, and is widely cited as a justification for building cloud services with weak consistency or assurance properties. CAP’s impact has been especially important in the first-tier settings on which we focus in this article. Many of today’s developers believe that CAP precludes consistency in first-tier services. For example, eBay has proposed BASE (Basically Available replicated Soft state with Eventual consistency), a development methodology in which services that run in a single datacenter on a reliable network are deliberately engineered to use potentially stale or incorrect data, rejecting synchronization in favor of faster response, but running the risk of inconsistencies. Researchers at Amazon.com have also adopted BASE. They point to the self-repair mechanisms in the Dynamo key-value store as an example of how eventual consistency behaves in practice. Inconsistencies that occur in eBay and Amazon cloud applications can often be masked so that users will not notice them. The same can be said for many of today’s most popular cloud computing uses: how much consistency is really needed by YouTube or to support Web searches? However, as applications with stronger assurance needs migrate to the cloud, even minor inconsistencies could endanger users. For example, there has been considerable interest in creating cloud computing solutions for medical records management or control of the electric power grid. Does CAP represent a barrier to building such applications, or can stronger properties be achieved in the cloud?

(main part of article followed by...)

Conclusion: The CAP theorem centers on concerns that the ACID database model and the standard durable form of PAXOS introduce unavoidable delays. We have suggested that these delays are actually associated with durability, which is not a meaningful goal in the cloud’s first tier, where applications are limited to soft state. Nonetheless, an in-memory form of durability is feasible. Leveraging this, we can offer a spectrum of consistency options, ranging from none to "amnesia freedom" to strong f-durability (an update will not be lost unless more than f failures occur). It is possible to offer ordered-based consistency (state machine replication), and yet achieve high levels of scalable performance and fault tolerance. Although the term amnesia freedom is new, our basic point is made in many comparisons of virtual synchrony with Paxos. A concern is that cloud developers, unaware that scalable consistency is feasible, might weaken consistency in applications that actually need strong guarantees. Obviously, not all applications need the strongest forms of consistency, and perhaps this is the real insight. Today’s cloud systems are inconsistent by design because this design point has been relatively easy to implement, scales easily, and works well for the applications that earn the most revenue in today’s cloud. The kinds of applications that need stronger assurance properties simply have not yet wielded enough market power to shift the balance. The good news, however, is that if cloud vendors ever tackle high-assurance cloud computing, CAP will not represent a fundamental barrier to progress."

Actually the whole issue of IEEE Computer is rather interesting.

Press "submit", bitch!

> Viewing of extreme or violent pornography and discussing it during sexual assaults.

How does that actually work? Do people have discussion about their pr0nz when they are performing rape?

So...

Any word on the design patents that are encumbering those chairs?

"what do you expect, I’m only 12?"

In a William Gibson novel, that kind of Count Zero gets brainfried remotely, then their parents' house gets visited by a missile.

THAT's security.

But...but....

"where it was used to process mathematical calculations for Britain's nuclear program"

This smells like numerically solving differential equations.

So, how do you apply this thing to the task at hand? Do you program it somehow? Is there a dude with a large table for which he has to fill in a column and whereby he gets the values from the WITCH?

Oh well

Office 2010, huh? If they are running an old OpenOffice, chances that they will upgrade to Ballmer Office 2013 before most of the current employees have moved into retirement are slim indeed.

Pray they never encounter the IFKAM!

A, civil servants and the tragedy of the commons.

Looks like USPTO again shat all over everything due to overall laziness and the need to collect some cash.

On homo sapiens' declining eye acquity...

"The star is so huge, it can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation Andromeda, even though it's 170 light years away."

I dunno, I see lots of stars with the naked eye, and whole lot if I'm away from the city in the dark countryside.

Cultural Enrichment Ruby?

So what about the speakers' religious beliefs and eating habits? Jedis and Vegans want to be there, too!

#appleyouareuseless but I will be your gimp on the next product launch anyway

"Oh my good how did this get there I'm not good with computers"

Sucks trying to navigate through live using only sharia, arseholes!

Seriously though the fact that Afghan people actually *still* are somehwat partial to these bottomfeeders says a lot about how utter incompetence of the US at doing anything right.

A good job for the MIT robot lab, allied to Lockheed-Martin

Your mission: Develop RAT-101, an autonomous system that can patrol an island-largish area in adverse weather conditions, either terrestrially or aerially for at least a week before needing pick-up. It shall identify and terminate any biological entity of the genus "Rattus" - and only those - by means to be proposed (possible means may include, but are not limited to, projectile weapons or force applied through physical contact). Reusing existing or COTS software and hardware systems is strongly encouraged. Proposal for compact nuclear energy sources are accepted.