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atallcostskyon Obama administration ready to put $4B toward self-driving cars

This would be the NHTSA probably.

atallcostskyon Cell-Site Simulators Aren’t Secret Anymore

I wonder if it would be possible to take the idea of certificate authorities and apply it to cell phone towers. Basically, each cell tower company would be a CA, and could generate a certificate for each cell tower. Major cell tower companies could then be trusted by other CAs, and cell phones could have a store of trusted CAs. Then, when a cell phone attempts to connect to a tower, a check is made to verify that the tower is trusted by a trusted CA. This way, a user could (at least maybe) revoke a certificate from a CA that has trusted a group that has set up a cell site simulator.

My knowledge of PKI is pretty shaky. Does anyone know if something like this would work and/or be an improvement?

atallcostskyon IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards

I'm not sure where to buy them separately, but I'm pretty sure they come on the Lenovo T410 and Lenovo X220i laptops.

atallcostskyon Ask HN: Is there microscope equivalent for sounds?

Related to this topic, there are some ways of visualizing sound. Some options are:

* Spectrograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram

* Vectorscopes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope

Digital audio workstations [DAWs] (used often by producers of electronic music) have lots of tools for visualizing audio in this way.

Here's an example of how some of the above work in FL Studio, a popular DAW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfnWlLS6Bqg

atallcostskyon Latest prototype self-driving vehicles cruising around Mountain View

It looks like Google will be posting monthly reports of their self-driving cars from now on. Looks very interesting. See: http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/

atallcostskyon Make School a Democracy

"Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima."

I'm curious - would you be able to expand on this? I find that I prefer learning by doing projects, building, etc as opposed to reading/problem sets/etc. Has there been research to compare the two approaches?

atallcostskyon Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

That does make sense - definitely something to think about.

atallcostskyon Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

This would be a problem of course, but I'm betting this is a problem most people would like to have. If my two options are: Die at 100, and not have to work for the last X years, or live an extra 20 years, with required working, I at least would prefer to live and work than to die and not work.

atallcostskyon 'sudo make me a sandwich' has become a reality

More xkcd real life fun: http://xkcd.com/chesscoaster/