gmaslov

Having all that information (school, doctor, lawyer, pest control company, health insurer, employer, credit card company, ...) about one person or a family, together in one place, is a social-engineering / identity-theft cornucopia. Imagine if Path had a data breach resulting in this contacts database floating around the internet.

Now most people's response to that kind of threat is to think "I'm just nobody important, no one would ever go to the trouble of using this information to impersonate me or otherwise make my life difficult." Probably you are underestimating one or more of: (a) your importance, meaning how much money someone stands to gain by impersonating you, (b) the gullibility/apathy of customer service reps at the companies you interact with, or possibly (c) the amount of free time and/or perversity of someone who will fuck with you just for the lulz.

Well, just because it really exists doesn't mean it wasn't a silly thing to ask for ;-)

Oh dear. I like this article, but using XML parsing as the example for sed made me cringe hard. Please never, ever attempt to work with XML using regular expressions!

Hmm, would the accelerometer really detect anything? I think the bullet would have to experience significant lift, otherwise it's in free fall and the only acceleration you'll see after it leaves the barrel is air resistance, which isn't in the right direction to change with each rotation. To a first approximation, spinning bullets don't experience lift.

Maybe there's still some minuscule effect that can be detected, though. The sections on Magnus force in http://www.nennstiel-ruprecht.de/bullfly/index.htm seem to suggest that this is the case. But now I'm not so sure it's as simple as counting the number of periods of oscillation from the accelerometer.

IANAIBOEP (I am not an expert in ballistics or even physics)

Off topic, but:

  To be considered for acceptance into the program,
  please print and complete the appropriate applications
  and fax the forms to +1-703-421-5828.

Verisign, a company intimately involved with the Internet at every level, wants faxed forms, in the year 2011? For access to the TLD zone files, something technical enough that a sane person must have been involved at some point? I can't decide if it's funny or sad.

I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.

No one would ever attempt to prosecute a corporation for perjury (the penalty specified by the DMCA) if it sends out a piddling few hundred fraudulent takedown notices. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past them to throw the book at any individual they catch sending one. Individuals have neither the stamina for a long legal battle nor any means of plausible deniability ("The notices were automated!", "We don't know who sent it.", "The guy who sent it has been fired, problem solved.", etc.), and prosecutors like winning cases.

IANAL.

The actual website for the project is here http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/ , and has a great FAQ section and more videos.

Stanislaw Lem wrote a pointed satire [1] on what might happen when new technology destroys all jobs. I think it's a brilliant distillation of the issues. (Alas, deploying Strong AI to solve the problem doesn't work out so well in this story.)

[1] The Twenty-fourth Voyage: http://www.scribd.com/doc/37246256/Stanislaw-Lem-The-Star-Di... (starts at page 9)

I'm speculating wildly here, but I suspect a major benefit to going 3D like this will be improved chip layout -- no need to take a lengthy route around all the stuff in the middle just to get from the ALU to the L1 cache (for example), just go straight up.

Of course the article doesn't mention if it's possible to make (and align) vias through this special glue, but I would really hope so.

This type of compromised-CA attack is why I never understood why browsers don't use the OpenSSH model: accept and store (prompting for confirmation) the certificate the first time you connect to a site, then throw up enormous red flags if the certificate ever changes.

The Firefox root CA list has dozens and dozens of organizations on it. Could a compromise of any one of them mean that this attack could be repeated?

Agreed. The setup of this question struck me as a bit of an arbitrary "moving goalposts" problem.

> Of course the energy requirements are virtually impossible to satisfy in addition to all of the other problems.

That's what they used to say about powered flight ;)

Well, worthless to everyone but ICANN.

These are very similar to (and easier than most of) the Project Euler problems. http://projecteuler.net/ -- Highly recommended for everyone.

What makes Lisp unique, in my opinion, is its elegant unification of code and data. The 'eval' function and of course Lisp macros are very powerful features that come out of this immediately, and theoretically you can implement any other language feature on top.

In most other languages, to do the same things you have to parse the syntax, build an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree), do whatever transformations you need, and if you're very lucky you can then call the compiler as a library. Lisp makes the AST directly executable with 'eval', and provides a syntax parser already. Moreover, the AST is made of lists and symbols, which Lisp is naturally perfectly suited to manipulating.

All this makes Lisp quite beautiful as a mathematical object. I can't speak on its practicality ;)

The future must be now. At least one of my subroutines of thinking already relies on an artificial machine. I call it my Google neuron; it's wired up directly to everything I don't know off the top of my head and fires whenever I feel unsure about something. Well, the latency is still a bit high, but I'm sure someone is working on that problem. ;)