jurjenh

The problem here being that "normal" bananas have seeds in them, and the Cavendish and Gros Michel are specific hybrids that don't - so the only way to propagate is essentially cloning them (take a cutting and grow it) - lots and lots of identical plants.

Going back to a more "natural" system would involve a lot of variation in fruit crops, which means handling and processing costs would go up tremendously, likely leading to the same result: no bananas for most people.

One of the more sustainable solutions is to eat local - food that is locally grown, thus suited for your environment. However, this means that all those in temperate climates will (eventually) need to forgo tropical fruits... or grow them in glasshouses.

Not sure what the best approach would be here, but I'm fortunate enough to be in an area where you can grow bananas - so I'm trying my luck (Auckland, New Zealand)

I could imagine some sort of organ senses - child has certain hormones (eg testosterone) in salive, and certain receptors on the nipple pick up on these hormones and then tailor the milk.

Note that I have no basis for this claim, but one of the many ways the body communicates is through hormones, so it certainly wouldn't be outside the realms of possibility...

Hmmm... where do we find out about all the CLASSIFIED blog posts? NSA internal forums? Any place where there's a summary of these reviews as metadata, hence leaving the content "CLASSIFIED" ? Who is watching the watchers?

How would they encourage "internal" blogs though - asking directly would most likely raise flags, or a flood of insincere blog posts that would counter the desired result.

What I'd be more interested in is how much this issue is being discussed internally. If these discussions are allowed, or even surreptitiously encouraged, then I'd take that as a possible internal propaganda push, subtle as it may be. What's in the conscious mind gets written about, hence you'd see these kind of "justification" posts.

If there was very little internal discussion, or it was frowned upon, then I would expect much less of these blog posts, as it would potentially undermine your career...

Micro-payments. Quick, easy, one-time. Then you don't need to worry about a thousand subscriptions to rarely-read sources.

Sounds easy, but I don't believe anyone has something that works?

There is the issue though that as young people, they may well not have the maturity or information to fully understand and comprehend the decision they are making.

I was going to detail this as a possible excuse - but considering this reasoning and the consequences has made me reconsider: You've made a bad choice [morally / ethically]. Now you have to live with the consequences.

Can be seen as a tough stance, but then again, so's life. Didn't really mean to fall of that cliff? Oh, here's your life back again.

That's a very interesting statement that can be read many, many ways... It may pay to clarify your background a little.

I'm a recent law graduate (- but I now work for the NSA...) researching warrant canaries (- and looking at ways to deal with these companies)

It may be a bit conspiracy-theory, but current affairs suggest it is certainly not outside the realms of possibility.

"A virus has been detected in your driving software. Please upgrade now to remove this threat" ... and the consequences are potentially a lot more damaging than PCs.

When the target gets big enough, it will happen. And how to protect against this, when we don't really understand the weaknesses yet - a rogue radar/lidar imitator sending false echoes, strong EM fields messing with electronic components - it could even be an intermittent connection fault in a communications bus. Plenty of unknown unknowns in this field.

An easy starting point would be to get this kind of data on similarly aged cars - cars sold over the last 2-3 years, then see what stats you can get there. I'd guess that you'd find some models that have never caught fire and some that have done so a lot more than tesla's, but that's pure speculation on my part.

> This means that if large triangles could be ‘drawn’ in space, their internal angles would add up to less than 180 degrees.

I wonder if this could somehow be done with the voyager 1 and 2, although I imagine this would involve setting the two voyagers up to look for each other - something that may well be many orders of magnitude outside what is possible, though they still seem to be able to contact us.

Also it may not be a large enough distance, but I'd guess its the largest available to us that we could actually test.

It was "inefficient" when Google did it... Right person in the right place with the right contacts at the right time with a certain amount of luck on your side. You can game some of these, but the thing not to forget is that it takes time, and a quick connection is quickly forgotten.

At a guess, I'd say its a round fluorescent tube hidden in the rolled/folded edge of the lamp - shining light up into the dome, which with the right angles should reflect back the light with the same intensity from any point. (Not entirely sure if it needs to be a parabolic shape or not)

The dome itself is most likely double-layered, so that you can hide your wiring in between the two layers.

While this is a great solution for places without easy last-mile connections, it seems to me this would still be vulnerable, as one compromised connection would essentially allow the same kind of snooping that we've got going on now.

Does anyone know whether this is so, or how to protect against snooping, as I would assume there is some implicit level of trust required for a network like this to stay secure.

which makes me wonder if there is a simple java package to do that - probably not much to write a simple curl / wget for java so that on any machine with a JVM you can just lein your way to clojure...

Just had a reminder of that this morning... Was doing a bit of routine maintenance on the server at work when I noticed repeated ssh login attempts appearing in the system logs... with usernames that clearly don't exist. Tracing the source ip address sent me to Beijing somewhere, so someone there was trying a port scan and random ssh login attempts.

I've never really looked for this kind of interaction before, and I wonder just how common it is these days - but I'd say that you can now pretty much guarantee that it will happen at some stage, and you'd better hope your security is up to the task.

download brew and install redis... nah, no time to do that just to get a preview of how it works.

Well, it may be the bees knees, but I'm not doing all that to get a look at it.

In one of the linked pages - http://quantifiedself.com/2012/07/nick-winter-a-lazy-mans-ap... he mentions quantifed mind, but I can't find any site with that name.

EDIT: Ooops, a little googling further reveals http://www.quantified-mind.com

After a little link-chasing I did get to a guide / tools page that may be useful: http://quantifiedself.com/guide/

And of course there is still the arc forum...

http://arclanguage.org/forum

But then you might want to use it with lets say glossy plain-coloured melamine sheets - most surface trackers have a lot of problems with this, so the calibration stickers are a cheap and reliable solution.

The only issue I can see is kick-back from the router bit, especially if you use larger diameter bits - this can throw the router significantly, and unless the control system compensates quickly yet gently, you may well lose tracking, leading to undefined results.

As a result of doing that, you'd be transferring the CO2 from the oceans back into the atmosphere.

I'm still unsure about the appropriate process of dealing with all the CO2 released over the last ~200 years - it originally came from somewhere, I'd imagine likely the atmosphere - then over millions of years it was sequestered into the earth through coal and oil. And we've undone that sequestering in a very rapid manner, over approx 200 years, an instant in geological terms.

I'd say the hammer stroke hasn't even started ringing yet, and we haven't even begun to see the changes that we've unleashed - and who knows what they might be? So many unknown unknowns there... and we're attempting to throw our best minds at it, yet we're also still very much continuing with our current trajectory.

Radial power transfer efficiency drops off proportional to r^2, as does omni-directional sound. Unless there is some sort of directional beam established to focus the energy transfer, I imagine these power losses will indeed occur. Note that room effects may well be non-negligible - reflections may mean more power arrives at the receiver than the naive estimate.

So I would imagine the ceiling mounted charging station would be a fairly heavy duty outfit with a multi-kW rating if it is to be able to service a large room.

From the video link further down the comments it clearly states that it uses ultrasound at around 50kHz, which is then transformed back into about 30V, but I didn't pick up any information about how much power is actually transmitted.

As for safety, they state that it is above human hearing, and bounces off skin, so does not penetrate tissue like the high frequency ultrasound used for medical scans. Not too sure about the high freq claim, as some "ultrasound" devices give me a headache even though they are supposed to be above human perception.

The idea seems to be to charge a battery in the flash-drive sized charging adapter, and then use this to charge whatever appliance you plug into it. They mentioned about 3hrs for full charge for this adapter, but again, not sure how much power this equates to.

I think the issue will be compiling it for the CLR and then distributing it. The current script gets and runs a JAR, but I 'd imagine it would be relatively trivial to modify the script to run the CLR instead - but you'd have to build from the source included in the JAR (if it's all there...)

Haven't had much experience with it myself, it has been a while since I've played with Clojure.

  light server stop

if you look through the script file, it has a series of options.

  light table
  light server start | stop | restart
  light update [version]

but as far as I can tell it always checks for updates first and will install them before it checks any of the arguments passed.

Another test done, now for a hold at 235m.

Does anyone know why this has been changed? I'd hazard a guess at dragon being slightly off the target position (slightly northwest), but haven't heard any commentary about why this may be.

I thought the planning and preparation would have some allowance for slight discrepancies, so are the changes to the planned points (220m to 250m) a part of this procedure, or would these "deltas" be a reactive response to real life?

Watching dragon sliding over those clouds is pretty hypnotic. You can see why they say watching earth from space makes the boundaries between countries disappear.

Like... (and i quote) "That's dragon passing over LA"

Looking at the screen with the cross-hairs it seems like the bottom right set of figures shows the distance to ISS, which was sitting at around 255m, and should go down to 235m (EDIT: was originally supposed to be 220m) before the crew on ISS tells dragon to head back to the 250m mark.

Here's hoping that they keep showing these shots from the ISS monitors throughout - kinda like watching someone coding but on a whole different level!

Thanks for the update - where'd you get that snippet of information? I tried to find a schedule of sorts but had no luck...

I could imagine a very efficient and quick way for system updates could be built this way. Would reduce hosting and bandwidth costs for the system developers / maintainers and could improve the speed and availability of updates.

The only immediate concern that springs to mind is that if you manage to crack into this channel, you could potentially gain access to millions of computers in next to no time. In fact, I believe botnets work similar to this (from what I can remember of the Reddit botnet AMA...