You can paint it yellow, but it's still a really-short bus. That might make sense for very low-density areas, but I was surprised when I needed to hire a school bus for a Scout event last year that the newer full-sized buses actually get pretty amazing mileage. At 10-15 MPG, it's terrible for a car, but when you're carrying 60+ people, that's fantastic. Especially considering you can still buy a pickup truck that gets similar mileage. I was expecting the answer to come back at "7MPG highway" or something more proportional to automotive mileage.

Kudos to the anonymous mechanical engineers who design these things. I suspect it would be really hard to build a full-sized EV bus that used less total fuel, considering the transmission and charging losses, and the fuel equivalence for the additional wealth needed to purchase such a thing.

This.

Two things to keep in mind here. The average price for real estate within the city limits of Austin isn't that high because it's pulled WAY down by the relatively cheap outskirts of town. If you want to live downtown with the cool kids, it's definitely not cheap. (And you DO want to live close to the job here...the traffic is getting insane, and they are doing more to make it worse than they are to fix it. The just keep incentivizing more and more companies to come here.)

And speaking of traffic....how many Dice employees are attending SXSW this year. This post almost perfectly corresponds to the start of the festival. The forces of marketing are strong in Austin...

Salary amplification in... states with no income tax:

- Alaska
- Florida
- Nevada
- South Dakota
- Texas
- Washington
- Wyoming

If you have no dividend or interest income, add:

- Tennessee
- New Hampshire

What actually matters here is not where you want to live to work, but where you want to live eventually/retire to, and how long you are willing to work before you can safely retire, which is how much money you are effectively able to sock away each year.

Austin is still something of a deal, since compared to California, you get about 25% of your salary back through not paying income taxes, but the other places in the article are less of a deal, regardless of the cost of living, because what matters is not the cost of where you are, but the cost of where you end up when you and your money eventually move there. And that includes differential real estate pricing.

Washington is not so much of a deal, unless you live near the Oregon border; Washington makes up for its lack of income tax through sales tax, and Oregon makes up for its lack of sales tax with an income tax, so if you can get salaries in Washington, and buy your consumables, furniture, cars, and other items in Oregon, you can get a pretty good deal. A lot of Microsofties take this option, and have no problem with job transfers, which are more of a problem in Austin than Silicon Valley, but less of a problem than if you took a job at some data center in Iowa.

The problem with living in Austin is that you're subject to the Texas Legislature.

Just like the problem with Silicon Valley and LA (Disclaimer: I live in LA) is that you are subject to the California Legislature.

Austin is *not* ready to be a big city. Its infrastructure wasn't designed for it. Its traffic jams are some of the worst in the country, its aquifers are in serious trouble owing both to desertification and fracking around the Colorado River's headwaters, and much of its distinctive nature is being destroyed by new development. This is why you see signs reading, "Welcome to Austin! Don't move here."

How can a list of "the seven major tech hubs" not include Seattle, which is home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, but include cities like Atlanta? That is a strangely biased list so I wonder what the criteria was for "tech hub".

In the US jurors can acquit for any reason and aren't required to say what it was. Usually they rule on findings of fact, but that is not a requirement as far as I know. There are a number of organizations proselytizing what they believe are the full "rights" of a jury, for instance, the fully informed jury association.

This is often derided by those who fear that racist jurors will acquit criminals whose victims are a discriminated against group and praised by those who fear that the the overwhelming body of existing law can be used against pretty much anyone - it's impossible t know the entirety of the law and so its impossible to avoid ever breaking it.

At the moment my fear of tyranny outweighs my fear of racists, though. I don't know if that will always be the case or if that historically would have been a poor assessment generally, but I think we need to think long and hard about ameliorating the potential issues of wrongful acquittals in other ways before risking an increase of wrongful convictions.

If only you could benefit from that before you spend your life savings on a lawyer (non-refundable), get fired, and have your name dragged through the media.

That and if judges would stop trying to weed out jurors that believe in nullification.

At one time, prosecutors usually did a decent job of not prosecuting the obviously innocent (or perhaps we just didn't hear of their misconduct as much), but these days they seem to have little care for guilt or innocence as long as they get their conviction.

i could think of quite a bit of problems that a 'couple of right hooks' would solve

Now that i think about it, whats the point of any law anyways? it should all be social justice, mob rule thats what i say, fuck the goverment. People in general should be allowed to just decide at any given moment what is a fair punishment and if somone is guilty or not, facts, evidence, fair trail...all that is just pointless when anyone can just look at a moment in a situation and just know what to do. couple of right hooks, maybe blow his brains out, or burn him...all these things can just be decided by whoever is around at the moment of emotional impulse

Ya...i totally like your idea

SELinux may have improved by leaps and bounds since I last touched it, but honestly it IS a wrong headed approach designed for an environment where a single security violation can be a disaster of global proportions.

That's not to say that MAC is bad (it most certainly isn't) or that it's not a good idea on a desktop machine (it is). More that if you make something too draconian and too painful to relax a bit when needed, it tends to get turned off.

The bug is a lie.

None of which explains why it needs executable code and data mapped into the same memory space.

This is why open source bug reporting systems need a "developer in denial" status. Here's the original bug report. If a developer tries to close a bug and the users don't agree, the bug should go into "developer in denial" status and that should count against the developer's stats. This particular bug was closed by Drew Bliss of Valve. 3 followers, 0 stars, 0 following. Should be flagged as "unsuitable for employment on security-related projects".

The only anonymity the users have is the notion, these bitcoin wallets exist only in the bitcoin universe and it can not be linked to real life entities. This is a big assumption to make. Whenever bitcoin universe intersects real universe there is potential for the anonymity to be broken. A vendor delivering goods maintaining records like "bitcoin wallet xxx placed order for yyy delivered to address zzz" will link the wallets to real identities and clues.

I thought "These blocks go well into the past, so people who have conducted illicit transactions in the past also have their wallets linked to the transactions. These can not be erased or modified. Multiple copies of the blocks exist. So the law enforcement can catch them years from now". More informed slashdotters explained that those "expired" blocks have been purged from most miners. Only their final checksums were carried forward. So past transactions to buy drugs or something can not be decrypted.

But NSA and other agencies have been sucking up internet traffic like a giant vacuum. They know more about the value of the blocks being validated (Mining is a misleading term. Mining is repeatedly validating the block till the checksum meets a criterion). Those blocks exist in the vault.

So yes, every time a drug dealer or a hired assassin gets nabbed and his/her bitcoin wallet gets decoded, all the wallets that dealt with him will be recovered. The web will grow. There is potential for a very large number of people to be caught by the law years after their "illegal" activity happened. If it is a time bound offense they might be lucky. But there is no statuette of limitation for murder and other higher felonies. Bitcoin blocks might turn out to be a huge law enforcement tool after all.

But most likely to catch illegal downloads than drug dealing, given the tenacity and connections of MPAA and RIAA.

who has lost real money by "investing" in Bitcoins than I have for anyone who lost real money by "investing" in beany babies. Like my momma always told me, "stupid is as stupid does".

Buy all you can. :)

The only thing that cannot be fudged is that we cannot make. Gold keeps it's spending power over long stretches of time.

Bitcoin can't and won't survive without regulation, and all (most) countries have said they won't, so... Many a fool and his money shall soon part. ; ) it'll be interesting to watch. 500 million dollars go missing, and the funny thing is governments don't really seem to care that anti-government investors lost their ass. LOL

What's important to realize is that the dollars won't go missing. They're still around - they have just changed hands. And that seems to be the real purpose of Bitcoin - have real money change hand, and mostly to the early adopters and those who get out in time.

In itself, bitcoins have no value. The only value comes from what other values people exchange bitcoins for. It's a parasite economy that depends on non-bitcoin money for backing.

And it's irrelevant. Can we forget it soon, like we've forgotten other ponzi/pyramid/tulip schemes? It's not worth mentioning - let fools and crooks shift real money around between themselves. The losers will deserve it, and while the winners don't, they're not worth losing sleep over.

Depends on dice. The universal constants are not randomly changing at least, so the outcome is based on certain rules.

I believe you're confusing Vogons with wizards. Too much pipeweed, Gandalf?

Both creative people and cranks have lots of wild ideas. The difference is that a crank reflexively defends his ideas with irrational vehemence. A creative person usually discard his ideas, because he knows there's always more where that comes from.

This kind of article bothers me immensely. It treats Einstein as the God of Science, and uses the fact the he worked on something as evidence that this idea is no crackpottery. Well, guess what, Einstein also shat, farted, pissed, had bad ideas, and even commited mathematical mistakes.

And one should never evaluate a scientific idea based on who's working on it. The Steady-State model of the universe is not a crackpot idea, simply because it is consistent with the laws of GR and (superficially) consistent with observational evidence. Philosophically, thought, it does seem quite silly, and I myself would never have regarded it as more than a mathematical curiosity, had it not been already falsified when I was born.

A more modern example would be 't Hooft's work on superdeterminisc models for quantum theory. The guy is obviously a genius, but this idea is pure insanity, and it saddens me to see people taking it seriously just because a Nobel prize is working on it.

What the hell is point of medicine if not to extend life, anyway?

Improving quality of life is more important than length of it. There's little point in extending life into the 100s, if those years are spent being unwell.

And who wouldn't want to be healthier and live longer?

Somewhere between 70 and 80 would do me nicely.

Sure you get a lot of loudmouths who speak before they think blurbing about Malthusian crises

It's a perfectly valid concern. This planet is finite, and the day when there's somewhere that would be pleasant to live that's off this planet seems like it's a very long way away.

The overpopulation issue isn't a certainty. We've already seen massive declines in population growth in the developed world. You can't accurately estimate what our growth rate will be with immortality. It is entirely possible that our population will stabilize with many people infrequently having children.

Remember, there will still be deaths from one thing or another. We will have wars... which will claim thousands at the least and possibly millions on occasion. That is population that will have to be replaced.

Add in car accidents and various medical issues that this won't fix and you'll have a need to replace population.

it will be much lower then what we need today to counter aging. But it will remain significant. So long as our birth rate doesn't much exceed that rate our population will be stable. If it does exceed it then we'll have a major overcrowding issue.

Overcrowding leads to a scarcity of land, increases in prices, and a lower quality of living. In our society that tends to depress the birth rate.

In fact, in the modern world, there is a very keen link between economic prosperity and the birth rate in the middle class. In the very poor there is no such link since they don't actually share the same economy. Their economy is more about welfare stamps and various free housing policies. Its very difficult to quantity their economic prosperity because they don't actually use money per se. Amongst the rich its a non-issue since we can always assume they have enough to justify further breeding.

In any case, with immortality we can assume there are ways to deal with the overcrowding issue. Most of them will self correct.

And you forget the many benefits of immortality such as a highly skilled labor force that is always in prime working age. That means a much much higher level of industrial output and a much higher level of technological and educational sophistication.

With that sort of thing we might just make spreading beyond the planet practical. Far fetched today... but who can say tomorrow.

In any case, I will not retard our technological sophistication simply to satisfy the baseless worries of Luddites.

And people are dying early now due to the rich-poor divide. So why not fix that now?
http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

Also, such research ignores the low-hanging fruit of better nutrition as I mention here: http://science.slashdot.org/co...

How to get healthier for most people in the Western world: https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
https://www.lef.org/magazine/m...

But it is hard to make huge profits from suggesting people live well and clean up their environment and thus prevent and cure disease... There are a lot more profits to keeping people on patented drugs by just treating chronic "conditions" or reducing the pains associated with them.

To be clear, I'm not against anti-aging research or genomics. I'm just saying, we as a society and scientific community are often ignoring the obvious well-proven paths to better health and extended life-span and diminished "frail span" for most people.

Of course, genomics also has a dark side -- the potential for customized plagues that may destroy humanity in the next few decades, like I worry about here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

So, I'd suggest we build healthier and more secure and equitable communities for everyone right now, before the plague potential of genomics fully emerges, in order to have the community spirit needed to deal with the dark side of such innovation.

This is just shifting the problem.

What we need to cure is: fear of aging.

First, you seem to assume that "more people" (ignoring the fact that birth rates are already decreasing) will mean "resources will be stripped that much faster", without creating new jobs or new tax revenue. You also seem to assume that people will reproduce more ("multiple families") as they live longer. That doesn't match what we see happening in the real world today.

Finally, if you "assume they will have solved" age-related diseases, why do you rely on those diseases as your main argument against longevity?

For other folks who are like me, and are wondering what this thing is, it's apparently an office suite like Openoffice, Libreoffice, etc.

I've never heard of it up to now, myself.

It's the old KOffice.

Krita is probably the most usefull of the apps and I've already replaced GIMP with it, however the rest are also slowly maturing :)

Return your geek card (and your low ID at once). Calligra has been talked about many times at Slashdot. It's a fork and renaming of the KOffice suite, the original KDE clone of MS Office.

These are horrible on Windows, except for Krita, which is beautiful.

People complain about ribbons in MS Office, but whoever though up the default UI layout for Words and Sheets should be taken outside and beaten about the head with an IBM Model M keyboard.

Argue about the UI layer itself all you like, but the interface itself is plain stupid. Most people use a mouse or a touchpad. Having to mouse all the way across a 1080p widescreen to get at common controls is stupid as stupid gets.

Yes, there's an argument that with limited vertical space, utilising instead otherwise redundant horizontal space sounds like a great idea. But, when all I see is huge swathes of blank space in a main UI element taking up the right-hand 1/6th of the display, I want to bite something.

I can reposition the control, but the darn thing won't dock to the top because some idiot decided to build the control in such a way to make that impossible.

Look, I get it, a bunch of people are very clever and made a spreadsheet that does really cool and intricate stuff and is a bit like Excel but not quite as full featured but at least it's free. Wonderful and well done to those people but if you want folk to actually use your software, do some bloody user-interaction testing!

http://lwn.net/Articles/419822...

this article, and the linked website are absolute shite.

What the fuck, Slashdot?

my stuff never gets posted, but shit like this does?

FFS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe that tracing family lineage is essential for special religious ceremonies that seal family units together for eternity. According to Mormons, this fulfills a Biblical prophecy stating that the prophet Elijah would return to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers."[2]

They are actively fulfilling a Biblical prophecy ONLY by determining genealogical lineage AND then baptizing the dead.
Simply baptizing them just makes them Mormon. In the minds of the LDS followers.

Only the genealogically backed baptism, fulfills the prophecy of The Second ComingTM.
Kinda like those Texans and Israelis who are breeding red heifers in order to bring about the end of the world.

That's right! Both these groups are jerking off to the idea of Armageddon!
And yet nobody is rounding them up into prisons and concentration camps under suspicion of conspiracy to kill everyone on the planet!
I know! Insane!

My husband is dead and I have no sons. I understand that you have many - send me one of yours and I will marry him and make him king of Egypt. Never will I marry a servant.

I am afraid.

A Hittite prince was sent, and he and his retinue were murdered en route. The only other record that we have of Ankhesenamun is her name and Ay's written together in way that signifies that they were married. Ay becomes the next pharaoh, and she disappears after this.

You have the mentality of a peasant. Whatever the nobles do, it must be OK because they would never take advantage of their position at your expense. They're so much more deserving then you.

Let's use a car analogy: suppose that you buy gas at the same station that Google execs do. They get charged the rate that the gas costs at the refinery, and you pay retail. Their gas is 25% cheaper (made up value) then yours. You have to pay for shipping costs, infrastructure costs for the service station (electricity, upkeep), the salaries of everyone involved between the refinery and the pump, etc. All that stuff has to be paid for to get the gas to the pump, so you are subsidizing their gas.

Except it's not a private company selling the gas, it's government services paid for by your taxes.

+5 Insightful? I could see +5 Vituperative, but your post lacks both insight and manners. Rather than calling him a peasant, why didn't you spend time reading the linked letter and article widely cited above? NASA says, for example, "While we concluded that the fuel arrangement between Ames and H211 did not result in an economic loss to NASA or DLA-Energy..." The cost H211 paid was the fully loaded cost. Go look that up in an management accounting text. There were no government services paid for by anyone's taxes. The price they paid was below market rates -- at the time the deal was signed all fuel was provided by DoD and sold at subsidized price (DoD craft) or fully loaded cost (non-DoD craft, including the H211 craft that NASA sometimes used). Here's a flash for you: sometimes these craft just flew in the air, so they didn't have the option of going to another "gas station" down the road -- Moffet Field was the only game in town for NASA, and was often convenient for H211 folks. Cost recovery is the default option for charges at most airports, and managers are very good at calculating fully loaded costs.

The problem is that H211 was getting a better deal than other craft at other airports in the area, not that the government or taxpayer was losing money. Given how much NASA was saving by having easy access to H211's aircraft, everyone was winning. However, NASA decided it looked bad, so to avoid any allegations of impropriety (like yours), it was in the government's interest to collect market rates and pass the profit on to the Treasury, so they've been doing that since September 2013. Mr. Schmidt's compensation is irrelevant.

A number of public and private entities use the field. H211 (and others) typically do two things:

1. They pay fees to NASA for the storage and operation of their aircraft at this airfield.
2. They agree to allow NASA to install equipment in these aircraft and afford NASA the use of these aircraft for experiments.

In exchange for this, they get cheap fuel, but not below NASA's cost. Sure, they're not paying the normal taxes on this fuel because federal regulations prohibit the taxation of fuel sold from government owned airfields, and federal regulations allow for private operations to use NASA facilities under contract with NASA.

NASA has hangars, fuel storage/delivery facilities, a short supply of aircraft for research, and no money. Private entities have aircraft, no place to park them near their bases of operation, and money.

Would it piss you off if frequent government contractor Lockheed Martin operated private aircraft out of Moffett? Oh! Wait! They do! Would you be pissed if the highly publicized and technologically interesting solar plane venture Solar Impulse parked their plane in one of the hangars and threw parties around it while in the Bay Area? Oh! Wait! They did!

People need to chill out about this. This is no big deal. Either change the laws creating this condition or kick private entities out of Moffett, an idiotic action that would likely result in the financial collapse of an already under-funded operation of NASA.

But, yes, I'm willing to grant your first statement... you are simple minded.

It is my understanding, that FDA's current stance is that all such person-specific treatments/medicines must be individually approved

There is already some flexibility on that front. Cancer immunotherapies like sipuleucel-T (Provenge, approved in 2010) are unique to each patient.

The clinical trials framework that's evolved over the decades isn't really equipped to deal with personalized medicine, but that's starting to change. Where I work, we're starting to understand the genomic basis of altitude sickness and putting together treatment trials on that basis. This is an area where the potential market is pretty large, of course, and for rare diseases that affect small numbers of people it's going to be harder, but if we can develop a generally accepted body of protocols for individualized trials then it should be possible to apply this to smaller groups as time goes by.

The actual benefits from pharmacogenetic testing for Warfarin metabolism are swamped by all the other factors which affect Warfarin metabolism (eg diet and other meds).

The FDA disagrees, and so does the evidence. And there are a whole lot of areas where pharmacogenetics is starting to have an impact on treatment. In any case, pharmacogenetics is a subset of pharmacogenomics; for example, as I mentioned in another comment, the lab where I work is working on expression-based tests for prediction of altitude sickness and setting up drug trials.

Gene therapy is performed through vectors, notably viral vectors.

Are Native American lands bound by the FDA?

if they said $200,000 for some wanker to hang around all day and pretend
to do a little php work you wouldn't have batted an eye

Take texas or South Dakota or either of the Carolinas... how much of this police buying are we seeing there? Not much.

My neighborhood in Dallas pays $70K/year for what the DPD calls "ENP" (Enhanced Neighborhood Patrol). For the $70K we get two armed, uniformed police officers driving a marked DPD patrol car for 1000 hours per year (above their regular patrols) in a neighborhood of about 1 square mile. This sort of thing goes on in neighborhoods all over town, and the DPD has a similar program for businesses that is quite popular as well. My brother who lives in Houston also has paid patrols by the HPD in his neighborhood (don't know the costs).

Anyway, "police buying" is alive and well down here in the Lone Star State. Come on down & check it out. (if you do make it down here, don't let anybody know you failed to capitalize the "T" in "Texas"...you might get shot)

You are confused because you don't understand how school district funding works. The schools are funded from the property tax collected WITHIN the school district, meaning that a district like Orange county is going to be funded a whole bunch better than a district in Compton. In other countries, schools are funded out of the national budget, and you don't have the disparity in education that the US has.

You might think that you might have school districts with both rich and poor neighborhoods, but generally what happens is that the level of school district funding either forces the property value in the poor neighborhoods up, because the district is well funded, or forces the property value down in the rich neighborhoods because the schools are bad, or the district zoning is redrawn to exclude the poor kids from the rich kids district.

I darn well stubbed my toe on *something* when I staggered home last night, so I'm pretty sure the garden gnome is not theoretical.

Dark matter is not THEORETICAL. There is direct evidence for it. Quoting from the relevant wiki:

The most direct observational evidence to date for dark matter is in a system known as the Bullet Cluster. In most regions of the universe, dark matter and visible material are found together,[33] as expected because of their mutual gravitational attraction. In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter. X-ray observations show that much of the baryonic matter (in the form of 107–108 Kelvin[34] gas, or plasma) in the system is concentrated in the center of the system. Electromagnetic interactions between passing gas particles caused them to slow down and settle near the point of impact. However, weak gravitational lensing observations of the same system show that much of the mass resides outside of the central region of baryonic gas.

In other words, gravitational lensing of light waves - which is 100% direct evidence of matter - shows a region where there is matter that is clearly non-baryonic (i.e. does not interact with the electromagnetic field, a.k.a. "dark"). This is not subject to dispute. The question of what, exactly, is dark matter - is indeed still a subject of scientific research. There are, however, a number of super-symmetric theories which posit super-partners for well known particles, the most stable of which turn out to have the exact characteristics we're noting observationally. It is important to note that these theories were not tailored to account for the dark matter, but seem to fit the observational evidence quite well so far. As with all science however, theories are subject to falsification at any times as soon as new evidence comes on the scene.

"So what if there was this giant swarm of space bees, and every 35 million years our solar system–"
"Wait. Wait, hold on. You're suggesting space bees killed the dinosaurs?"
"Not directly! These bees are huge. Moon-sized. And they live in the interstellar gaps between stars. I calculated that if their swarm passes through the Oort Cloud, they would get really upset and buzz around, and their gravitational forces would fling asteroids and comets into the solar system."
"How did you calculate that the Oort Cloud makes your hypothetical space bees angry?"
"Well it's a lot more plausible than your hypothetical invisible aether making the sun go wonky."

when a string bends in the 4th dimension it creates the effects of dark matter.

. . . but only if there is someone there in the 4th dimension to hear it.

In all fairness to mythosaz, he called it a "garden gnome," not a "theoretical garden gnome."