eldr

My partner works at a shelter and comes across this sentiment often. This is strange because a sizable portion of the dogs in their care where bought by their owners as puppies and then grew up to have physical or behavioral characteristics making them unsuitable for their owners who then bring them to the shelter.

There are plenty of irresponsible shelters out there but a responsible adoption center will insist that you have interaction with the dog before you adopt. The will have done thorough behavior assessments and will do their best to make sure the dog suits your lifestyle. I would guess about 80% of the dogs at her shelter require no further training to be a pet. In the remaining cases potential adopters are given guidance before they adopt and will usually know what they're in for ahead of time.

"In the piece, published back in August, they wrote about a murder near Chicago in which a father of six had been shot. At the scene, officers found two mobile phones. But they were passcode locked. Neither Google or Apple (the phones ran their software) could unlock the phones, and therefore the data was inaccessible.

"On behalf of crime victims the world over," the opinion piece read, "we are asking whether this encryption is truly worth the cost.""

Am I missing something here? Don't phones have SIM cards, IMEI numbers, serial numbers etc? Don't service providers keep records? Would they complain if a gun was found on the scene but the killer had not made the effort to engrave his name on it? Maybe they should spend their time doing investigations rather than writing editorials?

I agree with you, I don't think this graphic (or at least the underlying data) is very useful as an indicator of international military relationships. Of course it doesn't claim to be either.

As a single example, I recently decided that I don't know enough about US-Israel relations and started reading more on the topic. A report[1] I found linked from Wikipedia states that the US has provided Israel with $121 billion dollars (non-inflation-adjusted) since WWII, almost all of it military aid. The graphic shows $35 million in exports to Israel for 2013, the report lists $2.9 billion dollars in military aid in 2013.

If those figures didn't make it onto the graphic, there are probably many others which also don't.

[1] http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf

How the table is made. The details are beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVbo7ycpkeI

I had the opportunity to use the educational edition of SolidWorks for a few weeks a year or so ago. It seemed to have a fair number of the extra features included with it, one of which was CircuitWorks. I generated a model from a CircuitWorks example board and it turned out really well. When I tried to generate a model from one of my own Eagle projects it didn't look as good. From what I remember if there is no model of a component in the library, CircuitWorks just drops a bounding box in it's place which you can replace with your own model of the component. I had a deadline looming so I ended up using a photo of a prototype board as a texture on the part for the renderings I needed to do. This [1] help page mentions a lite version of CircuitWorks being available for all SolidWorks users, but I haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure about it's limitations.

[1] http://help.solidworks.com/2012/English/SolidWorks/circuitwo...

I'm usually skeptical of conspiracies, but now I guess I have to be more open to the possibility of this kind of behaviour.

If they went to these lengths with tech companies can't we assume that surveillance in place within financial institutions is even worse than what we know it is? It could hint at another angle beyond having lots of money where Wall Street has leverage over Washington. I can imagine bank execs threatening leaks should things not go their way.

I'm no expert on the US IP system, but it seems to me like a big part of the problem is that the USPTO grants patents for ideas which are both obvious and not novel. Some more ridiculous examples are the patents on making toast and the server patent mentioned in "When Patents Attack" where over 5000 patents for "the same thing" were in existence when that one was filed. Even then the patent was invalidated on the basis that the filer failed to mention his co-inventors rather than on the basis of prior art. I'm confused as to how those could ever get through the approval process in the first place, am I missing some finer points here?

This could be really cool, although as other people have said, achieving unattended operation seems like it will be challenging.

Does anybody know how the metal printing is supposed to work? Selective laser sintering machines that I've seen all seem way too big to fit in a vending machine.

I wonder how he would be treated if he had picked up a stack of paper printouts an AT&T employee had left on a park bench and taken it to a news outlet in order to showcase AT&T's recklessness with customer information? Would Aaron Swartz's case have been handled the same way if he'd gone into a library and photocopied a whole heap of journal articles? The powers that be seem terrified that someone might use technology in a way which they can't control. Apart from the disgusting human rights abuse that these cases illustrate, I worry about the future when people like judges and prosecutors think it's at all fair or reasonable to put people in jail for freely accessing information.

Thanks for the insight. Some quick (wikipedia) research would seem to indicate that osmotic pressure (27atm for seawater) is independent of membrane construction, at least under ideal conditions. Supporting the membrane during operation would seem to be a huge challenge, especially as they indicate that it has a tendency to tear during handling.

This article claims a 100x reduction in required pressure for the graphene membranes, while the Science article claims that state-of-the-art plants are already operating at 2x the theoretical minimum. These links would seem to support the claims of the Science article, that RO plants currently run at about 54atm (i.e 2x the theoretical minimum): [1] http://www.lenntech.com/processes/desalination/reverse-osmos... [2] http://www.remco.com/ro_quest.htm

I do hope that I'm missing something here though, and that fresh water for all is around the corner. I think it would go a long way towards improving the lives of many millions of people.