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For 11 years, Henley & Partners has published the Visa Restrictions Index, giving unprecedented and inimitable insight into the development of visa policies over time. It is the only Index produced in collaboration with the International Air Transport Association, which maintains the world's largest database of travel information.

Not explicit but smells like RTGs

"The effort contrasted and compared eight heat sources technologies, three power conversion, two dual cycle propulsion system configurations, and a single electrical power generation scheme." Yes, it's about RTGs, at least partially.

The quote "it was disappointing to all that the political realities would not allow use of the results" may refer to RTGs too :-)

We are living in the future when live broadcasts are being censored by AI programs in real-time. I'm sure dictators everywhere are looking forward for these technologies to mature. Having a firewall over reality is so convenient.

Oh, and look - the copyright AI doesn't likes Democrats as well: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/youtube-flags-democrats-convention-video-on-copyright-grounds/

What this tells is that we should not take AI seriously until smart Luis's (or his son) managed to make something decent out of it ... "This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law. And then, it got worse. Amid more cries of dismay on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, the official Worldcon Twitter announced: Chicon 7@chicon_7 We are sorry to report that #Ustream will not resume the video feed. #chicon7 #hugos #worldcon 3 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can. But Ustream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only access. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts."

Frightening! In reality, the deal has almost nothing to do with trade: actual trade barriers between these countries are already very low. The TPP is an effort to use the holy grail of free trade to impose conditions and override domestic laws in a way that would be almost impossible if the proposed measures had to go through the normal legislative process. The expectation is that by lining up powerful corporate interests, the governments will be able to ram this new "free trade" pact through legislatures on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

Interesting figures ...

Interesting article on china us trade inequalities

A habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land. The settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars the rest of their lives

"no political mumbo jumbo, no taxpayer's money" real work!

nice summary overview

Assuming the worst, Obama always has its handy antispy kit with him http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/us/politics/obamas-portable-zone-of-secrecy-some-assembly-required.html?hp&_r=2&

which city or country is next? who is ripe?

any hidden message

I knew it !!!

maybe 90' is too much but we ve been saying for so long about the power nap and never actually did it. I think the management tries to promote only politically correct methods for more creativity and new ways of working etc etc and neglects the potential power naps could have for some of us. I suggest as a first step a pillow on the desk and leaning on it after lunch for 10 - 15 '

University Alliance for Low Carbon Energy   Three universities, including Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have fostered up an alliance on November 15, 2009 to advocate low carbon energy and climate change adaptation The alliance will mainly work on 6 major areas: clean coal technology and CCS, homebuilding energy efficiency, industrial energy efficiency and sustainable transport, biomass energy and other renewable energy, advanced nuclear energy, intelligent power grid, and energy policies/planning. A steering panel made up of the senior experts from the three universities (two from each) will be established to review, evaluate, and endorse the goals, projects, fund raising activities, and collaborations under the alliance. With the Headquarters at the campus of Tsinghua University and branch offices at other two universities, the alliance will be chaired by a scientist selected from Tsinghua University.   According to a briefing, the alliance will need a budget of USD 3-5 million, mainly from the donations of government, industry, and all walks of life. In this context, the R&D findings derived from the alliance will find its applications in improving people's life.

good news for scientists...

One of the authors of the STL (C++'s Standard Template Library) explains generic programming and slams Java.

"I'd rather not even *think* about developing a web application/webservice/web-whatever in standard C++... is it actually possible?? Perhaps with some weird Microsoft solutions... I bet your bank online services are written in Java. Certainly not in PHP+MySQL :)" Doing in C++ would be awesomely crazy, I agree :) But as I see it there are lots of huge websites that operate on PHP, see for instance Facebook. For the banks and the enterprise market, as a general rule I tend to take with a grain of salt whatever spin comes out from them; in the end behind every corporate IT decision there is a little smurf just trying to survive and have the back covered :) As they used to say in the old times, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". "Industry has chosen Java not because of industrial-corporate marketing bullshit, but because of economics... it enables you develop robustly, reliably, error-prone, modular, well integrated etc... software. And the costs? Well, using java technologies you can set-up enterprise-quality web application servers, get a fully featured development environment (which is better than ANY C/C++/whatever development environment I've EVER seen) at the cost of exactly 0 (zero!) USD/GBP/EUR... Since many years now, the central issue in software development is not implementing algorithms, it's building applications. And that's where Java outperforms many other technologies." Apart from the IDE considerations (on which I cannot comment, since I'm not a IDE user myself), I do not see how Java beats the competition in this regard (again, Python and the huge software ecosystem surrounding it). My impression is that Java's success is mostly due to Sun pushing it like there is no tomorrow and bundling it with their hardware business.

OK, I think there is a bit of everything, wrong and right, but you have to acknowledge that Python is not always the simplest. For info, Facebook uses Java (if you upload picture for instance), and PHP is very limited. So definitely, in company, engineers like you and me select the language, it is not a marketing or political thing. And in the case of fb, they come up with the conclusion that PHP, and Java don't do everything but complement each other. As you say Python as many things around, but it might be too much for simple applications. Otherwise, I would seriously be interested by a study of how to implement a Python-like system on-board spacecrafts and what are the advantages over mixing C, Ada and Java.

Nice initiative, isn't it?

some citizen science added to this would make it even better ... as it is it's rather, boh ...

Well, true - making data public is one thing, and making others to work through them for you is another... I love the new term "citizen science" though (and an explanation on the Wikipedia page why they had to invent a new one because "crowdsourcing" is soooooo - politically - wrong).

the 10th is interesting, connected with our crowdsourcing experiments with the spacegame