I had the exact same thought. "Getting software right is very, very difficult" ... "trust us, we know; we still haven't figure out how to get it right".

But what you are proposing is effectively just another type of filter. It's something that will reduce--but not eliminate--spam, and is something that eventually the botnet folks will figure ways to get around. If you think that spam filters will never work, then increasingly stringent regulation of domain registration will not work either.

The parent's point was that removing the incentive amounts to removing the profit motive, and this is essentially impossible. Your suggestion about `the damned registrars' does nothing to remove the profit motive.

As strange as that would be, it's even stranger that she used to attend Grateful Dead concerts, and still considers herself a fan.

Next up for the team? Precisely measure planets around stars SPIC-20, CHINK-15, and GRINGO-117.

Actually, I've seen worse than this. I was at this bar attached to a hotel in Switzerland and they had a coin-operated Windoze machine. And old American guy (~70s) felt hip enough to surf the tubes, so he put in his coins, and upon login an IE browser window automatically popped up, full screen. My friend and I painfully watched him spend 10 minutes trying to find IE by going to Google and searching for "Internet Explorer". He even tried to download from one site and install it; when that didn't work he had to drag the bartender over and show him how to use this new-fangled device (bartender/IT? quite a CV).

Once he was on, he spent his time checking hotmail and his bank and stock accounts. But he was mindful of the security risks: when he was typing in passwords, he looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

Chu is already the director of LBNL, which is a large Department of Energy laboratory. He is already a high-ranking official IN the DOE; not only does he have the knowledge of the scientific subject material, he also intimately knows the inner bureaucratic structure of the DOE. Putting someone in charge who has experience with EITHER of those two categories would be a good idea; the fact that Chu knows both makes him almost perfect for the job.

Indeed. Just consider, how much crime is there today associated with the distribution and sale of alcohol. None, you say? Exactly. But there certainly was tons in the years 1920-1933. If a commodity is in demand, there will be a supply. Rendering it illegal doesn't change that; it only delegates the supply to those willing to break the law.

In Imperial Russia, Czar makes diode out of YOU!

It's subtly different. If you believe E=mc^2 (and there's no reason not to--it's been verified too many times to count, despite the misleading headline), then the energy in a field (electromagnetic field, gluon field, etc.) is equivalent to mass. In a proton, there is a non-zero gluon field that caries energy and hence mass.

The question then becomes, how can an elementary particle (like an electron) have mass? A free electron is not interacting with any fields, so how can it act like it has mass? This is the question that the Higgs mechanism answers. It says that elementary particles are indeed massless, and they interact with Higgs fields. The Higgs fields have non-zero values in the vacuum, and so provide "mass" to elementary particles through their interactions.

So the Higgs is responsible for giving mass to the individual quarks (via their interactions with the Higgs fields), but the proton/neutron mass is dominated by the energy in the gluon field, not the Higgs field.

I hope that is a bit understandable.

This `ask slashdot' is going to sound an awful lot like a previous question posted by an undergraduate math major who was/is going into a masters program in astrophysics (my comment in that thread, which is similar to the parent's, still stands in this case, and I won't bother typing it again, although I will second some other comments which recommend the Feynman lectures).

The OP requests non-undergrad books for undergrads, but I wholeheartedly disagree. The graduate PDE course is covering the technical aspects of the mathematics; one then simply needs a basic understanding of the physics (not another technical mathematical discussion), and I can't think of any better way to browse through undergrad textbooks.

If that's still not your cup of tea, there's always wikipedia.

I've always used emacs whenever I need a quick terminal-based text editor (yeah I know, "real users use vi"; whatever). But one server I used to work on had a problem where for whatever reason emacs wasn't working, and so I would use pico instead. And the problem with pico on this machine was that C-x C-s (which was ingrained in muscle-memory for me, reflex-like) would freeze the whole terminal. The only recourse would be to login separately, find the PID of the pico process and kill -9 (and only -9), whereby none of the changes had been saved. My co-workers sharing my office were both annoyed and amused because they'd be quietly working and at least a few times a day, out of nowhere I would just immediately shout, "FUCK!!".