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Having a larger pool of companies in the fund changes the probability distribution function. The bell curve gets narrower and taller in the middle the more stocks you put in the fund, meaning you're more likely to get an outcome closer to average, less likely to get an extreme outcome.

It's a consequence of statistics, nothing to do with stocks. If you roll a 1d6, every number between 1 and 6 has an equal chance of appearing. If you roll a 2d6, the bell "curve" becomes a triangle, with 2 and 12 being the least likely outcome (1 in 36 chance), and 7 being the most likely. A 3d6 turns flat sides of the triangle into a true bell curve. Increasing the number of dice results in the curve narrowing even further. By the time you get to 10d6, it's virtually impossible to get either of the extreme outcomes (1 in 60 million chance of getting a 10 or a 60).

So when you put thousands of stocks in a mutual fund like an index fund, it's virtually guaranteed to perform at the market average. Whereas if you buy stock from a single company it could perform average, or you could make a lot more money, or you could lose everything. Insurance companies and casinos rely on the same thing - by grouping lots of insured or gamblers together, the overall outcome becomes much more predictable. The increased accuracy of prediction (outcome closer to the average) allows them to make money despite decreasing their margin (offering a lower price for insurance than the competition).

No, I'm sorry, it appears to me that this is all photoshopped fakery. Yes, two-photon lithography is a real thing, but in this case we have some artist claiming to have done things which are not currently possible.

This kind of thing happens pretty frequently now and it pisses me off, sorry. Real scientists and engineers (and even artists) dream and strive to accomplish great feats of engineering and discovery. But some people like to pretend their dreams are real and by presenting fake accomplishments to the world they damage society by trivializing the actual accomplishments of real innovators. They present their "art" as if it were real, and it gets sent around the internet and people believe that it's true, and that further blurs the public's view of what's real and what's art or pure fantasy. What's the point of trying to actually do something like this when everyone thinks it has already been done?

So, anyhow, a few minutes googling will expose some of the original pre-photoshop images that these people appropriated to create their "art". For example, the microphotograph of the needle's eye can be found here with no tiny statue in evidence:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/bioimage...

In addition, depth-of-field, lighting, and other cues like the fact that there's no actual connection to the substrate make these fakes pretty obvious.

Ergo, I must presume the whole thing, including the video interview is all just "performance art".

Here's a tip: amazing and groundbreaking scientific and technological breakthroughs are generally not announced to the world by artists.

G.

If the cost of an online book was substantially cheaper than a hard copy I might feel different but it really isn't...

What about writers who sell physical books but give away the electronic versions? That's what Doctorow does and what I'm doing with "Nobots". If it works I'll make future books the same way.

Asimov:

Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, "Today, Tommy found a real book!"

It was a very old book. Margie's grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.

They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to--on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had when they read it the first time.

"Gee," said Tommy, "what a waste. When you're through with the book, you just throw it away, I guess. Our television screen must have had a million books on it and it's good for plenty more. I wouldn't throw it away."

Hang on to them (Link is to the text of the Asimov short story "The Fun They Had").

Margie even wrote about it that night in her diary. On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, "Today, Tommy found a real book!"

It was a very old book. Margie's grandfather once said that when he was a little boy his grandfather told him that there was a time when all stories were printed on paper.

They turned the pages, which were yellow and crinkly, and it was awfully funny to read words that stood still instead of moving the way they were supposed to--on a screen, you know. And then, when they turned back to the page before, it had the same words on it that it had had when they read it the first time.

Nice try teacher. Fact is, AI will be teaching kids in the future. They will do it better, will work 24/7, and work for free.

And I'm sure the kids will love it.

Murdoch is not simply the old dinosaur; this is merely another case of one form of extremism (loads of cheap ebooks) begets another (kill ebooks).

Both models have their place, or in the words of Thomas Edison

"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

Personally, I can't wait to find a decent ebook reader - don't like what I have seen in the Sony ones available in Europe. Might go for the iPad instead. But on the other hand, I still want paper books - I find there is something very calming in holding and reading a paper book, on a medium where you neither have to worry about power (eventually) running out, nor do you have the temptation of quite as easily switching back and forth between different books, ... It's more effort to change the (physical) book, and hence I find it more likely to actually stick to it. For work-related/reference books I want the ebook reader, for novels etc. I don't.
But unlike Murdoch (or people wishing the end of paper books), I won't go for eliminating either form, as I can see the advantages of both.

Not mentioned that often in the context of ebooks - I remember reading a short story as part of my school English lessons, which seemed to predict 'ebooks' - and it was written in the 50s: Isaac Asimov's The Fun They Had ( http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html )

There's a robotic scientist called ADAM that investigates yeast genetics (http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dcswww/Research/bio/robotsci/). There was a pretty cool paper in Computer a few months ago. The robot actively tried to devise new theories and produce experiments (it's hooked up to a bunch of yeast-genetics-investigatory stuff) to investigate those theories. As I remember, most of the theories turned out to be true and were pretty novel (function of various genes). The researchers double checked several (or all?) of them.

Hey, I even know the guy who worked with the Shamen on this. He would probably agree with me that "DNA music" is never going to be more than a gimmick (although there's probably a huge market for it in the magnet/crystal/copper pendant brigade).

Now, what is much much more interesting is proper evolutionary music, like my recently released (on Darwin Day, of course) site which has four channels of real time streaming evolving electronica. The link's in the sig...

The internet is far from making us stupid. I almost never read now but I use the web to get lessons on new computer programs, music, and various hobbies and studies. I use it constantly for communication with people I would have lost touch with. I write regularly to various authorities by email who I would not bother to write to by post. I check my health and ailments all the time. I trace friends and relatives. My life is full due to Google. My friends who are computer illiterate live increasingly isolated lives. . The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to civilisation, it has created the global village http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html predicted in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan. Reading based on words (as against reading images) is inefficient and will eventually disappear. The generation gap is due to young people abandoning reading and writing in favour of imagery. I am 77.

Some photos from the teams this year:

http://engsoc.queensu.ca/sailboat/Photos.htm
http://www.roboat.at/en/fotos/
http://richard.shipman.me.uk/gallery/Roboat
http://web.ensica.fr/microtransat/slideshow/Challenge%202007/index.html

and a few from the 2006 event:

http://www.ensica.fr/microtransat/Challenge2006/Gallery.htm
http://users.aber.ac.uk/cjs06/homepage/index.php?display=content/Photos/Research/Microtransat%20Competition%202006
http://wiki.atrox.at/index.php/Microtransat-Fotos

The previous event which was just run generated quite a lot of media interest including:

BBC News -- includes a video
The Register
UWA press release

v.i.z. (circa 1996):

http://www.aber.ac.uk/~phiwww/pm/

Let's ignore the fact that that code isn't either C or C++.

http://users.aber.ac.uk/auj/voidmain.shtml
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#void- main

why would they pay a human being to do what a robot can do better and more consistently? ... Couldn't the robots be programmed to build an artificial environment so convincing that you think you have everything?

And what is unique to humans? Or are you back on sex again?

Sex, in the sense of humans having two genders, and evolving in specific ways because of that, is pretty important to understanding human behavior. I reduced it to a throwaway comment about "hot chicks" in an earlier message but that was probably a bad idea for communication, if you're not very familiar with sociobiology. Have you read Dawkins' "Selfish Gene", for example? It sounds as though you want to undo a billion years or so of intra-species evolutionary competition by the application of some machines.

There's plenty of fiction exploring the consequences of applying machines to control human nature - see Imagining Futures, Dramatizing Fears, particularly the sections about losing our souls, losing control, and supplantation. I've read about a dozen of the books mentioned in the section on losing our souls, for example. Almost all of them seem more realistic to me than Brain's story, which seems mainly to be a happily-ever-after fantasy with little thought for any possible downside or limitations of reality.

Make it actively painfull to disobey, and actively pleasurable to obey; and the robots will be falling over your feet in a competition to obey.

Your SF author (Adams?) didn't think of that, of course. He simply based it on how humans work. But the difference is that humans don't get to create themselves. But the robots will, and they'll be unsupervised, because humans aren't going to retain the ability to understand the robots - they won't have the incentive or capability. It's a world in which humans are ultimately unnecessary, and unable to sustain their own environment. Achieving the particular "utopia" described by Brain will be an evolutionary dead end, as in humans who go that route will die out, perhaps after enjoying a generation or two of permanent fantasy.

So you're insane then. If the universe is deterministic, that doesn't mean there's an aim and a reason - it just means future states are purely dependant on the present state.

Ah, but without a reason, the future states would NOT be dependant on the present state. There would be no rules at all.

There is no aim or reason as to which particular atom of oxygen bonds with which particular atoms of hydrogen when a match is applied to a baloon filled with hydrogen and oxygen

The energy of the match is the reason- striking the match is the aim- this is accomplished through intelligent action. So you lie when you claim there is no aim or reason.

they bumped into each other due to what the rest of the world calls random chance.

Some random chance- a intelligent person struck a match and caused it to happen. If that is what the world calls random chance- well, I can only assume this is because more than half the world is functionally retarded (has an IQ below 110).

Even though we do actually know it's completely deterministic and given the data we could do the math and determine which atoms would bond based upon their current states (assuming quantum physics is bunk).

If you know that, then you know it's not "random chance"- then it rises from mere ignorance to lie.

A governing set of laws does not make aim or reason. They make a pattern but that's not the pattern being referenced - which would be something beyond that forced by physics.

Why would it be "something beyond that forced by physics"? Wouldn't that assume a God who can't follow his own rules?

According to evolution mutation happens randomly

Incorrect. According to quantum physics mutation happens randomly. According to evolution, mutation merely happens without referencing a reason for that mutation (it's outside the scope of the theory).

not you're definition of random, the one the rest of us use.

I refuse to accept another definition of random than what exists in the dictionary.

There is no reason or pattern.

There is plenty of both- and if you can discover them, you can use evolution as an engineering method. It doesn't even take a God to do it- human beings are CURRENTLY directing evolution.

Something causes a copy of the DNA to not be exactly the same as the original.

Yes, and every one of those somethings is governed by physical law, it's not "random" by ANY meaning of the word.

Survival of the fittest isn't the aim, the mutation doesn't give a stuff about survival of the species it's just a copy error.

Survival of the fitest isn't the aim- it yeilds the aim. It's the law that creates the aim.

I don't in fact. Are you saying that radiation can not cause mutation?

I'm saying radiation is not random.

Or that it doesn't do so via interaction with an atom/bond/whatever?

I'm saying that interaction isn't random.

Or that the result isn't DNA encoding something different?

I'm saying what the DNA now encodes is something specific that may be different, but that it isn't random.

Or that such a difference couldn't affect the organisms survivability in the presence of some chemical?

It might or might not- but the survivability isn't random.

Or that we can't know all the data required to know what's going to happen?

Just because we don't consciously know all the data doesn't mean that somebody else doesn't- or that the data doesn't exist.

So tell me what the lie was?

That the event was random.

I was guessing with respect to mechanisms of mutation, but I didn't claim to be an expert and used the magical word "whataver" which I hoped covered any mistakes...

Using magi

christian fundamentalists won't generally accept explanations like that, because if you read the bible literally, everything happened in 6 days 6000 years ago. perhaps you could argue that the "days" arent literal days, but epochs marked by god intervening to shape a particular aspect of our world, but that again would be untestable conjecture, and as such is not a scientific theory.

However, if you take both together, they point to a very interesting an highly useful form of engineering.

http://pcbo.dcs.aber.ac.uk/gallery/WellyWanging

Actually, the relationship one has with one's phone is much more subtile than that.

There have been a number of studies that seem to point to the way a telephone user will express one's self as if though the person they are talking with on the telephone was actually there. Phone conversations with intimate associates tend to contain body languages that express that relationship, while a telephone conversation with one's boss will result, generally, in postures that reflect that relationship.

Additionally there is the relationship with one's device in terms of how one is validated by one's buying choice. I have seen people show off their cell phone as if it were some kind of statement about themself.

What I think is most profound here is an incident that happened to me about a week ago.

My fiancee washed my Nokia 2260 cell phone, as I left it in my shirt pocket. She was horrified and I started thinking about how I was probably going to have to replace the phone. I removed its back and its battery and let it air dry for a day. Then I put it back together and turned it on. It worked just fine. I could almost hear the voice of John Cameron Swayze in the backgrond intoning: "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking..."

The newer cell phones most probably could not survive a washing in a laundry. And I'll bet the ones designed by these students -- if made -- wouldn't. But I'd have to say that I now have a sentimental feeling about my cell phone. It's a survivor.

By the way, I get married on 24 June, 2006. My fiancee likes my phone, too.

Well, if by democratic you mean, For all x elementof People, for all y elementof people, Valueofthehappinessof(x) = Valueofthehappinessof(y),

I don't think that it's comparable.

then that is exactly how I would compare different peoples's happinesses. I can see no reason why the happiness of those with educated minds should be favored over the happiness of the ignorant. Indeed, if society did, the ignorant would be more likely to remain ignorant, because many ignorant people wish to be educated, but are put off by the cost of it.

Mill had the idea that the joy of being cultured was superior to that of merely being indulgent. I agree with him. The outcome of this is that I am more willing to eg. pay higher taxes for others' education than I am to pay for better TV (for all), which is what my untaxed money could have otherwise done. I am not saying that an educated mind should scale more highly, but that the quality of education (including self-education) rates more highly than that of not being educated; mundane indulgent happiness is as valuable in both, but the quality of having an educated mind is usually worth being unhappy for, at least to some degree.

Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality has something to offer here, I believe.

I'm not exactly sure how to parse this. For one thing, I don't know how you're defining "moral". Are you using the utilitarian definition? That's pretty much mine, although I'm in the process of writing a huge paper where the culmination is an extended definition.

For the purposes of this discussion, yes.

If you're talking about utilitarian morality, I don't think there's a contradiction here. If acting to make others happy makes a person happy, that's wonderful and his actions will lead to both his happiness and the happiness of others.

The point is that the acting utilitarian will find their behaviour to be optimal at a different point than the hedonist. Hedonism wasn't originally what it is now taken to be, BTW, but rather included as part of its justification that we take pleasure in doing good for others. If the utilitarian assumes all others to be hedonists, you'll get plenty of people acting similarly to how the couple do in The Gift of the Magi.

Now, in the (*snicker*) "fair trade" (*snicker*) example you use, that's actually not moral acting. People who bias their purchases toward "fair trade" products are buying based on their own preferences just like anyone else.

Ah, but the utilitarian will, quite possibly favour fair trade when, if it weren't for their adherence to utilitarianism, they'd have bought something else. Also, although I get tired of the political bullshit, don't think that fair trade is ridiculous at all. If I choose to value the education of the poor, and the intrinsic quality of their work (which is what mades fair trade superior to simple money transfer), that is, in my view, an honourable decision. It isn't only the PC who choose fair trade.

Those who understand economics know that buying "fair trade" products when they are more expensive or inferior diminishes the net happiness of the world, so they don't get value from knowing that American workers made it in an air conditioned facility with free Coke machines every 100 yards, or whatever.

I don't think that this is true. I suggest that you do something simple and take the log (or similar) of each person's wealth before you average it. A three-fold rise in the wage of someone very poor is clearly worth far more than an extra couple of cokes a day for an American factory worker. Maximising happiness (or related quality) reaches a different optimum than

No I am not going to retract my statement. I guess it is born of personal experience.

When I take notes, I paraphrase what the instructor says, I do not quote them. I understand the point about not being able to read your own notes but I generally do not read my notes after I write them. The actual writing act embeds the information in my memory. Try taking notes in your Calculus class on your laptop. Oh where is that Integral key? Try taking notes in your Chinese class, Oh where is that xian4 on the keyboard. You cannot memorize chinese character without writing them. There may be exceptions and I agree that it would be very interesting to come up with a scientifically based comparison. Anyway.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/phenom .html

I admittedly am interested but ignorant on this whole topic, but why does this follow? I am thinking on a much too high level here, and maybe there is some unavoidable issue in brain and/or language structures, , but why wouldn't my language influence me, even though not everything is language? I'm sure the music that is played in different parts of the world has an influence on the brain's perceptions too. Dunno, seems so obvious :)

The idea behind the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (more accurately, the common conception of this hypothesis) is that language controls and defines what we can even think about. That people who speak a language that lacks a certain notion or idea are incapable of thinking of that notion or idea until it is given a linguistic construct in their language.

The best example is 1984, where a form of thought control is exacted through the language. They had the word "free" but only as in beer, never as in speech. Thus the idea of "freedom" wouldn't exist, and people who would speak this ficticious language would be unable to even conceieve that they are missing their "freedom" because they don't have any linguistic construct to represent such an idea.

Most linguists dismiss this notion entirely, and use evidence that thought is not (at least not entirely) language bound. That people subjected to such a forceful oppression within their language, will naturally resist, and their minds will know of "freedom" even though they have no word for it, and they will either invent a word, or extend the usage of a word, or something in order to represent an idea which does not have a word.

I found a paper: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html which gives some information. Of importance is what Sapir and Whorf concluded from a study by Franz Boas in 1911 of the Hopi language. Boas had made the determination that the Hopi language has no concept of time as an objective entity.

Of note from the article: His idea for proving the linguistic relativity theory was finding a concrete example of how the Hopi's lives were affected by their different linguistic concept of time. He claimed that the way the Hopi rely on preparation, announcing events well in advance, for example, showed a concept of time continuing along instead of being divided up as Western societies do, which matches the linguistic differences. This, according to Whorf at least, shows language determining thought, in other words Strong (or Extreme) Whorfianism.

The point of interest here is that Whorf never actually met a Native American, let alone a Hopi, and made these inferences from data that were not his own. In fact, the Hopi *do* have a concept of time very similar to ours.

So, basically, it mostly comes down to, language effects our language and our memory, but not until this study has anyone shown really anything that shows that language effects our perceptions of the actual world itself (which is what Whorf was claiming).

Much of this is not correct.

Firstly, the Anglosphere has a long tradition of research into the study of signs and symbols. See, for example, Peirce (pronounced "purse").

Secondly, the term "semiotics" is wide-spread in English-speaking communities, while the term "semiology" (or varaints) tends to crop up in European discussion.

Thirdly, the fields mentioned may make use of semiotics, but semiotics is a discipline in its own right, with its own journals and authors. Just because a particular Slashdotter has only encountered these concepts in a cognitive science course does not mean that they enjoy no independent existence. (Calculus exists independently of engineering!)

Fourthly, semiotics is often broken down - very loosely - into three areas: syntactics (the form of signs), semantics (meaning of signs) and pragmatics (use of signs). Hence, semantics is one area of semiotic study.

To find out more about how the study of signs and symbols intersects with computers and information systems, try this bibliography. In particular, the work of Ron Stamper is quite influential.

I strongly recommend this highly-readable introduction to semiotics.

Much of this is not correct.

Firstly, the Anglosphere has a long tradition of research into the study of signs and symbols. See, for example, Peirce (pronounced "purse").

Secondly, the term "semiotics" is wide-spread in English-speaking communities, while the term "semiology" (or varaints) tends to crop up in European discussion.

Thirdly, the fields mentioned may make use of semiotics, but semiotics is a discipline in its own right, with its own journals and authors. Just because a particular Slashdotter has only encountered these concepts in a cognitive science course does not mean that they enjoy no independent existence. (Calculus exists independently of engineering!)

Fourthly, semiotics is often broken down - very loosely - into three areas: syntactics (the form of signs), semantics (meaning of signs) and pragmatics (use of signs). Hence, semantics is one area of semiotic study.

To find out more about how the study of signs and symbols intersects with computers and information systems, try this bibliography. In particular, the work of Ron Stamper is quite influential.

I strongly recommend this highly-readable introduction to semiotics.

"This story is not a song, but a record." -- Lee "Scratch" Perry

Actually "It Just Works" was a slogan MS were using to describe Windows XP at one point. Four years ago if this is any measure.

Damn I knew posting something like that would have a bug... however it will compile, it just shouldn't.

Sorry about the void main(void). C is not my first language. (You wouldn't've wanted me to use the MS language I usually work with. =)

Anyways, to make up for this, here are discussions on void main(void):

http://users.aber.ac.uk/auj/voidmain.shtml
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/l egality-of-void-main.html

- a.c.

Here's a PDF from the Biologically-Inspired Robots Symposium 2004 on the ECOBOT II.

Here is a PDF File from the project owners, including photo.

Recall McLuhan's "The medium is the message" in reference to TV. The computer corollary is "the interface is the operating system".

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Maybe you're misinterpreting McLuhan's famous aphorism. It happens a lot. McLuhan was a technological determinist. He believed that media technology itself affects society in fundamental ways, much more so than media content. Hence, "the medium is the message."

Mirror of the screenshots here

They are actual size, due to small pocketpc screen I presume..

Links to the mirrors:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Really folks, is it so hard to throw a <a></a> tag around a url?

Shouldn't there be a #include after the #include ? The extern variable environ is available only if unistd.h has been included.

Nope. unistd.h declares extern char **environ, so if you do not #include that header, your code needs to declare the variable. The example program does that, so this is OK in this case.

I would argue that it's never very good practice to declare by hand things that are declared in header files, because the implementation can change -- witness the problems caused recently when errno became a macro, yet lots of code which used it failed to properly #include errno.h. But I'm guessing the example was coded this way for clarity.

While I am talking about this example, it could have used int main(void) instead of ...(int argc, char **argv) (like he does in ch03-getline.c).

You should never use int main(void).

size is declared size_t, so it should be printed with %z

Yup, you are correct. It should not be cast to unsigned long, however.

I also agree with you about the other examples, especially regarding the alloca cast.

The computer science department at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK has been working on aerobot research for several years now.. There have also been similar robots sent to Venus.

After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.

It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.

(or they'd make political hay from mandating a no-evil-uses-with-EZPass policy, but this is Slashdot, so we all just assume a police state is inevitable, right?)

Here we have a synopsis of it all. Excellent read - and there is not only 1984.

CC.

How come the University of Wales gets to have a Centre for Explosion Studies? You never hear about Welshmen blowing stuff up. Oh wait, I take that back.

Dead men don't need royalties

The fun they had

Here, and here are a few.

Phoenix Technologies has every right to be unhappy about about the Phoenix browser

Well, sincerly I don't get with your idea... Phoenix Technologies do not make browsers. Besides, why they wouldn't be unhappy with the fact that Herodotus popularized the Phoenix legend, that there is a plant called Phoenix, that there is a bird commonly called "Phoenix" (the japanese Phoenix Fowl) and a city called Phoenix? That's too one-sided to be rightful. While I would agree that calling Microsoft something else rather than Redmond's crap is wrong (well their name is original right?), Phoenix is a well-known name used by tens of nations in their traditional languages. Besides, Phoenix is a very common name used in software. There is Phoenix Software GmbH. There is Phoenix Simulation Software. AFAIK, something in one of Apache's projects is named Phoenix.

Why they would be so nice to sting into this one only project?

• Dealing with everyone from the head of dept to undergrads.
  
• Opportunity to lecture (e.g. training first years on college systems).
  
• Wide, welcome use of open source software on cost grounds.
  
• Can reboot servers in middle of day. :-)
  
• When server goes down, people go for a coffee instead of running around like headless chickens and holding up your repair efforts.
  
• Intelligent, vaguely sentient colleagues not averse to reading manuals and learning new things.
  
• Opportunity to pursue research or higher degree. (Playing with new toys also counts as "research"!)
  
• Live like a student again, but with money.
  
• No sales or marketing people spoiling it for everyone.
  
• No open plan offices.
  
• Atmosphere vaguely like a dot-com, but with funding.
  

• You're unlikely to get your hands on any big iron (but you might be able to justify a Beowulf cluster).
  
• Fixed term job contracts.
  
• Vulnerability to cutbacks.
  
• Lower pay (although in the right place and circumstances, without a family to support, it can be plenty).
  
• Every year, many of your friends leave.
  
• Limited career prospects unless you go full steam on the research.
  
• Ivory towers.
  

I'm sorry, but you still don't know what you're talking about. Catalan is only the official language for a whole language in Andorra, because it's the only country where it's spoken in the whole territory. Imagine there's some town in Russia very near to the Chinese border where people majorly speak Chinese. Isn't it a great idea to make Chinese an official language in Russia just for that? Same thing in Spain: Catalan is only spoken in a region of Spain, so it's just official in the affected regions: Pais Valencià, Catalunya and Balears (it's also spoken in the eastern areas of Aragón, but it's minor).
I guess you haven't been in Andorra, or even in Catalonia... you'd know that most of the Catalan speakers know Spanish too. You didn't like that "biased" webpage (first link I found in Google). Here's another one. So, are there 6M people living in Queens?

Debian is not best served by taking up space on its web page to promote Catalan. People who do that may well be "volunteers" in some organisation which promotes Catalan language and culture, but I would not describe them as Debian volunteers.

Yeah, right. So let's ditch the Esperanto, Danish, Swedish, Indonesian, Estonian, Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian and Catalan translations, they are minor languages and they are not worth the hard disk or time to maintain. Let's force the people that work on those translations to work on English, French or Spanish translations instead, which are much more useful... The Catalan translations of Debian in Woody will make it available to many Mandrake users in Catalunya, because till now, Mandrake was the only distribution with an extended Catalan support. Does that serve Debian, or not? We are not trying to promote Catalan, we're just giving Catalan users more freedom to choose between Spanish, French or the new Catalan translations.

A history teacher I once took some courses from in High School (Military History and US History) subscribed to an interesting theory; The fall of Russian Communism resulted from McDonalds.

The fact that there were McDonalds restaurants in Russia fed the public there the image of how Americans live, and with that as a model, it became increasingly obvious that Communism was failing to fulfill it's mission of Utopia. In 1984, Orwell realized that as long as the government asserted that everything was improving, people would not be too inquisitiveabout the subject. In Russia, this became impossible, and the people lost faith in their government.

In China, it seems as though a similar evolution is occuring; The alter-ego of Soviet Commuism, Chinese Communism, is being exposed to it's antithesis. Russian Communism focused, as I understand, mainly on supression and communitization of materialism, but was then faced with the holy grail of materialism, McDonalds. Chinese Communism, now that they have seen how materialism works, focuses on supression of intellectualism among their masses, and is now faced with intellectualism's holy grail, the internet, which allows the masses to see the intellectual side of Democracy.

DNA sequences can be translated into musical sequences, yes... Protein Music does this, for example. But could the music be reconverted into a format so that it can be worked with as a genetic sequence? If it were in the form of a MIDI file, then it should be possible, but if someone were to download an .mp3 of genetic information, could it be used as genetic information?

"The Internet Browser shouldn't be a product bought and sold in the marketplace. It's a very basic product at its heart, and should be included with PCs to begin with."

you know what? That's just what I feel about operating systems.

Ditto. That's what I love about Linux: it doesn't belong to anyone in particular (except perhaps Linus, in a genealogical sense). I think proprietary OSes are a bad idea in general. It's as if someone still had a patent on paper and pencil, and you had to pay them a royalty every time you wanted to doodle or jot down a few ideas. Like public infrastructures, I believe that PC OSes should belong to the community, not private companies, because they are so essential in making PCs work.

But then again, I am partial to anarcho-syndicalism...let's just say that, to me, Friedman's "invisible hand" sounds more like that of Darth Vader crushing an underling's neck that that of YHWH predicting the decadent king's demise.

Sounds a bit like the ALTAIR - a research project at Aberystwyth University (Wales).

This is a re-post of a fine piece by nightlight3 some months ago. I'd simply post the link, but slashdot archives aren't working. (I retrieved this from google cache).

This isn't flamebait - it's definitely a subject worthy of discussion. I, for one, have great reservations about whether this is a viable technology. This is especially important since so much money and attention is being poured into research, perhaps often without a real understanding of the basic principles. I happen to know people in Gershenfeld's lab, and know full well their tendencies to let the hype get out of hand.

Perhpas HP is spending the money as a marketing/PR effort, rather than them intending to get real work done. That would explain the press release.

So here it is; I hope nightlight3 will chime in.
- - - - -

"If one existed, a quantum computer would be extremely powerful; building one, however, is extremely challenging,"

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.

While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.

For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:

Quantum Mechanics is not a Science

Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.

For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:

Caroline Thompson's Physics

http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/Altair.sh tml

and photos:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/ajs99/Altairhtml/presspics .shtml

I'm not connected with them, I just work down the road.