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The parent article was referring to the SPARC64-V, which was introduced at the HPCA-9 conference held this year, 2003. The SPARC64-V is mentioned in a paper. The design and implementation of the SPARC64-V was an entirely Japanese effort. Fujitsu does not hire the equivalent of H-1Bs.

The SPARC64-V was not built at HAL.

The SPARC64-V crushes the UltraSPARC III in performance. The UltraSPARC III was built by H-1B labor.

DTMF is the technology that makes touch tones work. ANI is Automatic Number Identification, functionally very similar to Caller ID (but implemented very differently). It is commonly used for 911 calls, and may be used by calltakers in telemarketing firms.

And the required relevant link:

http://info-center.ccit.arizona.edu/~telcosvc/call eridfaq.shtml

You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.

The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.

We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here and here are some examples).

Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".

They were based upon the ancient Greek idea of mankind having "sparks" of the god(s) inside their very being; that everything the god(s) created had a piece of themselves inside as well.

There's plenty of science fiction about small computer devices, some of which could store personal data. There's a useful summary here.

with the "GRAPE" computers. (More links). I expect there are examples going back to the dawn of the computer age.

Sure. Some links below, found on google. I'd show you my textbook, if I could :)

http://library.thinkquest.org/26026/Science/extinc tion.html

http://biomed.brown.edu/Courses/BIO48/38.Extinctio n.HTML

http://nitro.biosci.arizona.edu/courses/EEB105/lec tures/extinction/extinction.html

http://fig.cox.miami.edu/Faculty/Tom/bil160sp98/10 _notes.html

Simon

Haven't you noticed the first American concentration camp off the cost of Cuba?

I wrote the firmware for the Meteorological subsystem (MET) of MPL (known at the time as Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor - MVACS). It was quite depressing when MPL crashed after myself (and many others) had worked on it for so long - particularly since the MET package never even got powered on! :-(

It looks like you've substituted a scanning LIDAR for the Tunable Diode Laser (TDL) Spectrometer that we flew (or intended to fly) on MPL, and I assume (and hope) you are using a different microprocessor than we did. The UT69RH051 (the UTMC rad hard version of the 8051 microprocessor) has a very serious design flaw that we didn't discover until after flight testing had started, that causes dropped interrupts if the serial port is used in full-duplex mode. If you do happen to be using that same microcontroller, you should be aware of this advisory issued by UTMC:

UT69RH051 Microcontroller PCA & Serial Port Interrupt Flag Anomaly

If you would like to contact me for any reason, you can email me at: "SlashDot_at_spamex.com" (substitute "@" for "_at_").

Best of luck on a successful mission, and may the Phoenix rise from the ashes of MPL! :-)

-- Ron

P.S
No operating system at all (neither open source nor closed source) was used in the meteorological subsystem of MPL. The firmware I wrote was a single program that ran on the "bare metal" of the processor board, and used interrupts to effect time slicing (in effect, it was its own operating system).

Proof of alien life was captured on film; much to the surprise of the people at NASA, a careless martian forgot to throw away his bottle of Aquafina...

I've just finished researching an essay about this. Anyone interested in quantum consciousness might find the papers available by Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers interesting.

Also check out anything recent by Francis Crick (Yep, DNA Crick) and Roger Penrose. Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist by trade and has done a lot of work with Penrose to propose some interesting models of consciousness, though whether they deal with the so-called hard problem, I'm not so sure.

Oh, and for a sceptics viewpoint, read anything by Daniel Dennett.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to know if this is shash or not, but I'm impressed by the attachment of Penrose's and Crick's name to these theories. Perhaps someone more enlightened than myself could comment?!

I've just finished researching an essay about this. Anyone interested in quantum consciousness might find the papers available by Stuart Hameroff and David Chalmers interesting.

Also check out anything recent by Francis Crick (Yep, DNA Crick) and Roger Penrose. Stuart Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist by trade and has done a lot of work with Penrose to propose some interesting models of consciousness, though whether they deal with the so-called hard problem, I'm not so sure.

Oh, and for a sceptics viewpoint, read anything by Daniel Dennett.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to know if this is shash or not, but I'm impressed by the attachment of Penrose's and Crick's name to these theories. Perhaps someone more enlightened than myself could comment?!

Japanese researcher Sugeno developed a voice-controlled autonomously stabilized small helicopters in 1991.

Yes. It's trivial.

It took a lot of careful effort to manuver NEAR/Shoemaker around Eros.

I wasn't born yesterday. That was because the speed of light made it really difficult to remote control the vehicle at that distance. Stick a man onboard and it's really, really easy.

Asteroids formed inside the "frost-line" in the protoplanetary disk.

True, kinda. But so did the Earth. The frost-line doesn't form until the protoplanetary disk gets blown away when the Sun lit up. The Earth lost most of its water because the Earth got very hot due to volcanic activity after forming, not because of its distance from the Sun. A smaller body wouldn't suffer then same fate (although the surface ice sublimes away within the radius of the asteroid belt.)

And, no, the densities do NOT tell you that they're made of ice. Who told you this?

See this (among many, many other places): Deimos and more particularly check out Phobos

(Or are you making this up as you go?) They're densities are low because they are probably fairly porous.

Really? Where did you get porosity from?

It's a not a very dense rock, so driving in an anchor (how would you do that, anyway?)

Explosives, blow a tubular hole and screw in a crampon. You don't need much strength anyway. Deimos is tidally locked, so using a tether out towards L1 or L2 is pretty simple. Alternatively, just using a free floating station at Deimos' general orbital radius works pretty well too.

Yes. It's trivial.

It took a lot of careful effort to manuver NEAR/Shoemaker around Eros.

I wasn't born yesterday. That was because the speed of light made it really difficult to remote control the vehicle at that distance. Stick a man onboard and it's really, really easy.

Asteroids formed inside the "frost-line" in the protoplanetary disk.

True, kinda. But so did the Earth. The frost-line doesn't form until the protoplanetary disk gets blown away when the Sun lit up. The Earth lost most of its water because the Earth got very hot due to volcanic activity after forming, not because of its distance from the Sun. A smaller body wouldn't suffer then same fate (although the surface ice sublimes away within the radius of the asteroid belt.)

And, no, the densities do NOT tell you that they're made of ice. Who told you this?

See this (among many, many other places): Deimos and more particularly check out Phobos

(Or are you making this up as you go?) They're densities are low because they are probably fairly porous.

Really? Where did you get porosity from?

It's a not a very dense rock, so driving in an anchor (how would you do that, anyway?)

Explosives, blow a tubular hole and screw in a crampon. You don't need much strength anyway. Deimos is tidally locked, so using a tether out towards L1 or L2 is pretty simple. Alternatively, just using a free floating station at Deimos' general orbital radius works pretty well too.

This is me while i fight the Linux kernel.

This is me while i fight against Lindows.

This is me while i fight against Napster.

This is me while i fight against SCO UNIX.

I see intelligence (and sentience/conciousness) as a form of computation

If it's the chance for extra-terrestrial life your after, the many moons of Jupiter are our best best. For example, Europa is thought to be quite seismically active and possibly sports an oxygen based atmosphere. Io and Ganymede might harbor E.T.'s as well.

If it's the chance for extra-terrestrial life your after, the many moons of Jupiter are our best best. For example, Europa is thought to be quite seismically active and possibly sports an oxygen based atmosphere. Io and Ganymede might harbor E.T.'s as well.

If it's the chance for extra-terrestrial life your after, the many moons of Jupiter are our best best. For example, Europa is thought to be quite seismically active and possibly sports an oxygen based atmosphere. Io and Ganymede might harbor E.T.'s as well.

That's... interesting. Here are some of the results I got:

Mulitcultural Long Hair Care Forum
The Moon Landings Were NOT Faked
and, best of all:
PoopReport.com: Your Source for Poop.

Seesh, did you read the proper answer?

A) Mercury does rotate. However, your "proper answer" got it wrong; while Mercury rotates on its axis every 58.6 days, it's moved a long way around the sun in that same time. As a result, it's day (period between one sunrise and the next) takes longer than its rotation period. In fact, it takes about 3 rotations to get one 'day'. Also, because of the elliptical orbit and long rotation period, you can get a funky double-sunset effect, when the sun sets, then rises again in reverse before setting again.

B) Mercury does so have an atmosphere. The atmosphere is, on average, about 440K; quite hot enough. The night side is cold, not because there is no atmosphere, but because the atmosphere is so thin it radiates the heat away into space very fast. Mercury actually has a very turbulent convenction system, especially around the terminator line.

"As we all know, computers do crash."

So do people

Hmm, are you sure it's that recent? I know they only pardoned Galileo recently, but the church hasn't been teaching geocentric theory for at least a century, if not two.

The Catholic Church has it's own observatory and has been doing genuine scientific work predicated on the earth orbitting the sun for more than 100 years. Also, the pope endorsed the Big Bang theory around 1950 (although there is no dogma, one way or the other on the subject).

Howard Stern?

H.L. Mencken, though, has the better version: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

So basically we agree, which is always a good thing. ;-) Also, I should hope that I would know a little bit about optics, or these folks would have to take back my degree... :-p

At the end, I could tell you the boundary conditions at a air/reflector interface, but I couldn't tell you where the damn mirror actually focused the light.

For a rebuttal to Mr. Dennett and a really cool online course try here.

Wake me up when they invent wireless power.

If you're looking for wireless power, this will knock your socks off! :)

I just read a fascinating (but somewhat heavy going for the layperson) paper by a professor of Philosophy inspired by the Matrix - I think someone actually linked to it from a previous /. Matrix story. There are lots of similar hypotheses to the idea that we are all brains in vats (or bits in a computer simulation.) For instance, if the god-botherers are right after all and there's a big guy with a white beard and we're all just figments of his imagination, how is this different from the Matrix? What about the Wolfram cellular automata work (and other less well-known work in the same field)? What about advances in cosmology and physics?

Any pointers from /.ers to similar material received with thanks :)

See also http://www.simulation-argument.com.

I can see how they want to get rid of the unsightliness of plastic bags blowing around everywhere, but this solution may be flawed. In a book I read on University of Arizona's famed garbology project (official website here), plastic has some advantages over paper. Easier to recycle, compresses better, and in a sanitary landfill, well, decomposition's bad. You'd prefer it to dessicate and sit there more or less inert and stable. The only landfill where there's much decomposition is going on is at Fresh Kills landfill in New York, conveniently located on the coast so it stays wet and the tides agitate the toxic sludge. However the problem facing South Africa looks like its going after is a litter problem, which maybe could be better fixed by building up the infrastructure to handle the garbage problem. While that may be a better, more permanent solution its also harder and more expensive to implement. Although it does remind me of one of Iraq's current problems, that being piles of trash that haven't been picked up in months and are still a low priority. Too bad it's also a recipe for a cholera epidemic.

http://www.mcb.arizona.edu/wardlab/relevant.html

So, I found out that my neighbor walked in on my roommate masturbating while watching Animal Planet. Yeah, surprising! Well this tension has been building up and has left me uneasy. The big problem is that he was doing it in a common area we share and now I'm uncomfortable laying anywhere in the room. What am I supposed to do? I know he'll deny it!

Read Abby's answer

Silly ph1ux, you can't use CIDR and class together. The purpose of CIDR is to provide more network granularity than the octet-centric 'class' based approach - see this little guide on subnetting and CIDR Blocks.

Not really.

It's possible to prevent java code from being decompiled. This can be done using Obfuscation of the code - basically converts the code so that it is more difficult to decompile (but not impossible).
The names of the variables and functions could be changed by such a tool to make it difficult to understand a program - as if it's already not difficult to understand without any comments.

What's your definition?

Well, by phenomenology I mean the mechanism or mechanisms by which the experiential phenomena of consciousness are created. A better introduction than I can give is given by Chalmers here.


I think "sentience" is a tricky word because it is completely meaningless.

The language we use to talk about consciousness is notoriously inexact and ambiguous, but there is something I mean by sentience that is different than what I mean by intelligence. I think the Chalmers article does a decent job of getting at it.

The Turing test was never meant to be an intelligence test for machines. It was meant to be a way to redefine "sentience" in a concrete manner.

Well, my first objection is that the Turing test isn't a test; it's a game. There's nothing scientific about it. But beyond that, I don't think that the sum of my existence is only what others can observe about me.

I challenge you to differentiate between a "zombie" and a person.

No, I challenge you! :)

The idea of the zombie is to point out the gap between syntax and sensation. Any computational model of mind has to bridge that gap, has to say how we get from code to subjective experience and qualia. Like seeing the color red, as I mentioned earlier.

But they don't attempt to bridge the gap, they just deny that one exists. Computationalists like Dennett believe that I don't really see the color red, I just run code that tells me I do. In other words, red is just symbols, and not an experience.

I respectfully disagree.

The more I've learned about cognition and neuroanatomy, the less I believe that distinction exists.

Well, to be just a tiny bit clearer, I'm not saying humans aren't machines. I believe we are. We just haven't explained exactly how we work yet.

Although gamma rays are probably not visible to any species native to this planet, you should keep in mind that our inability sense something does not mean that it is significantly different from something we can.

Consider this: The human eye cannot percieve ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, for us, it is not "optical", and definately outside of the visible spectrum. However, bees regularly use ultraviolet radiation to differentiate between flowers, which would make ultraviolet radiation "optical" as far as a bee is concerned.

Following this line of reasoning leads us to the conclusion that the visible spectrum varies and is a human-centric (mammal-centric?) arbitrary slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. As long as the electromagnetic radiation in question has similar properties to visible light, the same adjectives as used to describe visible light should apply.
(Although something tells me that there's a few differences between what's coming from my 60 watt bulb and a star gone nova...)

I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Masud Mansuripur.

"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge." Not on my planet, bucko.

I'm not sure what planet you're on, but at least on this one, light passing through a flat lens does indeed diverge.

If you are still interested, the article is reproduced without high-resolution pictures here

As far as I can tell, all that exists is an advanced discussion tool, with a content sharing tool coming soon. Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.). MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative is another project in the courseware space, and there are other institutions which have developed their own homegrown courseware system. What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc. The internet2 middleware initiative addresses some of this in terms of authorization (see Shibboleth), but more collaboration around standards needs to take place.

As far as I can tell, all that exists is an advanced discussion tool, with a content sharing tool coming soon. Universities need a much richer courseware system, one that handles a variety of tools (discussion, quizes, content management, tools that promote good pedigogical practices, etc.), and performs a variety of administrative functions (like authentication / authorization, grouping, reports & statistics, unified UI across tools, grading, etc.). MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative is another project in the courseware space, and there are other institutions which have developed their own homegrown courseware system. What we need in this space are standards for courseware - metadata standards, tool interoperability standards, etc. The internet2 middleware initiative addresses some of this in terms of authorization (see Shibboleth), but more collaboration around standards needs to take place.

I would suspect that many bots convert % symbols now. It would only take a pass through a standard URL encode/decode function.

There are better obsfucators available.

Contrary to public belief, this has in fact been done many times in the short history of AI. ALVINN was the first system that I learned of in my college AI classes, but a quick search on google returned many more.

CMU ALVINN

US VISTA

Temple Report on Autonomous Vehicle Systems

Yeah, but how does it compare with areal underwater basket weaving program, one that actually has a scheduled class and location? (although at this point in the semester, you'd have to wait until they offer it again next semester...)

Go Cats! Bear Down! :-)

Yeah, but how does it compare with areal underwater basket weaving program, one that actually has a scheduled class and location? (although at this point in the semester, you'd have to wait until they offer it again next semester...)

Go Cats! Bear Down! :-)

They had evidence of soil from the Yucatan peninsula in the K/T layer from outcroppings around to world, indicating that the impact took place there and scattered material specific to the peninsula, around the globe. Dinosaurs are found up to the K/T layer, but not above. This has been known for quite some time. The exact location of the crater was located around 1991 I believe, but was only corroborating evidence. The evidence comes from the composition of the K/T layer. This link might help.