Slashdot Mirror

However, This link says this asteroid actually shares an orbit with the Earth around the sun.

Now, I know that this object has a rather unusual "orbit" of the Earth, but what exactly qualifies it as a bonafied Satellite rather than just a near Earth meteor?

"You ever have that feeling where you're not sure if you're dreaming or awake?"

Many of you interested in anstronomy, or just the planets of the Solar System in general, might find this information very interesting. It's an account of other people who claimed to have discovered that Earth had a second moon.

I'm not trying to discredit the British team's discovery in any way, but it's still a very interesting read.

The main page of the site (called Nine Planets) is here.

Many of you interested in anstronomy, or just the planets of the Solar System in general, might find this information very interesting. It's an account of other people who claimed to have discovered that Earth had a second moon.

I'm not trying to discredit the British team's discovery in any way, but it's still a very interesting read.

The main page of the site (called Nine Planets) is here.

gotta love fun with CGI :)

Net filters cost money!

another wildcat article

an unscientific but humorous poll

universities should be truthful and rename Women's Studies as Lesbian Studies.

Perhaps you would like to contact her:
Phone: 602-542-3255
E-mail: jmcgrath@azleg.state.az.us

or... "Perhaps she is just insane" -Sheila Bapat

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

This all first started when she began attacking the women's studies program. After that she was more or less silent until here when McGrath decides that co-ed dorms are immoral. After a huge amount of flame from students, she responds, and says she maintains her position. More receantly the U of A reagents had to get in on this and defend the school. Then, of course, there is her latest and greatest bill, to limit internet acces that was introduced just receantly.

All said and done, she's got the campus riled up quite a bit. Some of the student replies have been most instructive.

Enjoy, and bear with us, this is *by far* the most hits we've ever seen in this short a time span.

Proposed bills would monitor university Web use, catalogs

everyone freaks out...

Proposed bills would monitor university Web use, catalogs

everyone freaks out...

Proposed bills would monitor university Web use, catalogs

everyone freaks out...

Sadly, there is some slight potential for this grim possibility to become reality in AZ. It wouldn't just be Universty policy, either. Take a look: http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/93 /81/01_4_m.html. (The bottom half is the most relevant part of the story.)

Are there any single-cell bacteria that have converted themselves into multi-cell versions?

>Depends if you count slime-molds or not; they go back and forth! Your question makes no sense in scientific terms; according to evolution, multi-cellularity only has to arise once, and from there it is "variations on a theme".

slime-molds are not bacteria. They are myxomycota fungi - eukaryotes! they're our close relatives!. For a picture click here

and for more information about taxonomy click here

and scroll to the bottom of the page. The latter is a cool page. You should also be aware that there is considerable controversy about the classifaction of any of these things and that these ones rely upon the use of 18S large-subunit rRNA.

My general point is that nothing in evolution and its study is as certain and as solid as you are making out, and further, that most of the support for evolution comes from molecular genetics, not from the fossil record which can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.

You are being too dogmatic - especially with regard to your horse example. This was one of the most embarrasing examples of "evolution", it was always presented as a succession of smaller to larger through intermediate forms. This linear pattern was seized on by creationists and debunked. Embarrassing and uneccessary, there is no need for regular "trends" in evolution to obtain.

There is controversy here and you are doing rationality and science no favours by trivializing and ignoring objections. Regards, Crush

If B. subtilis and D. radiodurans are Martian, then just about everything else on earth is Martian in origin as well. Yes, the two organisms have some incredible survival abilities--but biochemically they just aren't that different from terrestrial life.

You can get sequence info on the genome for D. radiodurans here, and B. subtilis here.

Basically, science knows a lot about these two organisms, and what we know suggests that they fit right into the phylogenetic tree. And even if they didn't, the fact that we can get a genome sequence *at all* would tell us they are probably related to terrestrial life.

If you're coming to the library to do research, then unless you just happen to be researching porn or hate groups, you'll probably enjoy the fact that there's not someone on the computer across from you staring at women in all sorts of unnatural positions.

Hrmm, Lets take a look at some of the popular "hate groups" these various blocking software blocks, shall we?

National Organization for Women
Covenant of the Goddess and The Witches Voice, Wicca is a nationaly recognized religion in the US
Yahoo Search Engine
MIT Project on Mathematics and Computation
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratories
The University of Arizona
Stonewall Inc., gourmet coffees, teas, food and gifts.
...and of course...
Peacefire, A site telling people how to disable this blocking software

The problem with commercial blocking software is the lists of blocked sites are not published, and often contain OVERBLOCKS, Stonewall Inc is blocked under the "Gay Sites" area of Cyberpatrol, but it has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality.

This is the reason we need to keep these "filters" out of our libraries and schools.

-- iCEBaLM

... right here. Written with an attitude. ;-)

[TMB]

Here is my proposal for an idea relating to the quake source release. Why not make a Quake client that can connect to Quake2 servers, or play Quake2 demos?

I know that Quake (1) and Quake2 are fairly different, however, there are many similarities. My original thoughts for this idea was to write a mod for a game like Unreal Tournament which lets you connect to Quake2 servers.

Now, there would be many technical challenges with this, such as, for example, how would the game media be displayed? The textures, models and sounds could be neglected, but you'd at least need to be able to play the levels. And from my knowledge the UT level format and the Quake2 format are pretty different.

I doubt this would have any real purpose; I'm mainly thinking purely from a "cool" factor. I mean, think about it. Imagine loading UT (or any other similar game) and hoping onto a Quake2 server. I just find the possible something interesting to think about :)

If anyone is interested in actually trying it, the Quake2 demo (DM2) protocol is documented at http://www.planetquake.com/demospecs/dm2/ . And the Quake2 network protocol is documented at http://www.opt-sci.arizona.edu/Pandora/q2/ .

Note: First, please don't moderated this as offtopic. My original idea invovled Quake2, but that the Quake code is out, it might be easier to do it with that. The two architectures are similar enough that it doesn't really matter..

Oh well, just my thoughts -- pete

First off, I resent the patronizing tone of your post; there have been truly enormous flame wars started by less insulting comments than your own. With that in mind, I have temporally disabled my tact module.

This preprocessed information only goes directly to the old subcortical vision systems.

There seems to be some severe misunderstanding here. If information is processed by the retina, I fail to see where this unprocessed information you refer to would originate. Are you implying that there are two parallel circuits originating on the upper layers of the retina? If the information has been processed before it reaches the optic nerve (i.e., by the retina), how does this unprocessed information arrive at the cortex?

You imply that the visual cortex gets all or most of its input from the LGN. You have it completely wrong I'm afraid. There isn't any room for doubt about this...

Having just scanned through every neuroscience text I could my hands on, I'd say there is considerable room for doubt. Churchland, Crick and Koch (to begin with) all seem agree that the LGN has rich upward connections to the cortex in all mammals, while making little or no reference to any other pathways.

(BTW, have you considered how implausible your explanation is from an evolutionary standpoint?)

...an entirely separate issue from the conscious vision I was talking about in my previous post.

This is an immensely ironic statement. See my closing.

And, as we all know, these cortical pathways are the ones that make us intelligent, perceptive - and, dare I say it - conscious.

True, false and false, respectively.

(Snipping the lecture on the LGN....)

In other words, these bandwidth-limited ascending pathways represent a pretty trifling quantity of information passed on to the visual cortex from the LGN.

Oh, yes, that's the only possible explanation....

Well, what can I say? Cortex roolz! It's what makes us human.

*sigh*

Seriously, it's obvious that you're fairly well read but you have to careful not to identify too closely with certain researchers' narrow preoccupation's.

As opposed to you, who thoughtfully provided one reference to back his argument, and, ironically enough, a researcher who is 'preoccupied' spinal and cerebellar neurons.

As for the rest about the cortex, I would strongly suggest you read: Panksepp's Affective Neuroscience; virtually anything by Crick, Koch; Newman and Baars re. the ERTAS; Damasio as referenced by Calvin; anything by Doug Watt; or the papers here or at the ASSC's online conference about emotion before lecturing about the function of subcortical systems. (Good starting hints: your assessment interaction of emotion and sensory information is 180 degrees from the truth, and consciousness is not a cortical function.)

• The Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics (CAAO) at the University of Arizona
• NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

• The Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics (CAAO) at the University of Arizona
• NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF)

If you look for yourself, it is indeed refreshing to have some Geek Humor in this paper, and it is something to smile about in the morning, which, I'm sorry to say, cannot be said about the other comic stips.

I was, indeed, pleased to see this article on Slashdot.

Kudos!

*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

If you look for yourself, it is indeed refreshing to have some Geek Humor in this paper, and it is something to smile about in the morning, which, I'm sorry to say, cannot be said about the other comic stips.

I was, indeed, pleased to see this article on Slashdot.

Kudos!

*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

Throw it away, the paper easily decomposes

Actually it doesn't. Go check out the garbage project.

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

I'm mostly Familiar with Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. There, we primarily use Sun Workstation and the IRAF project, while most of the software applications revolve around FORTRAN Language, due to the industry standard in the Astronomy Community.
I know from personal experience, that Linux Platforms like Red Hat and Caldera are often "passed" around from office to office and home to home so that the PC fleet can network to the Unix severs and scientists can do a majority of their Data reduction at the comfort of their home or Office PC and not some slow terminal connection.

Also on the horizon, the Astronomy community is eager to network everything together (with security and what-knot, so that some hacker kid can't get access to the HST) so that the Astronomer doing research can sit in his lab/office and do his research over a computer connection, rather then spend his precious time in an observatory maneuvering the Telescope and doing menial tasks of adaptive optics and taking dark images to adapt for errors in the telescope, that could easily be done remotely. All the while, while porting Unix software like qphot, emacs, super mongo, and IRAF to their Linux PC and working with their data instantly.

That ends this report from the field, this is BaronCarlos.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

I'm mostly Familiar with Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. There, we primarily use Sun Workstation and the IRAF project, while most of the software applications revolve around FORTRAN Language, due to the industry standard in the Astronomy Community.
I know from personal experience, that Linux Platforms like Red Hat and Caldera are often "passed" around from office to office and home to home so that the PC fleet can network to the Unix severs and scientists can do a majority of their Data reduction at the comfort of their home or Office PC and not some slow terminal connection.

Also on the horizon, the Astronomy community is eager to network everything together (with security and what-knot, so that some hacker kid can't get access to the HST) so that the Astronomer doing research can sit in his lab/office and do his research over a computer connection, rather then spend his precious time in an observatory maneuvering the Telescope and doing menial tasks of adaptive optics and taking dark images to adapt for errors in the telescope, that could easily be done remotely. All the while, while porting Unix software like qphot, emacs, super mongo, and IRAF to their Linux PC and working with their data instantly.

That ends this report from the field, this is BaronCarlos.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

I'm mostly Familiar with Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy. There, we primarily use Sun Workstation and the IRAF project, while most of the software applications revolve around FORTRAN Language, due to the industry standard in the Astronomy Community.
I know from personal experience, that Linux Platforms like Red Hat and Caldera are often "passed" around from office to office and home to home so that the PC fleet can network to the Unix severs and scientists can do a majority of their Data reduction at the comfort of their home or Office PC and not some slow terminal connection.

Also on the horizon, the Astronomy community is eager to network everything together (with security and what-knot, so that some hacker kid can't get access to the HST) so that the Astronomer doing research can sit in his lab/office and do his research over a computer connection, rather then spend his precious time in an observatory maneuvering the Telescope and doing menial tasks of adaptive optics and taking dark images to adapt for errors in the telescope, that could easily be done remotely. All the while, while porting Unix software like qphot, emacs, super mongo, and IRAF to their Linux PC and working with their data instantly.

That ends this report from the field, this is BaronCarlos.
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

"Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious."

AI has been in fall-back-and-regroup mode since the early 1980s. Its germination was in the outlandish promises of the 1950s and early 1960s, when respected computer scientists were seriously predicting that computer brains would be in every way superior to human brains within the next decade. There were some remarkable successes (like SHRDLU) but these were few and far between.

Prodded by more realistic thinking such as Hubert Dreyfus' book What Computers Can't Do, in the early 1970s everyone began to realize that the promises were failing miserably. It turned out that the human brain was terribly complicated after all and that we didn't understand much about thinking.

So the "strong A.I." claims, as they've come to be known, fell out of favor and the industry has been working on less ambitious projects since then. Nobody's willing to try to write a General Problem Solver or a humanlike robot today, but when smarter programs on a million-dollar satellite allow it to realign its communications dish out of human contact, everyone agrees that's a good thing.

If you want to see where the new wave of research into humanlike intelligence will be going in the next decade or two, start with Marvin Minsky's seminal The Society of Mind and Daniel Dennett's brilliant Consciousness Explained.

Jamie McCarthy

This looks like a Vigenere Cipher...

I know they are very weak ciphers but it still looks familiar...

Here... link away

http://www.achiever.com/freehm pg/cryptology/vig.html

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/h ttp/html/people/muth/Cipher/

http://cw.oaktree.co.uk/crypt/vigen ere_doc.html

http://sh akti.trincoll.edu/~rmorelli/FYSM122/Cryptograms/Cr yptogram8.html


--
Bun-Bun Rules!
90% of day read /.

For those of you who failed to read the entire article, here is the end paragraph:

"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."

So no, the problem is NOT with Microsoft. This time. However, do not lose sight of the fact that Solaris is still closed source, same as Microsoft. This should not be taken as an opportunity to bash MS, as they raise a very good point:

"Planning for high availability deployments takes time and discipline. Successful deployments invariably depend as much on strict adherence to administrative best practices, as they do to the specific technologies being deployed. Ultimately, customers need to strike the right balance between high availability requirements, system cost, ongoing support and service costs, and skill level of technical support staff."

The problem lies with Sun's closed system, not with Microsoft's closed system. Don't get me wrong, MS has their problems. Its just that this time, those problems didn't come into the picture.


NightStriker
Home Page

For those of you who failed to read the entire article, here is the end paragraph:

"Which brings us back to eBay. For those keeping score, eBay relies on Windows NT-based servers running Internet Information Server to provide front-end web services, and a single Enterprise 10000 from Sun Microsystems to host an Oracle database on the back-end. According to published reports, the outages at eBay, which began in February, are due to problems at the back-end."

So no, the problem is NOT with Microsoft. This time. However, do not lose sight of the fact that Solaris is still closed source, same as Microsoft. This should not be taken as an opportunity to bash MS, as they raise a very good point:

"Planning for high availability deployments takes time and discipline. Successful deployments invariably depend as much on strict adherence to administrative best practices, as they do to the specific technologies being deployed. Ultimately, customers need to strike the right balance between high availability requirements, system cost, ongoing support and service costs, and skill level of technical support staff."

The problem lies with Sun's closed system, not with Microsoft's closed system. Don't get me wrong, MS has their problems. Its just that this time, those problems didn't come into the picture.


NightStriker
Home Page

HiThere> I'm sure that if it had lived, it would
HiThere> be marvelous by now.

In a sense, it has lived. The successor to SNOBOL is Icon, which supposedly also has cool support for strings and rapid prototyping.

Here is my logo entry. At least IMHO, it is better than at least some of the nominations (especially if I'd gotten a chance to polish it up a little more: I had to rush myself just to make the gimp contest deadline).

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"

>For someone who acts so holier-than-thou, you should at least get your facts right.

I suppose I'm arrogant when excitable, yes. Consider me desecrated.

>The year that we measure on the planet is 365.24 days (hence the leap year every 4 years). A sidreal year is actually 366.24 years . . .

It's a variable quantity, yes, unless one knows what is meant by "sidereal". (Rotation, not measured against local conditions, "tropical" or the like, but physical rotation). Whom is "we"? Civilian? US Naval Research Lab scientist? Astronomer? Julian calandar, Lunar? After reading countless differing constant lists, the consensus as I view it seems to be 365.26 days (sidereal).

JPL Solar System Dynamics lists: Sidereal year (quasar ref.frame) 365.25636 d
Nine Planets holds at 365.26 days.

I'll consider JPL the authority. They've operated our most successful probes, after all else.
So, aye, I wish to know. Perhaps you're yet following this thread. Illuminate for me, sir or madam.

Well actually some is making a parody like that of family Circus, and they even call it disfunctional family circus, but all of their art is original imitation of family circus, and anyone can tell just by looking, that they are just reminiscent of the parodied comic strip, so they are on safe ground there. You can see the site for the school paper where it runs, and just do there, and find the comic, since I have no time, or patience to put in the exact URL for the strip, but by clicking on the following you are halfway there: wildcat.arizona.edu
Enjoy :>>--

P.S.: Sorry for posting thsi twice if that happens, but somehow the browser got mixed up, and so I am posting again....

Well actually some is making a parody like that of family Circus, and they even call it disfunctional family circus, but all of their art is original imitation of family circus, and anyone can tell just by looking, that they are just reminiscent of the parodied comic strip, so they are on safe ground there. You can see the site for the school paper where it runs, and just do there, and find the comic, since I have no time, or patience to put in the exact URL for the strip, but by clicking on the following you are halfway there: wildcat.arizona.edu
Enjoy :>>--

Read this report about what The TRON Project is in Japan, and do some more searching around for information about the TRON project in the Japanese consumer electronics industry, and then have a good deep thought about what Linux is...

And it will all start to make more sense. No, it's not some 80's movie rip-off ... though one has to wonder how TRON the Movie came about in parallel with the initial idea's about TRON the Project, and if there was any connection ever made.

Sakamura started something big in the Japanese consumer electronics industry during the 80's, that not a lot of Western technologists are really aware of... anyone that's worked on any Japanese consumer electronics RT/Embedded systems will at least have had *some* exposure to the Tron project, since a lot of Japanese electronics companies share development resources as part of the Tron initiative.

I've done a fair bit of work for Japanese companies in the embedded systems area, and recently had the odd deja-vu like experience of having access to the source code for two completely disrelated embedded systems projects, and witnessed the *same code* in each... even though these companies have *nothing* to do with each other, market-wise.

So it makes sense to me that one of the biggest Japanese consumer electronics companies is picking up on the shared developer resources concept that Linux and the OSS movement represent.

This could and should be a wakeup call for American (and other) industries that might still be competing against the Japanese consumer electronics giants...