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They are only doing this so that they can tap the sweet Mickey Mouse PC market before his likeness enters the public domain.

Too late. Copyright in Mickey Mouse's likeness has already lapsed, not because of expiration of twice-extended copyright but because of a defective copyright notice, according to an article published in the Virginia Sports and Entertainment Law Journal.

What, you've never seen Magritte?
http://www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch/ASB311_web/ASB311 _images/surrealism/Magritte_castle1.jpg

The evidence presented here (w/pictures) is pretty compelling too. I mean, if that doesn't look like a crater lake resort, then nothing will.

I concur. If dBase II can be said to be relational, then any data persistence mechanism is too. Some other candidates beyond ISAM (non-exhaustive list):

http://www.amherst.edu/~ermace/sth/photos.html
http://www.mkzdk.org/carnac/guiden.html
http://www.memphis.edu/egypt/giza.htm
http://www.crystalinks.com/chinawall.html
http://archaeology.la.asu.edu/teo/intro/sun.htm

Linkified goodness for the lazy (like me):

http://www.public.asu.edu/~mmcbeath/mcbeath.resear ch/CatchFly/CatchFly.html

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_10_14_02.html

here are two links to MP3s that every person should listen to. you might not like howard, but his points are valid and the things he speaks about are scary.

stern speaking with rep. serrano, d-ny; 8MB
rep serrano speaking on the house floor; 1MB

sure, this is mostly about the fcc and indecency fines, but it's also a first amendment issue

here are two links to MP3s that every person should listen to. you might not like howard, but his points are valid and the things he speaks about are scary.

stern speaking with rep. serrano, d-ny; 8MB
rep serrano speaking on the house floor; 1MB

sure, this is mostly about the fcc and indecency fines, but it's also a first amendment issue

The "poly" means that it's a polymer, like the polyethylene that's otherwise known as plastic.

Polymerization chains up lots of molecules together, so it's not surprising that something that was previously toxic can be "used extensively in the cosmetic and toiletry industry." Because of the new chain structure, polyethylene glycol is a waxy substance whereas ethylene glycol is liquid. There's no way to inhale it, and no way to drink it, and anyway, the new structure has rendered it non-toxic.

Well, okay, the MSDS says "large doses of the lower molecular weight products may cause gastro-intestinal upset."

Polyethylene glycol (PEG) is a water-soluble, waxy solid that is used extensively in the cosmetic and toiletry industry. As the molecular weight of PEG increases, viscosity and freezing point increase

Polyethylene glycol-electrolyte solution (PEG-ES) is used to cleanse the bowel before a gastrointestinal examination or surgery. It works by causing diarrhea... Polyethylene glycol-electrolyte solution (PEG-ES) comes as a powder to take by mouth

How in hell did this post get Modded "Insterestng"?

If you really want to know: look here

BTW, that was the first hit in google.

They will announce the new name next Wednesday, although a favorite is Lindos -- 'because it's the W that is causing all the problems'."

Exposure of 1 roentgen of radiation results in an absorbed dose to tissue of 0.97 rad. For purposes of radiation protection and dosimetry, it is usually assumed that the roentgen, rad, and rem are numerically equivalent for gamma rays and x-rays.

I guess you where sleeping your way through the optics lectures: These lenses could definitely work. If you look at the picture
you see that there are two fluids: brown one on top and a blue one on the bottom. If you remember Snell's law (ray bends towards the normal in the denser medium), you can conclude from the picture that the 'brown' fluid has a higher refractive index than the 'blue' fluid. The left picture thus resembles a hollow/concave/negative lens and the right picture resembles a convex/positive lens. Of these the positive (on the right) can be used to form a real image (one you can capture on a CCD or a retina), whereas the negative only forms a virtual image.

A colleague of mine did his internship at the group that invented these and my boss still works part-time at Philips.

So out of curiousity I randomly looked at some of the lines mentioned and according to SCO .. Lines copied:

init/main.c (Tab 18) 30-33

30
31 #include <asm/io.h>
32 #include <asm/bugs.h>
33

But ofcourse..

To be blunter,

Yes they do. I just googled and found this link, but I read about this last year in New Scientist magazine.

As one example from the article, scitnsts studying linguistics looked at architectural styles from cultures where buildings, bridges, etc have masculine, feminine, and neuter terms for them. Correlating architecture to gender, there were discernable patterns.

To quote one tantalizing point from the article, "Boroditsky said she is now considering studying how the design of bridges - a masculine word in Spanish, but a feminine word in German - differs between the two cultures. "

and this one:

Another researcher has found evidence that languages which have many terms for color, such as English, give their speakers an advantage in remembering them.

DISTINGUISHING PATENT AND COPYRIGHT SUBJECT MATTER

Not sure I agree on the hardware equivalent of software test for patents, things are not that cut and dry most times.

Ok, I was wrong. The 6 and 9th circuit court ruled in 2000 that source code is free speech.

Ars Technica has a great article about how code could be classified as speech (it was written before the ruling was passed).

Either way, patents, trade secrets, and copyrights encoumber the MS source code.

More food for thought

Mars.

Make/post your own caption because I can't think of one to be funny.

You can't just combine grayscale images from the L2, L3 and L5 filters to get a color in between ("true" red).

For dealing with an emission spectra for a homogenous substance, true, you can't just average 670 and 600 to get 635. True enough.

For most "real world" reflectively-illuminated objects, composed of a wide variety of different substances, yes, you can. Granted, you'll have gaussian rather than linearly-tapering peaks, but you can get "close enough".


The filter response for L1-8 are NOT notch filters people, they have defined curves. Two of the filters are specifically wide band responses as well. And the human visual response curves are equally important.

Yes, they effectively are. Check out Jim Bell's own (you know, the guy who's email appears at the link in this thread's parent) report on the Spirit Rover's panoramic camera (warning, PDF), specifically, figure 6 (page 82)... A nice graph of the pancam's sensitivity to various frequencies through each filter shows very good bandpass transmittance (the project explicitly spec'd 85% in-band, IIRC), with incredibly sharp tapering (less than one bandwidth away) for all except L1, R1, L7, and R7. And of those four, only L1 (no filter) has what you could call a wideband response, the other three just favor an ultra-sharp cutoff at their target frequency, at the expense of a slightly more broad tail in the opposite direction.


No, what he SHOULD have done is essentially what Nasa did, which is to solve a minimization problem matching up weighted averages response curves from the available filters to the red/green/blue response of the human eye, and taking the combination with least squared error.

You know, I agree with you, and have spent the past two days producing a program to do exactly that. However, NASA also should have done that, yet did not (despite your assertion) - They simply mixed L2 (or sometimes L4, yet oddly not L3, the obvious closest match to 650nm), L5, and L6. And, from my preliminary results, I'd say that Laney's results look pretty damned good... I can't tell them from what I get from a full 7-onto-3 channel convolution (though my SO can... I'll admit I don't have the best color vision in the world, but I can certainly tell green from brownish-orange).


And also that NASA saturated all of their pictures on tranmission to reduce error (and the exposure settings are nowhere to be found), so you have even less information to go on.

True - With one exception. Any image showing the calibration target has a peak norm equal to white, as well as 4+ independant channel verifications of those values. Thus, my accusation of scientific dishonesty for NASA cropping out that very target.

The android isn't named after "I Love Lucy," it's named after Lucy, a 40% complete hominid skeleton a bit older than 3 million years found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy, as the above link mentions, was named becuase the paleontologists were listening to the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over again and eventually someone called skeleton Lucy.

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" apparently was named after the title of a painting by Julian Lennon, the then-4-year-old son of John Lennon, not LSD.

If you don't believe John Lennon's explanations, then the most popular position was that it was named after the hallucinogenic drug LSD. LSD is the abbreviation for Lyserg-saure-diathylamid, or to us English speakers lysergic acid N,N-diethylamide. First synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, the "interesting" properties were discovered by the same in 1943.

Could possibly be clay. The Mini-TES website at Arizona State University has some slides of Mini-TES data. In this particular slide they're showing an unidentified mineral that definitely looks like it has bound water.

Could possibly be clay. The Mini-TES website at Arizona State University has some slides of Mini-TES data. In this particular slide they're showing an unidentified mineral that definitely looks like it has bound water.

That's misinformed, that's the temperature ~1m above the surface, the surface temperature does indeed rise above zero, and I believe has been since before Spirit landed

Real surface temp graph

Last I heard they'd found bound water, and the surface was a lot hotter than they expected it to be. In the last image release I notice they show a graph of the temperature (presumably up near the Pancam) at ~1m above the surface - the great thing about Mars' atmosphere is how quickly it get's cold the higher you get - i.e. very. Like, your feet could be warm and your head would be a solid block of ice.

The kinda cool thing is the TES data shows a current temperature map at surface level - you notice at Gusev Crater (where spirit is, about 15S, 185W - so basically around halfway down the right edge of the picture) the temperature is somewhere around 0C, +/-10 degrees or so.

The *really* cool thing is, when they were getting ready to make the rover stand up and strut its stuff, they went through extra checks and testing on Earth because the landing site was a lot warmer than they expected - there's every chance that it's above 0 there, in fact, there's every chance that (on the surface at least) Spirit is enjoying much better weather than I am right now.

It's common knowledge that Mars' equator regularly gets up into the positive numbers, even up above 20c, the only real question as to the feasibility of liquid water in these regions is whether there is any ice left there to melt, or if it is all up at the poles (or underground). Due to the low triple point of water on Mars, and the theory that it's just coming out of an ice-age, there's every chance there is no liquid left around there to melt, but there's certainly a chance there is.

Fortunately, we have a rover up there that will be able to tell us for sure in a few days :)

(posting A/C since a. it may fuck up my (and cubicle-mates internet connection and b. i work in a related fashing with it)

http://minites.asu.edu

Orion was a great idea, but the original plans were to launch the ship from earth. Let's hope that if they ever plan to revive it, they will launch from the moon (preferably the far side),since setting off nukes on or near earth would be far too disruptive. (early high-altitude tests like the Starfish test took out several communication satellites)

This has been said before in some above posts but obviously needs to be said again, BEAGLE WAS NOT IN ANY DANGER FROM THE DUST STORM ON MARS. The dust storm which started on ~ December 14th. has been winding down (look at the Mars Global Surveyor's Thermal Emission Spectrometer images to see current atmospheric dust levels) in the past week and was nowhere near the beagle 2 landing site for most of its duration anyway. Anyway, the USSR's Mars 3 Lander probe is thought to have probably never even transmitted anything from the surface at all. It's suspected that they just wanted to be the first to claim 'first mars surface transmission' and made up the story that the probe actually transmitted a picture which just happened to be nearly completely black(how convienient). I hope Beagle 2 is still alive and on the surface but if it did die it was almost certainly a failure of one of the many(non-redundant to save mass)entry descent and landing system devices, and not a dust storm which is at fault.

No Problem : Here's a link to the vorbis ripping plug =-P

Oh and not to be rip at full speed... I'm waiting for the plugin.. i'm guessing tomorrow =-). For now nullsoft would have been wise to include ogg and full speed in the free version, and then you could do the mp3 for a pay for version. And let people give them money if they liked it...

I spose they have to make a living.

Well, in the country with in its history legends such as Buffalo Bill and a long history of fighting racial inequality, there is a lot less silk-glove-handling and you have to stand up for your rights. The government will not just do it for you, you have to get up and make a stand, and then maybe you will get help. Or maybe not, but that doesn't mean that you will lose. But you will lose when you are lazy.

Too bad that statement is at best misleading and at worst entirely false... note the "over the 20 years" part--the Founding Fathers never intended copyrights to last as long as they do now; it was supposed to be a limited grant, limited as in less than 30 years (and even that, only after an extension, for which the original copyright holder would still have to be alive).

Pencils never used lead.

Not in recent history, but for thousands of years it was. Here's one of a billion Google links.

The Walt Disney Company may have already lost the copyright on Mickey Mouse due to a faulty copyright notice.

Snopes seems to think "Happy Birthday to You" is still copyrighted and owned by Time Warner. But it may not be different enough from an earlier song called "Good Morning to All", whose U.S. copyright has already expired, to be considered a distinct work worthy of a separate copyright.

You still have to swear on the Bible when testifying in court.

Since you're a big fan of stating incorrect facts, I thought I'd jump all over this one.

Contrary to your belief that you must swear on the Bible when testifiying in court, the fact is that you don't.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRE 603) make that pretty clear.

Check your facts before you state them.

Also, just for your information, the President is not required to swear on the Bible in his oath of office.

Not true. You might think that 40 years is the standard, but I just killed my workstation by running prime95 on it as a background job. My guess is that it was a fluke, but the manufacturer testing of components doesn't necessarily mena that the OEM or vendor will design thier systems within the same margins as the chipmakers do. Incidentally, the CPU survived the meltdown, but the Motherborad was what died. The CPU is a genuine AMD, the mobo was a gigabyte. The computer never overheated, but nonetheless it still ceased to function. Moral of the story: If you're going to use a pc don't buy bob's garage-a-tronic components if you want them to last. There's no reason to skip on important systems, the long term cost will bite you in the ass. -James (Anonymous because I can't find my logon)

A few comments. First, a state doesn't designate a library a Federal Depository; the federal government does (specifically, in most cases, Congress).

Second, related to the first comment, many university libraries are federal depositories, but they certainly aren't all state university libraries. For example, Harvard is a federal depository (in fact, both the College library and the Law School library are federal depositories).

Third, the "troll" is right. Federal depositories contain copies of all federal documents, not the entire contents of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress keeps copies of all federal documents (for example, you can use the thomas service at loc.gov to look up congressional bills, among other things), but also keeps copies of a lot of non-government documents (for example, it has a full collection of the Harry Potter-related books). These non-governmental documents are not included in the federal depository program. If they were, well, your ASU library would have all of the LOC's Harry Potter books too.

for a recent take on word shape see
Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2002). Does "whole word shape" play a role in visual word recognition? Perception and Psychophysics, 64, 785-794. [pdf] from Manolo Perea's homepage
For a take from someone who used to believe in the importance of letter order (I can't really tell what his opinion is these days), see Max Coltheart's homepage (no downloads, but googling "coltheart pdf" gives some decent results). Max came up with the doual-route-model, and it is actually rather suspicious, that Kevin Larson doesn't quote him, since he is in many ways the godfather of visual word recognition research. (For a takedown of Max's main points see Van an Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). What do double dissociations prove? Cognitive Science, 25, 111-172.[pdf] from Guy Van Orden's homepage (his main opponent, who miraculously also was not mentioned by Larson)

for a recent take on word shape see
Perea, M., & Rosa, E. (2002). Does "whole word shape" play a role in visual word recognition? Perception and Psychophysics, 64, 785-794. [pdf] from Manolo Perea's homepage
For a take from someone who used to believe in the importance of letter order (I can't really tell what his opinion is these days), see Max Coltheart's homepage (no downloads, but googling "coltheart pdf" gives some decent results). Max came up with the doual-route-model, and it is actually rather suspicious, that Kevin Larson doesn't quote him, since he is in many ways the godfather of visual word recognition research. (For a takedown of Max's main points see Van an Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., & Stone, G. O. (2001). What do double dissociations prove? Cognitive Science, 25, 111-172.[pdf] from Guy Van Orden's homepage (his main opponent, who miraculously also was not mentioned by Larson)

If you're doing something mickey-mouse

Then Disney will come after you for trademark[1] infringement.

[1] Disney owns no copyright on Mickey Mouse.

While the copyright on "steam boat willy" will at some point lapse

It has already.

And why should they work?
Okay, that was not well phrased. What I wanted to say is, if someone works hard, and owns a lot of money he may very well retire - but he should life by spending his well earned money and don't get more money for just putting it on the right bank account. With the current constellation of interests, money accumulates completely unrealted to the work done. However, because the interests don't come for nothing someone else has to work hard to to pay these interests. Where is their reward for their hard work?

The rich will always get poorer, because government "produces" more taxes. Aha

They do indeed--but that has precious little to do with why the sky is (usually) blue. Refraction occurs when light passes from a medium with one refractive index into another, and bends in so doing. There are lots of websites on the topic. The amount of bending that occurs depends on the material and on the wavelength of the light. Typically, materials have a higher index of refraction for shorter wavelengths--this dependence of refractive index enables prisms to separate light into component colours.

The apparent colour of the sky depends not on refraction (air has an index of 1.003, only a shade more than vacuum's 1.000) so light bends very little passing through the atmosphere. The important effect is Rayleigh scattering. Light with shorter wavelengths is scattered much more strongly--red and yellow light from the sun follows a fairly direct path to the viewer, so the sun appears as a yellow disc. Blue light is scattered repeatedly by the atmosphere, resulting in a diffusely blue sky. Interestingly, if you take a long exposure photograph on a moonlit night, the sky will still show up as blue from scattered moonlight.

Incidentally, I would call the 'sky' blue, even though the gases of the atmosphere are (except around cities) colourless. That's the colour you see when you look up, in the direction of what a layperson would call the sky. Oh, and I am a physicist.

If you look at a blue ball through the edge of a prism and it looks red, is the ball still blue? I think so.

If you look at a 'blue' ball through the edge of a prism, it will look blue or black--if it reflected large amounts of red light, then it wouldn't appear blue without the prism in the first place.

I would call you a pedant, if you were right.

I would still call you a pedant--and a condescending one, at that--even though you're a little iffy on scattering of light. If you would like some further pedantry, I would be pleased to explain why the sky is red at sunset.

A good Professor can make a boring class interesting, inspire you to achieve your full potential, and boil down the most complex ideas into a simple analogy or diagram. A bad Professor, on the other hand, can bore you to tears, complicate concepts needlessly, or just show so little effort that you feel inclined to show little in return. The quality of my education has always been effected far more drastically by picking good Professors then by picking well rated schools.

One could argue that a good school will have more good Professors (or even that this is the definition of a 'good school'). and they'd be right, but I don't think that there's as much of a difference as people like to believe. I've had plenty of awesome teachers at ASU and my share of horrible ones at Drew. Of course, the bad teachers at well reputed Universities are bad for different reasons; i.e. they're busy doing research and have their graduate students teach/grade for the class.

There are plenty of resources to help you find good teachers at the school you choose to attend. Besides, obviously, word of mouth, there are new sites such as PickAProf where students rate the teachers they've had (has anyone used this site? Does it work well?)

Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.

This image and this corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS images from the mars odyssey probe here) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.

Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.

This image and this corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS images from the mars odyssey probe here) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.

Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.

This image and this corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS images from the mars odyssey probe here) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.

Yes "snowmen" would be very interesting indeed.

This image and this corresponding daytime image (you can search through all of the THEMIS images from the mars odyssey probe here) show strange and as yet unexplained thermal anomalies on the surface(see here to put the images in context). This is really REALLY important since this is so far the only place on the surface that seems to be emitting heat of a geothermal(ie. not heat from absorbed sunlight) origin. These sites NEED to be imaged by the high resolution camera on MGS as soon as possible to find out wheather they are steaming ice towers or 'fumaroles'(likely due to the huge amount of water ice just discovered under the surface) of the kind found on earth or not. If they are, they are the most promising candidate for life to exist on the surface found to date.

Scientists have reconstructed the face of Lucy, famed early human, using this technology. To little surprise, they found her primitive features closely resembled those of homo sapiens SCO executivus...

Highly unlikely. It says here that Lucy was a hominid and therefore able to walk upright.

I also find it interesting that they use the word vaccine, when nobody really knows if HIV is a virus, or even exists. It's fascinating, but try it...go on google and type, say "polio virus image." You'll find dozens of scanning electron microscope images of the virus itself. Here it is attacking a cell...here it is with a special dye so you can see these structures...etc. Now try it with HIV. "HIV virus image." You'll find pictures of cultures that the author says are infected with HIV, and you'll find artists conceptions of the virus...but no actual virus.

It's never been isolated. It's difficult, but not THAT hard to isolate a virus. Get a culture going, put it in a centrifuge, spin it around, and things will seperate based on their densities. Do this for enough people who you know have the disease, and you'll find the criter they all have in common. Then culture it, and see what antibodies you find. You'd think with the hundreds of billions of dollars we've dumped into HIV research over 20 years, using the brightest minds in medicine, we'd have more than that.

All scientists have ever found are a bunch of non-specific antibodies, and when you test "HIV positive," all they're really saying is that you have several of these antibodies they think might result from HIV infection. None of the HIV tests (elisa, western blot) have ever even been approved by the FDA.

There are many scientists who doubt AIDS is actually caused by a virus, and may be something else entirely. Check virusmyth.net for more information. Also, this interview, with, among others, Dr. Peter Duesberg, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, makes some fascinating points about why AIDS may not be caused by a virus.

What you fail to realize is that a human(soul) will be able to join with a computer, eventually shedding the organic body. In such a way, computers could have souls.

neural interface research has shown this to be a possibility.