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Start a private setchicks@thefarm project Get inspiration here. You can at least not do any worse than they have, even though three meters is a little smaller than the Arecibo. You won't be looking for any non-random signals, you can be more specific and look for chick music only, and remember size doesn't matter!

First off, the only companies outsourcing are ones where the employees (normally in a union) demand an obscenely high wage for the value of the work they're doing.

is a perspective, is it not? Prior to the onset of inequitable free trade, those wages were merely comparable to other workers performing the same jobs throughout America (and western Europe; "the Western world", if you will).

The truth is the few you apparently count yourself a member of (or an heir to...or perhaps you are a beneficiary of offshoring? A manager or owner of an offshore firm? Slashdot should attach the first three octets of your IP address to your nickname, don't you think?) saw an opportunity to divert more wealth to themselves if they could use the rigged currency exchange rates and criminal lack of environmental and worker wage and safety laws offshore to displace American (and European) workers.

The consequence - and thus the truth behind the motivation - is well-documented in the resultant forced redistribution of wealth away from America's middle class.

And I apologize for my late response; you see, were I to "get a job" rather than run my own business, I would have more time to respond to those who choose to deliberately misinterpret evidence showing how America's corporations do not spread "goodness and light" but rather tolerate - if not encourage - the abuse of labor (of people ) wherever they can get away with it.

You’re right that the 30000:1 error ratio was pulled out of someone’s ass as a dogmatic argument, it’s the ratio of 90 million to 3000, and it was brought up to espouse the unsupported claim (it doesn’t mesh with my beliefs, therefore there must be something positively wrong with it) that radioactive decay is so inaccurate as to be unusable as a scientific tool, often based on willful denial of scientific experimentation (which is the opposite of dogma).

The rate of radioactive decay is measured in decay activity per second (curie) in experimentation but it is usefully indexed for radiometric dating purposes in terms of half life, which is a period of time in which 50% of a sample will decay to its stable isotope. We don’t have to wait for 50% of a sample to decay (although we can in particle colliders to the tune of picoseconds!). Half life is converted up from its much finer measurement in a far shorter time with a much more accurate instrument (using, say, accelerator mass spectrometry). Imagine the absurdity of presuming to date an object millions of years old accurately in terms of seconds it would be like saying I always get 3% of the way to work in 27,128.395 milliseconds when it is far more useful (and for all practical purposes analogous) to say that it usually takes me 15 minutes to get to work. Note that I am being confidently more accurate than “between a fraction of a second and 313 days.”

Far from ignoring cosmic radiation, I’ll cite research, experimentation and data: http://donuts.berkeley.edu/papers/EarthSun.pdf

Because it says so in Grammar and Language Arts textbooks, which are the closest things to official that language has.

But (a) the Linguistics textbooks say otherwise, and (b) actually, many usage guides endorse countable less (check out, for example, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which is probably the best usage guide).

Many history textbooks have said that Colombus faced considerable resistance to his project because medieval Europeans thought the Earth was flat. Which is just false; the people who wrote those textbooks got the claim from fictional accounts of Colombus' life. Do you know who writes the textbooks that you'd cite as authorities, and do you know the actual extent of their knowledge of language? It's very lacking. The "rules" usually come about because some dude made up some bogus reason to reject some construction as "wrong" despite the fact that everybody's used it for hundreds of years, and then grammar nazis cite him and each other as an "authority."

The story of the supposed prohibition on possessive antecents is notable for being (a) recent (the rule was invented out of thin air in the 1960's), (b) especially absurd (both in the reasoning behind the rule, and in the broad range of English classics that it would render "wrong").

How you expect to communicate without following some sort of "rules someone made up" I don't know.

The same way you communicate all the time, by using rules that nobody made up. That's what language is.

Reminds me of the crashed flying saucers that were recovered at Roswell which was truthfully reported by the military and then later called a weather balloon. For the interesting story from a physicist, check out lecture Tue 3/6/2007 of Physics for Future Presidents:

Lectures of Physics for Future Presidents, Spring 2007

(Spoiler: no aliens, but still interesting.)

If you want a warning when auroras are likely to be occuring without paying Spaceweather for alerts (so you can scurry outside and look), check out the NOAA's SWPC mailing lists. Go for the K-Index lists, and sign up for all those that apply for your location.

To figure out which minimum k-index results in visible aurora from your location, check out this helpful page; just enter in your latitude and longitude, and it'll give you your "magnetic latitude"; match that up with a k-index using the table, and you know which mailing lists to sign up for.

If your phone does email, you can get the alerts anywhere; if your phone doesn't but your provider has an email-to-sms gateway, you could just forward emails for the same effect. :)

With the worldwide glut of computing power out there, why would you want to spend all that time and effort setting things up in the real world? How long will it be before someone takes the power of BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) grid computing, and the talent of those who made 405: The movie (http://www.405themovie.com/Home.asp) and produce something beyond anything Hollywood has dreamed of?

So there's a mix here, but overall asteroids are more likely to strike without warning.

...until we catalog them. We can do that from low earth orbit with infrared telescopes. The wise mission has massively increased the rate of discovery, which is why I think the uncertainty about impacts will come from comets in the future.

/shameless-plug

Take a look at the MIMS at UC Berkeley iSchool, it's CS-y but interdisciplinary. CS, law, econ/sociology and business are all part of the core curricula, and several student final projects have been pretty cool.

Or, I'm a grad student of the PI, anyway. Something they didn't note in the article is that sometime today the satellite successfully imaged 100% of the sky, after ~6 months of successful operation. The cryogen is currently expected to last until the first week of Nov or so, so we should be able to get half the sky double covered. In principal, we could do the full sky twice with the shorter wavelength channels, but there isn't funding for a warm mission as of right now.

Sadly, the asteroid finding channel needs the cryogen.

Check out the WISE website, though. This mission is almost certain to produce images that will be used by Google and Microsoft in the future. It's also producing a catalog of interesting objects for followup by the James Web Space Telescope.

They already use use CUDA.

Well AC, have yourself a clue, and check out the real science on the matter:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

Muffins and orange juice will kill you. The past thirty years of low-fat, low-calorie and exercise advice has turned what was common knowledge for hundreds of years on its head -> carbs make you fat, and being fat is unhealthy in all kinds of ways. Just remember that carbohydrates turn into sugar in your blood stream incredibly quickly, so when you look at that muffin, or that glass of OJ, or that piece of bread, just imagine instead that you're simply spooning candy into your mouth, because that's essentially what you're doing.

Go ahead and stave off your cravings by eating sugar three meals a day, everyday, for the rest of your life, and see where that gets you.

Fascinating, thanks for the link.

I appreciated this line from the abstract: "We identify models where dark matter particles are beyond the reach of any planned direct detection experiments while being within reach of neutrino telescopes."

So they're looking to cover the space that isn't covered by projects like CDMS, which does direct detection. Which only makes sense, but it's just exciting to me to see cutting-edge science tackling problems from multiple different angles simultaneously.

What do you need a computer that fast for?

Simulating exploding hydrogen bombs, weather simulation, brute-force cracking, etc. Basically any distributed project you can think of (see BOINC) can also be done with a supercomputer.

Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?

It's a scientific model with a boatload of variables and dependencies. Ask these guys.

OT, but small correction - butter, cholesterol and salt are good for you, it's carbohydrates that cause heart attacks, diabetes, obesity, cancer and other chronic diseases. If they wanted to make anything illegal, it should be sugar, whole wheat bread, sweet fruits and their juices, potatoes, and all other starchy snacks and sugary drinks.

Reference: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

You mean the clause mentioned here? The one that hasn't been a part of the BSD license since 1999? That advertising clause?

Except for the name of the organization, the WebM license is word-for-word identical to the license currently used by the primary copyright owners of the product known as "BSD". If that's not "an exact BSD license", then I don't know what is.

No, YOu cannot offload CPU work to GPU work with a virtualisation solution. Even if it was possible the network bottleneck would be far larger than most advantages gained.

And second, the GPU that is integrated has the same kind of processing power as current integrated (on the motherboard) solution. You can offload a little bit, but since there are power limits you do can expect very high gains. THe gains that exist will be used for power efficient laptops/notebooks or cheap desktops.

If you really have large amounts processing work to do that fits a GPU well, you can invest in a GPU card better that has a high power envelope. There are not many applications for this (relative to number of PC boxes), this will be a niche market (but even a small % of all pc sales is a big market...)

That all said, distributed project file like Boinc will only benefit from more opengl capacle GPUs in the field.

Er... stupid 4chan meme is... lame and old and tired and, well... stupid.

Let's see, where to start... Ok, yes, large computing operations are all done on *nix. I manage THOUSANDS (note the plural) of *nix servers (and nearly as many Windows servers), and while I'm much less concerned about their default installs on a *nix, even those are just as capable of being compromised, especially depending on the distribution. And no, RHEL is not what I'd consider one of the more secure ones, unless you're also leaving SELINUX enabled, which robs the machine of a great deal of functionality and connectivity: put a default Plesk install on a *nix machine on a non-firewalled publicly addressable IP and watch how long it takes to get compromised - I can do it in under 3 minutes. You also probably have no idea just how many production *nix servers are hopelessly behind on kernel and other system updates, leaving them vulnerable to a dizzying array of compromises and exploits against everything from HTTP to SSH to webmin/usermin. Much like a Windows system, even *nix systems need some post-install configuration to ensure their safety, as well as continuing maintenance and updates, otherwise over time they become just as vulnerable as anything else, and there is no dearth of noob *nix admins who think that simply using a *nix makes them invincible and regular security maintenance unnecessary.

Also, yeah, let's see how long your "few $k a month" server(s) stands up to 10GB/s sustained DoS from Zeus or the remnants of Mariposa - unless it isn't connected to a switch that is in turn eventually connected to something else, in which case it's more or less useless for business. Botnets aren't used for computing power, and if they in fact were, I do believe you'd be rather chagrined by your above statement. There's a REASON that the various BOINC projects have been running so long, and not just because it's cheaper: it's because they crunch far more data in these distributed applications than they could do in their own server farms at any reasonable cost. Once again, this isn't the point.

Additionally, you missed the points raised by other posters above re: low-hanging fruit. You don't go after the better-administered (and a lot of Windows server admins use Windows because they have no admin skills at all), better secured servers, you go after the easy ones. Ones you can get a trojan on a 5 million Windows desktops and servers, stealing passwords and credit-card information from the former and using the latter to host the attack sites distributing your malware.

As man_of_mr_e said, especially if you live in a civilized country (which does not include China, Russia, N. Korea, Iran or Brazil, IMNSHO), then attacking a corporate system with the risk of the FBI etc. coming after you is not remotely worth it, especially when you can go after individuals who are unlikely to ever successfully initiate any sort of law enforcement action. "Grandpa's 10 year old computer" probably has his bank password on it, however.

So they say there are 5.5 million species on earth and the World Resources Institute Says 100 species are going extinct every day!

So, by 2160 every species on earth will be extinct. Sounds good to me, lets eat!

"I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to proveNo product is ready for competition in the educational world." Phillip Johnson

That's a great question. That's exactly the question everybody should ask before anything else.

The answer is: no, there's no way Bob can tell if Alice changed her particle in any way. There's no FTL communication. As to why should we care, it's complicated (I'm assuming you're asking for a theoretical "why should we care", not practical reasons).

If Alice and Bob do things in a certain way, and then compare results in the end, they can see that in some sense the two photons made a choice in response to the measurements they made, and once the choice was made by one, the other one instantly "knew" and agreed with it.

How they know that is a little complicated to explain, as it involves a little bit of math. Physicists call this "violation of Bell's inequalities"; Wikipedia has something about it in the article about Bell's Theorem. I can't recommend it, though, as it tries to explain a lot in a very short space, so it's not too clear. If you're interested, here's a lecture note that explain it all from the very beginning (only math knowledge assumed) that ends exactly at the point of explaining this effect: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/f04quantum/notes/lecture1.pdf

I would recommend looking into supernova searching. As an undergraduate, I worked in a lab that used a robotic telescope high in the mountains to automatically search for these extremely bright and relatively common phenomena. Given their brightness and longevity, it is relatively simple (in astronomical terms) to design and build a system to look for these objects. check out KAIT, the telescope I worked on.

Another book from 15 years ago that biffed it.

You can die of cancer without doing anything at all that's unhealthy. Breast cancer is suicide? Explain that to me, please.

Call me crazy, but actually, your chance of dying of cancer is probably due to doing something you *think* is healthy, but really isn't -> like eating carbohydrates.

Check out this guy's lecture on the "diseases of civilization" that would appear whenever carbohydrates got introduced into the diets of indigenous folk:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

There's a good chance that by eating all those whole grains and cereals that have been touted as "healthy", you've been setting yourself up for cancers of all sorts.

I don't know if I would trust Jasper Rine. He was a part of the committee reviewing Ignacio Chapella's tenure case and made a forceful (but empty) threat during a class, implying one of his students stole it. (In reality, it was probably some shmuck off the street who nabbed it.)

You can have that kind of computing power at home TODAY. Stumble over to http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ to see where LHC and other projects get their global computing power (SETI@HOME is probably the most famous). From there you can start your own project, and in no time you'll have millions of computers around the world crunching away for you! Maybe that'll help you pick next week's winning lottery numbers?

There have also been some concerns over possible problems related to hydrogen gas leakage.[50] Molecular hydrogen leaks slowly from most containment vessels. It has been hypothesized that if significant amounts of hydrogen gas (H2) escape, hydrogen gas may, because of ultraviolet radiation, form free radicals (H) in the stratosphere. These free radicals would then be able to act as catalysts for ozone depletion. A large enough increase in stratospheric hydrogen from leaked H2 could exacerbate the depletion process. However, the effect of these leakage problems may not be significant. The amount of hydrogen that leaks today is much lower (by a factor of 10–100) than the estimated 10–20% figure conjectured by some researchers; for example, in Germany, the leakage rate is only 0.1% (less than the natural gas leak rate of 0.7%). At most, such leakage would likely be no more than 1–2% even with widespread hydrogen use, using present technology.[50]
...
[50] ^ a b "Assessing the Future Hydrogen Economy (letters)" (PDF). Science. 10 October 2003. Retrieved 2008-05-09.

The implication there is that even if leakage were a major problem, the gas doesn't escape the planet. Even if it did, and we switched entirely to hydrogen, and consumed 100 times the current rate of energy, I have a hard time believing we'd actually make a dent in the oceans. I'm going to guess that, by volume, the amount of oil that was ever on the planet is pretty trivial compared to the size of the oceans. Unlike what happens to oil when we burn it, most/all of the hydrogen would eventually be converted back into water.

I agree. That was the best story of dozens that I read on the entire subject.

There were 2 reasons for that: (1) Schwartz and Weber interviewed Robert Bea http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~bea/ and (2) They were smart enough to understand what Bea was talking about.

The reason Bea is so brilliant is that (1) He understands the technology thoroughly and (2) He concentrates on the question of why engineers don't do what they know they have to do in order to prevent accidents. Bea does for civil engineering what Feynmann did for the Challenger disaster.

ANSI used to have a policy that they would not accept standards which contained patented components. That changed in the 1980s, I think. (The link to ANSI's patent policy is currently returning the message "Cannot connect to the configuration database. For tips on troubleshooting this error, search for article 823287 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com./")

The legal way to address this is to require that standards bodies, from IEEE to ANSI to MPEG-LA, lose their exemption to antitrust law if they promulgate standards which contain patented components. Without that exemption, when companies get together to agree on a standard, it's conspiracy in restraint of trade.

In general, most of the more annoying patent problems are really antitrust problems. Anyone can get a very narrow patent on a very specific way of doing something. Such a patent is not useful unless the very specific way is a de-facto standard enforced by market dominance. That's an antitrust issue.

The reason MPEG-LA gets away with this is that the Justice Department signed off on it in 1997. That's consistent with the FTC-DOJ 1995 guidelines in this area. Anyone can buy an MPEG-LA license under stated terms. So they meet the guidelines. The guidelines don't address the issue of the interaction of de-facto standards and market power. They should. That's what needs to be revised.

For background, here's a speech by an FTC commissioner of the Clinton era on this issue. He makes the point that antitrust lawyers and patent lawyers don't talk to each other much and don't understand each other's fields. Also see this Justice Department Antitrust Division talk from 2007. If you want to talk intelligently about this issue, you need to read these materials.

I'll talk to you in 20 years. Or can we just wait another 5 since we've had 15 years of cooling?

The problem with the precautionary principle is that even if your prediction is right, you've got no reason to believe that your suggested remedies will a) do anything to help, b) not do anything to harm. The precautionary principle was notoriously applied in regards to dietary fat (Ancel Keys, may he burn in hell), and we've been suffering the results of this nationwide nutritional experiment for the past 30 years of low-fat/low-calorie/exercise dogma. The result, an increase in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimers, and other chronic diseases. The real culprit? Carbohydrates.

See http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

So the problem with your belief is that even if your hypothesis is right, we have no reason to believe your proposed action would work and not harm us all greatly. Given the gravity of the situation, it seems reasonable to wait 20 years before deciding upon a course of action that may destroy humanity.

When the overwhelming majority of scientists in a given field agree on something, it's probably true. It does require a considerable amount of evidence for me to disbelieve that, and I haven't seen nearly enough such evidence.

Most new findings in science breaks with established tradition, and meets resistance from a majority of the scientists in related fields. If we practiced "science by consensus" (we DON'T) we'd never get anywhere.

Example, plate tectonics (stems from the continental drift hypothesis):

Some truly revolutionary scientific theories may take years or decades to win general acceptance among scientists. This is certainly true of plate tectonics, one of the most important and far-ranging geological theories of all time; when first proposed, it was ridiculed, but steadily accumulating evidence finally prompted its acceptance, with immense consequences for geology, geophysics, oceanography, and paleontology.

[---]

Reaction to Wegener's theory was almost uniformly hostile, and often exceptionally harsh and scathing; Dr. Rollin T. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago said, "Wegener's hypothesis in general is of the footloose type, in that it takes considerable liberty with our globe, and is less bound by restrictions or tied down by awkward, ugly facts than most of its rival theories."

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html

I think the original poster was referring to this piece by the father of floating point, William Kahan, and Joe Darcy

"How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere"

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf

Over at Evans Hall at UC/Berkeley, stroll down the 8th floor hallway. On the wall, you'll find an envelope filled with flyers titled, "Why is Floating-Point Computation so Hard to Debug whe it Goes Wrong?"

It's Prof. Kahan's challenge to the passerby - figure out what's wrong with a trivial program. His program is just 8 lines long, has no adds, subtracts, or divisions. There's no cancellation or giant intermediate results.

But Kahan's malignant code computes the absolute value of a number incorrectly on almost every computer with less than 39 significant digits.

Between seminars, I picked up a copy, and had a fascinating time working through his example. (Hint: Watch for radioactive roundoff errors near singularities!)

Moral: When things go wrong with floating point computation, it's surprisingly difficult to figure out what happened. And assigning error-bars and roundoff estimates is really challenging!

Try it yourself at:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/WrongR.pdf

People interested into floating point math will find some very interesting materials and horror stories in the documents collected at the home page of professor William Kahan, the man behind IEEE754 standard.
According to my personal experience the paper by David Goldberg cited in the post isn't that difficult after all. Plenty of interesting materials can also be found in the Oppenheim & Shafer textbook about digital signal processing.

Netalyzr also checks for this, both for the client and for the DNS resolver, and reports specifically the DNS resolver's status.

The resolver side tests include actual DNS MTU, advertised MTU, EDNS and DNSSEC requseting, whether the resolver can failover to using TCP, and other related issues.

Overall, the "512B" thing is largely a myth, a few resolvers have this problem but most don't. Rather, the big problem is lack of support for fragmented responses, which won't affect deployment from the root but will affect things when zones start getting signed.

For the end system connection, however, the "512B" or "No EDNS" is a bit more common, but still fragmentation is overall a larger issue.

The EICAR test "virus" is used to see if you have working AV which is blocking threats that are downloaded from the network.

Please see the FAQ.

We've seen a few ISPs that MitM www.google.com in DNS (you can check for yourself in Netalyzr.

Does anyone know (save me looking at a TCPdump) what domain name firefox uses, is it www.google.com or something else, for the google searches?

So - you are assuming that space science is solely NASA then? While that make up a large chunk of the resources for space science, they are not the only resource. As you say, DoD does provide instruments such as DMSP and LANL as does NOAA. In Canada our resources are small and we often have to use multiple agencies just to cover over a small project (for example, our current project uses funding from NSERC as well as CSA and CFI grants.

NASA does have several multi-spacecraft projects (see THEMIS for example). But, you are correct, ESA does have a leg up on this sort of stuff.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think that human space flight does have it's place. My question at this point is more "Is it worth (scientifically) putting money into human space flight or instrumentation and robotic exploration and space technology and engineer?" I would say without any reservation, that human space flight, at this point, is not worth it. Is it worth sending a couple of men to the moon to collect a few rocks and find out some tiny info about the 50 square km that they land in or use a high resolution imager to map the moon? Then using that same technology - adapt it to map Mars? Or Europa or Titan? That spacecraft could also have instrumentation to study high energy particles near the moon, looking at safety issues for long term stays - all sort of useful science that would lose out.

What about developing the engineering and technological means to allow for long stays on the moon? Spend 5-10 years researching astronaut safety, building materials, biospheres, ecological and environmental surveys for using natural resources - then go to the moon for extended stays of weeks and months? Using this technology to then go to Mars? It is the choice of where to put the limited funds for the next 5 years, 10 years... where will it be of the most use?

Prof. Terrence Deacon pod casts his anthropology courses from Berkeley. IIRC he suggests, when thinking about nature versus nurture debates, it's necessary to keep in mind that both nature, in terms of genetic predisposition, and nurture, in terms of the impact of environment, both play roles @ 100% each. Much like bipolar disorders and schizophrenia there must be a genetic predisposition but there must also be environmental factors. Suggesting that the gene alone is sufficient might be a bit of an overreach in a creature as complex and socially nested as ourselves.

No, the neutralino does not interact through the weak interaction.

They really do. To quote the Berkeley CDMS website linked from the Ars article about possible (but very speculative) dark matter detection, who are trying to detect WIMPS and in specific neutralinos:

Specifically, a cross section for interaction between a neutralino and a nucleon in ordinary matter of the order of the electro-weak scale would be consistent with a meaningful cosmological role for the particle. This expectation of a weak interaction together with the expected mass range of the neutralino, 10 to 1000 GeV, produce the acronym "WIMP": Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.

So that and other usages of "weak interaction" lead me to believe neutralinos interact via the weak interaction.

I would expect there to be differences in the experiment, but the overview seems very similar: Put an extremely sensitive detector as far down in the earth as you can to shield yourself from as many normal cosmic rays and particles as possible, and wait for years to see enough events to say you've got a decent probability of having actually seen something real.

Weakly interacting does not mean that it interacts via the weak interaction. That is why direct detection experiments look for elastic interactions between a dark matter particle and a nucleus in the experiment. This is why you have to minimize the background as much as possible.

No, the neutralino does not interact through the weak interaction.

They really do. To quote the Berkeley CDMS website linked from the Ars article about possible (but very speculative) dark matter detection, who are trying to detect WIMPS and in specific neutralinos:

Specifically, a cross section for interaction between a neutralino and a nucleon in ordinary matter of the order of the electro-weak scale would be consistent with a meaningful cosmological role for the particle. This expectation of a weak interaction together with the expected mass range of the neutralino, 10 to 1000 GeV, produce the acronym "WIMP": Weakly Interacting Massive Particle.

So that and other usages of "weak interaction" lead me to believe neutralinos interact via the weak interaction.

I would expect there to be differences in the experiment, but the overview seems very similar: Put an extremely sensitive detector as far down in the earth as you can to shield yourself from as many normal cosmic rays and particles as possible, and wait for years to see enough events to say you've got a decent probability of having actually seen something real.

This is the correct link to the video mentioned above.

Where can I rent this botnet legally?

BOINC is an academic platform to do exactly what you describe.

The Problem with Threads (UC Berkeley's Prof Edward Lee)
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
Half a Century of Crappy Computing

The computer industry will have to wake up to reality sooner or later. We must reinvent the computer; there is no getting around this. The old paradigms from the 20th century do not work anymore because they were not designed for parallel processing.

I spent a summer doing this in grad school for the Vegetation Type Mapper project at UC Berkeley. I'm not going to lie to you--it was a ton of work. But the results were cool. The site has all the old maps georeferenced, plus ways to download them.

Needless to say, the library was involved in the project, as was a giant scanner. We relied on ERDAS Imagine software to georeference the old maps to current USGS base maps. There was also a lot of accuracy assessment involved to make sure we minimized error in the georeferencing process. Probably one of the trickiest parts was making sure the old landmark you were using as a control point had not substantially changed in the intervening decades.

My professor and her colleagues published a paper detailing the project.

I spent a summer doing this in grad school for the Vegetation Type Mapper project at UC Berkeley. I'm not going to lie to you--it was a ton of work. But the results were cool. The site has all the old maps georeferenced, plus ways to download them.

Needless to say, the library was involved in the project, as was a giant scanner. We relied on ERDAS Imagine software to georeference the old maps to current USGS base maps. There was also a lot of accuracy assessment involved to make sure we minimized error in the georeferencing process. Probably one of the trickiest parts was making sure the old landmark you were using as a control point had not substantially changed in the intervening decades.

My professor and her colleagues published a paper detailing the project.

With the introduction of "lock-in" as a concept it is recognized that while markets will find optimal solutions they can become "stuck" with sub-optimal ones for a while. The time-scales are what matter, a market may view a few decades as a blip while to you and I that is quite a while.

"But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." -- John Maynard Keynes, _A Tract on Monetary Reform_, 1923.

Excerpt from http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/monetaryreform.html , because I can't find an etext online (pretty strange since you'd think it'd be out of copyright now).\\

Perhaps there is a skillset worth defining here - some offshoot of library sciences?

That offshoot is called "Information Science." Most "Library Science" programs now call themselves "Library and Information Science" programs. There is now even a consortium of universities that call themselves "iSchools." In my preliminary research while looking for a graduate program in "Information Science" it seems as if the program at Berkeley has gone the farthest in getting away from the legacy "Library Science" and moving toward a pure "Information Science" program.

I personally think that the field of "Information Science" is really where we are going to find the next major improvements in the ability of computers to actually impact our daily lives. We need entirely new models of how to look at dynamic, "living" data and track changes not only to the data but to the schema and provenance of that data. That is how "data" becomes "information" and then "knowledge." I won't write my doctoral thesis here, but suffice it to say that simply squeezing data into a decades old model of software version control is not quite going to cut it. In software version control you don't have as much of a trust problem. Yes, you do care if someone inappropriately copies code from a proprietary or differently-licensed source. However, you don't have as much incentive for people to intentionally fudge the code/data one way or another. In addition, data can be legitimately manipulated, transformed, and summarized to harvest that "information" out of the raw numbers. This does not happen with code. Yes, there is refactoring, but with code it is not as necessary to document every minute change and how it was arrived at. With data, the equations and algorithms used for each transformation need to be recorded along with the new dataset. In addition, the reason for those transformations and the authority of those who did the transformation.

Throw into the mix that there will be many different sets of similar data gathered about the same phenomena but with slightly different schemas and different actual data points which will all have different provenances but will need to be manipulated in ways to bring their models into forms that are parallel to all the other data sets associated with those phenomena while still tracking how they are different ... and you will see that we don't just need a different box to think outside of, we need an entirely different warehouse. (You know, the place where we store the boxes, outside of which we will do our thinking.)

Many of the suggestions posted here are a start, but only a start.

Amusingly enough, the idea of compressed sensing (I will rephrase for clarity) that a minimal sampling is needed for working with high dimensional data that can be described in a much smaller subspace at any given time has been used to describe neural processes in the visual cortex (V1). [See Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, https://redwood.berkeley.edu/%5D. The lingo used is a bit different than the CS community, but the math is essentially the same. The point being that compressed sensing could lead to answers a lot more natural for human perception than simply canceling out high frequencies.

Also the point is that CS leads to [near] perfect reconstruction for signals of a certain nature rather than the fuzzyness that comes from some other algorithms that do not take the inherent sparsity of the signal into account.

Ah, I think I see what was going on. It was keeping my credentials cached both (1) from one login to the next and (2) even though I was issuing 'sudo -k' and 'sudo -K' in an xterm.

I already said that sudo does some parent checking to make sure that two invocations don't reuse the same tokens if they don't share a parent; apparently -k/-K only removes the tokens that it would clash with.

So that mystery is solved; both versions have the same behavior in this respect (which shows why you don't need to be lucky to cache credentials).

BTW, on this general topic, I highly recommend this paper (PDF) from the Usenix security conference in 2005. The bottom line from it is if you say "eh, this is hard to exploit as you have to be unbelievably lucky", you definitely can't discount the chance that there's a way for the attacker to stack the dice in his favor.