Slashdot Mirror

All you need to understand is polynomials. This online book has an excellent explanation in chapter 2 ("Divide-and-conquer algorithms"): Algorithms Book

IMO, I'm not a huge fan of strict network neutrality, there are cases where you want advanced traffic management techniques that would be non-neutral: EG, if you are dealing with wide-area wireless, banning P2P applications is probably a very good thing, as wireless bandwidth is vastly more expensive. Likewise, token-bucket hacks which improve interactive traffic could in some ways be considered "non neutral", as the start of a transfer is given preference, but the net result is it greatly improves user experience.

But what is important is network transparency : we need to know what is happening, since without knowing what's going on, you can't distinguish between reasonable management practices and unreasonable ones, such as wireline services blocking P2P, favoring some sites over others, or blocking applications.

Additionally, there are a lot of behaviors, such as DNS wildcarding, which are non-neutral but have been overlooked in the debate by focusing solely on application transport.

Thus I believe its important to develop tools (such as, obligatory plug to the research project I'm involved with, , Netalyzr) so that we ensure transparency. We need transparency, because we need to "Trust, but verify". Otherwise, even if network neutrality was legally enforced, how do we know we are getting what we expect?

The short answer is: Whatever.

It's a little more nuanced than that. To the extent that a long term session is more predictable than a short term session (or vice versa), it may matter. See Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH.

Double fail!

Yes they are:

Dinosaurs are not extinct. Technically. Based on features of the skeleton, most people studying dinosaurs consider birds to be dinosaurs. This shocking realization makes even the smallest hummingbird a legitimate dinosaur. So rather than refer to "dinosaurs" and birds as discrete, separate groups, it is best to refer to the traditional, extinct animals as "non-avian dinosaurs" and birds as, well, birds, or "avian dinosaurs." It is incorrect to say that dinosaurs are extinct, because they have left living descendants in the form of cockatoos, cassowaries, and their pals — just like modern vertebrates are still vertebrates even though their Cambrian ancestors are long extinct.

ipv6.google.com is IPv6 only, and if you can reach it, you are IPv6 enabled.

We actually used this for the IPv6 test in Netalyzr as the basis of the IPv6 connectivity test. Our servers don't have IPv6, but we have a small amount of javascript on the analysis page that tries to fetch the logo from IPv6.google.com and reports success or failure back to the server.

"From most of the Linux advocates I hear commenting on slashdot, there AREN'T bugs or missing features in Linux. So why the developers? ;)
...
I like Linux and have no problem with devs getting paid to work on it. Sound slike a good idea to me; in fact, it sound slike how almost every single product in the world is made, pretty much. That has a user base over like 2. :)"

Accolades on choosing an appropriate SlashID:

• Most of the work in kernel development is in driver development
• We experience time linearly, so being the first to support USB 3 had to wait until USB 3 actually existed for example
• You are referring to Linux distributions as if that is the same as the Linux kernel
• Linus Torvalds, and most of the developers, didn't get paid to develop Linux until it became very popular
• Many, many, many very popular FOSS solutions exist that are very popular and were developed by people who WERE NOT paid to do it. Have you ever heard of Sendmail? No? Well then how about Apache?
• Smiley emoticons intended to indicate snide cleverness are best reserved for those rare occaisons that you actually say something clever
• I went easy on you

Not just that but excessive neuronal activity is highly inefficient. There's evidence that even within specialized tasks, such as visual and auditory perception, the brain is trying to minimize the number of neurons firing (see work pertaining to sparse decomposition in neural activity such as some of the research done here: https://redwood.berkeley.edu/). Still, I don't think that %10 is a good number to quote, even for instantaneous usage. Very, very little is actually known about the brain aside from rather weak correlations.

We use EC2 as the back-end for Netalyzr (our free, applet-based network testing and debugging service), and right now are in the middle of a minor flashcrowd with our big updated release. No recent glitches we've noticed, with long running small instances.

So for that to happen, the treasury would need to make more capital available (such as we saw during the insane bail-outs that have been happening). But, as is now known from the bailouts, even dumping 2 trillion on the market will not cause significant inflation (and China has less than 800 billion).

I've read that's because the increase in national debt has only counterbalanced a decrease in private debt (lending & borrowing), so the total amount of debt in the US actually hasn't changed much. Without govt spending, then, we actually would have encountered deflation as during the great depression. This encourages further economic slowdown by encouraging people to wait until later to spend any money, since it will then be worth more.

This presentation on IMDB architecture, written some time post-2006, only mentions MySQL.

It's not surprising that a large scale site would use more than one RBMS though, in some role. Many Oracle shops - especially web sites - also run MySQL in some role. That may be a strategic factor in Oracle's purchase.

In any large enough collection of random numbers you will be guaranteed to find whatever pattern you're looking for, whether it's a hundred thousand zeros in a row or the text of the collected works of Shakespeare. You can test statistically how likely you are to find particular patterns in a collection of numbers of a particular size though.

Finding patterns can be hard. If you have an idea of what you're looking for you can do much better than if you just want to find any pattern. SETI at Home has a page about what they look for: http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/about_seti/about_seti_at_home_4.html

Some of his worries turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.

"Information available over the Internet is often stale, incomplete, misleading, unreviewed, or simply wrong. "

Well, he sure nailed it regarding the Wikipdia.

Clifford Stoll is an internet sceptic, not a ludite. His arguments against expensive school IT programms financed by cuts in the teaching staff of public schools have solid points. As do his warnings about the Interweb isolating people rather than bringing them together.

Some of his worries turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.

I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.

My 2 cents.

If only the US had launched some space observatories
If only the US had bothered to maintain some of its science assets
If only the US had conducted any exploration of our solar system
If only the US had commissioned any meaningful physics experiments
If only the US had any anthropologists discovering stuff
If only the US had any geneticists discovering stuff
If only the US had bothered to conduct any nuclear physics experiments
If only the US had any medical science to speak of
If only the US had any practicing bioengineers
If only the US had funded any studies into the harmful effects of BPA

...then maybe then SlashSnot editors would avoid indulging their myopic views of the US science.

Kepler and Corot are the missions which have been launched and will be searching for exoplanets over the next few years. WISE and Herschel are the missions that have been launched, which are not targeted at exoplanets, but instead in the IR region. WISE tends to be focused as a total sky survey mission in the near-IR while Herschel is focused more on the mid-far IR at more specific targets.

Combined they potentially give use the ability to begin the search for Matrioshka Brains. IMO, one of the primary problems with astronomy and astrophysics is that the physicists (and most physics based research activities) start with the assumption that the "Universe is dead". But what if thats not true? What if it is in fact quite "alive"? This makes things horribly more complex for the physicists and astronomers because "life", esp. advanced intelligent life, can stretch the boundaries of what is determined by the laws of physics. Even more difficult -- for a complete "Theory of Everything" it probably means the physicists and astronomers are going to have to enter into serious discussions with the biologists and sociologists (to determine the characteristics that advanced civilizations might possess.

The Kepler and Corot missions, because they are focused on stellar photometry (brightness) can detect transients of other objects in front of stars. So they may be able to provide some limits on the abundance of various "dark objects" orbiting between our solar system and those stars (the planet searches are obviously looking for repeats, but the data, once public could be scanned for transient occultations (i.e. one time apparent occultations which indicate something between us and the star, be it a nearby asteroid or a more distant Matrioshka Brain). Freeman Dyson has suggested that the study of stellar occultations would be useful (presumably recognizing that not every stellar occultation indicates a planet around the star -- some might represent intervening objects transiting across the field of view. Know the size of the object being viewed, and one can set limits on sizes/distances of what is being viewed). (And Jupiter Brains or Matrioshka Brains clearly fall outside of the realm of classical (read acceptable to the "realm of comfortability" of most astrophysicists). [I have been to several conferences of gravitational microlensing astronomers -- this statement is made on the basis of direct experience -- they think in terms of hard data and they will only reluctantly acknowledge ideas which conflict with those in which they have been trained).

Now the WISE and Herschel missions are more interesting from the perspective that they begin to allow us to ask the fundamental question of "What is the rate at which Stars go dark?", i.e. what is the rate at which civilizations migrate from a pre-Kardashev type I level civilization (where we are now) to a Kardashev type II level civilzation (which does not require but is significantly enabled by the development of mature molecular nanotechnology [in the robust Drexler/Merkle/Freitas framework]. So the possible development rate could be measured in anything from months (which is feasible within our solar system, to decades, to centuries (solar system development has varying degrees of "difficulty")). And one measures that rate at that which a solar system goes "dark", with a slow conversion of visible light radiation (an undeveloped star) into an IR star (that being intelligently harvested) (i.e. the star effectively goes "dark"). We are just posed on this transition point ourselves, so it is not unworthy of study or discussion. Perhaps most importantly, the currently launched missions enable the setting of limits on the abundance of Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilizations. And it is useful to

WISE’s infrared telescope and detectors are kept chilled inside a Thermos-like tank of solid hydrogen, called a cryostat

and surely the hydrogen will now boil off?

And here's the Berkely page and the NASA mission page for a more succinct intro.

..and cloning was demonstrated. See... http://www.scard.org/gsm/ http://cryptome.org/gsm-a512.htm http://cryptome.org/jya/gsm-cloned.htm http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/gsm.html

The paper pre-print will appear on the arxiv as 0912.3592, but is already available as on the CDMS homepage. Two events or 23% seems a bit low for all the hysteria... Pentaquarks went away after 50 events were discovered at more than 10 different labs...

They may have the first video evidence, but I'm sure I've heard about octopodes using tools before, and Google turns up one reference almost three years ago about a very similar case, and a 2008 paper (PDF) which reports observation of octopus tool use and references a 1984 paper as describing certain octopus behaviour as probably tool use. I'm not sure from the Google Scholar description of this 1999 paper whether it refers to mention of octopus tool use in 1940 or in Roman times:

...
Historia, Liber IX, 48; Plinius Secundus, 1940) reported a description of tool-using behaviour ...

Perhaps someone with a subscription can check it out.

From the WISE Launch Press Kit (1.97 MB - PDF)/a>:

The mission’s sensitive infrared telescope and detectors are kept chilled inside a Thermos-like tank of solid hydrogen, called a cryostat. This prevents WISE from picking up the heat, or infrared, signature of its own instrument. The solid hydrogen, called a cryogen, is expected to last about 10 months and will keep the WISE telescope a chilly 12 Kelvin (minus 438 degrees Fahrenheit).

Happy now?

The orbit of Phobos, particularly, has an oddity that has attracted a lot of interest, and more data is always welcomed.

The orbit of Phobos is decaying, presumably due to tidal friction - the work required for Phobos to raise a small tidal bugle in the part of Mars below it. There is nothing surprising in that, per se (Moons inside a geostationary orbit will decay inwards due to tidal friction, Moons outside a geostationary orbit will "decay" outwards), but what is surprising is the "Q" required to match the observations. (The Q is total energy in the bulge divided by the rate of energy lost per orbit.) The Q inferred from observations of Phobos's orbital decay, and the rigidity of the Martian surface found from observations of the Martian Solar tide, is about 90. The corresponding Q for the Earth is about 12, but that is mostly due to ocean tides, and the Q inferred for the Earth's mantle is about 280.

So, the Mars-Phobos system has a higher solid-body dissipation than the Earth-Moon system, which is surprising. In nailing this down, all sorts of data have been acquired for Phobos (including eclipse data from the Mars Rovers), but there is always room for more. What the current data should do is provide a tie for the relative longitudes of Phobos and Deimos which (especially if this can be repeated) will help make sure that there are no drifts between the orbits of the two Moons.

By the way, with the current orbital decay, the expected lifetime of the orbits is somewhere in the 20 to 40 million year range - it seems unlikely that we just happen to catch Phobos at its end-of-life, which has raised speculation about its decay being time variable.

What sources are you basing your claims of insecurity on? Have you read http://webblaze.cs.berkeley.edu/2010/secureextensions/ ?

SETI@home searches also for pulsars, primordial black holes and new kinds of astrophysical phenomena that are outside of scope of "ET"

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ap_info.php

It's hardly a matter of "believe" whether or not something qualifies as real science, the methodology matters; even when not finding anything with its methods in our galactic vicinity, SETI gives us an important data refining the probabilities of technological civilizations, our long term survival outlooks, etc.

Also, SETI is complimentary with other areas of astronomy. Heck, SETI@home searches not only for "ET" ( http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ap_info.php section "Sources of pulses"); it brought the idea of distributed computing into the mainstream and gave other scientific endeavors BOINC to use.

...is an easy way to get parasites.

Yet, who is Petr Hoava? He maintains a Web page that offers the following biography.

"Petr Horava received his Ph.D. in 1991 at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He was awarded the Robert McCormick Research Fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, worked as a Research Associate at Princeton University, and won a Sherman Fairchild Senior Research Fellowship at Caltech, before joining the New High Energy Theory Center at Rutgers University in 2000 as an Associate Professor. In 1997, he was awarded the Junior Prize of the Czech Learned Society, and in 1999 he appeared on the list of top three scientists of the Czech Republic of the 90's. He joined the Physics Department at UC Berkeley in 2001."

The liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989 has unleashed an intellectual force that will advance human knowledge by leaps and bounds. 2009 is the 20th anniversary of that liberation.

Buddha bless the Eastern Europeans.

How do I link to something I saw on television, and copied down? The answer of course is that I can't.

If you can't find the video on-line, and you can't find another source (and, for simple factual data, I find that hard to believe), then provide something approximating a proper citation. While the formatting isn't really important, in MLA format would include:

• Title of episode or segment
• Title of program
• Title of series
• Producer, Director, Performers, Writer (if known. Inclusion and order depends on emphasis)
• Network
• Local Affiliate and the city
• Date of Broadcast

Examples at the linked page:

• Racism 101. Prod. Thomas Lennon. PBS. KQED, San Francisco. 5 Oct. 1988.
• White House Prayer Breakfast. Al Gore (Introduction), Bill Clinton (Address), Rev. Gerald Mann (Closing prayer), Rabbi Alan Cohen (Interview)." C-SPAN, Washington, D.C. 11 Sept. 1998.
• "Torture." Narr. Scott Pelley. Sixty Minutes. CBS. WCBS, New York. 30 March 2008.

It's impossible to track down "The BBC, May 2009" and see the source myself; a full citation makes that possible (though not necessarily easy or practical), and more importantly lets me know if the source is reputable. "The BBC" covers a lot of ground -- was this an opinion piece? An interview with a politician? A piece of investigative journalism?

For all those who feel it necessary to spout Randian edicts about the folly of parasites ignoring the engineering superman, please ensure that you have read the entire document: Investigation of the Performance of the New Orleans Flood Protection Systems in Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005 (July 31, 2006)(pdf), the one led by UC Berkley

-(random quote): A large number of engineering errors and poor judgements contributed to these three catastrophic design failures, as detailed in Chapter 8. In addition, a number of these same problems appear to be somewhat pervasive, and call into question the integrity and reliability of other sections of the flood protection system that did not fail during this event. Indeed, additional levee and floodwall sections appear to have been potentially heading towards failure when they were “saved” by the occurrence of the three large breaches (which rapidly drew down the canal water levels and thus reduced the loading on nearby levee and floodwall sections.)

The real issue I have with the NoSQL people is they're a bunch of whiny babies, who haven't even taken the time to understand the problem before lashing out at the first thing they see.

Yeah, some NoSQL advocates are certainly like that, but do you know what's even worse? The whiny ACID-babies who haven't taken the time to understand the problems that most NoSQL systems are really trying to solve, and are just deathly afraid of having to learn something besides their comfortable RDBMS-tweaking ways. Things really do get a bit different when you have petabytes spread across multiple sites, where even millions spent on Oracle licenses won't really yield a solution. A lot of this work is based on Eric Brewer's CAP Theorem, which was presented as a keynote at PODC in 2004 and has since been formally proven. How's that for a bunch of folks who didn't know what's already out there? Brewer's work was in turn informed by Lamport's (e.g. vector clocks and eventual consistency), who in turn built on others going back at least as far as Codd and the relational model. The simple fact is that you can't have all of C/A/P, some people legitimately value A/P more than C, and C (consistency) in this context includes the I (isolation) of which you seem so enamored. Stonebraker already made the point that this has nothing to do with SQL, and much better than you, but it does have to do with ACID and ACID is simply irreconcilable with some needs. Raising facile objections to the name is a poor substitute for tackling the real issues.

I've written about the cargo cult mentality myself, even in this particular context, anticipating your remarks by at more than a month. Someone here has indeed not taken time to understand the problem before lashing out: you. Please get over the puerile attitude that different knowledge must be inferior knowledge, and educate yourself a little.

Economists and Complexity Theorists work very closely together nowdays, especially around the area of algorithmic game theory. In fact there have been much more recent results in this area, for example I just read an interesting paper on the price of anarchy in network routing. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~gvaliant/papers/SR_sub2.pdf Many of the most popular complexity theory blogs often urge their readers to visit relevant economist conferences. Personally, I love this area, right at the intersection of algorithms, complexity theory, discrete mathematics, graph theory, operations research, optimization and game theory. Every single one of those fields is awesome by themselves imo, so algorithmic game theory is right up there for me.

Again, there's a difference between true famine--where there's simply no food or very very little food available--and malnutrition. We're told by the establishment that a 'calorie is a calorie.' But it's much more complicated than that. Gary Taubes did a great lecture that touches on this. See The Quality of Calories. I

The stuffed belly, yes. The stuffed face and arms, no. See The Quality of Calories. I'm not talking about true famine here, but more marginal cases--thought I made that clear.

The universe is, as far as we know, nondeterministic at some levels. Radioactive decay, for example, is a process for which there does not seem to exist anything beyond a statistical model. There is evidence that such nondeterminism extends to the neural level, with implications for free will.

Sure he is. He's even got a paper published on bounds on the Pancake sorting problem.

I'm a math grad student. I, and several of my fellow students do live texing. Anything else is just plain clunky, and is designed for idiots who can't handle a moderate learning curve. LaTeX is the only way any serious mathematician types up mathematics in any context.

Here is some advice on live texing from a fellow grad student:
http://math.berkeley.edu/~anton/index.php?m1=me&m2=TeXadvice

and spend $60,000 (plus interest, so probably closer to $100,000), say, to get a Masters in Science, and then you think you will only make 40,000-60,000/yr

Grad students in PhD programs in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the areas discussed in TFA) almost never pay anything to go to grad school. The school covers their tuition, and they also get paid as TAs and RAs (enough to live on). Even in the worst case, where you're doing a terminal master's and can't get a tution waiver, TA, or RA, you're not necessarily going to need to spend $60k for a 2-year program. Grad student fees at UC Berkeley are $11k/year for residents. The rest of the costs would depend on your living situation. E.g., if you have a spouse who can pay the rent, you may not have any other costs at all.

In the physical sciences, very few people enroll in a terminal master's program, mainly because it's kind of useless. It doesn't qualify you to do research or university-level teaching, and it's not needed for almost anything besides research. The main exception I know of is that a lot of K-12 teachers do go back to school to get master's degrees, and they do it because they perceive it as being well worthwhile monetarily (contradicting your argument).

I don't know where you got the 40-60k income figure. I teach physics at a community college, which is not exactly the most prestigious or lucrative gig, and I get paid about twice that. (I have a PhD, not a master's.) 40k might be about right as a starting salary for someone who got a master's in math and then went into K-12 teaching (depends on rural vs urban, etc.). But by the time you have significant seniority, it would be a lot higher than that.

Citation needed.

HFS+J case sensitive is essentially a modified UFS2.

Citation needed. (Executive summary: no, they're not, the on-disk format is completely different. And, yes, that paper applies to HFS+, whether journaled or not, and whether it's case-sensitive HFSX or not.)

I was pleased to read that Heino Nitsche is one of the project's lead researchers. His general chemistry course at Berkeley was very informative and enjoyable (and not just because he has a German accent and glorious mad scientist mustache); I've yet to meet someone who can get that excited about chemistry at 9 a.m. :)

I still remember a story he told us during the unit on radioactivity and nuclear decay. One of his cats, sick with cancer, was treated with radioactive I-131. After the cat "cooled off" at the vet hospital, Heino took him home, nursed him back to health, and, like a true scientist, measured the cat's radioactivity every morning with a Geiger counter. Sure enough, the measured decay curve strongly matched the predicted one. The cat lived for several more years, too.

If you want a brief overview of the history of heavy element synthesis, especially as it pertains to Berkeley, check out his lecture (47) on the subject.

This isn't pure rhetoric and sarcasm, whether the author meant it that way or not.

Credential Grab: I'm a doctoral candidate, and this is in my area of research.

The right solution, without considering feasibility, is that traffic may be anonymous, but that receivers should be able to refuse to receive anonymous traffic, and should also be able to refuse to grant resources (such as incoming network capacity) to that traffic. The current Internet architecture doesn't make this technically feasible, as the sender is generally in control of your inbound network capacity. There's a research push toward architectures that remove this limitation, such as the Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3). (Not one of my favorites, but it illustrates the point.)

My personal goal is that we develop an internet architecture which allows for provisioned virtual network links on shared physical infrastructure. Then Kaspersky (and anyone who agrees with him) really can have an isolated network, carried on the same physical infrastructure, while those who think anonymity is an important goal can have their own isolated network, sharing hardware but with neither able to impact the other. Network overlays can do all of this right now except for the provisioned links, and MPLS and similar technologies could already enable provisioning if they were widely adopted and deployed.

(My own research is into high-speed overlay hosting platforms.)

In related news, Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson is still convinced that the internet will meet its end by 2010. Back in 2007 they claimed that the "exponential" growth in demand for bandwidth will butt up against the "linear" investment in networking technology causing brownouts and no internet by 2010. And as recently as May of 2009, they have been still saying this! Then in October 1st the same company claimed that Net Neutrality will end the internet (or at least as we know it). Which causes me to wonder ... what kind of business model is Nemertes running? Do they stand to profit from this FUD or establish themselves as expert prophets if one of these things happens?

Really, the biggest question is ... why would the WSJ throw their journalistic integrity on the line for this kind of news? What did they gain at the risk of look like Popular Mechanics who in 1951 speculated we would all have personal helicopters in our garage?

Not Linux. Randomness comes from the time (hardware, persistent), but also from the randomness of network traffic and other driver miscellanea such as HDD head seek times, mouse movements, keystrokes, CPU temperature data, electrical noise on the power supply (with the right hardware)...

If you start the LiveCD only to use online banking there isn't much time between the startup and the time you need randomness for a secret key. The question is if there is enough time to gather sufficient entropy from the environment.

Others have suggested to seed with the current time, but that is easy to guess for an attacker. Netscape's original SSL implementation was broken because the PRNG used only the current time (in microseconds) and the PID as a random seed ([1], [2]).

[1]: http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=87602167418753&w=2
[2]: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.html

This should be rather illuminating: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/view_profile.php?userid=4422

I agree. No mention of a paper, or any corroboration. Is this guy ( http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/view_profile.php?userid=4422 ) claiming that he's discovered it? By the way, comedy quote from that page:

"I think there is a strong possibility of extraterrestrial life based on a passage in the Bible. The Lord talks about gathering His creation from the ends of the Universe."

It was Eisenhower. "But it isn't always easy to tell whether an error is a typo or a thinko. Take the pronunciation of nuclear as "nucular." That one has been getting on people's nerves since Eisenhower made the mispronunciation famous in the 1950's. In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Mia Farrow character says she could never fall for any man who says "nucular." That would have ruled out not just Dubya, but Bill Clinton, who said the word right only about half the time. (President Carter had his own way of saying the word, as "newkeeuh," but that probably had more to do with his Georgia accent than his ignorance of English spelling.)"

Who really wants/need bleeding edge technology anymore?

Numbers...must...go...higher...

You are an idiot

And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote.

If you think corporations aren't getting representation you must not be from this planet. Yay! First Contact!

-- [begin sig]

Support SETI@home

Especially appropriate given your sig...

ObTopic:The whole point of copyright (see the copyright clause) is that things end up in the public domain, so WTF congress? life_of_author+70 is not reasonable.

The ability of subjects to comply has nothing to do with the best diet for curing the obesity epidemic? Get real. The one certain thing we know is that diets don't work. The success rate on diets is something like less than 1%--and yet we have you apologists for the "gluttony and sloth" theory still preaching the gospel, even as the louder that gospel has been preached, the more people have become obese.

As for "calories in, calories out," you know, repeating it doesn't make it so. The whole "calories in, calories out" mantra has been repeated again and again for the past 50 years or so, but it fails to account for a multitude of falsifying observations. For example, have you not seen the pictures of obese women in the third world with starving children? This is a pattern that is seen again and again wherever traditional diets are replaced with diets rich in refined carbohydrate.

I can tell you from my own experience that I have been on reduced calorie diets again and again and have often had disappointing weight loss so long as those diets included abundant carbohydrate. For example, I was on Weight Watchers for almost a year, which equated to around a 1600 calorie a day diet--at the time I weighed over 400 lbs., so I should have lost tons of weight. Initially, I lost about 25 lbs. However, after the first two months, I started to slowly gain weight. Weight Watchers advised me to reduce my points, so I did, and it slowed the rate of gain but failed to get me back to losing. Ultimately, they accused me of cheating (I wasn't).

One falsifying observation to falsify an hypothesis. Anecdotal? Sure, but anecdotal evidence is sufficient to falsify an hypothesis if the evidence is reliable (and I know my evidence to be reliable, and all you need is a copy of National Geographic for the other.)

Gary Taubes gave a really great talk on this subject at Berkeley. I suggest you take a listen and at least consider that maybe there's more to this story than simple thermodynamics. Metabolism matters. As Richard Feinman (not the physicist, the other one) puts it, "you aren't what you eat, you're what your body does with what you eat." Not that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply, but they don't apply in the simple-minded, deterministic way that you want to apply them. The talk is available at: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

And before any of you jump in to point out that the DMCA is just a U.S. thing, you had better keep in mind that the DMCA is just the U.S. implementation of the WIPO COpyright Treaty [wikipedia.org], so these types of court cases are probably in the pipeline for your country soon too!

Yes, but it is a lousy implementation of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. There were other competing legislation, and considering that U.S. law already complied with the entire treaty with the exception of one provision, I think it is fairly safe to say the DMCA goes far beyond being a mere implementation. The DMCA law dramatically expanded the scope of copyright law, conflicting with the first sale doctrine by granting copyright owners the power to dictate audience behavior, and going ridiculously far beyond copyright protection by giving owners the power to control access to intellectual property, whether a violation exists or not. You can read more about it in Taking A Bite Out Of Circumvention: Analyzing 17 U.S.C. Â 1201 As A Criminal Law by Jason M. Schultz. There is also a nice summary taken from a paper by Pamela Samuelson, Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised.

A lot of web browsers when you ask for foo.com, if that fails, will look up www.foo.com

Try checking with netalyzr:
Netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu, as that does the lookups directly.