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Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

Use something like Microsoft Project to setup a flow chart. Know what you are going to have on your front page, knwo what menus you are going to have, and submenus. Have this designed before you start coding.

Actually what's better than MS Project, and cheaper, is a drawing or sketch pad. Sketch out a Story Board of the layout of each page with labels for links such as with storyboards here.

If you have a little extra processor time, you could help SETI. I believe they have more data than they can search through. The client that loads SETI also can do a number of other projects, such as folding. The client can be throttled, and set to only run while the machines are not being used, akin to the time you might be running screensavers. http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ With the extra space, you could always use Clonezilla to back up one machine on another.

Guess what guys? We've run out of GHz (mainly a power/heat problem). Start writing parallel programs.

Here is what the article says:

To be fair, though, it is not Intel's hardware that is at fault here, but today's software. If a program only uses four of the eight processor cores, then the Skulltrail system is noticeably slower than a single-socket quad-core computer. Since there are practically no current games or desktop applications around that can utilize more than four cores (if that many), the Skulltrail system does not offer any benefit here.

Read The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley which has the description of why, this time, there is no getting around parallel programming.

Also examine NVIDIA's CUDA platform, which scales from a handful of processors on your PC's NVIDIA chip to the 128 processor NVIDIA Tesla card. Scalable parallel processing is the future.

Actually "nucular" is now the official US spelling as of about January 20, 2001.

I work for this experiment. I was going to say everyone on here misinterpreted this as some big brother thing, but then I realized the summary just sucked. The whole point of the experiment is to prove that this traffic monitoring can be done while preserving anonymity. Here's a better summary: http://lagrange.ce.berkeley.edu/exponent/index.php?section=133

From the better summary:
"This system is unique in that protecting the privacy of the cell phone owner is the highest priority, even occasionally at the expense of increased data quality. The system is designed with a distributed architecture, where no single entity has complete knowledge of the phone identity and fine grained location information. In addition to anonymously transmitting encrypted position and speed information, data is only collected when the user identity and trip route cannot be reconstructed."

Seriously, if UC Berkeley is doing research on technologies to track your every move, the black helicopters are already on their way...

Berkeley's already on it.
  http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/~frueh/3d/

While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html

Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime

http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378

http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss

http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss

Pick your own subjects!

While away a useful few hours with Google Tech Talks
http://research.google.com/video.html

Then do some searching for podcasts, both audio and video. A quick sample of a hundred feeds or so:

http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/podcast/podcast.xml

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AiBquicktime

http://www.archaeologychannel.org/rss/TACfeed.xml

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/rss/archive.php?seriesid=1906978378

http://aaweekly.blip.tv/?skin=rss

http://www.techonline.mtu.edu/iTunes_Media/astronomy_rss.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Audio/Podcast.xml

http://astronomy.libsyn.com/rss

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/podcasts

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/groks.rss

Pick your own subjects!

If you power down your systems at night, then BOINC won't work!

Sarah Werning's profile page @ Berkeley -- Her photos

I think the story at science daily is more interesting than the BBC one.

Sarah Werning's profile page @ Berkeley -- Her photos

I think the story at science daily is more interesting than the BBC one.

1. The person who told me about the hiring of someone from outside of the company to replace me still works there. You can be sure that person won't want to make the statement publicly for fear of losing their job. So in my books it's all the employees that knew what had happened that let me down, not the other way around. I'm known to be a fighter, but some fights you know you're not going to win on your own.
2. How do you retain a lawyer for a wrongful dismissal suit when the income you would have required to pay the attorney is no longer coming in? When I was 'laid off' I had 4 months left on my annual rental agreement (4 x $750 = $3,000), so do I hire the lawyer and gamble my rent money on it without any other employee's legal testimony?

Despite having had previous technical + operational help desk experience (apx 2 years), having published public domain open source code which was used by http://cheshire.berkeley.edu/ the Cheshire 2 project in 2001, specifically the Object Oriented Programming extension to Tcl/Tk used in http://zoom.z3950.org/bind/tcl/cheshire/ the ZOOM Tcl module, having coded a web site using Perl and win32::odbc for a client, having worked on a web crawler by contract for a company based out of North Carolina and other related successful experience in the I.T. field which was listed on my resume, I DID NOT FIND EMPLOYMENT FOR 2 YEARS AFTER THIS INCIDENT AT THAT COMPANY and even then it was at first level at an ISP's help desk.

The problem with your comment is it assumes the circumstances in my life are the same as yours. I never did get my RRSPs which meant the company didn't match my contributions because of the incident and the money I had saved up to make that contribution got reallocated to rent. I did pay the rest of the rent though since I don't believe in skipping out on my legal agreements.

I've worked in software production as a full time employee twice since having started to learn how to program in 1987. Both times an acquaintance who knew about my programming skills recommended me to their respective employers who in turn put me through full interview processes. Despite my merits I can't seem to find employment as an entry level help desk technician let alone in software production and it all falls back to the hole in my resume which I couldn't fight.

Don't talk as though you would have contributed to justice by lending me the money for my legal bills pal.

A disillusioned Canadian.

30-50 years ago, if you went to college, chances are your parents were blue collar people who worked their asses off to save enough money to give you that opportunity, and you probably had to work your ass off to get more money and scholarships to make it.

Actually, at many state schools such as the UC system once you got in tuition was free. See here:

Douglass said that after his election in 1966, [Ronald] Reagan proposed cutting the UC budget by 10 percent across the board. He also proposed that, for the first time, UC charge tuition

In general, college is MUCH more expensive now than 25-30 years ago, and also much more necessary to land a job that pays a living/family wage. The result is that graduates are necessarily much more mercenary in their career aspirations to pay off those debts (averaging now about $30,000 at a public school) yet also far less likely to agitate collectively for a political solution -- since they can be fired so quickly for their activities outside the workplace.

It ain't the fat, it's the carbs. Keep the meat and cheese, just ditch the soft drink, fries and the bun.

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

CORN! Corn? Yes. Corn.

Destroy ADM and Cargill, today!

There are numerous refutations to your "never suggested that publishing their design or secrets would lead to better security". Many experts have said precisely that.

An IT Security article on full disclosure states that as early as the middle of the 19th century locksmith Alfred C. Hobbes thought full disclosure was important to clear up the rash of lock picking people were experiencing. It goes on to discuss exactly why full disclosure works so well.

David Wagner says in an article on security: "Today, many security companies are strongly resisting this, and I think they will need to learn to accept and embrace public scrutiny as a natural and necessary part of security systems." -- David Wagner and Ian Goldberg are the ones who cracked the security of the SSL layer in Netscape 4.

IEEE article abstract stating that full source code access can have "real benefits for security", although that's not automatic and it has to be done correctly.

Bruce Schneier -- yes, THAT Bruce Schneier -- has an article on his blog that starts "Full disclosure -- the practice of making the details of security vulnerabilities public -- is a damned good idea. Public scrutiny is the only reliable way to improve security, while secrecy only makes us less secure."

Is that enough or do I need to go to the second page of this Google search?

BTW, DJB thinks that both full disclosure and isolation of trusted components are absolutely vital. He's the guy who won the right for Americans to export cryptography technology in court against the Department of Justice. He also found a timing attack against OpenSSL's AES cipher and his Unix Security Holes class of 16 students turned up 91 previously unknown holes in one semester.

As for "Security by design", that helps. However, with many programs being written in languages which allow null pointers, stack overflow, buffer overflow, and array overflow the design can be as secure as you want and the program can still be crashed. In some cases arbitrary code can still be executed. Address randomization, NX bits, run-time bounds checking, and automatic memory management can go a long way. Sanitation of inputs, static analysis, time padding, and more still have to be considered in some cases.

The tests Coverity is running are an example of static analysis. If there's a C routine that can be coerced into smashing the stack or overflowing a buffer in the heap, that can often be automatically caught and reported. Memory leaks often can be, too. They're probably also able to do at least rudimentary checks for sanitizing input values.

http://www.path.berkeley.edu/PATH/Research/demos/

Berkeley has produced a document that's even more specifically addressing the voting machine verification.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ReleaseNotes

Holy crap, reading the documentation helps!

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC clients, including:-
SETI,
Folding,
Climate Prediction,
Einstein searching for gravitational waves,
LHC helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC,
Rosetta,
Stardust,
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC clients, including:-
SETI,
Folding,
Climate Prediction,
Einstein searching for gravitational waves,
LHC helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC,
Rosetta,
Stardust,
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC clients, including:-
SETI,
Folding,
Climate Prediction,
Einstein searching for gravitational waves,
LHC helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC,
Rosetta,
Stardust,
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

What? BOINC is open source, so is SETI@home, and possibly some other BOINC projects too.

What? BOINC is open source, so is SETI@home, and possibly some other BOINC projects too.

I installed it last night. Simply download the small script they link to here, chmod +x the script, and run it. It creates a directory and tells you which script to run. Run that script and tadaaa, the BOINC client starts. The only problem I had was my firefox install is not where the client expected it to be so it couldn't go to the finish registration page, but the helpful error message actually gave me the URL so I copied it to my browser and finished up that way. This is on FC4 BTW, with a Sempron 2500, so you don't need the latest cpu, and you can define the amount of cpu time the process gets using the preferences in the client.
BTW, I also run FaH, and have been since 2004 (I am inside the top 3.5% ranking). I didn't join either project to earn credits either, but I am not interested in seeing my stats, because there are many other multi-cpu machines dedicated by the *heros* out there that get all the high counts, and my contribution is off the bottom of the scale in comparison.
But it is still a contribution.
Also, you could always try this site if you really need to find out what you've accomplished. You need a minimum of 1 credit to use the system.

It is on the Ubuntu box I'm sitting in front of at the moment.

Glad someone made an easy install for Ubuntu :-)
Not seen one for Fedora yet :-(

.... I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...

Yep, I know that I can see the stats, or 'credits', for my account :

• SETI@home member since 8 Jul 1999
• Total credit 95,887
• Recent average credit 198.56

What have gone are the stats for the project as a whole.

• Total cpu time (in years) for the project
• Total cpu time (in years) for the last 24 hrs
• Current processing capability (TFlop/s average for the last 24hrs)

I know there is no way I can compete with any of the top participants, but that is my point. I didn't join to compete for 'credits', I enjoyed contributing to the project as a whole.

From a (pdf) paper written in 2001 and published on their about page.

As of 23 October 2000, 2,438,045 volunteers had run the SETI@home program. Of those, 519,725 were actively running the program and had returned a result in the previous two weeks. These volunteers had donated a total of 437,000 years of CPU time for a total 4.3 x 1020 flop. Currently, the average processing rate of computers running SETI@home is 15.7 Tflops - averaged since the start of the project, the processing rate is 9.5 Tflops. To our knowledge, SETI@home is the largest distributed computation project in existence. It could also be considered to be the largest supercomputer in existence and the largest computation ever performed.

That was in October 2000, so what are the figures now ?
I know there are several different sites that produce stats, so these might be available somewhere, but they aren't on the main site any more.

It is on the Ubuntu box I'm sitting in front of at the moment.

Glad someone made an easy install for Ubuntu :-)
Not seen one for Fedora yet :-(

.... I also know what the highest position I stood in the world is (if only that was my slashdot UID), where relative to my team, where relative to my country, how much credit I got from each work unit, how much credit I got on a day to day basis...

Yep, I know that I can see the stats, or 'credits', for my account :

• SETI@home member since 8 Jul 1999
• Total credit 95,887
• Recent average credit 198.56

What have gone are the stats for the project as a whole.

• Total cpu time (in years) for the project
• Total cpu time (in years) for the last 24 hrs
• Current processing capability (TFlop/s average for the last 24hrs)

I know there is no way I can compete with any of the top participants, but that is my point. I didn't join to compete for 'credits', I enjoyed contributing to the project as a whole.

From a (pdf) paper written in 2001 and published on their about page.

As of 23 October 2000, 2,438,045 volunteers had run the SETI@home program. Of those, 519,725 were actively running the program and had returned a result in the previous two weeks. These volunteers had donated a total of 437,000 years of CPU time for a total 4.3 x 1020 flop. Currently, the average processing rate of computers running SETI@home is 15.7 Tflops - averaged since the start of the project, the processing rate is 9.5 Tflops. To our knowledge, SETI@home is the largest distributed computation project in existence. It could also be considered to be the largest supercomputer in existence and the largest computation ever performed.

That was in October 2000, so what are the figures now ?
I know there are several different sites that produce stats, so these might be available somewhere, but they aren't on the main site any more.

Suggestion: Try out the SETI@home help forum. If that doesn't work, email Eric Korpela, the SETI@home Project Scientist. I won't put his email address here, but a google search will reveal it. He's had the same email address for a very long time. He'll probably be able to give you a hand once you get past his challenge/response spam filter.

Where the heck are they going to get the processing power to deal with all this new data? I know for a fact that they are not "running out" of work to hand out to SETI@Home volunteers.

That said, let them borrow some of your electricity, and run SETI@Home. I would like to find proof of extraterrestrial life, and I know you would, too. Here's the link: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php (This is a real link and not a minicity)

Your second sentence deserves a +5 Informative; it's the short answer.

[rant ON]
Also, grandparent isn't seeing the big picture, but I'll assume it was a genuine question, as most people Just Don't Need To Know this stuff. How much does a piece of paper cost? Barring external damage and extremes of pH (like newsprint), that piece of paper and the information stored on it (like say, oh, a Constitution) is good to go for a few hundred years, maybe shy of a thousand if it was hand made without chemicals at all.

I need three layers of technology just to spin up and read data from a 4 gigabyte IDE platter drive I bought 8 years ago, and that's just to access 8 year old pr0n! ;)

Back to the topic, seeing as games like Doom3 involved terabytes of data for development, a digital motion picture like Star Wars with 4-5 hours of raw footage and god knows how many terabytes of ILM effects... well I can't really count that high, but RTFA for an idea of the level of complexity "born digital" masters involve. Do you really think they're going to "throw away the source code" and just keep the neat and tidy digital master? How will he make Han shoot first again, huh? Costs triple when you have to deconstruct it first!

Okay, here's an example of how it was in 2000. Now, extrapolate data size and storage size and content creation for eight years... hmm, do you think there's a ceiling? What about the next eight years? Is that a logarithmic curve jumping off my page?

Photography was invented 150 years ago, and we still have the first physical photographs ever taken. They may be boring, but I will personally kick the ass of anyone that says they're not important.
[rant OFF]

Bottom line is, technology and content is changing and growing so fast, we no longer have TIME to decide or realize what of it is actually important, or the BUDGET to actually save it all indefinitely.

And even more so, AI, which was so promising to so many of us in the 80s turned out to be so hard that it is basically impossible.

You must have been asleep for the past 2 decades. AI is, to every generation, the stuff that we don't know how to do yet. In 1985, a chess computer being world champion seemed like AI. In 1995, a computer answering the telephone when you ask if your flight is on time seemed like AI. There are still things that seem like AI, but I doubt my children will believe it.

You might be thinking of Strong AI, but even that isn't completely lost yet.

basically AI never got going,

No, we just don't tend to call it "AI" much any more because it was hard to get funding for things labeled "AI" after the AI Winter. It's no coincidence that the guy who wrote the book on AI is now Director of Research at one of the top software companies.

Googling the phrase "vacuum microelectronics" is quite informative. Or just look at a plasma screen TV, which is actually an array of tiny gas switching tubes. A good introduction to the field is here:

http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/People/Grad_Students/botis/documents/papers/243_botis.pdf

When tubes get that small, one no longer needs high voltages and heated cathodes to achieve electron emission. The electrostatic field and a tiny emitter point will work just fine. If solid state never came around, who knows what kind of tube-based electronics might have been developed.

It is, you'd need something like the storm bot-net to do it, sorry gotta go I hear the whap whap of black helicopter blades landing outside. no seriously you'd need a lot of computers, and running them would be expensive, maybe installing BOINC on government computers and running in the background would be useful for projects like this, especially unclassified ones.

"I do not think IP laws exist for either reason you give. "

Actually, that's the only reason it exists in the United States. US Law is not concerned with the moral aspects of IP. Here's a good summary here:
      http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/Sweet&Maxwell_1.htm

If you look in the constitution itself, you'll see the U.S. specifically has copyrights/patents to further more creation of IP:
      http://www.conlaw.org/patent_copyright.htm

Here's a key paragraph:
    "Patents and copyrights are grants to the holder, by the state, of monopoly powers, for a specific period of time, for a specific reason. The goal is to provide incentive for invention and art. "

And while certainly you as an IP owner care about making money, society only cares that there is enough incentive to make you produce more.

The Ditch-Digger analogy is exactly apropos, as you seem to be equating hard work and investment with the right for protection. The ditch-digger works as hard as any guitar player, and he has invested everything he has... his time. Therefore his work deserves special protection? Of course not. And yet you're somehow claiming a moral superiority for playing guitar.

That's why the U.S. law does is not concerned with the artist's investment, it's simply an economic protection.

I think the argument that somehow the amount of investment is what deserves protection falls apart as well. If I write a little song in 5 minutes and record in 1/2 and hour and sell 10 Million copies, do I only deserve a little protection because of the amount of time? Or do I deserve the same protection?

The bottom line is that copyright and patents are very special monopolies granted by the government (you can argue they are socialist by nature), and they only reason is because they provide an economic incentive for creative works. No more, no less.

I really enjoyed watching the Physics for Future President's course from UC.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978373 or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0 (if you don't like real player!)

I don't use acrobat (osx preview seems much better) and I've never had a PDF which wouldn't display thumbnails, and the thumbnails display a little slowly as you scroll down so i was sure they got auto generated.
I do see lots of PDF files without the index tho (the proper textual index) which causes preview to display thumbnails instead of the index down the side.

The following PDF has no TOC, just thumbnails:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Googling_Max-Exercises.pdf

The following PDF has a proper TOC, which is displayed by default instead of thumbnails, but you can still switch to thumbnails if you want:
http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~piefel/LaTeX-PS/Archive-2004/V12-PDF.pdf

I much prefer the latter...

The only upside from a manned mission is that we feel all warm and fuzzy when our heroes return from the voyage. Big deal.

I don't know of any fuel on this planet that will take a large enough payload of fuel to Mars for the return trip. Who said they would ever return? At current tech, it's a one way ticket.

You haven't seen any probes sent with enough fuel to return. You won't see it anytime soon. Fuel that is light enough to take, but has enough mass to provide thrust to escape Mars orbital velocity doesn't exist. Nuke has a limitation, as you use the fuel, it drops below critical mass. Shielding the travelers is a problem. Getting enough initial thrust to launch off Mars, then reaching escape velocity without overheating is a problem.

Got any working ideas. Before you post, check the physics involved. A quick crash course in the basics is here.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978373 Watch or listen to Gravity and Satellites 1 & 2. When you understand the amount of energy required to take enough energy and mass to Mars for the return trip with passengers, then feel free to post. Don't forget you need more than just enough fuel to escape Mars, but also enough to slow down to reach Earth. Earth is in a lower orbit. To reach this orbit, you need to slow down.

Deceleration to orbital speeds is required for survivable re-entry. Leaving Mars to return to Earth does include going from an higher solar orbit to a lower orbit and the requirement to reduce kinetic energy to reach the lower orbit. In other words, you will expend fuel just to slow down.

The Moon mission had the advantage of the Moon and Earth are in the same Solar Orbit and return from the moon required only a little energy because of the low lunar gravity. To get to the Moon, there was not the requirement to leave Earths orbit. Going to Mars has none of these advantages. Mars does have lower gravity than Earth, but the requirement to leave Earth Orbit, increase kinetic energy to reach the outer orbit of Mars, land, and relaunch (with atmospheric resistance), reduce kinetic energy, to reach Earth orbit, and reduce kinetic energy for re-entry is simply a physics problem for energy of magnitudes greater proportion than visiting the Moon and returning. The Mars mission can not be done like the Moon mission. They carry way too little fuel.

http://www.muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/PffP.html

You might make it to Mars, but I doubt you will be returning in my lifetime.

No. According to Wikipedia, the best attack against the E0 cipher used by Bluetooth is one that requires "the first 24 bits of 2^{23.8} frames and 2^{38} computations to recover the key." That means 14,605,415 frames, or about 7.3 million key-down/key-up message pairs. To put that into perspective, the machine I've been typing on right now has had about 213,000 keypresses in the last 4 days, so in less than 4-6 months, my key would be compromised. I'm a programmer; An employee working in data entry would likely have pressed many more keys in the same time period.

There are other generic attacks that apply to Bluetooth keyboards, such as the timing attack on keyboard-interactive SSH authentication by Song, Wagner, and Tian. One particularly good way to thwart this attack is to send either real or dummy frames at a constant rate. Unfortunately, this would either destroy interactivity for things like games, or (more likely) increase the average number of frames sent per minute, which would decrease battery life and make it easier for an attacker to get the 2^{23.8} frames he needs for the first attack.

Ha!
You may "personally disagree" ofcourse, but do think about it a bit more.
Apple maybe selling a bit more Macs, because of the Ipod and Vista, but there is definately an upper limit to that. Businesses, unless they are in the graphics industry, will not switch to Macs. Also, outside the US Apple has a much smaller share.

Microsoft is hardly an amateur when it comes to abusing it's position. I suggest you read up a little bit on Microsoft's history.

Microsoft plays hardball(pdf) is a nice start. It describes the licensing techniques Bill Gates used on OEM's.

Don't think anything has changed, Bill Gates is still there with his extreme competitiveness. The company breathes his attitude towards business. And you get to see it often. Bribing Nigerian officials, dumping software in China, aggressive OOXML lobbying, it's all illegal... They are not exactly showing corporate social responsibility, like big companies are supposed to do this day and age.

Really the simplest proof that Microsoft maintains a crippling monopoly, is the pricing of their products.
Even with bulk license contracts, Vista and Microsoft Office are still much, much more expensive than it's competitors. Yes, you can argue about differences in functionality, but change the discussion to value to cost ratio and it's a clear cut case.

Normal market effects aren't working, a clear sign of market manipulation. Even 15 years after Bill Gates' CPU-licensing practices, OEM's still almost exclusively sell Microsoft OS's on their PC's for consumers. You tell me why. And don't say it's because consumers demand it.

Heck, Microsoft might be selling the greatest software on earth, consumers should still have the freedom of choice to get that not-so-perfect, -but free- software with their PC.

And simulation training is part of how the military overcome people's reluctance to kill.

There is sufficient fuel to power IFR type facilities for well over 100 thousand years. This results because the IFR is a breeder reactor which can utilize uranium 238. Today's reactors only use uranium 235 which is less than 1% of the uranium found in nature. The IFR, with its fuel reprocessing capability, can use all the uranium. There is enough uranium that has been mined and placed in barrels (uranium 238) for IFR-type plants to provide all the electricity for the United States for over 500 years -- without mining. Also, the IFR can likely reprocess the spent fuel from today's reactors, and use the recovered materials for fuel. Uranium is as abundant in the earth as many of the commonly used materials such as bismuth, cadmium, mercury, silver, etc. In fact the uranium in a typical 1 ton block of granite (concentration of about 5 ppm) is the energy equivalent (if used in the IFR) of 10 tons of coal!

"...specially modified AT&T cellular phone towers which, in addition to their normal communications duties, will relay an aircraft's position to air traffic controllers and other aircraft in real time."

Am I the only one this rings a big alarm bell with? Anyone who's been in an earthquake or similar disaster knows how quickly the cellular network becomes utterly useless, either due to being overloaded with "We just had a quake!" traffic or equipment failure. Witness the Nisqually quake of 2001, or the Loma Prieta quake in the Bay Area in 1989.

Within five minutes after those events, the cellular phone networks in the area were completely unusable. I know, because I lived through both events. The only things that kept working were (in most cases) POTS landlines (and even then you sometimes had to wait about a minute for a dial tone), public-safety two-way radio systems that did not depend on the cell network, and ham radio repeaters.

I don't care how "specially modified" these towers will be. The idea of entrusting something as critical as air traffic control data to something that's part of the cellular network makes my skin crawl.

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA is an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. The idea is for artists to take two selected digital works and remix them how they see fit, in a real Creative Commons kind of way. The neat thing about this is that the public (i.e. us) is also invited to do the same.

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/digitalart/ripmixburn

I go to the PFA fairly often, but I regrettably still haven't been to the BAM, even after four years.

Does this confirm your theory, or refute it? It's a Berkeley link, and an MIT Press dictionary. So maybe it confirms your "only people who'd argue it" stereotype?

There are designs which don't produce long-lived waste. Our lovely government just happened to can the project before it was completed.

As you can see, firebird, maxdb, mysql and postgresql all support encrypted connections.

Oracle can be configured to as well.

Instructions for JDBC (java database clients) encryption.

That should be enough options for now - so pick your favorite poison :-)