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I wouldn't say so, check http://www.inftyproject.org/ Their OCR claims 99% success in printed documents (i've tried it is true). And wait a few years,there are some really promising papers out there, i bet you'll be amazed on the number of people working on this problem since the late 90's. 3 years from now i am almost sure you'll be able to enter any kind of math expression by hand using a digitizer (don't ask handwritten offline OCR just yet though :( )
check out this guy as well http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/ his work is groundbraking, i hope they will have a solid opensource system in a couple of years

So, some major differences between Google and the dot-com boom are a) Google actually makes a considerable amount of money b) The Internet is substantially more stable than it was (initial fervor has subsided and things have shaken out and consolidated since then c) Google is packed full of the best people We had a visitor from Google a while ago (Pablo Cohn). The guy reports to Peter Norvig and has taught machine learning summer school to Guido Van Rossum. These guys are literally the modern superstars of Computing Science. In the Dot-com boom/bust, tons of money was gambled on any random person with a crazy idea. In contrast, Google is a collection of super talented people earn crazy money off their ideas.

Isn't Linux 90%+ socialistic? Most of the software is released for free (free beer), only generating donations, and done for fun and the benefit of all. I was under the impression that the distributions that cost a fee had a small market share.

And apparently, socialism can work. A few years ago (after the release of AMD64 Linux and before the release of XP x64), I remember seeing $40,000+ workstations running mostly open-source (free speech and free beer) software for Hollywood level video editing/creation (CinePaint and Cinerella, along with Maya, which is commercial). The market was blown open because the relatively cheap (compared to say SGI or SUN) AMD64 hardware platform usually runs 10-20% faster with 64-bit code, which Microsoft couldn't (or wouldn't) get to market. Intel's Netburst was a failure on 64-bit, and couldn't compete at 32-bit. Apple couldn't compete either. The G5 might have an edge on the Opteron per core (benchmarks here and here), but you can't stick 4 or 8 physical G5 cpu's in a machine like you can with Opteron.

More advice from Dave Messerschmitt.

Re: PP, I agree with some other posts I've seen here that PP can be used badly or well. Most of the aweful PP talks I've seen would have been just as bad (and possibly worse) with another technology.

That said, it's not as though all tools for a given task are equivalent. I'm a lot more likely to make a long straight cut using a table saw with a guide than I am using a hand saw without a guide (and possibly even with).

In this regard, I don't think PP is nearly as bad an offender as MS Word, because Word makes it far too easy to do bad things, like ignore styles, and hard to do good things, like use styles instead of one-off formatting. (In fairness, it seems to be improving, but is still a far cry from, say, FrameMaker from 1992.)

More advice from Dave Messerschmitt.

Re: PP, I agree with some other posts I've seen here that PP can be used badly or well. Most of the aweful PP talks I've seen would have been just as bad (and possibly worse) with another technology.

That said, it's not as though all tools for a given task are equivalent. I'm a lot more likely to make a long straight cut using a table saw with a guide than I am using a hand saw without a guide (and possibly even with).

In this regard, I don't think PP is nearly as bad an offender as MS Word, because Word makes it far too easy to do bad things, like ignore styles, and hard to do good things, like use styles instead of one-off formatting. (In fairness, it seems to be improving, but is still a far cry from, say, FrameMaker from 1992.)

says my climate professor[*]. The EPA quoted a 2001 scientific report as saying that "the rise in CO_2 levels was unlikely to be a result of human activity". Except that same report's first line reads "most likely", not "unlikely". And so the original report's authors got back together and wrote an amicus brief saying so.

So they were informed by the best of today's climate scientists. They weren't deciding climate issues, they were deciding legal ones. Or did you want the climate scientists to decide the legal issues?

One of the people involved has this nice summary:
http://www.atmos.berkeley.edu/~inez/ClimateChangeS cience_SupremeCourt.htm

[*] "It was obvious from what they wrote in the decision."

Ethanol is not the answer. It takes more energy to produce than it yields. If you factor in the ammonium nitrate (fertilizer, made from, you guessed it, oil), the fuel burned to harvest it, transport and refine it, there is a net 54000 BTU loss per gallon.

Here's one article about corn which mentions it:
http://www.ecoliteracy.org/publications/rsl/michae l-pollan.html

Here is a more detailed scientific paper:
http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS41 6-Patzek-Web.pdf

Biofuel is not a sustainable solution. Why our government is pushing it, I'll never guess. It solves _NOTHING_. It certainly helps the farmers tho, at $4 a bushel this year, they are making out.

Here is a more viable solution being developed by BP:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/02/news/economy/biobu tanol/index.htm

Ethanol is a joke, pork barrel politics at it's finest... It's a smokescreen to hide the real problem: We don't have a good(or even passable) solution.

-AC

I participated in this search and spend approx 10 hours looking at the pictures. It was strangely satisfying to do, like a meaningful scavenger hunt. I later discovered Stardust@home using the same Amazon Mechanical turk technology. You are helping the scientists find star dust particles in a aerogel. It takes 15min to qualify via a test but is it quite fun and as I said earlier strangely rewarding.

>Personally I don't know anyone who has ever cheated on a paper. I suppose with some of the
>fluff classes and electives some may have because those classes are a low priority, but by
>and large plagiarism is no where near as big a problem as these people make it out to be.
>High school maybe, but not in higher education.

You are lucky, then, not to have seen it. My own projects have been copied verbatim and turned in by other people. Concretly, I had written some A* stuff that used to be at http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/index.ht ml, and later a professor reported that they'd caught their students just taking my code and pretending it was theirs. Ugly, and pretty stupid.

I think plagerism and academic dishonesty happens much more frequently in higher education than one might suppose.

Why is it, that when bright scientists tell us that we are undergoing climate change and man is partially responsible, so many none scientists will say that it needs more study?

I guess that it is for the same reason that when similarly bright PhD scientists and engineer say that have more than 100 years worth of power, then others have to say that they are not intelligent enough to know how to do their math.

True. It would be very interesting if anyone had time to take the Shootout C programs, run them though ccured and compare the results. My guess is that we'd see performance in line with the other type-safe, low-level compiled languages (e.g Ada and Eiffel)

Threads are a seemingly straightforward adaptation of the dominant sequential model of computation to concurrent systems. Languages require little or no syntactic changes to support threads, and operating systems and architectures have evolved to efficiently support them. Many technologists are pushing for increased use of multithreading in software in order to take advantage of the predicted increases in parallelism in computer architectures. In this paper, I argue that this is not a good idea. Although threads seem to be a small step from sequential computation, in fact, they represent a huge step. They discard the most essential and appealing properties of sequential computation: understandability, predictability, and determinism. Threads, as a model of computation, are wildly nondeterministic, and the job of the programmer becomes one of pruning that nondeterminism. Although many research techniques improve the model by offering more effective pruning, I argue that this is approaching the problem backwards. Rather than pruning nondeterminism, we should build from essentially deterministic, composable components. Nondeterminism should be explicitly and judiciously introduced where needed, rather than removed where not needed. The consequences of this principle are profound. I argue for the development of concurrent coordination languages based on sound, composable formalisms. I believe that such languages will yield much more reliable, and more concurrent programs.

.. before flying off the deepend of political discourse.

Subsidies are one POLITICAL issue that can be handled separately form the SCIENTIFIC discussion of ethanol.

Ignoring the former to look at the latter..

Berkeley recently did a rather deep paper on ethanol.

Summary here: http://rael.berkeley.edu/EBAMM/summary.html

Ifn you can't read and understand that, I highly suggest sticking to political discussions only.

Corn alcohol requires large amounts of energy to produce so it actually increases the use of coal and oil.

See my comment here:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/arc hive/000431.html

It may prove difficult in the short term to reduce the term of copyrights which have already been extended. Also, the forces pushing perpetual copyright are strong. However, there is another route, which may be easier, employing the concepts of Aikido -- moving with the strong force and redirecting it in a better way. Rather than fight to reduce the maximum term of copyrights, consider that existing and future copyrights could be taxed annually just like real estate as long as they are kept from the public domain. This uses a market-based approach to limit the external costs of copyright monopolies.

What is the social justification for such a tax?

Real property taxes are justified by the notion that real estate imposes a cost on society -- for fire departments, police departments, schools, roads, sewers, water pipelines, libraries, town courts, property record archives, and so forth.

Copyrights were originally monopolies granted "for a limited time" with the notion that the costs they imposed on society would be repaid by the work moving into the public domain after that limited time. That bargain has effectively been broken because the terms are so long (and likely will be in perpetuity in the U.S.A. given the recent Supreme Court decision). Yet, copyrights still pose a cost on society. There must be courts to dispute them, police to enforce them. There must be prisons to hold the millions of copyright offenders. Like no one in the 1960s would imagine a million U.S. citizens behind bars for non-violent drug offenses in the 1990s, it is possible that there may be a million U.S. citizens behind bars in the 2010s for copyright violations as the "War on Those Who Share" gets underway. There must be an information superhighway to transport these works, and standards for disseminating them. Authors of derivative works must spend time researching whether a work is already in the public domain, or locating all the related rights holders if it is not. Extensions of the principle of copyright to cover the ideas in the work such as characters or plot lines or other structures make it ever more costly to create new non-infringing works. Many new or derived works are not created because of these chilling effects, which is a hidden cost of copyrights. People in developing nations or others who cannot pay use fees for copyrighted works are deprived of education or enjoyment when such a deprivation does not directly benefit anyone. So, given all these indirect costs of granting copyright monopolies, society is justified in imposing a financial cost on copyright holders to rebalance the copyright bargain.

Real estate is typically taxed at a small percentage of an assessed value. If the taxes are not paid, the real estate essentially becomes owned by society. Note that these annual property taxes are in addition to any fees for recording deed transfers, liens, title searches, and such.

Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax

Wow, you're really good at spewing alarmist bullshit aren't you?

• I don't know how often archive.org scans a web page, but Google averages 1 month between full indexes (admittedly, spread out over the month). I can't imagine archive.org doing it much faster. So the chance of archive.org picking up a document that was visible for a few hours is pretty slim. Instead, hundreds or even thousands of ordinary visitors could have viewed the same information and saved it, sent it off to the press, created their own mirror, etc. You don't need to repeat the "oops, something was posted when it shouldn't have been" scenario three times.
• The Internet Archive respects the robots.txt file and will remove/not cache content that is disallowed to the ia bot. There's also procedures for removing content from the archive when robots.txt is not enough.

New construction materials all have drawbacks: carbon fibre panels don't dent, they shatter.

Manufacturers are already moving away from having the skin bearing load in a crash situation, and are spreading more of the load out on the frame (the "spaceframe" design). For example, look at the plastic panels on Saturns and Pontiacs. They didn't need to bear load, and it'd be hard to claim that Saturns had poor crashworthiness. Having been in a highway-speed accident in one, let me be the first to attest to how impressively those things hold up. I rolled over and ended up in a ditch, and the front windshield didn't even break; I think the total bill was something like $2k. Carbon fibre is also already heading into commercial vehicles, although, unlike Saturns, starting at the high end (BMWs and Corvettes, for example)

If you're worried about shrapnel, carbon fibre is certainly less of a shrapnel risk than glass, and we've dealt with that pretty well (for example, lamination). Just like a windshield, if a panel breaks, you replace it. In short, of Boeing thinks that carbon fibre will work for an aircraft situation, I have little reason to think that it wouldn't work for an automotive situation. Aircraft parts generally bear tougher operating requirements than cars do -- a lot more repetitive stresses and the like. Of course, if you want repetitive stress, I can't think of a better example than the Westgate Bridge (page 4).

All of these techniques would make the car a lot more expensive.

Which is why it comes down to tech improvements. After all, it's not the raw ingredients of carbon fibre that have been prohibitive, historically; it's the labor. I'm not sure why you think that aluminum is difficult to fabricate; it's easier to cast and machine than steel (repair, well, that depends on the type of damage; aluminium is more susceptible to metal fatigue, although it doesn't rust). Many of the problems in working with titanium are simply due to shops not being equipped to handle it -- for example, all welding must be shielded, and casting isn't as simple as just putting ingots in a crucible and pouring (although the Taramm process gets closer to that). Titanium has a number of manufacturing advantages to counter its disadvantages, though -- for example, corrosion, poor welds, and fatigue are easy to spot because the metal discolors proportional to its oxide thickness.

Unlike most RTS games that would come later, rather than commanding the action with a disembodied mouse arrow, Herzog Zwei put the player in direct control of a carrier aircraft that they would fly around the battlefield. While capable of transforming into a robot and engaging the enemy on the ground, its greatest strength lay in its ability to transport units. This one element more than anything betrayed the game's console roots, and probably resulted in the game being frequently misjudged as an action title.

For what it's worth, the Kellogg and Wolff study can be found here They frankly speak to the shortcomings of their methodology and the limits that introduces. Still, the upshot the Aussies burned more energy and spent more money to boot seems sound.

From http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/abbrev.html

CAD Computer-aided drafting; Computer assisted design
CADD Computer-aided design and drafting

I was referring to the first entry of course.

Why on earth would you use the cache link for a page that still exists?
http://www.ucei.berkeley.edu/PDF/csemwp163.pdf

Anyone remember Unocal?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?art icleid=1240&CFID=4936540&CFTOKEN=31436615 http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/worldandus /archives/2006/04/people_daily_we.php

Idle comes bundled with the Windows installer. I use that all the time. It is pretty simple, a colourized text editor mostly, but it doesn't have the pokey feel of Eclipse. About my only complaint about Idle is that it doesn't have any line numbering down the left side of the window. Instead the line numbers are in the lower right corner in a box which makes me look away from my code. It might be just me though.

An good intro to Idle follows:
http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/idle_int ro/index.html

Neither. See: "The Problem with Threads," Edward A. Lee, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2006-1, January 10, 2006.

Good work Sherlock. One of the main prerequisites you forgot about is that the Average Joe isn't going to do that. You're also forgetting that CFLs look like ass. Not to mention... how many people just have fixture in their house that they can put their warming gels in? In my basement, the lighting fixtures are the bare bulb kind. So that means there's NOTHING that I can put the filter in. Should I REALLY have to go to the trouble and expense of building a custom light fixture (that may not even be safe as I'm not an engineer) just to make the switch from incandescent to CFL? Should anyone? The answer is NO. In my case I compromised. I don't spend a lot of time in my basement, but the amount of time the light is on throughout the day is enough that putting the CFL will not only save me a little money, but will also cut down on emissions from used electricity. The basement looks even uglier than it did before due to the completely ass light that CFLs provide. But I can live with that as it's not where I spend a whole lot of time.

However, I will NEVER put CFLs in my living room (it has halogen tracklights anyway), kitchen, bedroom or bath until they produce one that gives off light that doesn't look like the bleakest day in February in Canada. I want the light to look natural and comfortable. I want to be bathed in the light of the warmest summer day as viewed from a comfortably shaded (but not dark) location. CFLs don't cut it yet. Since this is where the industry is headed though... I hope they will make moves towards creating decent CFLs that won't require filters or other bizarre tricks.

Finally, the gel suggestion while it might sound like a decent idea is actually a load of crap. The problem that all CFLs seem to suffer is not that they product the wrong colors that you can filter out. The problem is that they LACK the appropriate level of certain colors to produce something that feels natural. With a lot of work, you probably could filter out the more dominant colors to try and emphasize what's missing, but that would result in a VERY dim output. What's really needed is a better balance of phosphors to produce the REAL full spectrum and not what some marketroid labels as "daylight".

This may be a bit obvious to all you /.rs ... but what the hell...

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

It's more like "bang the drum softly". Once every ten seconds.

That's 100 seconds, and then, it's not a regular beating, not regular at all, actually, it's pretty innacurate to think of it like drums beating. It's more like a noise, a continuous noise, just like the sound of a volcano while it's erupting, or the sound of a rocket while it's lifting off, only much lower. It's not a perfectly continuous noise either, you can see/hear distinct beats, but I don't think it's incompatible with a narrow band noise.

Anyways here you can hear for yourself what it sounds like, speeded up a thousand times, and if you speed it up even some more in an audio editor (since here it has some frequencies we hardly can hear) you'll see that it definitely doesn't sound like a regular drum beating but more like a noise, a noise between 0.02 Hz and 0.06 Hz.

It's a shame that so many people around here like you assumed that it was something like a regular drum beating, and started fantasying about it. That's what scares me about Slashdotters sometimes, we're too certain of our understanding of things.

I would think a BOINC project might produce enough muscle to get a really big brain going. Imagine a BOINC cluster of...

;-)

The thing is, MOST algorithms cannot be PARALLELIZED or it is not worth it.

That's the theoretical problem. The practical problem is that a large amount of low-hanging parallelization is thrown away because current languages and architectures force (or strongly encourage) programmers to unnecessary sequentialize their programs, even when they know that their code contains potentially parallel constructs. Plus, the frameworks for specifying parallelization are nonstandard, nonportable, designed with specific hardware architectures in mind, and can't be composed with each other.

I would be more likely to donate my cycles if I was able to pick which project I was most interested in loaning my hardware to.

You're looking for BOINC.

Maybe, instead of everybody making their own little grid system...

I don't think you fully understand what you're talking about.

For starters, BOINC is not a separate grid. It's a framework and client for many grids. BOINC users can (and do) contribute to many different projects including your "established projects" like Folding@Home and SETI@Home, and including many of the other grids you've listed. Many of the others you listed do exactly the kind of jobs you're calling for, like disease research.

Also, you seem to think that all grid computing projects are interchangeable, and that just isn't so. They may work with different data, or using different methods; they may not have the same requirements for job submission; they may operate on vastly different scales. Basically, they're suited for different research needs. A nice thing about OpenMacGrid, for example, is that researchers can take the same Xgrid job they've been using on their tiny network and send it to a public grid without much, if any modification.

For those that are interested, the Berkeley View project website is at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/, which includes some video interviews with the principal professors involved in the project. There is also a blog at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/blog/

For those that are interested, the Berkeley View project website is at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/, which includes some video interviews with the principal professors involved in the project. There is also a blog at http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/blog/

pretty much the same thing Dave Patterson's been saying for a while now...in fact, the CW sounded so familiar, I went back to double check his lecture slides from more than a year ago:

http://vlsi.cs.berkeley.edu/cs252-s06/images/1/1b/ Cs252s06-lec01-intro.pdf

and it's pretty much identical (check out slide 3 on the first page of the pdf)

There is (and always will be) an inverse relationship between security and usability

Speculation at best. UI design is hard just as security is hard. In fact, the difficulties of both are directly related IMO. The question is, "how can the user convey their intent to the system?", because surely the user doesn't intend to loose a virus which destroys their computer. The flip side is, "how can the system translate those intents into enforceable security properties?" In other words, it's a matter of proper user-system communication via a trusted path, ie. good UI design and a good security architecture are both necessary to achieve the desired effects. There has been some good research on secure user interfaces, the most successful of which are based on capability security principles [1],[2],[3],[4].

Compartmentalising the applications in such a draconian fashion would appear to be heavily leaning towards the security side, and not the usability side of the argument [...] The article talks about the picture-viewer not being able to access the web.

Only because you have a monolithic view of "the application". Let me make the distinction clearer by rephrasing the usefulness of the security property we're interested in: why should the image rendering component of the application have access to the web? Really, only a small portion of the application would need net access if it needs it at all, but surely not the component that accepts a PNG file and renders it into a bitmap for display to the screen. And yet, in all systems widely in use today, the image rendering library has exactly this authority, and more (authority to delete your personal files for instance). It'd be amusing if it weren't so sad.

Most of the apps I use daily require web/internet access. I think that's only going to increase over time.

I agree, but isolating components from wielding permissions they don't need is simply necessary for good security. Fortunately, it's also good software design. :-)

[1] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/design.h tml
[2] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/ideus.ht ml
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/957/
[4] http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2005/2005posters/23-y ee.pdf

There is (and always will be) an inverse relationship between security and usability

Speculation at best. UI design is hard just as security is hard. In fact, the difficulties of both are directly related IMO. The question is, "how can the user convey their intent to the system?", because surely the user doesn't intend to loose a virus which destroys their computer. The flip side is, "how can the system translate those intents into enforceable security properties?" In other words, it's a matter of proper user-system communication via a trusted path, ie. good UI design and a good security architecture are both necessary to achieve the desired effects. There has been some good research on secure user interfaces, the most successful of which are based on capability security principles [1],[2],[3],[4].

Compartmentalising the applications in such a draconian fashion would appear to be heavily leaning towards the security side, and not the usability side of the argument [...] The article talks about the picture-viewer not being able to access the web.

Only because you have a monolithic view of "the application". Let me make the distinction clearer by rephrasing the usefulness of the security property we're interested in: why should the image rendering component of the application have access to the web? Really, only a small portion of the application would need net access if it needs it at all, but surely not the component that accepts a PNG file and renders it into a bitmap for display to the screen. And yet, in all systems widely in use today, the image rendering library has exactly this authority, and more (authority to delete your personal files for instance). It'd be amusing if it weren't so sad.

Most of the apps I use daily require web/internet access. I think that's only going to increase over time.

I agree, but isolating components from wielding permissions they don't need is simply necessary for good security. Fortunately, it's also good software design. :-)

[1] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/design.h tml
[2] http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/ideus.ht ml
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/957/
[4] http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2005/2005posters/23-y ee.pdf

The idea of putting every application into a virtual machine is a good one, Every app is essentially in its own VM. They all run within a private address space. System calls to the OS let it talk outside of that address space. You'd need the exact same mechanisms to poke holes in your proposed per-app VM to access shared network, disk, or other resources.

The question that you should be asking is how do those holes get opened, what scope do they have, and how do you revoke them later. The current OS model is sandbox/VM model is sententially all-or-nothing.

see http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ping/sid/design.h tml

Ignoring the slashvertisement, I think the real reason people tend not to reuse code is because any code they find will be either (1) broken, or (2) not up to the specific task and also broken. With rare exceptions, all code is broken to some degree, including yours (and including mine). Newer code tends to be slightly less broken about older code, as more people find new ways to break things; but however much some CS professors like to go on about OOP or whatever the latest fad is, the art of software engineering simply hasn't advanced to the point where people can reliably build non-broken software, in the sense that civil engineers build non-broken bridges or architects build non-collapsing buildings. Until we find the silver bullet that reduces software engineering to a reliably solvable problem, there's really not much we can do.

What, there's no silver bullet? Well, then I guess we're just SOL(*), aren't we?

(*) SOL: Secure in Our Ljobs (the L is silent)

You are ignoring the truth that markets can be manipulated with money as easily as with political power.

I disagree. First, markets are actually quite difficult to manipulate to a great degree (especially without the presence of some kind of government-granted monopoly). Only in those rare industries where few significant players exist is this feasible (and these usually, but not always, owe to government granted monopolies). Once you have more than a few significant players it's nearly impossible. Powerful politicians, on the other hand, are relatively few in number and they can be bought quite easily. Second, I never suggested that markets can't be manipulated or that there is no place for regulation. You seem to be under the impression that I'm a libertarian--I am not.

In a free market system wealth invariably concentrates in fewer and fewer hands. Even if you don't buy that, you must see that wealth is distributed so inequitably that there will exist some class of people for whom the only good economic alternative is to sell themselves into slavery.

We don't live in a zero sum world. The rich can get richer faster and the poor can (and generally do) get richer at the same time. Most of the country, even the poor, have enjoyed generally significantly higher incomes each year on average. Median family incomes have more than doubled since the 1940s and the similar number holds true for all economic quintiles (and if you look at, say, the 1800s several times more). Most people are living longer and are healthier. Roughly 70% of the country now owns their own homes.

What's more, the record is much more mixed (see pg 456) than you seem to believe -- in fact there is evidence to suggest that much the opposite has happened in the US over the past 100 years.

When all the world is owned, those who do not own the means of production become the slaves of those who do, as otherwise they have no means of supporting themselves. The owners are the wolves, the people who do not own and must sell themelves into slavery are the lambs. Get it?

The long term trend in the US is very much the opposite of what you suggest. You are too fixated on "the means of production" since you view everything in zero sum terms. Human capital is a very real form of production too. A skilled programmer, doctor, lawyer, etc, for instance, may own almost no property, but can still command a high salary (and eventually purchase property of their own). As our economy evolves towards more and more of a knowledge based system and as efficiency grows ever higher (thanks to capital investment, innovation, flexible labor markets, etc), individuals will have greater bargaining power to command higher salaries and higher standards of living will be obtained for most people. It may not always be perfectly smooth year to year, but that is the trend and that is reality.

In regards to free market types scaring the crap out of me, I am refering to people who think that the unregulated free market is a more equitable and fair way of excercising control than democracy. As in the ancient Greek kyklos, people in a Democracy are free to elect a tyrant, and often do. It makes no difference whether that is a political or economic tyrant.

Nonsense. Name the economic tyrant in the US and tell me how it compares to, say, Stalin, Hitler, etc? We do not effectively allow anyone to gather so much power that they can abuse anyone like this. If people don't like their employer, they will leave for another one (just talk to any employer/see turnover rates). If people don't like the services/products offered, they will (with few exceptions) go to another provider.

Syndicalism, as practised by the Mondragon Collective, a large gro

Bush's memo/article (published originally in The Atlantic Monthy) did have an effect in America. But the ideas in it as regards hypertext are far from original.

From 1937, HG Wells' essay/lecture "The World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia" reflects a more accurate version of what we now call the World Wide Web. Bush's hypertext was mostly personal and barely social. http://sherlock.berkeley.edu/wells/world_brain.htm l

And even more important was Emanuel Goldberg, who actually had the machine that Bush describes working and patented pre-WWII. Unfortunately, for Goldberg, who had been head of Zeiss Optical, the Nazis tried to surpress all of his work. He eventually ended up in Palestine (later Israel of course) where his further work was kept secret. See Michael Buckland's great biography for this story in creativity, leadership, technology, politics and history. http://www.amazon.com/Emanuel-Goldberg-His-Knowled ge-Machine/dp/0313313326/

Sorry, but there's no silver bullet that's going to solve all our software development woes.

At first, I thought, hey, maybe you're just misguided. Maybe you are. However, here's the problem with that theory. You've taken the time to get a lot of different links together and post them here. That suggests that you're capable of doing decent searches. Therefore, you should already know what's wrong with your claims. Now, just to answer your objections (so you don't claim I'm "avoiding" the "facts"):

SPICE itself (without the p) is originally a unix program IIRC. Could he use that?

The main issue with threaded programming is creating reliable programs. With multiple cores, you get a much higher level of parallelism than we have seen before.

There is a great (though depressing) paper that discusses the challenges:

http://www.ddj.com/dept/64bit/196901362?cid=RSSfee d_DDJ_All -- a very brief summary/review
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EE CS-2006-1.pdf -- full paper

Berkeley tech report (inc. Patterson as author)

Brief summary (I heard the same talk when he spoke at PARC), computational problems are divisible into one of thirteen categories that range from matrix multiplication to finite state automata. Most existing research (academia and industry) into parallelism tends to focus on about seven of those categories that are most easily parallelized - think supercomputer cluster. Most apps that you or I use fall into the graph traversal or finite-state categories (think compilers, apps with an event loop, etc.), into which there is essentially no research. Patterson even suspects that finite state machines are inherently serial and CANNOT be parallelized.

So ... the apps that we already use can't really get faster on parallel cores without major, fundamental advances in computer science that don't seem to be approaching. Which means we'll be using our current apps for a LONG time.

Additional note: IBM (and other chip manufacturers) have a vested interest in telling everyone that parallelism is the future. They can't make faster chips anymore, they can only compete on sheer number of cores.

"Your snide attitude is a bit odd - does it make you feel good?"

Slashdotters have a chip on their shoulders. Something about being taken off the breast too soon.

Any way here's my search engine :)

Here's one thing to keep in mind. The hidden web. Search engines have improved, but a lot of content is still inaccessable.

What I don't get is that she's very dismissive of the Yucatan crater, saying it's too small. Well, it was big enough go spread iridium across the entire planet in pretty big concentrations, so I'm not sure what she's basing that off of. Her entire thesis seems to be that the crater is timed 300K years wrong, and that her volcano is closer to the time. But to me it seems that the best case she could make is that the crater in the Yucatan is the wrong one, since the die-off correlates very well with the iridium layer. She seems to want to make her volcano the interim winner, but I don't buy it. Not to mention, those eruptions were continuous over an extended period, while KT seems more abrupt.

Still, always good to try new ideas, I'm just not putting the crown on this one.

A very good comparison at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowe n1b.html

From the THEMIS web site:

Themis, the goddess of justice, wisdom and good counsel, the guardian of oaths in Greek mythology, represents the THEMIS mission. She will confirm without prejudice, as implied by her fame, one of the two competing theories for auroral eruptions. THEMIS, with her sword (representing instruments) and scales (representing science discoveries), has both power and impartiality.

Basically, the scientists chose this name because they are hoping their mission will help resolve some of the major controversies in magnetospheric physics thanks to it's advanced instruments and multi-spacecraft approach. They also probably realized it would make a good acronym. Thinking up a catchy acronym for a NASA mission is much harder than you think!

Google. What a mystique! They can 'innovate' new forms of -

Cross-site scripting exploits:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-01-n12 .html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=338

Exposure of personal and sensitive data:
http://www.finjan.com/Pressrelease.aspx?id=1261&Pr essLan=1230&lan=3

Data loss:
http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu/MT/vanhouse/archive s/000663.html
http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_featur es/google_email_troubles_continue.html

Site failure:
http://status.blogger.com/

Privacy violation:
http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html
http://www.google-watch.org/krane.html