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You can't expect someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

Sounds like we need more plankton.

Indeed, in no small part because the acidification of the oceans from increased CO2 (quite independent of the warming effects) is dissolving the calcareous exoskeletons of many varieties of sea life, the base structure of coral, and much more. The reduction in CO3-- ions compared to HCO3- reduces their access to building material in the first place.

Note that we are not on the verge of running out of oil.

The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand.

I doubt we are on any verge of the ability of the earth to absorb co2 either.

Tell it to the climate scientists who are measuring uncomfortable trends like rapidly rising methane emissions from former permafrost in Siberia, and the rumored rise in methane alerts from tanker detection systems along undersea gorges such as the one at the Hudson River. Former sinks are becoming sources.

Whats more, all that fossil fuel carbon came out of the atmosphere to begin with anyway. Burning it just returns it back to the atmosphere to be absorbed again by life for the cycle.

Coal strata mostly date from the carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. Oil and oil shale dates as far back as the Cambrian, over 500 million years ago. This carbon has been out of circulation for as much as half a billion years, and no extant ecosystem or living species is adapted to the conditions which prevailed at that time.

As I mentioned before, the last time we had a surge in atmospheric CO2 (end of the Paleocene) we had a mass extinction. What sort of delusion lets you think that it wouldn't do the same thing all over again?

If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit.

I highlighted that in case anyone reading this had doubts that you are delusional or dishonest.

As for man and his technology - we're a tertiary effect at best

Humans with mere axes and muscle-powered saws denuded the forests of Michigan in just a few years. (One consequence was the extinction of the Michigan Grayling, which required cold water in streams protected from direct sun. These ceased to exist, and the fish along with them.)

That was over a century ago (the fish finally died out in the 1930's). Since the late 19th century, our ability to change the environment has increased many-fold. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 tracks human emissions. In short, anyone who says what you're saying is either lying or delusional.

If it suited the alarmist industry, we'd be back to expecting the next ice age and probably trying to put lamp black on the glaciers to melt them - like they wanted to do back in the 1970s.

You are confusing a media-driven phenomenon of the time with scientific discussion which never claimed that glaciation was about to recur; this shows the shallowness of your knowledge. The scientists were looking at the historic climate cycles and noting that the current orbital fo

A good feature of the NY 911 cell phone plan is that citizens send images when they choose and a good feature of the permanent cameras is that they operate as a deterrent.

But these can be combined, as they are in the design of a research project called Video 911. It sends data before something has happened, but only when someone on the ground feels a threat to safety. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control (or choose to signal some emergency) and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

It's more little brother than big brother. More details are in the paper and presentation.

A good feature of the NY 911 cell phone plan is that citizens send images when they choose and a good feature of the permanent cameras is that they operate as a deterrent.

But these can be combined, as they are in the design of a research project called Video 911. It sends data before something has happened, but only when someone on the ground feels a threat to safety. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control (or choose to signal some emergency) and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

It's more little brother than big brother. More details are in the paper and presentation.

A good feature of the NY 911 cell phone plan is that citizens send images when they choose and a good feature of the permanent cameras is that they operate as a deterrent.

But these can be combined, as they are in the design of a research project called Video 911. It sends data before something has happened, but only when someone on the ground feels a threat to safety. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control (or choose to signal some emergency) and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

It's more little brother than big brother. More details are in the paper and presentation.

the camera can be 'confiscated' and your picture is gone too. With a camera phone, the picture can be emailed to the world before the 'bad guy' can take your phone away....

That observation was the impetus behind a research project called Video 911. It's different from the new move in New York (which is a great advance) in that it is intended to operate even as a deterrent. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

The deterrence would derive from the assailant knowing that their image, voice and actions have already been transmitted to an evidence store. More details are in the paper and presentation.

the camera can be 'confiscated' and your picture is gone too. With a camera phone, the picture can be emailed to the world before the 'bad guy' can take your phone away....

That observation was the impetus behind a research project called Video 911. It's different from the new move in New York (which is a great advance) in that it is intended to operate even as a deterrent. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

The deterrence would derive from the assailant knowing that their image, voice and actions have already been transmitted to an evidence store. More details are in the paper and presentation.

the camera can be 'confiscated' and your picture is gone too. With a camera phone, the picture can be emailed to the world before the 'bad guy' can take your phone away....

That observation was the impetus behind a research project called Video 911. It's different from the new move in New York (which is a great advance) in that it is intended to operate even as a deterrent. When you launch the app on the phone it begins transmitting video and sound to a call center. The user holds a button on the phone to signal that they still have control. When they release the button, they have a short window to type in a code to neutralize the recording. Otherwise it is inferred that they have lost control and the video and GPS data are passed on to an operator who decides whether to dispatch police.

The deterrence would derive from the assailant knowing that their image, voice and actions have already been transmitted to an evidence store. More details are in the paper and presentation.

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I think some public schools might disagree.

(okay, so the platters are a little on the heavy side)

It occurs to me that the power consumed for this kind of calculations is quite high. Back when I was doing seti@home, the classic one, they explicitly told people not to let computers running for the sole purpose of calculation, even asking them to turn them of when you guys in the US had a power crisis. There are people running farms of computers just for the fun of it. *sigh*

seti, primes and stuff might be important, but I'd like to still have some power left to radio a reply to E.T.

"All that said, yes, Kyoto is not going to deal with the problem. However, given that we have enough poeple, such as yourself, who refuse to acknowledge the extent of the climate change problem, I hardly expect that an international treaty which includes more strict emmission curtails will ever come into being"

Ok I am going to wade in here.
The latest tactic I have seen is people pretending that all discussion is over on this issue.
It is not even close to an agreement. Now climate change is a fact anyone that looks at the facts of the matter will agree that the climate swings even radically at times. The example I like to use to illustrate this is the T-Rex. Show of hands from the people that believe that the T-Rex was stomping around in snow?
Right it sucks to be cold blooded. I *think* most paleontologists agree they lived in a tropical climate.
The first response I hear is usually that the continents are drifting and the T-Rex existed when Montana and South Dakota were far further south. I would invite you to go to UCLA Berkley's quick time movie showing the drift of the continents over the last 750 million years. It shows the position of North America 65 Million years ago. It was at the roughly the same latitude as it is now but further east from its current position.
So unless you think that the Dinosaurs lived in snow you can not logically state that the climate does not change all the time and can change wildly. Then the entire matter comes down to how much effect if any man is having on the climate.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/geology/anim1.html

There is just so much IRRATIONAL crap expressed here and other places. And it is not by accident that these irrational viepoints are expressed - it's all about SOCIAL ENGINEERING - see:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/1 0/27_lakoff.shtml/

Instead, rationally expressed viewpoints (in the case of any science) must be based on the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Doesn't anyone in the USA study the SCIENTIFIC METHOD in school now a days (or ever?)? There are no such things as theories; on the other hand in SCIENTIFIC METHOD there is a HYPOTHESIS:

" In empirical research, assertion made about some "property" being studied. Such an assumption is made early in the investigation, guiding the investigator in searching for supporting data. The hypothesis is found to be true or false at the conclusion of the research study, depending on whether or not the proposed property actually characterizes the "elements"."

There are NO scientific published research pieces utilizing the SCIENTIFIC METHOD that proves that:

There is a god.

HIV is the probable cause of AIDS

People's activities are THE cause of global warming.

All children are born evil.

And that Ohio will slaughter Forida ;)

There's a "god"! REALLY?! We humans cause "global warming" (read universe warming)? REALLY?! Saddam took down the Twin Towers. Oh REALLY? HIV causes AIDS. REALLY?! Ohio will slaughter Florida. REALLY?!

Lakoff explains it all:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/1 0/27_lakoff.shtml/

Webcast courses from UC Berkeley: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/

The latest court case at the USA's Supreme Court - showed that there is no scientific proof (via the scientific method - grade 9 science remember?) - "that we humans are causing GW". But at the same time it's interesting to note that Canadians don't buy the GW Bull while apparently USA citizens do believe the GW Bull (just like 40% of USA citizens believe that Saddam took down the Twin Towers).

I have always been perplexed as to why USA citizens are less rational when it comes to all kinds of issues from "IDers know more about science than anyone else" to Single Sex Marriageis Bad", or that "Ohio was going to clean Florida's clock".

Fortunately, George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science explains it all: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/1 0/27_lakoff.shtml/

In Canada (Lakoff explains):

is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in ...........

In The USA (Lakoff explains):

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline -- physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

From the orginal POSTGRES white paper

From the Wikipedia article

You can't compress this stuff unless you do it losslessly. Compression artifacts mess up photometry - if you're trying to compute apparent brightness, you need to factor in things like how bright the ambient sky is, and how much point sources get spread out (FWHM, seeing). That is, a point source that passes through the atmosphere looks like a normal probabliity distribution because of atmospheric distortions. So to get an apparent brightness, you have to correct for this effect. If compression artifacts are introduced, FWHM is thrown off, and you have no idea how "crisp" your image really is. That's why these data sets are so large. Quite literally, they're doing a pixel dump from their massive ccd all night. But hey, somehow I doubt they'll be using this telescope for anything but object detection. There's no reason to store it all except to compare a current picture to one in a base set, kinda like KAIT on stearoids.

Webcasts available from Cal: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/index.php

....including "Operating Systems and Systems Programming" and "Machine Structures" are here. Hopefully these are a good listen.

I've also gotten through most of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures and although there's a lot of chalk-on-blackboard noises that you're not able to see, you can still pick up quite a bit of good info.

Joel on Software loves to remind us of this article whenever some company claims to have vaporware that will allow "anybody" to program computers:

"No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering"

by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (author of "The Mythical Man Month")

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings /NoSilverBullet.html

"Computer", Vol. 20, No. 4 (April 1987) pp. 10-19.

Gentoo/FreeBSD: license problems require a development pause

Edit: Timothy (drizzt) found us the escape route. Applying ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.Lic ense.Change we can legally drop the clause 3 of 4-clause BSD license, and be done with it. I'm writing in this moment the code to do this, but it might require a new stage to come out. Anyway, the problem is solved, and I think I'll mail FSF for them to actually put that note somewhere, as it doesn't seem to be that documented around here.

This is a very sad blog by my side, although I hope this can be cleared up soon so that I don't have to be this sad anymore in the future.

Basically, the public Gentoo/FreeBSD development is officially halted starting tonight, as there are some license issues between libkvm and start-stop-daemon .

libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause . For this reason, until I can clear this problem up, the stages are pulled off from the mirrors, and won't be put there in the mean time.

s-s-d is not the only GPL-released package that links to libkvm actually, GDB does it, too, but I think that on the GPL part, we're fine with the license, as it's a library that comes with the operating system, the problem is that we don't abide to the advertising clause (and we'll probably never be able to do so) and thus I don't think we're allowed to redistribute binaries.

I've mailed David O'Brien, who maintains the devel/gdb6 port for FreeBSD, hoping that he knows more than me about these interactions, in the mean time, I consider the public development of Gentoo/FreeBSD halted. This does not mean that I won't continue working on it, but we cannot currently redistribute it.

Bear with us until we can find a solution. If we cannot link libkvm, I'm ready to try cleanrooming it into a MIT-licensed library.

A shadow lies upon all BSD distributions

Posted by Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò 15 hours ago

Or so it seems. I've written yesterday about the troubles that forced me to get the Gentoo/FreeBSD stages out of the mirrors, to feel safer and to avoid issues to the Gentoo Foundation that would get bit if there was a problem; today I was invited to join #gnu by mattl on Freenode (who was in turn invited to join #gentoo-dev by christel), and there I talked with ams (Alfred M. Szmidt), who agreed with me that the clause is way too vague (what would be considered "advertising material"? a poster? a booth at an expo? a website? a document explaining the installation procedure? an article on a magazine?), and to be safe we'd have either to get the permission from all the entities involved there, or list all the acknowledgements for all the entities (at least 110 if I have to depend on the quick'n'dirty grep I posted yesterday, but probably a lot more after seeing the files directly, see later on in this post). Both strategies are difficult to apply on both short and long terms.

But this is not just a problem for us, as the title of this post already made you suspect. All of the *BSD-derived projects took some way or another code licensed 4-BSD that is not under copyright of UCB, that would then require them to provide the acknowledgements on all the "advertising material", whatever that is. And I'm pretty sure most of the *BSD projects have something that can be considered advertisement even to the stricter of the meaning.

So even if the situation is nasty, and not easy to cope with, and not even quick to deal with, we have one advantage: the same situation is true for other projects, and thus it's well possible that we'll be able to find all the 4-BSD licensers and get them to change to 3-BSD, or replace the code with cleanroom implementations that would be licensed under a saner license.

Javer is taking care to contacting FreeBSD Foundation, while Timot

CIL performs static transformation on source code during compilation, not a dynamic transformation at runtime or a just-in-time compilation. See the documentation at http://manju.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/ for more information. Also, Java uses a virtual machine to run code compiled specifically for the VM. You might instead refer to Apple's Rosetta runtime translation from PPC instructions to x86.

Dunno about "these people", but the findings of cognitive science are an often recommended addition to economists' toolkits. See, for example, the work of Nobel prize (for economics) winners Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, and Herbert Simon.

All economics is founded on a small number of assumptions about how people make decisions (specifically the micro-economic decision by a consumer to purchase a product). Descriptive decision theories such as those developed by Kahneman & Tversky and Simon have shown these assumptions to be false. Unfortunately, the majority of economics courses in universities only briefly, if at all, touch on cognitive science, decision theory or psychology. Real-world decision-making, despite efforts since the 1940s (lookup "Decision Theory" and Von Neumann & Morgenstern) does not reduce to a mathematical analysis.

This isn't quite true. While lanugages and programmers rarely use extended precision floating point numbers directly, the registers on IA-32-based chips are 80-bit registers. All instructions operate on 80-bit values. Values that stay in registers over the course of a computation benefit from the added precision.

For most applications, this isn't terribly important. But, for the accuracy of numeric applications, it's very useful. Numeric applications that use the FPU are inherently more accuarate on IA-32 systems than other architectures. Unfortunately, most languages don't let the programmer control when values stay in registers (the register keyword is ignored by most compilers), so any benefit from this for most software is purely accidental, or the result of hand-coded assembly.

I'm glad to see a language taking extended precision seriously. As libraries that rely on numeric code become more common (think data mining, feature tracking in images, automated car-parking algorihtms, etc), the effects of accurate computations will be visible to more end users. But, it may be too little, too late... Intel is moving away from the FPU and towards SSE, with a max of 64-bits for floating point numbers. It may be years before we get another commodity processor line that gives us a little extra accuracy for free.

For some more reading on the topic, here's a good academic rant with lots of examples and experiments that illustrate the differences between 64-bit and 80-bit floating point numbers.

-Chris

What about always using 100% of your CPU? I run the BOINC client for the Rosetta@HOME project and tell it to crunch as much data as it can with idle CPU time. It is ALWAYS up and running. So, if I have this running on a machine that also uses Tor then the "create extra CPU load" method would fail.

At least the sea took Cthulhu with it!

It needs to be clarified here that 'negative refractive index' means that the group velocity is in the opposite direction as the phase velocity. The net flow of energy is therefore in the opposite direction to that of the individual wave-fronts. This really isn't very exotic, and occurs whenever the dispersion relation of a medium has a negative slope. Also the 'Super Lens' has been demonstrated over a year ago and was reported in one of the most prestigeous scientific journals (Science). Here's a link to the article: http://xlab.me.berkeley.edu/publications/pdfs/27.S cience_4.22.2005_superlens.pdf

You have the basic experience to continue learning, and pass on the relevant parts to your students. Some resources I would recommend are the MIT Opencourseware and the Berkeley Webcast.

These resources provide two similar but different approaches to learning about computers and programming.

Berkeley Machine Structures first 8 lessons or so provide a quick and dirty intro to C.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978347
Yeah it might be over their heads, but you should be able to watch it ahead of time and glean enough understanding to show it to them.
Dan Garcia, who i think is currently teaching it is also a great and entertaining prof.

I agree - hard work should be rewarded. I have no problem with people who start a company with a great idea and become very wealthy - I'm very glad for them when it happens. What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well

To me, "Social Justice" means that some reasonable limits should be placed on the accumulation of wealth, otherwise you end up with an Aristocracy.

150 years seems like a cherry picked number. It coincides with the end of slavery in the US, which was a revolution of sorts and one of the violent upheavals where wealth was forcibly redistributed. It was followed by quite a bit of progress as the descendants of the freed gained on the rest of society. If you look at the last 50 years, however, you'll see most estimates show wage disparity has about doubled and wealth disparity tripled.

Wrong. Whatever timeframe you want to look at that includes a reasonably large amount of time over the past century actually shows relative decreases in the share of wealth amongst the top 2%, top 1%, top .1% and even top .01%. http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/estateshort.pdf Please look at page 13 of the PDF. For instance, in 1913 the top %.01 of the country owned about 10% of the overall wealth and now they own about 4% (with some relatively small increases over the past decade).

The first point you bring up is a myth, long ago put to rest, I'd thought. As for the economies, they vary quite a bit as does the nature of their stance on technology and employment.

I studied economics and I disagree. Please enumerate the countries that demonstrate your point that are so similar to the US that a reasonable person couldn't disagree. If you can't or won't, then you really can't reasonably assert, against the status quo, that this is simple myth.

Since we have historical records of numerous localities that have changed their economic policies over time we have some pretty well normalized ideas about how certain economic policies are likely to effect other "quality of living issues."

Name them. You are the one that is stidently arguing for change and asserting that it is somehow obvious, certainly this must be a trivial exercise then.

For example, if you are looking at violent crime you'll see the single strongest correlation between it and any other factor anyone has documented is wealth disparity. I don't know a serious sociologist that has even argued this in decades.

I can only assume you are referring to the correlation between poverty and crime. However, even if you take for granted that less poverty means less crime, that does not mean that social transfer programs will actually achieve, over the long run, either less poverty or less crime. If these social programs cause a net loss in wealth overtime, increased unemployment, etc, then the benefits of the transfer are easily outstripped by the losses. For instance, France has a huge social welfare system, and yet they have hundreds of thousands of Arabs in their streets that have been essentially rioting for a long time now (long since before the US press picked up on it) despite it (likely due to the fact that they can't find jobs, and so on).

The US has practiced socialism in the form of education, police, roads, industry subsidies, welfare, social security, prisons, and military for a long time. The level of this socialism is not particularly low, but it is directed in different ways than seem ideal.

You are essentially arguing that any form of taxation is socialism. This is just plain ridiculous. Socialism is essentially about wealth redistribution for its own sake. Taxation, as has been practiced in our economy (by and large) and others long before "socialism" was even an invented, is about recognizing that there are certain costs that have to be pooled. The intent of them as well as the degrees of taxation are very different.

Actually, the majority of the wealth in the US is held by a small number of people, not necessarily billionaires but a very small percentage. Almost all of these people inherited this wealth.

Prove

And on a much larger scale? http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Many of the points in the interview implied that software was simply soaking up all the hardware performance, and perhaps we could squeeze more out of the software. I completely agree, except ...

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings /NoSilverBullet.html

The problem is that the software is an order of magnitude slower than it needs to be because the hardware has increased in performance by 2 and 3 and 4 orders of magnitude. If we had held the software to the same standards as we used to back when the hardware cost more than the programmers, it would be more efficient - but would only be able to make use of a couple megabyte of RAM and disk. The looseness of current software is part and parcel of harnessing the hardware. The hardware didn't just allow us go loose with the software we wrote - it allowed us to use abstractions which were measurably less efficient, but which had the side effect of allowing us to harness the hardware in the first place.

As a pair of trivial examples, take arrays and dictionaries. When I ask interview questions like "Design a hashtable" or "Reverse a linked list", many candidates have to actually step back and think about the question! 30 years ago, designing a good hashing function was the mark of true talent, and gains were to be had by selecting the linked-list scheme which best suited the problem at hand. These days, many people don't really know why you'd use a map versus a hash_map, or a vector versus a deque. And, for the most part, they don't really need to.

There's been great controversy in libraries about the privacy implications of tagging books. The San Francisco Public Library board nixed the library's idea to switch from barcodes to RFID, even though the latter makes library circulation more accurate. Berkeley essentially fired its library director for implementing RFID tagging of books. Studies show that there are potential threats to privacy either by setting up a scanner outside of the library to see what people are taking out, or by targeting certain "hot button" titles and scanning to see who exits the library with them. These threats seem to be pretty outlandish to me since there are generally easier ways to monitor people's reading, like just following them around the library to see what book they take off the shelf. But some people are very worked up about this. Yet the library use of RFID is much less likely to result in a loss of privacy because the RFID tag will contain only an accession code, not the title of the book nor the ISBN. This is because libraries use a true item-level number for circulation, since they can have more than one copy of the same book. One would have to access the staff module of the library system to make the connection between the code and the book. With bookstore tagging of items, my guess is that at least part of the code on the tag will be the ISBN, which reveals the book title. It will be interesting to see if the same people get worked up about the bookstore's use of RFID if it ever hits the US. Right now, it's still considered too expensive to tag individual books.

This is an absolutely amazing project. Forget the space program; forget SETI--if this thing works as designed, pure science will gain more in 2008 than it did in the previous decade. But, they need your help! The energy output for this thing is just incredible that if an entire beam were to go off-course and hit the wall of the accelerator, there would be a rather sizable explosion. Even smaller errors can add up, damaging the accelerator over time. The LHC@home project lets you donate your spare CPU cycles to help calibrate the machine in order to minimize the risk of accidental wall collisions. Come on, I know there must be some physics geeks out there... show your support! Given the sorry state of pure science research in the USA, this may be your only chance...

Democracy for America, the follow-up to Howard Dean's Dean for America organization, is running a "Put paper ballets on the agenda" drive right now. They want people to tell Nancy Pelosi, as the future Speaker of the House, to make this a priority for next year's Congress.

So if you care about this issue, make sure she hears about it!

For what it's worth, I filed testimony in the EFF lawsuit, OPG v. Diebold, where Diebold was suing kids who (like me!) posted to the Web copies of some Diebold memos in which you can read about Florida precicints with negative 16,000 votes for Al Gore and Diebold "upgrading" the software to uncertified (read: "illegal") versions in California.

http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~maratb/readings /NoSilverBullet.html Insurance has a concept called churning. That's what these new fads sound like to me for programming.

This link http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/ho w-much-info-2003/execsum.htm/ lists the amount of new TV programming at 70,000TB per year or 31,000,000 hours of original content (This is roughly 2.2GB per hour.) At 1.5GB per hour it would come to 46,500TB per year. I am sure that these numbers will go up considerably once HDTV is mandated, since HDTV comes in at 69GB per hour. Using these figures (and capacity doubling every 1.5 years) it is roughly 40 years before we have a 3.5" hard drive that can hold one year of original TV programming.

The reason you get cancer is (VERY generally speaking) not because your body is stressed but because DNA replication and repair is not perfect. It leads to mutations which, in a VERY VERY unlikely event, create immortal and invasive cell lines we clinically call cancer.

Well, you being a biochemist and doctor, I highly doubt that anything I say is going to sway your opinion...but, no offense, instead of seeing cancer as having a single cause (e.g. DNA replication and repair leads to mutations), I see it as a multi-faceted problem, with the biggest factors being stem cells, enzymes, diet/nutrition, and lifestyle and exercise. The biggest problem with mainstream medicine, in my opinion, is that everything is treated in isolation.

• In 1902, John Beard, a professor of embryology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, authored a paper published in the British medical journal Lancet in which he stated there were no differences between cancer cells and certain pre-embryonic cells that were normal to the early stages of pregnancy

In 2000+, we are just starting to see that cancer cells contain pre-embryonic stem cells that form the very material that John Beard saw in 1902. See:

http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2004/1227/070.ht ml

• The same John Beard also noted that the body had a way of regulating this material, to keep it from getting out of hand. In the same 1902 Lancet article, he pointed out that one of the ways the body keeps these cells in check is by the use of enzymes.

Note: See the 1993 study, almost 100 years later, by Nicholas Gonzalez, where he used pancreatic enzymes to get these results on patients with pancreatic cancer (And btw, Gonzalez based his treatment on research done at the turn of the last century!):

Five of 11 patients in the initial series, which was sponsored by the Nestle Corporation, survived for 2 years or more and the results were published this past spring in the journal, Nutrition and Cancer [33(2):117-124 (Note:The 5-year survival rate for all patients with pancreatic cancer is only 4 percent.)

• If folic acid is in short supply, Ames found, thymine levels drop and a large amount of uracil instead of thymine is incorporated into human DNA. This leads to chromosome breaks when DNA is being repaired and subsequent mutations. The findings in the Fertility and Sterility report support this model, the authors claim. (reference: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/0 2/26_diet.html)

Go to google and type in "poor diet causes dna mutations" and then read my post from the Lancet again. The above reference is just one of many, many examples of poor diet causing DNA mutations, and there are several other vitamins, not just folic acid that play a role in cancer prevention. The bottom line is, they don't have cancer rates in third-world countries like we do in the United States. It isn't environmental, just read the Lancet article already cited and it isn't genes...but it is dietary/vitamin related.

I could cite research article after research article, but I'm not going to sit here all day ( Although, I could post more if it will actually be read).

The bottom line, for me, is this: I can count on a couple of fingers the number of people I have known that had cancer and went the traditional chemo/radiation/surgery treatments and lived more than a year afterwards. But I have personally known, and known through friends and co-workers, more people who put some of the above research into action and skipped the chemo/radiation/surgery and went on to live normal, healthy lives.

Again, cancer is a multi-faceted problem. Most Americans don't want to change their diets and/or lifestyle, they want to take a pill and be cured. I don'

I don't know how Richmond compares to the rest of the US. I've only ever lived in the San Francisco Bay area. One other commenter says it's one of worst areas in the country. I doubt that, you don't get many movies about the gangsters of Richmond and on the whole, the Bay Area is fairly affluent.

The part of Oakland that has its own school district is Piedmont. Note its geography. It's easy to find confirmation of what I say about the racial makeup of Piedmont and Oakland and comments about Piedmont schools compared to Oakland.

Caught the video, and while I don't have sufficient physics or math to certify what he's talking about, I have been following the plasm fusion field for years and am glad that someone has followed up on the fusor concept.

However one of the things that Dr. Bussard points out is that he is unable to simulate the experiment due to a lack of computational resources, in particular he states that he had one contracter bail in the middle of the contract when he realized that the problem could not be computed on a "reasonable budget" with existing resources.

I think there may be a way around this by using the parallel approach initially setup by Seti and now called 'BOINC'.

Can I suggest that some of the really smart numerics guys take a hard look at the processing model and potential resources available by BOINC to see if it's a sufficiently good fit to apply in order to try simulating some runs, perhaps initially targetting the model (WB6?) that gave the high fusion counts? Can it be done? Because if it can, then it *should* be done.

I know that I'd be willing to switch my BOINC processing cycles over to such a simulation, and I doubt that I'd be alone in doing so. Heck, I'd even be willing to help out on the non-numerical coding end of things...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - for reference...

That's true. Everytime when someone says "we're going to run out of oil" what they really mean is that "we're going to run out of cheap oil".

If you got the time, take a look at this page, watch the lecture from 8/29/2006, and in about the middle, the prof will show a chart and explains everything.

This is nothing new... I can' believe people actually paid money for this study. I could've done it for half the price!

I have a CS undergrad too. I had the same concerns about areas of weakness in the education I received.

I highly recommend the MIT Open Courseware and the Webcasts at Berkley.

Each provides a quite different approach to CS education. Just remember that you did not learn everything you will ever need to know in college. Hopefully your undergrad taught you how to learn new information quickly.

Building large software systems is hard, but experience shows that building large software systems that actually work is even harder. And trying to do all this before your competitors has proved fatal to many software projects. This course covers techniques for dealing with the complexity of software systems. We will focus on the technology of software engineering for the individual and small team, rather than business or management issues. Topics will include, among others, specifications, principles of design and software architecture, testing, debugging, static analysis, and version control.

This course is unique in the CS curriculum in that students are involved in a large-team project. You will see what it takes to collaborate with people with different skills and approach to software development. Students select the topics of the projects and almost all aspects of developement (programming language, libraries, build environment, etc.).

I regret never being able to schedule this one when I was there, so can't comment on how it would have prepared me...

Sorry but you have completely misunderstood what evolution is about. There is no "evolutionary ladder", where some things are "more evolved" than others. No organism on the planet today is superior to any other - as long as it manages to survive, that's good enough, whether it's a human being that can travel to the moon or a microscopic bacterium that can kill said human being. Evolution is about how species change over time. Initially, all species were marine. Then a few adapted to the point where they could live on land. Then some of those land-dwellers went back to the sea. The reason we're quite sure this happened with dolphins and whales is because they're mammals and they must go up to the surface to breathe, whereas fish can "breathe" underwater. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/ is a good place to learn what the theory of evolution actually says if you're interested.

It does exist already.

But the earliest living things on earth might have been bacteria like the ones near hydrothermal vents. They're in a kingdom called Archaea and are small and simple in design.

Their chemical traces have even been found in sediments from the Isua district of west Greenland, the oldest known sediments on Earth at about 3.8 billion years old. This means that the Archaea (and life in general) appeared on Earth within one billion years of the planet's formation, and at a time when conditions were still quite inhospitable for life as we usually think of it.
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The atmosphere of the young Earth was rich in ammonia and methane, and was probably very hot. Such conditions, while toxic to plants and animals, can be quite cozy for archaeans. Rather than being oddball organisms evolved to survive in unusual conditions, the Archaea may represent remnants of once-thriving communities that dominated the world when it was young.