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Soon we'll all be eating cloned beef from cattle raised in high density feedlots who stand around in their own feces and urine pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. Then the meat will have to be irradiated to kill the resistant strains of E. coli created in the cattle's stomachs because were forced to eat corn that they didn't evolve to eat.

Since consumers will expect their irradatiated meat to glow in the dark, they'll create glowing cattle just like the glowing pigs.

Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma if you want to or watch Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms talk about the real future of raising meat (long) and how to turn vegetarians back into meat eaters and why it's important to have promiscuous healthy earthworms.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

Have fun.

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~timothyv/images/ magritte.jpg

http://ideiasemdesalinho.blogs.sapo.pt/arquivo/La% 20Promesse_Rene%20Magritte.jpg

http://www.ariadne.org/studio/michelli/magritte.jp g

http://www.latal.de/char/magritte.jpg

And my personal favorite and current background wallpaper:

http://www.ap.stmarys.ca/~smuaps/quotes/Magritte/M agritte,%20Ren%E9%20(Belgian,%201898-1967)%20-%20L e%20Beau%20Monde,%201962,%20oil%20on%20canvas,%20p rivate%20collection%20(Small).jpg

For more information, read Falling into a Black hole (with nifty animations). Specifically, see answer to question 5. Or see question 3 of the Black Hole FAQ.

Gravitational heating left over from the formation of the planets and radioactive decay both provide for heat in the cores of the planets in our solar system. For alot of detail on this subject you can look here

Time to tune into the new century. SETI@home has been available under the GPL for several years now. Nothing prevents you from modifying it and using the modified version.

I keep asking for people to send me processor specific optimizations and so far only a Mac/PPC version has shown up. I'm ending up writing the SSE version myself which is taking a damn long time. I'd even like to see versions that use the GPU. The problem is not that we are unwilling, it's that I'm one guy with limited time. So far nobody is sending me code...

So put your money where your mouth is and send me some code. Join the boinc_opt mailing list. If no one is willing to put in the work then why the hell should I bother doing it myself.

That was before BOINC. Now the SETI client is open-sourced, and there are optimized versions. If your optimized version returns results like the standard client, you get credit; if its results are different, you don't.

The problem is, as discussed earlier, GPUs do single-precision math, and SETI requires double-precision.

Particularly devastating was their carriage return invention three years later. In between, the IBM Selectric introduced the "golf ball" electric type. The writer was taken out of the process by making things too easy!

So in just four short years that shook the literary world, the unfortunate Class of '61 saw the demise of pushing down manual keys, that pushed manual bars up, with a manual level you pushed to advanced lines.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) funded the BLEEX project in 2000. Last November, U.C. Berkeley's Human Engineering and Robotics Laboratory, successfully demonstrated the first experimental Exoskeleton in which the pilot (i.e., the wearer) could carry a heavy load, while feeling only a few-pound load.

The DARPA funded BLEEX was prototyped to allow soldiers to carry 70 pound packs across flat and sloped terrain with hopes of 150 pound capacity in the next 6 monthes.

Both are wonderful applications for exoskeleton technology; between the nature of asymetrical warfare and the retirement of the baby boomers, I think we're going to see alot more veterans and grandpa's go robo. Now if we could only improve that 30 minute battery...

The blog entry just cherry picks some data from Master's thesis work done by Andrew Fiore at MIT (he is now at Berkeley). His online dating research papers can be found here.

Fiore's thesis is a much more interesting read then the blog entry .

The blog entry just cherry picks some data from Master's thesis work done by Andrew Fiore at MIT (he is now at Berkeley). His online dating research papers can be found here.

Fiore's thesis is a much more interesting read then the blog entry .

Why not link to TFA? Here is a more direct link to the research. I wonder why we got linked from the summary to another summary. Maybe because the summary is new today but the research is 2 years old.

Anyhow, none of the numbers seem all that surprising, except that 55% of active members are women (63% of all members were men).

actually you got all of what you said wrong.

In fact, no.

Tell me why, in "democratic" countries around the world, exit polls are used as a very reliable marker to check for vote rigging, and are considered almost perfect.

They aren't considered "almost perfect" by anyone who, you know, knows things. For example, take this article by RFK Jr. He wrote what you say, that exit polls are today a perfect science. His article is based largely on the DNC Report about the 2004 elections. One of the authors of that Democratic report recently wrote: "Exit polls have always been as much art as science and their problems have been getting worse just as presidential elections have been getting closer" and "Given what we know, it appears to be the case that the official vote count for all of its difficulties was more reliable than the exit poll."

This guy is an expert in statistical analysis of voting patterns. He maintains that Gore should have won Florida in 2000 (not that it was stolen, mind you, but that errors [specifically, the butterfly ballot] awarded the victory to the wrong guy). He co-authored the Democrats' own report of the 2004 elections. And he entirely refutes what RFK said about exit polls.

He also wrote in that same article: "unlike Florida in 2000, there is no scientific evidence that any of the reported irregularities in Ohio [in 2004] rose to the level of changing the outcome." Again, this is the Democrats' own expert. He claims that, simply, the Democrats lost the election in Ohio, and there's no evidence to suggest they should or would have won it apart from any anomalies, and that the exit polls were wrong, and the actual polls were right.

how the CA special emissions work. What if you have a car you've bought outside the state.

The CA "special" emissions work largely by becoming the de facto standard, since their emissions standards get adopted by several other states, not just California. Roughly 25% of the cars made meet whatever the Californians required at the time it was made, because to put it simply, it would cost more to design separate Civic, California Editions and Civic, Everyone Else Editions, except when the cost of manufacture is greater than the cost of designing a completely separate poorer-mileage version of the car.

Interesting fact I found looking this stuff up: Only California can make more-stringent emissions requirements (see paragraph 6 about "why should anyone care"). No state can require less pollution than California requires.

And yes, if you want to register a car in California it has to pass California's tests. Or you pay more. If your chips don't make the exhaust exceed their smog levels or whatever they're checking for these days, then I'm pretty sure that they won't make you change them. Of course, you could always just forget to mention them ;)

"Nearly any document that describes an innovation can qualify as publishable evidence of prior art. Brochures, conference papers and company invention disclosure forms are all fair game. The important thing in establishing prior art is to make sure that a document has a clear publication date."

"Contrary to what distributed computing propaganda says"

Propaganda like this?

The United Devices client has it at 50% by default, and is easier to configure.

One group is actually modeling climate change using the BOINC distributed client. I don't participate myself, as most of my home computers are old and too slow to run the client-- and I'd rather just switch off the box.

http://climateprediction.net/

What is climateprediction.net?

Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

I am sure there are a numer of ways to learn Scheme if you are interested. Here's one: follow the CS-61A course podcast of Brian Harvey's class at Berkeley.

Compromising Diebold machines seems to be a regular method of swinging elections in Florida ( UC Berkeley )

The white hat community needs to start undermining vulnerable e-voting technologies whenever and wherever possible. Just put a few Democrats into office in the bible belt.

The CEO of Diebold is on record as a dyed in the wool Republican: "Our job is to deliver the election to George W Bush". Problematic for a vendor with so much trust. But once their machines start swinging votes for the other side, they'll soon start adding security.

Current semester is here, I believe if you go looking around on that site you can see archives of past semesters too. The classes are a mix of a few high-enrollment courses which tend to get taped every semester, and courses that are taped once every few years to refresh the archive. You can see these on iTunes too, there may be a phobos URL somewhere on the website if you look.

A (as far as I know) complete set of notes (sometimes going back many years in the archives) exists at http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/

Web casts are made available based on what room the course is scheduled in. As you may expect, the general trend is that larger rooms (which are given to larger classes) have web casting equipment.

But I have found lecture notes in general to be very detailed anyway and in some ways advantageous to audio in the ability to skip back and forth.

Just two links:

http://ocw.mit.edu/
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Consider this: video recording of Introduction to algorithms class, notes, exams, assignments, ... http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-046JFall-2005/LectureNotes/i ndex.htm

Free and apparentely available to everybody. Does somebody know other links to a projects that would be as good as this?

Just like they do at Berkeley. I've listened to a couple of the History 5 lectures, and even without the slides they're quite enjoyable. I suppose it might be a bit harder for math classes though.

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

A lot of our classes are webcast for anyone and everyone who wants to view the lectures. Apparently, they are experimenting with podcasts too. Webcasts are a great resource for people who go to class and want to catch up. They're also a great resource for people who can't make the class but want to keep up.

The truancy issue is between the professor and the student. Most of our professors don't do anything to encourage attendance. They offer their lectures; you can take them or not. You're also free to learn by any other means available to you. Do the graded coursework, pass the exams, and you'll get the grade you deserve. Most students who go to lecture tend to do better.

If you really want to attack the truancy issue, one thing professors will do from time to time is give pop quizzes. If they're worth enough of the grade, students actually get nervous about missing the classes. Another option (you can watch the CS 61C lectures to see it in action) is that professors use "clickers" in class. So, instead of being penalized for ditching, you get bonus points for participating in lecture; you can't participate if you aren't there.

Lecture videos are avaliable for a number of courses at ocw.mit.edu. Another poster commented that OCW content was very poor. This may have been true early on, but it's clearly getting better.

UC Berkeley now has video/audio lecutres avaliable for a number of their courses at webcast.berkeley.edu

Sometimes you can find lectures from MIT and Berkeley at video.google.com. For example, Physics for future Presidents

What is your exact intent? Students are going to still miss / skip class (podcast or no podcast). Remember every student learns differently
Though I'm not entirely proud of this, I slept literally through an entire semester of classes (of 20 semester credit hours), both because
I had to commute 2 1/2 hours and because 2 of the professors were that boring in person. That being said I had a tape recorder which allowed
me to record all of my classes (with permission of my professors). I listened to the tapes on the bus and train while I studied going to and from
college, and ended the semester with 3 A's and 2 B+'s.

Now I'm not a genius, but I believe everybody learns differently. An unrestricted podcast may help some of your students actually get better grades.
Granted, like other posters have said you'll have good and bad students in your classes. Students who want to learn will and others will not.

You may want to look at UC Berkeley's approach on iTunes. I attend a different university, but I
suppleiment some of my classes with their free podcasts. Just something to consider.

Regards,

MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)

Archiving everything in your house is a bad idea. Archiving the Internet is a very different thing. First off, who is going to be the moderator? You? What if I disagree with your opinion of what is worthy of archiving or not? What happens if, as I pointed out, something that you chose not to archive would have turned out to be useful in prosecuting an identity thief (or worse)? Any moderator will have absolutely no way of knowing what information will be useful in the future and what information won't be. Then there's the practical aspect: How many people do you suspect it would take to screen each and every page in the Archive for it's suitability for six year olds?

And do they also do the same for the Internet proper? All of the information that you object to exists on the Internet itself. It's not hard to find. You can find the exact same information on Google, so should we moderate them also? Every other search engine? Usenet? Yahoo Groups, Google Groups? Do you begin to see the futility of your quest?

Your argument is also unfounded considering the IA has a removal policy in place for exactly the sort of info you object to "Occasionally, data disclosed in confidence by one party to another may eventually be made public by a third party. For example, medical information provided in confidence is occasionally made public when insurance companies or medical practices shut down. These requests are generally treated as requests by authors or publishers of original data." If they are archiving your credit card number, let them know and they will remove it. As for Kiddie Porn, considering they would go to prison for hosting it, I suspect that they do their best to remove it ASAP.

Regarding your story about Paypal-protect.org, why didn't you just contact Yahoo to have his email account shut down? In their terms of service: "You agree to not use the Service to: 1. upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;". It doesn't much matter how enthusiastic the guy is about selling your CC data, if you have no way to contact him he won't be too successful.

And here is another link: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/

"... all TV and VCR that are turned off cost Americans nearly a billion dollars a year in electricity."

"[One study estimated] that the phantom load from TV's alone was equal to the output of a Chernobyl sized power plant. "

"There is no question that rolling blackouts could have been avoided if Californians cut their dryer use in half. Heck, it would only take something like a 10% reduction in electrical use across the country to shut down half of the nuclear power plants."

"... all TV and VCR that are turned off cost Americans nearly a billion dollars a year in electricity."

"[One study estimated] that the phantom load from TV's alone was equal to the output of a Chernobyl sized power plant. "

"There is no question that rolling blackouts could have been avoided if Californians cut their dryer use in half. Heck, it would only take something like a 10% reduction in electrical use across the country to shut down half of the nuclear power plants."

Several other people here have mentioned Logo - an excellent choice, in my view. I recommend taking a look at the three volumes of Brian Harvey's Computer Science Logo Style .

The Logo tree has spawned several other languages - two worth looking at are NetLogo and StarLogo TNG - both of these languages are particularly well-suited to modeling projects, the first with a traditional text-oriented perspective, the second with a graphical programming interface.

Another programming language specially designed for education is Alice - the language is designed so students can graduate rather quickly to more complex object-oriented languages. Python, Ruby, and Java would all be good follow-up languages to Alice.

Finally, let me gently suggest that you not follow through with at least one portion of your original plan: the game c-jump is a very poor choice for introducing students to programming. Not only is the game completely inappropriate for any child over the age of 3-4 (it is just a very boring version of snakes and ladders), it is also extremely poor from a pedagogical viewpoint, with no creative activity on the part of the students, reinforcing notions of code as arbitrary sets of commands. The first couple of tutorials in Alice will be far more enjoyable for your students, and actually get them involved in some real thinking about programming.

if you look past the turtle and graphics, logo is similar to lisp or scheme, and just as powerful. The UCB logo books demonstrate a pascal compiler written in logo, IIRC.

I put idle machines to work on SETI@Home (with permission of course).

It was reported in 2004 that Shrimp have the fastest 'kick'.

But does it run Linux?

This comment selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.

The old-timers in the crowd probably already know about this one:

Replacing CapsLock with Left-Control on X
Create the file ~/.Xmodmap with these contents:

            remove mod4 = Meta_L
            remove mod1 = Alt_L
            remove lock = Caps_Lock
            keysym Meta_L = Alt_L
            keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
            add mod4 = Meta_L
            add mod1 = Alt_L
            add control = Caps_Lock

If you are running something like XFree86, add

            xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

to your ~/.xinitrc file or ~/.xsession file. If neither of those exist, you can always do it from the command line.

text stolen from http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/swapx.html

The most apparent flaw is that the theory of Evolution as I understand it proposes that living, conscious creatures were generated from inanimate matter.

Another, albeit less easy to understand flaw is that the theory of Evolution proposes that higher forms of life (e.g. humans) Evolved from lower forms of life (e.g. monkeys/apes).

I have a cat that may have evolved from a tiger of some sort.
He certainly looks the part.
Apparently no one has taken the time to research where domestic cats come from.
I've always wondered how they could have evolved from something like the sabre toothed cat.
Probably not, considering the smaller teeth that my cat has.
Perhaps my cat evolved from another line of cats, here's a page with tons of info on that possibility.

Interesting, isn't it?

Due to the efforts of Willam Kahan at U.C. Berkeley, IEEE 754 floating point, which is what we have today on almost everything, is far, far better than earlier implementations.

Just for starters, IEEE floating point guarantees that, for integer values that fit in the mantissa, addition, subtraction, and multiplication will give the correct integer result. Some earlier FPUs would give results like 2+2 = 3.99999. IEEE 754 also guarantees exact equality for integer results; you're guaranteed that 6*9 == 9*6. Fixing that made spreadsheets acceptable to people who haven't studied numerical analysis.

The "not a number" feature of IEEE floating point handles annoying cases, like division by zero. Underflow is handled well. Overflow works. 80-bit floating point is supported (except on PowerPC, which broke many engineering apps when Apple went to PowerPC.)

Those of us who do serious number crunching have to deal with this all the time. It's a big deal for game physics engines, many of which have to run on the somewhat lame FPUs of game consoles.

You're Just Wrong(tm) about that, actually. See BOOST. No, not the masochistic c++ template library (ANYTHING written in C++ is masochistic), Berkeley's Out of Order Stack Thingy. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~satrajit/cs252/BOOST.p df

Probably mostly just an accident of history register machines went superscalar first and "won" (mostly, because maybe since stack machines were more efficient, the need for superscalarity didn't hit so early...),. But, in short: stack machines, with similar design overheads to register machines, can extract at least as much concurrency as register machines, maybe more.

Who can forget the English Electric Leo-Marconi KDF9, the British stack machine from 1960. That, and the Burroughs 5000, were where it all began.

Stack machines are simple and straightforward to build, but are hard to accelerate or optimize. Classically, there's a bottleneck at the top of the stack; everything has to go through there. With register machines, low-level concurrency is easier. There's been very little work on superscalar stack machines. This student paper from Berkeley is one of the few efforts.

It's nice that you can build a Forth machine with about 4000 gates, but who cares today? It would have made more sense in the vacuum tube era.

the problem with this project is that it addresses the last mile without addressing the previous 20, 30, 40 miles. remote villages don't have internet connections, so there's nothing to share. what actually needs to happen is these guys need to combine their work with another project at UC Berkeley.
The UCB project has essentially taken off-the-shelf routers and expanded their range to 40 miles.
The 802.11 networking standard, more commonly known as "Wi-Fi", is defined by a set of international standards that limit its range to about 200 feet. (This is why computer-toting travelers cluster in groups at Wi-Fi "hotspots" at airports and cafes, and why a laptop user on the street can horn in on Wi-Fi from a nearby house.)

Brewer and his group first pinpointed the factors that make these standards ill-suited for long distance networking, then developed software to overcome the limitations. Combining their software with directional antennas and routers to send, receive and relay signals, the team has so far been able to obtain network speeds of up to six Mb/s at distances up to 40 miles.

These speeds are about 100 times faster than dial-up speeds and carry 100 times as far as regular Wi-Fi. The technology allows anyone with about $800 for a pair of small computers with directional antennas to network with another location within 50 miles and in line of sight. If there happens to be a hill in the way, no problem: A couple more antennas at the high spot can relay the signal between stations.

Anyone know if there's a Java implementation of "structural regular expressions" as seen in the Sam editor on Plan 9?

Once all of these new Ethanol refineries are built the cost should drop substancially. Also as technology increases over the next 5 years or so the efficiency of Ethanol will grow dramatically. This will make it cheaper for the consumer and better for the enviroment. The only loser here is OPEC. The state of California, not known for supporting corn growers for the hell of it, may be voting this November to require all new vehicles sold there to be able to run E85.

Ethanol Sucks

W00t Ethanol
 

Actually, it always bugged me that the TV series put the Stargate in Cheyene Mountain. If I remember the movie right, it was in an abandoned missle silo in North Dakota. Which made a lot more sense storywise — why locate such a secret operation in a base where thousands of people work? But of course, to make Vancouver look like Colorado Springs, you just have to avoid getting the Fraser River in the background. Lot harder to make it look like Grand Forks.

This changed over seven years ago. To be unambiguous, Google (and others) refer to the updated license as the "new BSD license."

See: ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.Lic ense.Change

Sheesh

Kids today.