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I'm impressed that this thread is not full with references to the LOGO programming language. LOGO is still (after decades) one of the best example for teaching programming to kids IMHO. And by "kids" I mean persons bellow the age of 12.

There are some commercial flavors (some are quite impressive), but my teaching of LOGO is based on the FMSLogo released under GPL http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/ (an updated version of MSWLogo) and of course the Berkeley Logo (UCBLogo) is a nice way to go, too http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html.

For starting, you get an interpreter ready to listen to your commands and an editor to "enter many commands" and/or group them in methods and many more nice things (you can of course write quite complex software, but for me this is not the point). You get to know a programming language which is alive for decades suited for children and why not teaching material about fundamental programming concepts which are mature and build over decades.

Understanding concepts like: a computer program (writing, saving, loading your source), program input/output, writing and calling methods (functions, subroutines whatever you want to call them) with or without parameters, syntax errors, loops which is not that trivial for small ages gets easy with LOGO and moving this turtle to draw on screen is a nice way to enter this world at these ages.

Afterwards there comes variables, decisions (if-then-else) and you have an environment to teach all the principles of programming which are used almost in every programming language the kid might be interested in the future. All these while moving a turtle (=having fun).

BTW, before the OOP paradigm became such a standard as is today, LOGO from the early beggining was kind of Object Oriented; the turtle is an object and commands to the turtle like 'forward 30' or 'right 90' are turtle/object-centric (object methods). Nowadays you can have many objects (turtles) moving around (our turtle is a class). Not just for historical reasons, kids at these ages get into thinking giving commands to an object which is a nice thing to have in their minds for their future findings in programming.

Oceanstore as well.

SETI@home

That's a misquote on the part of the article author. Windows 95 is not allowed. Period. No operating system that is not *currently* supported by its vendor/open source project is allowed. Exceptions will only be made for certain types of lab equipment and other devices that are both necessary and cannot be upgraded and there must be other mitigation plans (e.g. extra firewalls). Read:

http://security.berkeley.edu/MinStds/

(which is the actual policy) and then decide.

Here's the article text, moderators, please mod the parent into the ground!

Securing UC Berkeley's network

School looks to shore up security in wake of breaches.

Linda Leung,Network World,04/24/06

The University of California at Berkeley has made a name for itself in networking, with innovations such as Unix, Berkeley Internet Domain Name, Smart Dust and SETI@home. But the school has made headlines over the past few years for some things of which it is less proud, namely a couple of security breaches (a stolen laptop containing personal information on graduates and a compromised database of California residents).

At the start of this year, the university published a scathing self-study of its Information Systems and Technology department. It acknowledged the school's advanced IT network and talented professionals but recommended radical changes to the IT department's governance and structure (read the report).

Clifford Frost, director of Berkeley's Communications and Network Services (CNS), recently spoke with Network World Senior Online News Editor Linda Leung about what the university is doing to ensure that when people think of the school, they think "innovation," not "infiltration."

How has IT evolved at the university?

It's been haphazard. In the case of the network, it's been pretty organized. Back in the '80s, there were campuswide committees that said networking is going to be important so let's start building it up now. The campus financial and administrative systems are pretty advanced. But campus student systems [such as online registration and course catalogs] are less well-funded and organized because there has not been a single high-level sponsor. This is one of key things the campus is open to addressing in the reorganization.

Also: What makes Harvard's net tick

What is your security plan?

Every networked device has to have its operating system kept up to date with security patches - Windows 95 is not allowed unless you buy a separate firewall device and stick it in front of [Windows 95]. There are microscopes controlled by old operating systems - [the owners] have to put a firewall in front of them. We have software that people can use for free - they don't have to buy their own firewall or anti-virus software.

Having a policy only goes so far. McAfee's Foundstone scanner allows us to scan the network continuously for vulnerabilities. [If something is found] we tell [the device owners] to fix it or we turn off their access. Departments can log in and scan their own nets.

How else do you secure the network?

We do intrusion detection at the border of the campus network and more and more inside the network. We monitor to detect when systems have been broken into or are being broken into or about to launch an attack, and we can turn them off. We use McAfee IntruShield Snort, Nessus and Bro Intrusion Detection System. [Intrusion detection] is a big issue because we've had some pretty big security breaches on campus [see stories hereand here]. There is a big thrust in getting people to encrypt data on their desktop or laptop.

How do you get ahead of the security challenges?

The latest thing we're doing is getting people on campus to audit their systems, and the recommendation is to remove [sensitive i

Here's the article text, moderators, please mod the parent into the ground!

Securing UC Berkeley's network

School looks to shore up security in wake of breaches.

Linda Leung,Network World,04/24/06

The University of California at Berkeley has made a name for itself in networking, with innovations such as Unix, Berkeley Internet Domain Name, Smart Dust and SETI@home. But the school has made headlines over the past few years for some things of which it is less proud, namely a couple of security breaches (a stolen laptop containing personal information on graduates and a compromised database of California residents).

At the start of this year, the university published a scathing self-study of its Information Systems and Technology department. It acknowledged the school's advanced IT network and talented professionals but recommended radical changes to the IT department's governance and structure (read the report).

Clifford Frost, director of Berkeley's Communications and Network Services (CNS), recently spoke with Network World Senior Online News Editor Linda Leung about what the university is doing to ensure that when people think of the school, they think "innovation," not "infiltration."

How has IT evolved at the university?

It's been haphazard. In the case of the network, it's been pretty organized. Back in the '80s, there were campuswide committees that said networking is going to be important so let's start building it up now. The campus financial and administrative systems are pretty advanced. But campus student systems [such as online registration and course catalogs] are less well-funded and organized because there has not been a single high-level sponsor. This is one of key things the campus is open to addressing in the reorganization.

Also: What makes Harvard's net tick

What is your security plan?

Every networked device has to have its operating system kept up to date with security patches - Windows 95 is not allowed unless you buy a separate firewall device and stick it in front of [Windows 95]. There are microscopes controlled by old operating systems - [the owners] have to put a firewall in front of them. We have software that people can use for free - they don't have to buy their own firewall or anti-virus software.

Having a policy only goes so far. McAfee's Foundstone scanner allows us to scan the network continuously for vulnerabilities. [If something is found] we tell [the device owners] to fix it or we turn off their access. Departments can log in and scan their own nets.

How else do you secure the network?

We do intrusion detection at the border of the campus network and more and more inside the network. We monitor to detect when systems have been broken into or are being broken into or about to launch an attack, and we can turn them off. We use McAfee IntruShield Snort, Nessus and Bro Intrusion Detection System. [Intrusion detection] is a big issue because we've had some pretty big security breaches on campus [see stories hereand here]. There is a big thrust in getting people to encrypt data on their desktop or laptop.

How do you get ahead of the security challenges?

The latest thing we're doing is getting people on campus to audit their systems, and the recommendation is to remove [sensitive i

There already is one -- Open Sound Control.
Unfortunately it has only been implemented in a smattering of hardware, though it is available in a fair amount of software, including Max/MSP, SuperCollider, most of the Native Instruments stuff (their KORE hardware/softSynth system will be using it). Also iimplemented for Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.

I believe it runs over ethernet using UDP.

OK, back to the discussion....

I was thinking about what if I could build a peer-to-peer antispam system which might solve the problem of spam once and for all. For example, using a Kademlia-based distributed-hash-table might work. Your client-side outlook or Thunderbird plugin would do a hashing of your complete email message after the headers, and/or hashes the attachments and/or the fields contained in the headers, then quickly, using the genius of Kademlia (which I really don't understand too well) possibly combined with a local bayesian filtering system, you are able to quickly find out if a message is: 1. spam 2. mailing list 3. not spam. To prevent spamming just leave out 3 & 2, so that any message that gets reported at all is going to be spam; why would a spammer report their own messages as spam?

Of course they could try reporting known common email like mailing list messages, etc... that aren't spam as spam, but a local adaptive filter similar to gmail's spam filter, that adapts to each user would sort that out.

A further protection against spammers spamming the system would be a way to trust a certain node, like everyone has an option to generate a guid that identifies you as unique. Then over time, you build up a trust percentile with other people who marked the same messages as spam, and the more closer they do, the more they trust your choices, and you trust them.

This could even work for usenet, which is filled with so much spam that it makes it nearly unusable, especially since in the case of usenet generally everyone has the exact same message beyond the headers.

So after this genius brainstorm I searched for 'kademlia spam' and find this guys page:
SpamWatch - A Peer-to-peer Spam Filtering System
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/spamwatch/
Also he wrote this interesting paper:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/papers/ata_middlewa re.pdf

Here's a similar project, but unrelated:
http://www.mailavenger.org/

Also other things could be implemented, like for example, quickly reporting email worms and the like.

For more in-depth Kademlia information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

I was thinking about what if I could build a peer-to-peer antispam system which might solve the problem of spam once and for all. For example, using a Kademlia-based distributed-hash-table might work. Your client-side outlook or Thunderbird plugin would do a hashing of your complete email message after the headers, and/or hashes the attachments and/or the fields contained in the headers, then quickly, using the genius of Kademlia (which I really don't understand too well) possibly combined with a local bayesian filtering system, you are able to quickly find out if a message is: 1. spam 2. mailing list 3. not spam. To prevent spamming just leave out 3 & 2, so that any message that gets reported at all is going to be spam; why would a spammer report their own messages as spam?

Of course they could try reporting known common email like mailing list messages, etc... that aren't spam as spam, but a local adaptive filter similar to gmail's spam filter, that adapts to each user would sort that out.

A further protection against spammers spamming the system would be a way to trust a certain node, like everyone has an option to generate a guid that identifies you as unique. Then over time, you build up a trust percentile with other people who marked the same messages as spam, and the more closer they do, the more they trust your choices, and you trust them.

This could even work for usenet, which is filled with so much spam that it makes it nearly unusable, especially since in the case of usenet generally everyone has the exact same message beyond the headers.

So after this genius brainstorm I searched for 'kademlia spam' and find this guys page:
SpamWatch - A Peer-to-peer Spam Filtering System
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/spamwatch/
Also he wrote this interesting paper:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~zf/papers/ata_middlewa re.pdf

Here's a similar project, but unrelated:
http://www.mailavenger.org/

Also other things could be implemented, like for example, quickly reporting email worms and the like.

For more in-depth Kademlia information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

ATi is even worse - last I checked, they could perform only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floating point calculations in hardware.

And just in case you aren't aware, 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for anyone doing even the simplest mathematical calculations; for instance, with 32-bit single-precision floats, integer granularity is lost at 2 ^ 24 = 16M, i.e.

16777216 + 0 = 16777216
16777216 + 1 = 16777216
16777216 + 2 = 16777218
16777216 + 3 = 16777220
16777216 + 4 = 16777220
16777216 + 5 = 16777220
16777216 + 6 = 16777222
16777216 + 7 = 16777224
16777216 + 8 = 16777224
16777216 + 9 = 16777224
16777216 + 10 = 16777226
16777216 + 11 = 16777228
16777216 + 12 = 16777228
16777216 + 13 = 16777228
16777216 + 14 = 16777230
16777216 + 15 = 16777232
16777216 + 16 = 16777232
etc

For instance, consider the work of Professor Kahan at UC-Berkeley:

William Kahan

PDF File: Roundoff Degrades an Idealized Cantilever
PDF File: How JAVA's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
PDF File: Matlab's Loss is Nobody's Gain

Sun has a "quad-precision" floating point number for Solaris/SPARC, but, sadly, it's a software hack, and, like IBM/Sony/Cell/Playstation, far too slow to be used in practice.

I believe that IBM makes a chip for the Z-Series mainframe, which can perform 128-bits in hardware, but I imagine that it's prohibitively expensive [if you could even convince IBM to sell it to you in the first place].

The best configuration here would probably look like a fancy-schmantzy Digitial Signal Processor [DSP] chipset, from someone like Texas Instruments, capable of 128-bit hardware calculations, mounted onto a card that would plug into something very fast, like a 16x PCIe bus, which in turn would be connected to a HyperTransport bus [but boy, wouldn't it be really cool if the DSP lay directly on the HyperTransport bus itself?].

By the way, if anyone knows of a company that's making such a card, with stable drivers [or, God forbid, a motherboard with a socket for a 128-bit DSP on the HyperTransport bus], then please tell me about it, 'cause I'd be very interested in purchasing such a thing.

ATi is even worse - last I checked, they could perform only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floating point calculations in hardware.

And just in case you aren't aware, 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for anyone doing even the simplest mathematical calculations; for instance, with 32-bit single-precision floats, integer granularity is lost at 2 ^ 24 = 16M, i.e.

16777216 + 0 = 16777216
16777216 + 1 = 16777216
16777216 + 2 = 16777218
16777216 + 3 = 16777220
16777216 + 4 = 16777220
16777216 + 5 = 16777220
16777216 + 6 = 16777222
16777216 + 7 = 16777224
16777216 + 8 = 16777224
16777216 + 9 = 16777224
16777216 + 10 = 16777226
16777216 + 11 = 16777228
16777216 + 12 = 16777228
16777216 + 13 = 16777228
16777216 + 14 = 16777230
16777216 + 15 = 16777232
16777216 + 16 = 16777232
etc

For instance, consider the work of Professor Kahan at UC-Berkeley:

William Kahan

PDF File: Roundoff Degrades an Idealized Cantilever
PDF File: How JAVA's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
PDF File: Matlab's Loss is Nobody's Gain

Sun has a "quad-precision" floating point number for Solaris/SPARC, but, sadly, it's a software hack, and, like IBM/Sony/Cell/Playstation, far too slow to be used in practice.

I believe that IBM makes a chip for the Z-Series mainframe, which can perform 128-bits in hardware, but I imagine that it's prohibitively expensive [if you could even convince IBM to sell it to you in the first place].

The best configuration here would probably look like a fancy-schmantzy Digitial Signal Processor [DSP] chipset, from someone like Texas Instruments, capable of 128-bit hardware calculations, mounted onto a card that would plug into something very fast, like a 16x PCIe bus, which in turn would be connected to a HyperTransport bus [but boy, wouldn't it be really cool if the DSP lay directly on the HyperTransport bus itself?].

By the way, if anyone knows of a company that's making such a card, with stable drivers [or, God forbid, a motherboard with a socket for a 128-bit DSP on the HyperTransport bus], then please tell me about it, 'cause I'd be very interested in purchasing such a thing.

ATi is even worse - last I checked, they could perform only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floating point calculations in hardware.

And just in case you aren't aware, 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for anyone doing even the simplest mathematical calculations; for instance, with 32-bit single-precision floats, integer granularity is lost at 2 ^ 24 = 16M, i.e.

16777216 + 0 = 16777216
16777216 + 1 = 16777216
16777216 + 2 = 16777218
16777216 + 3 = 16777220
16777216 + 4 = 16777220
16777216 + 5 = 16777220
16777216 + 6 = 16777222
16777216 + 7 = 16777224
16777216 + 8 = 16777224
16777216 + 9 = 16777224
16777216 + 10 = 16777226
16777216 + 11 = 16777228
16777216 + 12 = 16777228
16777216 + 13 = 16777228
16777216 + 14 = 16777230
16777216 + 15 = 16777232
16777216 + 16 = 16777232
etc

For instance, consider the work of Professor Kahan at UC-Berkeley:

William Kahan

PDF File: Roundoff Degrades an Idealized Cantilever
PDF File: How JAVA's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
PDF File: Matlab's Loss is Nobody's Gain

Sun has a "quad-precision" floating point number for Solaris/SPARC, but, sadly, it's a software hack, and, like IBM/Sony/Cell/Playstation, far too slow to be used in practice.

I believe that IBM makes a chip for the Z-Series mainframe, which can perform 128-bits in hardware, but I imagine that it's prohibitively expensive [if you could even convince IBM to sell it to you in the first place].

The best configuration here would probably look like a fancy-schmantzy Digitial Signal Processor [DSP] chipset, from someone like Texas Instruments, capable of 128-bit hardware calculations, mounted onto a card that would plug into something very fast, like a 16x PCIe bus, which in turn would be connected to a HyperTransport bus [but boy, wouldn't it be really cool if the DSP lay directly on the HyperTransport bus itself?].

By the way, if anyone knows of a company that's making such a card, with stable drivers [or, God forbid, a motherboard with a socket for a 128-bit DSP on the HyperTransport bus], then please tell me about it, 'cause I'd be very interested in purchasing such a thing.

ATi is even worse - last I checked, they could perform only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floating point calculations in hardware.

And just in case you aren't aware, 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for anyone doing even the simplest mathematical calculations; for instance, with 32-bit single-precision floats, integer granularity is lost at 2 ^ 24 = 16M, i.e.

16777216 + 0 = 16777216
16777216 + 1 = 16777216
16777216 + 2 = 16777218
16777216 + 3 = 16777220
16777216 + 4 = 16777220
16777216 + 5 = 16777220
16777216 + 6 = 16777222
16777216 + 7 = 16777224
16777216 + 8 = 16777224
16777216 + 9 = 16777224
16777216 + 10 = 16777226
16777216 + 11 = 16777228
16777216 + 12 = 16777228
16777216 + 13 = 16777228
16777216 + 14 = 16777230
16777216 + 15 = 16777232
16777216 + 16 = 16777232
etc

For instance, consider the work of Professor Kahan at UC-Berkeley:

William Kahan

PDF File: Roundoff Degrades an Idealized Cantilever
PDF File: How JAVA's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
PDF File: Matlab's Loss is Nobody's Gain

Sun has a "quad-precision" floating point number for Solaris/SPARC, but, sadly, it's a software hack, and, like IBM/Sony/Cell/Playstation, far too slow to be used in practice.

I believe that IBM makes a chip for the Z-Series mainframe, which can perform 128-bits in hardware, but I imagine that it's prohibitively expensive [if you could even convince IBM to sell it to you in the first place].

The best configuration here would probably look like a fancy-schmantzy Digitial Signal Processor [DSP] chipset, from someone like Texas Instruments, capable of 128-bit hardware calculations, mounted onto a card that would plug into something very fast, like a 16x PCIe bus, which in turn would be connected to a HyperTransport bus [but boy, wouldn't it be really cool if the DSP lay directly on the HyperTransport bus itself?].

By the way, if anyone knows of a company that's making such a card, with stable drivers [or, God forbid, a motherboard with a socket for a 128-bit DSP on the HyperTransport bus], then please tell me about it, 'cause I'd be very interested in purchasing such a thing.

Nonsense. Not technically one species, but http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanointro.h tml.

Those guys are the REAL masters of climate and atmosphere manipulation!

Speed. OS X has many nice feature, but the fast execution of some computationally intensive applications is not one of them. Ditto for databases. For a slightly dated comparison check out:

http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/

The key issue is that for the (floating point intensive) application I and this person care about, his 2.7 pound Pentium-M Linux laptop is faster than his 44 pound G5 running OS X. I don't know if this holds for the intel macs....

It's called tsearch2. It has come bundled with PostgreSQL for a while now.

O'Reilly was talking about it at a conference in 2004, but I forget when it was actally released. Version 7.3 or something I think.

If you want to see something really cool in PostgreSQL, check out PostgreSQL's GIST support.

"And where is the fossil evidence that the duckbill platypus evolved from another species?"

You aren't that same person who was claiming that platypi were crosses between birds and mammals, are you?

Platypi are monotremes, one of three different sorts of therians. Like all fossil records, their fossil record is skimpy, but not a mystery.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/mammal/monotremefr.ht ml

At one time, before evolution or cladistics were really understood, laypeople found them quite weird. However, there is nothing evolutionarily inexplicable about them today. Nothing about them is really birdlike: from egg-laying to the bill, all their features are characteristically therian, the group from which monotremes, placental, and marsupials descended.

"True there are numerous species in existence today, but we cannot identify DIRECT parent and child species of any particular species, respectively."

Correct! Evolution works by branching. That means there are almost an infinite number more distantly related _cousins_ in the fossil record than there are direct ancestors of any living creature. Given how rare fossilization is (even for the dinos), there's no reason at all to expect every single creature that ever lived to fossilize, which is basically what you're asking for. You need to learn a lot more about how fossilization works.

Eiffel is kind of dated. Even its successor, Sather, didn't catch on, even though Sather has been out under the GPL since 1999. There are some great ideas in there, but the language was a bit too clunky. It's kind of like Ada and Modula in that respect; the concepts are sound but the syntax is too bulky to become popular.

On the other hand, all the languages listed here protect against buffer overflows without requiring an interpretive run-time system.

wait til you see the average credit this thing gets on SETI@Home - there'll be a TBlair@10DowningSt account at the top of the list before you know it.

wait til you see the average credit this thing gets on SETI@Home - there'll be a TBlair@10DowningSt account at the top of the list before you know it.

What do we lose? A portion of a global pie of openly-available information.

We go from having a truly-globalized free-market and free-trade of ideas and opinions, one in which the collective wisdom is available for everyone else in that global crowd, to a protectionist trade of information, in which you have to be a member of some elite, local club and know people to get in and gain access.

I'm thinking of so many parallels in computing and economics this subject makes my head spin; obviously I've started with a clear economics analogy. But what about the analogies from the computing world?

* Warez groups -- You have to know people and gain their trust to get in to some groups and trade with them. They have, in a sense, "regionalized" some of their content that would otherwise be made available (were it not illegal under copyright laws. That's another issue, although related in terms of the protectionist regulation that IP law imposes).

* Businesses -- Want access to internal corporate data? Hack one of their boxes (exploit stupid users with a bot you've written that is attached to an email claiming to have naked pics of Maria Sherapova, although, this assumes the spam filter doesn't detect and discard the message, and that the heuristics of the virus-scanning software doesn't detect your bot as a trojan); social engineer your way to a username/password combo (i.e. play con-artist); or become employed there. Businesses have cordoned-off their proprietary information from the public-at-large, except for product information.

* For-pay websites -- Many newspapers (such as The Economist and the NYTimes) require you to have a subscription to access premium content. They have compartmentalized their proprietary information into a pay-to-play region they've defined.

* Microsoft vs. F/OSS -- What better example for Slashdotters? :-) On one side, you have a closed, proprietary vendor who sections-off their OS code, etc. from the outside, and only if you are a super-player (e.g. a government of a highly-developed nation) can you gain access, and then only under restriction. The OSS world of software, by contrast, is open for all to see. MSFT closes off (regionalizes) their information to the rest of the world; OSS is open to the whole world. One is protectionist about their code; the other, free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech free-traders of information.

Those are some present-day examples of what happens when information is sectioned-off from the rest of the world.

Now imagine that being the case with *ALL* information, of all kinds -- not just corporate or proprietary information. Medical information; university research; open-source software; statistical data about a variety of subjects; the list goes on and on.

I began by saying this is a scaling problem. It is, and to make my case clearer from the computing side, answer this simple question: how much combined data do you have on your LAN at the moment?

In a private residence of just one or two people, you might have, at most, a couple TBytes -- and that's if you're recording TV shows and movies all day (legitimately, I assume!). Even on a large engineering university's LAN, you might have no more than a couple PBytes (I'm guessing; my last experience on a uni LAN was in 2001, when there were some 6 TBytes indexed by our unofficial file-share indexer, on a LAN with 26,000 students, plus who knows how much storage space the university's depts. officially had).

Now compare that to the rest of the the 'net 532,897 TBytes, and that was way back in 2002.

There is no reason or excuse for outright political/legislative *bans* on the flow of information on the Internet. Period. Restricting the rates at which that information travels (perhaps by way of packet-shaping), or restricting the access to

yea, you got to love that mach kernel http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/and how slow it is

"Are the authorities maintaining, on the one hand,
that evolution is documented by geology and, on the other
hand, that geology is documented by evolution? Isn't this a
circular argument?" Larry Azar, "Biologists, Help!"
BioScience, Vol. 28, November 1978, p. 714. _In the
Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood_
(7th Edition) by Walt Brown http://www.creationscience.com/on-
linebook/ReferencesandNotes65.html

The article is from pages 712 to 715.

This quote takes the cake for dishonesty. How this one is out
of context is fairly unique though.

Larry Azar at the time of this article was with the Philosopy
Department of Iona College in New Rochell, New York (
http://www.iona.edu/about/description.htm ). He describes
himself as a "philosophy teacher" and in the context of
biology he calls himself an "outsider."

His question, "Isn't this a circular argument?" is not a
rhetorical question, it is a real one. Basically this article
is a philosopher who is _not_ an expert in the sciences asking
a series of questions about biology including evolution in
hopes that biologists would respond and clarify the issues for
him. And they did exactly that. There were a number of letters
to the editor on pages 208 to 209 of the April 1979 issue
which also had an article in response called "Evolution: Help
for the Confused" by Bradley T. Scheer on pages 238 to 241. In
that article the quoted question was answered.

The young-earthers might as well quote questions asked by
students to instructors in freshman classes as "evidence" for
young-earth dogma.

The web components built into GNOME are only good for rendering simple HTML and XML and do not have any active scripting features/plugins etc. Think of it more as a preview for web documents, like image thumbnailing.

Unless those web documents need ECMAScript in order to render correctly. Before you flame me about principles that ECMAScript should never be necessary, think about documents written in languages not supported by major operating systems.[1] They need to be transliterated at view time from an ad-hoc character encoding into a stream of <img> elements that refer to glyphs representing the characters of the language, and it's a lot more bandwidth-efficient to do this using a script at the client side than at the server side, even with gzip transfer encoding.

[1] "I want to make sure everyone understands that we (Microsoft) don't add characters to Windows unless they are in characters that are in Unicode." (Citation) Unfortunately, not all scripts in existence are encoded.

You listen to the wrong radio stations. I've heard many of these groups on college and community stations like KALX, KEXP, etc. Those DJs also spout myspace addresses for themselves and many groups. Kinda like many people did with Friendster a few years ago.

This too shall pass unto the next fugly site whose owner is friends with certain press writers. That's the real trick about myspace; he has all the right friends in the right places.

So seti@home was successful after all! I can't wait to see all those new DELL PCs with true alien tech! Any Linux port to this new alien arch yet? It should be hard to get the spec from such a distant vendor!

BOINC can easily network thousands of PC and Unix servers to run simulation of this kind. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Here is an example of how old it is.

All this rock moving required years of heavy equipment operations. The construction site looked like a mall was going in. All this rock had to be not only placed, but anchored; the house is near the San Andreas fault.

The house is on Mountain Home Road in Woodside, recognizable by the gatehouse that looks like a Japanese teahouse. In the end, it looks rather modest; it just has a landscape that belongs to a rockier area.

So that's a real dream house, built for someone with a mania for big rocks.

Evolution is an amazingly large and complex system; I can say without a doubt that my lack understanding of evolution would preclude me from making as decisive a statement as "If you follow that through, mankind is likely to get less healthy, and less intelligent". I do not mean this to be a flame, rather I want to point out that there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that A) Evolution is occuring faster than we realize and B) there are factors besides random mutation that affect the ability of a Homo sapien to survive. What I mean by my second point is that with the creation of civilization, we have introduced a socio-economic element in to the process of natural selection. In other words, resources are now scarce on this planet (The demand for resources exceeds the supply) with seven billion of us thus we compete for resources. Certain socio-economic factors play a role in what resources an individual has access too thus improving the chance that their progeny will survive.

Hypothetical situation time!
The year is 2050 and the glaciers have melted cutting the amount of usable and farmable land mass throughout the world. Wars, faminine, plaque, the seven signs of the apocolypse have all come to bear; whose left standing? The people with the socio-economic wherewithall to weather the storm.

As I've been writing this post I've been developing my own thoughts on the topic and I would actually argue that your logical progression is incorrect. The greatest strength of evolution is randomness; although people who already have superior genes more readily pass them on to the next generation, that does not preclude randomness from stepping in and giving someone a step up. Under no circumstances in evolution is lots of offspring a bad thing; at least not one I'm aware of. Breaking the cycle just allows for mutations in other groups giving other people a chance at survive. Plus many evolutionary advantages come with disadvantages too so maybe all us smart folks will die to some brain eating disease. The species survives, all the smart people die and within 100 years there are smart people again. Go evolution...

More specifically, learn Scheme using SICP. MIT has videos of the lectures, and Berkeley is podcasting both audio and video streams of current class session. There is a free Scheme environment for all manner of OS free and not here

There's no need to bring inflammatory psychological speculation into it. We tax the rich for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that's where the money is. I won't try and argue whether it's morally justified or not, but I will note that the top 0.5% of US citizens hold 25% of the US's wealth. If you were a politician and wanted to be re-elected by popular vote, who would you hand the bills to?

There are two major problems with using manned space exploration missions as a public relations tool: (1) very few people who dream of becoming astronauts will ever get to travel into space, and (2) NASA gets extremely bad press whenever lives are lost. Astronauts do go out to schools occasionally to do outreach, but there are many more scientists analyzing data from unmanned missions working at NASA or at universities who do this kind of outreach on a regular basis.

I regularly participate in a program where I answer children's questions about space exploration. Data from most of the NASA spacecraft missions are now publically available online. Anyone can go and see the latest data from a number of NASA and even NOAA satellites on the Internet. This also makes it possible for K-12 students to participate in space exploration by analyzing data from NASA spacecraft for a school science project. There are even instruments on NASA spacecraft that have been built primarily by undergraduate and graduate students in science and engineering. Some NASA spacecraft, like the mission recently launched to Pluto, contain a CD of the names of average people who support space exploration. The Startdust@home (http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) project will allow Internet users to help analyze data from the Stardust mission.

Admittedly, scientists have not always done a good job of involving the public in space exploration. However, they are getting a lot better at it, thanks to the Internet. Unmanned missions can be an even better tool than manned missions for getting the public interested in space exploration, when outreach programs are planned properly. There are many ways that the public can participate in space exploration through unmanned missions and experience the excitement of discovery for themselves. People just need to make the effort to participate in these opportunities. With manned missions, we can only experience new discoveries vicariously through the astronauts, and there are limits to where we can send humans with our current technology. Personally, I think this is why the media seldom covers Space Shuttle launches in the detail that they used to do in the 1980s.

Mod parent up!

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/spirochetes. html

Check out some of Professor Kahan's shiznat at UC-Berkeley:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/

How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
WARNING: PDF DOCUMENT

MORAL OF THE STORY: Precision matters. You can never have enough of it.

Check out some of Professor Kahan's shiznat at UC-Berkeley:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/

How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
WARNING: PDF DOCUMENT

MORAL OF THE STORY: Precision matters. You can never have enough of it.

I'd like to contribute to the project but it doesn't have a Boinc client? Other than the original project page, all I could find is this and it doesn't say anything about Boinc. Too bad. You'd think they'd try to take advantage of the large install base rather than require people to install an additional client.

There's other information regarding the votes besides this particular audit. You may consider U.C. Berkely a leftist institution, but their Quantitative Methods Research Team has quite a bit of credentials. U.I.Chicago, Notre Dame, Cortnell, U. Penn., U. of Wisconsin, Stanford, and Princeton might also be in a blue states, but they are also very highly respected. Other schools that have weighed in include Temple, U. of Utah and Southern Methodist U. Mathematical arguments like this may not sway dick and jane, but I would expect them to have more credence with the slashdot crowd:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Pol ls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf (PDF)

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national
poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%.
Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as
different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1
in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to
chance.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:
1. Statistical Sampling Error - or Chance
We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be
ruled out.
2. Inaccurate Exit Polls
This is the theory that Edison/Mitofsky put forth. They hypothesize that the reason the exit polls were so
biased towards Kerry was because Bush voters were more reluctant to respond to exit polls than Kerry
voters. Edison/Mitofsky did not come close to justifying this position, however, even though they have
access to the raw, unadjusted, precinct-specific data set. The data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their
report show how implausible this theory is.
3. Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of
Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election
results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted
cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu:7101/

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade,
respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch
voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in
Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of
81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm
Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should
have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 -
a difference of 19,300 votes.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the
significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting
cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of
electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for
President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this
appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once
in a thousand chances."


http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/us/FL2004/WandF lorida2004.pdf (PDF)

Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in just the
most critical st

This is a very interesting forum, we have been working on making the job seeking process much easier and organized. We are part of a project team at UC berkeley and you are invited to participate in a survey that will help us better understand the role of information documents other than resumes in the job application and candidate reviewing process. This survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. Survey: http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=366 504 Thank you for your support. Your opinions are very important to us. Please start the survey below. Our project page: http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu:8080/joshuach/verts earch/project.jsp

Mining uranium releases heavy/highly soluble radon gas http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html which is highly radioactive and pollutes any nearby water table. Currently it kills more people than drunk driving per annum.

As for breeder reactors, put in 5 kg of plutonium waste to use as fuel and get 15kg of highly nuclear waste from the other 10kg of elements (pollonium and paladium i think). In other words - the tonnage of waste created by these reactors increases exponentially, why do you think they were banned?

The reason is deliberate, CURRENT GENERATION NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS ARE ENGINEERED TO PRODUCE PLUTONIUM FOR WEAPONS AS THIER MAIN PRODUCT and electricity as a by-product. Consequently they are heavily subsidised to make them appear economically viable.

The only realistic future for nuclear is the INTEGRAL FAST REACTOR, liquid metal cooled, uses 99% of the radioactive elements U238/U239 (vs less than 3% for cold war reactors)and current nuclear waste becomes a useable fuel. No need to mine uranium any more as there is enough spent fuel to use for many thousands of years, and no need to worry about those pesky terrorist spoiling your day because of the pyro-process closed loop feul re-processing. These are the types of reactors that we need to invest in around the world because they virtually eliminate waste transuranics, the volume of waste decreases and the remaining fissile radioactive material (the plutonium ash) is reduce to a half life of a mere 500 years.

Cold War reactors, should all be left to run out thier remaining lifespan and decommisioned in favour of these new generation reactors, in every way Integral Fast Reactors are safer and are engineered to produce electricity as a main product.

Sure it's easy to accept the rhetoric about Cold-War nuclear power but it's all been said before (power to cheap to meter etc), however SAFER NUCLEAR ALTERNATIVES EXIST. This is a no-brainer and I'm suprised how many people get duped into thinking that we stopped being able to come up with any new methods for generating energy since the 1950's. You think patents are only used to stop software being developed? What do you think these industry's lobby groups are doing, influencing politicians to make introducing alternative enery sources easier? Do you think these industries care that they pollute the air, make greenhouse gasses or kill generations that aren't even here yet? Public opinion must FORCE goverments and corporations to invest in better technology or we face a bleak future.

The reality is our economies are heavily dependant on oil and coal and we have reached a point where it is obvious that this economic model is not sustainable. Cold War Nuclear (including pebble bed) power is no better than these because it to produces deadly wastes from the raw material stage to the spent feul stage, and lets not forget the millions of litres of radioactive water that is also produced.

There is no future in somthing that kills our kid's kids kids kids kids.... It's time for you 'Cold War'-nuke jocks AND anti-nuke types to take a pragmatic approach, look at the facts and evolve your thinking. A sustainable nuclear alternative exists and now is the time for people to get thier heads out of the sand and relegate coal, oil and cold-war-nuclear to where they belong - history.

IFR information is available here http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/designs/ifr/ifr1.html

"Silicon Snake Oil" by Cliff Stoll http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/ : deeply ambivalent!

I'm pretty sure these guys - http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - are using the CPU for their modeling, but why not the GPU? I think the way the Climate Prediction project (http://climateprediction.net/) works is the software crunches numbers for a while (e.g. how did the weather progress on the morning of June 3, 1811) and then takes a snapshot of the result at periodic intervals. Seems just right for a graphics card, given its modeling strengths and download/upload constraints.

Send them a message containing the link: Click here to be removed from our mailing list..

Perhaps it's easier never to use its. Just use it is whenever you can, then use its in the other places.

BTW It's Berkeley not Berkely (http://www.berkeley.edu/)

There are a number of things TFA doesn't tell you, or misleads you about.

1) The Climate Prediction experiment has been going on for several years now, first as a standalone application (like Seti@home), and now as both as a BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) application.

2) There are multiple BOINC [distributed computing] projects with greater than 10,000 users (see here, and here.) - thus even if the BBC meets it's goal of 10k users, it will still be far from the largest.

These are related to Bufo Alvarius aka The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert.

But (unfortunately), the venom of Bufo Marinus does not seem to contain the strong hallucinogenic compound found in Bufo Alvarius (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine aka 5-MeO-DMT).

While some have claimed that bufotenine does have a psychoactive effect, it is disputed, and I wouldn't try it. It definitely does have a cardiovascular effect, which can be dangerous.

See TOAD VENOM...THEIR TOXICITY & PSYCHOACTIVE EFFECTS.

So, I don't think I will go toad hunting to Australia. Good old psylocibin or LSD seem much safer...

FWIW, you can buy something like this right now. The Lemur is a touch screen that supports multiple touch-points at once, and communicates over Ethernet via OpenSoundControl. I have one on my desk at work, and it works well -- e.g. I can use 5 fingers to drag 5 different balls around the Lemur's touch-screen simultaneously, and see my actions mirrored instantaneously on the software on my PC.

"This does nothing to elucidate how, after any number of generations, a salamander could become a rhinocerus."

Ok, now, this is gonna sound silly, but the changing color thing is only something that we have been able to observe in ONE HUMAN LIFETIME. Just one. Now, let's do some math. The Devonian period, when amphibians first appeared, was about 417 to 354 million years ago. Now, let's assume a typical lifespan of a single organism is, oh, 10 years. That means that there have been 35.4 million generations, minimum, between a current rhinoceros and the earliest amphibians. We've seen major physical changes in just hundreds of generations, not to mention mating separations between populations. But I suppose looking at evidence and extrapolating things is invalid. Who knows... the sun isn't gonna come up tomorrow because it just doesn't feel like it, and God wants to test our faith. Or something.

Four letters: KALX

are there still what we consider to be "dinosaurs" - and what were considered "dragons" prior to 1850 or so - roaming the remote places of the earth?

Why "remote" ? You've got plenty of them right out the window !

Thomas