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A couple quick points.

The blaming Bush thing I know is cool and fun, but the United States Senate told the Clinton Administration 99-0 that Kyoto wasn't doable in the United States because of the economic costs, so really any CO2 emissions control system that will cost tax revenue, jobs and votes is dead in the Senate. People like to say W is sticking his head in the sand, but the political reality is that in the United States 100 Senators have to vote on this, 1/3rd of them are up for election every two years and they don't want to stick thier necks out on the line for Kyoto or Global Warming.

If we are only looking at the last 100,000 years for a clue as to climatic change then we aren't looking at the entire climatic history of the Planet, we are looking at 1/2520th of the climatic history of the Earth since the PT event. Do we know what happened during the other 251,900,000 years? Do we know what the Sun did? Nope.

Why are some of the other planets in the Solar System under observation also warming at the similar rates as the Earth?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/0 4/21_jupiter.shtml

Either planets under go cyclical actions which we don't understand yet, with the Earth and Mars warming while the equitorial region of Jupiter warming while the poles cool, or something is effecting the planets at the same time (Solar) or it's all a crazy coincidence.

Personally, I think it's Solar activity, likely a long term variability in the Sun we don't understand yet. Or pirates and the FSM.

For print resources I would suggest:

Understanding Search Engines by Michael Berry and Murray Browne

as well as

Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto

For online resources I would of course direct you to the work of our Search Focus R&D Group

So they don't look like teh little rocketship diagram we have grown used to all these years.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/virus.gif

I should point out that the fungus in question might actually be a species of Cordyceps rather than Entomophthorales. There's a cool photo of a beetle that was killed by a parasitic fungus at bugguide.net.

The problem with finding prior art is that you need to find one piece of prior art that covers all the aspects of a claim. You can't mosaic them. The prior art we used in trial was the following:

• A. Fox, E. Brewer, "GloMop: Global Mobile Computing By Proxy", Position paper, (Sep 1995), Used to be available from: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox/glomop.

• Joel Bartlett, Experience with a Wireless World Wide Web client, Digital WRL lab Technical Note TN46

• Stefan Gessler and Andreas Kotulla. PDAs as mobile WWW browsers. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 28, No. 1-2, 1995, pp. 53-59.

• Joshi, Anupam, Weerasinghe, R., Mcdemott, S., Tan, B., Bernhardt, G. and Weerawarana, S., "Mowser: Mobile Platforms and Web Browsers'', Bulletin of the TCOS, IEEE Computer Society.

The general concept was clearly obvious back then. But the patent had some specific details that Inpro claimed were not obvious. I believe they were obvious to someone in the field in 1996. Clearly the judge agreed.

Oops, should have googled:
preprint apparently available at http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/LeftBrainWhorf.p df

Even the most softcore porn featuring a 17 year old is illegal,
JB Ramsey,

Meanwhile, there's a woman in a bikini strattling a man in an ad on a website targeting young girls.
http://www.girland.com/

Meanwhile Planned Parenthood wants girls on the pill. Of any age.
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/teens/thepill.h tml
http://www.eadshome.com/plannedparenthood.htm
http://www.ppwi.org/?processor=content&sectionpath =30/31/33&complexcontentid=766

Meanwhile sexual content is a marketing tool used to get the attention of teens.
http://www.focusas.com/SexualBehavior.html
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/sexrevol.ht ml

Meanwhile a Kraft commercial starred a junior high scool-age boy offering his cheese sandwich to a young girl. When she accepts,
Barry White's "let's get it on" plays.
http://www.thefixx.net/printthread.php?s=d98713dfe a3bd42a3bdb0aa1b8097b7b&threadid=537&perpage=13

Meanwhile Dave Matthew's band "crash into me" is (was, 10 years ago) played on radio stations anytime day or night. Meanwhile "sex and candy" was on the radio day and night.

Meanwhile Walmart sells thongs geared to young teens
http://www.menstuff.org/archives/walmart.html#2002

Meanwhile many marketing campaigns across the nation are either:

Promoting some (shirt,dress,jeans) as a way for girls to look sexier and thus more attractive to boys.

Using shows that do promote teen sexuality (and are thus more attractive to teens) as a vehicle to promote their items (sponsors of the afore - mentioned Doogie Houser episode)

Meanwhile MTV, in addition to showing "love in an elevator" and Madonna's "like a prayer" video (again, dating myself) begins a show TITLED "MTV undressed" where teens frolic in bedrooms wearing underwear. Unmarried, bi, gay, or straight seems to make no difference.

We're out to protect the young people. give me a fucking break.

It really amazes me how naive people are.

Here's a really unscientific way to see how much damage emissions form cars vs geological damage.

Look at the map of California. Imagine that Los Angeles , San Diego, and San Francisco are just black, nasty, unbreathable poison. Compare that to the rest of the square footage area of the state.

Now compare that to the San Andreas fault line http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/0 1/09_quakes.shtml

What will cause more damage?

Do the same for the northwest and compare to Mt St Helens and other Yosemite vents.
The vents of Yosemite do more toxic spewing than the rest of the US driving public day per day.

If I were an alarmist, I'd be moving the hell out of the northwest too. Indonesia just had a quake and I'm sure that the rest of the plates on this planet will adjust too.

1986

January CNN is the only network to air live coverage of the space shuttle Challenger explosion.

No one could deny the believability of the Jan. 28, 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, for instance, thanks to CNN's live coverage.

A good resource on evolution is the University of California Museum of Paleontology's Understanding Evolution page at http://evolution.berkeley.edu

A good resource on evolution is the University of California Museum of Paleontology's Understanding Evolution page at http://evolution.berkeley.edu

And as for the free content for UC Berkeley courses, we have only 100-level (or lower) classes which are basically prerequisites for a UC Berkeley education. I'm sorry to say that if you were looking for course content, you'll need to look elsewhere.

Somewhere like http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html. Not all classes are active, but there's archives. Berkeley doesn't have an official OpenCourseWhatever system, so you have to look around a bit.

First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes site and store).

Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley.

What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U, announced yesterday.

Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford.

Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).

...how they can come up with numbers like this. For every study like this that shows one result, you can find a mirror study that shows the opposite. Frankly, I don't know a single person that keeps any devices in standby.

These numbers are not new, and this story is 5 years late. See: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/0 2/09_energ.html

They will keep talking about energy wastage and no amount of energy awareness if going to change that. Unless of course, you have to refill your electricy "tank" for $5.00 a gallon, and then everyone will buy the consumer electronics equivalent of a Prius or Insight.

From my understanding, we don't do more webcasts because of economic issues -- a human shows up and tapes the lectures, someone has to pay him or her, etc.

Nope, it's a charged-base device like eprom or flash; the charge is on a floating gate, not a trench capacitor. Grandparent got it right.

The charge is in a floating gate, but it needs regular refreshing or the value will be lost. This is essentially identical to a normal DRAM and completely different from a Flash, EPROM or EEPROM (which retain charge without refresh or even power at all).

A DRAM doesn't necessarily use a trench capacitor either. Some do, but just for one other obvious example, there are also stacked capacitor DRAMs. IOW, DRAMs store data in capacitors of various types.

Now, if you look at a floating gate transistor, what do you really have? Take a look at this simplified diagram just for one example of what it's equivalent to (and note that this paper is talking about exactly the floating gate circuits used in EEPROMS and such...

I suspect people wondered the same thing about Antony van Leeuwenhoek. Why would anyone care about things too small to see? What a collosal waste of time. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.h tml

It will be March 1st, 2006 before the first image is available for searching, but NASA seems confident that enough users will be into is and that they'll meet an Oct 1st, 2006 deadline.

You can pre-register here: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/prereg.html

It will be March 1st, 2006 before the first image is available for searching, but NASA seems confident that enough users will be into is and that they'll meet an Oct 1st, 2006 deadline.

You can pre-register here: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/prereg.html

ok. those are the large samples... if you want to help nasa (or nsa) compute the stardust microscope data (or echelon data) you can do that soon on Stardust@Home

Here is some data on interracial friendships.

Like you, I live in a diverse city.

As for the rest of the thread, you are basically asserting that "affirmative action" and "reverse discrimination", along with the various quotas, shell companies, etc., does not exist.

I never asserted that "affirmative action" -- a policy I wholeheartedly support -- doesn't exist. What I do assert -- since you ask -- is that affirmative action is a necessary part of compensating for, and eliminating, racism in society.

By the way, the very strangeness of the phrase "reverse discrimination" should alert you to the fact that some doublethink is going on. If someone encountered an ad that said "no white person will be hired for this job", that would be discrimination, not "reverse discrimination", and would be treated as such by the courts.

I am amazed at the amount of "flamebait" and "offtopic" moderations I am receiving in my posts on this subject -- posts which I think, while aggressive, are reasoned and well sourced, certinatly more so than the urban legends and anonymous coward "I saw it happen for 25 years" posts that are getting "interesting" mods. I am shocked that a group of people with access to google and the knowledge of how to research a topic could suddenly become so shell-shocked by self-righteous indignation.

Look, I support affirmative action. What that means is that, for example, I support the occasional awarding of college entrance to a black candidate who is less qualified than a white candidate. Do I think that is discrimination? No. I believe -- and facts and figures back me up on this -- that the black candidate will have suffered greater discrimination, will have received a poorer chance at schooling, will have received less attention from teachers, will have had a far higher %age of friends and family in jail.

If he's overcome that to be the near-equal of a white candidate who didn't suffer that, not only is awarding him entrance the morally right thing to do, it is also the pragmatically right thing to do.

From my perspective in the IT industry, no, there is not hardly any discrimination in hiring practices. I've worked in a few different jobs and all were fairly diverse (proportional probably to the actual racial/sex representations). What people look at is your accomplishments, research, etc.

However, I would be willing to say that there are discriminatory practices with regards to internships and scholarships. I come from a very poor family which currently has no income at all. My high school was horrible, e.g. only 20% of the students in 10th-12th grade could pass a basic algaebra 1 standardized test. I have a very respectable gpa, with a constant 3.5, in major and out. Yet I doubt many people would believe the lack of opportunities and/or assistance available to me. I would say somewhere around 50% of the internships, and around 80% of the scholarships for CS students focus heavily on race instead of economic/educational background.

Companies like Microsoft are notorious for being eager to deal out internships to people of any race which isn't white (and, recently, isn't Indian), as can be noted here. From the link:

While all candidates who meet the criteria for eligibility described below may apply, a large majority of our scholarships will be awarded to female students, underrepresented minority students, and students with disabilities. Minority applicants must be a member of one of the following groups underrepresented in the software field: African-American, Hispanic, or Native American.

But it isn't just private corporations trying to make themselves look culturally sensitive, many universities have similar practices. I was extremely excited last semester when I received an email telling me about a summer internship at UC Berkeley, which the email described as targeting "first generation, low income, students with little chance for research", I matched all 3 criteria and was very excited. However, when I went to look at the application I noticed something very peculiar--there was nothing about income, instead it requires your ethnicity.

Now I'm not saying that all schools do things like that, and yes it's possible that my advisor simply misunderstood the description she was given about the scholarship. I'm actually not even very upset about most of it all. My problem is that people seem to use the argument that because of past racism, other races need to be helped along wherever possible, so as to create a better and more equal society. The problem is, how is any of that equal? You're just saying that people need extra help soley because of their race. It seems like if you're concerned that there are so many people of race x in economic class y, then maybe you should be looking at people's economic status instead of their race. If this is the case, then scholarships will go out to the people of race x that really need them, instead of giving them to both the poor and the more fortunate simply because of their skin color.

Ok. It wasn't from a backhoe (but from a software bug) but on January 15, 1990 114 AT&T switching nodes went down and cut off service to at least 60,000 customers. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nikitab/courses/cs294- 8/hw1.html

If a course uses a cheat check program such as MOSS, multiple students outsourcing assignments to the same place will likely get the served by the same coder, hand in the same program, and get caught. That is, the more students that outsource in a class, the greater the chance of getting caught.

Stories:
1. I know of one TA who did rent-a-coding on the side, and happened across an assignment from one of his classes posted. He bid, got the contract, and reported to the professor.
2. Sometimes it is the student who is "not the sharpest knife in the drawer" who outsources. I found a student posting an outsourcing bid who was easily traceable. I contacted the student before a bid was accepted.
3. In a C++ class, I had a cluster of programs flagged as similar by MOSS. Upon investigating I found that a student had posted a solution on a web site. Only one of the cluster compiled. The others failed because their browsers had removed everything in the #include statements between the angle brackets. The students did not recognize the problem and had not even tried to compile the programs before handing them in. In that class, a program which didn't even compile was worth nothing anyway so their cheating yielded programs which were worth nothing. Their plagiarizing yielded a zero for the course and a note to the Dean.

First of all any computer science program worth anything at all will keep all previous assignments and run them through Moss. If your school doesn't do this your degree probably isn't worth anything anyway.

So now all those outsourced coders need to have a fresh implementation for each sale.

Second. Most upper division CS projects take a lot of time. I mean it's like a full time job. Not even most ace students could bang one a completely new version on top of their own course load. Most of these projects are simply not designed to be completed 100%. So that leaves professionals. And even if a student could afford a professional's rates a professor could spot a professional's work instantly. Either they would use some toolkit or framework or if they were good enough to bang it out without one then the work would be too good to be from a student that would not be familiar with the material before taking the course. Or even if that was a question a 5 minute interview would tell him the truth.

But now for the bad news. Most CS degrees ARE NOT worth anything. Most do not do due diligence. Many professors are not qualified to catch a cheat. Many professionals today are total frauds or grossly incompetent.

You pay money to a university to get "damn good" at something. If you want to be a fraud just fake your resume. Lots of people do it. I've met them. Especially if they are from other countries that do not speak English. How is your manager going to call India to see if you really have a degree from IIT and 10 years of experience as an architect? How is a behavioral interview going to find out if you really have a 2 year certificate and worked as a junior programmer for 2 years?

Nothing. But the barriers for entry are really that low out there.

Why can't something that gets removed from the Earth and never replaced run out?!

Because as a non-renewable resource becomes scarcer, the price rises. This reduces demand and allows the remaining supplies to last longer.

In general, the price of a non-renewable resource must rise at the rate of interest each year. This is because an owner of a source of a non-renewable resource must make a decision: sell today or hold out until tomorrow? If they sell some amount today, they can take the cash and invest it at the rate of interest. But if they hold out until tomorrow, they will have forgone that interest unless the price of the resource has risen in the meantime. So in an economy where there are many suppliers, sales will be just enough for the resource price to rise at a rate equal to the rate of interest. Of course I have ignored the cost of exploration and extraction and many other factors, but that is the basic economic model that underlies non-renewable natural resource use rates and prices over time.

Tony Fisher's textbook is an accessible introduction to the economics of both renewable and non-renewable natural resources.

We may be small, but we have big tools. Our technology allows us to extract and consume billions of tons of oiland coal each year. Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era. You don't need to be an atmospheric scientist to see the trouble we are causing. The atmosphere traps some of the sun's heat and we are effectively putting more insulation into a system where the energy input cannot be readily decreased (a broken thermostat)... There are going to be big effects when you add more energy to a (relatively) closed system. The earth will eventually find a new equilibrium, but I doubt it will be very accomodating to us when it does.

I'm a pessimist, but I also take a very long term view. After all, the first anaerobic bacteria created the atmosphere we breathe - and this would have been a pollution crisis in their world if they could have recognized the evidence and understood the ramifications of it.

So maybe we are creating the next environment for something better than us. Or maybe we'll get some giant dragonflies again:

According to recently developed geochemical models, oxygen levels are believed to have climbed to a maximum of 35 percent and then dropped to a low of 15 percent during a 120-million-year period that ended in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian. Such a jump in oxygen would have had dramatic biological consequences by enhancing diffusion-dependent processes such as respiration, allowing insects such as dragonflies, centipedes, scorpions and spiders to grow to very large sizes. Fossil records indicate, for example, that one species of dragonfly had a wing span of 2 1/2 feet.

My money is on a coming panic at the effects of climate change that leads to an attempt to rectify by seeding the oceans with iron filings to feed the plankton and speed the process of breaking down the CO2. This could lead to another elevation in O2 that starts a planetwide fire and forces life back into the oceans again.

I think the fever metaphor is right on - sometimes fever kills the patient. It is the body's own immune response that creates the real problem. Perhaps life is, on some level, programmed to evolve little monkeys who get good at shooting down the occasional catastrophic meteor impacts (the reason we are so inclined to war, with the star wars missile defense type projects being a sort of holy grail for life's long-term success). Perhaps the earth's 'immune response' is normal in the evolution of a life-bearing planet, and unfortunately in some cases, fatal.

N.B. While I consider myself pagan and have no discomfort with being called a tree-hugging dirt worshipping hippy, at this time I don't necessarily believe in an individual sentience per-se in the earth as Goddess, or even as a single organism. But I am willing to believe that this process happens over and over and over again on many different worlds and that creates the basic protein structures that will tend to evolve in certain ways.

The pathologist Lewis Thomas wrote in response to the Gaia hypothesis that he could not see the earth as a living organism, but he could imagine it as a single cell. And then on our immune systems he said:

In real life, however, even in our worst circums

No offense, but you need to compare OS/X with more recent systems.

> I mean some of the features like Expose and Dashboard are really convenient once you
> get to use them

Only compared to using nothing to organize your windows. I use desktop manager for keeping my various apps organized by default. I hardly ever used Exposé as result.

> system wide services

Very few applications provide services (in the application's menu). To make applications interact, windows' COM is actually superior.

> How could one argue that having features from one program (or independent of any program)
> that can be used by all other programs. It saves the hassle and overhead from multiple
> programs replicating the same functionality.

This is exactly what Microsoft COM does, and like I said it's more powerful than Apple services. You can integrate application components into your own, like for example an Excel spreadsheet into your own accounting software, whatever.

> apps that are directories

Superior to the windows' way of installing anywhere and modifying the registry, but not as good as something like stow IMHO. Anyway, this is a 1990 NeXTStep feature.

> It will be very difficult to convince me to downgrade to a system where you can't use
> your spellchecker in all applications

System spellchecking is great, but it's not enabled for all applications under OS/X, only certain Cocoa apps. Firefox doesn't have the system spellchecking at all for example. Word comes with its own spellchecker (incompatible with the system's). None of the Adobe apps, all built with Carbon, have system spellchecking.

> I can copy a program onto a flash drive or an ipod and it works just fine. I can back up
> programs without worrying about installers.

For some apps yes, for others, no. Usually the large applications require an installer.

> The UI is great and more consistent,

Between Cocoa (white and brushmetal), Carbon and X apps, I tend to disagree.

> but more importantly for me is the multitasking. It actually works under high loads.
> I have a dozen applications running right now, and that is normal.

Windows since 2k has no problem with this. Under Linux I typically run 2-3 users at once, 10-20 apps each with no problem, and Linux is faster and much better than OS/X at memory management.

> My uptime on my laptop right now is 45 days,
> even though I carry it back an forth to work every day and
> used it to game at a LAN party last weekend.

This is true that I love this aspect about my iBook.

> I can run the vast majority of software designed for Linux, including X apps,
> as well as most mainstream software, since most things have a mac port.

Have you tried OpenOffice 2.0 on Mac yet? It's pretty terrible, whereas it works great on Linux and Windows. The truth is the Mac port of F/OSS is usually behind and of lesser quality than what is found under linux. Moreover Apple's X11 server is slow and poorly integrated.

> I guess what I'm not seeing is how you consider another OS to be superior.

For me, I don't much like Windows, but it is unmatched for games. Games suck on OS/X, they are usually older and more expensive, except for a few. For file and compute servers, I like Linux, especially on 64-bit machines. OS/X is not 64-bit despite what Apple pretends, and Linux is much more efficient on the same hardware (see Berkeley link above).

I like my little iBook - OS/X, but I'd love it more if I could have a decent CPU in it and if OS/X were more efficient.

> Maybe if you need some specific, resource intensive application that only runs on
> Windows, you're stuck.

It's all a matter of compromises. Mac + OS/X is a good platform but not perfect. It

No, I didn't give any supporting links because I wouldn't know where to begin...

We're talking about thousands of scientific papers going back to the 1930's....

Instead, here are some links to some non-technical introductions:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101matter.html
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/dm.h tml
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/cfcp/primer/d ark.html
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/no de2.html#SECTION00020000000000000000
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/text/darkmatter.txt

No, you probably won't find technical details in these sources, but many of them contain links to more detailed information.

Also, as much as I find your dismissive attitude obnoxious, I am happy to help you explore the actual evidence for dark matter. Feel free to reply to this post with any actual questions.

Doug

I guess the top schools aren't taking very many bright students these days, sigh.

On the website for Russel and Norvig's AI textbook they have a list of schools that use their book, and at the bottom is a list of the top 40 CS programs in the US. (Their point being that 39 of the 40 use their book, and the one that doesn't also doesn't teach AI. But that's beside the point here.) Rockhust College is not on the top 40 list.

Plus yeah, way off base about OS X. Wow.

p.s. I went to #39. (Not that it matters.)

Well, now that it's back, we help them and join in the search: http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

CCured is a source-to-source translator for C. It analyzes the C program to determine the smallest number of run-time checks that must be inserted in the program to prevent all memory safety violations. The resulting program is memory safe, meaning that it will stop rather than overrun a buffer or scribble over memory that it shouldn't touch. Many programs can be made memory-safe this way while losing only 10-60% run-time performance (the performance cost is smaller for cleaner programs, and can be improved further by holding CCured's hand on the parts of the program that it does not understand by itself). Using CCured we have found bugs that Purify misses with an order of magnitude smaller run-time cost.

So if we hook this up with the SETI@home program, could we look for intelligent life in the universe that's inside the speck of dust? "Beam me up, Scotty: there's no intelligent life down here."

The Stardust@Home Project where you can pre-register and find out more.

for those of you to lazy to read the entire thing, here is a link to the website http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

A Fast Multi-Resolution Block Matching Algorithm for Multiple-Frame Motion Estimation

Efficient Video Similarity Measurement and Searc (probably grad students here)

I felt my brain being damaged while I looked them over, but they appear to employ something similar to image matching with the added component of movement. It looks like if they are implemented as desired, you could find video similar to a reference piece. This is not useful for searching based on a text query, however. But, you could build an index that matched words to a reference library of video clips, then search for matches to your reference clip.

Of course, all the heavy crunching would be used to build a lean, fast search index, hopefully.

Those were just the first results I grabbed. Here's the Berkeley press release:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/0 2/02-21-2000.html

Luckily we live in the NY Metro area within driving distance of a large number of universities. We found a few online lists of programs (
here and here) via a post in the sci.crypto newsgroup.

I can't believe so many people bitch about Google not open sourcing 90% of their production software when, for the last 5+ years now, they've been the poster child for what's possible if you use open source.

Honestly, how many times have you had to defend Linux as being production-worthy by saying "Google uses it!"

It's just kind of sad to hear this angry rhetoric when it's quite obvious Google is facing many serious competitive threats in the search area (and elsewhere like email), such that the "secret sauce" of how the searching algorithms, clustering software, file storage, and production environment works are closely monitored by spammers and Microsoft and yet you demand the release of such algorithms for what? So you can run a 10,000-machine cluster at home and have your own search engine?

God you people are so petty and short-sighted. Google endorsed Linux. Google proved what you can do with open source. Google employs the original authors of the Gimp, the author of Python, the author of Subversion... etc etc etc and yet you're all so misguided as to accuse them of not being open source friendly.

If all it takes is a spinning high power magnetic field then a magnetar would be a natural spaceship. Heim's theory might explain why the magnetar in the article below is moving so fast.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/0 1/09_magne.html

I sometimes wonder what would happen if GNUarch was merged with wikimedia. (And while we're at it, let's merge with BOINC as well! ;-) )

On a hasty no-but-seriously note: are you suggesting WMF is wormable? I can't see how; an machine infected with a WMF worm would have to contact another vulnerable machine and somehow induce it into downloading an image file and parsing it. There was a rather feeble attempt at an IM worm over the weekend which fortunately seems to have fizzled, and I can't easily imagine other vectors. (Perhaps I have a weak imagination!) (Hmmm, if it's OK I may take the liberty of mailing you from my work addy about that?)

I think a lot of people are treating this as a spambot / zombie threat, which is more of a nuisance than a threat to the entity hosting the zombies. A wormable threat like MS05-053 (was it? they blur into one after a while) tends to prompt faster action, at least amongst those who witnessed the havok Nimda, Code Red, Blaster et al wrought.

My theory is that the coders with enough skillz to write effective malware and little enough morals to actually use it are more likely to be working for straightforward money-motivated crooks these days than to be out just to trash the world.

Exactly. Over 10,000 scholarly journals are published every month. When the number exceeded a few hundred, decades ago, overload had already set in. Now there are at least great indexes and searchable databases. This list compiled by Berkeley shows what is available in most university libraries. I especially like Stanford's HighWire Press, a free database of over a million scholarly articles. Things are getting better, not worse.

It appears that Bleex is a Berkley project:

http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/bleex.htm

Is this the same project? It sure looks similar, only sans green outerwear.

http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/bleex.htm

Talk about a rehash of something old. All their media coverage is from March of 2004.

The article sounds an awful lot like it was lifted from this press release, dated March '04.

TFA is DoS'ed, so I have to ask... have there been new developments in the last couple years, or is this just a dupe from two years ago?

1)6 feet/sec is only about 4 mph. Not too fast.
2)I can ruck with over 100 lbs on my back for a few hours. Days without even lugging JP-4 around.
3)Do I need to carry 200lbs and sound like a chainsaw? This just makes me more of a target.
4)The user can duck and squat, but if under enemy fire could he engage and overtake? Or fall prone, return fire, and *get back up*?

Berkely has some interesting videos of the exoskeleton in use
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Berkely has some interesting videos of the exoskeleton in use
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Berkely has some interesting videos of the exoskeleton in use
Part One
Part Two
Part Three