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Ummm... Hello?!?!

The obvious missing item on this list is Microsoft coming out with a handful of licenses that even the Free Software Foundation recognizes as "free software" licenses. Sure, they haven't released any important software under these licenses yet, but coming out with the licenses is an amazingly interesting step for Redmond.

From http://bleex.me.berkeley.edu/CV/BLEEX-Summary.pdf:

The control scheme needs no direct measurements from the human or from the human-machine interface (e.g., sensors between them). The controller, based on measurements from the exoskeleton only, estimates (i.e., computes very quickly) how to move so that the wearer feels very few forces. This novel control scheme is quite elaborate, but it is an effective way to create locomotion when the area of contact between the wearer and the machine is unpredictable.

A little longer ago than I thought, but this was already posted.

I am fairly sure the machine design aritcal that your link references is several months old.

Here is another link:

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

Hardware-software codesign is nothing new and revolutionary. It has been taught for years at berkeley and around the country. A bunch of links can also be found here

Known by all /.ers for seti@home, it was the SETI Institute that made the discovery in cooperation with NASA.

I don't know if you're trolling with your sig ("If man evolved from apes, why are there still apes and not more people?"), mean it as a genuine question, or even as some form of sarcasm, but for what it's worth I'll bite...

Man did not evolve from apes. Man and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
That's it, it's that simple.

If your sig was meant as some kind of irony, then 'scuse me for wasting your time, my irony detector must be broken
If it was meant genuinely, then I hope this helped, and I would also direct you to the excellent Evolution 101 website which will fill you in on many other aspects of how evolution works
And if it was meant as a troll, well, I guess you got your laugh.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0 _0_0/evoscales_01

Interesting, but the species are still mosquitos, they didn't become frogs or blu-jays, or grow gills or learn to spin webs, or change phylum. In the end, they're still mosquitos.

Major change takes time. Speciation, as noted with the mosquitoes, is the only significant step you need - once the population are isolated and can't interbreed they can develop in radically different directions. If you want some demonstrations of signficant change in form feel free to consult the fossil record. I've gone through this once before, but lets' do it again:

Are there any intermediate forms in the fossil record? Yes. Let's take the development from reptiles to birds. Archaeopteryx is a commonly cited example (distinctly birdlike), but we can go a lot further than that in terms of intermediate forms. In practice Archeopteryx is between lizards and birds. Between reptiles and Archeopteryx are therapod dinosaurs. Between early reptile like therapods and Archeopteryx are late more bird-like dromaeosaurids and between early dromaeosaurids like Troodons and Archeopteryx are various feathered dinosaurs, which includes fossils that simply had feathers, apparently for warmth, through to later fossils that actually had clearly flight adapted feathers.

Want to try something different? How about whale evolution? We can start with a land dwelling mammal that looked fairly dog like but had certain ear structures not found in other mammals that are more suitable for hearing underwater. Then there's ambulocetus which was similar, but in practice was rather akin to a mammalian crocodile, with back legs obviously adpated for swimming, the same ear structures as our first creature, and a nose structure, similar to a crocodile, that was ideal for breathing while immersed in shallow water. Next there are things like rodhocetus which is remarkably whale like, yet still posses back legs, and still has a nasal structure placng the nostrils toward the tip as in ambulocetus. There's aetiocetus which shows the transition from snout tip nostrils toward nostils at the top of the skulls as in modern whales. Then there's basilosaurus which is decidedly whale like, but lacking in a few modern whale features, and retaining distinct, but quite useless, hind limbs similar to those of rodhocetus.

You can find similar sets of forms for the development of horses, the development of snakes from lizards, and even for the ape to man path, among many others.

Oh, I'm sure you can parse those and say "but what's between that?", but I think for most people who are not being mindlessly dogmatic that represents fairly reasonable evidence of transitions from lizards to birds, or from land dwelling mammals to whales, and, if they bothered to do the extra research and reading, the development of horses, snakes and man.

Kidding indeed....good luck on the number crunching earthlings, I am going to use my distributed computing power to look for ET.

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

So I'm not being sarcastic here, my genuine questions is : why should I spend my free computing power on calculating prime numbers instead of research to cure cancer?

Well, thanks to McCarthyism, the University of California instated a loyalty oath. Many faculty, especially at Berkeley, refused to sign and therefore were dismissed. However some of these faculty fought the oath in court and won, so I'm not sure the grandparent's statement is presently valid.

This business also contributed to the Free Speech Movement.

Of course Google and Microsoft are working together. When you've got a famous name like Michael Jordan on the roster, who wouldn't be enthusiastic!

Maybe I should change my name before I write a grant proposal...

*No roads
And what do you call what we have now? I call it "rocks, holes, and unofficial speedbumps". I'm considering throwing in the towel on trying to maintain an SUV, for gods sake, because I can't drive regularly without something getting screwed up on it: shock absorbers, electrical problems, etc.

*No police protection
Good. The last instance of "police protection" I received was being pulled over and ticketed $20 for not wearing a seatbelt. I'd pay not to get that kind of "protection".

*No fire departments
We've had three cases here recently of firemen getting caught starting fires. Two weeks ago there were twelve mysterious grassfires all over the state in one day. And guess who put them out? Volunteer fire departments.

*No primary or secondary education
        *As a result of which, 90% of our middle class would be being paid substinance level wages, working 12-16 hour days to be able to eat. You know, like we did before we enacted regulations to stop that shit.
You can get an education without the help of the government. And if you're too dumb to do so, you're better off working 12 hours a day, because it would be wasted on you. By the way, my mother has a college degree, and works 10 hours a day in a factory, so let's not pretend that education has much to do with working conditions or job availability.

*No military, so we'd likely be part of China by now
If I had back the taxes that I pay and freedoms that I sacrifice to support all the ridiculous US military excursions around the globe, I'd do just fine defending my country the way it was intended to be defended: by citizens, not by mercenaries. As it is, the US government more often attacks US citizens and creates terrorists and dictators than protects us from foreign threats. And the Chinese nuclear arsenal was built by a man educated through the generosity of the US taxpayer. So, no, I don't exactly see how my taxes are being used to protect us from China, or anyone else.

*No social security, so we'd have elderly people competing for jobs in order to live
I don't give a shit. Young people compete for jobs in order to live. There's nothing magical about the elderly that makes them immune to the decisions they have made in their lifetime, good and bad. Life sucks, you have 70 years to learn to deal with it. If you haven't done so by then, tough. Don't expect to impose your stupidity on future generations.

*A large homeless problem, as elderly people will frequently lose the competition
Elderly people can live with their families, like they have done for thousands of years. Those without families should have that much more retirement money to live off of.

*A much lower expected lifespan, due to the above and lack of medicaid
Yeah well everybody dies. Get over yourself. And lifespan is more affected by improvements in healthcare for the young than by using the elderly as an excuse to ruin the economy.

*Garbage all over, since we wouldn't have garbage pickup and people would refuse to pay
I have (private) garbage pickup. And I pay for it. And if I didn't, it would get burnt in an incinerator or buried in the backyard, which is exactly what the garbage people do with it anyways.

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/lectures.html

Those are lectures in Operating Systems at UC Berkeley. The assignments are done by simulating an OS with algorithms written in Java. This worries me.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= average+web+page+size

has some good results
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/
has info from 2000 and a link to the same info from 2003

specific internet 2000
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/internet.html
and 2003
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info-2003/internet.htm

it's worth noting, these types of statistics can take a year or more to compile..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= average+web+page+size

has some good results
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/
has info from 2000 and a link to the same info from 2003

specific internet 2000
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/internet.html
and 2003
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info-2003/internet.htm

it's worth noting, these types of statistics can take a year or more to compile..

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= average+web+page+size

has some good results
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/
has info from 2000 and a link to the same info from 2003

specific internet 2000
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info/internet.html
and 2003
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how -much-info-2003/internet.htm

it's worth noting, these types of statistics can take a year or more to compile..

I see this as being a boon to SETI. If there was ever a needle in a haystack, it's trying to tease a possible intelligent signal out of the cosmic background noise. If you have an idea what the background is like in general, then it's far easier to detect an abnormality in that background noise. The question will end up being, are we simply detecting more false positives or are these real signals?

The original post might've said this poorly. The taxonomic system is certainly a human invention, to help us understand what is related to what (or better, how each type of living thing is related to all the rest). However, if you wish to insist it is designed, it was badly designed. The original concept is great, but there are places which are muddy and where the original hierarchy doesn't match well with those organisms which are somewhat unique.

We need a new Linnaeus.

FYI, the Earth has been in existance for some 4.5 billion years. This is broken down into several time groupings starting with Precambrian. The next eras are Paleozoic which begins some 650 million years back, prior to this there were no abundant fossil records. The Precambrian record has been divided into several divisions and the earliest fossils found date back to 3.8 billion years ago. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/precambri an.html

"As I posted on another thread, the patent system was not designed to spur people into inventing. Patents or not, people will always be inventing. The patent system was designed to ensure that the way new inventions work will be available, in the future, for other people to build on."

Actually it is also supposed to encourage invention - or more to the (economic) point - R&D based innovation. You make a good point but the disclosure benefit is only one of the classical economic justifications for the patent system. Sorry to nitpick but these days I'd rather do that - to encourage otherwise good comments like yours - than reply to the rubbish from people who e.g. claim that Nobel prize winning economists don't know what they're talking about ;-) You may like to read this up to date and interesting introduction:

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/pubs/l eveque.htm

It's too bad that now fundamentalists are going to have this news story as a weapon against proponents of science. This is despite this person apparently having nothing to do with science. We need better representatives, like the following:

Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason
http://www.csicop.org/si/

Discussion and debate of biological and physical origins
http://www.talkorigins.org/

Understanding Evolution
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/

Here's a brief technical look at the theory by the University of California - Berkeley's
Museum of Paleontology : http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html

Of interest are twenty proposed characteristics "the first birds shared [...] with
many coelurosaurian dinosaurs." Take a look and see what you think.

-Shawn

I didn't know that Nature was such a high end CS publication. At SOSP this year Vigilante (http://research.microsoft.com/~manuelc/MS/Vigilan teSOSP.pdf) was presented--a much more complete paper in a more salient venue.

The citations list at the end of the Nature paper also is missing a large body of relevant work. Check the citations list of the Vigilante paper for details--50 references most of which are missing from the Nature pub. Also, the publications the Nature paper cites are mixed--some are good (like http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/containment/ ), but I don't think the editors of "Physical Review Letters" (a physics journal) are really up to speed on the latest in computer security research. Indeed, most of the works they cite are either from physics journals, Nature, or Science.

The analysis is quite math heavy, and makes some unrealistic assumptions (i.e. worms only spread to their neighbors). In the end, they "show" that it is theoretically possible to stop worms with a side-channel network. Vigilante, on the other hand, has an implementation of a vaccination system, and simulation results run against Blaster, Slammer, and Code Red. Now, which is more convincing to you?

Good point, and DM has indeed kind of a voodoo feel to me (IANA Astrophysicist). A try for an answer can be found here

http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/fcgi-bin/fcgi? cmd=view_feedback&id=27264

All I care about is driving down my avg. processing time per unit @ this point, from:

3 hr. 12 min. 13 sec.

(and, counting, going downwards @ roughly 1.7-2.0 seconds per unit processed @ this point & we only have until Dec. 15th 2005, then this section (the original) of this project shuts down & the app quits getting datasets to process - my first 50 were done on an AMD K6-III @450mhz (avg. 24 hr. per unit processing time here), then the next 310 were done on a Dual CPU/SMP Pentium III @ 1ghz (avg. 6 hr. 58 min per unit processing times here on this 2nd rig) & now I can get down to 2.5 hours per unit processing time now on this setup listed below)

Pentium 4 3.2ghz
512mb Micron matched pair DDR400 RAM
Western Digital "raptor" 36gb disk #2 (storage)
Western Digital "raptor" 74gb disk #1 (apps + OS)
CENATEK "rocketdrive" 2gb (solid-state disk where I run the units from)
GeForce 6800 GT OC by BFG vidcard (not that it matters, but listed it anyhow)

Right now, I'm the fastest per-unit processing time on my team, TRIBAR (which is #51 & right behind TeamSlashdot on the top 200 chart), & want to get under the 3 hr. mark & into the 2 hrs.++ range... doubt I have the time to get there, but will try until Dec. 15th 2005 when this project shuts down & moves to the BOINC client as part #2 of this study/investigation.

Now, on topic:

Do I think this dataset can be used to hijack a system? No, I doubt it, but then, I do not have the sourcecode to the SETI@Home charactermode/consolemode app that I use either... still, I find it VERY doubtful it could be used maliciously in & of itself.

(Could the client-app have buffer overflow possibilities? Sure, local or remote wouldn't matter because once you run it, since it's a client app, any LOCAL exploits become remoteable if the app is attacked, & runs its bogus code (if any) under YOUR user-rights context!)

APK

P.S.=> I think the project will have merit in the future, helping us choose which galaxies etc. to choose as candidates for exploration... as well as being an EXCELLENT benchmark of computer system CPU/RAM performance! apk

I am not exactly nuts about it, & I have been @ SETI myself since 1999 (did my 1st 50 units on an older AMD K6-III (the type with the Pentium Pro-like L3 cache on a 'Super-7' motherboard by ASUS) @ 450mhz, & w/ that oldster, units took 24 hours each to complete a single unit).

Most of what I did was between THIS & LAST year though, 1679 units - 50 = 1629 on a Pentium 4 @ 3.2ghz (running the units on a CENATEK "RocketDrive" solid-state 2gb ramdisk PCI board on the 1st partition on it of 1gb).

I got myself down to

http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/fcgi-bin/fcgi? cmd=view_feedback&id=27264

3 hrs. 13 min. 25 sec. per unit avg. time

The fastest guy on my team TRIBAR is @:

3 hrs. 12 min. 39.9 sec. per unit avg. time

With the newer/second mentioned system above, & am the 2nd fastest-per-unit time on my team, TRIBAR. I don't know if I'll pass the fastest per unit member of my team now, there might not be enough time left to do it now.

This is sort of disappointing to me, as I am just about to overtake the fastest person on my team in per-unit processing times & am around 1.5 minutes away from it (around 1 week now, since the gains I see now are around 1.5-2 seconds taken off my avg. time each time I do a unit).

The SETI@Home system STILL works & is sending out units, but I doubt it will after that Dec. 15th 2005 mark.

I haven't tried the new BOINC client myself, & was wondering - how long does it take others to do a unit on it & are the processing times LONGER or SHORTER with this new client & possibly new datafile format?

Thanks for the info. guys on how long the per-unit processing times are between both client types, for those of you that have used both the commandline model of SETI@Home & also the new BOINC client!

APK

P.S.=> The reason I'm so into the "avg. time per unit processing time" on SETI is becaause it's an excellent benchmark of a system in certain areas, & I use it primarily for that (as well as contributing to this cause, because I have a feeling that one day it will contribute to space travel due to the findings from its data)... apk

wget http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dl/boinc_5.2.8_i686-pc-l inux-gnu.sh

sh boinc_5.2.8_i686-pc-linux-gnu.sh

cd BOINC
./run_client &

./boinc_cmd --project_attach [project_url] [project_key]

It's pretty amazing that TFA's discovery was by students.

Actually, that's pretty normal in graduate school. Professors have the breadth and depth of understanding that allows them to select promising projects and to know which have the greatest current value. (i.e., they know how to select a project that's currently important / interesting with a good likelihood of getting grant funding.) This also allows them to direct a large group of graduate students. But generally, once the graduate students receive the problem, it's up to them to find the solutions and any new discoveries to finish the job.

An example: A student is told to implement a mathematical model for tissue growth in a collagen scaffolding. The professor says that a level set method is probably the best way to model the boundary of the growing tissue / colony of cells and hands off several research papers to the graduate student. The student tries those things and find that some methods work well and others don't. The student does a literature search and finds out that this is the best that exists. At that point, the student confers with the advisor as necessary and develops whatever new techniques are necessary to get the job done. Then, the advisor and student get to write two papers: one on their new numerical techniques, and another on the science findings that were made possible by their new numerical techniques.

The key is that the graduate students are responsible for filling in the fine details of a larger project. This means that it's only natural that they'll discover new things along the way. (That's what they write their dissertation on.) The professors of course have a major role in this, too, but in a certain sense, they're (extremely competent) managers, but not of the pointy-haired variety. :-) -- Paul

For SETI@home, OpenVMS was responsible for less that 0.2% of the results returned. Non-intel Windows generated about 0.06%. That means if I worked non-stop on porting, 8 hours a day, 47 weeks a year, I should probably allocate about 3 hours and 45 minutes anually towards a VMS port, and 1 hour and 8 minutes toward a Alpha/Windows port. I don't think I could accomplish either in that amount of time. Think of it as economics in action.

Unfortunately, I only work about 25% time on SETI@home coding, if that, so divide those numbers by at least four.

It's likely that someone will eventually do these ports. A lot of ports are available here. Just not VMS or AlphaNT yet. Of course, an unsupported binary is more difficult to install.

Sorry, but that's just the way reality works.

He gave a talk at the Synthetic Biology seminar at UC Berkeley two weeks ago. The web cast is located here:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses/archive.php?se riesid=1906978261
It's titled "Programming Dynamic Function into Bacteria"

Boinc itself isn't really a replacement for seti though, it is simply a manager
You choose which projects you wish to subscribe to, and how long you want any particular project to hog resources for and away you go.
At first i ran seti alone, but recently I have been running the Einstein@home and LHC@Home client on a 33% resource share basis with Seti.
Einstein, looks for spinning Pulsars and the LHC is a client from CERN running simulations of particles spinning around the new Six Track large hadron colider.
The LHC project has just finished sadly, but I think I'll move onto the Rosetta project, which is looking to work out various protein structures and interactions and how they can be used.

If, like me, you always fancied running a few other projects other than Seti but didnt want the hassle of manually deciding which client ot run then Boinc is a real boon and well worth the few minutes needed to set it up.

Have a go, I think you will like it!

Petri Nets: Wikipedia

Tadao Murata has written an excellent paper about Petri Nets, courtesy of IEEE: PDF

For web prototyping, there's DENIM from Berkeley. It produces functional web pages from sketches. Another Java app.

Here's to another 200 years of "well enough."

Windmill? DARPA is working on dust sized devices that work off of ambient vibration.... catch up with the times. Smart Dust is an old idea.

http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDus t/

MOTAR the imperious

...we share 98% of our DNA with chimps...

Without going further, where did you get the statistic from? Or is it "common knowledge"? I do a great deal of source checking before I make a statement such as this one, because it's a very incredible statement to make. We share 98% of our DNA with chimps?

Please see this article before trying to explain to me why you think we share 98% of our DNA with chimps. And did you even read my argument for homologous structures? This by itself is not enough to prove anything about evolution. If I wanted to make a house, would I not use four walls and a roof? If I wanted to create bones that were light and strong, would I not use the same organic materials in all of my mammal projects?

Don't even get started about Haeckel's experiments on embryos, the data of which were falsified a long time ago. See this biography of him from UC Berkeley if you're in doubt about the validity of his theory of recapitulation (which by the way is sometimes STILL taught in schools as fact despite its rejection by evolutionists).

If you're interested in knowing more about the lies you've been taught, I can furnish you with many more examples. There isn't "a ton" of evidence for evolution.

IANAL, but I don't think this is entirely true. If she signed a contract with them, and in the contract they promised to let her attend, they may be forced to do it, even in the case the contract contained conditions like that she never drinks etc. Conditions like that are not necessarily legally enforcible.

Actually, the "can't drink alcohol" concept has been tested in court. In Hamer v. Sidway , the appellate court held that abstaining from drinking (among other things) constituted a forebearance, and was thus legitimate consideration in a contract. If you contract with a school, the terms will likely be they give you an education, and you give them money and obedience to their code of conduct. If that code includes a prohibition against drinking, then you can be held to that term.

Public schools may have some issues with this as a consequence of the fact that they are governmental entities, but private schools are pretty well covered. Also consider that contracts need not be executed in writing, save for a few cases (real estate being the most notable).

I am, of course, not a lawyer.

Yes it can, yes it has, and here you go (skip to the "Experimental Results" section if you're feeling lazy).

> Does it fit with what can been observed

Quite well.

> (information only comes from intelligence; order decreases over time...)

Your error is in misunderstanding the laws of thermodynamics. Those state that in a closed system, order decreases over time. No part of the earth is a closed system, however, and your "observation" is in fact very simple to debunk:

Plant a seed.

What was once nothing but a tumultuous pile of dirt lashed by wind and rain will soon become a highly-ordered plant. While entropy increases as a whole (i.e., the sun is still fusing), local increases in order are something we observe all the time.

As for information coming only from intelligence, well, I suggest you read up on the optimization of chemical trails ants lay to a food source. Very, very simple rules govern those trails, but they quickly lay out an efficient path for the ants to follow. That's information, and I would argue that ants ain't all that smart.

I would also argue that if your faith is so weak that evolution threatens it, you have bigger problems. How much of Christ's message was about speciation, and how much about interacting with God and your fellow man? You might want to read up on how Jesus treated those who followed the letter of the law and ignored the spirit (Pharisees, mostly) - I think you may be misguided.

Yes it can, yes it has, and here you go (skip to the "Experimental Results" section if you're feeling lazy).

> Does it fit with what can been observed

Quite well.

> (information only comes from intelligence; order decreases over time...)

Your error is in misunderstanding the laws of thermodynamics. Those state that in a closed system, order decreases over time. No part of the earth is a closed system, however, and your "observation" is in fact very simple to debunk:

Plant a seed.

What was once nothing but a tumultuous pile of dirt lashed by wind and rain will soon become a highly-ordered plant. While entropy increases as a whole (i.e., the sun is still fusing), local increases in order are something we observe all the time.

As for information coming only from intelligence, well, I suggest you read up on the optimization of chemical trails ants lay to a food source. Very, very simple rules govern those trails, but they quickly lay out an efficient path for the ants to follow. That's information, and I would argue that ants ain't all that smart.

I would also argue that if your faith is so weak that evolution threatens it, you have bigger problems. How much of Christ's message was about speciation, and how much about interacting with God and your fellow man? You might want to read up on how Jesus treated those who followed the letter of the law and ignored the spirit (Pharisees, mostly) - I think you may be misguided.

Just look at all the airplanes, powerplants, car computers, etc. It's not very usual at all to see one fail critically.

Airplanes, powerplants, car computers (not to mention that the article talks about the recent Prius woes).

I understand your point that you don't hear about these things happening every day, but to state that one can ensure bug-free code is not correct. Every single one of these things depend on external input, and testing all possible combinations of inputs is often impossible if not reasonable feasible.

Define "macro" and "micro".

Speciation? Evidence is out there.

Gross physiological changes, like many-legs (centipede) to 6-legs (ant)? Found the gene

There's a pretty good transitional fossil record for several species showing many steps of macroevolution, such as horses (gradual change from multi-toed and small to single-external-toed and large) and humans, so there is reasonably strong fossil evidence for macroevolution, as well as the above predictive and experimental evidence.

Hence, since there does exist this reasonably strong evidence that macroevolution can and does occur, it becomes reasonable to ask what evidence suggests that it does not occur. Do you know of any?

> That bad ideas are good ideas if none better can be found

Why is macroevolution a priori a bad idea? If it fits the observed data (it does) and has demonstrated predictive power (it does) and is supported by experimental evidence (it is), then why is it bad? (It may indeed be, but that's a claim you'll need to substantiate.)

> How would data pointing to an intelligent designer differ
> from data pointing to randomness?

Quality of the resulting designs.

Standard examples are the human eye (the retina would not need a blind spot if it were installed the other way around; it's inefficient compared to the reflective-coated eyes of cats and other animals, etc.), the appendix, the prostate gland (prone to infection and dangerously constricts the urinary tract when that happens), and so on.

Some would interpret bad designs like these as evidence of "whatever works first" randomness, rather than careful and intelligent crafting of a pinnacle of creation.

Read the first link I gave - there is strong experimental evidence for speciation in the "reproductive isolation" sense. Macroevolution has pretty strong evidence in favour of it; I don't see why that's a challenge to your faith, though. Does it really matter whether the earth is 6000 or 5 billion years old? Does it really matter if animals were created in a day or an eon? Does it really matter if man was created in an instant or over millenia? Are those the really important questions that faith addresses?

Not if you're Christian, they're not. Christ didn't talk a whole lot about where the earth and animals came from, but he did speak at length about how we should interact with each other, and with God. Those who hold doggedly to a literal interpretation of the Bible while glossing over the actual content of Jesus's message would likely get much the same treatment as the Pharisees---which is to say, quite the surprise in the afterlife. Something to consider.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22definition +of+is+is
An especially interesting entry:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sjblatt/notes/nottrue .html

...and some of the entries show the Bush crew getting involved in the game

Make-a-Degree programs are for underwater basket weaving. Computational linguistics is an advanced topic. You won't touch it, nor should you, until a graduate program. You don't know enough about computer science to do anything advanced yet. Get yourself a CS degree and take some linguistic, anthropology, and psychology electives, then apply to a graduate program and do CL as your thesis. Read some CL papers and apply to the schools that publish in the CL journals. University of Washington has a program in CL consider applying there, or at least read their prereqs.

1. The results from any project run on World Community Grid are required to be placed into the public domain for anyone to use.

2. I'm Not sure what you mean by this question. The research institute creates the data and World Community Grid verifies and packages it up for deployment on the grid. Results are verified by World Community Grid, packaged and sent back to the research institute for whatever post processing they need to do on the raw results. All data is sent and received via an encrypted link.

3. As answered in #1, the results are placed into the public domain, so anyone can utilize them.

4. The Windows client is closed source, licenced from United Devices. BOINC is open source.

For anyone asking: No idea what's the license but the source code is open:
http://boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/source_code.php
(by the way, they really make it hard to get there from the main page...)

This is an interesting article by Hal Varian on the economics of Amazon's used book sales:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTim es/2005-07-28.html

His collection of articles make for pretty interesting reading about a variety of topics, from the perspective of an economist:

URL:http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/%7Ehal/people/hal /articles.html?

Yes, it's too bad there isn't a school with a long and impressive reputation for it's Computer Science department that offers online courses. That might help people take them more seriously.

No offense, but your comment is simplistic and silly. You're making unsubstantiated statements that don't really make sense and don't stand up to facts. Did you spend too much money on an Ivy League degree, and now you feel the need to justify the excessive cost?

Yes, it's too bad there isn't a school with a long and impressive reputation for it's Computer Science department that offers online courses. That might help people take them more seriously.

No offense, but your comment is simplistic and silly. You're making unsubstantiated statements that don't really make sense and don't stand up to facts. Did you spend too much money on an Ivy League degree, and now you feel the need to justify the excessive cost?