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This is the famous incident that's always dragged out. It actually turns out to be somewhat more complex than the "common" version that you've probably heard by word of mouth. Check out this version for some facts, or check this one.

In short; the computer said "What you're doing is pretty stupid. Are you sure you want to do this?" and the pilot said "Yes".

Or, in other words, had the computer actually had final say, the accident likely would have been avoided.

Actually, this reminds me of another interesting feature on the A320, which is the computer's response to an emergency. Let's suppose an engine lights on fire. The master alarm goes off, and the central screen says "Fire in engine 1. Please shut off engine". So, you shut off the engine. Then the screen says "Please prime fire suppression SQUIB 1. If fire is not out in 30 seconds, fire SQUIB 1.". Meanwhile the red SQUIB 1 button starts flashing, and then the "30" starts counting down.

Another neat one is the traffic system. If the computer determines you're on a course which would take you dangerously close to another aircraft, a voice says "TRAFFIC! TRAFFIC!", and then the central screen shows the other aircraft in relation to you, and displays a list of maneuvers to carry out to avoid the other plane. (This is actually pretty standard. If you were in a 767 flying head-on at another 767, by the time you could identify the orientation of the other 767 and realize there was a problem, it would be too late to do anything about it. But, it's still very cool).

JPEG2000 is "common"?

The Mac doesn't natively support it yet (wait till Saturday). Windows doesn't natively support it yet, as you note. Linux doesn't support it at all, really, because you can't write an open-source implementation due to patent issues.

Basically the only way you can use it are with a special JPEG2000 app, or one of the few commercial apps that supports it (Photoshop being the primary one). And of those people with the capability to use JPEG2000, I don't know anybody using it. It's too new, too rare, and too shrouded in patent issues.

I'd hardly call that "common".

People do not wake up one morning and decide to be homosexual. It is who they are

If you're implying that people are born gay, I'd like to have a look at your research, because pretty much everything I've ever seen used to support this has been subsequently discredited.

Since you can't seem to produce your evidence, I'll put some more of mine forth. Here's a study of rats done at Berkeley that would seem to call into question much of the 'evidence' used to support the 'gay gene' theory.

Here's another good analysis of the 3 major studies most often cited in support of genetic 'gayness', and why they are so flawed.

As for why religion needs protection... Religions don't need protection from descrimination from the general population. It needs protection from government intervention. If someone doesn't want to hire me because I'm Buddhist, I'm really not terribly concerned. There are many other employers that aren't so narrow, and even if I can't find one, as long as my real rights are respected I'm free to be a self-determined entrepenuer. Please note that I don't consider anything but self-employment a right. No one owes me anything. If, however, the government doesn't allow me to vote because I'm Buddhist then we have problems. Religions need protection from government intervention. Why? Religions have historically been used by government as a tool to manupulate the unthinking masses. Religion is a very dangerous thing -- especially in the hands of government. It is a two edged sword.

If website attacks grew by 36% and the internet grew by 30%, I wouldn't look at this as about on par with internet growth. You are right to say that this isn't a big deal.

I had more faith in ZDNet for publishing the obvious. Maybe next week they'll run a story about how the world population increase is due to children as well.

I'm not kidding. This is a perfect opportunity to learn a useful skill. Take the $50 you'd spend to get your unit repaired and spend the money on a used soldering iron and a shiny new tip instead.

Then (here's the important part) practice on stuff that you won't miss before you try repairing the drive. Raid your neighbor's garbage for old electronics and spend a few hours removing components, replacing them, tinning wires, etc.

Two nice online introductions to soldering (both originally produced by Nasa) are located here:

http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/elab/soldering.htm

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/bsc/PDFFiles /Soldered.pdf

Or, if you really don't want to learn to solder, talk to your neighbors. See if there's a ham radio club in your neighborhood. Hunt for a radio/television repair shop. Drop by the electronics shop at your local community college. Or, chat up the guy selling refurbished electronics at the nearest swap-meet.

The big reason is the sheer vastness and varied topology of the Internet. Try running a massively distributed application sometime and get a real life education in exactly how theoretical the guarantee of data transfer between two machines picked at random is. My organization ran a 1,300 PC computer grid in our prefecture and was unable to get effective performance out of 300 of the machines due to them being isolated from the rest of the network, due to causes ranging from internal firewalls, misconfigured routers, and packets that vanished into the ether for no particular reason.

The other biggie is, of course, computational "biodiversity", which didn't hamper our application (which we were able to recompile for every type of machine on our grid) but which would bite a worm, Worhol or not, in the posterior. For a Warhol Worm you need to have a infection vector which works without user intervention, which in practice means a buffer overrun in a network service, and there is no implementation of any network service running on over 50% of the Internet (you'd think Windows would have a few, right? Nope, saved by the MS marketing department's decision to develop a million flavors of the same OS).

Now, outside the context of the Warhol Worm, I think F/OSS is actually going to make the biodiversity problem worse, not better. Take a look at the attack on Mozilla earlier this year through the shared JPEG library. Widely used "best of breed" OSS libraries *will* be targetted as they gain significant installed bases (which is happening very rapidly with the upswing of corporate support to OSS).

Does not your scrotum need kicking?

Yeah, whatever. You can't trust Java for anything remotely numeric, it's broken, it's a fact. Anyone who's read professor Kahan's (Berkeley) How JAVA's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere papers, and followed the issue for a little time will run like the devil from Java...
I mean, modelling disease involves differential equations. You have to be crazy to use Java. C is much more trustworthy in that respect.
In fact, this knowledge should be widespread.
It's sad to see so many people take for granted that something a big company did is flawless. ;-)

I am a developer involved with refbase. I say that not to plug the product (it is a bit minimalist for a real library, but there are many individuals, research groups and departments who use it to host papers), but so you know where I'm coming from. I have interacted with the open source bibliographic community & have tried many products & keep an ear to many others.

First, check out the oss4lib blog and openbib. These will point you to a lot of other good material.

Next, absolutely download , which is one of the most full-featured & comprehensive library solution that the F/OSS community currently has.

I personally thing cheshire deserves a shout out too. A clean, FAST python-backed online catalogue with cross-site searching & conforming to a lot of nice standards like MODS.

You should also keep an eye for developments from bibliophile. This is a collaboration between many players of F/OSS literature databases.

If you have an embedded bitmap, save the doc to HTML and you'll get a HTML file and jpegs. In older versions of Word, 97 I think, this seemed to be at the original resolution. Later ones downsampled and made it fairly useless for print. If you don't have 97, or the file won;t open in it, for Word 2000 I found this method: this method that requiues some scripting:

Extracting Images from Microsoft Word Documents
by Ka-Ping Yee

You may have noticed while using Word that on many occasions, it loves to take control of your document away from you. It will rearrange your figures randomly, alter your formatting when you aren't looking, insert blank pages that hold the rest of your document hostage -- even fight with you over the text you are typing in. Just another way in which it loves to screw you over is to take ownership of any image you insert. The programmers responsible for image copy/paste and export deserve a good smack upside the head for this arrogance.

The Problem

Once you insert an image into a Word document, it's gone for good. Or so it seems. You can never recover the original image: as soon as the image arrives, it's automatically scaled to a different size. You'll find that if you try to copy the image and paste it outside of Word, it arrives scaled based on its size in the Word document. There's no way to fix it to 100% size again, so the image always comes out fuzzy. It also comes out horribly posterized for no particular reason; Word seems to apply a filter on export for the sole purpose of degrading your image.

But all of the image data is clearly present in the document. Word can scale it to any size. If you zoom in, all the detail is there. All of the colours appear crisp and perfect -- but in Word, and in Word only. How can you free your pixels from the tyranny?

The Secret

One of the many ways you can export your document, in Word 2000, is to "Compact HTML". This generates one HTML file with the text of your document and separate image files containing your figures. Alas, the images are JPEG files -- full of awful compression artifacts -- and of course they are randomly scaled to some size that depends on the size in your document and the phase of the moon.

However... if you watch very closely, you will see that PNG files exist in the output directory for just an instant before the JPEG files are written! The PNG files appear briefly, proving that Word has the pixels you want. Then, after it has mangled your artwork by converting it to JPEG, it blows away the PNG files (why would you want them anyway?).

The Solution

When you export your document to foo.html, the images appear in a directory called foo_files. Write a script to repeatedly copy away all the *.png files in this directory (your script will have to blindly copy away in an endless loop, not failing even while the directory doesn't exist). If you export to your home directory, which is cross-mounted from Unix to the Windows network on \\coeus, you can write this as a Unix shell script. For example:

mkdir saved
while true; do
/bin/cp -f ~/document_files/*.png saved
done

Start running the script, and let it spew error messages.

Then do File -> Export To... -> Compact HTML, and save to \\coeus\userid\document.htm .

After the dust settles, you should find your images lying in the saved directory, with names like img00001.png, pristine and perfect as when they were first inserted -- rescued at last from Word's evil, megalomanaical clutches.

Although a few cases have enforced anti-reverse-engineering clauses in negotiated licenses between sophisticated parties, no court has yet enforced a mass-market license restriction on reverse engineering and at least two courts have refused to do so.

While the case law on anti-reverse-engineering clauses of mass-market licenses is relatively sparse, a substantial number of legal commentators have recommended courts not enforce such clauses.

Although a few cases have enforced anti-reverse-engineering clauses in negotiated licenses between sophisticated parties, no court has yet enforced a mass-market license restriction on reverse engineering and at least two courts have refused to do so.

While the case law on anti-reverse-engineering clauses of mass-market licenses is relatively sparse, a substantial number of legal commentators have recommended courts not enforce such clauses.

Don't like the price? Get charged with felony in California and you can get your DNA sampled for free (as in nothing left to lose) .

The Soft Walls FAQ (PDF) says:

Can pilots tolerate a reduction of navigable airspace?
Among the more extreme ideas circulating include restricting aircraft to narrowly defined air lanes, making, in effect, tunnels in the sky. This greatly reduces flexibility in the system, making it much more difficult to adapt to unusual weather or traffic conditions, for example. If Soft Walls is deployed, the regulatory bodies that define the no-fly zones will have to exercise restraint to not unnecessarily reduce the navigable airspace. Ideally, Soft Walls does not reduce legally navigable airspace at all, since regulatory bodies already restrict the airspace around inhabited areas. As such, Soft Walls only reduces navigable airspace by removing the space where flying is unacceptable anyway.

But there is a significant difference between regulatory no-fly zones (what we have now) and regions into which an aircraft will not fly (what Soft Walls will impose). Some pilots argue that there are emergencies on an aircraft that would justify flying through regions of airspace where flight is forbidden. However, the pilot who does this is choosing to override the regulatory bodies, putting people on the ground at risk in an effort to protect the people in the craft. Should the pilot have a right to make that decision? Soft Walls means that the decision is made by the regulatory bodies. There is no aircraft emergency grave enough to justify an attempt to land on Fifth Avenue, and no pilot should have the right to choose to take that risk. Soft Walls can enforce that policy.

Of course, it is not new that there are regions into which aircraft will not fly. No aircraft, for example, can fly through a mountain, no matter how grave the on-board emergency that makes the pilot want to be on the other side of the mountain. Soft Walls creates no-fly zones where enforcement is gentler than that defined by mountains, but the constraint is equally strong. The aircraft simply cannot fly there.

Complete Disclosure: I work on the Soft Walls project.

The Soft Walls FAQ (PDF) says:

Can pilots tolerate a reduction of navigable airspace?
Among the more extreme ideas circulating include restricting aircraft to narrowly defined air lanes, making, in effect, tunnels in the sky. This greatly reduces flexibility in the system, making it much more difficult to adapt to unusual weather or traffic conditions, for example. If Soft Walls is deployed, the regulatory bodies that define the no-fly zones will have to exercise restraint to not unnecessarily reduce the navigable airspace. Ideally, Soft Walls does not reduce legally navigable airspace at all, since regulatory bodies already restrict the airspace around inhabited areas. As such, Soft Walls only reduces navigable airspace by removing the space where flying is unacceptable anyway.

But there is a significant difference between regulatory no-fly zones (what we have now) and regions into which an aircraft will not fly (what Soft Walls will impose). Some pilots argue that there are emergencies on an aircraft that would justify flying through regions of airspace where flight is forbidden. However, the pilot who does this is choosing to override the regulatory bodies, putting people on the ground at risk in an effort to protect the people in the craft. Should the pilot have a right to make that decision? Soft Walls means that the decision is made by the regulatory bodies. There is no aircraft emergency grave enough to justify an attempt to land on Fifth Avenue, and no pilot should have the right to choose to take that risk. Soft Walls can enforce that policy.

Of course, it is not new that there are regions into which aircraft will not fly. No aircraft, for example, can fly through a mountain, no matter how grave the on-board emergency that makes the pilot want to be on the other side of the mountain. Soft Walls creates no-fly zones where enforcement is gentler than that defined by mountains, but the constraint is equally strong. The aircraft simply cannot fly there.

Complete Disclosure: I work on the Soft Walls project.

I use 90% of my brain to look for aliens.

That was the last time I remember Bipolar transistors being hyped as the next revolution in CPU technology. Back then Exponential Technology http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/announce/1996/x7 04-533.htmlwas developing a PowerPC processor that was claimed would be able to run at the unheard of speed of 533MHz. The Mac fans of the time were drooling over the prospects for Pentium crushing performance.(About 200-300Mhz at the time)
BYTE magazine article from the time http://www.byte.com/art/9611/sec6/art14.htm

Copyright as the sole payoff is not enough. If my idea is novel enough that nobody else is likely to think of it, but is relatively easy to implement, then copyright gives me very little protection. Thus, no payoff.

You yourself have stated that patents have only applied to SW for 7 years. And, we all agree that the current implementation of patents on SW is flawed. So, how could there be any positive empirical indications?

I don't know any economists. Perhaps there are "many" that disagree with me. (How many economists do you know?)

What I know is human nature-- people don't do things generally unless there is some kind of potential reward. This includes the kind of rewards such as a good feeling that you've helped somebody, and money. The idea that I could get a temporary monopoly on implementations of my innovative idea will spur me to publish my ideas, so others can take advantage of them. Without that, I'd just keep it to myself. Additionally, it may spur me to pursue intriguing ideas, investing time and money to see if they work out. Without the payoff, I am not interested.

As a small time software guy, the chance that you'll win in the patent lottery is a lot smaller than that you'll win. And the problem is that it's not a free choice you have: if there are software patents, you have to play the game, you can't opt out. And again, this has nothing to do with patent quality, but with the fact that every computer program is built on many ideas and the fact that pretty much all innovation in software is sequential (along with the fact that large companies have more money to obtain more patents, of course).

As Shapiro said in 2001:

Today, most basic and applied researchers are effectively standing on top of a huge pyramid, not just on one set of shoulders. Of course, a pyramid can rise to far greater heights than could any one person, especially if the foundation is strong and broad. But what happens if, in order to scale the pyramid and place a new block on the top, a researcher must gain the permission of each person who previously placed a block in the pyramid, perhaps paying a royalty or tax to gain such permission? Would this system of intellectual property rights slow down the construction of the pyramid or limit its height?

Actually, Joachimstaler is the German name for it, but the town is in Bohemia (the Czech Republic) where it goes by the name of Jachymov. It's got a neat history -- first, they mined very pure silver here (which is why the 'thaler' or dollar got a reputation for being a really strong currency). Only, the miners kept dying mysteriously... Because the site also happened to be rich in uranium. It was from this site that Mme Curie got the pitchblende for her experiments.
During the 1950s, the communists turned the site into a concentration camp for political prisoners, who were forced to mine the uranium for the Soviet nuclear program. Today it's a spa town well-known within the Czech Republic for its curative radioactive water (used to treat some forms of cancer).

...but here it's an expectation? Well, I guess this is what you get for giving these places the "rich man's loophole" by making it a nice large (and possibly price fixed) admission fee that's conditionally waived for the undeserving. Now when some Ohio State (or even better, Wright State) students would return the favor for the Wright Flyer stunt at MIT, that'd be news, not some high-tax state that caters to the same crowd as MIT's nearby neighbors, also home to Caltech's evil neighbors.

Berkeley has some videos of their BLEEX (Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton) Project on their web page.

Video

I swear that guy in the video is the Star Wars kid, if was making robot noises with his mouth he would have me convinced.

Berkeley has some videos of their BLEEX (Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton) Project on their web page.

Video

I swear that guy in the video is the Star Wars kid, if was making robot noises with his mouth he would have me convinced.

Often some combination of Maya on the front-end with lots of custom scripts is used to generate RIB data which is rendered by a RenderMan interface compliant renderer. You won't get PRMan (Pixar's implementation) very cheaply, but there some other good implentations. You may still be able to dig up a copy of the Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) somewhere. RenderDotC has a resolution limited evaluation version. There's also Aqsis and which is GPL, but I haven't used it so I can't really speak on its quality or how complete it is. Pixie is another GPL renderer which seems pretty cool. All of them can run on Linux.

Part of the reason that RenderMan renderers are so popular is that they let you write custom shader scripts which they interpret to shade and deform the geometry. It's kind of the equivalent of GPU pixel and vertex shaders (which are partly inspired by RenderMan, by the way.)

If you want books, Advanced RenderMan is excellent. (My copy is well worn.) The RenderMan Repository has some examples and some good basic information on RenderMan. They also have a nice collection of PDF's of the course notes from the RenderMan SIGGRAPH courses over the years. Those typically have chapters by folks from the studios describing how they accomplished certain effects. I highly recommend it for getting the flavor of the the thing. Lastly, there's the RenderMan spec itself from Pixar, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to all this.

My suggestion to start trying this stuff out would be too Google for RIB export scripts/plugins for Blender (I know they exists, but I don't use Blender), grab one of the GPL renderers out there and pick up a copy of Advanced RenderMan to start learning the shading language. Good luck!

Not forgetting

4. Lost the ability to see in ultra-violet.

From a study of 'opsins', the chemical molecules that convert light into electrons, and enable vision to work, many small animals and insects have the ability see these wavelengths. Humans seem to have lost this ability, due to the increased refraction at short wavelengths caused by larger eyes.

5. To be able to visualize magnetic field lines.

Magnetically sensitive molecules have been found in avian retinas. The theory is that these could appear as some sort of overhead display in the bird's mind (although, nothing more than lines running across the field of view, or maybe a pair of light/dark spots).

6. To be able to visualize polarised light (as used by the octopus). Underwater, light is polarized by the reflection of light reflected off fish scales. Many fish try and camouflage themselves by trying to match the optical intensity of their surroundings. For simple predators this works, but more complex creatures
such as the octopus are not fooled.

Also, polarized light can be used to signal to other members of the species without attracting undue attention.

7. Or having 16 visual pigments like the Stomatopod, which is also known to use polarised light to signal to others of the same species (And which also has stereo vision using one eye).

"Sometimes, it's an institutional thing, as noted by postings to this article about certain countries offering entire courses centered around this competition."

Like these ones, for instance:

http://www.cse.unr.edu/~westphal/spring2005/cs491F /
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/392/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/csx98/
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dodds/ACM/homeACM.html

http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu

Keep it running on all of my PC's, and they all run at 100% all the time. Good way to keep the house warm on those cold alaskan winter nights.

This story reminds me of the robot fly created by Ron Fearing of UC Berkeley and Michael Dickinson of Caltech some years ago. Check it out: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/mm/spingar nkoff/flyorama/robofly.html

Yes, but one would think a 160-bit key would be good enough for most things. I doubt data corruption wouldn't get caught using this.

There are several arguments against the possibility of strong AI. First and foremost, there is disagreement on fundamental philosophical issues.

All proponents of strong AI have to somehow make a stand against at least John Searle's famous Chinese Room argument and Terry Winograd's phenomenological (and biological) account, in his book Computers and Cognition. Hubert Dreyfus provides, of course, an even deeper phenomenological argument in "What computers (still) can't do". (Dreyfus does give Neural Networks some chance, perhaps that is why the original poster is still enthusiastic about the "Baby Bootstrap"?)

Since their arguments are available in the links above and/or other places on the web, I will not repeat them here. My point is that anyone who is seriously interested in AI has to really consider their philosophical ground, and has to do so in the light of arguments against it. After all, the arguments pointed to above are still more recent than arguments for strong AI.

In other words, I would like to ask of (strong) AI proponents to answer a just what this "learning" is, that the baby bootstrap is subject to? What "knowledge" will it contain? Oh, and what about its means of "expression", "language" as you may call it?

If it's free 3d software (that doesn't suck) you're after, there's a fair bit around these days:

• Wings - Utterly wicked sub-d edgeloop modeler, offering better poly tools than the majority of commercial packages (Maya's poly tools are cack, and need to be extended with scipts).
• Blender - The UI was designed by mutant space robots on peyote, but other than that minor deficiency, it is a pretty capable package.
• Pixie - Free renderman renderer. It isn't prman, but pretty nifty all the same.

Regarding piracy of 3d software.. I think most vendors probably accept that this is going to happen amongst home users / students. Otherwise, no one would be able to learn their products, the price is simply prohibitive. That being said however, both Alias and SideFx are offering free uncrippled (featurewise.. they create watermarks) learning versions of Maya and Houdini respectively. Discreet don't appear to be doing the same.. but honestly I can't understand anything Discreet does these days.

The hardest cases are Professors, who _really_ like their laptops. How protected should a list of student names and student IDS be? (Mercifully, the student id is not the SSN). Note that student names are protected information, grades can be posted on doors, but the student id is used, not the name.

It is sad that it takes a case like this to get the barn door closed.

Total Disclosure: I work for Berkeley, but I have no idea about the details of the missing laptop.

Silly me for having applied there in the fall of 2001 for a graduate program. How long do they really need to hold onto my data when I told them I was going somewhere else? I suppose just in case I apply for something else again.

Their Identity FAQ is useful, but the number they list to call to see if your name was on the laptop just plays a message. They also claim they'll try to contact everyone who's name may have been compromised.

Identity fun.

Social Security Number Safety

Although a SSN is only meant to be used for tax and government purposes, it is often used by financial institutions, businesses, and others as a unique identification number. Because the SSN is a unique ID, it is often the target of "identity theft". Therefore you should be very careful about where and to whom you give your SSN.

• Never carry your Social Security card or number with you. Keep it at home in a secure place.
• Only give your SSN to someone who has a specific and legitimate need for it.
• Be very careful with any forms, applications or other materials that may have your SSN on it.
• Never give your SSN to someone who phones you. You should initiate the call or meet in person.
• Never reply to email or web sites that request an SSN.

Amen to that.

And to think, all those CPUs could actually be doing something useful instead. If it's just about taxing your processor once a week (or maybe more frequently; I've never had the dubious pleasure of a Gentoo install) then surely Folding@Home or SETI@home can provide more than enough exercise for even the most voracious CPU/geek combo.

But, no, of course, that's not l33t enough. I half wonder that if SETI and/or Folding had their clients scroll dummy compile messages across the screen whilst they run, all these die hards might run them instead.

(Though I suppose not a few of them are specifying -O8 just so that they can run SETI at supposedly "breakneck" pace...)

iqu :P

Even if this article is a bit dated, it's very relevant. I find it interesting because he talks some about the economics behind managing risks like those cited.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTim es/2000-06-01.html

Dr. Varian's writings are in general quite interesting. He is quite able in his discussions of economics for people without a background in the field, like myself.

Really, I can't fathom how people would choose primes over protiens when protiens may help the fight against cancer amongst others.

Your assertion about the fossil record is ludacris.

Fossil record

Ludacris

Ludicrous

Ironic

Berkeley Groks can be interesting science program. They've had some top notch guests for interview too. Their xylophone linking music is classic :)

Can be got either here:
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/
or
http://www.archive.org/audio/collection.php?collec tion=groks

The audio section of the archive.org has great live music sets freely available too. There are also famous speeches available.

I remember stumbling across a free audio book site some time ago. Not sure of the quality. You might want to check it out.
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp

The EFF has been following the DRM issue for quite some time now. See also this 2003 conference on DRM at Berkeley.

Someone got his blog pointed at slashdot, while I love the subject, its 4 days old, been on blogs for 3 days and a poor cut and paste job from the original Press release.http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/release s/2005/03/16_microjet.shtml
Read the press release, its better :)

Press Release!
Engadget!

This is a fair amount of research going on for this; it's known as adiabatic logic.

Here's a short paper on how it's clocked:
Charge Recycling Clocking for Adiatbatic Style Logic

Formica

Also, VOIP apps would probably just eventually adapt by providing their own QoS using overlay networks (for example OverQoS) if QoS became a real issue.

...can zombies be clustered?

Clustered using a Win32 worm? No.

A botnet node, however, could easily be manipulated to handle distributed computing such as Folding@Home, SETI@Home, or, with Java, Remote Method Invocation (RMI).

A 50k node botnet with each zombie contributing to, say, cracking an encryption could be invaluable to hackers and a multi-billion corporation's worst nightmare.

I suppose that sunrises as we know them begin happenning when there's an Earth that rotates, rather than when the sun first exists. Still, 3.6 million is shorter than the age of man.

I suppose that sunrises as we know them begin happenning when there's an Earth that rotates, rather than when the sun first exists. Still, 3.6 million is shorter than the age of man.

As for the one-button mouse, I'd observed at Xerox Parc which had a 3-button mouse, that people were very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select" and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of putting writing on keys did not occur to anybody, including me. So if I was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be labeled.

All the interesting bits of the internet will be a cross between bittorrent, boinc, and stumbleupon.

Diva is used by Ptolemy II, a set of Java packages supporting heterogeneous, concurrent modeling and design.

Ptolemy II uses PtPlot to plot 2D signals. Ptplot has a backward compatibilty mode with Xgraph, the signal plotter written by David Harrison for X Windows.

Total disclosure: I'm on the Ptolemy II and PtPlot development teams.