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... I was going to make a comment on how ironic it would be to...

Actually, the real irony of this story is that the guy who photographed Kerry is a professor of journalism ethics at a likely target for conservatives.

An external observer never sees an object pass through an event horizon. Nonetheless, the object does pass through the event horizon, in finite proper time (i.e. according to its own clock). When you take black hole evaporation into account, an external observer sees an object reach the event horizon at the exact instant that the hole evaporates. But the object has actually long since passed through the horizon and been destroyed by the singularity. There is a difference between what an observer sees (or doesn't see) happen to an object, and what actually happens to that object. See this FAQ.

http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/

You're welcome.

My preferred design tool is Canvas from ACD Systems (formerly Deneba). Canvas is a technical illustration oriented, jack of all trades vector based graphics program available on the Mac and Windows. Canvas is sort of a combination of a technical/precise version of Illustrator, Photoshop light (works with a number of Photoshop filters) for bitmap manipulation, and Pagemaker light all in one program. Imports and exports a wide variety of formats. Of particular interest in this case is the ability to export PDF and HTML. You can define HTML links on objects so that you can use that do create low fidelity prototypes or walkthroughs.

I usually create design "sketchbooks" in Canvas that contain my wireframe mockups and send them to the developers (and anyone else) as a self contained PDF document.

A few in our company use PowerPoint in a similar fashion, but with much less ease, capability and style.

Another tool that you should look at is Denim which is a tool for informal, early stage web site and UI design. Fairly useful and keeps things at an informal "sketch" level. Really requires a graphics tablet though.

I find delta can often be useful for automatically narrowing down a large test case to a small one.

And BTW, it's 'Dijkstra'.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu

- Lebofsky

The weakest link in any cryptography protocol is the key, reguardless of how big it is.

That's totally incorrect. In fact, the weakest link is almost never the key size. The failure point in protocols often has nothing to do with the security of the underlying cryptographic primative. PGP's file format lead to a break in the PGP system without attacking any of the cryptographic primatives. Similarly, SSL was broken on netscape because of a faulty choice of random number generator. Wep was broken in 802.11b devices due a series of flaws that didn't break the underlying algorithms. Cipher design is very difficult but it's only the easy part. Protocols are a nightmare.

During the cold war some soviet spy's would use an encryption scheme where a single bit of the key would decrypt a single bit of the message, after decryption the bits of the key that were used to decrypt were thrown away. The key had to be huge and it could only be used for a certain number of messages. That type of encryption is called a one time pad, it's nearly impossible to break. The common encryption schemes today like RSA or DES go for reusable keys but you still need to switch your key's every so often.

It is unbreakable but people often sing it's praises and neglect the fact you have to get this key to the other party you want to communicate with. Since the One time pad (OTP) is the *same* size as the plain-text you want to communicate then surely it's just as easy to communicate the actual message? In some cases it's useful, like where you can give someone they pad before they start their covert mission but in a modern internet setting the OTP is useless.

Generally the idea is to make the key as large as possible. There will always be a cap in how large one can go. Limitations in computing power can make the time needed to decrypt a message with a large key unacceptable. Maybe the key needs to fit onto some ealy concealable physical medium, or maybe it needs to be remembered. The idea is to acertain your upper limit and use keys that are that length

Again, another misconception. Bigger keys do not have a huge impact on performance if your using a block cipher. I could make DES use 768-bit keys if I dumped the key schedule and used independant subkeys. It wouldn't improve it's security either. Infact, differential cryptanalysis of DES and it's varient is generally done by assuming the subkeys are independant. Bigger keys do not always equal bigger security.

I stand by my original analysis. Smaller keys are better because they're easier to protect. The only need to be big enough to resist brute-force and there is no use in increasing the size further.

You can deblur to some extent. However it is an ill-posed problem: Roughly speaking, in one dimension for simplicity, if you blur by a point spread function h(x), this is convolution of your original image f(x) to get a blurred image g(x):

g(x)=h(x)*f(x)

where "*" is convolution. If you take Fourier transforms, convolution becomes multiplication and

G(w)=H(w)F(w)

has zeros in the frequency domain and if you try to divide by H(w) to invert the blurring

F(w)=G(w)/H(w)

Then H(w_0)=0 for some frequency w_0 (actually many frequencies) and you are dividing by zero when computing F(w_0). This magnifies any non-blurring related noise or error in G(w) (which is always present) and you get garbage back. Practical deblurring schemes like Wiener filtering, Tikhonov regularization and total variation regularization effectively limit the component of the reconstructed F(w) at or near those frequencies. Thus some information is lost: you don't even try to get F(w_0) right. But the effect can still be quite good. Typically this results in a less blurry image with less sharp edges. I don't think you could do this sort of regularization with a lens, but I could be wrong.

Some pretty pictures and comparisons of various algorithms can be found at Deblurring

Probably a package that weighs 5 pounds, doesn't open right, has about 2 sentences of actual use,

Oh, I expected that joke to go a different direction:

Probably a package that weighs 5 pounds, is misaddressed, has excess postage, has leaking liquids or powders, has exposed wires, emitting a ticking sound....

A Few Tips on Suspicious Packages

Weird stuff . . .

The DENIM Project might be something you could look into. It is a tool for web page and UI design but it should be easily adaptable for your needs (especially with its export to HTML). You could also try Visual Thought though it is no longer developing nor supported (but is more tailored to what you're describing than DENIM).

A completely seperate _Domain_ of life, only recently delineated from bacteria an eukaryotes. Analysis of acid mine drainage sites have found these microbes living in pH -3.5, and actually actively drive down the pH themselves. See http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/archaea/archaea.html. Jill Banfield, a Macarthur Grant recipient, has done quite a bit of work on this.

A completely seperate _Domain_ of life, only recently delineated from bacteria an eukaryotes. Analysis of acid mine drainage sites have found these microbes living in pH -3.5, and actually actively drive down the pH themselves. See http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/archaea/archaea.html. Jill Banfield, a Macarthur Grant recipient, has done quite a bit of work on this.

This has probably been reverted to the 3-clause BSD license through the Regents' mass relicensing of such code; see ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.Lic ense.Change

However, the university statement only says BSD Unix files have the clause removed. It's unclear if they X11 files with that clause are included or not.

He points out that Berkeley needs to be asked about this:

* The Regents of the University of California can be contacted about the contents of xc/programs/Xserver/hw/sunLynx/fbio.h and asked if the 4-clause BSD license still applies to them.

But further not all of these files are under the standard BSD license. But other licenses that are similar but not identical.

The messy truth is that there is code copyrighted by the Regents in XFree86 under *several* similar but distinct licenses. Some with an advertising clause, some without. Some GPL-compatible, some not.

In the 'worst case' That is, total conversion to biofuel, that 5 BTU would come from more biofuel and/or crop waste.

It better come from crop waste, because if it all comes from the product fuel the total productivity falls by a huge amount (83% for that 1996 example; it would probably be somewhat better now, but I'll wager it's still more than 2/3).

The use of crop waste isn't quite free either. In current harvesting techniques the corn is shelled on the combine and the stalks and ears are shredded and put back on the soil. This adds organic matter and helps control erosion. If you take it away for fuel, what other inputs are you going to need to hold the soil down and maintain its quality?

Distilleries could be made a lot more efficient as well. From what I have seen, currently there is no effort made at most distilleries to recapture the heat of condensation from the produced ethanol.

Distillation of seawater often uses multiple-effect stills, but salt does not have the problematic quality of vaporizing easily. This limits the temperatures and pressures you can use for effective separation of ethanol/water mixtures, and cuts the ability to recycle heat through common techniques such as using the condenser of a high-pressure stage to heat the boiler of a low-pressure stage.

This does not excuse the distillers for failing to use techniques which are known to work, such as solar flat-panel collectors for heating stills. The temperatures are under 100 C, which works just fine with solar. If they used a concentrating "power tower" it would be feasible to generate electricity as well as process steam to run the stills.

I believe the real purpose of the subsidies is national security. They are meant to maintain reserve food production capacity in the U.S. much like paying farmers to NOT grow crops, but more productive. That capacity parallels our strategic oil reserves. If food could be stored indefinitely, we would just maintain strategic food reserves.

It may surprise you to learn that the US once DID maintain food reserves, only their avowed purpose was to stabilize prices (buying in rich years, selling in lean years) rather than any strategic goal. Farmers were paid to idle land which would otherwise flood the system with surplus food. It worked, until someone got greedy and made a big sale to Russia when stocks were low. (According to the Cato Institute, that someone was the chairman of ADM.)

If food could be stored indefinitely, we would just maintain strategic food reserves.

You don't need to store food indefinitely, you just need to cycle it through storage fast enough that it doesn't go bad. In the case of grain, this can be a matter of years if I'm not mistaken. How many years of backup do you really need?

In a worst case economic disaster, hyperinflation is driven by dependence on imports.

That's the point I was making; the entire "biofuel" system as currently constructed is highly dependent upon imports, and will fare just as badly as everything else if they were to be restricted. To be a real source of security it has to be independent.

This need not be overly difficult. For instance, if we got the "hydrogen from green algae" trick working on an industrial scale and 5% efficiency, the hydrogen could fix the nitrogen required for crop production without any fossil inputs (as might recycling of the fermentation solids as animal feed, the manure handled as input to a methane digester for further fuel production, and finally the digester effluent used as liquid fertilizer). For the distillation step solar heat would do, or byproduct steam from a steam-cycle powerplant. This would eliminate the dependence of any part of the ethanol process on imported fuels, and free much of it from fossil fuels.

Actually, I'm sure many Universities do display the stats of student reviews after each semester. Take Berkeley EECS for instance. There are no actual written comments, but that might have to do as much with a lack of transcribers as it does with censorship.

My Book if you want to start at the bottom and work up.

How to Design Programs or Simply Scheme if you want to start at the top and work down.

I think there's also some good introductory Python books.

After intensive visual research, the scientists found the following.

Insertion of a miniature microphone yielded no conclusive results, although members of the team did claim to "someone" singing college fight songs in a very off-key manner.

I want one of those: wedding stuff

Yeah, 6502 is easier to learn, because it's so simple. Of course, students aren't going to want to write code for an Apple II or a C64, but give them a good NES emulator, documentation, and an assembler, and they'll have a lot of fun coding for the 6502. (although I must admit, the NES is a weird little machine. The PPU's oddities might cancel out the 6502's simplicity. :-)

Once you know the 6502 it's easy to learn the 65816 (SNES or Apple IIGS) or any of the other popular 70s or 80s microprocessors.

I learned SPARC assembly in college. A very elegant machine (with only a few oddities to learn, such as filling that delay slot after a branch instruction) which teaches you lots of stuff about modern computer architecture. Last semester they used 386 assembly language instead, which the students (and instructors!) found much more difficult.

With three G5 CPUs and if they ever managed to get linux on this baby think of how many SETI@Home Work Units you could crunch in a week? *drool*

Okay, we've seen it in the past. Let's put two and two together. Andy + Warhol worm = Andy Warhol. Now pay up!

fyi a math prof here at Berkeley wants to write an Open-Source calc textbook within a few years. His webpage if you are interested:

link

Here's some advice applicable to your question unlike the other 98% of unrelated opinions already posted:

OCW will get you started on the right foot, but I would recommend finding a suitable research field to apply those skills to.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been in a research lab at my alma mater's comp sci dept. And several of these grad students came from a non-computer science background such as physics, chemistry, genetics, etc. Once they found an immediate application for their programming skills, their skills progressed at an amazing rate. This does not mean that all science-based individuals are good programmers, but the purpose and foundation for learning (and learning properly) is already there.

So my advice? Use the internet to start researching some of the better computer science schools research groups and see if there is anything out there you like. Conjoining your medical background with a CS focus might lead to neuro/bio/medical -informatics, or maybe computational biology. You can also go into simulation, such as scientific visualization of specific area of medical research or even go into computer graphics. There are literally thousands of specific areas to look into.

Here's on example: Sticking with the foundation learned in OCW and applying proper programming techniques (such as learned in "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers) to fields such as computer graphics can be a great way to get immersed in the field - as long as you have an end application to apply your skills. So picking up a project like applying computer graphic visualization and simulation to a medical process or generating physical-based character animation can be extremely beneficial. You'll obviously have to learn computer graphics programming somewhere along the way, but that that'll just sharpen both your math skills and visual sense, along with having another great tool under your belt.

Go research some of the current projects going on at research labs at the top computer science schools. Here are some suggestions for you to check out:

And of course not all computer science research falls under the header of the computer science department. Research medical departments doing interdisciplinary research with both engineering and computer science.

Almost all research labs have papers of their work (even their most recent) avaialble in PDF format. Download some of the earlier papers to get a feel for the research focus and try to find something that interests you. Try to implement the same techniques and algorithms using your skills. This will bea great way for you to realize what you still need to learn and get a great foundation in a new area of research.

But always keep in mind that proper programming is of utmost importance. So while your trying to leanr a new area of research by applying your skills, also focus on the studying from the better programming books out there that teach you how to become a better programmer. Go on amazon for suggestions. Start with looking up my previous suggestion and go from there.

Good luck, and sorry about all of the hundreds of wasted postings coming from IT people bitching about their lack of applicable skills.

Martin

See here.

You can find a good analysis here.

The computer science department at Berkeley has already broken the Yahoo-like Captcha. They use an algorithm to break it. They recommend "Gimpy" as a replacement, which their software has yet to crack. The blog is full of crap, the captcha is generated every session, so you can't make a link to the image like they would like because the session would end.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu"

Yes, and to hitler anyone non aryan was not human.

But that doesn't make it true.

Saying anything, include your misguided attempt at analogy, doesn't make anything true. Okay, and...?

You don't get to redefine free to mean the opposite of what it means, just as he doesn't get to redefine human.

You just made an analogy that claims simply saying something doesn't make it true. That would include your absurd statement over what I do or don't get to say!

We can clear this up right now. I agree 100% with what this meaning of free is. I believe most literate people would agree as well. Even if you did agree with that definition, you may find that we would still disagree on the definition of freedom in regards to Open Source development. The reason may escape you, but it is simply subjective interpretation. An unavoidable human condition. It isn't clear to people who take things literally how such a thing is allowable, but in this case take my word for it. The best you can do is allow the market to prove who's right and who's wrong. It all honesty, it won't even do that. It will simply prove who's best fit for the purposes of the majority.

I love how you talk about "community" and "greedy" and the "Selfish".... you sure are a communist, aren't ya?

No. But, what are you, who snidely loves the talk of "greedy" and "Selfish" and the "community"? Someone who prefers greed and selfishness? An uncivilized person? What label of anti-community superiority would you prefer to wear?

Bet ya think corporations are generally evil?

Only those who violate the community's trust and don't reciprocate. Correction, I also don't like corporations who lie, cheat, steal, and hurt people. You might even say that I don't like uncivilized behavior in corporation, as I wouldn't like it in an individual.

I think you've never written a line of code in your life.

Let's hope for your financial well being you don't invest in the stock market.

If you had, you'd know you can't close open sourced software in a commercial environemnt practially-- you have to commit your changes to the public tree, otherwise you have to track what everyone else does.

And, of course companies like Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, SCO...etc, never had the resources to do that during the Unix Wars and later up until the late 90's. They all made Unix from scratch and none of their closed source Unix variants ever came from previously open source roots. Please, your showing your historical ignorance. Of course, you can always claim that saying anything doesn't make it true - HA!

All the "stealing" you guys think you're preventing is a figment of your imagination.

The literally minded can be considered a danger to themselves, as well as the community. Theft in terms of the loss of social profit can be considered a simile. A more accurate phrasing would be that when a person or company takes something from the community, without giving back to the community, that act is like theft of the community's potential gain. Those who are concerned over the loss of the community's potential gain simply use the GPL to mitigate that. Those who prefer the BSD don't view the community's interest in the same manner, allowing the proprietary forks during the Unix Wars to occur.

Just like all communists who want to force others to live like they do "for the good of the community" you try to force people to your ideology,

Please point out where I force anyone to do anything. The laws you are forced to live by are passed by those representing the community. Are those laws communist? Are you, for living under them? Your simple worldvi

When did Nomadix "come up" with their brilliant idea? Does anyone actually know?

I know that Berkeley's AirBears system (airbears.berkeley.edu) had it sometime in 2000-2001. Perhaps, someone came up with this idea before Nomadix?

Anyways, patents suck. Especially stupid ones like this.

I can't find a link to an actual demo of it simulating a human voice, but here's a page that documents its use to reproduce the sound of a suling (javanese wooden flute). Does a good job too. I've heard it demo'd with a human voice, and it was pretty good (though the neural net needed additional input - the syllable being sung - obviously).

i'm sure that many of the other academic computer music labs around the world had similar software long before yamaha introduced this package. still cool, though.

I can't find a link to an actual demo of it simulating a human voice, but here's a page that documents its use to reproduce the sound of a suling (javanese wooden flute). Does a good job too. I've heard it demo'd with a human voice, and it was pretty good (though the neural net needed additional input - the syllable being sung - obviously).

i'm sure that many of the other academic computer music labs around the world had similar software long before yamaha introduced this package. still cool, though.

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Then we should create an opensource project for the advancement in the studies on these same things that his foundation is funding and knock em out with distributed clients(like Seti@home) or the Virgnina super cluster something definatly linux.

That way we can prove his money is being horded and used for the demise of his compitors, or itch his media persona to donate $$ to the project.

I did a reverse dns lookup on the list.. It's kinda funny that University of Utah Printing Services and UC Berkeley Printing Services both come up on the list..

Take a look at the full list (note: these are only the ones that returned something)

No, it isn't if you don't apply it in a literal sense, such as if you disregard the entire concept of methaphor or simile. The loss of "potential revenue" by a company due to the activities of another company can be addressed in court, and repayment can ordered. That is a literal concept. If there is a way to represent the idea of "future losses" for the community that can be encapsulated in a single word, it is theft. A more accurate phrasing would be that when a person or company takes something from the community, without giving back to the community, that act is like theft. The word "like", makes this a simile. You may not consider it perfect for the role, but you haven't introduced a helpful substitute.

You're mincing words and trying to mislead people in the process.

Not my intention at all. You take things too literally. I'm trying to clarify as much as my poor abilities will allow. If you'd like to give it a shot, you're welcome to it.

First off, I can vouch for my grandparent poster's ability with the English laguage and I believe he knows what he is talking about and is right on the money.

I'm glad you have an opinion on the matter. It wouldn't be much of a discussion without one.

We do not discuss metaphoric losses in the world of software

Maybe you don't, but others do. The world isn't simply black and white as I'll show you later in the post. As an aside, people who believe that the world is black and white can be a danger to themselves and those around them as they take things too literally. The GPL clearly isn't for everyone, as the number of BSD supporting posts show in this article. However, I haven't read anything of evidence to indicate that the GPL would inhibit or hinder the growth of software, or take away code from the community as a whole. Hence, my position on it. I recognize that at a point in time, the BSD provided a useful mechanism for licensing Open Source software. That was until an improved license came along. The "improvement" is controversial to some, but an objective market will decide which is the better. My bet is that more people favor an implementation of the Golden Rule such as the GPL, than disapprove of it.

time is not something that is owned and can be robbed from someone.

The world isn't black and white, and someone stating such a broad assertion deserves instruction. To put it literally, you're absolutely wrong. On the other hand, my point regarding the BSD license and theft are not literal. It is merely illustrative of a subtle and important concept. Apparently, too subtle for some.

Figures of speech work well to denote ideas in the figurative sense

And, what is wrong with symbolic representation? It is our ability to symbolize that allows us to code.

but confusing them with literal ideas only serves to show that you don't know how to properly present the thought.

Or, that you don't understand that thoughts have meaning other than in the literal. That would indicate a lower level of self education, or someone who doesn't wish to understand past what he sees. Hence, taking things literally where literal thinking doesn't apply. I recommend a regimen of philosophical readings into abstract thought.

INFRINGEMENT which is what you are confusing for THEFT.

No. Infringement is simply some violation of an agreement, and can at times even be inappropriately used as a longer version of the same word, theft. What I'm stating is theft as a simile, not as a literal act. Theft as a simile is as real as a description of what something is like. Theft in a literal sense would not be tolerated and would become a legal

I'm really tired of this arguement, so I'll just point you to a site that says it much better than I want to take the time to say.

Ultrasonics

As you'll read, there has been research done, and it is noticable to chop off frequencies above 22KHz. Granted a single wave is not going to show the difference, but we more than likely detect that waves effects on other waves.

"It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form."

I doubt that that pop-ups are even as effective as direct mail, which is to say not very. Pop-ups and pop-unders are the web equivalent to pick up lines. The senders claims of effectiveness are suspect.

The rather major difference between this form of plagerism detection and most is that it is performed by an external for profit company.

I have run plagerism detection on all the assignments for all the courses I've run. No one has ever complained, and no one would have grounds to. Since the plagerism detection is just part of marking and placed no extra requirements upon the students.

I don't know anyhing about Moss that I didn't read on http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html just now, but it doesn't seem to infringe on the rights of the student.

My university tried a similar thing last year and it also caused a stink amongst the students. The problem is that to submit the assignment the student must first submit it to the plagerism detection company. That submission requires assigning some rights to that company - essentially to comply with the assignment submission requirements the student must license their work to the company in question to use for profit making purposes with no compensation at all.

At my university that actually conflicts with the letter of the university regulatoins about student intellectual property, since the university isn't allowed to force the students to do anything with the student's own IP.

I was a TA for a C programming class just last semester. With all the programs I had to grade, it was unrealistic for me to be able to detect cheating without help. I submitted papers to the free-as-in-beer MOSS program at UC Berkeley. The system doesn't require students to hand assignments in through it and merely shows you the closest matches and lets you draw your own conclusions. It's an impressive piece of work and it doesn't make anyone any money by my use of it.
To my extreme dismay, the system brought up submissions by two students that grew progressively more similar as the semester progressed until it became obvious they were not original. Possibly the hardest thing I have ever done was to report these students to the professor. They admitted to it and both failed the class as a result. It still pains me to think that I had a part in causing them so much grief, but I still believe I did the right thing. If nothing is done to prevent this, it betrays the students who work hard to produce their own work. The value of a degree goes down as well as the integrity of the institution if anyone with money to buy assignments or skilled friends can do just as well as those who learn these skills on their own.

Still, I'm glad I got a research position this semester where I will not have to play such a disciplinary role.

Many people on /. assume that any use of cheat checking is "guilty until proven innocent", but that is not necessarily the case. I am a computer science professor who submits all programs for comparison to all other students in the class to MOSS . The 300 programs means 90000 comparisons which are returned sorted on similarity. It would be foolish to simply acuse people based on that. I spend at least an hour on each case. I only use MOSS to do a first pass to eliminate the programs which I need not look at. Out of 90000 only the top dozen require checking. Any case I build against a student is the same as if I did it all by hand -- I simply have been saved the time of looking at the vast majority which are fine. Of course, the assumption is that there are no false negatives -- all that I DON'T look at are innocent. Many years of experience have convinced me that it is a reasonable assumption.
But my point is that the computer is not determining guilt; I am.

Briefly, the issue of the database of papers is quite a different issue and I agree with the sentiment that it is a problem. I do teach courses with essays and I can tell you that it is quite easy to find plagarism proof -- I can search the web as well as the students. Just last semester I read a paper, the alarms went off, I searched and found the sources, and failed the student.

People who have mentioned that the underlying issue is cutting costs, and that that is wrong are correct on both counts. In the US, financial support for education appears to be at a nadir.

Don't worry about the Taj Mahal! It already has been modeled by using just photographs. Who needs anything more? I'm sure it has at least 1,000 polys!

Life demands it!

Life must spread itself in order to survive, if all known life is limited to Earth, which is one small planet, it can be all killed in one little (little for the universe anyway) accident. Accidents both natural and man made, like an asteroid impact, new unstoppable disease, nuclear or biological war. Even a drastic climate change could kill 80% of all living things on the planet.

I believe life naturally advances to an intelligent level for its own survival. The world has been trying for a long time many times an asteroid set it back. We as humans really have only just come onto the seen, and only the past 10,000 years have we been really moving forward. The next few hundred years may pass as calmly as the last 10,000, but we have been lucky so far. If we are to survive we must leave Earth and this solar system.

Arthur Clarke said "If the human race is to survive, then for all but a very brief moment in its history the word ship will mean space ship."

The Pale Blue Dot

Asteroid Risk
Magnetic Changes
Climate Changes

My 2 cents...

not this mission but in 2007 their will be 4 of them, its a joint project between the Planetary Society and SSL berkley[project sites]


In 2007 the French NetLander mission is scheduled to deploy a network of 4 identical landers to study the atmosphere and interior structure of Mars. Onboard each NetLander craft will be upgraded versions of the Mars Microphone sensors placed on the panoramic camera head, enabling stereo recordings of the Martian sounds from a height of about 1 meter above the surface

Link here.

Why not use integral fast reactors to reduce nuclear waste?

If we burn the long half-life isotopes as nuclear fuel, and leave short half-life isotopes that decay quickly, we can seriously reduce

the amount of nuclear waste

the time that waste needs to be stored.

the tonnes of nuclear waste produced for which the only solution seems to be

"stick it in a fast reactor and use it again".

except that made the know-nothings even more scared of their own shadows, so politics and fear-mongering killed that too.

Or perhaps my irrationality extends to thinking that when the pigeons around the UK's nuclear waste processing plants are so radioactive they would be classed as nuclear waste themselves

if you think that proves anything about nuclear waste reprocessing as such, then you would indeed be thinking irrationally. if, however, you get a sneaking suspicion that the simple explanation - namely, that whoever operated that particular plant were a bunch of goofball morons who shouldn't have been trusted to operate a toaster - might after all be more likely, then perhaps there is still hope for your rationality and sense.

The problem with nuclear power is that it is made by humans and they have a habit of fucking up on a grand scale.

how, exactly, is that a problem with nuclear power?

that is a problem with people. don't blame nuclear power for your belonging to a race of goofball morons. if you let humanity's inherent flawedness scare you away from doing anything at all remotely dangerous - because, ohmygoddess, we might fuck it up somehow, because we are so goddamn motherfucking stupid, we can't trust ourselves with pointy sticks even, we might poke our eyes out, won't somebody think of the children - then nothing will ever get done. at all. by anybody.

yes, nuclear power carries some risks. so does every other damn thing you will ever think of. as a general rule of thumb, the more worthwhile and useful things you can think of will be proportionally more dangerous. that's life - deal with it.

As a UCB EECS graduate, I can truly appreciate FreeBSD.

As a hardware nerd, though, I was a little disappointed at the empirical results the OS turned in for my disk array (RAID5, 4x200GB, 16kB block size, 8:16:32:256K stripe size) - burst and sustained transfer is much faster under Windows. Have a look at the results: IDE Hardware Raid On FreeBSD

Giving a value on the Richter scale is not really meaningfull. You can have a 7 earthquake doing almost no damage if it happens far below earth surface and big damage with a 4 one near the surface in a low developped country.

It all depends on where the earthquake takes place.

You should use an estimate on the Mercalli scale. I find it more relevant.

Richter scale is all about energy released, Mercalli scale is all about damage/lost of lives which really is what matters.