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I remember something like that too - probably it was about either this, this or this.

I'd argue instead that the machine being imperative is the problem. It's 2011 and we still just have a gigantic array of words that we can move an instruction pointer through... See e.g. Lambda: The Ultimate Opcode for an alternative approach to system design.

Nothing really prevents us from building an expression reduction machine (with an imperative IO processor, naturally... it is nice to interact with the external environment) nowadays. I'm not sure where the rest of the project went, but there was a project involving Ivan Sutherland at Berkeley that built a purely parallel processor. In FLEET there is no notion of a linear program nor of linearly addressable memory--programs become dependency graphs that are reduced.

Basically, the machine being a really fancy Turing machine is an accident (in the formal sense), and not at all essential to computation. It happens to work pretty well and certainly will be dominant for a long time, but forever? Probably not, expression reduction machines can be clockless, massively parallel (as in executing thousands of operations simultaneously), &c -- which means smaller dies, lower power usage, ....

Another thing to think about is that this is for freshman. I'm suspecting that anyone who can get into CMU has a pretty good grasp on Algebra... and probably the differential/integral calculus. Functional programming is a natural extension of the mathematics the students have already learned whereas OO is an entirely different paradigm which presents a barrier to actually learning the essence of computing science.

That, and CMU is the Land of SML. The mantra there is that OO is a hack--an artificial conglomeration of several orthogonal concepts: modules, protocols, records, polymorphic functions, &c. Under that philosophy OO is just another obsolete intermediate step in the evolution of computer language.

Is this really different from the Berkeley Intro to CS (CS61A) being taught around Scheme before getting into Data Structures and OO (CS61B) in the second semester? I think the third course in the series(CS61C) is C and assembly. I think this has been the case since 1989 when I graduated. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp11/ http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61bl/sp11/ http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp11/ MIT only switched to Python from a similar curriculum upon which the Berkeley one is based a few years ago because of a robotics API and they wanted to standardize the intro course across different majors, I was told.

Is this really different from the Berkeley Intro to CS (CS61A) being taught around Scheme before getting into Data Structures and OO (CS61B) in the second semester? I think the third course in the series(CS61C) is C and assembly. I think this has been the case since 1989 when I graduated. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp11/ http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61bl/sp11/ http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp11/ MIT only switched to Python from a similar curriculum upon which the Berkeley one is based a few years ago because of a robotics API and they wanted to standardize the intro course across different majors, I was told.

Is this really different from the Berkeley Intro to CS (CS61A) being taught around Scheme before getting into Data Structures and OO (CS61B) in the second semester? I think the third course in the series(CS61C) is C and assembly. I think this has been the case since 1989 when I graduated. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp11/ http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61bl/sp11/ http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/sp11/ MIT only switched to Python from a similar curriculum upon which the Berkeley one is based a few years ago because of a robotics API and they wanted to standardize the intro course across different majors, I was told.

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/, requires Java. I personally used this tool to benchmark some consumer router/firewall gear, to find most of it takes 100-300ms to make DNS lookups (which explained why web surfing felt so slow through these things, all the DNS requests were taking about 6x longer than they should).

.... However the Evolutionist Model is also not within the realm of actual science...

Evolution is observable and testable, so how is it not in the realm of actual science? Do some googling, you'll find a ton of real research that supports evolution.

How about a self-assessed buyout value taxed at 3% annually for copyrights, maybe less for shorter patents?

Some little progress documented on IP taxes is at: http://www.ip-tax.com/

Then (2003, by me):
http://p2pfoundation.net/Copyright_Tax
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000763.html

From one of those links: "Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments."

I got the idea from someone's slashdot sig back around; the sig asked something like, if it is intellectual property, why is it not taxed?

Ultimately we need to move beyond an economic system more-and-more built around "artificial scarcity". See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
   

How about a self-assessed buyout value taxed at 3% annually for copyrights, maybe less for shorter patents?

Some little progress documented on IP taxes is at: http://www.ip-tax.com/

Then (2003, by me):
http://p2pfoundation.net/Copyright_Tax
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000763.html

From one of those links: "Since it is difficult to value a copyright, one possibility to determine the value of a copyright is to let copyright holders assess themselves how much it is worth it to them to keep their work out of the public domain. Then the rights holder would pay annually a small percentage of this value (perhaps three to five percent). Each year, when the rights holder sent in their tax, the rights holder could change this self-assessed value to reflect their changing priorities and a changing market. If the rights holder did not pay the tax, then the work would move immediately into the public domain. If someone wanted that work in the public domain, they could pay the copyright holder the self-assessed amount and the work would then immediately be moved into the public domain. This public domain buyout possibility serves to limit the tendency of rights holders to produce low self-assessments to minimize their annual tax payments."

I got the idea from someone's slashdot sig back around; the sig asked something like, if it is intellectual property, why is it not taxed?

Ultimately we need to move beyond an economic system more-and-more built around "artificial scarcity". See also:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
   

And they got Andy Lewandowsky, the Berkeley guy with the autonomous motorcycle, too. (He got better results with less money than anybody else.)

It's good to see this. After the DARPA Grand Challenge, it wasn't clear if the whole field was just going to go away again due to lack of funding, like it did after Demo '97. The real lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge was that, 1) the technology was almost there, and 2) with about 10x the funding of the typical robotics project, you actually get working systems. Most previous robotics projects were maybe one professor and four grad students.

I've replied to plenty of the so-called points you raised. You failed on every one of them. You don't know your own country's recent history, you purposefully left out the fact that the woman in question in Gatineau was dying of Alzheimers' and it was her relatives, not her, who were b*tching and moaning - she was beyond language. You have no clue as to what we gave up in NAFTA - for example, we can't put an export tax on oil and use the price differential to encourage industry to set up here. We had a sweetheart deal under the old Auto Pact, which NAFTA screwed up. With only a few exceptions, we can't ban substances that aren't banned in the US - we had to continue to allow n additive - MMT- that was harmful - Ethyl Corp. vs Canada, thanks to NAFTA, while we couldn't go after Imperial Tobacco in US courts for the billions they made in enabling illegal tobacco smuggling.

You didn't even know what the oil patch was - you thought it was the tar sands. A quick google of "canada oil patch" would have fixed that, but anyone commenting on Canada-US trade relations should already be familiar with the term, as well as Canada's position as the #1 supplier of petro products to the US (Mexico is #2).

My original point was that health-care services in both english and french are guaranteed in quebec. They have been for decades. Anyone can find a few times when policy hasn't been correctly applied (or do you really believe that Quebec should be held to a higher standard - absolute perfection - than anywhere else?).

So many of your arguments are so uninformed (and some of them have no factual basis), that it's not possible to debate the points with you - you simply don't know enough to form, never mind defend, a cogent argument (which is why you dragged Alzheimers patients into the whole discussion, I guess - it's not like they're going to express a contrary - or any - opinion).

From the article:

When Washington, D.C., tested an open-source electronic voting system intended for armed-forces members last year, a team of University of Michigan computer scientists hacked in and altered votes.

Each time a vote was cast, the hackers left a "calling card" on the screen, played the Michigan fight song and secretly changed the latest vote — until election officials shut down the site after two days.

"This obviously doesn't go a long way in building public confidence," Election Trust Managing Partner John Bodin said of the incident. But that shouldn't tarnish a "trusted" industry leader like Scytl, he said.

On another note:
Here is a Berkeley paper that looked at a voting system by Scytl used in Florida: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/scytl-odbp.pdf
They we're mixed in their findings (jump to the conclusion if your just browsing...)

I know fraud happens with paper, I know this saves money, but I'm still skeptical.

From the FAQ after the second link in TFA:

Q: How does the King CD eVoting platform provide end-to-end online balloting security?
A: Secured by Scytl USA, this solution provides end-to-end security. Votes are encrypted and
digitally signed by voters in the voters' voting devices (e.g., PCs) before they are cast. The private
key to decrypt the votes is divided in shares which are distributed to the King CD Electoral Board
(community stakeholders) before the election begins. The private key is destroyed in this process
and do not exist during the election. At the end of the election, the King CD Electoral Board
members have to meet to reconstruct the private key and decrypt the votes.

Encryption is a good start... really I have mixed feelings about this too. Any thoughts on this encryption anyone? - I would love to hear from someone with industry experience.

Well, we did think about this sooner, but thanks the Ancel Keys, and his 7 countries study (that ignored data from another dozen or so countries that confounded his hypothesis), we've mistakenly pushed the low-fat/semi-starvation dogma for the past 40 years.

The simple fact of the matter is that the chronic diseases of civilization are caused by high insulin levels in humans, and the primary driver of those insulin levels is carbohydrate intake.

Cites: Gary Taubes, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" - you can find a summary here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

In the midst of slashdot posts that refer to these theories as pretty much completely accepted... regarding matter at the aforementioned Big Bang:

You should tell the University of Michigan

And Berkeley, I guess

It apparently highly depends. Some sites (again, education ones) appear to say there was no matter, just anti-matter. Some say matter.

Yes, I am an ASIC designer. Transistor design varies wildly based on the process type but below is what can happen for a low-power CMOS process. Also SATA uses clock recovery and there are many things that can go wrong there.

One case that can cause reliability issues is metastability. If you're not familiar, metastability is what happens when more than one input of a register changes within a certain time interval. The usual case is the clock input arrives too close to a change on the data input(called a setup violation), but it can happen with reset pins as well. The internal circuit of the flop isn't designed to handle these cases so the output voltage is not forced to either low or high, but hovers somewhere in between for a time before ultimately drifting one way or the other. Now if your clock and data are such that this case happens every clock, the output may in fact never settle and stay in an undetermined state.

Besides the logical effect, there is a reliability effect as well. When the flop output is between high and low, the feedback circuit inside causes a direct short to ground that lasts as long as the output is unresolved. This can cause hot-electron effects and electro-migration, although local melting may be possible but that typically causes a hard failure. Both of these cause electrical property changes which can be read about here.

I should point out that some designs have special registers that can handle metastability. They do this by increasing the register size about 10 times so that the transient current during metastability can be handled reliably.

I was skeptical of his point myself, then I started paying closer attention and damned if he wasn't right. Sure it depends upon the film, but ones that are properly filmed give all sorts of interesting things they can do without the extra 3D technology.

I'm not sure the effect discussed in that article is that significant at cinema screen distances but, FWIW, Kurt Akeley gave a keynote talk on the importance of linking convergence and focal distance at Graphics Hardware 2003.

There is a paper on his research here.

I had the idea several years ago of doing a computer animated movie using a voluntary distributed computing model, like distributed.net or SETI@Home. Once it was scripted and storyboarded and the animation plan was complete, individual frames (or even portions or layers of frames) would be farmed out to folks to run on their computers. The complicated part would be that folks would almost certainly be able to assemble parts of the film prior to release, but that might be OK. Multiple scenes could be produced, so the plot could have multiple possible endings. If I were to produce part of the film on my home machine, I'd want to go to the theater and see how it all works.

My script idea was of three or four young kids, who fly in virtual fighter planes over a landscape that is based on the real structure of the net as a geographic metaphor. Of course cities and other facilities in the virtual landscape would match up fairly well with the real landscape, since the net does that already. I think the father of one of the kids is the one who invented the visual metaphor immersion system. They would discover one guy who was a bully or hood at school IRL flying his own plane (as a result of hacking into the father's system and stealing an early copy, that has some flaw the bad guy doesn't know about), and dropping 'bombs' (metaphorical visualization of inserting hacks) onto websites around the net. (I came up with the idea when most hacking was recreational, not commercial or political.) So these kids would have to use their own skills and tools to fight the hacker guy in virtual space, and also deal with him and his gang in real life.

IMHO that would be a great movie, and I'll bet a large number of slashdotters would love to participate. Heck, the profits could even go to support open source. And now it's possible to do it in 3D.

I even toyed with the idea of setting up a website where folks could work together to build the script and the story board. This could be the first 'open source movie'. I do own meatspace.us ... hmmm.

Yep, and autonomous driving in mixed traffic was done for No Hands Across America in 1995. Also, SARTRE is very similar to the CHAUFFEUR I and II European Commission projects in the 90's and early 00's.

The AHS History 1939 - 1997 movie (RealPlayer) is awesome.

What happens if you hit a magma vein in the Moon? Possibly something like Saturns moon Enceladus which spews out what appears to be something like water. But in the our Moons case your looking more at a volcano that could spew magma and that is unknown when it will stop since there is such low gravity.

The surface of the moon is cold. The liquid hot magma would cool quite rapidly, plugging up the hole. After all, that's where the lunar seas came from.

With enough pressure, it wouldn't. Remember, for a hole to plug up like that, it needs gravity. Thats why I mentioned Saturns moon Enceladus. Its even colder there then out Moon and they don't stop until they run out of pressure. Not because "It'll cool quite rapidly", the pressure will cause the cooling parts to keep flying outward.

This could cause things like ash to blow over the Earth

Ash from what? Volcanic ash on Earth is created by pulverized rock. The low gravity on the moon means the rock is launched upward instead of pulverized.

Liquid cord of the Moon means that is where the volcanic ash would come from. That why I mentioned what if they hit mamga. Magma is lava, it would burn and melt the sides of the whatever tunnel it is using to come out of, and would fly outward. Due to the Moons very low gravity, it wouldn't fall back down to the Moon but enter into the Earth's orbit. Similar to how Saturn's rings work.

possibly enter the atmosphere or other negative side effects (like lava rocks hitting satellites)

You have no real understanding of just how large space is, do you?

You have no real understanding of things in orbit work do you? Something like this happens, the cooling lava rocks won't go outward into space, Earth's gravity would be too strong. It would go inward, towards Earth. It's the reason satellites don't go flying out randomly into space. It's how any planet can keep a moon.

As well as the fact the a volcano on the Moon might cause it to shift orbit due to the gravity (like a jet engine, depending on the pressure and size of the volcano)

...and you have no real understanding of just how massive the moon is either.

Nor do we know just how much magma, sulpher and/or other materials are in the moon. Making an explosion large enough might cause enough of the Moon to tilt. Drain enough magma, ect, could cause the same effect. What would happen if you managed to cause enough rupturing to cause something like a new volcano the size of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano which happens to be on the smallest planet. Its possible without more information and since it's only just be figured out 2 weeks ago that the Moon most likely has a liquid core, it shows we know very little about the Moon. Also, we don't know how much pressure is built up within the Moons core, enough pressure and we make the only hole to the pressure and it could burst out, ripping a bigger hole. Maybe a volcanic eruption the size of the one that happened on Jupiters moon Io in 2002?

Another fact is that the Moon appears to possess light elements like sulphur and oxygen, which are both flammable

First, oxygen isn't flammable. Oxygen is an oxidizer that supports fire, but something else is burning. Second, how are you planning to sustain a sulfur fire without an atmosphere? Or are you asserting that the moon is covered with massive pockets of oxygen that are lined with sulfur? If that's your model the way you fight the fire is to vent the oxygen from the chamber. You're left with vacuum, and the sulfur fire goes out.

Again, we don't know enough a

Yes, science does give us ways of testing a hypothesis involving causality. However, AGW is not a testable scientific hypothesis (at least nobody has ever actually stated it as such) that would determine causality. Given the complexity of the climate system, it's actually quite incredibly difficult to demonstrate causality, especially for any one given factor. In some cases, it's simple - we know solar cycles and output are causes, not effects (since we've got no mechanism for the earth affecting the sun). For CO2, there's no reason to believe that causality couldn't go either way (CO2 rising in *reaction* to temperature, rather than vice versa).

As an example, I'll refer you to Gary Taubes, author of "Why we get fat" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories". We've always thought that exercise causes one to lose weight -> in fact, the causality there is most likely reversed, with a low weight causing the impulse to exercise. Taubes' refutation of the "calories-in/calories-out" hypothesis of weight gain/loss is particularly interesting, and relates very nicely to the AGW hype:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

Netalyzr does exactly this, among other things. It will tell you how big your perceived buffers are along your network path, upstream and downstream.

I don't see what's so great about this. They have to bury a huge number of sensors in pavement, and they're wired devices; they are all on a coax cable. Buried cables in pavement are a huge maintenance headache. Freeze/thaw cycles and traffic pressure damage the cables over time.

UC Berkeley has developed a wireless sensor for such applications. It's an extremely low power device powered by the compression of the pavement as cars go by.

But the real competition is cameras. In the last ten years, the trend in California has been to replace traffic sensing loops with cameras and video processing. One camera can replace the loops for all lanes on an intersection face. Electronics is cheaper than all the pavement-cutting and wiring needed to get the traffic loops wired back to the controller. Finding open spaces in big outdoor parking lots can be done with a small number of cameras.

I posted this earlier, figured this was an appropriate thread to post it again with some additions:

If you want a warning when auroras are likely to be occurring (so you can scurry outside and look), check out the NOAA's SWPC mailing lists. Go for the K-Index lists, and sign up for all those that apply for your location.

To figure out which minimum k-index results in visible aurora from your location, check out this helpful page; just enter in your latitude and longitude, and it'll give you your "magnetic latitude"; match that up with a k-index using the table, and you know which mailing lists to sign up for.

If your phone does email, you can get the alerts anywhere; if your phone doesn't but your provider has an email-to-sms gateway, you could just forward emails for the same effect. :)

Additional links:

• Spaceweather.com has a similar service that they charge money for (and likely gets the data from NOAA list anyways), but that does work if you need alerts on the phone and can't get them through email. They also have news posts and images whenever a large geomagnetic storm rolls around.
• NOAA's 3-day estimated Kp-index has the current Kp index and the last 3 days'
• CSSDP's real-time aurora oval is one of the most accurate current images of the aurora over Earth, showing roughly where it's visible and how strong (assuming perfect skies); green is weakest
• NOAA's Aurora Oval is similar

wrong, China is a Sino-Tibetan language. That language group has more first-language speakers than Indo-European, Sino-Tebetan languages includes by the way northeast India (shame on you for assuming all Indians speak an Indo-European langauge)

http://stedt.berkeley.edu/html/STfamily.html

Arabic is member of the Semitic language family.

So how does this relate/compare to BOINC...? I gather one doesn't want to run both of them simultaneously...

Astronomers have been looking for alien worlds for more than 15 years, and now you too can join the search.

Yes, and I also could have joined a world-wide search for extra-terrestial life back in 1999 when SETI@Home was launched... (I realize the goal and approach of this planet project is different)

Currently, the best we can do is to put it off for a while (which does help economically as well as putting a few more decent years on everyone).

Actually, chronic disease, which doesn't kill you, but make you dependent on all kinds of medical interventions, doesn't help economically at all, especially if the extra years are non-productive ones in retirement. Keep someone alive till they're 120, collecting social security, and you're talking a significant economic toll on society.

And not everyone suffers from eating a carb-heavy diet.

I'll grant that -> but everyone who has a weight problem does. The "never-fat" people may end up suffering other effects of insulin, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and alzheimers....and some people might be resistant to all of those deleterious effects. But planning a national diet based on the sturdiness of a very small percentage of the population is like telling everyone to do cocaine just because there are some people out there who aren't harmed by it's chronic use.

You make a good point though about the connection between corporate government influence, and the USDA dietary recommendations - big cereal and grain companies, corn farmers, diabetes drug makers, heart surgeons, and others in this chain of causality all have significant vested interests in pushing the dietary guidelines in a specific direction, whether or not it is backed up by the science.

The science is pretty clear - lots of protein, lots of fat, just a teeny bit of carbs, is the healthiest diet to eat. People have different flavors of it (paleo, atkins, etc), but the common factor here is signifiant carbohydrate reduction.

Now do we have the political will to get the government out of our diets? Probably not. Corn farmers get lots of subsidies and donate lots of money. But as more and more people learn that the very advice they thought was "healthy" is in fact the cause of chronic disease, maybe people on the grassroots level can make a difference.

If you're interested, and you've got two hours, check out this lecture: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

So what is wrong with universal health care? Every dumb idiot out there who isn't covered and seeing a doctor, is making me pay more out of my pocket. Because when they are sick enough, they all come to the hospital.

Well, your example is very well stated, but I think it might be a bit different if you considered it from a different angle.

The *real* problem here is people getting sick. People not paying for being sick (or costing more for being sick than they ever made), is a *symptom* of the problem, not the actually problem. Even in your alternative scenario, where Billy Bob gets preventative care, we've treated the *symptoms*, not the *causes* of his disease (and frankly, probably cost more in the long run, depending on the prescription costs).

If we want *real* health care reform, we need to start attacking the causes of disease, not the symptoms. Smoking, definitely one of them, but the real problem, the whole host of "diseases of civilization" based on diabetes (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and alzheimer's are all related), is actually exacerbated by our current federal dietary guidelines. The source of this problem is insulin, and it is made worse by the carbohydrate intake that is currently recommended by our government.

So right now, government is subsidizing corn production, telling us to eat more carbs which make us more sick, then subsidizing health insurance to take care of the sickness they created with their corn subsidies and poor dietary recommendations. Maybe if they just got out of the way things would be better.

Check this video out for more details on the whole carbohydrate thing: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/sugarmans/Wendy%20TortStoryFinal%20ii.doc

I recommend starting on page 12. The stuff leading up to that is lengthy discussion that doesn't really talk about the relevant case, Bodine v. Enterprise High School

Considering the energy requirements for hunting, as opposed to the energy requirements for gathering, there's a reason many modern scientists think that our core energy/dietary needs were met by gathered food, rather than hunted food.

As far as modern hunter-gatherer societies go, "Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherers derived > 50% (56-65%) of their subsistence from animal foods (hunted and fished), whereas only 13.5% of worldwide hunter-gatherers derived > 50% (56-65%) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods"

It's likely that ancient H-G societies functioned in a similar way.

According to:
Cordain L, Brand Miller J, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SHA and Speth JD. 2000. Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2000;71:682-92

It's no coincidence that one of the most important food types for proper nutrition is raw grains like chick peas.
I'm curious of why you specified that they are "raw", since raw foods have much less nutritionally available content vs cooked foods. Take those same raw chick peas and cook them, and the human body (and every animal, for that matter) can absorb the nutrients much more effectively.

But you can live quite well eating meat once or twice a week, and getting your protein requirements from grains or eggs.
Of course. I mean, you don't even need the meat once or twice a week- people can do just fine on purely vegetarian diets. Another interesting note on grains though- it seems that eating meat allows humans to more effectively eat other types of plant foods as well.

from http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-14-1999a.html:

Buffered against nutritional deficiency by meat, human ancestors also could intensify their use of plant foods with toxic compounds such as cyanogenic glycosides, foods other primates would have avoided, said Milton. These compounds can produce deadly cyanide in the body, but are neutralized by methionine and cystine, sulfur-containing amino acids present in meat. Sufficient methionine is difficult to find in plants. Most domesticated grains - wheat, rice, maize, barley, rye and millet - contain this cyanogenic compound as do many beans and widely-eaten root crops such as taro and manioc.

the difference between and earthquake, and not is how QUICKLY the energy is released.

think of it this way.. take X amount of energy and bend a piece of wood over 100 years. take that same amount of energy and apply it in 10 seconds. Over a hundred years, you'll end up with a bent piece of wood.. in 10 seconds, you get a snapped piece of wood. tectonic movement is slow bending, earthquakes are the snap. you don't notice a shift of an inch over 20 years, but in an earthquake, it's shifting FEET in SECONDS.. slow movement (release of energy) is not nearly as devastating or violent as a quick release.

the Hayward fault runs right though CAL Berkeley Stadium. every so often, over the course of years, there's a measurable movement (one side vs. the other)..
see the pics. before you click on the link.. all that movement happened over ~hundred years (the stadium was built in 1922-23)

http://seismo.berkeley.edu/hayward/ucb_campus.html

if there was a major quake on that fault.. row 5 on one side of the fault would match row 6 on the other.

we all know the Bay Area is a hotbed of earthquake activitity because of sublte signs like the last 2 pics on the link.. apparently, there was no such "creep" on the Midwestern Fault - so they weren't expecting an earthquake.

That's a good question. The answer is that your proposed explanation for quantum phenomena (fixed correlated spins) simply don't account for what is observed. That's exactly what is made crystal clear by John Bell's paper where he shows that the "fixed spin" explanation yields some equations (known today as Bell's inequalities), and then shows that quantum mechanics predicts that these equations are violated in some circumstances.

A couple of decades later, Alain Aspect finally made the experiment and saw that quantum mechanics is right and Bell's inequalities are actually violated. This experiment was of course reproduced a many times by many other people.

To really understand the difference between the classical and the quantum explanation, you have to get a little technical, but a bit of linear algebra suffices to understand the basic idea. I find that a really good explanation is found in the first lecture of this course: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/f04quantum/notes/lecture1.pdf

The really complicated (where there's no consensus even today) is what is actually happening. Some people insist in explanations called "non-local hidden variables" (Bohm's interpretation), and other go for "instantaneous collapse of the wavefunction" (Copenhagen and a few others), and others prefer "many worlds" (Everett's).

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

( Wu must be senile. He forgot Google. )

this torturer.

Yours In Electrogorsk,
K. Trout

As cited above, 50%.

The top 10% of taxpayers may have paid 55% of the taxes, but they also earned just about 50% of the income[1]. It seems only fair that they pay around 50% of the taxes.

In fact just over 50% sounds fine to me

So you are seeking a 5% reduction in taxes to the top 10%...

, since the top 10% probably have a little more to spare after food, shelter, and clothing than the bottom 90% and can better afford to help support shared infrastructure, war, et al.

[1] http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2007.pdf

From the sound of the second part, it sound like you want to raise taxes: "[since they can afford it]"

I'm with the winning UC Berkeley Overmind team. ( http://overmind.cs.berkeley.edu/ ) We're very excited to have won the competition, and we're hopeful that soon we'll be able to create an agent that can beat the very best humans.

Here's an overview of our strategy. Broadly, our agent always plays Zerg, and its primary objective is to apply constant pressure to our opponents, which will let the agent continually expand to improve its economy. To that end, our agent had three primary tools: a scouting worker that harassed early, zerglings that provided early defense, and mutalisks which basically force the opponent to stay in their base. Our agent would make decisions, based on what it observed, to trade off between these different forces. It might build more zerglings if it sensed more early pressure, or it might skip them altogether if our opponent wasn't going to attack early.

Our choice of mutalisks was deliberate. They are a highly mobile all-purpose air unit that can mass up and cause significant damage in a short period of time. Also, they don't have bounding boxes, meaning that they're more amenable to computer control. That choice proved to be really valuable, because a lot of the opponents seemed to have preferred ground armies. However, there are many other strong units. For example, the other agent in the finals (Krasi0) was truly impressive with its ability to repair units.

Anyway, on our page we have a couple of videos, and we'll have several more by tomorrow (Saturday).

There is some truth to your statement, but there are a number of sites dedicated to scholarly works or reference data. Google scholar is a good starting point for many things, findlaw provides access to court decisions and interpretations, and any number of sites are dedicated to journals and scholarly publications (even in the field of science).

Now if you're getting to all of your news sources through fark or /. --- yeah, you're out of luck.

Point being; if you know where to look there are tons of valuable educational and reference resources to be found on the net (didn't /. do a review on an online set of courses not long ago). I've been listening to this series as of late: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978371 , though I hear that Harvard has a good set of podcasts available as well.

Would it not make sense to communicate first?

Provided that if there is life out there, and if it's intelligent, said life can understand any of our languages, or would care to take the time to figure out what it meant.

I think there's an easy answer to that: Wouldn't we try? Don't we already search for it? Haven't we tried coming up with ways to make understanding easier [1][2][3]?

If there is intelligent life out there, it will surely look nothing like us and most likely think in wholly different ways. But whatever they do, if they have ever gone to the length to discover radio, don't you think that one of the prerequisites to that is trying to find out why you can't send on a particular frequency as well as on others, because it's blocked by another, albeit weak, signal?

Of course, if they don't exist, or can't receive or even can't understand it after all, what have we lost by sending it in the first place?

[1] - Voyager Golden Record
[2] - Arecibo Message
[3] - Lincos

I had to question your assumption that patent suits were less common in the 80s, so I did some googling. Turns out the 80s were pretty bad too:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallZiedonis07_PatentLitigation_AEA.pdf
The pretty and relevant charts are on page 24 (Figures 3 and 4)

The excerpt from the paper that describes those charts (page 10-11):

Figure 3 shows that litigation has risen along with the increase in patenting, and also that
there has been a substantial increase in suits involving non-rival entities during the past ten years,
supporting the claims of some in the industry (FTC, 2003). Figure 4 shows how litigation
probability for our firms has changed over time. As suggested by interviews reported in Hall and
Ziedonis (2001), the overall probability of litigation on a per-patent basis rose steeply after the
creation of the CAFC and the strengthening of patent enforcement that followed. However, it then falls again to the pre-1982 level, possibly because of the success of the defensive portfolio
strategy in reducing litigation between rivals.

The number of patents in the mid 80s was quite high, only about 1/3 less than ~2000. As Fig 4 shows, lawsuits per patent peaked in the mid 80s. The most interesting change to me is the increase the number of patent lawsuits between non-rivals. It would also be interesting to see data from 2001 to 2010 to see if the trends continued.

The message to take from this though is that 80s were hardly a time of free IP love and openness.

BS! I dare you to cite one scientific study supporting your statement. Here are some studies or references to studies that conclude organic food [pdf] can feed the world.

Falcon

And he didn't even get a shot on The Big Bang Theory!

More information here

Cut out the simple carbs by all means, but leave the complex carbs in.

Not if they're going to raise blood sugar levels. Being "complex" is no panacea for having a high glycemic index.

they're downright essential if you actually use your body and don't just sit around in front of a monitor all day.

Tell that to the Inuit, or the Masai, who ate exclusively animal products before the introduction of western diets. You can't live without fat, and you can't live without protein, but you can live without carbs just fine.

ALL food will raise your blood sugar levels,

BS. Fat and protein do not measurably raise blood sugar levels, period.

Too few carbs and you go into ketosis, which is a potentially dangerous medical condition necessitating constant supervision.

BS again. You're confusing ketosis with ketoacidosis.

Now, it seems you're of the school that believes the old trope "calories in, calories out" - watch this lecture, then get back to me: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

I'm in total agreement that a high-sugar diet is a health time-bomb

That bomb already exploded. With the demonization of dietary fat, cholesterol, and animal protein in the 70s, the entire US population has essentially been moved to a high-sugar diet for the past 40 years. That wheat bread? That orange juice? That oatmeal? Dumps into your bloodstream as sugar. The rise in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases over the past 40 years can be laid at the feet of the high-sugar diet (aka, the low-fat diet).

If you really want to get into the gory details about the digestive process and path, check out this lecture: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

LL/SC means load linked/store conditional. I just found this here http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~culler/cs258-s99/slides/lec09/sld012.htm and remember using this on a PowerPC. The hundreds of cycles mentioned sound horrible indeed. The other side to the story is though that you don't want much communication anyway but this issue would put more pressure on the programmer to prevent it. You could also do it yourself via Peterson algorithm or something similar though.

CAS seems to mean compare-and-swap, another atomic primitive. The following might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_algorithm

Notice that the Peterson algorithm is blocking.

Let me say something controversial and state that SMP is for fearful managers and lazy programmers, i.e. "oh lets rather make little baby steps toward our new iteration of our big serial application that in the future may have some parallel features on the old but now multicore architecture", and "yawn, lets not break anything in our grave of global variables and just add a few threads here and there were the consultant has inserted a piece of nicely modularizable code, no one cares about the exact performance improvement as long it is parallel and faster".

Summary of the Summary: BP did a bunch of stupid things, but it was TO's (Trans Ocean - the rig owner) responsibility to control the well even if BP purposely designed the rig to fail. They didn't do that. And Boom. IMHO this is not a shot across the bow of Transocean...it's an arrow aimed straight at their heart: "the crew... did not act to control the well".

That's not how it works in the oil and gas business and I have many friends in the industry. The ultimate responsibility is in the hands of the well owner, not the rig owner. In this case that is BP because BP called all the shots. And that is the company people will sue. There are a number of things that BP did to bypass Transocean's safety protocols. While it appears that Transocean may have damaged the BOP before handling control to BP, you don't know if BP knew that. There is evidence BP pressured Transocean to finish off the well their way. Transocean wanted 3 concrete plugs with finishing mud in between. In order to save time, BP did not want the finishing mud. Professor Robert Bea who was asked to investigate the incident by the White House says if the mud had been left, there may have not been a blowout even if the BOP was damaged.

The author seems to imply that the Columbia River Basalts were generated by the mantle plume, a supposition that isn't in the paper's abstract. Far as I know the jury's still out there. Here's a pdf of a 2007 paper covering the same topic; or, if that won't open for you like it isn't for me at the moment, here's the Google Quick View version.

This is conservation of energy, not subtle epidemiology.

Except the human body is not a simple mechanical engine - using a naive conception of conservation of energy just doesn't apply.

A solid with one end placed in a vat of hot water will eventually conduct this heat to its other end - this is basic physics, dependent on the conductivity of the material. Use a human instead of a solid, with their feet in hot water, and you won't see this heat conduct to the forehead.

Obesity is a side effect of high insulin levels coupled with insulin resistance (which differs over time and between individuals), and insulin levels are primarily governed by dietary carbohydrate intake.

I eat easily 5000 calories a day, sit on my ass, and don't gain a pound. My body knows well enough to excrete any excess calories, and doesn't accumulate fat because I'm not eating carbs and my insulin levels are kept low.

I used to believe this was a simply conservation of energy thing, with more exercise and less food being the answer, but I was wrong.

Watch the following lecture before replying: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/event_details.php?webcastid=21216

That comes from the WISE mission: http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/mission.html WISE is a whole sky infrared survey that happens to pick up asteroids. The spacecraft spins to survey a complete arc of sky roughly perpendicular to the Sun direction.

You'll also notice that during much of the 2000s, there is a gap in discoveries at about the 5 o'clock position. This corresponds to monsoon season in the southwest U.S. (roughly July to mid September). Most of the discovered asteroids in the past decade were made by the Catalina Sky Survey, based just outside of Tucson, AZ, and they generally don't bother observing during monsoon season because of the increase in cloud cover.