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While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.

If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.

If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.

It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.

Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.

You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.

Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.

It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.

I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".

My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.

Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.

SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con

While the lawsuits being defended by IBM and filed by Red Hat are likely to put an end to The SCO Group's menace to the Free Software community, I don't think simply putting the company out of business is likely to prevent us from being threatened this way again by other companies who are enemies to our community. I feel we need to send a stronger message.

If we all work together, we can put the executives of the SCO Group in prison where they belong.

If you live in the U.S., please write a letter to your state Attorney General. If you live elsewhere, please write your national or provincial law enforcement authorities. Please ask that the SCO Group be prosecuted for criminal fraud and extortion.

It makes me very sad to write this, because I lived in Santa Cruz for fifteen years. Sam Sjogren, a close friend from Caltech, was one of SCO's first programmers, and for a little while my only friend in town after I transferred to UCSC. Many of my best friends used to work for SCO either writing code or doing tech support. I even used to sit in the company hot tub with my friends who worked there from time to time. I used to dance to the music of SCO's company band Deth Specula at parties around the town.

Before I ever installed my first Linux distro - remember Yggdrasil Plug-n-Play? - I was a happy user of a fully-licensed copy of SCO Open Desktop on my 386.

You wouldn't think the SCO Group of today is the same company that once had to tell its employees that they shouldn't be naked at work between 9 and 5 because they scared the visiting suits from AT&T. That's because it's not - the SCO Group got its name and intellectual property from SCO through an acquisition. I don't think any of the friends I once knew at the company are likely to still be working there. The SCO Group is in Utah. SCO was originally called The Santa Cruz Operation, a small father-and son consulting firm named for a beautiful small town between the mountains and the ocean in central California. The Santa Cruz Operation was once as much a bunch of freethinking hippies as any Linux hacker of today.

Yes, it makes me sad. But I digress.

It seems that SCO is asking a license fee of $699 for each Linux installation. Take a look at SCO's press release announcing the licensing program. That's just the introductory price - if we don't purchase our licenses before October 15, the price will increase to $1399.

I have three computers that run Linux. That means SCO claims I must pay $2097 today, or $4197 if I wait until after October 15. SCO says their fee applies even to devices running embedded linux, many of which were purchased by their owners for far less than SCO's "license fee".

My response is that SCO is guilty of criminal fraud and extortion. I didn't violate SCO's copyright or acquire their trade secrets through any illegal means, and it is fraud for them to claim that I did. It is extortion for them to tell me I must pay them money to avoid a lawsuit.

Even if SCO's claims are true, it is not a violation of their copyright for me to possess a copy of their code. Instead, any copyright infringement was committed by the vendors who supplied me with the Linux distributions I use.

SCO's license is actually no license at all - if it really is found that the Linux kernel contains any infringing code, the GPL forbids everyone who possesses a copy from using it at all. No one would be allowed to con

That having been said, I think the theory has merit. It basically says that the universe is inherently fuzzy, in the sense that all measurements are approximations, and hence not discrete. This last is the big sticking point, since quantum mechanical calculations rely basically on projecting a vector in a "state space" onto a particular axis and seeing what value comes out. If the axes are 'fuzzy', it becomes much harder to do the math. In fact, this theory would require the addition of a 'measurement scale' to pretty much every equation and variable in physics! This isn't a conceptual problem for most physicists, but it's a royal headache, and doesn't really give more accurate results for 99% of the problems out there. The only thing this theory might be useful for is our conceptual understanding. It's not going to change the nuts-and-bolts of physical calculation.

Disclaimer: IANAP, but I did take two years of physics at Feynman's university, one quarter of which was from Kip Thorne.

1 googol is 1E100, while 128 bits is 2^128=3.4E38?

Seems there is a common misconception that was debunked as early as 1997 .

Check out the works of Vernor Vinge (there's some here) He predicts that once we "invent" artificial intelligence, it will be the end of human innovation. Pretty interesting stuff

I've been an avid avid amateur telescope maker since I was twelve years old. It led to me studying astronomy for a time at Caltech. While I'm a programmer now, it's still a very enjoyable and intellectually stimulating hobby.

While a basic newtonian is a straightforward instrument that can be built by anyone who's good with their hands, telescope making can get as complicated as you want if you're really looking for a challenge. Optical design is still a wide open area of research in mathematics, software engineering, and physics, and some of the more interesting designs take quite a bit of skill to fabricate. That means anyone can make a satisfying telescope, but the hobby will yield a lifetime of interest because there's always new things to learn.

You can construct your own telescope with a primary mirror of 8 inches in diameter for less than $200. It will take quite a bit of work, but it is enjoyable and meditative work. Grinding mirrors is one of the things I do to relax and relieve the strain of coding all day.

A good place to start looking for information is the ATM FAQ. The procedures for grinding, polishing and figuring are pretty involved - you should buy one of the books from astronomy publisher Willman-Bell.

There are a number of people and business who sell inexpensive mirror grinding kits. They will come with a glass mirror blank and an assortment of different sizes of abrasive grits. I would recommend asking on the ATM mailing list (that you can find in the FAQ) when you're ready to order your first kit.

The 8" plate glass kit I bought from Dan Cassaro for my current project set me back $64. When I get done working on the mirror, it will cost me about $35 to have a vacuum coating laboratory aluminize it. Good quality eyepieces cost about $50 - just one will do to start with but it helps to have more.

While fancy equatorial mountings can be expensive to make, it's possible to make a quite servicable altazimuth mount out of common materials like plywood and a few hand tools.

I'd pick one of the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatories in Hanford, Washington or Livingston, Louisiana, and also Barringer Crater in Arizona.

Well, If you want Geeksih how about this:

Palamar Telescope.

Then again there is Cal Tech in Pasadena.

Next you can stop at JPL.

There is also Mt. Wilson above Los Angeles.

Of course you could also goto Griffith Observatory but it's closed for a renovation.

All these are in the San Diego/Los Angeles area.

Heck, if you are into art/old books/old stuff there is the Getty.

And of course the Huntington with their copy of the Guttenburg bible.

We also have Edwards Airforce Base which is where the shuttle use to land, but they put on a heck of an air show.

And when traveling to the LA area you need to fly into the Burbank airport. They built the SR-71, the F117 and several other toys right there...

When you are done with Los Angeles area head on up to the San Fransisco area and check out the Valley. I'm sure a couple more people here can fill you in on those spots.

MAn I think I'm going to love looking at this thread!

Well, If you want Geeksih how about this:

Palamar Telescope.

Then again there is Cal Tech in Pasadena.

Next you can stop at JPL.

There is also Mt. Wilson above Los Angeles.

Of course you could also goto Griffith Observatory but it's closed for a renovation.

All these are in the San Diego/Los Angeles area.

Heck, if you are into art/old books/old stuff there is the Getty.

And of course the Huntington with their copy of the Guttenburg bible.

We also have Edwards Airforce Base which is where the shuttle use to land, but they put on a heck of an air show.

And when traveling to the LA area you need to fly into the Burbank airport. They built the SR-71, the F117 and several other toys right there...

When you are done with Los Angeles area head on up to the San Fransisco area and check out the Valley. I'm sure a couple more people here can fill you in on those spots.

MAn I think I'm going to love looking at this thread!

I'd recommend Palomar Observatory. Not only is it one of the nicer observatories in the country, it's in beautiful southern California.

You want to come here anyway, right? LA, Hollywood, San Diego? It's between LA and SD, and worth the trip.

Overture was yet another product of the IdeaLab hi-tech incubator. Based in Pasadena, they recruited heavily from Caltech. They're technology is not for crawling pages, but instead for auctioning off keywords plus the innovative pay-per-click agreements.

Structure? We don't need no steenking structure.

Anything beyond an AI Army of One will be unable to come up with a sufficiently complex Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind to start coding True AI or Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) in JavaScript for teaching AI and in Forth for robots.

A minor problem with the sole-source, lone-inventor Organizational Model for Open Source is that funding is almost impossible to obtain, unless you get your project listed in the Free Software Donation Directory or you write a book about your Open Source software. Even then, the sheeple will hound you as a crackpot, a 'Net-loon or a crank, with the result that even here on SlashDot the vicious malcontents will take up the cry and none of the world-famous Slashdot book reviewers will dare to write a reasonable, mind-opening review of your book, with the result that you will fall off the edge of the Open Source world into oblivion, but it won't matter what has happened to your Army of One, because your Open Source software will have advanced the State of the Art.

See slides or more details.

Neanderthals could not envision a written word, although the Egyptians could. But the Egyptians could not envision movable type; eventually Gutenburg did. For Gutenburg, a "computer" refered to a person doing math, and was not a machine. In the '70s as computers began marching into many businesses, people cosidered cloning, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many other things "sci fi" -- and yet they are developing now, for potential release within our lifetimes.

The pace of change over the past 100 years makes me unwilling to forecast what would come 50 or 100 years from now. Indeed, to the Neanderthal, Egyptian or even Gutenburg, the pace of our change would be beyond their tech horizon: their world was far more static and unchanging. Yet the changes over the past year -- or over the past 50 years -- have not overwhelming. The so-called "technological singularity" is not an event horizon, a point-of-no-return beyond which all natural law changes, but a traditional horizon, a permanently receeding point beyond which our future predictions become rapidly more hazy. This article helps show that we will always be able to see some distance ahead, be it only a few decades, and the change will not become instantly overwhelming. Indeed, the pace of change is limited by the ability of society to teach new thinkers what is currently the state-of-art level, and whatever technologies we invent to increase the pace of learning will also assist in increasing the pace of acclimation.

I agree with this. I run the web sites for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program and we get big unpredictable traffic spikes after earthquakes. We can get a month's worth of traffic in two hours after a big earthquake. There's no way to plan for this, so we just pay Akamai for their caching service, and it's worked very well for us. You can read about traffic spikes we've had at my office web page.

Biological organisms do acomplish computational tasks but I doubt anyone's going to try to port netBSD to the ecoli bacteria anytime soon. What we stand to learn from studying these systems is the understanding of the Algorithms that govern basic biological functions.

How does a few simple molecules of DNA self assemble into an elephant? These are structures which are orders of magnitude larger and seemingly more complex than the original building blocks. Can we code a set of building blocks to self assemble into a stapler instead of an elephant?

If our DNA code is to large and obfuscated to make any sence right now, let's forget about it for a moment, how wold you execute any of these instructions to begin with? What protine.dll files do you need to interpret DNA? What happens if you're missing them? What if you cold write extra?

What are the errors involved in genetic computation? Can knowing how these errors are produce be used to prevent disease? Will knowing how these errors occur help us detect precursurs years before disease sets in?

Can we use the knowledge of self assembly to make better RFID tags. The application of this knowledge to nano/micro/macro manufacturing are going to be most imediate in this field. Then maybe nano/micro robotics in a few years... okay many years.

As for the ethics, well we're a long way from being doing anything that's ethicly questionable so ethics is mostly a nonissue. The knowledge just isn't there yet. People occasionally do things in the course of their research that involve creepy things like dead babies, but that's not a new debate in the ethics.

Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(

Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?

This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.

Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?

Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.

OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting. :)

--LP

The oblateness of Altair was measured using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI) in 1999-2000.

I'm not an algorithms expert, so I'll not try to explain the jargon in the preceding paragraph. Instead, I'll just cop out and say that now you know what terms feed a search engine. I will, however, provide this link to bwtzip an experimental compressor covered by the GNU General Public License that uses the Burrows-Wheeler transformation, and this link page, mostly about suffix trees.

I wish I could find it, but I recently read a paper that showed a pretty impressive comparison between some compressor that used a Prediction by Partial Match variant and arithmetic coding (probably not truely free, due to software patents on arithmetic coding) versus gzip and some other compressors.

I found this one on slashdot. This is the C programming course from the University of Washington in Seattle, if you poke around you'll find the other online available courses.

I hope this two missions take place, mainly because I want to get the project I work on off this stinky dirty ball. They took our rockets because of planetary restriction which we don't have.

If you can stream, checkout a video feed of the 17A/B pads which hold the Rovers A & B resp. Plus it has the countdown!

Internet traffic, if I remember correctly, is bursty

Part of what the FAST TPC project tries to do is make it less bursty, by inserting a timer mechanism on the sender to spread out the transmission of packets. It's mentioned on page 5 of the FAST pdf.

(Willingly throttling your send rate will reduce the speed you can send small files, but when sending large files it'll reduce the chances of overloading the network, which could lead to an overall improvement)

You need to read the articles again.

The Fast TCP system, designed by a team of researchers at California Institute of Technology - Reuters

That is the promise from a team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who have developed a system called Fast TCP. - New Scientist

Then you need to read what you wrote again.

this sounds like the sort of technical mumbo-jumbo that snake-oil salesmen were peddling back in the dot-com era

Equating highly-regarded CalTech researchers with snake-oil salesmen? Sounds like a troll to me.

And you seem to imply the technical details were somehow obscured and withheld, when it's obvious that publications like Reuters and New Scientist aren't going to explain TCP windows in detail for the general public.

A simple google search of "fast tcp caltech" yielded the home of the FAST protocols at the top of the search, which has enough technical details, simulations and results for any one competent enough to understand it.

What are you going to tell us next - BSD is dying?

The FAST website points to "FAST vs Linux TCP" performance comparisons as a demonstration of their success. Linux's TCP/IP code is completely different from BSD's, right? (In the past, the Linux stack was reported to be "dead-slow" in some conditions, hopefully this has been fixed)

Do you think they'd have achieved less impressive results if comparing against FreeBSD TCP speeds? Or would you happen to have data comparing FreeBSD (using inflight_enable) to typical Linux performance?

The whole point of their paper was that TCP breaks down when the bandwidth-delay product gets really high, because of the high number of packets "in flight" per control iteration, and because of the comparatively high (per-rtt) probability that non-congestion-induced packet losses will occur. So yeah, they are using a high-bandwidth, high-latency line with relatively few flows, but because that's the situation they're working on, not because it's a rigged test. I think the New Scientist article did a bad job in making it clear that this is about how to take advantage of obscene amounts of bandwidth, not how to squeeze performance out of more meager links.

If you look at the applications they're interested in, namely multi-terrabyte scientific data set tranfers, UDP wouldn't be an ideal choice because they need the reliability features of TCP as well as the congestion control. Also, I'd expect this to achieve similar throughput to (well-behaved) UDP streaming protocols, because they have similar origins. FAST TCP and modern congestion-controlled UDP applications both used rate-based congestion control, largely based on the ideas introduced in TCP Vegas..

I stand by my claim that the New Scientist article sounds like snake oil. It's a misleading article, pure and simple.

But, now that I've read some of the documents from the Caltech site, and I think I understand the claims, the research is fairly interesting, at least in the world of "ultrascale" networking. Of course, I'm just an unfrozen caveman engineer, and that world confuses and frightens me, so my understanding might be slightly off. Here goes anyways.

As I understand it, the authors are saying that current TCP congestion avoidance algorithms break down on very high speed, long-haul networks. They mention looking forward to 100Gbps and higher speeds for "ultrascale" supercomputing. They have papers analyzing TCP Vegas (which was designed in 1994) and show that for the networks they're looking at, Vegas "does not scale to this regime". Specifically, they examine throughput stability of Vegas, and show that with these ultrascale networks, performance can end up bouncing between the two states of "balls-to-the-wall" fast and molasses slow. (They do not actually use the phrase "ball-to-the-wall"; that's my addition.) Network performance doesn't reach equilibrium, and your average throughput is quite ugly. In this context, the "cars starting and stopping" analogy starts to make sense.

This is a fairly different "regime" than I'm used to; then again, I'm an unfrozen caveman engineer, and the fastest neworks I've dealth with are 10Gbps LANs, and not high speed WANs. It appears that network performance on such networks can be surprisingly bad, at least, it's surprising to me. (And heck, there's a world of conditions under which Vegas is a great TCP congestion control algorithm, and the network delivers fair bandwidth to everyone. They even link to plenty of papers which analyze, simulate, and measure conditions where current algorithms work just fine.)

They're really looking forward to where the network finally starts to reach pathological extremes, and this all breaks down, which is different than conditions I (and most readers of the New Scientist article) would have seen.

Their first solution, by the way, is a slightly modified algorithm called "stabilized Vegas". They prove that this algorithm avoids the oscilating behavior, and thus avoids the low throughput situation that results. Neat.

Let me summarize my summary: original article bad, sounds like a scam. Actual research interesting, but applies to network speeds and conditions that are forward-looking, and probably don't directly apply to Mr. Bob Homeuser for quite a while. Fire bad.

Congestion control based on roundtrip times is old news but is uncommon AFAIK. What really happens is direct feedback from routers along a transmission's path. This is done in TCP Vegas, which was first proposed in 1994 and I think is fairly common now. The problem with scaling this or any of the other common TCP implementations to high speed/high delay links is the reaction to detected congestion. "Normal" TCP aggressively scales back its send window (send rate) when it detects congestion, usually chopping it in half. The window/rate then grows linearly until something goes wrong again. This results in alot of lost throughput in high-speed networks especially if the amount of "real" congestion is low. The FAST group is working on a new TCP implementation that doesn't react so aggressively to congestion. This is great for those high-speed/low-congestion networks we all wish really existed but is not something you want to use on the always-backed-up Internet. Would probably make things worse.

I suggest you RTFPDF namely this one.

Which says nothing about hardware (and none of the others I read mentioned any change to hardware)

Also a little reading and you will discover this is just a stop gap measure untill ECN is fully deployed.

And yet more reading will produce this little gem at the bottom :-
With 9,000-byte MTU, Linux, FAST and Scalable TCP all sustained more than 2.53Gbps on a single flow between Sunnyvale and Geneva, apparently limited by the transatlantic link. HSTCP sustained 1.8Gbps in that experiment. We emphasize that these experiments are preliminary and not yet conclusive

Second, it's intended for use for single big flows on gigabit networks with long latency. You have to be pumping a few hundred megabits per second on a single TCP connection over a link with 100ms latency before it really pays off. It won't do a thing for your DSL connection. It won't do a thing for your LAN. It won't do a thing for a site with a thousand TCP connections on a gigabit pipe.

Third, unlike some previously hokey attempts to modify TCP, this one has what looks, at first glance, like sound theory behind it. There's a stability criterion for window size adjustment. That's a major step forward.

(I first addressed these issues in RFC 896 and RFC 970, back in 1984-1985. Those are the RFCs that first addressed how a TCP should behave so as not to overload the network, and what to do if it misbehaves. So I know something about this.)

See caltech's press release on FAST for an article that actually makes sense.

Also, could someone please explain to me why boringly predictable stereotypical slashdot feedback is being modded up?

"Whoa! Faster pr0n!"

"Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!"

-Insert completely unrelated Microsoft bashing post here-

-Insert completely unrelated technobabble from some geek posting out of their ass (without reading the article first)-

News for nerds. Stuff that matters. Discussion that doesn't.

Yep, definitely not hundreds of pages of technical specifications available anywhere.

This is part of a whole bunch of TCP and networking related work at CalTech.

I hate to do this to them, but the Caltech Networking Lab site has more info.

From what I see, the improvement here is to use packet delay instead of packet loss for congestion control. They claim this has a bunch of advantages for both speed and quality.

Here is a Google cached copy of their paper from March 2003.

Looking at the information on their web page at caltech, the FAST network project is working with alternate TCP window sizing schemes.

Namely, instead of reducing window size in the case of packet loss, window size is changed based on round trip latency. The problem being that reducing the window size in response to loss works well on most networks, but has a serious problem when dealing with very high-bandwidth links.

In such a case, the conventional TCP windowing will shrink greatly in response to even one or two lost packets, which when you are sending a LOT of data, will occur.

The real work (and it seems to be somewhat covered in their web pages) is how to use latency for congestion detection/control, but I haven't read it in enough detail to quite understand this, NOR how this scheme will interact with conventional TCP streams.

gnome
kde

gnome
kde

First off the space.com story alternated between calling the galaxy Arp 229 and Arp 299 which totally confused my astronomer self.

BUT. . .Arp 299 is one of the galaxies calssified as a starburst galaxy, meaning we see lots of star formation going on in Arp 299. People saw how much star formation with ISO and we'll be looking at it with SIRTF after we launch. It's thought that supernovae can trigger star formation by the shocks from the explosion disturbing the gas clouds and making them unstable. Of course the multiwavelength data is needed to test this theory and this radio data combined with the optical and infrared will be a good first start. . . .

The episode is called "Interface" from the 7th season of ST:TNG. Geordi actually uses a neural interface to control the probe remotely.

Hell I thought you were doing Blondie's Rapture.

I saw a bunch of their car/motorcycle things here in Silicon Valley, but I'd never drive one when I could ride a real motorcycle. (And yes, that's a Corbin seat there as well).

I'm glad someone pointed this out. You may remember the study published last September from a Caltech researcher that concluded that the match between humans and chimps was LOWER than previously thought -- not higher. All depends on which genes you want to consider in the counting.

GMD

The Aibo AI Mind is available to make your pet robot dog a more intelligent companion for you.

The User Manual of the Aibo Kennel Club Robot Artificial Mind teaches you how to interact with the Aibo AI Mind.

A more recently updated Mentifex AI version is freely available for tinkering and for installation in more humanoid robots than the Aibo.

Technological Singularity is on its way -- thanks to the Sony Aibo robot dog!

I don't think the big profs count the 2.2 and 3.6 meter telescopes as a top tier toy. As an undergrad at Arizona I had regular access to a 2.3 meter and a 2.4 meter telescope on Kitt Peak immediately after my freshman year. Part of this was due to having a nice advisor and some of it was because everyone else was trying to use bigger telescopes like the MMT and Magellan.

Seeing as this guy is at Hawaii I'm betting the fights over the 2 to 3 meter class telescopes is no where near the fights people would get into over the much bigger (10 meter class) WM Keck telescopes

And after only an undergrad degree I have a cushy job in astronomy at the SIRTF Science Center that pays more than some astro postdocs. . . .

I don't think the big profs count the 2.2 and 3.6 meter telescopes as a top tier toy. As an undergrad at Arizona I had regular access to a 2.3 meter and a 2.4 meter telescope on Kitt Peak immediately after my freshman year. Part of this was due to having a nice advisor and some of it was because everyone else was trying to use bigger telescopes like the MMT and Magellan.

Seeing as this guy is at Hawaii I'm betting the fights over the 2 to 3 meter class telescopes is no where near the fights people would get into over the much bigger (10 meter class) WM Keck telescopes

And after only an undergrad degree I have a cushy job in astronomy at the SIRTF Science Center that pays more than some astro postdocs. . . .

For the record, I'm one of Dr. Adami's grad students in (The Digital Life Lab) at Caltech. Most of the programming is done at our sister lab in Michigan.

We recently released Avida version 2.0, with a new GUI and complete with god mode where you can inspect and edit the genome of any organism at any point.

We encourage you to play with Avida yourself. You can get information and a Mac OS X binary at:

Avida's Hompeage. Older versions for linux and windows are available there as well.

The intrepid can build the current version for OS X or Linux from source, please see Avida's Sourceforge Project. If you want the nice GUI, you'll need QT.

Other information about Avida, our lab's research, and artificial life in general can be found at:

The Digital Life Lab Homepage

Our sister lab at MSU, run by Professors Charles Ofria and Richard Lenski.

The Int'l Society For Artificial Life

For the record, I'm one of Dr. Adami's grad students in (The Digital Life Lab) at Caltech. Most of the programming is done at our sister lab in Michigan.

We recently released Avida version 2.0, with a new GUI and complete with god mode where you can inspect and edit the genome of any organism at any point.

We encourage you to play with Avida yourself. You can get information and a Mac OS X binary at:

Avida's Hompeage. Older versions for linux and windows are available there as well.

The intrepid can build the current version for OS X or Linux from source, please see Avida's Sourceforge Project. If you want the nice GUI, you'll need QT.

Other information about Avida, our lab's research, and artificial life in general can be found at:

The Digital Life Lab Homepage

Our sister lab at MSU, run by Professors Charles Ofria and Richard Lenski.

The Int'l Society For Artificial Life

Those interested in playing with Avida and seeing how evolution can be modeled using computation, thermodynamics, and information theory should get a copy of Cristoph Adami's book, Introduction to Artificial Life

I had the fortune to take Dr. Adami's class on the subject. It was an eye-opener to say the least. I think I remember more about statistical physics from his brief overview than I do from any other classes I took on the subject.

Those interested in playing with Avida and seeing how evolution can be modeled using computation, thermodynamics, and information theory should get a copy of Cristoph Adami's book, Introduction to Artificial Life

I had the fortune to take Dr. Adami's class on the subject. It was an eye-opener to say the least. I think I remember more about statistical physics from his brief overview than I do from any other classes I took on the subject.

lim --> ***

That's mathematical notation for the current AI situation: "The stars are the limit."

Chess-playing is not the definitive measure of man or machine. Rather, thinking is.

AI as a Whole has got a lot of Unified AI Systems going -- major endeavors racing into the Future towards the Technological Singularity.

The AI textbook AI4U may be ahead of its time in presenting machine intelligence, so future generations are left with the high-philosophy AI4Udex to delve into the deepest possible study of the now unstoppable Artificial Intelligence.

Dark Matter isn't the only explanation for Fritz Zwicky's 1993 observation.

I'm at the Palomar 200-inch, by the way. But we're in fog for the third night straight, so I have plenty of time for posting to Slashdot.