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Telemaintenance (I think) prior to ~1995 was systems-sensors reporting status of equipment at remote locations.
Telemaintenance (I think) post ~1996 becomes the wearable wireless computer diagnostic tool-set for telemaintence.

http://www.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril/
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/
http://e-science.caltech.edu/

I am an old guy ... I remember .... You can Yahoo/Google "Telemaintenance YYYY" to confirm/learn.

In ~1996 (I think, I remember) the telemaintenance acronym APES [Avatar Populated Experience/Environment Simulations/Synergy] in a CCT [Collaborative Community Technologies] proposal/paper. Considering present social-web environments, games .... Anyway, it is all still very interesting.

For SoA (State of Art), Yahoo/Google ("wearable computer" MIT CalTech hardware software) or ("ubiquitous computing" MIT CalTech hardware software 2007) to confirm/learn.

Nope, I never attended MIT, CalTech ..., I ain't got a college degree, I dropped out of high school in 1969, then too the USMC at 17yo, Honorable Discharge at 19yo ... I always think about where education is going for individuals like me (more of US than there was), I mean, look at POTUS Bush ... he is far less educated then most folks I talk to every day, and VPDryDick has more ability to deliver humor/torture/terror than a POTUS-puppet performance. Oh, I do have a GED and over 160SemHrs in many subjects.

!HAVEFUN!

This is the effect of minute "dust" particles permeating space and absorbing/deflecting light. The effect is less for longer wavelengths which is why we can get a better view of the Galactic centre in the infrared.

http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12356.html

From an article in discover magazine:

John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more people will gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved. He and his colleagues have created a theory that has revealed some simple yet powerful ways to accelerate the flow of information. Vastly accelerate the flow: Doyle and his colleagues can now blast the entire text of all the books in the library of Congress across the United States in 15 minutes.

I haven't actually read the whole article in a while but from what it seems, this guy has a pretty good solution to this whole problem that I don't see discussed a lot.

NEW RFI INQUIRY SET BY FCC

From Electronics, November 23, comes this note: A new inquiry into radio-frequency interference is being readied by the FCC in response to increasing business and consumer complaints. The notice of inquiry under Docket No. 78-369 is expected to be ready in December, with comments due by May 1, 1979. Nearly three quarters of the RFI complaints come from home entertainment electronics users, the FCC says, and usually involve citizens' band, amateur, broadcast, and land-mobile transmitters. Other malfunctions produced by RFI involve air navigational aids, pacemakers, truck braking, and automotive electronic fuel-injection systems, as well as explosive systems used at construction sites.

The project may usher in a new generation of balloon-borne scientific missions that cost less than sending instruments into space. Scientists also can test an instrument on a balloon before making a commitment to launch it on a rocket. The balloon, with its gondola of scientific instruments, was launched successfully on the morning of October 3 from the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Sounds like someone is a little excited about their balloon flight. First of all, congratulations on a successful flight!

Now telescopes flying on balloons are not new.

HERO (High Energy Remote Observatory) Balloon project flew it's 4th flight last spring from Ft. Sumner. http://wwwastro.msfc.nasa.gov/research/hero/hero_index.html

GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) flew back in 2006.

Caltech's Boomerang balloon http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~lgg/boomerang_front.htm

And many more http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/

I am always happy when a colleague has a successful flight...

The PhysOrg article is a bit misleading. I work in the Lewis Group on a solar energy project but am somewhat familiar with the nose research. Work on the electronic nose in the group has been ongoing since at least 1994 (one of the first articles our group published on it is here), and a more accurate (but outdated) description of the research is available on the group site. Several other groups have been doing similar research for some time. Current work in the group includes the development of mathematical models to describe sensor response, the use of various nanomaterials as sensors, the development of spatiotemporal sensor arrays, and the creation of piezoelectric chemical vapor sensors. The current research is interesting and exciting, but the tone of the PhysOrg article would have been more approprate had it been written 10-15 years ago.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~sean/book.html http://www.trillia.com/zakon1.html

Guess who sold her the breadboard?

Many US Universities (Including MIT) are happy with grades from those exams. So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.

I don't know what MIT is doing, and I'm not contradicting you about wherever you went, but I don't think that's typical. At least at my alma mater, they don't care where you came from, but they want to see some sort of standardized test score. In fact, they tend to rely on them more heavily for foreign students, who typically don't get an opportunity to interview in-person, and who may be coming from a radically different educational background than a U.S. student. (Which means the admissions officer can't look at their transcript and really know what it means, in the same way someone very familiar with high schools in a particular region of the U.S. can.) Foreign students usually also have to take the TOEFL and get some minimum score.

I also distinctly recall that there was no financial aid offered to foreign students; it was a strictly cash-on-the-barrel-head operation (in some cases, literally *cash*, although I don't expect that happens anymore).

I think that the extent to which universities roll out the red carpet to foreigners is usually overestimated by many U.S. students; coming here to study ain't no picnic.

Picking a few schools more or less at random, I see that testing for non-U.S. students is de rigueur at William and Mary, Caltech (which offers some financial aid to foreign students, but admission is not need-blind), and Duke. They seem to vary a little on whether the TOEFL is required or just encouraged, but except for a short note on Duke's page about an exemption from the SAT for students coming from countries where it isn't offered, there's no acceptance of alternative national tests in lieu of the usual SAT/ACT. I think that's more an exception than a rule.

As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say

As to why paper trails are bad, they don't say

*sigh*

This doesn't break "public-key cryptography". Even if you could build a Shor-factorization machine big enough to use against real-world keys (and that's a *big* if), it's only good against RSA. Elliptic-curve cryptosystems, for example, would be entirely unaffected. In general, the question of whether general-purpose quantum computers would break all public-key cryptography is a really hard one. It's equivalent to whether there are any trapdoor one-way functions which are in P but with inverses not in BQP. Even the existence of non-trapdoor one-way functions is still an open question; they would have to have inverses in , and proving that would also imply P != NP. All the existence of Shor's algorithm really shows about that problem is that there is at least one problem, integer factorization, which is in BQP but (probably) not in P.

Anyway, it's a long way from running Shor's algorithm to factor 15 to being able to factor a 4096-bit RSA key. Remember that because of the no-cloning theorem you can't build a flip-flop for qubits, so quantum circuits are all combinatorial logic. Applying Shor's algorithm to real-world RSA keys would require building a complete modular exponentiator combinatorially out of quantum logic gates, wide enough to deal with the biggest key sizes practical for anyone to use (and the cost of RSA encryption/decryption only scales linearly with the key size). We couldn't even build that out of regular non-quantum logic.

*sigh*

This doesn't break "public-key cryptography". Even if you could build a Shor-factorization machine big enough to use against real-world keys (and that's a *big* if), it's only good against RSA. Elliptic-curve cryptosystems, for example, would be entirely unaffected. In general, the question of whether general-purpose quantum computers would break all public-key cryptography is a really hard one. It's equivalent to whether there are any trapdoor one-way functions which are in P but with inverses not in BQP. Even the existence of non-trapdoor one-way functions is still an open question; they would have to have inverses in , and proving that would also imply P != NP. All the existence of Shor's algorithm really shows about that problem is that there is at least one problem, integer factorization, which is in BQP but (probably) not in P.

Anyway, it's a long way from running Shor's algorithm to factor 15 to being able to factor a 4096-bit RSA key. Remember that because of the no-cloning theorem you can't build a flip-flop for qubits, so quantum circuits are all combinatorial logic. Applying Shor's algorithm to real-world RSA keys would require building a complete modular exponentiator combinatorially out of quantum logic gates, wide enough to deal with the biggest key sizes practical for anyone to use (and the cost of RSA encryption/decryption only scales linearly with the key size). We couldn't even build that out of regular non-quantum logic.

*sigh*

This doesn't break "public-key cryptography". Even if you could build a Shor-factorization machine big enough to use against real-world keys (and that's a *big* if), it's only good against RSA. Elliptic-curve cryptosystems, for example, would be entirely unaffected. In general, the question of whether general-purpose quantum computers would break all public-key cryptography is a really hard one. It's equivalent to whether there are any trapdoor one-way functions which are in P but with inverses not in BQP. Even the existence of non-trapdoor one-way functions is still an open question; they would have to have inverses in , and proving that would also imply P != NP. All the existence of Shor's algorithm really shows about that problem is that there is at least one problem, integer factorization, which is in BQP but (probably) not in P.

Anyway, it's a long way from running Shor's algorithm to factor 15 to being able to factor a 4096-bit RSA key. Remember that because of the no-cloning theorem you can't build a flip-flop for qubits, so quantum circuits are all combinatorial logic. Applying Shor's algorithm to real-world RSA keys would require building a complete modular exponentiator combinatorially out of quantum logic gates, wide enough to deal with the biggest key sizes practical for anyone to use (and the cost of RSA encryption/decryption only scales linearly with the key size). We couldn't even build that out of regular non-quantum logic.

First of all, sorry for the tone I took before. These conversations piss me off.

The thing is, stealing from strangers is GOOD for the individual unless there is an outside force like the police to make it not so good (notice that thievery is frequent in many 3rd world countries without a strong police force). The thing is, however, that on the whole for the society, stability is good (especially since individuals do not have to then provide additional overhead for security). So, over time, societies that effectively prevent stealing will prosper at a greater rate than those that don't. One of the ways that these societies can prevent thievery is by implanting memes in their members brains (notice that you accept the meme "stealing is wrong" as the word of god, which, by the way, is another meme that has no basis in physical observation that you may have never acquired if you parents or preacher never told you to accept). If this goes on for long enough, it may become ingrained with brain structures that promote these memes (such as the way all human value fairness to a degree, as shown in certain experiments. See these pages for some information:

Thus, from an evolutionary perspective*, it becomes obvious that societies and biology manipulate memes and the weights in our judgment making process in order to provide for more stable civilizations. Absolute morals do not exist, however the absence of some rational stabilizing rules would make civilization unstable. Thus, kill and steal as you like, but society will come down on you. It's all a game and we should have not problem seeing it that way.

*By evolutionary prespective, I mean both physical and social structures.

You might try curvelet methods, which seem to show a great deal of promise: http://etd.caltech.edu/etd/available/etd-05262006- 133555/

It appears that they simply picked a bad demo image. The Caltech site has a much more compelling sample at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~nlaw/lamp_pics/.

ObRTFA: RTFA. It's not used *instead* of adaptive optics, it's used together with adaptive optics.

No, they propose that it be used together with adaptive optics. The research that was done to produce this press release was actually done at the Mount Palomar observatory, which was completed in 1947 and most certainly does not feature adaptive optics.

From the article:

The technique could now be used to improve much larger telescopes such as those at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, or the Keck telescopes in the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This has the potential to produce even sharper images.

(Emphasis mine)

See here, for example, for more information.

There are wavelength ranges in the NIR where the atmosphere is indeed transparent (J,H and K bands, for example); but the atmosphere is opaque at most NIR wavelengths (and, even at those IR wavelengths where the atmosphere is transparent, the transmittance is lower than at visible or radio wavelengths). See here for more info.

It's nice to read one of these rare insightful posts on slashdot. In fact I may close my browser before scrolling any further :)

I think you've hit the nail on the head that registry is the key problem. This reminded me of Rothemund's work although their pattern structures are slightly finer than the DNA scaffolding that he created.

If either technique paid off (ie to the extent that components could be attached to arbitrary points in the pattern) then it would revolutionise chip design. But, that is quite a big if. It should be interesting to see if this work pans out enough to come to market.

Animation and 3d are great ways to show the concepts. Beats the heck out of static reading/powerpoints, especially for modern high schoolers. Jim Blinn & cohorts at Cal tech did a pair of great works on Physics (The Mechanical Universe, circa 1987) and Project Mathmeatics (much more recent). Then try your own lessons (or have the kids do some) using Alice 3D

Project Mathematics Home Page

Project MATHEMATICS! videos explore basic topics in high school mathematics in ways that cannot be done at the chalkboard or in a textbook. They bring mathematics to life with imaginative computer animation, live action, music, special effects, and a sense of humor.

Mechanical Universe Home

The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond is a critically-acclaimed series of 52 thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course. The series was originally produced as a broadcast telecourse by the California Institute of Technology and Intelecom, Inc. with program funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project.

see see Jim Blinn's title list

The "Gifted Label":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18l.htm
"And American schools tend, fundamentally, to mistrust students. One way to deal with danger from the middle and bottom of the evolutionary order is to buy off the people's natural leaders. Instead of killing Zapata, smart money deals Zapata in for his share. We've seen this principle as it downloaded into "gifted and talented" classrooms from the lofty abstractions of Pareto and Mosca. Now it's time to regard those de-fanged "gifted" children grown up, waiting at the trough like the others. What do they in their turn have to teach anyone?"

The entire academic pyramid scheme leading to the PhD:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ... Lederman's point is that American science is being stifled by the failure of the government to put enough money into it. ... However, although Lederman would certainly disagree with me, I firmly believe that this problem cannot be solved by more government money. If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. ... [The] issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think tho

In addition, Wikipedia states that Mira's velocity is 63.8km/s -

Well, either, Wikipedia is wrong, or the guys at Galex, who actually did the work, are wrong, as they say Mira is traveling at approximately "130 kilometers per second" relative to the gas it's traveling through. And that, combined with Mira shedding it's outer layers as it expands and contracts, is why it has a tail.

As for Sol, the reason it doesn't have a tail is:

1) Unlike Mira, it's not a red giant sloughing off it's outer shell, and
2) Sol is traveling through the Local Bubble, which is an area with a particularly low ISM density.

Personally, I wish folks who don't consider themselves laymen would get their facts straight before criticizing a NASA press release, not to mention all the scientists who did the original work. But hey, that's just me.

Do you suggest otherwise? The issue raise here is about the hottest year, not the hottest decade. As noted in the article, the trend is not affected by the corrections. In the present work, 2001 goes off the top 10 list and 1938 comes on. The statement half of the 10 hottest years on record have occured in the 90s or latter becomes 40% have. With this window (ten hottest years) you need only wait a year or two to get back to the same statement. 1938 is unlikely to remain on the list for long. A more interesting question is how soon 1934 rolls of that list. With an accelerated warming trend, how's three decades sound? That's right. The forecast with the greatest limitation on future CO2 emissions that I know of, by Dave Rutledge, has 0.6 degrees of warming by 2037: http://rutledge.caltech.edu/. That makes a year with the temperature of 1934 a 0.7 degree excursion, below the current list cutoff. Warming is better than steroids at making records fall.
--
Switch to solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

DNA = Douglas Noel Adams...

Douglas Adams was very interested in the combination of music and math, and biology. I think I even remember reading (probably in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) about music made from DNA (similar to the idea of making music from corporate profit reports). Then again, I could be pulling that out of MYASS...

"It was a weapon that we believe was stocked from the ex-regime time and it had been thought to be an ordinary artillery shell set up to explode like an ordinary IED and basically from the detection of that and when it exploded, it indicated that it actually had some sarin in it," Kimmitt said.

Tests conducted by the Iraqi Survey Group (search) -- a U.S. organization searching for weapons of mass destruction -- and others concluded the mustard gas was "stored improperly," which made the gas "ineffective."

E-week was never known for its academic rigor. Netlab posts their published papers including FAST TCP: motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance in IEEE Transactions on Networking.

E-week was never known for its academic rigor. Netlab posts their published papers including FAST TCP: motivation, architecture, algorithms, performance in IEEE Transactions on Networking.

Or there are a lot of missing qualifiers like "over a specific worst-case line that TCP doesn't come close to theoretical maximum performance on".

Yes, this is what FAST TCP is designed for.

hmm, yeah, what I said - http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/FAST-ToN-fina l-060209.pdf

I was referring to the Caltech efforts, not the commercialized device. Don't know anything about the Aria products. For example, see the below link: http://ultralight.caltech.edu/web-site/sc05/html/i ndex.html This is based on a patched Linux 2.6 kernel, and it's a couple of years old.

Actually, FAST TCP is also available as a linux kernel patch. It's a well-tuned Caltech product which has been in development for years:

http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/

Several highlights include:
- Caltech held the world record for data transfer for awhile
- Won the bandwidth challenge at SC05

It's one of the best ways to tune a single TCP stream. Finally, the list of about 50 TCP-related publications should indicate this isn't handwavium:

http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/fastpub.html

Traditional TCP streams (such as what you get with FTP) top out around 10-20 Mbps. If you want to see a single stream go a couple hundred Mbps, you need TCP tweaks like FAST (however, FAST is one of many competing TCP "fixes").

Actually, FAST TCP is also available as a linux kernel patch. It's a well-tuned Caltech product which has been in development for years:

http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/

Several highlights include:
- Caltech held the world record for data transfer for awhile
- Won the bandwidth challenge at SC05

It's one of the best ways to tune a single TCP stream. Finally, the list of about 50 TCP-related publications should indicate this isn't handwavium:

http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/fastpub.html

Traditional TCP streams (such as what you get with FTP) top out around 10-20 Mbps. If you want to see a single stream go a couple hundred Mbps, you need TCP tweaks like FAST (however, FAST is one of many competing TCP "fixes").

It's *possible* for a spectra elevator to exist, but that doesn't mean anything. Plugging Spectra's strength and density (3.5e9 N/m^2 and 950 kg/m^3) into Spelsim, using a payload mass of two tonnes and a safety factor of only 2, we get an elevator mass of 9.8745e17 kg. That's 987,450,000,000,000,000 kg: just about a quadrillion metric tonnes. By comparison, Mars's largest moon (Phobos) is about 1/10th that mass. I've seen the mass of Mount Everest cited as about 1e14kg (1/10000th the mass), all living organisms at 1e15kg (1/1000th the mass), the water in the atmosphere and the total biomass aboveground at 1e16kg (1/100th the mass), all of the surface freshwater at 1e17 kg (1/10th the mass), and the entire stratosphere at 1e18kg (same mass)

Think you can launch that?

I just saw the first part. Very interesting indeed, and it shows many of the same neo-cons that were interviewed in "Why we fight". For example, William Kristol, whom I never had heard from before, but after hearing what that guy says, I'm convinced he's a sociopath (The same goes for Rumsfeld, but the whole world knows that already ;-) ).

http://web.mit.edu/admissions/
http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/uga/

and the list goes on...

Disclaimer: I am a physicist who studies quantum information.

You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.

Making money in Many Worlds is easy, even without time travel. Suppose you want to bet on who will win the World Series. Get some quantum bits, and decide beforehand on what (orthogonal) states of those qubits correspond to which teams. Prepare a superposition of all 30 possible teams. Now, measure your state, and bet all your money on whichever team your measurement tells you. Wait for the world series to finish, then either collect all your winnings, or, if you didn't win, kill yourself.

In all worlds where you're still alive, you'll have won a lot of money.

Note to theoretical computer scientists: this is very similar to how someone (who believes in Many Worlds) might try to compute the answer to a problem in the complexity class Post-BQP.
Note to everyone else: don't try this at home.

If you want the real story of why math and science teaching in the USA is so bad, see this about the collapse of the exponentially growing PhD pyramid scheme starting in the 1970s:
"The Big Crunch"
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
and also more by the same author (Dr. David Goodstein) here:
"Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates"
http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives .132.html
From that second link: "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned, cut and polished they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."

What good does it do to make teachers happy with their salaries if the system they work in is fundamentally broken for todays' needs? You can even have both happy teachers and happy students -- but does that mean kids are learning and growing in good ways? An example of this is when teachers become entertainers, essentially feeding students the intellectual equivalent of candy all day, but everyone is happy (at least as long as the party lasts). Now, this is very different from the "hard fun"
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
John Holt, Seymour Papert, and others talk about (e.g. learning to play the piano well, or to build a complex robot like encouraged by Dean Kamen's FIRST programs http://www.usfirst.org/ ) and which children generally must choose for themselves to pursue if they are to get much out of it beyond misery.

Also, consider this Libertarian-oriented article on schooling:
"Enterprising Education: Doing Away with the Public School System"
http://www.mises.org/story/2216
"All the arguments in favor of a public provision of primary education prove to be unfounded and/or incorrect. The failure of the state to provide a high quality service to all (its explicit goal) has rendered public primary education illegitimate; and the immeasurable waste of resources and rejection of consumer desires has left public education borderline immoral. As well, if an educated citizenry is to be considered necessary for the operation of the republican government, then it is an inexcusable conflict of interest when elected officials are the ones in charge of providing that education. Furthermore, the argument of externalities and nonexcludability fails to buttress the case for socialist education. The only ethical, reasonable system for the provision of primary education is the fr

Why would you need a degree to be dean of admissions for a safety school?

This could really be a fascinating technology -- although technically it's "nanowires" and not nanotubes. As an experimentalist, I really hope that when it comes to actually growing these things it is feasible; it also might be difficult to make contact to the nanowires after you've made them to collect the electricity. Nonetheless, I think that nanostructured devices (while expensive at the moment) may be the solution to making high efficiency photovoltaics possible. Sometimes it's surprisingly easy to grow nanowires/nanorods just by flowing gas over a material and a substrate in a tube furnace, so cost may turn out to be fairly low. Patterning these by photolithography (how computer chips are made) would definitely be too expensive, along with molecular beam epitaxy or atomic layer deposition. My hope is that a simple inexpensive thermal process would work to grow these or other photovoltaic nanorods. The reason that so many stories are posted about solar energy is that it's our one scaleable renewable energy that could eventually displace a significant fraction of the fossil fuel energy that we currently use and spew CO2 into the air. For a really interesting lecture about world energy and alternatives check out Dr. Nate Lewis' presentation at http://nsl.caltech.edu/energy.html (the video is probably the best). Who knows, one of these breakthroughs if it works well could change a lot for us.

The Millikan Library shelves were braced after the 1971 San Fernando quake toppled them and dumped the books on the floor. This was the same quake that led to Throop and Culbertson being condemned, and damaged Gates badly enough that parts remained closed until it could be strengthened during its rennovation about a decade later. Dr. Housner's shaker did make the building sway slightly, but not enough to tip over shelves, spill the drinks in the president's office, knock the Isign to the ground, or otherwise interfere with normal goings-on at the library.

The Millikan Library shelves were braced after the 1971 San Fernando quake toppled them and dumped the books on the floor. This was the same quake that led to Throop and Culbertson being condemned, and damaged Gates badly enough that parts remained closed until it could be strengthened during its rennovation about a decade later. Dr. Housner's shaker did make the building sway slightly, but not enough to tip over shelves, spill the drinks in the president's office, knock the Isign to the ground, or otherwise interfere with normal goings-on at the library.

Lots of places have been accusing SCO of violating the GPL by providing lxrun but not the sources for it, and referring people to ibiblio for the sources. It's quite difficult, though, to violate the GPL when the project seems to be licensed exclusively under the Mozilla Public License.

Let's not sink to the level of SCO by making accusations which are easily demonstrated to be false. Of course, if there's GPLed code in lxrun which was relicensed without permission of the original author that's another matter, but I haven't seen any claims of that.

People really should not assume someone is violating a license without checking to even see what license is involved. That includes when the accused is a big ball of crud like SCO.

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/

Nature has been performing experiments in our atmosphere for 4.55 billion years at energies much higher than we could hope to attain in a collider. If it was possible for a black hole spawned in one of these event to swallow the Earth (or whatever other nightmare scenario you've envisioned), it would have already happened and you wouldn't be around to discuss it.

Reference 1
Reference 2

>> Building a space elevator using carbon nanotubes...that's advanced. Magnetic field
>> drives...that's advanced. Solar sails, antimatter engines, gravitational drives...all
>> advanced.

> All *fictional*. With the possible exception of solar sails, based on my understanding
> of those "technologies", they are not at a point where time might be usefully spent on
> them by engineers as opposed to SciFi writers.

It is not necessarily true that currently fictional technologies are unlikely to be near-term realities. Science fiction and genuine science are not entirely disconnected; the best science fiction is grounded in at least some form of true science, and then takes off from there. Many scientists are curious about the kinds of "science" that appears in fiction, especially if there is enough of a framework to make it at least plausible.

Manned space flight was fictional from pre-1900 until 1961. The concept of geosynchronous communications satellites was largely invented by Arthur C. Clarke several decades before they were engineered into reality.

Space elevators are complete fiction--except that the research and engineering to actually *build* one is going on right now, and the discovery/creation of carbon nanotubes is a likely candidate for the material needed. Ion drives were theoretical, then fictional, and are now used in actual satellites and probes. I've just recently read about some proposed magnetic field propulsion--that might lose funding with the elimination of NIAC. The Star Trek transporters of the 1960s, originally 'invented' to avoid wasting air time on landing/takeoff, were pure fiction...but controlled quantum teleportation is now a (limited) reality.

Gravitational drives (or 'warp drive') are still well into the realm of fiction, *but* there are two active research programs looking for gravitational waves (LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) and LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory).

Is it possible that discoveries in gravitational wave physics might make gravity-based drives possible? I don't know, but if we are already doing the background work to evaluate it, we'll be better prepared to capitalize on any future discoveries.

I spent more than an hour reading about this and other finds on the homepage of one of the team who found that,
M.E.Brown

The Link has a animated model of the thing and a schematic of its structure that looks like candy..

How hard is this to prove, anyways, to all the quantum physicists in the house?

IANAQP, but I think it's pretty hard to prove given that you can simulate a quantum computer with a classical computer. (Source.)

But, if you have lots of qbits then you can simply argue that it's running too fast to be a simulation:

"Take for example a system of only a few hundred qubits, this exists in a Hilbert space of dimension ~1090 that in simulation would require a classical computer to work with exponentially large matrices (to perform calculations on each individual state, which is also represented as a matrix), meaning it would take an exponentially longer time than even a primitive quantum computer." (ibid)

So I'm thinking that when they get to their 64 or 128 qbit device that we know for certain that it's genuine.

I wonder how long it'll be before Intel and Motorola are selling quantum computers and arguing about the qbit myth?

Disclaimer: I am a physicist who works on quantum computing and also has a computer science background

Nobody is going to use Travelling Salesman in the real world to plan journeys. You can already quickly run an algorithm which will get you a journey plan that's maybe 99% as good as the optimum.

Actually, I think there is a theorem that finding an algorithm that efficiently produces highly-accurate approximate solutions to arbitrary problems in NP-hard is about as hard solving NP-complete problems exactly.

All this aside, it's worth noting that D-Wave is only claiming to provide a square-root speed-up for NP-complete problems, and there is some doubt as to whether they can even deliver that, as they scale up to larger numbers of quantum computers. While it's technically possible that P=NP, most people believe P!=NP, and it seems almost as likely that BQP != NP (BQP is the class of problems efficiently solvable with a quantum computer).

For an excellent discussion of what D-Wave has done and just how skeptical you should be, visit Scott Aaronson's blog. (No, I am not Scott Aaronson, but I do know him and can vouch for him being an extremely smart guy. I am also not the Quantum Pontiff, aka Dave Bacon.)

I would be very interested in your research, can you post some pointers to modeling feedback?

The caltech datasets are in my opinion artificial, since they rotate all images in the same direction.
For example, a moterbike always faces to the right, and the 'trilobite' is even rotated out of the plane (leaving a white background) so you only need to estimate the right angle of rotation.
for example, see:
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/Image_Datasets/Calte ch101/averages100objects.jpg
you would never get a consistent blurred image if you would allow unconstrained views of an object.

Better datasets in my opinion are the VOC challenge:
http://www.pascal-network.org/challenges/VOC/datab ases.html#VOC2006
and the digital video benchmark Trecvid (where we work on)
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/
which is not only true real-world data, it consists of hundereds of hours of video, instead of a few of thousand images.