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I would like to see 100% of the American border guarded by:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/shm.htm
https://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/predator-uav/
https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-air-force-is-retiring-the-predator-drone-for-the-mo-1792832541
https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=jil

The fewer human beings that are involved in the defense of no-man's-land style borders, the better.

But then again, I'm an anti-globalist who wants to stop smuggling and trade. Stopping immigration is just a byproduct of ending the first two.

Check this out and, if you would, please provide some comment.

http://thedaily.case.edu/rotat...

It seems to put a new spin (haha!) on the relationship between normal matter and dark matter and the rate of spin in galaxies.

Scientific American article about acidification (from CO2) contributing to Permian Extinction...

Overview:
https://www.scientificamerican...

Full Article:
http://burro.case.edu/Academic...

Damn right I want to know! I feel that there could be something groundbreaking in this line of inquiry, just waiting for us to figure it out. I get the feeling you do too.

Here is a link to something that should be considered. A bit disappointing in my opinion in one way, as it rules out many of the more exciting answers to the question of dark matter, but exciting in its own way. You may find this interesting: 153 galaxies with rotation speeds that can be inferred directly from their observable matter

This is not as cut and dried as you might think. The link below describes how there is a 1 to 1 relationship between observed matter in a galaxy and rotation speed. No mystical and mysterious dark matter is needed to determine the rotation speed.

Check out the link below:

Case Western Reserve University

regular rape of inmates

It's a popular myth/legend/stereotype, but there is absolutely ZERO factual basis to back it up:

http://blog.case.edu/case-news...

http://www.newmaterials.com/Ne...

Point taken, I scanned the first part and it sounded like the one I remembered.

I've had a hell of a time finding links to the study (as opposed to the book for sale), which was widely available a few years ago.

http://blog.case.edu/case-news...

http://www.newmaterials.com/Ne...

• University Circle Police - a private department funded by the businesses they serve. University Circle is a neighborhood housing many significant educational, medical, cultural and historical facilities, which is bordered on all sides by very high-crime neighborhoods
• The Transit Police, which I believe may be the largest department in Ohio - polices the public transit buses, trains and terminals
• CMHA Police - serves the public housing projects in the county
• CMSD Police - serves Cleveland's public school district
• Cleveland's three largest hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and MetroHealth, each have their own police forces (though apparently not web sites)
• Metro Parks Rangers - basically park rangers with police authority
• Most of the colleges and universities in the area (even the small schools and technical colleges) have their own campus police forces

That's obviously in addition to all the private security services that lack full law enforcement authority. And I'm probably leaving a few out in my list above - it's been a few years since I've lived there or payed real close attention. But the point is, it's by no means unusual for a private organization to form it's own full-fledged police force.

It all may be so, but nevertheless Google is an awful lot closer to Isaac Asimov's Multivac than I ever expected to see in my lifetime.

In the 1960s, when I would tell people that I was working with computers, a very common response is "What does that mean? Do you ask it questions?" At the time, I always thought it was a laughably naÃve question.

Google DOESN'T understand English, and that it takes a lot of lateral-thinking and adventure-game knowhow to formulate a question well. (For example: if you want the text of a poem or a song lyric, don't search on the title or the first line, search on the most obscure line or phrase from the poem you can think of because that's what's most likely to get you the full text).

Nevertheless, I just used Google to find me the ext of Isaac Asimov's The FInal Question.

Considering that the current use of drones is on VERY shaky legal ground with respect to our treaty obligations and other relevant international law, expanding the use to the full theater of combat would essentially be a declaration of the U.S.' intention to repudiate, among other agreements, the Geneva Convention and the U.N. charter.

See Leila Sadat, America's Drone Wars

No matter the number of digits in your bank account, in the end you're still human.

No matter how many digits King Louis XIV had in his bank account, he was still limited by the speed of horses for transportation and communication.

"Immortality" will probably happen within this century or millennium.

But then, we're ultimately limited by available matter/energy in the universe.

For what it's worth, I'm still working on The Player of Games myself, so I know the feeling.

The trick about superior military powers is that they need to have motives in order to conquer. Power only corrupts when you have an incentive to be corrupt—a person raised in an environment of endless bounty, like the Culture, would be socialized to consider power-seeking to be a form of mental illness. Why take from others when you already have all that you could ever want? It is perhaps the most basic possible immoral act. Certainly there are instincts, but those have little utility for most people for most of their lives. This is why the spy in the first book (Perosteck Balveda) acts so helpless and transparent once she's caught, and is so traumatized by the events she witnessed—really just a handful of deaths; nothing too extreme for most action heroes—that she kills herself in the epilogue. People in the Culture are, by and large, pacified... but that's also why they consider themselves better than everyone else. Certainly there are a lot of outsiders who would agree with you that this is obnoxious and that the Culture is meddlesome (e.g. Horza.)

As a piece of science fiction apparatus, I am certain Banks would keep the Culture out of harm's way, and for a fairly simple reason—the series was started amidst the late-eighties period of dystopias and cyberpunk. Cast against its literary context, like the somewhat lower-brow Star Trek: The Next Generation (the same vintage), there is ultimately a message in the series that humanity as a whole is good, and that we can hope for a good future; that violence and greed are petty objectives and a waste of life (or technology, or whatever) unless in self-defence. Suggesting that the Culture gets eliminated by an opposing force would simply go against that objective and diminish the message, by suggesting that all of the goodness of humanity cannot withstand pure aggression. The only end-points I can see that wouldn't evoke this would be ascension or merging with another civilization with the same sense of enlightenment.

...Basically, it was written specifically to spite your literary taste.

I believe there might be a way: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm :)

There are three reasons I think it's a bad habit to worry about the heat death of the universe when making life decisions.

One, I believe we should look at the forecast for life on the scale of billions of years; a scale comparable to the one for which it has existed. In a situation where you have absolutely no idea about how long a period of time will last (say, waiting for the train), the most reasonable assumption is more or less that you are exactly in the middle of waiting—it gives nice 50-50 probabilities for everything. As a result, worrying about the heat death of the universe is too far off.

Two, extinction is not something that we naturally accept. The death of the individual is undoubtedly something we're used to being inevitable, true, but the end of a kind is consistently tragic. (And for all of their horriblenesses, Hitler 2000s are relatively rare. Humans are by nature too optimistic for them to stay around long.) It doesn't benefit us to know that one day everything will be gone—as long as there is another day in sight, we should work to make that day a bright one. The diem can still be carped (although David Mitchell once articulated a fairly good point that you shouldn't get too obsessed with living in every moment, since you'll miss out on planning ahead.)

Three, it may not be all that unavoidable. In Asimov's classic shaggy god story, The Last Question , humans throughout the future repeatedly ask their computers if entropy can be reversed. The answer is always "insufficient data," until eventually the computers are so vast and powerful and both they and humankind have ascended outside of material existence, that the computer just starts creating a new universe all on its own.

So I say... what good can come of thinking about the end of the universe? The only element it truly adds is a sense of nihilism; a lingering misery and awareness that eventually, everything will be gone. (Maybe.) If I am going to lie to myself about anything besides my writing skills, it is definitely going to be this distant, fuzzy little spectre.

Twice now it has been posted "Not only should you read The Last Question, but you should ALSO read The Last Answer"

And twice now you have attempted to claim they intended to say "You should not only read The Last Question, but also read a totally different story called The Last Question"

Why do you refuse to believe there are two stories by the same author with different names?

The Last Question: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
The Last Answer: http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/

Perhaps you should make yourself aware of both of them, before attempting to correct others who know what they mean to say :P

"Landreth said modest resources funded this self-described âoefar-fetched idea.â Crucial support came from the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Foundation, the Thome Foundation and the National Institutes of Health."

http://thedaily.case.edu/news/?p=5430

That's for the basic research. The clinical trials study will likely have other sources. Those cost $$$$.

Case Western news release
Paper: " Bio-inspired, efficient, artificial lung employing air as the ventilating gas"

An interesting study was done at my alma mater, CWRU, that found that while reading was closely tied to heredity, math ability was influenced by nurture.

I disagree. The GP said:

high cost and long wait times resulting from EPA, OSHA and various state agency regulations (not to mention fighting Greenpeace and other hippies)

State regulations have a huge cost on business. I would bet money that the GP is NOT in favor of repealing all of these regulations. Nonetheless the point stands that regulations can actually do more damage when our pollution is just shipped abroad to places like China where laws are either nonexistent or ignored.

Mining does not by definition require there to be toxic chemical spills and pollution. The kind of obstructionism that groups like Greenpeace (see the GP's post) put up absolutely has an impact on developments.

Lastly, for a very different take from yours on the issue of government regulation and the ultimate impact of laws and policy on the environment, I would recommend: "FABLES OF THE CUYAHOGA: RECONSTRUCTING A HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION" (http://law.case.edu/faculty/adler_jonathan/publications/fables_of_the_cuyahoga.pdf)

This is precisely what Vista and Win7 do. If you download an executable, it will have a flag set in file meta-information that basically indicates that the source was network... when you run it, the OS will warn you and ask to confirm.

....snip.....

Meanwhile, no other desktop OS that I know of does anything similar, .....snip.....

MacOS X, at least when you use Safari, is also flagging content downloaded from the network.

MacOSX tells me whenever I ask it to run a file downloaded from the net for the first time.

So does Vista - in fact, if you have antivirus installed (and it properly integrates with OS by using the corresponding APIs), it will even make it scan the file before starting it for the first time.

Of course, One of the big complaints with Vista was that the OS got in your face every time you tried to do something that could cause problems, simply because Windows Users became acclimated to being logged in as Administrator and being able to do whatever the heck they wanted without question. Granted, Windows Vista was a little extreme with the amount of times that they asked if you wanted to allow something to run. I don't know for sure, but I do not think that you could adjust the alert levels in Vista. They changed this in Windows 7 so you can make your User Account control get in your face some of the time, all of the time, or none of the time.

MacOSX tells me whenever I ask it to run a file downloaded from the net for the first time.

So does Vista - in fact, if you have antivirus installed (and it properly integrates with OS by using the corresponding APIs), it will even make it scan the file before starting it for the first time.

Except that IIS has fewer. Let's see:

IIS7, first released in a server OS (Win2K8 - it was actually present in Vista before that, but no-one would run a server using it, so we don't consider that period) in January 2008, has 2 vulnerabilities in its entire lifetime, and only one of those is remote. That makes it 1 vulnerability per 10 months, or 1 remote vulnerability (which is usually what you care about for servers exposed on the Net) per 20 months.

Apache 2.2, first released in December 2005, has 16 vulnerabilities in its entire lifetime, 15 out of which are remote. That's roughly 1 remote vulnerability every 3 months.

"Oh, but no-one uses Win2K8 and IIS7", I hear people saying. Very well, let's look at the generation before that - IIS6 vs Apache 2.0. IIS6 was released with Win2K3 in April 2003; Apache 2.0 was released in April 2002, a year before that. Lets see:

IIS6 - 8 vulnerabilities to date
Apache 2.0 - 38 vulnerabilities to date

In the interests of fairness it should be noted that a larger percentage - twice as many - of IIS6 vulnerabilities would give the attacker system access (i.e. provide an infection vector), compared to Apache. Even so, in absolute numbers, it's 3 system access vulnerabilities for IIS6 vs 7 such vulnerabilities for Apache. So, even accounting for that extra year, Apache still has worse security record overall for the last two major releases (or the last 6 years).

A secure OS would make sure that all code downloaded from the net is identified to the user as code downloaded from the net and its source/publisher, and a secure OS does not allow the downloaded code to execute until after the user has acknowledged that it is a downloaded program and given explicit permission.

This is precisely what Vista and Win7 do. If you download an executable, it will have a flag set in file meta-information that basically indicates that the source was network... when you run it, the OS will warn you and ask to confirm.

The problem is that this is not fool-proof. Consider this: how is the OS supposed to know that file comes from the network? From OS point of view, files don't "come" from anywhere - it's just that some application opens a file and starts writing data into it. The fact that said data was received from an open socket to a remove server a few milliseconds ago is not something an OS can reasonably detect. Thus, it really is all up to application to set the flag correctly. IE does that, and so does Firefox; other browsers might, or they might not.

Meanwhile, no other desktop OS that I know of does anything similar, and it's certainly quite possible for a Linux browser to download an executable file and chmod+x it - the OS won't stop it, because how could it possibly know that it's a bad thing, or even distinguish such a syscall from another one originating from user explicitly running chmod in the shell?

Don't forget that Lego and your kid's creativity aren't the only winners here. According to the last, parenthetical link in the summary it's powered by LabView, which is something every technical person will see again and again in their lifetime.

Its modular, graphical interface is a perfect compliment for Lego-style robot building(and is also invaluable for test and measurement automation).

I saw this the other day. Basically, a pair of professors, one in law and another in computer science (specializing in software testing) are trying to bring the problems with EHR to a wider audience.

They call for testing and certification of EHR systems (Though thankfully not through the FDA).

It'll be interesting whether anyone listens to them.

A couple popular ones:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/tibetanSociety/social.htm

Etc., etc. Now, the fact that Tibet was formerly ruled by an oppressive, fanatical, and theocratic regime characterized by slavery doesn't make what China is doing now correct.

However, from the perspective of someone fighting for human rights, claiming that it was some sort of "peaceful paradise" can only undermine positive efforts.

Acknowledge that life in pre-China Tibet was absolutely terrible for the average person, acknowledge that life for the average Tibetan has improved dramatically in terms of education, quality of life, etc., and then, from this more realistic position, demand more.

Propping up what is understood by anyone knowledgeable about Tibet as a myth only hurts efforts to improve human rights and religious freedom in China.

Frank Gehry is a one-trick pony. We ended up with this monstrosity, something akin to an exploded Jiffy-Pop container with a building underneath.

See also this and this.

Frank Gehry is a one-trick pony. We ended up with this monstrosity, something akin to an exploded Jiffy-Pop container with a building underneath.

See also this and this.

Frank Gehry is a one-trick pony. We ended up with this monstrosity, something akin to an exploded Jiffy-Pop container with a building underneath.

See also this and this.

I go to a university in Cleveland. Needless to say, we get a good amount of snow in wintertime, being on a lake as we are. Well, our business (oh, I'm sorry, management) school has a Gehry building (pictures here, look at the floor plans to get an idea of how confusing the building is) uglying up our campus, too. Problem is, the roof is so curved and twisted that once snow starts to fall, it collects on the roof until huge chunks of snow and ice fall around 15 feet off it all at once, onto a heavily-traveled sidewalk. The problem was so bad that the university used to just close that sidewalk for the winter once the first flake hit the ground.

Now, starting for this winter, they've installed concrete planters along the building, probably (but not admittedly) to give the snow a place to land that isn't on students' heads, while still keeping the sidewalk open. Rumor is that my school wanted Gehry to pony up money to help pay for the planters, but he refused. I mean, seriously, would a competent architect fail to realize that snow falls in Cleveland? Doubtful, but Gehry did.

This building on campus at Case Western Reserve Univ. was also designed by Gehry. It also has issues with snow/ice (its in Cleveland) building up on the odd angles then falling on people. I walk by it every morning, and if you ask me it's just plain ugly.

Any chance that with all that iron you can loosen up the crazy restrictions on comment posting? It can get rather ridiculous sometimes.

mysql and postgres both use readline, I believe. Oracle, db/2 and that ilk cannot:

Now that you mention this, how hard would it be to write a simple readline-based interface for pretty much any RDBMS? If you've got an API in which you can plug directly into, and if you've got a list of all the possible things that can be done with the database (or at least a general method to finding them from the database itself), it should be rather trivial to create something like this.

Can two or more standards be, by definitation, standard? Why not just publish a RFC and allow everyone write applications to that. What could be more standard than that.

What is a "Standard

"Is Microsoft serious about supporting ODF", NO

"is this a merely a PR stunt to make Office Open XML look more like a legitimate standard?", YES

Full Spectrum Warrior on the XBOX had a map that was almost identical to a map of the campus at Case Western Reserve University.

http://case.edu/

The best thing I have found that exists in a ready-to-be-used state (as opposed to the countless hordes of maybe-someday projects) is vtfileman. Its available at http://vtfileman.sf.net/ and there are at least two instances of it running at universities (http://filebox.vt.edu/ is the original and http://filer.case.edu/ is the one that I run). I have some implementation notes on installing Filer at http://filer.case.edu/wiki/filer/notes

It does have a lot of other requirements though, such as an LDAP server for accounts, Apache to serve the HTTP and WebDAV pages, Apache Tomcat for the JSP interface and proftpd if you want FTP access. However, it is pretty sweet once its running.

If thats too complicated, you may be better off just making WebDAV shares individually for different groups. Personally I like that with vtfileman, people can set up their own accounts with little to know interaction with the system administrator.

The best thing I have found that exists in a ready-to-be-used state (as opposed to the countless hordes of maybe-someday projects) is vtfileman. Its available at http://vtfileman.sf.net/ and there are at least two instances of it running at universities (http://filebox.vt.edu/ is the original and http://filer.case.edu/ is the one that I run). I have some implementation notes on installing Filer at http://filer.case.edu/wiki/filer/notes

It does have a lot of other requirements though, such as an LDAP server for accounts, Apache to serve the HTTP and WebDAV pages, Apache Tomcat for the JSP interface and proftpd if you want FTP access. However, it is pretty sweet once its running.

If thats too complicated, you may be better off just making WebDAV shares individually for different groups. Personally I like that with vtfileman, people can set up their own accounts with little to know interaction with the system administrator.

Actually, it is two paperclips put together: http://wiki.case.edu/Case_logo

More on the logo.

The true offense in the OP was calling it "Case Western". It's not a "reserve university", whatever that means.

I've always just called it "Case" since I started there as an undergraduate in 1994, while my e-mail address still contains cwru.edu. Both of those are used now - "Case" just validates the fact that most people really get tired of saying the whole name over and over again.

Actually, its not two paper clips together. It's a fat man holding a surf board. Look for yourself

Those who think luna may be the only free (as suggested in the story by Stallman) place soon should check out this http://blog.case.edu/epn1/2005/04/25/paper_experim ent/

Which these kids can't get. Because they're illegal immigrants.

So - either those colleges have better aid programs than my college (likely anyway), or the kids are still SOL.

BME at Case Western http://bme.case.edu/ sidesteps the problem by having multiple sequences. BME covers such a broad range of topics that if it isn't specialized it does end up as a major that lacks depth. At Case we have Bioelectric Engineering, Biomechanics, Imaging & Computing, Instrumentation, Orthopedic Biomaterials, Polymeric Biomaterials, Systems and Control, and Tissue Engineering as sequences. We all start out taking the same core engineering classes as every other engineer then we take a few core BME classes - biomaterials, bioinsturmentation, biophysics, blah blah. Then we take the proper classes for the sequence. It's very specific and in depth at the end - that's why Case is ranked 4th in the country for BME.

Well, that concept is not exactly new.

The rest of the ecosystem would probably not be so flexible.

Finally, I think when these people said the rally was at school, school was defined as college.

Indeed.

RTFA a little more closely--Case Western's Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab is covered in the section "Bugs and Whegs" (and one of their "crickets" is the photo-subject of Figure 4).

Check out Case Western Reserve University's Biorobotics Research.

They have an very interesting program that starts in the biology lab where they're recording the nerve impulse patterns of live cockroaches as the run. This data is then studied by the robotics team in order to develop locomotion routines for the robots.

Additionally, there is research coming out of this project which enables victims of paralysis to have implants which help them regain some mobility of other wise unusable limbs.

Interesting that there was no mention of Case Western Reserve University's robotics program.

They have a very interesting project going on pursuing a cockroach design. Cockroaches have the fastest motor capability in the world. On the biology side of the research the cockroach's nerve impulses are being studied by cutting away the exoskeleton and attaching sensors to varios muscles involved with locomotion. The Computer Science and robotics end then studies this data to implement the cockroach's locomotion capability on the robot.