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First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code.

But it can't. C++ is notorious for its inspection features, or rather, lack thereof. C++ offers virtually no meta class information. That's the sole point of moc's existance.

(And not only Qt desparately needs meta classes. The ROOT framework also uses a meta class generator, here creferred to as a "dictionary generator", but doing the same thing moc does: build a meta class from a class.)

Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++"

You can't just use a mixin here - you had to inherit from a generated (by your much-hated moc!) class. That would not only pollute the name space but also make your program less readable.

Maybe it's best to think of moc as an aspect weaver that weaves in meta object information. This style of programming (AOP) is current research in Computer Science and going far beyond mere OOP techniques.

[...] not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView.

I agree fully-hearted (esp. on your gripes about QTable). Then again, the article reads:

Model/view classes for list box, tree view, icon view and table

Sure sounds good to me!

Time and Classical Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity

HERE

previous links to the paper seem not to be to the one to be published. try this one

It might be best to remember that a paradox is an apparent contradiction and therefore, not a real contradiction, whether in theory or in science.

As a physicist, I find Lynd's paper provides nothing new, nothing insightful and in summary to be of no significance.

The Quantum Machine states:

"BREAKING NEWS: LYNDS AFFAIR MAY BE A SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT (AS ORSON WELLS AND THE WAR OF THE WORLDS) AFTER ALL (news story in development)"

For whatever that's worth. Maybe an actual news story will develop there. For now, there's no content. Much like Lynds' paper, which is here.

It's actually one specific implementation of distributed computing, but apparently the name "Grid" caught on to the public and press, and so the term has become a general name for distributed computing projects.

At least, that's how I believe the story went...

It's actually one specific implementation of distributed computing, but apparently the name "Grid" caught on to the public and press, and so the term has become a general name for distributed computing projects.

At least, that's how I believe the story went...

It's actually one specific implementation of distributed computing, but apparently the name "Grid" caught on to the public and press, and so the term has become a general name for distributed computing projects.

At least, that's how I believe the story went...

• Paper on Gled,
• Cactuscode (completely different approach),
• ROOT OO Data-analysis framework (Gled is a ROOT application),
• CERN Atlas Project Grid activities (what kind of thing its needed for).

• Paper on Gled,
• Cactuscode (completely different approach),
• ROOT OO Data-analysis framework (Gled is a ROOT application),
• CERN Atlas Project Grid activities (what kind of thing its needed for).

There's always a way to contrive some benchmark that will make system x seems faster than system y -- try hard enough, and you'll find a way.

But what matters is whether or not the benchmark is in some way relevant to the work you're doing. I can tell you, for the stuff that I'm doing, this benchmark has relevance. The article's biggest complaint is that gcc3 is being used on all the processors -- well welcome to the real world buddy!

I use a an analysis package called Root all day long. Go looking through the makefile for Root and you'll see that when it's compiled on macosx it uses gcc3 and when it's compiled on linux running on intel processors, it uses gcc3. So these benchmarks reflect the kind of performance I should see -- hence it's relevant to me and thousands of other people... that makes it a pretty good benchmark IMO.

If you genuinely think that Sweden should thank the US for the internet (as if it mattered where things were invented, given that all inventions build upon previous inventions), then the US should also thank Europe for the World Wide Web, developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) (which Sweden co-sponsors), without which hardly anyone except us geeks would be likely to use the internet.

Actually they do have their own distro... CERN Linux. It's essentially Redhat with a few modifications.

if you read the paper (which OK is not as bad as not reading the article), you would realise that this is not a project which is being performed only at CERN; when LHC (and others, eg ALICE) become active in a few years, the data is going to be piped to literally hundreds of participating instututions (this is the current list for one of the smaller experiments) for data analysis. so, no, this is not enough processing power, and yes they need it to be publically available. i also know people who are (or were?) working on the security implementations. believe me, at CERN, they think it through; its run by lots of really smart people who know what they are at, not politicians. the distributed processing that comes out of these projects will hopefully pave the way forward for the next generation of the internet (the grid).

Why on earth would someone need a 1000+ node cluster?

The Atlas Project at CERN, when it comes online, is supposed to produce a petabyte of data every year. I doubt one 1000 node cluster would be enough to process that data quickly.

WebGraph is a framework to study the web graph. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. More precisely, it is currently made of:

1. A set of flat codes, called codes, which are particularly suitable for storing web graphs (or, in general, integers with power-law distribution in a certain exponent range). The fact that these codes work well can be easily tested empirically, but we also try to provide a detailed mathematical analysis.
2. Algorithms for compressing web graphs that exploit referentiation ( la LINK), intervalisation and codes to provide a high compression ratio: for instance, the WebBase graph (2001 crawl) is compressed at 3.08 bits per link, and a snapshot of about 18,500,000 pages of the .uk domain gathered by UbiCrawler is compressed at 2.22 bits per link (the corresponding figures for the transposed graphs are 2.89 bits per link and 1.98 bits per link). The algorithms are controlled by several parameters, which provide different tradeoffs between access speed and compression ratio.
3. Algorithms for accessing a compressed graph without actually decompressing it, using lazy techniques that delay the decompression until it is actually necessary.
4. A complete, documented implementation of the algorithms above in Java, contained in the package it.unimi.dsi.webgraph. Besides a clearly defined API, the package contains several classes that allow to modify (e.g., transpose) or recompress a graph, so to experiment with various settings. The package relies on fastutil for a type-specific, high-performance collections framework, on MG4J for bit-level I/O, on the COLT distribution for ready-to-use, efficient algorithms and on GNU getopt for line-command parsing.
5. Data sets for very large graph (e.g., a billion of links). These are either gathered from public sources (such as WebBase), or produced by UbiCrawler.

In the end, with WebGraph you can access and analyse a very large web graph, even on a PC with as little as 256 Mbytes of RAM. Using WebGraph is as easy as installing a few jar files and downloading a data set. This makes studying phenomena such as PageRank, distribution of graph properties of the web graph, etc. very easy.

You are welcome to use and improve WebGraph! Installation

You just have to install the .jar file coming with the distribution, and download the jars WebGraph depends upon (i.e., fastutil, MG4J, COLT and GNU getopt). You may find useful to refer to the JPackage Project if you own an RPM-based distribution. In the same vein of the packages above, WebGraph is also distributed as a Jpackage-like RPM.

WebGraph is a framework to study the web graph. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. More precisely, it is currently made of:

1. A set of flat codes, called codes, which are particularly suitable for storing web graphs (or, in general, integers with power-law distribution in a certain exponent range). The fact that these codes work well can be easily tested empirically, but we also try to provide a detailed mathematical analysis.
2. Algorithms for compressing web graphs that exploit referentiation ( la LINK), intervalisation and codes to provide a high compression ratio: for instance, the WebBase graph (2001 crawl) is compressed at 3.08 bits per link, and a snapshot of about 18,500,000 pages of the .uk domain gathered by UbiCrawler is compressed at 2.22 bits per link (the corresponding figures for the transposed graphs are 2.89 bits per link and 1.98 bits per link). The algorithms are controlled by several parameters, which provide different tradeoffs between access speed and compression ratio.
3. Algorithms for accessing a compressed graph without actually decompressing it, using lazy techniques that delay the decompression until it is actually necessary.
4. A complete, documented implementation of the algorithms above in Java, contained in the package it.unimi.dsi.webgraph. Besides a clearly defined API, the package contains several classes that allow to modify (e.g., transpose) or recompress a graph, so to experiment with various settings. The package relies on fastutil for a type-specific, high-performance collections framework, on MG4J for bit-level I/O, on the COLT distribution for ready-to-use, efficient algorithms and on GNU getopt for line-command parsing.
5. Data sets for very large graph (e.g., a billion of links). These are either gathered from public sources (such as WebBase), or produced by UbiCrawler.

In the end, with WebGraph you can access and analyse a very large web graph, even on a PC with as little as 256 Mbytes of RAM. Using WebGraph is as easy as installing a few jar files and downloading a data set. This makes studying phenomena such as PageRank, distribution of graph properties of the web graph, etc. very easy.

You are welcome to use and improve WebGraph! Installation

You just have to install the .jar file coming with the distribution, and download the jars WebGraph depends upon (i.e., fastutil, MG4J, COLT and GNU getopt). You may find useful to refer to the JPackage Project if you own an RPM-based distribution. In the same vein of the packages above, WebGraph is also distributed as a Jpackage-like RPM.

I'm currently working for a small research group which is part of a particle physics experiment and we are running entirely on Redhat systems, using many excellent open source tools made available by CERN. In my experience, a Unix like environment works orders of magnitude better than a windows environment, especially when it comes time to automate events. I can't even imagine trying to do what we do in a windows environment. It would be an absolute nightmare trying to run most of the program we write.

Have fun!

uhm....have you even got the slightest idea what a particle accelerator is?
take a little look over here to get a grasp about the sizes of the things...

the circumference of the LHC is 27 km (or a little less than 17 miles)

Many people have already pointed out that black holes are not going to destroy the earth, but I guess people might be interested in this, which is a simulation of what a black hole event might look like. It shows an end-on view of the the ATLAS detector (picture), with most of the noise and rubbish taken out.

The curved, coloured lines are tracks left by charged particles. The green ring is the electromagnetic calorimeter, whilst the red ring is the hadronic calorimeter. Calorimeters just measure energy - so the histograms radiating out show how much energy was deposited at each point. So by looking at the histograms you can get an idea of how energetic the track was. Hope that makes sense!

Incidentally, the picture is zoomed to show the interesting detail better. The detector is extremely large! Look here for a picture that shows people standing next to it ... it's about 5 storeys high, and is in a cavern 100m underground which is about 13 storeys high. Oh, and I work on it...

It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet.

I believe that Richard Stallman wrote most of the original GNU C compiler, although it was derived partly from a portable optimizer from a 1978 Univeristy of Arizona research project.

"GNU `diff' was written by Mike Haertel, David Hayes, Richard Stallman, Len Tower, and Paul Eggert."

"GNU Make was written by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath."

"Richard Stallman was the original author of GDB, and of many other GNU programs."

Finally as regards your claim that QM is bizarre - actually I find QM quite rational and satisfying

Ahh, that explains the problem.

"Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." - Niels Bohr
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics" - Richard P. Feynman

quantum mechanics bizzare 8910 hits. If you don't think QM is bizarre then you're only familiar with simplified and erroneous pop-sci explanations of QM.

Your arguments, where they attempt to rely on physics, are strictly pop-sci, littered with implausible and incorrect layman-friendly analogies

To paraphrase Clarke's Law, any sufficiently advanced science is indistiguishable from nonsense. I'll try to include some authoritative links to prove I'm getting it right. I'm saying bizarre stuff because QM really is bizarre.

To talk of photons colliding is nonsense. Photons are packets of EM energy; they don't "collide"

"An International Conference on The Structure and Interactions of the Photon Including the 14th International Workshop on Photon-Photon Collision"

Packets of EM energy really can collide. Just because it is "nonsense" doesn't mean it isn't true.

It's disingenous to suggest that Bohr won the *entire* argument.

Really? And exactly where in the Bohr-Einstein debate did Einstein do anything other than concede?

We still need classical mechanics

It's still useful on a higher emergent level, but is is simply wrong down on the quantum level. Just like Newtonian mechanics are useful on the human scale, but completely wrong when you look at high speeds.

In fact, the point-like particle not only exists

No, according to quantum mechanics the concepts of particles and waves are both wrong. The idea that an electron is a particle with a real position is completely incompatible with the "double slit" "single electron" experiment. There is no way a point-like particle with an actual position value can go through two different slits at the same time.

Point-like particles do not exist. Just because it is "nonsense" does not make it wrong.

The photoelectric effect proves that light isn't really a wave. Just because it is nonsense to say light isn't a wave doesn't make it wrong.

Wave and particle descriptions may be useful at times, but they are both fundamentally incorrect. You are trying to use duality to glue together two broken models. Duality means you really have one thing, and it is neither particle nor wave. It is something else. It is something bizarre and nonsensical.

the point-like particle not only exists, there are some types of experiment where it's all you get to see.

Yeah, there are some types of experiments where you put an elephants trunk on a table and all you get to see looks like a snake. Just because some experiments say an elephant resembles a snake doesn't mean an elephant is a snake.

There are experiments that prove electrons aren't particles. The particle model is useful at times, but it is wrong.

Matter and energy are not "views" of the same thing

If you allow me to assume string theory, the only difference between a particle and a light wave is a difference in direction.

Imagine a garden hose. Light would be a wave moving along the hose at the speed of light. A particle would be a wave going around the hose at the speed of light. A wave going around the hose would be a stationary stand

WiFi is a bad choice for voice communication. The upside is that it is free (after the initial investitions). GSM allows companies to have their own internal phone network and selectively allow workers with a correct sim card to use this internal system. The company doesn't has to pay anything, and people get to carry around their normal cellphones. If you have a Nokia phone, maybe you have wondered what this "closed user group" feature means - that's what it means. Often, these companies outsource the creation of the voice network to a normal cellphone company, and pay them a flat fee for all internal voice communication. A organisation that uses this system is CERN, and they work together with the swiss operator Swisscom. You can find a bit of inside information here.

WiFi is a bad choice for voice communication. The upside is that it is free (after the initial investitions). GSM allows companies to have their own internal phone network and selectively allow workers with a correct sim card to use this internal system. The company doesn't has to pay anything, and people get to carry around their normal cellphones. If you have a Nokia phone, maybe you have wondered what this "closed user group" feature means - that's what it means. Often, these companies outsource the creation of the voice network to a normal cellphone company, and pay them a flat fee for all internal voice communication. A organisation that uses this system is CERN, and they work together with the swiss operator Swisscom. You can find a bit of inside information here.

Imagine if the first signal we decode is: "don't build a particle accelerator larger than 5 kilometers in diameter or you will destroy your whole world."

That would be pretty darn bad - because it would be too late :-)

Fortunately though, the message probably reads, "don't build a particle accelerator with more than XXX TeV center of mass energy", and even this would be accurate only for lepton (i.e. electrons or muons; tau or neutrino accelerators being not very likely) accelerators. The Tevatron, for instance, uses protons (and antiprotons) as ammunition. The proton itself consists of quarks and gluons, and in a proton-antiproton collision, only one of them actually interacts - the rest is just fragments that clutter the forward regions of the detector.

do your homework
20 member states running it form all over Europe

... because as they say on their web they are far beyond p2p networks in data sharing. This is interesting and I wonder how long it will take RIAA&MPAA to sue thier U. S. based sponsors for developing technology that might be used to infringe copyright law.

A major collaborator on this stuff is Globus which provides an API for grid applications. Same people who are partners with IBM in the butterfly.net game grid.

Maybe MTU can use it to store their students' Kazaa archives.

------

here. Seems they move 300 Gb/s not 300 GB/s arround. Still impressive.

You want boring? Then go and take a look at the PDF papers on this site.

Are they boring? Yes, exruciatingly and mind numbingly so...
Did they help us win the Second World War? err...yes

Appropriate joke for the Mac platform, since PowerPC processors have an eieio instruction...

A non-animated PDF version here.

Link is valid for 7 days :-)

• The Internet
  
• BSD Unix (and variations)
  
• Linux
  
• The GNU project
  
• Object Oriented Programming (and, by extension, anything built using OOP principles, like Microsoft Windows)
  
• The World Wide Web

I've sometimes heard this as "most of the easy science has already been done", but that is also not very well worded. What it means is that it is no longer possible to make fundamental discoveries (or even any discoveries at all, apart from personal ones) by rolling balls down an inclined plane. Instead, you need either a large scale machine, say a particle accelerator, or even a small scale machine, say a STM machine or similar. Both of these are quite complex devices, which one person could not build and operate by themselves. But, I would argue the "easy" point though. In the 17th century, Galelleo's experiment was surely not "easy", although it is easy to reproduce with modern equipment.

Btw...care to back up what you are saying about CERN with a link? I'm genuinely curious what they have running.

Ah, lets talk petabytes of datastorage! The RD45 project! Be sure to check out this "slideshow". Quote: "(...) 200-400TB/year at up to 35MB/second."

I was told (though I cannot find any link to back this up) that oracle could not face up to the CERN tasks.

Companies that are run by competent management (...)

Unfortunately I have seen a lot of incompetent management...

If you want to play around with odbms, I would like to suggest ozone. It's java/gpl. You can also find me on the mailinglists.

Btw...care to back up what you are saying about CERN with a link? I'm genuinely curious what they have running.

Ah, lets talk petabytes of datastorage! The RD45 project! Be sure to check out this "slideshow". Quote: "(...) 200-400TB/year at up to 35MB/second."

I was told (though I cannot find any link to back this up) that oracle could not face up to the CERN tasks.

Companies that are run by competent management (...)

Unfortunately I have seen a lot of incompetent management...

If you want to play around with odbms, I would like to suggest ozone. It's java/gpl. You can also find me on the mailinglists.

Either you have stuck around with too many bad lisp programmers, or you haven't paid enough attention to what they were doing - no usefulness can come from code which uses lists for anything more than they were designed for - sequences of data. (-:

Also, it is not very rewarding to just clip the first element off the list you gave - it will still be around (not being garbage collected until the pointer to the head is), so why bother?

Scheme is not, in any way I can think of, over-extended. It is designed to be a minimalistic language - hells, it even has minimalistic syntax. Please check your facts before you claim such things. Common Lisp does have a hell of a standard, though. But see Greenspun's tenth rule for why.

And concerning your hate of paranthesis, I can only believe that you have mapped your () buttons to the wrong keys - using them from a non-shifted key (dump those []s, for example (-;) makes them much easier to type (and having an editor which can operate with the lists your code forms, helps too - use vi -l or emacs).

you would not even need to define any new macros for the stuff that is shown in the review, IMHO - before, after, around-methods and call-next-method already exist in the lisp standard. (cue greenspun's tenth rule of programming).

Ok, that's the introduction, here we go:

First, let me state that the alternative to war is not to do nothing. It is to do things more constructively, build rather than destroy.

Let me also state that I'm not in the "it's the oil" crowd. I think Bush honestly believes that he is on a God-given mission as the World Leader to save the world. But I didn't elect this moron, and neither did you. Unelected leaders are dangerous, regardless of who didn't elect them... :-) Especially when they're fanatically religious...

First, a bit of history: US officials visited Saddam in 1984, to restablish diplomatic ties, as Saddam was in a war with Iran, this was a great opportunity, and these officials saw no reason why they shouldn't establish diplomatic relations. Well, of course they knew that Saddam had been a despot since he seized power in 1979, and they knew full well that he had used chemical weapons against his own population as well as in the war against Iran.

But, what the heck, this war against Iran, that had to be supported, regardless of some puny WMDs. The delegation leader's name was Donald Rumsfeld. Yep, these guys are old pals. Cool, eh?

Where were you when Amnesty reported that Saddam Hussein tortured and murdered unknown tens of thousands of Iraqis when your current defence-head shook hands with him?

The problem with Saddam had been much easier to solve if the US had put some pressure on Saddam in 1984, rather than supporting the dictator. The US gave him the position he now has. And guess what, dictators sometimes have their own agenda. Who would have thought?

OK, so you can argue that old mistakes are no reason to stand down now.

True. But you have to realize that you have to do things differently than you did before.

Well, what happened in Kosovo, that's an example of the success of intervention? Well, I don't know about the murder rates right now, but the number of killings before and after the bombings were pretty much the same. No real improvement. Strengthen democracy? They can't even elect a president now, because everybody thinks that the whole thing stinks and nobody shows up at the elections. Yep, we'll just bomb some more in 50 years when tensions rise again. Slobo was thrown out? Sure, but at the 11th attempt. With Slobo in power, Yugoslavs tried to throw him from power over and over again. The silence from the rest of the world was overwhelming. Nobody cared, nobody listened. Half a million of the elite who were at the forefront in trying to overthrow him left the country in dispair. If they had been given just a little support, the whole catastrophy may have been avoided. As it is now, it is just a matter when the region explodes again.

If Saddam had actually had WMDs that were a threat, then urgent action may have been needed. But the evidence put forward by US administration sucks badly. It consistently falls apart on examination. Besides, it is backed by blatant lies and misinformation, that has no other purpose than scaring people. Such as "given enough high-grade uranium, Saddam can makes nukes within six months". Well, yeah, I'm a physicist, and I can do that too, but I wouldn't need six months!

At the same time, the same mistakes are committed over and over again. There are some of republics of central asia that are not democratic at all. In fact, they are highly oppressive. Even, it may be getting worse while we're watching. But, because they're now "allies", we're looking the other way, instead of supporting those working for democracy. It's the same story over again. It is the same reason why the US supported Iraq and Saddam, why they now support the oppressive regimes in particulary Uzbekistan and Kirgistan. They're only making it worse. Are you looking the other way now, because you president says that you should? Then please don't come shouting for bombs in 20 years from now!

It is time to think things over, and take a different path.

There is a huge, well-educated middle class in Iraq, and they are the key to overthrowing Saddam. Making sure that these people can start thinking about politics again rather than worrying about getting food on the table or a US bomb down their chimney is probably the best thing you can do to forward democracy in Iraq. They allready have to worry about Saddam's agents, so removing a couple of worries can only be a good thing. The problem is, Saddam knows it, and his power is now so well established, supporting those is going to be really, really difficult.

There's another path. Iran has made huge progress lately, pretty much in spite of US efforts. Most of the Iranian population is really young, and they don't want to take any more bullshit from the old moronic fundamentalists.

There is also a bunch of forward-thinking academics, who is not afraid to challenge the theocracy, and many internationally minded scientists.

Not long ago, Iran joined CERN. Yep, that's the european nuclear research organization. Those who are thinking "nuclear, iran, scary!" are missing the point, and need to RSFH (read some f* history).

Empowering these people in Iran is very likely going to light that candle of democracy in the region that Bush is talking about. Without bombs, without a war. Without USians becoming subject of hate all over the world. Without sacrificing human rights, like pretty much every US intervention has done in the past. It is going to bring about change made the people themselves, it is going to empower people in the entire region, possibly in the entire world to bring about change. It is what can make tyrants tremble.

You know, there are success stories when it comes to peaceful transitions, take Guatemala for example, Bolivia had also an extremely corrupt and violent government but popular uprising did the trick there. To some extent, the wide attention that South Africa got helped the transition there. Military action is not, and has never been the only way. But looking the other way, has never helped.

You're going to spend something like $50 billion on war, very likely. Imagine what you can do with those money, if you instead make an investment in empowering the people who wants to see change?

Ok, that's the introduction, here we go:

First, let me state that the alternative to war is not to do nothing. It is to do things more constructively, build rather than destroy.

Let me also state that I'm not in the "it's the oil" crowd. I think Bush honestly believes that he is on a God-given mission as the World Leader to save the world. But I didn't elect this moron, and neither did you. Unelected leaders are dangerous, regardless of who didn't elect them... :-) Especially when they're fanatically religious...

First, a bit of history: US officials visited Saddam in 1984, to restablish diplomatic ties, as Saddam was in a war with Iran, this was a great opportunity, and these officials saw no reason why they shouldn't establish diplomatic relations. Well, of course they knew that Saddam had been a despot since he seized power in 1979, and they knew full well that he had used chemical weapons against his own population as well as in the war against Iran.

But, what the heck, this war against Iran, that had to be supported, regardless of some puny WMDs. The delegation leader's name was Donald Rumsfeld. Yep, these guys are old pals. Cool, eh?

Where were you when Amnesty reported that Saddam Hussein tortured and murdered unknown tens of thousands of Iraqis when your current defence-head shook hands with him?

The problem with Saddam had been much easier to solve if the US had put some pressure on Saddam in 1984, rather than supporting the dictator. The US gave him the position he now has. And guess what, dictators sometimes have their own agenda. Who would have thought?

OK, so you can argue that old mistakes are no reason to stand down now.

True. But you have to realize that you have to do things differently than you did before.

Well, what happened in Kosovo, that's an example of the success of intervention? Well, I don't know about the murder rates right now, but the number of killings before and after the bombings were pretty much the same. No real improvement. Strengthen democracy? They can't even elect a president now, because everybody thinks that the whole thing stinks and nobody shows up at the elections. Yep, we'll just bomb some more in 50 years when tensions rise again. Slobo was thrown out? Sure, but at the 11th attempt. With Slobo in power, Yugoslavs tried to throw him from power over and over again. The silence from the rest of the world was overwhelming. Nobody cared, nobody listened. Half a million of the elite who were at the forefront in trying to overthrow him left the country in dispair. If they had been given just a little support, the whole catastrophy may have been avoided. As it is now, it is just a matter when the region explodes again.

If Saddam had actually had WMDs that were a threat, then urgent action may have been needed. But the evidence put forward by US administration sucks badly. It consistently falls apart on examination. Besides, it is backed by blatant lies and misinformation, that has no other purpose than scaring people. Such as "given enough high-grade uranium, Saddam can makes nukes within six months". Well, yeah, I'm a physicist, and I can do that too, but I wouldn't need six months!

At the same time, the same mistakes are committed over and over again. There are some of republics of central asia that are not democratic at all. In fact, they are highly oppressive. Even, it may be getting worse while we're watching. But, because they're now "allies", we're looking the other way, instead of supporting those working for democracy. It's the same story over again. It is the same reason why the US supported Iraq and Saddam, why they now support the oppressive regimes in particulary Uzbekistan and Kirgistan. They're only making it worse. Are you looking the other way now, because you president says that you should? Then please don't come shouting for bombs in 20 years from now!

It is time to think things over, and take a different path.

There is a huge, well-educated middle class in Iraq, and they are the key to overthrowing Saddam. Making sure that these people can start thinking about politics again rather than worrying about getting food on the table or a US bomb down their chimney is probably the best thing you can do to forward democracy in Iraq. They allready have to worry about Saddam's agents, so removing a couple of worries can only be a good thing. The problem is, Saddam knows it, and his power is now so well established, supporting those is going to be really, really difficult.

There's another path. Iran has made huge progress lately, pretty much in spite of US efforts. Most of the Iranian population is really young, and they don't want to take any more bullshit from the old moronic fundamentalists.

There is also a bunch of forward-thinking academics, who is not afraid to challenge the theocracy, and many internationally minded scientists.

Not long ago, Iran joined CERN. Yep, that's the european nuclear research organization. Those who are thinking "nuclear, iran, scary!" are missing the point, and need to RSFH (read some f* history).

Empowering these people in Iran is very likely going to light that candle of democracy in the region that Bush is talking about. Without bombs, without a war. Without USians becoming subject of hate all over the world. Without sacrificing human rights, like pretty much every US intervention has done in the past. It is going to bring about change made the people themselves, it is going to empower people in the entire region, possibly in the entire world to bring about change. It is what can make tyrants tremble.

You know, there are success stories when it comes to peaceful transitions, take Guatemala for example, Bolivia had also an extremely corrupt and violent government but popular uprising did the trick there. To some extent, the wide attention that South Africa got helped the transition there. Military action is not, and has never been the only way. But looking the other way, has never helped.

You're going to spend something like $50 billion on war, very likely. Imagine what you can do with those money, if you instead make an investment in empowering the people who wants to see change?

I use CERN's Colt library for java math stuff every now and then. It's pretty easy to figure out, assuming you know what you're after.

Well,

It's not so simple.

As far as math packages go, matlab and mathematica are the most powerful; but they are very different.
Mathematica is by far the best for pure maths work (the only one real mathematicians accept--it can be slow compared to others but it does real algebra), whereas matlab has more in terms of data analysis, visualisation etc.
Maple is nice and easy to learn, but somewhat less specialised, and I see very nice thing being done in python, as remarked in earlier posts.

In particle physics, one useful data analysis package we have is root , which is basically a collection of C++ classes and a command-line c++ interpreter, very neat, very scaleable (works with our *huge* datasets)...

But on the whole I have found that we end up using a *lot* of different languages:
--you write your large projects in C/C++, and that's what the particle physics community is trying to standardise on
--interface with someone else's older code that's in fortran (a lot of it has not been ported yet.)
--you script things in python and shell, so you can run all of it in a sequence
--on a personal level, many people then use mathematica for the mathematical work (it's really unequalled when you want proper solutions.)
--you also find quite a few people writing frontends in java these days...

For my projects (particle physics etc) I generally use C++ these days (farewell fortran) because of the usefulness of templates. Recently I had to use some largish matrices (1000x1000 and growing - need more memory!) for a lattice calculation and found The Matrix Template Library to be most useful for my sparse matrices - and with an easy (well, easy for someone who knows STL) interface which allowed me to add a tensor product method - nice! The beauty of MTL is that it's just a series of header files - amazing! Then for data analysis I use ROOT an object oriented data analysis framework - it does histogram plotting / fitting etc... but is much more than a simple potting tool - you can build a cross platform GUI with it if you like, but the documentation is not the best. I've also used Octave for some FFT stuff too. It's like the unix philosophy really, use the right tools for the right job and use them together.

Someone should invent a scripting language with static type checking. (Are there any?)

Oh I don't know, how about C?

And in what category will fall a C or C++ programmer if you have things like C/C++ interpreters ?

Interesting point, which makes me remember, that .de domain names are usually just that, plain .de . For example earlier today we had this, ther's also this site. The same thing goes for .ch - for example the URL this famous site - and probably a few more countries.

Wonder what the regulations really are.

The DNS system is pretty much full of inconsistencies anyway (.tv, .cx, hmm what else?). I once had an idea how they can be arranged to be more logical, but change would just confuse oh-the-so-numerous websurfing grandmothers of the world.

Try here.