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These photographs taken by one of my colleagues, which have been linked elsewhere from this topic

Another link

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/ cia/

The Average American watches 4 hours of TV per day (http://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/health/docs/tv&heal th.html)- anything we can do to rid America of this horrible menace is a welcome thing!

Bring on our new High School Gym Coach overlords!

7.0 is definitely a pretty big quake. The Northridge Earthquake killed more than 50 people in the Los Angeles area and it was "only" 6.7. There was some pretty significant damage . Of course, its epicenter was in an urban area..

I just returned from the CSUN Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities where Pete DeVasto of Adobe was demoing a beta build of Adobe Reader for Linux using the Gnopernicus screen reader. Speech output, Braille output, working navigation of the PDF documents he showed (including forms), all accessible to him on the Sun Opteron box he was using, running the forthcoming edition of Sun's Java Desktop System Release 3 (GNOME 2.6 with GNOME 2.8 accessibility bits). Even as someone very much involved in this work (I'm Sun's Accessibility Architect), it was really cool to see this, and to see the reactions from folks at the conference to what Adobe was showing.

"But this begs the question..."

no it doesn't. it raises the question. the phrase "begging the question" means something else entirely.

Why do they measure Internet addiction (or gaming addiction) in hours? There are non-alcoholics who drink more than some alcoholics, by choice rather than compulsion. Not all abusers (of anything) are addicts. FWIW, I'd like to see comparisons of "TV addiction": Americans watch an average of 28 hours of TV each week.

Perhaps this is the link

Boobies

They will not reach my "buy button"
I despise commercials. They are nothing less than constant brainwashing. The more they hammer me with BS commercials, the more I am turned off to that product. Most commercials are so offensive and annoying that I only have to see it ONCE to be forever turned off to the product.

I know what I need. I go to the store and buy only the things I MUST have. I do not buy extra things, I don't "browse" or "shop", I buy.

I can't hit the SHUT UP button on the remote fast enough when a commercial comes on.

I wish the U$$A had commercial free TV like the UK does, or at least did have at one time.
I would pay for commercial free TV.

-
http://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/health/docs/tv&healt h.html

Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child: 20,000
Number of TV commercials seen by the average person by age 65: 2 million
Percentage of survey participants (1993) who said that TV commercials
aimed at children make them too materialistic: 92
Rank of food products/fast-food restaurants among TV advertisements to kids: 1
Total spending by 100 leading TV advertisers in 1993: $15 billion

I did something similar for my Master's Thesis.

Mainly I looked at various tools and how effective they were. I also looked at setups in the surrounding neighborhood and pwn3d (with permission) the campus VPN via the wireless network.

You claim that the naysayers are less versed than these "experts" in consciousness is a classic appeal to authority or Argumentum ad verecundiam. Physics is not the be-all and end-all of understanding; rather, semantic and ontological constructions form the entire basis of bases. Only through unification and reconciliation with all branches of science and philosophy will consciousness be truly understood.

I will also say that I personally disagree with your theory of the mind as being limited to a Newtonian scale. I've actually designed and been involved in the design of AI algorithms (read: large slow Matlab simulations and FPGA implementations). No matter what I did, there was a level of complexity beyond the understanding of the subject at the time. That's a practical obstacle that I and others have experienced. I believe it's definitely at least quantum in nature. But our personal opinions are not necessarily relevant to the truth now, are they?

Why should I waste my time disputing what you say?

You shouldn't. You should do some investigation of you own. The facts are the facts.

You haven't proved any of it. Your facts are occasionally wrong and definitely imcomplete and your insinuations are unprovable.

Which of these facts are wrong? Incomplete? Of course, you make no effort to prove your assertion.
What did I insinuate?

Did Bush f things up before 9/11? Yes.

Agreed.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that he and his administration systematically dismantled our investigations into terrorism, and specifically the terrorists who attacked on 9/11.

This link discusses
Bush's ambassador to Yemen's refusal to allow the head of the investigation into the USS Cole bombing back in to Yemen. The source is just the first I found in a search, so if you don't like it feel free to find your own. It is a fact, and it has been widely reported. Buried mostly, but reported nonetheless.

This link
reports that the FBI was ordered to "Back off" the Bin ladens and the Saudi royal family.

I don't suppose you remember who Coleen Rowley is? Ashcroft refused to allow a search of the laptop of the 20th terrorist.

Did everyone else? Yes.

As demonstrated above, not everyone else fucked up. Some people were doing quite well before they had their knees taken out.

Further, as I said, We were warned of the specific attacks in advance by the intelligence services of multiple countries. Perhaps this is what you were talking about when you called my facts incomplete? I forgot to mention that Russia and several other Arab countries warned us as well.

You're a contentious fool.
An ad hominem attack is the most base logical fallacy.

You have to prove the spirit of your attacks is true, or I'm not even going to be bothered responding.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The facts are what they are.

"The time he wasted could have prevented the second WTC plane from hitting." Of course it could have.

So you agree that he could have prevented the second plane from hitting the second tower by taking the simple action of responding to the threat by doing his job rather than joking that That's some bad pilot (aside: My father is a pilot, so I have some slight understanding of how horrified the poor man's wife must have felt to hear Bush ridicule her murdered husband and joke at the deaths of all the innocent passengers and crew of the plane and those immediately killed in the building.)

He then continued to react to the single worst terrorist attack on US soil by going into a classroom and reading a book to a bunch of second graders.

You're a partisan hack to imply that his inaction is somehow his intentional irresponsibility.

Another ad hominem, this time with a red herring thrown in.
You clearly learned your debating skills from some extremist right wing agitator. Refute facts and arguments with hatred. That lesson so many on the right have learned so well has poisoned public discourse in this country. Thanks for helping to propogate it.

What the reasons for his inaction are are irrelevant to the point which you already admitted which was that he could have stopped all of the attacks after the first had he done his job.

Where the partisanship comes in with expecting the President of the United States to do his job rathe

Why should I waste my time disputing what you say?

You shouldn't. You should do some investigation of you own. The facts are the facts.

You haven't proved any of it. Your facts are occasionally wrong and definitely imcomplete and your insinuations are unprovable.

Which of these facts are wrong? Incomplete? Of course, you make no effort to prove your assertion.
What did I insinuate?

Did Bush f things up before 9/11? Yes.

Agreed.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that he and his administration systematically dismantled our investigations into terrorism, and specifically the terrorists who attacked on 9/11.

This link discusses
Bush's ambassador to Yemen's refusal to allow the head of the investigation into the USS Cole bombing back in to Yemen. The source is just the first I found in a search, so if you don't like it feel free to find your own. It is a fact, and it has been widely reported. Buried mostly, but reported nonetheless.

This link
reports that the FBI was ordered to "Back off" the Bin ladens and the Saudi royal family.

I don't suppose you remember who Coleen Rowley is? Ashcroft refused to allow a search of the laptop of the 20th terrorist.

Did everyone else? Yes.

As demonstrated above, not everyone else fucked up. Some people were doing quite well before they had their knees taken out.

Further, as I said, We were warned of the specific attacks in advance by the intelligence services of multiple countries. Perhaps this is what you were talking about when you called my facts incomplete? I forgot to mention that Russia and several other Arab countries warned us as well.

You're a contentious fool.
An ad hominem attack is the most base logical fallacy.

You have to prove the spirit of your attacks is true, or I'm not even going to be bothered responding.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The facts are what they are.

"The time he wasted could have prevented the second WTC plane from hitting." Of course it could have.

So you agree that he could have prevented the second plane from hitting the second tower by taking the simple action of responding to the threat by doing his job rather than joking that That's some bad pilot (aside: My father is a pilot, so I have some slight understanding of how horrified the poor man's wife must have felt to hear Bush ridicule her murdered husband and joke at the deaths of all the innocent passengers and crew of the plane and those immediately killed in the building.)

He then continued to react to the single worst terrorist attack on US soil by going into a classroom and reading a book to a bunch of second graders.

You're a partisan hack to imply that his inaction is somehow his intentional irresponsibility.

Another ad hominem, this time with a red herring thrown in.
You clearly learned your debating skills from some extremist right wing agitator. Refute facts and arguments with hatred. That lesson so many on the right have learned so well has poisoned public discourse in this country. Thanks for helping to propogate it.

What the reasons for his inaction are are irrelevant to the point which you already admitted which was that he could have stopped all of the attacks after the first had he done his job.

Where the partisanship comes in with expecting the President of the United States to do his job rathe

Try this link And look for the "website" heading, not that the second, most complete date is the access date.

I refer you to this article about the fine spending under the Department of Homeland Security. A few choice bits of its budget?

" A new university-based homeland security research center program for Texas A&M, avoiding an open and competitive award process. This was pushed by Republican Whip, Tom DeLay, whose district includes Texas A&M.

$2 million so the Smithsonian can start a 108,000-square-foot building in Maryland to house its collection of fish, frogs, bugs, birds and other animals preserved in alcohol-filled containers.

$5 million to subsidize farmers' markets and roadside produce stands in 31 states.

$2.5 million to map coral reefs in the waters around Hawaii."

Not only could we count these now - but any historical dispute arising up to 2500 years later as to the result of an election would be easily settled - pot shards from 500BC and earlier have been found, and with a bit of care we could even stretch the traceability to 35,000 years (the oldest known ceramics date from around this age).

OK - people have to mark their own pot shard, and it relies on the probity of the counting officials, but it's still a damn sight better than relying on dodgy software and potentially biased private vote counting.

Besides, the thought of the Supreme Court being deluged with shards of pottery in case of dispute is a nice image.

I learned Simula 67 back in 1987. Cal State Northridge had it as part of the "Intro to Programming Languages" course (a 200 level course).

SBIG has an adaptive optics device for amateurs called the AO-7. It doesn't correct for everything that professional systems do, but it does improve the image considerably.

. . . . .

Imaginary quote of the day: "I am not an addict. I just do it all the time."

I am often struck by how the same issues come up again and again in history, and how often past struggles for liberty have to be repeated. This struggle has a pretty long history going back at least to 450 BC. In Rome at that time there was no publicly accessable writen law. Instead the law was preserved by the an upper class (the Patricians) mostly as an oral tradition. Needless to say this put the lower class (the Plebians) at a considerable disadvantage when they went into court. They had no ready way of knowing what the law actually said.

In about 450 BC the Plebians won one of the earliest and most significant victories for equality in the western legal tradition. They forced the publication of the laws. The laws were inscribed on twelve tablets and made accessable to all citizens. This established a pinciple which, has survived to this day, that the law ought to be published. (Twelve Tablets)

Even so there are several new and non-so-new developments that have really undermined this ancient victory for equality. The law has become so complex that no one really knows what all of it says, and only a privileged class of experts really know what any small part of it says. So we are again in a position where most people have no direct access to the law, and where there is a privileged class that serve as intermediaries between the people and the law. This new development of effectively copyrighting parts of the law, or limiting access to legal databases, is really just a continuation of this trend. It stengthens the hold that the wealthy have over access to the legal system.

Basins that lack source rocks are barren; in his model they should contain hydrocarbons
There obviously are rocks which block upward flow. My 300-foot water well isn't producing oil; how deeply were those basins drilled? "Every deep hole that has been drilled into the crystalline basement, by several Soviet deep drilling programs, by the German on-going deep drilling efforts, by the deep drilling into the Swedish granite, has shown the presence of hydrocarbons at depth."
Natural gas deposits at the "... deeper levels, which must be expected to have maintained the much more abundant gas, ... have been found to be very productive."

He ignores plate tectonics
Note "Figure 3", a petroleum and tectonic map of SE Asia. This is within a section "Horizontal and Vertical Patterns of Hydrocarbon Fields" which points out "a larger scale phenomenon than ... the geology of the outer crust." He's well aware of tectonics, and is pointing out that the Middle East, where several tectonic plates meet, show oil similarities over the entire region which aren't explained by burial and rotting of small areas of material...in rocks of many different ages.

his references are often 50 years out of date.
I see 6 references before 1960 in that paper's list of over 40 references; what does "often 50 years" mean?
The "rotted material" theory of oil is also old, from 1757.
If you want new text, look at this week's tabloids at the supermarket. If you want truth then you find it where it exists.

And as for oil fields not refilling, look at Wall Street Journal, page one, April 16, 1999, "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning", where 3-D seismic technology showed a deep fault gushing oil into the Eugene Island 330 field, which was producing 4,000 barrels per day and is now producing 13,000.

No offense, but the term ignorant comes to mind when I read your comment. Just so you know, there are plenty of references to my "Completely Untrue Statement". Seriously, if you want to whine about your tax dollars, find out how much of them go to subsidize big oil and then wonder why people think and say negative things about the Loner Star State.

One way do do this with one LCD screen is to take a 15" LCD and a old Overhead projector and build a projector. You may have to have a dark room but it looks awesome. I have built one for my basement Home Theatre and it rocks. A good set of instructions can be found at VG150 LCD Projector.

why do they want .doc or .ppt at CSUN?

CSU-Microsoft Campus Enterprise Agreement (CEA). I really love this line: "A distinct advantage to the campus enterprise agreement is that it does not require any exclusivity whatsoever. CSU faculty, staff, and students have the option to use any software they want" because the next sentence says: "Microsoft accepted this type of agreement because two-thirds of the CSU campuses endorsed Microsoft Office products as their campus-wide standard".

The office XP is only avilable at the $20 price because 2/3rds of the schools in the system are going to force 100% Microsoft monopoly on their students. I'm sure the situation at the other 1/3rd is going to be almost as bad. If you enforce a zero tolerance policy of against Microsoft competitors then you get a deep discount (more like a bribe). It's not Microsoft using anti-competitive tactics, it's the schools doing it! (chuckle)

Not that the school officials care too much about how much the students pay for Office XP, I'm sure the deal saved at least a few thousand dollars for the administrative offices.

There was a recent article on /. about Microsoft making a deal with a college that would require every student to take a course in .NET or C# (I forgot which).

Disclaimer: I don't know jack about CSUN, I just did a google on microsoft CSUN and it was all in the first link.

-

I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.

I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernist philosopher who disavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."

In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.

Just a thought.

For what it's worth, Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) finished his degree (I think at CSUN) years after starting Apple, making his fortune, then quitting Apple. His co-founder Steve Jobs never finished.

And of course, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and never finished -- but how often does Microfsoft hire programmers without degrees these days?

The bottom line is, whether you should get a degree depends on what you want it for. On AVERAGE a degree benefits most people financially, but having degrees is no guarantee of success, and not having one is no guarantee of failure.

--Robert (Ph.D., M.B.A., M.A., B.S.)

There's been a series of stories about oil wells refilling themselves lately. One of the ideas is that our current source of oil is from methane that was trapped beneath the Earth's surface at the big bang, and from fosilized animals. This story could actually be further evidence of that idea.

An alternate theory is that their is a biomass layer bacteria below the surface of the Earth that is producing methane. That methane is then changed into oil by heat, preasure, and the filtration to the surface of the. Haven't you noticed that most oil well are dug where there is a large amount of sandstone and other porous rock?

<Useful links>
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.ht ml
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/recharging/
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/origins.h tml
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/038798546 8/202-8329969-5193459
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/margins/seeps_worksho p.html

Be forewarned, these are part of a special collection on "Human Sexuality" and can't be checked out the library. I don't think you can even browse the collection without requesting permission, but it's nice to know there's a larger collection of porn in comparison to what's under your bed.

-Mr. Fusion

Be forewarned, these are part of a special collection on "Human Sexuality" and can't be checked out the library. I don't think you can even browse the collection without requesting permission, but it's nice to know there's a larger collection of porn in comparison to what's under your bed.

-Mr. Fusion

It beat the conditions they had at home in Greece, but it really was slavery.

Unfortunately, Americans, being very provincial, tend to think only in terms of American style slavery, in which manumission was rare and unexpected. (Oh, and no one was really sure what to do with free slaves, except repatriate them to Africa.)

For more information on Roman style slavery, try reading the Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough.

The real problem with comparing things to the H1-B system is that there isn't anything exactly like the H1-B system. It somewhat resembles both indentured servitude and Roman style slavery.

American style slavery was really more like feudalism, almost no hope of freedom or every raising your social status.

Of course, it is difficult to compare the H1-B system to anything else, since it is a modern invention with its own rules and peculiarities. However, to dismiss a comparison with slavery, especially non-American slavery simply reflects a lack of knowledge of the history of the ancient world.

We review Stranger in a Strange Land, followed by The Book of Kells, then the Res Gestae, then The Rosetta Stone.... Come on! This book bored me to near-death 21 years ago. It was a long grinding-down of the soul, like Catcher in the Rye.
I appreciate the effort of the review, and all, but by now, anybody likely to be on /.(literate, intelligent, older than 12 years) should have already been exposed to it.

"when did I imply that we didn't know a lot about petroleum? "

Mmmm let's see perhaps when you said
"The fact is there's still a lot *not* known about petroleum (how its made, how to find it, how to extract it), even by the experts."

Holy lack of logic Batman! Since when does "There is a lot not known" = "We don't know a lot"?

Oh yea one more thing your link is just about useless. Class notes from a 1997 lecture? Give me a break.

Why, because it shows that petroleum engineers are taught that the origins of petroleum aren't known? Then this guy must be full of it as well.

Newton went away for a year due to the plague, I believe. And yes, that was when he began Principia. But he spent most of his creative years at Cambridge, where he would have been under constant peer review (not that he had any peers).

Newton's models of Optics (oh yeah that thing) was not publicly released for years as was his development of calculus.

Wiles maintained connections with his mathematical colleagues, and used the work of others to arrive at his proof of the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture
Nobody said that Wolfram didn't use the work of others -- the claim is that he did not allow others to see his work until it was done. Wiles worker for 6-7 years without acknowledging to anyone what he was working on.

I don't know what you consider Heisenbergs "best work" but I would say it is the wave / particle duality. This work was done as a PhD student but was highly unpopular and he worked (to some degree in isolation).

I guess you're just quoting from some sources, I have to warn you they are not reliable. Anything claiming that "Po218, Po214, and Po210 are also negatively charged ions similar in size to fluoride and hydroxyl ions" is so far out of the ballpark it's amazing.

This may well be true. I don't claim to be an expert in the area and am relying on sources that seem to be taking a Scientific approach. That's really all I can do at this point, since I'm not going to take the time to study the subject until I'm on par with a professional in the field. Instead, what I must do in this type of situation is to read the summary texts and basic explanations, attempting to find little signs as to the scholarship and adherence to Scientific methods of the authors.

For example, when Gentry says in the mid 90's that no one has even attempted to address his discoveries, it's obvious to me that he's not a person you can trust. You still refuse to address this, despite my bringing it up previously.

Also remember the half-life of Po, we're talking 3.05 minutes for 218, and 150 microseconds for 214. So if Rn dropped out of solution, there would be enough time for the Po 218 to move for a while before all of it decayed, leading to a "tube" appearance.

Nonsense. That's pure speculation. From what I've read, the Rn can pool like bubbles quite rapidly. Since these are processes that no one is really able to reproduce in the lab, your guess is really as good as mine. The only alternative would be to devise some advanced computer models to simulate the situation. I doubt that anyone cares enough to do so in this case, since simple non-God explanations exist.

Likewise Pb-214 (first decay of Po-218), with a 26.8 minute, then Bi-214 with a 19.7 minute, then to Po-214. So there would be weeks between the precipation of Rn 222 (3.825 day half life) and the final decay of Po-214 to get 95% of the Rn222 decayed. In that time there would sure be a "blur". There are none that I'm aware of - do you have peer reviewed, published results to show those? If not, then your scenario does not hold water.

Well, this isn't a subject that has received tons of attention. It's a minor oddity that Gentry has locked onto because he thinks it proves something, but plenty of Scientists have offered rational explanations for why that oddity exists. Most geologists have better things to do with their time, I'd imagine. It's kind of like the egg mystery that was only recently resolved. The exact physics behind why a boiled egg could be spun like a top and a non-boiled egg couldn't be was a mystery. Because God did it? No, because it's a relatively insignificant oddity that no one cared about enough to look at it seriously until recently. This halo thing is the same. No one really cares, and the explanations of how they might have gotten there seem logical enough for most people to go on about their more important businesses.

I found a link that better explains all of the details of how those bubbles of Rn can form and how certain types of rock can reform their crystal structures without returning to the molten state, leading to the curious nature of the halos. Plus, the authors mention numerous reasons why Gentry is barking up the wrong tree. For example, all of the Po halo rocks are found right near uranium deposits, which give off a lot of Rn gas, which then explains the source of the gas for the Po halos. It seems like if Uranium/Radon weren't involved in the process that Po halo deposits would show no relation to Uranium deposits... but they do.

Besides, this whole argument is flawed from the beginning. If God created the universe in 6 days about 6,000 years ago, why did he make most other things appear as though they'd been in existence for billions of years? If God really wanted to leave "fingerprints", the night sky would be relatively dark because the light from most currently visible stars wouldn't have had time to reach us. We'd be all amazed to note how new stars would be appearing all the time, and their appearances would correspond to their distances from us. To the contrary, we can see stars that were formed billions of years ago.

Another example: In the arctic regions, there are layers of ice created by the yearly cycle of buildup and melting. Each year creates a quite visible line in the ice. Scientists have been studying core samples for years now. Typically, they can count about 100,000 lines in the ice before they pressure has blurred things too much to be able to distinguish more. 100,000 lines correspond to 100,000 years. Wouldn't it be interesting if there were on the order of 6,000 lines?

Jeez, and I haven't even brought Evolution into the mix. The weight of evidence in favor of billions of years of evolution is completely overwhelming. One little physical oddity is nothing against the mountain of evidence for evolution. Add in the fact that there are reasonable explanations for that oddity, and the game is over.

Well, I've spent enough time on this oddity myself.

Note that in the talkorigins reference you gave there is no mention of the studies in coal-ified wood

You should have looked through talk origins more carefully. This is a link to this page on coalified wood.

Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything.

There are any number of sociology studies that demonstrate the social stratification of the US. The common-sense wisdom of a classless society and increased social mobility within the US (compared with European countries) is just pure ideology, useful to those with real power and inherited influence, essential for the preservation of hegemony. Remember Orwell -- if you remove words from the language and ways of talking about things, then it becomes almost impossible to easily think about these things. Or try Foucault, for an example of how people's ideas can be constrained by discursive regimes.

Or think about the Usual Suspects:
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Certainly. An empire encompassing the Mediterranean, most of Europe, and some of Asia and Africa is impractical when it takes three months to get a message from one corner to the other, let alone a defense force.

The Roman Empire had many problems but communication was not one of them. Caesar once covered 800 miles in ten days on one of the Roman roads, and a courier on horseback could cover 360 miles in two and a half days. The farthest reaches of the Mediterranean could be reached by sea in 7 days or so.

The Romans built roads to every place they conquered that included relay stations that ensured regular communications.

Legions were stationed throughout the empire so movement over long distances was not normally an issue. When a rebellion was large or sustained, legions could be collected and concentrated from neighboring provinces. There were no successful rebellions in the Roman Empire.

By the second century AD the Romans had a sense that the Empire had reached its practical limits for administration and they began building walls and fortifications to delimit the boundaries.

The Empire failed because of corruption, civil wars and inflation plus the barbarian invasions. But the instability did not come simply from its size.

This is really nothing new.

The Cyberlink Interface: Hands Free Brain-Body Actuated Control for Augmentation and Enhancement of Human Computer Interaction(produced in 1999), and their website

And an article from last year about a similar device.

hubbabubba

I yam a proud and happy

... you would have to say that persons who are deprived of property are not victims since there was no bodily injury.

Hmm, somehow there's been a timewarp here... that ooks like a comment from this timeframe. Back when DirectX3 was current and people were talking about Fahrenheit (remember that?!), as in that older-than-Lou-Rawls link you provided. Maybe I've been sucked into a beta test of Slashdot Classics(tm) by mistake.

> and is easier to code

Programming for Direct3D is not easy. To go short, it is poorly documented, requires much more code to accomplish something than in OpenGL, and is tough to learn. As an added bonus, it's not open, it's not as scalable as OpenGL, and it's not any faster than OpenGL (if you have proper OpenGL drivers, that is).

Or to quote John Carmack, "It (D3DIM) inflicts great pain and suffering on the programmers using it, without returning any significant advantages."

Here's a link to an article discussing some of these points.

To stay more ontopic, if Microsoft hadn't "embraced&extended" OpenGL into Direct3D, games would probably be written for OpenGL, and therefore be much easier to port, since OpenGL is used on many, many platforms, because it's the oldest, most mature 3D API, that's also very portable, powerful and scalable.

----

Indeed, the similarities between H2G2 and Time Warner are uncanny. Likewise the BBC to AOL. Just a few years ago it would have been H2G2 buying the BBC; my, how the tables have turned.

Personally, this is the last straw for me. I'd all but given up on the BBC in any case. I switched my viewing habits to the high-quality "Sky One" channel, and haven't looked back. Say what you will, but you can't question the integrity of Rupert Murdoch, can you?

Not sure if this is exactly what you mean but here's a link to some writing about v.r environments where they're talking about stimulation of various senses within v.r. as it applies to remote control of robots etc. Presumably this would be just as valid in prosthetic limbs



--feeander--

there is a huge, politically-charged (in the psych community) book intended as an aid in diagnosis of mental disorders...it's called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. now, a lot of what's in it could be considered a manifestation of popular opinion (e.g., homosexuality used to be listed in it as a disorder, but has since been removed...see Michel Foucault for an interesting perspective on [western] society's need to stigmatize and outcast...does the phrase "ship of fools" sound familiar?), so you can certainly make an argument that the fraction of the population listed is arbitrary. and, i can't deny that it is an individual's personality quirks or lack thereof that affect how interesting of a person they may or may not be.

but the point to me seems to be that if people are having a hard time living due to depression, schizophrenia (which does not imply multiple personality disorder, btw), etc., they need help. lots of mental disorders have their roots in body/brain chemistry. they're not personality flaws. in fact, such chemical imbalances have a strong correlation with genetics. how fair is it to hold someone's genetics against them? remember: mental illness is not a personality flaw. i know it's hard to remember this when it so strongly affects the way someone behaves, but it's important not to forget this.

as far as the surgeon general goes, does anyone here remember what c. everett koop's report about AIDS in the 80's did for the stigma of HIV and other STDs? surely a similar lessening of the stigma of mental illness cannot be a bad thing. but i must say that i am simultanousely unsurprised and appalled by the insensitivity that i see in this supposedly intelligent community (especially after the post-Littleton outcry i saw here..."nuts"?!...gee, no one here has had any bad experiences with pigeonholing?). maybe the stigma will never go away.

Genealogy of the Drug War

End the Fucking Drug War

I will gladly flout the law by keeping these pages up if it does ever pass.

Genealogy of the Drug War

End the Fucking Drug War

I will gladly flout the law by keeping these pages up if it does ever pass.