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Regarding the subject of this article, you're right. The LinuxFest NW website should have a map.
However, it doesn't take a lot of brain cells for a person to find a map. In addition to just Googling directly, as soon as a person finds that LinuxFest NorthWest is held at Bellingham Technical College, they can just click on the college's "About" page, which links to the How to Find Us (Bellingham Technical College) page, which shows a map and has a hyperlink to Google Maps.
LinuxFest is meant for people with brain cells. (That's not just meant as an insult, but an observation: LinuxFest is targeted to people who are interested in Linux, or at least people who heavily use computers. People who don't get a thrill out of using their brainpower will probably not find LinuxFest to be interesting.) So, the lack of a map on the linuxfestnorthwest.org website is probably not a major issue.
Regarding all of your other questions, they are addressed by CID 46938675.

But it was FOUR lights
http://www.pierce.ctc.edu/tlink/social/theme1/pica rd_cog_diss.html

Évariste Galois is the immediate, obvious choice.

Of course Albert Einstein would probably be in the library, but it's worth making sure there's a good biography that explains his struggles as a child, his annus mirabilis, how his Nobel was for the photoelectric effect, what E=mc^2 and relativity really are, how he was invited to be PM of Israel, etc.

I suppose it's entirely appropriate for 5th and 6th graders to know there was indeed a real Nicholas Flamel.

Another fascinating biography is that of Thomas Midgley, the poor soul who came up with three ideas that seemed brilliant at the time: leaded fuels, CFCs, and a system of ropes and pulleys in his bed that strangled him.

And what middle-schooler would not appreciate the toilet humor in the life of Tycho Brahe, so concerned for court etiquette that he let his bladder clog and kill him?

So again... Fact someone REPORTED THE NAME OF VALERIE PLAME TO NOVAK. Let me type it in english. Someone reported the name Valerie Plame to NOVAK. Since you dared... 1, 2, 3 (Department of Energy, If left alone, Freeh warned, unbreakable encryption poses a threat to fighting crime through wiretapping., Finally... Case Study of HR 695: The Security and Freedom Through Encryption (SAFE) Act... This is where the government decided to place controls on encryption leaving the US because (guess what...) the government cannot break ciphers as easily as you might think. So when I use the term "Unbreakable Crypto", let me make it clear what I mean... Without the keys its impossible... With the keys... Good luck. It would 1) take too long 2) require more space then there currently is ON THE PLANET 3) by the time they cracked it, it would likely mean nothing.

This reminds me of the DepthX submarine which was described in a recent issue of Wired. The probe would drop down, melt through the ice, and then autonomously search for hydrothermal activity on the sea floor.

The group working on it is currently putting together a version to explore and search for life in a rather hostile water-filled cave in Mexico. They've got a progress report here, with many details and pictures.

Some other links related to a Europa probe:

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/archive/design/europa/
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio/por tfolio351/pages/352-EuropaProbe.htm (neat painting)
http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors /jvanleer/astro%20sum01/astro101/missions_to_europ a.htm
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20021102/fob3r ef.asp

Scientific articles:

The Challenge of Landing on Europa
Possible ecosystems and the search for life on Europa
others

".mobi," in reference to the Mobius Strip, representing the eternal stream of pop-up ads that will assault the cell users that try to access those sites.

Sure the event could have been held in a larger town and been another (yawn) commercial flop @200 a head to hear some schmuck talk about how he worked for Pixar (cough).
But grassroots and small town kept this thing fun and educational. There were some big names including Amazon, Sun, and the man Rasmus Lerdorf.
Suprisingly there were a lot of families there, and even children scurring about chewing on network cables and doing...kid things.
The event gets better each year while keeping it noncommericial and free. There were quite a few regional and local businesses there but no one was pushing except maybe that Rackspace guy who thought the fest was his private infomercial.
It was all pulled together by a bunch of volunteers including the gracious host (Bellingham Technical College).
All things considered I'm marking this down on my calendar for next year. Cause each year they take stock and make improvements. Do the same.

Acidophiles.

There is no environment on Earth too extreme for life, as long as there is liquid water.

One method of making scalable games is to use recursive based algorithms to generate the graphics. Basically, code up a 'for' loop, and vary the number of iterations depending upon the architecture of the machine it's running on. For things like trees, water, snowflakes, clouds, grass, hair, and so forth, this optimises rather well.

For example, refer to Koch's Snowflake

On a low end machine, only two or three iterations would be needed to create a decent snowflake. On a high end machine, you could iterate this function a hundred times with various compounding affects such as rotate, copy, resize, diff, transparency, and so forth. With high end machines, you can do close ups of snowflakes without any resolution loss... And most all of this is using the same algorithm as the lower-end machine would use...

Granted, the fractal algorithms have to be well designed and thought out to achieve this effect. A basic Koch's Snowflake algorithm at high iterations doesn't look too much different from lower iterations... Some transforms would need to be introduced to the algorithm, but those could also be scalable...

Anyhow... $0.02 cents

> He has obviously seen a magician to the same trick I do.

Note that Peris Diaconis had a hand in this. A brief biography states that he was a magician for eight years, running away from home at age 14 to join a magic act.

Magicians and charlatans may take advantage of this illusion.

As it happens, Persi Diaconis, one of the statisticians interviewed in this article and presumably one of the discoverers, was a magician.

For example see this brief bio.

All I get is an education. I don't want that crap. I want my free iPOD. Damn you WCC

I looked for the same thing for years and found nothing. My solution was to take a year of general and a year of organic chemistry at a local community college. Before you dismiss this option as "hey, that's not a book," consider the advantages.

First, your goal (like mine) is to understand, not to jump through some gateway subject hoop. The "serious" books are all horrible and the others are for entertainment, but there are some truly great teachers out there, most of them young and still full of love for the subject but without the political skills or baggage of a lot of Major Institutions, hence you tend to find them at community colleges. They have time to talk to you, there are practically no barriers to entry -- the worst you'll face is "instructor permission," which you can get past by telling the instructor that you want to take the class because you want to understand the subject and they'll turn to putty in your hands. (After taking the course you'll be able to diagram the mechanism of the chemistry instructor --> putty reaction.)

Second, it's convenient and almost risk-free. Take it at night or during the day. If you're worried about the grades or time commitment, audit the class!

Fourth, it'll keep you on a schedule and you'll get done sooner and understand more because the course will be reasonably compact and planned to teach you the topic. There is no #3. Just seeing if you were paying attention.

Finally, o-chem in particular requires a lot of memorization (I needed about 120 reactions for one final), and an instructor can give you hints about how and what to memorize that you could not get from a book.

It's kind of like math in that you get way more from doing it than reading about it, so take lab too. If you're worried about the cheezy CC chemistry lab facilities, take lab anyway and then go take it again at the University of Money later.

The quality of the instructors varies widely, so ask around and find out who's really good. It's usually pretty obvious. If you need a recommendation and can get close to Seattle, I can recommend someone here who is an unbelievably good chemistry teacher (and one of the best teachers in general that I've ever met).

And by the way -- good on ya for learning some chemistry! It's a great subject, and it certainly has a lot to do with pretty much everything you breathe, sit on, eat, smell, run away from, and have in your pancreas. Watch out for that physics stuff, though -- it's the only thing possibly even more beautiful than chemistry, and it will shamelessly attempt to lure you away with its seductive ways <subliminal>give in</subliminal>.

I'll weep about the DMCA and those additional royalties in a second.

Commercial (and even non-commercial) radio in the United States has an extremely serious problem: It all sounds the same.

Where I live (Seattle) has a few stations which are worth listening to. The classical music station, The underground/rock music station, The folk music station, and of course The extremely annoying dance music station. (I'm not a big dance music fan, but if you want to feel like you're in a disco, even when you're not, it's a good thing).

The other 30 stations on the dial are utterly, completely interchangable. There's a station which plays all the hits from 1968-1972. Over and over. Just like every other big city in the US. Imagine that! There's three "alternative" music stations which alternate between K0RN, the Beastie Boys, and Shania Twain (there must be something alternative about her, but God knows what). Even NPR, which I wake up to every morning, does not sound a bit different if I listen in NYC, Atlanta, or San Francisco. They have All Things Considered, they have Car Talk on Saturdays, they have a mid-day call in program to talk about local politics. Who woulda thunk it?

So, if I want to listen to K0RN, or Stairway to Heaven (for the 6.02x10^23rd time!), or even listen to Fresh Air, I have this highly sophisticated device to do that. I call it a "radio". There is no imaginable reason why I would waste bandwidth and hassle to get a streaming media connection to do that.

For Internet Radio to be a success, you must first put out product which is different enough to provide value added. In this way, content is just like every other business.

j.

You should of just gone to google, the first instance I easily found of that story is here. Its worth a quick read.

Yes, you are right, though it doesn't explain lycos. I was about to slam you for not trying an Inktomi-based search and posting the results.... but I tried to do the same, and it's damn difficult to tell if someone's using Inktomi or not. I found (via google) this out-of-date list. Inktomi has a list of partners, and yahoo's on the list, but it doesn't say what services each partner actually uses. This page at Inktomi mentions that AOL, iWon, MSN, and more (aprarantly 125) are using their search (it's mentioned in the top yellow box on the right side of the page). So, with that in mind, let's give these three a try and see if they product any porn sites with a query for "black bear":

• AOL's results list Condos, T-shirts, AllAlaskanGifts (paid adverts), pages about actual black bears, the B&B, Hunting, Campgrounds (not the nude one from yahoo's present search), wildlife and conservation. Pretty good...
• iWon's results page displays nothing if Javascript is disabled. I gotta get that javascript popup filtering junkbuster patch installed. For the sake of this slashdot post, I'm turning javascript back on for a moment: hmm, they're doing funny stuff and that link may not take you directly to a results page.... easy enough to do the search, but here's what I'm seeing: page about different types of bears, lodging per state, travel info, photos and articles about american and alaskan black bears, more stuff about american black bears, american bear association, dietart habits of bears, wildlife park, black bear systems (a company, funny that none of the other searches turned this one up in their top results), campground, an inn, web design company named black bear, more stuff about bears and camping. So far one of the best search results in this "black bear" benchmark, and not a single porn site yet (neglecting yahoo's return of a clothing-option campground with black bear in the name), but still one more chance for porn at MSN.......
• and here's MSN's results (damnit, went to MSN before turning javascript back off, going to shut if off right now.. ok), so let's see how MSN did: Univ of Maine Athletics (mascott is a black bear), more pages about univ of maine, info about diff species of bears, research about animal social systems, stuff about yellowstone, miccesota wince shute wildlife sanctuary, even more pages about univ of maine, the sanctuary in minnesota again, and the texas zoo

I did read the original post, and admittedly his point was that his friend tried "black bear" on yahoo 6 months ago and got porn, but for crying out loud, how fucking difficult is it to actually visit the search engine and type in BLACK BEAR and see for yourself if it really dishes up porn links? Ok, not everyone knows HTML to include nice formatting and links in their messages, but it's pretty simple to visit a search engine and actually see if it dishes up porn, instead of posting about how a third party accomplished this feat half a year ago!

(ok, rant mode off, we all know the cronological order and moderation system reward early postings)

I think it's pretty safe to say that one doesn't risk getting linked to porn when searching for "black bear" these days, and I'm skeptical that this condition really existed 6 months ago on yahoo. Some search engines (notably yahoo and MSN) have problems with wasting valuable browser screen space with redundant links, at least in this simple "black bear" benchmark. For a while now I've believe google was the best, but I'm pleasantly suprised to see that other search engines are doing quite well.

Jello and some other "musicians, actors & activists" will be speaking Nov. 13 at Shoreline Community College in Seattle as part of a lecture series. Check out this link for more info. It looks like you have to buy tickets, so you had better look into it soon if you want to go.

I have hated politics of olympics ever since.

Arrgh.

sulli