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When I first came across that web page with the Florida analysis I was a bit sceptical. As a result, I went to the website with all of the statistics from Florida's 2000 election and performed a similar analysis. The results can be found here (sorry, only Excel format):

www.duke.edu/~mth6/florida2000.xls

As you can see, many of the same "anomolies" appear in the percentage change up/down for the Republicans and Democrats.

If I were a betting man, I'd say that analysis further back will show a similar trend: the registered Democrats there tend to actually vote Republican, not that there is widespread manipulation of the voting manchines.

sure there is, it's the top-most link, in fact.

Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project.

Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke's electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project.

Duke's Web site has more pictures and a longer article

Good news too from the Duke Robotics Club. Thanks to funding from the Lord Foundation, the club's newest robot, a commercially-available wall-climber, took first place in the 2004 CLAWAR (CLimbing And WAlking Robot) International Wall-Climbing Robot Competition last week in Madrid. Pratt seniors Andrew Meyerson and Kevin Parker and Pratt junior Julien Finlay helped prepare the robot for the competition. The team was led by Pratt graduate researcher/student Brian Burney. Five other robots competed against Duke's climber, two from Italy and three from Germany, but none was as capable as Duke's. It autonomously approached the wall, transitioned from the floor to the wall, avoided obstacles, and crossed a 1-centimeter-tall barrier. The Duke Climber used an on-board programmable processor, three ultrasonic sensors, an accelerometer, and an infrared sensor to perceive its environment.

Good news too from the Duke Robotics Club. Thanks to funding from the Lord Foundation, the club's newest robot, a commercially-available wall-climber, took first place in the 2004 CLAWAR (CLimbing And WAlking Robot) International Wall-Climbing Robot Competition last week in Madrid. Pratt seniors Andrew Meyerson and Kevin Parker and Pratt junior Julien Finlay helped prepare the robot for the competition. The team was led by Pratt graduate researcher/student Brian Burney. Five other robots competed against Duke's climber, two from Italy and three from Germany, but none was as capable as Duke's. It autonomously approached the wall, transitioned from the floor to the wall, avoided obstacles, and crossed a 1-centimeter-tall barrier. The Duke Climber used an on-board programmable processor, three ultrasonic sensors, an accelerometer, and an infrared sensor to perceive its environment.

Good news too from the Duke Robotics Club. Thanks to funding from the Lord Foundation, the club's newest robot, a commercially-available wall-climber, took first place in the 2004 CLAWAR (CLimbing And WAlking Robot) International Wall-Climbing Robot Competition last week in Madrid. Pratt seniors Andrew Meyerson and Kevin Parker and Pratt junior Julien Finlay helped prepare the robot for the competition. The team was led by Pratt graduate researcher/student Brian Burney. Five other robots competed against Duke's climber, two from Italy and three from Germany, but none was as capable as Duke's. It autonomously approached the wall, transitioned from the floor to the wall, avoided obstacles, and crossed a 1-centimeter-tall barrier. The Duke Climber used an on-board programmable processor, three ultrasonic sensors, an accelerometer, and an infrared sensor to perceive its environment.

Unless you know how to game the system. For example, one could write a CGI script that lets you decide how many counties to rig, how much to win by (to avoid recounts), and the polling margin of error so you can make your results look "real".

But that's impossible, surely. :)

-jdm

The Chinese deliberately steal Western software, videos, and music, make millions of copies of such intellectual property, and then proceed to export the illicit goods into the American market. The pirated copies of, say, Windows XP compete directly against the real McCoy in the American market. The FBI have arrested numerous Chinese for pirating software, music, and videos.

The piracy rate in Russia is 87%. The rate in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) is 92%. The rate in Russia is lower than the rate in China; moreover, the Russians do not export the pirated software into the USA to compete against the original manufacturers of the software.

Clearly, piracy in Russia is a problem but is nowhere near as bad as piracy in China.

Nanotubes aren't difficult to manufacture. It's nanotubes of appropriate length and consistency that are hard to manufacture. The current record is a mere 4cm, a little too short to reach orbit, even when wound as a cable. It's still several times longer than the previous record. If we can keep up this pace, we might be able to get nanotubes with lengths of tens or hundreds of centimeters soon, and those might be enough to wind into a cable. Imagine someone suspending himself from the ceiling with something the diameter of thin-guage fishing line.

Heh... Imagine catching a marlin with the same line.

Anyway, we still have some things to do, but we may be getting close to the point where we're not trying to peer over the horizon because the next major port is in view.

this?

I did that, you silly person.

That's a lie- you never made any argument. I've carefuly read ALL your posts on this topic, and none of them contains anything resembling an argument. All you've made are contradictions or the occasional appeal to authority.

Please, just point out which one of these posts you think contains an argument.

For reference, here's an example of someone else making an argument for your position. He doesn't support it very well, but at least he tried.

No cite, sadly -- I can't find the original (and more in-depth) article I had originally read on the web now -- but the researcher's name was Dr. Michael Platt, and the research in question is referenced in this NewsWeek article (halfway down, look for "berry berry"). I'm not sure if this was before or after he left the Glimcher Lab for Duke.

His lab page is here, but none of the paper titles ring a bell.

If you're interested, you should at least be able to reach him at: platt at neuro dot duke dot edu

[THIS IS NOT A QUESTION]

While stocks are risky in the short term, their risk over time is much less. Examine the Historical Behavior of Asset Returns.

I much rather invest $10,000 in an diversified stock index fund today than in bonds if I want to take that money out in 40 years. If I want to take it out in 1 year, I would put it in bonds.

Another issue: if a stock index fund does not have a strong return over 40 years, the economy, as a result, will be so screwed up that the government won't be able to tax people to come up with the money anyway...

Have you checked the changelog for Red Hat contributions? Or ever read their blogs? Every day they fix, implement or try to perfect many many features. Alot of the things that you take for granted is a result of them. Red Hat does a ton of work on not just the kernel, but in every aspect of linux. They just don't try to hog the spotlight like some other companies. I mean seriously, at least once a day check out what these guys are working on.
Regards,
Steve

GCC 3.4.x - Precompiled Headers (Speed up) and C++ improvements (and more coming)
Kernel 2.6.8
KDE 3.3 - which includes a much improved KDE PIM groupwhere packages.
X.org x11 6.8 - with translucency & Drop shadows
GNOME 2.8 - New Admin stuff and a lot of other features
Evolution 2.0 - Offline IMAP & WebCal support
SELinux
IIIMF - Standardized Asian character input
Wow!. Torrents are available

It's an interesting concept, but I honestly question some of the image results. For example, Test returns:

$ A punching bag dummy
$ A Hindu woman dancing
$ A Home Pregnancy Test
$ This

Weird.

because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music

All of them.

Dave Brubeck can't [duke.edu]. Django Reinhardt couldn't [playjazzguitar.com]. Paco de Lucia can't [geocities.com] (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India). ney

There is a blog called Duke's Vomit Comet Crew written by four Duke University students who were chosen to perform experiments studying the effects of microgravity while riding on NASA's Vomit Comet plane. They describe what their ride was like and include pictures and video.

There is a blog called Duke's Vomit Comet Crew written by four Duke University students who were chosen to perform experiments studying the effects of microgravity while riding on NASA's Vomit Comet plane. They describe what their ride was like and include pictures and video.

There is a blog called Duke's Vomit Comet Crew written by four Duke University students who were chosen to perform experiments studying the effects of microgravity while riding on NASA's Vomit Comet plane. They describe what their ride was like and include pictures and video.

Using series to approximate the solution of differntial equations is taught in class. Heck, go a little further in mathematics and you'll conjure up polynomials functions as the solution to a set of partial differential equations, known as the Galerkin Method

So in what way is the above news? (Hint, take a look at the link and what's stated there.)

As soon as I read your post, this first response is exactly what I was thinking -- install it at home. If you have the hardware available to you, set up a lot of different configurations. Try not using your windows machines at all for a while and doing everything on Linux. If you don't have hardware available to you, get some. Linux runs great on machines 4 years old (yeah, yeah, we could run it on our 386's too -- but runs *well*) that cost $100 or are even free.

• Try:
• Linux as your firewall/router
• Install Apache - every good admin should know how to compile this and some basic configuration information
• Three words: "./configure", "make", "make install"
• Setup a second machine - test using NFS and Samba
• If you want to get a little adventurous, try NIS
• If you don't know sh, practice -- you'll need it -- same goes for VI
• RPMs (and I'm sure Debian's package manager also) make life easy -- if you want the easy way into linux, choose an RPM based distrobution like Fedora and check out YUM
• Having a weird problem that you can't easily solve? Google Groups are a good starting point.

baptiste writes "Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music!"

baptiste writes "Duke University has entered into an agreement with Apple to distribute iPods to all of the incoming freshmen this year - that's 1650 iPods! This agreement is part of an initiative to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life" The iPods will have audio and text on them including special university content such as "faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books." Faculty will be assisted in creating new content for these devices by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology And here you thought iPods were just for music!"

According to Duke's website, it now costs in excess of $40,000 per undergraduate year at Duke. And all they have to do to get people to commit to that level of insane cost is to give away network access and iPods? If that's the case, look for every two-bit program in the country to be loading students up with $2,000 in "freebies", just before tuition goes up $5,000. Of course, college students today are mostly on the public dole in the form of grants, government-insured loans (many of which are defaulted upon, passing cost to the taxpayer), and federal aid to their school. So what do they care? This is even better than the sleazy "finance guy" at the car dealership, who is all too willing to sell you the $2,000 car warranty, rolling it in to your 7%, 6 year balloon note.

Just a minor point but don't forget about Johns Hopkins or Duke to name a few universities founded by rich men.

What about this other case?
"In 1985, a DEA agent in Mexico was captured and tortured to death by members of a drug cartel. Subsequently, U.S. agents with the help of Mexican nationals "snatched" Dr. Alvarez-Machain in Mexico and delivered him to the United States for trial as a participant in the torture and murder."

Or a scholarship.

http://www.duke.edu/ipod/

Yes. From the original article:

Through a special Duke Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes site, students also can download faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books.

There are entire classes of computational problems which are calssed as Embarassingly Parallel.

It means it is so trivial to parallelize the problem and get gains from it (think SETI@Home) that it's a no-brainer.

Other computational problems don't just simply fan out to the bazillions of nodes with tiny independant pieces of data.

Your assertion that the Cray CTO is talking FUD when he uses the actual term is just plain wrong and unfair to him. He actually knows what he's talking about.

Indeed, Bloom Filters are the shit.

These days, in my spare time, I'm writing a p2p program -- think of it as a swarm-download system, like BitTorrent, on an overlay network topology, like eMule (only eMule uses Kademlia, and I'm using Pastry). It has been shown, here and here, that Bloom Filters can drastically reduce the traffic generated when searching peer to peer networks. I recently coded a Java implementation of a Bloom Filter for my p2p program, and it works great in testing. (But the p2p program isn't anywhere near done, so don't ask about it ;)

Furthermore, Bloom Filters can be compressed -- see Michael Mitzenmacher's work here. The idea that you can compress a Bloom Filter is a little counter-intuitive, because the size of the bit vector and the number of hash functions are derived using calculus to maximize the compactness of the set, for a given false positive rate -- thus, in this state, it is non-compressable (it is "already compressed" by simply being an optimal Bloom Filter). To compress a bloom filter, you must choose a large bit vector, and a non-optimal number of hash functions, then apply the compression algorithm (typically arithmetic coding). Because the bit vector is so large, it is sparsely populated -- and so compression works.

Often you can save 10% and 20% on the size of your bloom filter, while having a lower false positive rate. Score!

A very nice, very interesting survey of all the applications of Bloom Filters can be found here.

- sm

Interesting quote:

"The SCMS and royalty requirements [of the AHRA] apply only to digital audio recording devices. Because computers are not digital audio recording devices, they are not required to comply with Serial Copy Management System requirement... It is clear from the language of the AHRA, and subsequent judicial interpretations of the statute, that Congress did not anticipate ten years ago that the SCMS would be inadequate to contain the impending home digital recording explosion that was galvanized by the Internet."

I hate to say it, but I don't think the AHRA is sufficient or really applies in this case. The article does go on to talk about amendments to the AHRA rather than passing new industry- lobbied legislation. It suggests some good ideas for amendments. Very interesting.

See this footnoote, and bear in mind that there are also international issues that are not necessarily the same as U.S. issues.

IANAL, blah, blah, and I'm not trying to defend Unisys - just explain what I think they were thinking at the time....

Without a doubt, the most handy web-based app I've run across is the MindTerm Java SSH client. Exceedingly handy for logging into my machines when I'm on the road and only have access to someone else's computer. It's commercial, but good old Duke has a copy up on their web pages for all to use.

2)YDL created yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) that handles dependencies automatically.

No they didn't. Linux@DUKE created and maintains yum

2)YDL created yum (Yellowdog Package Manager) that handles dependencies automatically.

No they didn't. Linux@DUKE created and maintains yum

I just got a new AMD64 laptop, and am wondering about getting a version of redhat to run on it. Anyone know of any torrents or download links to get a good version?

"I think, if you reflect, you'll find that you've missed the point. neither I nor the article mentioned having all the distributions use the same packaging system."

Sorry, my mistake.

The "'unified' method" issue is a valid one. Yum (an others like it) have made some progress to this end (yum talks redhat/mandrake rpms as well as debian pkg -- it also goes a long way to resolve dependancies and conflicts automatically). Wrapping yum in a gui would be nice. I would say that the problem is not with "installing programs", but with package management (packages may or may not contain "programs").

I think, however, that many people get the terms "Linux" and "Distribution" confused (as well as "Desktop Environment", I suppose), and when someone says "Linux as a Desktop OS", they are really referring to a "Desktop Linux Distribution". Even if Windows and MacOS used the same kernel, you wouldn't (necessarily) expect the user experience to be the same. I suppose (which is your point) running the GNOME Desktop should have a unified interface to system-level configurations (including package management) across distributions, but that (hopefully) is what GNOME System Tools is all about.

Tuition: $29,350
Room & Board: $8,210
Books, Supplies, Toothpaste, airfare back to New Jersey: $2,520

Grand total $40,080

Free iPod priceless*

*actual cost ~$400

2003-2004 undergraduate costs

Tuition: $29,350
Room and Board: $8,210
Personal Expenses Books & Supplies: $2,520
Total Cost: $40,080

Duke.edu

but their filesystem on campus is pretty esoteric (and a pain to navigate) if you want to transfer files back and forth

1. setenv CVSROOT ~/MyRepositoryDirectory
2. cvs init
3. pts creategroup myusername:mynewgroupname
4. pts adduser someuser myusername:mynewgroupname
5. pts adduser someuser2 myusername:mynewgroupname
6. pts adduser someuser3 myusername:mynewgroupname
7. fs setacl ~/MyRepositoryDirectory myusername:mynewgroupname write

Guess it's time to reapply as a freshman?

Also, considering that Gates and his wife have donated $55 million to Duke since 1998, I wonder how/if this will affect the university's relationship with Microsoft.

Benkler Lecture This is the most though prevoking essay I think I've ever read in favor of Open Source and the problems with the current state of the patent system.

Given that this is traffic for this week since the Fedora FC3test1 announce, that's a bucket of legal traffic to put against whatever they're claiming.

Fun stats on the BT tracker --> http://torrent.linux.duke.edu:6969/

If you read the release schedule, you'll notice that FC3 isn't due until 18 October.

The link to the torrent can be found in the article text, actually. But since this is Slashdot: http://torrent.linux.duke.edu/FC3-test1-binary-i38 6.torrent.

It's test1.

If you're afraid of it breaking anything at all, you probably don't want to use it.

If you on the other hand want to help the developers find the bugs at an early stage so they can squeeze the bugs, download it immediately, start testing and report bugs.