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As someone who has a degree in botany and has worked in greenhouses that were maintained at 1500ppm. You should know that CO2 levels become dangerous at 5000 ppm, not 1200ppm.

Your degree in botany may speak to your ability to determine what effect CO2 has on plants, but it has no bearing on your ability to determine its effects on humans and other mammals. CO2 has negative health repercussions beginning at about 1000 ppm, which vary between individuals. Working environments with 1500 ppm CO2 can definitely be harmful to health. (They may also reduce plants' ability to absorb nitrogen, but that's a separate argument.)

"Let's face it: a lot of so-called "Linux administrators" these days are little more than clicky-clicky Windows drones, people who almost never use a command-line and prefer staying with dumb GUI tools.

I'm a Slackware user. Since at about 1995. Just recently I was googling for solution for some problem. And I've found a solution that basically said "run the tool that Ubuntu uses to reinstall everything and that should fix it". And everybody in the discussion thread hailed how great advice that is. For me that does not answer the question at all. It does not help other distro users at all and it also does not answer the question what is actually wrong. It reminds me of the Feynman's Wakalixes makes it go. It does not explain anything. The set of people that understand how stuff works is shrinking and shrinking ...

http://www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/Abstracts/Eriksson_IAFPA%202006.pdf
and
http://www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/presentations/Tuesday/session8/Eriksson/Eriksson_iafpa2006.ppt

http://www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/Abstracts/Eriksson_IAFPA%202006.pdf
and
http://www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/presentations/Tuesday/session8/Eriksson/Eriksson_iafpa2006.ppt

Text is here: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:4x3raI0CVjoJ:www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/Abstracts/Eriksson_IAFPA%25202006.pdf+&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us

Contains:

This is the html version of the file http://www.ling.gu.se/konferenser/iafpa2006/Abstracts/Eriksson_IAFPA%202006.pdf.
Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.
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Proceedings, IAFPA 2006, Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University
Charlatanry and fraud - an increasing problem for forensic
phonetics?
Anders Eriksson
Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden
anders.eriksson@ling.gu.se
In my talk I will describe one case of charlatanry and one case of fraud in forensic phonetics.
Charlatanry can take different forms. One type is when someone appears as an expert without
having the necessary qualifications or no qualifications at all. Another form is when some kind of
physical device is used or marketed which is based on principles for which there is no scientific
support. This is nothing new. The use of voiceprints is a classical case of this type. Charlatans often
exploit the fact that people are easily impressed by advanced technology. Today the methods are
often claimed to have been made possible only because of recent advances in computer technology.
The following two quotes may serve to illustrate my point: "enhanced by the rapid advancements in
personal computer technology", "the worlds most advanced application of this core frequency
based technology". This is how both products I will present here are described by those who market
them although in reality they are very unsophisticated products from a technological point of view.
By fraud I will refer to methods or devices based on principles which are so obviously false that
there can be no doubt that the people who produce them or use them must be aware of it. The
second example is of this kind.
A lie detector which can reveal lie and deception in some automatic and perfectly reliable way is an
old idea we have often met with in science fiction books and comic strips. This is all very well. It is
when machines claimed to be lie detectors appear in the context of criminal investigations that we
need to be concerned. Both examples presented here belong in this category. They are of particular
interest for forensic phonetics because they are both said to be based on analysis of the human
voice. The basic idea behind "lie detectors" based on voice analysis is that there are properties in
the voice signal that may be reliably correlated with lie or deception.
A gadget called Voice Stress Analyzer (VSA) or Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE) has a history
that goes back to the seventies. In the sixties it was discovered that in larger muscles like the biceps
there is involuntary tremor, called micro tremor, with a frequency in the 8 to 12 Hz range. This
gave rise to speculations that the same phenomenon might be present in the larynx muscles and that
it may affect the voice source frequency. In particular it was suggested that the tremor might vary
as a function of stress in the speaker. Before anybody had a chance to investigate the possible
occurrence of micro tremor in the voice, the first "lie detector" based micro tremor in the voice
source appeared. (See. Rice, 1978). In the years to follow, many researchers tested voice stress
analyzers based on these ideas, but with largely negative results. Hollien surveyed the literature in
1987 and concluded that: "the ability of voice analyzers to detect stress from speech-or to identify
spoken deception-have been negative or "mixed" in nature". He a

Excellent points. I think that there is still a great amount of improvement to be made on how we teach. In the beginning, it was all dry and hard, indeciphrable. Today it is all soft and dumb, imprecise. There's serious need for artful rewriting of the approach, so that it can be comprehensive, understandable, exact, insightful. Not a small task!

You comment reminds me of Richard Feynman, and his remarks about education. See the excerpt from his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman".

Thank you for your challenge, I will try to explain my view.

Biodiversity
Biofuel has the potential for becoming a huge source for energy, and therefore has the potential to become a huge source of income for farmers and energy companies. Since some species are more suited than others for biofuel production (growth rate, disease-free, water efficient, simplicity creating biomass, simplicity of extracting biofuel from biomass), these species will be preferred by biofuel producers. This means introduction of, or extending, a monoculture that is destructive for the diversity of insects, birds, plants and animals. Granted, modern agriculture is already a threat to diversity, but the introduction of biofuel production will not minimize this problem; just because everything is crap doesn't mean that it can't get any worse.

In addition, modern agriculture and biofuel production is "too effective". Decomposing trees and plants are a necessity to plants, animals and most importantly insects. Without a natural life cycle, the risk reduced biodiversity (by insect, bird and animal species going extinct) are significant.

If I may make one quote to illustrate my point, the quote comes from Simon Counsell, director of the UK-based "Rain Forest Foundation":

"The expansion of palm oil production is one of the leading causes of rain forest destruction in Southeast Asia. It is one of the most environmentally damaging commodities on the planet. Once again it appears we are trying to solve our environmental problems by dumping them in developing countries, where they have devastating effects on local people."

Invasive species
The species most suited for biofuel production are characterized by rapid growth and the ability to grow in a multitude of environments. These are also traits that characterize species prone to become invasive. Fast-growing, water-efficient plants with little or no known pests can rapidly take over entire ecosystems, replacing the natural plant life (and consequently insect, bird and animal life). Even domestic species can become invasive when the natural ecological system is destroyed.

Conclusion
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for replacing the fossil fuels of yesteryear with new energy sources, but doing so without a thought to the actual ecological cost of those energy sources is just plain stupid.

References:
http://www.ub.gu.se/sok/dissdatabas/detaljvy.xml?i d=6933

http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2005/12/bioenerg y.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673 ,1659036,00.html

Science 22 September 2006: Vol. 313. no. 5794, p. 1742. Title: Adding Biofuels to the Invasive Species Fire?

http://www.physorg.com/news78069543.html

Secondly, Lua does not support Unicode, which is a defect not only for text processing but for anything requiring serious localization.

That's a showstopper for me. In this day and age no language that claims to be general purpose should be without UTF-8 support. English+ASCII covers only a fraction of the world's languages.

---

The patent mafia: When all they've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

There is a course like this at the University of Gothenburg.

http://www.informatik.gu.se/eng/education/opensour ce.xhtml

The purpose of this course is to study the philosophical foundations and theories that have developed in the open source/free software field. Beginning with a historical view of the developments in theory and philosophy the course participants will continue their study of the phenomenon and also be given the opportunity to discuss the new issues these development philosophies have given rise to. Additionally the question of whether these same theories and philosophies can be applied in other fields of intellectual endeavour aside from programming.

Language and colors

My pet peeve with Disney, the final straw as it were, is that they bought Winnie The Pooh(!) and turned it from a beautifully illustrated and profoundly philosophical book for all ages, into another hysterical and loud franchise, inflicting even more ADHD on an already obnoxious generation of disturbed brats.

Milne and Shepard are spinning in their graves, while obese brats chewing on Happy Meal plastic toys piss on them. :P

Errm. Electrolysis of salt water, I'm pretty sure, won't produce sulfur. The most prevalent ions (more than three-fourths) in seawater, are Cl- and Na+. Let's review: hydrogen gas gets bottled and sent off to run cars, etc. Oxygen flies off into the atmosphere, where there's already plenty of it, which doesn't suddenly turn into SO2 for no apparent reason. (Source.)

Now, there's sulfate dissolved in seawater, true. Why that couldn't just be either (a) mined for industrial purposes or (b) tossed back into the ocean) is beyond me.

--grendel drago

We were hoping for a few more original entries, but the rules do state that you're allowed to submit previous work... But with games being submitted every day, it looks like we might even beat last year's 63 entries.

*Prays his bandwidth will survivs*

easy navigation is my aim; don't know if i've succeded with this one .

i guess this might be somewhat off topic since my site is nothing compared to high-traffic info-packed sites like www.bbc.com

Oooh, this was an obvious one...

and encourage non-commercial trading of live performances of their shows. A given venue they are playing at may not permit taping, of course.
Some links if you're unfamiliar with the Dots:
fall 2002 north american tour dates so you can go tape :),
The Official Live LPD Archive, roughly 30 live shows complete, over much of their twenty-year history
LPD official website
(Not an affiliate of any kind, just a fan)))

Donkey Kong is 24k in size.

Hot Seat Harry is 1023 bytes in size. (It's padded to 16 KB with zeroes because the iNES file format supports only 16K chunks for code.) Find it here.

This reminds me of an interview with Kraftwerk, where they envisioned that one day they would be able to send their robots on tour and themselves staying at home in the Kling-Klang studio, sending music and video to the venue in question.
Seems like somebody else at least partially beat them to making the vision a reality.

Before I lead to confusion: This product is "not there yet" but it is part of the final plan.

The AmigaDE is a "virtual computer" and thus AmigaDE applications run anywhere. They are binary compatible to all devices the DE engine runs on. Some say: "This is like Java." But it is not. Java is a runtime-environment (in this case) but

the AmigaDE is a fully virtual computer, coming with its own CPU.

What does this mean, especially in referral to your question ?

It means, that all your beloved applications run everywhere. This way you need to carry a disk only, on which you have installed your favourite applications, databases etc. and as soon you find yourself using other hardware the DE runs on, you just slide in your disk and the "virtual computer" deflates. You use the same machine as the one at home, the DE does scale down and adapts to the hardware it is running on, be it a desktop, a PDA, a notebook or a special terminal at the airport (well, I said its not there yet ;-)).

While this does not mean that you access a central server remotely over a network (your question), this way you take your "central" machine away with you on a ZIP/JAZ disk (or so).

This is all very interesting and exciting stuff.
However, Amiga Inc. have not yet shown, who and what they are, and this makes me raise an eyebrow and concerned if we will see the DE ever going so far, to utilize its full potential.

This is such (theoretical at least) a revolution, that it will need time to absorb and get accustomed to. And the market plays an important role as well, sigh.
At the moment the AmigaDE is nothing more than a system running on (I am naming the most important platfomrs only) Windows, WindowsCE.NET, Linux (RedHat offer(ed?)s the SDK on their web-page (once?)) and others, mainly to play games on PDAs.

See here or here (list of mirrors) for a video [mpeg, 85MB] (or DivX v5, 13MB) where it gets demonstrated.

Sorry, try these instead:
DivX 5
MPEG

Sorry, try these instead:
DivX 5
MPEG

There are mirrors linked from that page. As per the webmasters request I mirrored the files as well:
DivX 5, MPEG

Where's your mirror? ;)

There are mirrors linked from that page. As per the webmasters request I mirrored the files as well:
DivX 5, MPEG

Where's your mirror? ;)

I remember playing "community" strategy games on BBSs about 15 years ago (remember Trade Wars?), where a) the graphics were terrible (ascii), b) connection was slow (1200 bps modem), c) there wasn't much in terms of messaging or community either (although you could send messages). Lot's of fun.
Why? Because the concept was different, new and exiting, that's why. You'd play against other humans, not a dumb computer opponent.

So while I agree that the community part is important, there are definitely interesting ways to achieve that (e.g. Pirates). Technically you'd just use Bluetooth, GPS, or telco triangulation techniques for it.
So if at least some of these people are innovative we should see some pretty neat apps. And I mean neat apps, I couldn't care less if downloadable primitive shoot-em-ups fail to be successful on mobiles.

I still remember a study I saw done where they injected spiders with various drugs to see what it did to their web making ability. Here is a link that has some information on the study. I could not find a "official" link to the study. But you can see get a idea of the effect of caffine on their ability to spin webs. Pretty amazing what caffine did to their abilities. Just got to wonder what it does to a human.

Actually, I'd be more worried about the fact that MS programmers (and programmers in general) are on caffeine. I think it explains a lot.

Spiders on Caffeine

Secondly, the Portuguese were active in parts of the Northern Atlantic in the 1400's, and increasing rapidly thereafter, particularly due to several expeditions searching for a northwest passage. Now, why they would search for that in the shores around Greenland, if they at the time did not have knowledge that America likely stretched far north, is an interesting question.

There are claims concerning Columbus visiting both Greenland and Iceland.

Some claims about Portuguese activity in the North Atlantic can be found here: a message referring to claims about Portuguese slave traders, an article (in Norwegian, unfortunately) referring to theories about Columbus reaching Labrador in 1477, with subsequent Portuguese activity in the Northern regions as a result, a claim that Vatican records tells of a slaving raid in 1418, and information about a possible Portuguese expedition to Greenland around 1479, an article about possible contact between Columbus and Vikings on Iceland, based on memoirs written down by his son.

Much of this is of dubious quality, though, and I'm certainly not judging their quality, but it is an interesting theory whether correct or not.

While brining up more or less weird theories, though, there's a few people that have presented a theory that Columbus was originally Scandinavian, member of an important family with roots in royalty throughout Europe.

Decide for yourself whether to laugh at a funny story, or believe there's something in it. But either way, history from that far back isn't always as straightforward as people tend to think - there are very few parts of history from that time period that is comprehensively documented in trustworthy sources.

There really have been some cool experiments with spiders on drugs, and how that impacts their work. Check out this page. And this page, which includes a picture of a web spun by a spider on LSD -- it's more precise than the work done by a straight spider. Pretty damn weird.

Thoose of you who haven't can check out John Carmacks latest plan at http://w3.informatik.gu.se/~niklas/joh nc.txt