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The full paper can be found here. From the abstract:
We present new weak lensing observations of 1E0657558 (z = 0:296), a unique cluster merger, that enable a direct detection of dark matter, independent of assumptions regarding the nature of the gravitational force law. Due to the collision of two clusters, the dissipationless stellar component and the fluid-like X-ray emitting plasma are spatially segregated. By using both wide-field ground based images and HST/ACS images of the cluster cores, we create gravitational lensing maps which show that the gravitational potential does not trace the plasma distribution, the dominant baryonic mass component, but rather approximately traces the distribution of galaxies. An 8 sigma significance spatial offset of the center of the total mass from the center of the baryonic mass peaks cannot be explained with an alteration of the gravitational force law, and thus proves that the majority of the matter in the system is unseen.

I would assume this is the Bullet Cluster (1E 0657-56) combined X-ray and weak lensing results that Maxim reported at the Six Years of Science with Chandra Symposium last November. The interesting bit is that in this merging galaxy cluster the hot gas (~ 30%) has collided and been brought to a stop while the dark matter (~ 70%) haloes which are collisionless have passed through each other and are offset from the gas. By plotting the weak lensing image (which shows the total mass) over the X-ray image (which shows the baryons/gas) you can therefore see the existance of dark matter, since the mass is in a totally different place from the gas you can see in the X-ray. This isn't a fundamentally new result but it is a very nice visual demonstration of the existance of dark matter. Rotation curves of galaxies and the temperatures of galaxy clusters had proved it already but with this you don't need to do any maths you can just see it. Page 25 of this 6.5 MB pdf is the one you want for the image.

I would assume this is the Bullet Cluster (1E 0657-56) combined X-ray and weak lensing results that Maxim reported at the Six Years of Science with Chandra Symposium last November. The interesting bit is that in this merging galaxy cluster the hot gas (~ 30%) has collided and been brought to a stop while the dark matter (~ 70%) haloes which are collisionless have passed through each other and are offset from the gas. By plotting the weak lensing image (which shows the total mass) over the X-ray image (which shows the baryons/gas) you can therefore see the existance of dark matter, since the mass is in a totally different place from the gas you can see in the X-ray. This isn't a fundamentally new result but it is a very nice visual demonstration of the existance of dark matter. Rotation curves of galaxies and the temperatures of galaxy clusters had proved it already but with this you don't need to do any maths you can just see it. Page 25 of this 6.5 MB pdf is the one you want for the image.

I would assume this is the Bullet Cluster (1E 0657-56) combined X-ray and weak lensing results that Maxim reported at the Six Years of Science with Chandra Symposium last November. The interesting bit is that in this merging galaxy cluster the hot gas (~ 30%) has collided and been brought to a stop while the dark matter (~ 70%) haloes which are collisionless have passed through each other and are offset from the gas. By plotting the weak lensing image (which shows the total mass) over the X-ray image (which shows the baryons/gas) you can therefore see the existance of dark matter, since the mass is in a totally different place from the gas you can see in the X-ray. This isn't a fundamentally new result but it is a very nice visual demonstration of the existance of dark matter. Rotation curves of galaxies and the temperatures of galaxy clusters had proved it already but with this you don't need to do any maths you can just see it. Page 25 of this 6.5 MB pdf is the one you want for the image.

Erica Hupp/Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1237/1726

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998

  Aug. 14, 2006
MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-128

NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

Reporters must call Megan Watzke at the Chandra Press Office at: 617- 496-7998 or e-mail: mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu for participation information. Shortly before the start of the briefing, images and graphics about the research will be posted at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/

Briefing participants:
- Maxim Markevitch, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
- Doug Clowe, postdoctoral fellow, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.
- Sean Carroll, assistant professor of physics, University of Chicago, Ill.

A video file about the discovery will air on NASA TV at noon, Aug. 21. Audio of the event will be streamed live on the Web at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/home

- end -
------------[snipped due to lameness filter... how fucking LAME!]
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I'm a biochemist. It took me quite a while to find a buisness like this, but I finally found one and am now working there:
broad.harvard.edu

broad.mit.edu

I like your "describing the beach" analogy, but you perhaps give astrophysicists/cosmologists less credit than they deserve. We certainly do have to do a lot of extrapolation to say anything about distant stars, galaxies etc, but we do get some breaks. An obvious example is emission lines: you can take a sample of gas in the lab, pass a current through it, and look at the frequencies of light it gives off. That list of frequencies gives you a 'fingerprint' for the gas you're looking at, and it's well understood in terms of quantum mechanics.

Now, when we look at distant stars or galaxies, we see exactly those same series of lines (modified systematically by redshift as appropriate), which tells us that quantum mechanics works the same in those stars/galaxies as it does here on earth.

At the same time, there is still a huge potential for uncertainty when trying to get more specific information, which is what makes astronomy/astrophysics so hard (and interesting :-). The Hubble constant issue that brought this up is a nice example: The WMAP results constrain H very tightly, and therefore, if there's no dark energy or cosmological constant, the predicted age of the universe (it's just 1/H, although the weird astrophysics units of km/s/Mpc seem designed to make that non-obvious) can be found very precisely - that is, with a small 'statistical' uncertainty - it may not necessarily be very *accurate* - that is, the reported value is close to the true value.

That might seem done and dusted, but as others have pointed out, there are other ways of constraining the age of the universe. An obvious way of getting a lower bound is to look at the oldest things we can find. Globular clusters are believed to be very old, and by modelling the evolution of these galaxies suggests that they're older than the age given by 1/H.

It's further complicated by things like the results of the High z supernova search, which suggests the universe is accelerating in its expansion, and so 1/H isn't a good measure of the age of the universe.

So, given all that, which do we believe, and how do you summarize the "age of the universe" in one number? Answers on a postcard to any well-regarded, peer-reviewed astrophysical journal...

Not at all...

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carboh ydrates.html

Although the fine points of the glycemic index and glycemic load may seem complicated, the basic message is simple: Whenever possible, replace highly processed grains, cereals, and sugars with minimally processed whole-grain products. And only eat potatoes - once on the list of preferred complex carbohydrates - occasionally because of their high glycemic index and glycemic load.

"Dr. Kimberly Thompson of Harvard University"... There's your problem.

Did some looking up on Dr. Thompson (site). I especially found this press release amusing. Apparently NHL '99 is only 1.5% violent, so hockey is about 43x less violent than a game with dots and classic sheet-over-the-head ghosts. Amazing.

I am so, so sick of the money being pumped into these frivolous shitty studies at ivy league colleges. These best of the best "social researchers" are so out of touch it's just sad. Jesus Christ, put some money into public schools or feeding the homeless or something that might be of some use to society.

"The study was funded by a private gift from Mitchell Dong and Robin LaFoley Dong to the Harvard School of Public Health." Sucker born every minute.

"Dr. Kimberly Thompson of Harvard University"... There's your problem.

Did some looking up on Dr. Thompson (site). I especially found this press release amusing. Apparently NHL '99 is only 1.5% violent, so hockey is about 43x less violent than a game with dots and classic sheet-over-the-head ghosts. Amazing.

I am so, so sick of the money being pumped into these frivolous shitty studies at ivy league colleges. These best of the best "social researchers" are so out of touch it's just sad. Jesus Christ, put some money into public schools or feeding the homeless or something that might be of some use to society.

"The study was funded by a private gift from Mitchell Dong and Robin LaFoley Dong to the Harvard School of Public Health." Sucker born every minute.

I'm a little skeptical of their method. TFA mentions that the quasar was lensed by a foreground galaxy and they measured the flickering as individual stars lensed the quasar. It just doesn't work that way. When a galaxy gravitationally lenses a background object, the image will appear as an arc or multiple points around the lensing galaxy. This configuration doesn't allow for flickering due to individual stars because you are using the combined masses of all those stars to do the lensing. Given that a typical galaxy has 100 billion stars, any individual effects are .000000001%, in other words, not measurable.

Reading some more into it, I found the paper:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0505/050551 8.pdf

Lots of math and theory, but no data to be had, which I find suspicious... I did some googling on the quasar Q0957+561 and found several links.

This site, by the author:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~rschild/qgl.html

This goes into how measuring the time delay between the flickering images of the quasar can give an estimate on the age of the universe (correlation between geometric distance and redshift). Also, he seems to have a persecution complex....

Also:

http://www.extrasolar.net/planet.asp?PlanetID=74

Again, the same author suggests a minute fluctuation in one lensed image and not the other is consistent with a microlensing event by a planet in the foreground galaxy. I still don't see how you can say that since the paper in the first link talks about how years of observations and statistical correlations were needed to make the discovery of the MECO. One fluctuation out of many observations is like spitting in the ocean...

This link gives an alternate explanation for the planet microlensing event:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/Q/Q0957+ 561.html

And the obligatory Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Quasar

One thing I noticed is that most of sites I found are either from the author himself or use his papers as the primary source. He also appears to have his fingers in everything from determining the age of the universe (his estimate was 12 billion years as opposed to 13.7 billion, but still pretty good), detecting extrasolar planets, and now debunking black holes. Dr. Schild has done some good work, but I'm skeptical of his recent "discoveries".

Just a note: It was reported in New Scientist, but the research article was published in the Astronomical Journal, which is one of the top journals in astronomy.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bi bcode=2006AJ....132..420S&db_key=AST&data_type=HTM L&format=&high=44ca1941e201308

It appears they are talking pac-man world according to the pdf here http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu/images/e-gamelista lpha.pdf Maybe he can throw stuff or jump on the ghosts or something in this version? Has anyone played it to see if maybe we're missing something? I hope... maybe...

You joke, but they're dead serious. Of the 65 games studied, Super Mario Brothers ranked #5 in the death rate. It earned a whopping 4.8 deaths per minute! This "Mario" guy must be some kind of mass murderer. Read it & weep.

Apparently from a study by a Harvard professor:

http://www.kidsrisk.harvard.edu/mainFrame/news/faq s8.html

I managed to dig up a little from a site by the creators of the study. Here's the juicy bit:

One author (Kevin Haninger) reviewed and coded all of the recorded game play, noting the starting and ending times of each incident of violence toward other characters, the type of weapons used for violence, whether the violent incident resulted in injury or death, and the number of character deaths attributable to the violent incident. The JAMA article contains a table that lists each video game we played, as well as the genre, console, release year, ESRB-assigned content descriptors, and our measures of violence.

So it seems that the number refers to the percentage of time that the game is violent. Now, how is violence defined such that Pacman gets such a brutal rating?

We defined violence as acts in which the aggressor causes or attempts to cause physical injury or death to another character. We did not include damage to objects, accidental actions that unintentionally harmed another character, the effects of natural disasters, or the presence of dangerous obstacles that could not be attributed to the actions of a particular character. We also did not count as violence any intentional acts of physical force that represented normal play in a sports game (e.g., tacking in football or checking in hockey), because the intention of the player is technically to stop the other player without causing injury. We did count excessive physical contact in sports games, such as punching or otherwise attacking another player (e.g., after the football play was over).

If Pacman's ghosts were replaced by rolling boulders, it would have nearly no violence. Discuss.

At no time in our evolutionary history did snakes actually represent a dominant predatory force...

I don't see how you can seriously make this claim. Certainly the common ancestor we share with, for example, mice, would have had to contend with predation from snakes. But we don't have to resort to such distant relatives to see examples of snakes affecting our evolutionary history. Vervet monkeys, Rhesus monkeys, and others have alarm calls that are specific to snakes. Furthermore, rubber snakes are frequently used in primate research involving the processing of fear-- perhaps you yourself should see Mineka on this topic. To the extent that we share a common ancestor with these primates does our own evolutionary history involve predation by snakes. So unless you are going to claim that color/binocular vision in primates evolved after alarm vocalizations, then it seems pretty clear that our fairly immediate ancestors faced predation and evolutionary pressure from snakes.

It isn't true Tycho was the last person to discover a Type Ia, in fact quite a few have been discovered this year:

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/RecentSuperno vae.html

Future cures for type-I diabetes:

Dr. Faustman's complete cure for diabetic mice:
http://www.mgh.harvard.edu/diabetes/%5Claboratory_ type1.htm

INGAP Peptide:
http://blogs.healthcentral.com/diabetes/david-mend osa/the-ingap-revival-2006-05-30

Keep your pancreas crossed for good luck.

How about here. Its the closest to a real cure for type 1 so far, and oddly, Denise Faustman has had trouble getting federal funds for what is arguably a real cure for type 1 diabetes. Makes one wonder where the FDA's priorities are - cures or selling maintenance for chronic illness.

How about here. Its the closest to a real cure for type 1 so far, and oddly, Denise Faustman has had trouble getting federal funds for what is arguably a real cure for type 1 diabetes. Makes one wonder where the FDA's priorities are - cures or selling maintenance for chronic illness.

Go check again, we GAVE billions in weapons, and provided interest-free loans. It was given the status of "major non-NATO ally" and given preferences in weapons contracts. According to this, Israel still owes $3Billion to the US in unpaid loans as well.

Threads are used because they are easy for development. They can also keep the multiple units of a parallel processor busy. However, using more threads than there are processing units introduces overhead into the system. There are better ways to do task scheduling... like event-driven models.

So, why not combine the multi-threaded and event-driven models? Some very interesting research has been done in this area. Check out Staged Event-Driven Architecture, or SEDA. Like threads, it has high fairness in scheduling. Like event-driven models, it scales to a large number of concurrent requests. In fact, it degrades gracefully even during a Slashdot effect.

For an interesting hybrid approach between threads and events, check out SEDA - Architecture for Highly-Concurrent Server Applications. Basically, you write a server as a collection of stages connected by event queues. A stage receives an event on an incoming queue, does some processing on it, and then places it on an queue to some other stage. This mirrors the way an event-driven system is designed. Each stage has its own thread pool to handle events. All IO is asynchronous and is treated like any other event in the system.

One word: SEDA

What do you have to say about this? Or this?

"The recommendation to drink three glasses of low-fat milk or eat three servings of other dairy products per day to prevent osteoporosis is another step in the wrong direction. ... Three glasses of low-fat milk add more than 300 calories a day. This is a real issue for the millions of Americans who are trying to control their weight. What's more, millions of Americans are lactose intolerant, and even small amounts of milk or dairy products give them stomachaches, gas, or other problems. This recommendation ignores the lack of evidence for a link between consumption of dairy products and prevention of osteoporosis. It also ignores the possible increases in risk of ovarian cancer and prostate cancer associated with dairy products."

Dairy or Calcium Supplement (1 to 2 times). Building bone and keeping it strong takes calcium, vitamin D, exercise, and a whole lot more. Dairy products have traditionally been Americans' main source of calcium. But there are other healthy ways to get calcium than from milk and cheese, which can contain a lot of saturated fat. Three glasses of whole milk, for example, contains as much saturated fat as 13 strips of cooked bacon. If you enjoy dairy foods, try to stick with no-fat or low-fat products. If you don't like dairy products, calcium supplements offer an easy and inexpensive way to get your daily calcium.

Oh, anyone can have a bad picture.
this is a little hotter... especially if brains gets you hot.

It is tempting to want rules that say "if make a change with this tool, does that count?", and there are certainly cases (such as the case of framing paintings) in which the court has made a rule of that form, but it appears to me those aren't the fundamental axioms the court is using to make the decision, instead, it is my impression that the "axioms" here are the items listed above (and one or two more that are less relevant to your example, IIRC.)

I'll note that US Copyright Law, unlike the stronger copyright laws present in some European companies, does not give me absolute protection against the modification of my works "per se." France, for example, gives authors/copyright holders the "moral right" of control over people reusing their work, the US merely protects the authors commerical interest(s) in such derivatives. I have some sympathy to this, after the telecast of Brazil-minus-the-twist-ending... .YUCK!

By the way, I'm not a rah-rah-rah we need more copyright law thug. I actually find the treadmill extensions to the length of US copyrights, desparately cycling to make sure Mickey Mouse stays locked down, entirely inappropriate. And I've given permission in more than a few cases for folks to make derivative works of my images that might (or might not) be in legal violation but in which I felt that I'd suffer no harm, often for no more compensation than a link and/or a proper copyright notice. But I do think that some protection for derivative works in copyright law is appropriate.

Lisa Randall is a babe!!

I do not think that word means what you think it means...

As above, racism is only really a problem because some people won't let it die. They're too concerned about appearing perfect rather than being perfect.

Leave race alone for a moment; there's this other study (and I say this from memory; could be wrong on details) that Gladwell quotes, but seemingly, the vast majority of CEO's in the US are not just white, but also above 6 feet tall. Apparently, people have an implicit, irrational preference for someone taller than themselves to lead them in their jobs.

Put simply, race, height, sex, colour of your hair all matter; people are sheep, they're easily influenced by Shiny Bright Noses, and as a society, there needs to be at least an awareness of these factors.

If other nations dislike the government we democratically elected, they are free to choose not to associate with us as a response.

Which Harvard are you attending? The one in Cambridge, Mass?

http://www.fao.fas.harvard.edu/cost.htm

Try again. Harvard costs 46-48k. And don't even get me started about Harvard Law School. The Ivies (especially Harvard and Yale) fuck the middle class.

Oh sweet Princeton, how I could have used that Bloustein money!

To add to this, Professor Alvin Roth has routinely put up his presentation slides from his Economics 2040 graduate class (small class about various Economics Experiments):

http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ec2040/Handout s/Lecture7_Markets_Lab_and_Field_Experiments_1/lat ebiddingoneBay.experiment.pdf

It's a summarizing read of the original paper, with good statistical proof and some thoughtful questions.

Cold gaze *shudder* http://physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall .html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/trivers04/images/r andall300.jpg

I would suggest you and all the other morons on here actually do some research instead of spouting off. The incidence of foam hitting the shuttle is extremely high and has occured since the beginning, if flights had continued at the same rate as they occured at the start of the shuttle program we would have had many more critical hits. If you don't believe me, ask NASA. Or better yet, read the emails and information that was available to the team members during the Columbia mission:

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/ en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=305032

This is the same damn problem they've had since the beginning--only they've continued to make changes without enough testing. The fact that they recently altered the foam is good cause to be even more cautious.

And to the people denouncing the engineers and gov't workers and accountability on this thread, get a clue and pick on another agency. NASA -- the entire agency -- is highly accountable for failed missions from the top on down because it relies on image and public support. The higher ups are accountable to a congress that wants more frequent launches and toys with the budget and priorities--and has a short memory with regard to why we have such a moronic shuttle design. The engineers are doing their job, they did it during columbia, they did it during challenger. In both cases management failed and senior management was fired/retired/encouraged to leave. So spare me the covering-their-asses mentality.

The president of Harvard said absolutely nothing like women can't participate in math and science fields. Most of the discussion on that topic was ridiculous hyperbole propagated by people who for some reason decided to be upset by it. His speech was given in the context of empowering women, not belittling them, and most who report on this issue seem to have missed his point.

All he said was that it might be worth our time to look into biological causes that draw women away from math and science. He did not say anything to the effect that women aren't as good as men. Saying that men and women might be different seems about as shocking to me as saying that, OMG, women are so much better at giving birth than men. Shocking.

If you don't believe me, read the transcript and tell me what he said that's insulting.

Read this to dispell some of the propaganda you've been hearing

http://md1.csa.com/partners/viewrecord.php?request er=gs&collection=TRD&recid=A7421234AH&q=g.+kukla&u id=788325659&setcookie=yes

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972Sci...178..190K

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5638/ab s/270573a0.html

Dozens of others that are accessible to casual search.

Owned much?

No, they don't say "plunging into the next ice age", any more than the current articles claim that New York will be buried under a mile of boiling water next week.

However, the screeching hippies and the sensationalist press of the day spun it that way, just like they're spinning the current (modest) increase as the end of civilization.

More various astromovies:

Lunar Transit by the International Space Station Alpha: http://members.aol.com/mrtsp91/iss.htm

Meteor explodes in Earth's atmosphere:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981123.html

A Martian dust devil passes rover Spirit:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050426.html

Fast moving stars orbiting black hole SgrA* in the Milky Way's center:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001220.html
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/vide o/vid-02-02.mpg

Dynamic rings, wisps and jets of matter and antimatter around the pulsar in the Crab Nebula:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0052/movies. html

Cat's Eye nebula expanding:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990916.html

Variable stars "twinkling" in globular cluster M3 over a single night:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041012.html

Shock wave of supernova SN1987A creates hot spots in surrounding material:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/2004/09/video/a

To find more videos try searching NASA's astronomy picture of the day archive: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apod/apod_sear ch

I *heart* astronomy :]
Me too.

Here:

http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/cmus ings/SIRAof2006DiscussionDraft.pdf

and a summary (actually an initial proposal),

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat051606.html

I deals more with streaming than anything else. It provides licenses for:

  1. One form and agency will be the only licensing method any non-dramatic musical work.

  2. Incidental copies (in ram, buffers, etc) are covered under a royalty-free single license (possibly with an administrative charge).

          a. an alternative suggestion is to waive any license for intermediate copies under a statute.

  3. the Copyright Royalty Board will set royalty rates for existing and new digital medias (and may set them at zero value, ala incidental licenses)

  4. If a royalty rate has _not_ been set for a media, the licensing body may still issue licenses, and the CRB may retroactively set rates. The aim is to make legal distrobution possible before red tape is finished, to combat (neccessary) infringement in new technologies.

  5. there is no provision that addresses how royalties are to be distributed by designated agents to copyright owners. This should be addressed in statues accomponying the bill, and should not be left to the designated licensing agent (conflict of interest concerns).

Thats pretty much it. Most seems harmless, although I wonder who the CRB is made up of, govm't? RIAA? Public Oversight Committee (ha!)? The blanket royalty rate thing also is a _little_ spooky, it means all songs have the same royalty percentage (if I understand correctly), which seems to feed into the commoditization of music (personally, I am of the opinion that single-price markets destroy the incentive for labels and musicians to create truely original works). On point two, that's an administrative nightmare, so I'm hoping the alternative is strongly suggested or codified.

Basically, not _nearly_ as bad as slash and boingboing made it out to be, though truthfully this summary is from the proposal, not the actual letter of the law (and IANAL, though I am/have been a professional programmer, audio engineer, musician, and copyright geek).

...but there's a nifty explanation of at least one source of these errors here (pp. 13-16).

Well, see, that's the point, isn't it? The cybersquatters are infringing on trademarks to begin with. But you can't touch them because they're outside your local city government.

Assuming that a trademark qualifies for protection, rights to a trademark can be acquired in one of two ways: (1) by being the first to use the mark in commerce; or (2) by being the first to register the mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO"). 15 U.S.C. 1127(a). Remember, however, that descriptive marks qualify for protection (and can be registered) only after they have acquired secondary meaning. Thus, for descriptive marks, there may be a period after the initial use of the mark in commerce and before it acquires secondary meaning, during which it is not entitled to trademark protection. Once it has achieved secondary meaning, trademark protection kicks in.

For another take on ID, check out:

http://www.law.harvard.edu/alumni/bulletin/2006/sp ring/ask.php

(An Evangelical Christian sounding off about the ID/evolution debate and the problems for evangelicals)

read this pdf

There already is a smaller scale version of Silicon Valley roughly centered on Boston, Massachusetts. The partial circle defined by Route 128 (and to a lesser extent the larger one surrounding it defined by Route 495) has most of the required properties already. Heck, it even has the same elevated levels of Asperger's Syndrome that Silicon Valley has.

I think a bigger point is the number of colleges and universities in the Massachusetts area (like MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, and Boston University, to name just a few). Plus, besides Boston, there are numerous other technologically advanced places in that ring (including Cambridge, Saugus, Waltham, and Billerica, to name just a few). If you do a look-up on the saga of ODF and the history of OASIS and/or GNU you'll find a lot of these places mentioned -- OASIS originated in Massachusetts, the Free Software Foundation is headquartered in Massachusetts, and AFAIK Massachusetts was the first government to sanction a special "Open Source Software Trough" to encourage the usage of open source software within both its own branches as well as its local community governments. It's not clear to me where the weird view that Massachusetts is somehow against free software, open source and information sharing that some are espousing is coming from...

The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high.

No, I don't think it is, and I don't think anyone can say that with any certainty.

I tend to class problems in three general ways:

1. Theoretical problems: We're not sure if this is even *possible*. e.g. FTL travel
2. Materials problems: We think this is possible, but we don't know what to build it out of. e.g. a space elevator.
3. Engineering problems: We know this can work, we know how to make it, we just have to work out the nuts and bolts. e.g. The Manhattan project.

Depending on the particular scheme in mind, commercial fusion is all three.

1. There are a wide variety of fusion schemes (the various aneutronic cycles, all cycles in thermal non-equilibrium), that are simply theoretically impossible to generate net energy from. Even plain old D-T fusion is *theoretically* hard; sure, we know it's possible, but getting it to proceed at a rate sufficient for useful net energy extraction might just be intractable.
2. What do you build the reactor vessel out of? You need something that can survive the 300-500 displacements *per atom* that it will experience from neutron collisions over the lifetime of the reactor. No such material is known; ITER will generate only one hundredth of that sort of neutron flux, so it can't even adequately explore the issue. There's another test facility intended to do that, but it's doesn't even exist on blueprints yet. Again, proper materials just might not exist, so you might have to replace the reactor vessel inner surface every few years, which dramatically increases the costs of the scheme and makes it much less viable commercially.
3. Everything else, and there's a lot of it, sits here. And there are some pretty big engineering problems as well, but yeah, those aren't show-stoppers. How do you get the energy out? How do you turn a flood of 14 MeV neutrons into electricity?

Here's the wikipedia article, and here's the case I recall as supporting my position.

The research i've been doing in P2P networks (due to my involvement in the okopipi project) has shocked me. In file sharing, we're living in the STONE AGE. Yes, even with bittorrent (which depends on centralized servers, and there's practically no privacy. And anonymous bittorrent like mutorrent is closed source, who knows if they got a backdoor in there).

EDonkey uses MD4 for hashing, it depends on central servers, and has no anonymity at all. And without mentioning queue # 4892 for a popular file.

Unfortunately for filesharers, file sharing networks based on modern P2P architectures is very scarse. The supernodes / ultrapeers approach is obsolete, easy to disrupt both denial of service and eavesdropping attacks.

The future of P2P is Overlay Networks.

From an architectural point of view, I would recommend the KAD p2p network, which bases its architecture on the relatively-new kadelmia network (See Technical paper on Kadlemia, 2002).

Even then, Kadelmia could be improved because it's based on a Pastry network topology - compared to other topologies like De Bruijn Graphs, proposed by a recent paper in 2003.

And more research is being done dealing with load balancing, anonymity, trust, reputation, etc.

As I said, current peer to peer networks are in the stone age. Someone needs to design a file sharing network based on the latest research, and publish it.

The orbital radius increases because the earth's rotation velocity is greater than the moon's angular velocity. If the moon orbited the earth quickly (say.. at LEO speeds assuming that were possible...) the transfer of angular momentum would go the other way.

Also, a jovian IS significant compared to its star. especially as evidenced by the detectable wobble.

Again, you are right (the mass ratio of Jupiter to the galilean planets is 1:20000, while Jupiter is about 0.01 solar masses).

However, for all practical purposes you will still find that the observed system is stable, which was the original question of this thread. While hot jupiters often violate the Hut criterion and are thus formally in the unstable regime, numerical calculations show that Jovians next to main sequence stars are stable on timescales longer than the typical lifetime of a star. See, for example, Rasio et al. (1996, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1996Ap J...470.1187R, click on arXiv preprint if you do not have a subscription to ApJ). These authors find that Jovians next to main sequence stars are stable on timescales longer than the typical age of a lower main sequence star down to orbital periods of 10 hours (their Fig. 1 is a nice summary). And this is also what is corroborated from the large number of hot Jupiters found - we just wouldn't see them if their orbits were not stable.