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Quoting one of our most famous physicists:

I am interested in the backreaction conjecture, according to which structure formation would lead to the observed larger expansion rate and longer distances without the need for dark energy or modified gravity.

Not quite your multi-big-bang theory but similar elements wrt dark matter/energy. And something that's being studied by professional physicists around the world.

I'm not familiar with the multi-big-bang theories (I've only seen some headlines) but I have some understanding of the classical idea. Basically, we're inside the ongoing big bang, and it looks like a black hole to the outside. There are probably a lot more out there (see this book for one fun idea) but they would be fundamentally out of our reach.

(I have a master's degree in physics and I did study proper General Relativity, but I haven't had much of a research career, at least not in cosmology.)

So this person wants to be away from government regulation, such as regulation on carbon dioxide emissions, ...and is preparing for climate change refugees. This seems highly contradictory as one would normally expect such a person to be in favour of regulations to prevent climate change.

There are certainly people who reject science because of the regulatory implications. In that case they are selecting for facts based on a desired conclusion. That is the irrational position. Surely one should base a conclusion on the available facts.

Nathalie Mezza-Garcia, on the other hand, accepts the best available science even though she is opposed to the regulatory implications. That is rational. In addition, she proposes an alternative to regulation. That is also rational.

This is really the debate we should be having. What mix of mitigation/adaptation is appropriate? Her solution of zero mitigation may seem extreme, but it is at least rational.

I reckon Russia might do OK.

Uhm. Not too likely at this point. Fossil fuels make up a third of Russia's budget revenue and over half of its exports. (Source: Bank of Finland's Economies in Transition policy brief No. 5 from last year entitled Overview of Russia's oil and gas sector,the Bank of Finland keeps a pretty close eye on Russia, it being one of the largest trading partners we have and a major geopolitical question mark if unstability/collapse hits). Quoting the brief:

Oil and natural gas have been a key part of the Russian economy for decades, even though Russia is, strictly speaking, not an oil state. It is difficult to assess accurately the importance of oil and natural gas for the Russian economy but, according to the latest estimates, oil and natural gas have accounted for approximately one fifth of Russia’s GDP1 in the 2000s. They have accounted for nearly 30% of consolidated budget revenue and over half of export revenue. The largest Russian companies operate in the oil and gas sector, and their weighting in the Russian stock market index amounts to more than half. Both the Russian stock market and the ruble exchange rate therefore closely follow the development of the oil price. (pg. 4) - -
.
Russia’s oil production is dominated by 11 vertically integrated companies, whose share of oil production is nearly 90%. The largest of them is majority state-owned Rosneft, whose share of oil production has grown significantly in recent years through the acquisition of other companies in the
sector. Including its most recent acquisition, Bashneft, Rosneft accounted for nearly half of Russia’s oil production last year. In addition, nearly 200 smaller companies operate in the oil production sector as well as three foreign companies within the framework of production-sharing agreements. Most experts, both international and Russian, have for a long time now expected the country’s oil production to begin to decline, so the continuation and even an acceleration of growth in last couple of years has come as a surprise to many of them. The decline in production of the traditional fields has been contained by better-than-expected improvements in production efficiency, and replacement production has been obtained from new fields more quickly than expected. Most forecasts, however, still expect production growth to at least level off in the next few years and for production even to decline (Figure 1)
.
It is expected that it will be possible to improve further the production efficiency of traditional fields, but this will become increasingly difficult and expensive, so investment would have to be increased. Production of many of the newer large fields is estimated to have already reached its peak level, so
they, too, will no longer be able to maintain growth in the coming years. Completely new fields will be continually developed, but bringing them on-stream will take time and require investment. In recent years, the investment required to maintain growth has been limited by the decline oil prices, greater difficulty in obtaining financing, and the Western sanctions, which restrict the scope for purchasing the technology needed in oil production from abroad. The sharp weakening in the ruble, however, has significantly softened the impact of the decline in oil prices on Russian oil companies. In recent years, too, investment in oil and gas production has increased at a reasonably brisk annual rate of just over 10% (nominally), but due to high inflation the real growth of investment has been modest. (pg 5)

In connection with the state finances of oil producing countries, a budget break-even oil price is often spoken of. This refers to the oil price that balances the budget, namely the oil price at which budget revenue exactly covers budget expenditure. This indicator is, in principle, simple and easy to understand, b

Päivi Räsänen

Ok, now that's just umlaut abuse.

Your post on the fine Finnish language has made me feel Really Bad, and I think words like "umlaut" should be banned.

Seriously though, while I think the name of Päivi Räsänen goes well with the word "abuse", there are also sensible people with the same last name. Also, I salute anyone who can make international characters appear on Slashdot.

David L Parnas (yes, that one) wrote a famous piece on the feasibility of Star Wars (pdf ahead): http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/przybils/courses/CBD06/papers/p1326-parnas.pdf I don't think that anything has changed. Computers are faster, technology is better, but the problem is still equally complex.

Indexing on data sets of that size is itself a pretty big challenge. You don't want an index that takes years to build, and it doesn't do much good if it's so huge that it is itself super-slow to access.

There is some research [pdf] on making compressed full-text indexes, but much of it is still research-level.

There used to be a utility, sgrep, for searching SGML/XML.

I think I'm also against the zeitgeist, at least on those other use cases. I'm pretty sure that the only deployed driverless vehicles in existence are ones which operate at low-speed or in a closed environment (e.g. closed tracks or rails) where the problem is tractable and the risk of an accident is minimal.

Incidentally, history is repeating itself. If you've never read the classic paper by David Lorge Parnas about his time on the SDI committee, do it now. It's sobering.

I never get any modpoints any more, but if I had I'd mod you up.

For a personal app, the time and effort it takes to get it done also counts and here Swing and Java2D are well thought out.

Another hint.
Last I tried any drawing in java was 5 years ago.
I found it easy to set up a look that kept redrawing my canvas every 500ms.
I then ran the program through the debugger in eclipse, and I could see the image change as I changed the code, due to javas hot code replace.

Now a days I wouldn't write java code in my spare time.
Scala is more entertaining, and Scala also takes the pain out of Swing applications.
Take a look at this spreadsheet demo application:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/wikla/OTS/Sisalto/examples/html/ch33.html

Example is from Programming Scala. Best programming book I have read in years.
http://www.artima.com/shop/programming_in_scala

It looks to me like it *was* linus's work number when he was at transmeta (at least from the address thats alongside it on http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/ ). Firefox tells me that page hasn't been modified since 1999.

As the game is based on open source box2d physics engine, there are also other games with partially similar feel and game play. Crayon Physics was the one with the original idea, though.

Nokia Internet Tablet and Openmoko Neo FreeRunner owners might be interested in Numpty Physics: http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/ & http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/rantalai/freerunner/numptyphysics/

Kids growing up "dirty" and kids growing up "clean" tend to have the same health issues as adults.

Only there are studies that do show difference. One example is a study between kids livin in eastern Finland vs kids living across the border in Russia. Can you guess which group has more allergies as adults? As in 5x more?

I'd give you a link but the national newspaper web page (www.hs.fi) seems to be kaput today. Here's one for a study starting/started just now studying the phenomenom: http://savotta.helsinki.fi/halvi/tiedotus/lehti.nsf/e1e392ad852e72f5c225680000404fa8/94bdf837e42b8b9cc225745700419453?OpenDocument

All in Finnish of course, but that's your problem, not mine! You should find something with "DIABIMMUNE" as the study is multinational.

In the spirit of teaching a man to fish rather than handing him a fish, let me recommend that you check out design patterns and page templates. Here are some *great* resources:
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
http://www.welie.com/patterns/
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/patterns/
http://ui-patterns.com/docs/pages/about

This will give you the basics on what needs to go on the page (interaction and information design). If you then skin these items with color palettes that are pleasing to you, you're pretty much good to go. Here are a couple of color palette resources:
http://redalt.com/Tools/I+Like+Your+Colors
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/index.php (this one is particularly interesting to me in theory - I have not used it, but it seems promising)

I have collected documented mosaics, cave paintings, bronze seals etc. of dinosaurs made by the ancient man here: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/dinosaur.htm Dinoglyfs and dinolits from the antiquities they are, really. Such fresh fossil samples indicate that the geologic time scales are naiiive. Here's another news along the lines: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/TRexin_verisuonet.htm pauli.ojala@gmail.com Biochemist, systems biologist Finland

I have collected documented mosaics, cave paintings, bronze seals etc. of dinosaurs made by the ancient man here: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/dinosaur.htm Dinoglyfs and dinolits from the antiquities they are, really. Such fresh fossil samples indicate that the geologic time scales are naiiive. Here's another news along the lines: http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/TRexin_verisuonet.htm pauli.ojala@gmail.com Biochemist, systems biologist Finland

Quite easy actually.
First, let us tackle the verb and the subject.

Throw = Heittää
Chair = Tuoli

Now, the interesting thing is that the basic form of this verb is only used when speaking of 3rd person perspective. F.ex. "Ballmer heittää tuolin".
Also note, that in this case the basic form of "Tuoli" is not used. The 'n' suffix indicates a possessive form. Which makes no sense so it must mean some other form. Which, I have no idea. No one but the men of language sciences know all of Finnish forms of words.
Then, let's have a look for first person action. "I throw a chair" -- "Heitän tuolin".
Again, have a look at the suffixes. Lord only knows why, but now we threw out one T and added an N to the verb. The subject has the N suffix again. the subject is actually useless without a form. Basically only thing you can do with a subject without form would be edumacation like "This is a chair" -- "Tämä on tuoli".

To give something to chew. Let's list the normal presens form:
Heitän tuolin (I throw a chair)
Heität tuolin (You...)
Heittää tuolin (He/She...)
Heitämme tuolin (We...)
Heitätte tuolin (You (in plural))
Heittävät tuolin (They...)

And to indicate the possessive:
Tuolini (My chair)
Tuolisi (your...)
Tuolimme (Our...)
Tuolinsa (His...)

Any combination of these is valid.
More interesting things to do with 1st person declensions.

And here's the 15 basic cases to finnish language:
nominative, genitive, accusative, partitive, essive, translative, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, abessive, comitative, and instructive.

And 12 adverbial cases:
superessive, delative, sublative, lative, temporal, causative, multiplicative, distributive, temporal distributive, prolative, situative, and oppositive.

You don't just throw chairs in Finnish! Prepare for lifetime of torture with the grammar before you can simple things correctly!
From http://www.helsinki.fi/~jshermun/language.htm:
"It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions."

two pictures > 2048 words:

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/nikki/linux-communism.jpg

http://www.nixp.ru/pub/walls/linux-china-communism.jpg

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/hprajani/phun/god-v-sa tan.png

Screw that. Give me Satan any day.

A few years back I registered apfbiolectronics.com (APril fools bioelectronics. Made up a name and had a friend design a website about affordable medical devices for the masses

I took an arm crash dump at random from google and then posted a complaint to linux-kernel and linux-arm about how linux crashed and killed my test monkey and could they hurry up and fix it so we could move on with human trials.

• 2 offers for help
• 1 plea to scrap the project immediately in the name of all things good in this world (man I wish I still had that email).
• A thread debating the validity of my post
• Someone telling me that he hopes I used a scratch monkey
• Someone used my post to back up his bug report
• 12 days later someone posted a report on their lug's mailing list.
• Two YEARS later someone referenced it on the linux advocacy newsgroup

The sad thing is I'm never ever going to top that prank

A few years back I registered apfbiolectronics.com (APril fools bioelectronics. Made up a name and had a friend design a website about affordable medical devices for the masses

I took an arm crash dump at random from google and then posted a complaint to linux-kernel and linux-arm about how linux crashed and killed my test monkey and could they hurry up and fix it so we could move on with human trials.

• 2 offers for help
• 1 plea to scrap the project immediately in the name of all things good in this world (man I wish I still had that email).
• A thread debating the validity of my post
• Someone telling me that he hopes I used a scratch monkey
• Someone used my post to back up his bug report
• 12 days later someone posted a report on their lug's mailing list.
• Two YEARS later someone referenced it on the linux advocacy newsgroup

The sad thing is I'm never ever going to top that prank

indicates the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two random variables. Doesn't mean that the relationship has to go up. If you look at a correlation such as people that were in world war II verses the number of radios listened to by families at night, there would be a negative correlation, one with a downward trend. If the correlation coefficient is +1 then both variables increase equally, if it is -1 then both variables decrease equally, if it is zero then there is no correlation. Try this link http://noppa5.pc.helsinki.fi/koe/corr/cor7.html and you may understand how strength and direction can be predicted from the correlation coefficient. However, to truly understand the closeness of the serendipitous relationship, you need more than just the correlation coefficient, and that is most peoples mistake. Same for the over emphasis of just reporting a standard deviation.

One version is called:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istro-Romanian_langua ge

There are many other:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html

Personally, I like monadic parser combinators, like those provided by the Parsec library for Haskell. You can parse arbitrary context free grammars, and even many sensible context-sensitive ones with little difficulty, you get to write your parsers in the language (Haskell) and you get meaningful parse error reports for free.

A major downside to the approach is that Parsec itself lacks a symmetric choice combinator, having only left-biased conjunction, together with a combinator which causes a parser not to consume input when it fails. Though other libraries, like Koen Claessen's ReadP rectify this, the associated performance costs tend to be higher.

I tend to use Parsec even for some tasks where many people would use regular expressions. It might not be quite as fast as statically building your parser, but it's possible to get really quite decent performance out of it, and the convenience level is quite high.

Another interesting thing to look at are arrow-based parser combinators, like PArrows -- these allow for a greater level of optimisation at runtime, so you can get really good performance while allowing for things like symmetric choice. They also can allow for cool features like the ability to inspect the parser and emit code in various languages for that parser. (The one I linked to has the ability to compile parsers to JavaScript code in fact.) The downside is that arrows tend to be a little more inconvenient to program with than monads.

Well, we have the technology.

Google "whole-cell patch clamping". http://www.biocenter.helsinki.fi/bi/physiol/Techni ques_patch.htm

Yes, we CAN read/write sensations to any one cell of your brain.

Also, look up fMRI while you are at it... This will cost just a bit more than $100 target price, however.

right here.

Just a minor correction to the linked article: Mika Sillanpää worked at the Helsinki University of Technology, not at the Helsinki University when he wrote the paper in question.

http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/janmatti/copyprot_readme.t xt

Ok... This is illeagal too: http://cs.helsinki.fi/u/janmatti/copyprot_readme.t xt

He does.
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/pat.gif

There is one succulent point that everybody technological innovation appears to overlook: the increase of cancer rates in our society as EMF permeates our environment.

Studies in the University of Helsinky in the paper titled "Helsingin yliopisto, opiskelijavalinta, muut yliopistot ja EMF", Dr. Jusdakinaenen explains that for a population of 23 persian rabbits, 2 developed leukemia after spending 72 hours in a centrifuge while a cell phone was being operated in a room at least 20m (20.3 yards) away. I find that is very significant.

Luckily, there are responsible companies like Motorola that are now offering carbon-copper polymers that shield the phones, allowing the harmful EMF rays to remain inside the phone. Unfortunately there is an impact on the reception, but a wired solution has been proposed.

Which is nice.

There's too much stuff on the internet.

This week, Alexandria began providing free wireless Internet access

We've always had free wireless Internet access at Aleksandria, you insensitive clod!

[Disclaimer: only students & staff need apply]

See?
-ReK

Gotta love outdated websites! Yes, I'm talking about: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/

In that case you'd want a small "loader" kernel patched with kexec like TLSboot has.

Greasemonkey is good and on asa's blog, platypus was mentioned which is a great new extension to interactively modify pages and generating greasemonkey scripts from your changes. Now, browse happy, worry free, and worship our common WWW illiterate god! I hate Microsoft, and Apple is cool, especially since OS X builds on open source.

*starts masturbating to the karma rating boost*

I never wrote anything about UI consistency. I however agree that those toolbars could use some improvement with respect to consistency. That screenshot rather nicely demonstrated your point so I feel that I must now return the favor: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kaitanie/UI/Windows/Sc reenshots/FunnyScreenshot.jpg
I found this screenshot during web browsing and it very nicely demonstrates UI inconsistencies in Windows. Look at the toolbars!

Yes, a few. :)

At the university of Helsinki (Where Linux was born) we have a similar policy. I asked one of the admins about the issue with bittorrent clients. The response was simply that because the university has an insane amount of bandwidth, BT tends to transmit at full speed, to the point that other traffic actually suffers noticeably.
The "illegal" part is because enough people have used those to distribute unauthorized copyrighted material that the network disruption can be directly connected to them.
It is a major issue, because the university has to pay for the bandwidth it uses, and p2p clients use as much bandwidth as they get.
The admin mentioned that prioritizing them down does not work, as different clients popping up and changing ports all the time causes too much work. Because they don't serve much purpose to studies, it was decided that it is impossible to separate the legal from illegal uses with existing resources, and it is not feasible to pay for the extra bandwidth.
Here is a site (in finnish) explaining the effect of p2p apps on university bandwidth use, with graphs

... except that nobody found out.

I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.

The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.

About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!

Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)

Idiots.

... except that nobody found out.

I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.

The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.

About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!

Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)

Idiots.

... except that nobody found out.

I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.

The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.

About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!

Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)

Idiots.

... except that nobody found out.

I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.

The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.

About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!

Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)

Idiots.

... except that nobody found out.

I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.

The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.

About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!

Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)

Idiots.

If you like Risk (or LotR Risk), you might want to check out my Risk probability calculator. You may even find that you should adjust your tactics. :-)

This elitist racist-ass cracker hasn't taken any submissions from the brothers!

At this point in time, the actual utility of using genetic analysis to answere taxonomical questions is in doubt. "Good old traditional taxonomy" ( Linnean taxonomy) is for the most part dead. It has been replaced with the modern science of Cladistics. As the underestanding in the use of genetic data matures, it will play a more prominate role in the Science of Cladistics. Other sciences are also having an impact on Cladistics, behaviourology for example. My latest research involved reviewing the current understanding of the evolution of the genus Canis. One needs to go no farther then this to experience the plight and the promis of genetics. Unfortunatly the problems are not just scientific, they are also political thanks to the enviro-wackos ( as distinct from the scientificly based enviromentalists). I am still hopefull that science will prevale and that genetics will become an important tool in the understand of life. Unfortunatly that time is not now.

I have been using Canis as my example because, other then just finishing a review of it days ago, it has a very complicated and convoluted history with a lot of political implications, and so far genetic analysis has not been very usefull. It is also one of the places where behavioral data is being examined. In a way, it is at one of the cutting edges of cladistic science, and far more accessible then the quagmare that the investigator of bacteria have found themselves in.

Yeah, the first thought I had was "McDonald Buck"? Are they serious?

Turns out there is a McDonald Buck, who does know something about Linux. As parent says, repeated searching on worldbank.org (or worldbank.int) gets scratch.

For the curious, his e-mail address comes from wmbuck.net, which he owns. His website is however completely locked out using server-side authentication.

Hey, it's a boring Saturday night :).

Before the my-format-is-better-than-your-format debate kicks into high gear, it should be said that the LSB intends to use the RPM format as a stop-gap measure

Of course, you know who is on record about how stop-gap measures "...have a way of staying around. Forever."