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Actually the janitor changes it once a week when he cleans the room.

Hehe.. maybe he is. The municipal power company in Reykjavik, Iceland built a Focault pendulum in their HQ as a showpiece. Local urban legend has it that after it was first installed the thing would stop swinging at seemingly random intervals which caused the artist and the physicist who designed it a lot of head scratching. No amount of calculations, physics theory and modelling could explain these mysterious disruptions in the predicted workings of the pendulum so finally they set up a camera to observe the thing. The footage showed the pendulum swinging away for hours and hours until suddenly a member of the cleaning staff walked into the frame, stopped, looked at the pendulum, reached out, stopped it with his hand and then walked out of the frame. Mystery solved... dunno if the story is true but it made me laugh.

Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN? Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?

The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website: http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf... The University of Iceland's institute of earth sciences has a news page in english: http://earthice.hi.is/bardarbu... They have also set up a number of webcams: http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (Vaðalda, north of Vatnajökull, towards Bárðabunga) http://vedur2.mogt.is/grimsfja... (Grímsfjall) http://vedur2.mogt.is/kverkfjo... (Kverkfjöll) Not very spectacular sites but the content is a bit better than most of the bullshit you are likely to get from the corporate media.

There is now also a YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Why is it that when a thing like this happens (supposedly), we're directed to the misguided BBC, and to cowardous CNN? Doesn't Iceland have some kind of geologic society or meteorlogic society that issues reports based on adequate, current, hot-off-the-volcano scientific data?

The icelandic met office has a site that tracks seismic activity (read: earthquakes), they have an english website: http://en.vedur.is/#tab=skjalf...

The University of Iceland's institute of earth sciences has a news page in english: http://earthice.hi.is/bardarbu...

They have also set up a number of webcams:
http://www.livefromiceland.is/... (Vaðalda, north of Vatnajökull, towards Bárðabunga)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/grimsfja... (Grímsfjall)
http://vedur2.mogt.is/kverkfjo... (Kverkfjöll)

Not very spectacular sites but the content is a bit better than most of the bullshit you are likely to get from the corporate media.

Iceland's National Energy Authority has created the world's first magma-based geothermal energy system after drilling 1.3 miles (2,100 meters) through the Earth's crust.

Could they have actually reached the mantle that close to the surface? I would believe they tapped into a volcano, but mantle doesn't sound right. Crust there is something like 15 km??

That's not much of a tripwire, since your odds of activating it are sorta low.
What about FireShepherd which actively jams Firesheep?

Yeah, why not just sit in the coffee house running FireShepard instead? ;-P

Also: the chemistry of volcanic ash is problematic in the case of Iceland because of the presence of significant amounts of fluorine. This makes it more chemically reactive than quartz sand grains, especially when heated.

"It has to do with the type of plate tectonics here. The plates are pulling apart, yielding a very deep rift that releases very hot magma from very far down in the mantle, which is saturated with CO2 and when released goes very high, far, thick and long. Naturally this will melt a great deal of Iceland glacier very quickly, impacting the currents in the Atlantic."

This is true for all of the volcanoes in Iceland. They are related to the rifting that occurs along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American plate is stretching away from the Eurasian Plate. The magma comes up the cracks and eventually erupts onto the surface. CO2 has little or nothing to do with melting the glaciers. The heat of the lava at the vent does, and the contact with the water produces much of the explosiveness that eventually produces ash and lofts it into the atmosphere. The climatic effects are mainly from a combination of the ash particles and aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, and they are mostly cooling effects due to obscuring the Sun, however, Eyjafjallajokull is not a big enough eruption -- so far -- to have a significant climatic effect. Katla, by contrast, is a much larger volcanic center and has historically had much bigger eruptions, hence the worry if that one blows too. The effect on Atlantic ocean water is negligible except around Iceland itself.

There are plenty of the more technical details at the Nordic Volcanological Center site, including a link to this paper [PDF] that has ample detail about these two volcanoes and their historical and more modern behaviour. It isn't cause for optimism. The key phrase from the introduction is that eruptions at Katla have been up to 2km3 in volume, whereas those at Eyjafjallajokull "have been negligible in historic times and range in the 0.1km3 scale. This is a "small" eruption. Really. Even with that "negligible" volume, the most recent eruption lasted from 1821 to 1823, and was with Katla erupting simultaneously. These eruptions have sometimes A) lasted for many months or years, and B) been much, much larger if Katla erupts too. Not to mention the local effects such as even bigger jokulhlaups than have been triggered so far, and for some eruptions (e.g., Laki in the 1700s), release of toxic gasses such as HF too. Sometimes the eruptions are no big deal, and they wane and stop over a few weeks. Sometimes they are nasty and prolonged. It isn't clear what this one will do, but if there are signs that Katla is going to join in ... be prepared for something much more awful.

"It has to do with the type of plate tectonics here. The plates are pulling apart, yielding a very deep rift that releases very hot magma from very far down in the mantle, which is saturated with CO2 and when released goes very high, far, thick and long. Naturally this will melt a great deal of Iceland glacier very quickly, impacting the currents in the Atlantic."

This is true for all of the volcanoes in Iceland. They are related to the rifting that occurs along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American plate is stretching away from the Eurasian Plate. The magma comes up the cracks and eventually erupts onto the surface. CO2 has little or nothing to do with melting the glaciers. The heat of the lava at the vent does, and the contact with the water produces much of the explosiveness that eventually produces ash and lofts it into the atmosphere. The climatic effects are mainly from a combination of the ash particles and aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, and they are mostly cooling effects due to obscuring the Sun, however, Eyjafjallajokull is not a big enough eruption -- so far -- to have a significant climatic effect. Katla, by contrast, is a much larger volcanic center and has historically had much bigger eruptions, hence the worry if that one blows too. The effect on Atlantic ocean water is negligible except around Iceland itself.

There are plenty of the more technical details at the Nordic Volcanological Center site, including a link to this paper [PDF] that has ample detail about these two volcanoes and their historical and more modern behaviour. It isn't cause for optimism. The key phrase from the introduction is that eruptions at Katla have been up to 2km3 in volume, whereas those at Eyjafjallajokull "have been negligible in historic times and range in the 0.1km3 scale. This is a "small" eruption. Really. Even with that "negligible" volume, the most recent eruption lasted from 1821 to 1823, and was with Katla erupting simultaneously. These eruptions have sometimes A) lasted for many months or years, and B) been much, much larger if Katla erupts too. Not to mention the local effects such as even bigger jokulhlaups than have been triggered so far, and for some eruptions (e.g., Laki in the 1700s), release of toxic gasses such as HF too. Sometimes the eruptions are no big deal, and they wane and stop over a few weeks. Sometimes they are nasty and prolonged. It isn't clear what this one will do, but if there are signs that Katla is going to join in ... be prepared for something much more awful.

You should check out the videos of the example in progress at Eyjafjallajökull. It's *awesome*. And if you don't know what a jökulhlaup is, it's a huge meltwater flood that is generated by the heat of the volcanic eruption melting the ice beneath a glacier. Eventually the reservoir of water bursts out from beneath the glacier.

Nice maps of the current and earlier Iceland eruption in March can be found at the Nordic Volcanological Center.

We have excellent schools, the University of Iceland and ReykjavÃk University (who are the AI world champions). Most of the lectures will be in Icelandic but some in English and all the material is in English. We're in deep recession if you haven't heard so our terrible exchange rate means that stuff is very cheap to you.

I promise, by the end of this rambling post I will be on-topic.

That depends on what you base your morality on.
- If rape and murder are immoral primarily because a deity says so, ask the deity.
- If they are immoral primarily because of their effects on society as a whole, you would need to conduct a study to measure the effects of each over time in society.
- If they are immoral primarily because of their effects on the victim, your answer will vary with the victim.

If you put a gun to my head and said "PICK: RAPE OR DEATH!", I would (reluctantly) pick rape. On the other hand, I've heard of rape victims who suicide because they are haunted by their past. Surviving rape appears to be subjectively worse for some than others. Of course, being a victim of neither (thus far, anyway ...) I don't have unimpeachable perspective into which might be better or worse.

I don't think you're going to get a definitive answer here; I dont even think it is possible. The best you could hope for is some form of pseudo-quantum probability that one would be less immoral than the other, depending on the victim.

My subjective, relatively uninformed answer is that murder is more immoral than rape. I can't speak as a deity, I can't speak for society at large, and I can't speak as a victim. The only thing I can base my judgement on is that I am an optimist. Since murder is final, it offers no possibility of the victim overcoming adversity, recovering, moving on. As unspeakably wrong as rape is, it at least offers that (difficult) chance for its victims.

As an optimist, I see Freenet or any anonymizing technology as one more tool for toppling repression. Given the chance, I think more people will choose to do good with it than evil. Killing anonymous internet access because of CP would be immoral in the same way I feel murder is. The chance and that choice to rise above adversity is taken away.

This is the official translation to english (low quality pdf), sent to me by a belgian teacher of mine. Don't know if it's available elsewhere ...

It's ironic that a 'commercial' software house is being patent trolled especially after recent statements from Oracle regarding taking other peoples intellectual property.

"We can just take Red Hat's intellectual property and make it ours, they just don't have it."

Larry Ellison

The infamous Nalar's Rib crash? There was a patch. Take a look at the only site you need, the BAK Help Web: http://www.hi.is/~eybjorn/krondor/krondor.html .

You mean like the feudal city-states of Europe way back when?

No, closer to Medieval Iceland than anything else.

The thing about talking to people who share your own views is that you tend to not explore dissenting ideas.

Maybe 20 years ago. Now with the Net much of what government was supposed to protect us from can be replaced with feedback systems, proper contract and tort law, and a healthy freedom of speech online. Also, I would rather NOT explore dissenting ideas than see those ideas and actions criminalized as is the case in every democracy. Dissent is criminal, so is performing non-violent mutually-consenting actions with other adults.

But brought back so many great memories! The website Behind Enemy Lines told the story of a guy who was so sick of asking her to stop using his domain as a spoof email reply address in her spams, that he hacked into her laptop using a PC Anywhere security flaw, and downloaded some half-naked piccies and slash stories of her and her partner in crime, and posted them on his site along with the story.

Clicky!

Have little effect on sea level. It is floating already. However, if the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, there will be a serious increase in mean sea level. Greenland meltdown is estimated to yield about 7m (circa 23 feet) rise in sea level according to this. Should the Antarctic cap go as well, sea level would increase over 70m (about 230ft) according to this source. Seven meters puts me on the beach, 70+ meters puts me in the position of having to breath water, which I've yet to succeed at..

Kira Nerys is indeed hot .. she'd probably be my first pick, just over Jennifer Lien. (Not all the women on ST:V were bitches.)

There was an implicit quid-pro-quo between Apple and Xerox. Xerox got to invest (pre-IPO) in Apple in exchange for the PARC tours and demos.

Read my previous post here for more info. The link in that post has since died, but there's more info on the deal here. Search for the text "open the kimono" on that page and start reading from the paragraph above it.

~Philly

Exactly, I attend the University of Iceland, and the IT administratios has tackled this bandwith problem very aptly. Here is a letter I received when I was downloading (legal) bittorrent files with unlimited upload the other day (roughly translated from icelandic)

-------------------
Dear user


In the last 24 hours a machine in your care ([my machine].rhi.hi.is) has sent aproximately 2400 MB (Million bytes) from the university network. This traffic counts for ca. 1.43% of the total traffic coming from the University of Iceland through the university network in that period.

Please check the configuration of this machine. It is possible that it is under the control of someone else and is being used to communicate illeagal content. If not you must inform us of that (by replying to this email) so we will not have to monitor this machine regularly.

We remind you of the rules regarding the use of the University's network equipment:

link

and point out that if this massive use continues on this machine without us hearing explanations, it's access to the outside of the network will be limited for security reasons.


Administration of HInet (****@hi.is)



PS This email is sent automatically to those who are registered for machines or domains connected to HInet.
[...]
Thank you.


They must limit the use of their network for extra curricilum activity somehow I guess

I followed your link and went to the link "data", and selected the first glacial data link I could find.

While the statement "some glaciers are receding, some aren't" is certainly not wrong, as in any year you can certainly find at least one glacier, which hasn't receeded this year.

However, looking at the graph above, I think the statement "glaciers are receeding" paint an fairly accurate picture of the general situation.

The antarctic glaciers, however, are certainly receeding,

> its coastal ice pack is thicker than ever.

Maybe because of the receeding glacier, the coastal lines calves the thinner ice shelves, and only the thicker parts of the glacier remain?

> Global warming would [...]. Global cooling, on the other hand, [...]

What makes that scenario more likely than the reverse? From an Alaskian point of view warmer weather probably means better agriculture. But from an African point of view, I guess the reverse is the case.

here are mirrors of the pictures, to lighten the load on osdn.org.ua:

photo1 and photo2



But I agrre sith sd4l (448263), it is suspicious that the guy is running KDE. Anybody who speaks Ukranian want to clear this for us?

here are mirrors of the pictures, to lighten the load on osdn.org.ua:

photo1 and photo2



But I agrre sith sd4l (448263), it is suspicious that the guy is running KDE. Anybody who speaks Ukranian want to clear this for us?

Well, my tax kroner at work is giving me an education that helps me understand how the world works.

Fjölnir is in Icelandic, a language spoken by only about 300k people.

Documentation in Icelandic is available. You can also get a compiler.

Fjölnir is in Icelandic, a language spoken by only about 300k people.

Documentation in Icelandic is available. You can also get a compiler.

Why isn't it a more explored area?

The Hydrogen Industry have been suppressing Nitrogen research for years. The Bush administration and cohorts in Congress are bought and paid for by the Hydrogen lobby. The DMIE at the University of Iceland discovered a design for a Nitrogen fuel injector that had an efficiency equivalent to that of an automobile getting 450KM per liter. Obviously such a design would threaten the profitability of Hydrogen bases systems, so the design has been withheld and the researchers have been forced to sign NDAs.

Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.

Wow! Is this the reason that more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility? Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them. The late science critic Paul Feyrabend said it best:

And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society.

From Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

If you are sincere about discovering the crackpottery and outright deception that is endemic in the pysics community check out this site: Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics

Yeah, but Krakatau was still limited in magnitude, despite being the largest recorded eruption in civilized history ( I think Toba in Sumatra was the largest if you include less civilized history.)

I think the rapidity with which life regenerates has a lot to do with the magnitude of the event.

The supervolcanoes, despite their devastating effects, don't seem to be quite as potentially catastrophic as collisions with space debris.

A sufficiently large comet or asteroid really could wipe out so much of higher life forms that Earth might have to re-start with single cell organisms.

Iceland's plan is quite exciting. They're going to replace gasoline and other imported fossile energy carriers with hydrogen.

The hydrogen is to be produced by electrolysis of water using hydro power or geothermal energy. (Both of which Iceland has an abundancy of, so far they have harnessed only 16 % of the total capacity.)

Electrolysis is an expensive way to produce hydrogen. According to the calculations, hydrogen would be 2-3 times more expensive per energy content than imported gasoline. On the other hand, fuel cell applications, in which hydrogen is used, are in general twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. This levels off the price difference.

According to the current plan, land vehicles will use gaseous hydrogen, whereas fishing fleet will be fueled with methanol. Iceland's metal industry produces huge amounts of carbon oxides' which can be collected. Carbon dioxides and electrolytically produced hydrogen are combined into methanol.

By adopting hydrogen as the energy carrier for transportation, Iceland would be able to reduce the dependancy on imported fuels significantly and reduce carbon dioxide emission by up to 50 %.

The transition to hydrogen economy has been championed by professor Bragi Arnason since the late 70's. For more information, see prof. Arnason's latest presentation on the subject (pdf).

The University of Iceland has been doing this for years. It's the norm. The University has it's staff, but Comp. Sci. students run their equippment all by them self.
J.

There are mirrors at:

http://elias.rhi.hi.is/premier.cl uelessfucks.com/
http://cow.org/~noise/belps.freewebsi tes.com/
http://homepages.manawatu.net.nz/~alanjb/

There is also some interesting posts at an old mirror here:

http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/ (gotta love that domain name!)

This is great information... where else could you find out how many freckles are on a spammer's ass :)

------
IanO

If I may quote my favorite CEO: "Pursuing the biological simile, observers pointed out another problem caused by Microsoft's monopoly: the lack of genetic diversity in the PC ecosystem. Because PCs and their software are too similar, one noxious automaton can do much more damage than would occur if we had several alternative life forms.
This argument deserves closer examination. True, BeOS, MacOS, and Linux users were not infected by the Love virus. Had each system had 25% market share, a single virus could only infect 25% of the population."
The ILOVEYOU virus is kindergarden stuff compared to what a real programmer could really do if he/she put their mind to it, but since experienced programmers are (most of the time) fairly matured individuals, but it would only take one fairly good hacker to release a plague on the world...

If I may quote my favorite CEO: "Pursuing the biological simile, observers pointed out another problem caused by Microsoft's monopoly: the lack of genetic diversity in the PC ecosystem. Because PCs and their software are too similar, one noxious automaton can do much more damage than would occur if we had several alternative life forms.
This argument deserves closer examination. True, BeOS, MacOS, and Linux users were not infected by the Love virus. Had each system had 25% market share, a single virus could only infect 25% of the population."
The ILOVEYOU virus is kindergarden stuff compared to what a real programmer could really do if he/she put their mind to it, but since experienced programmers are (most of the time) fairly matured individuals, but it would only take one fairly good hacker to release a plague on the world...

If I may quote my favorite CEO: "Pursuing the biological simile, observers pointed out another problem caused by Microsoft's monopoly: the lack of genetic diversity in the PC ecosystem. Because PCs and their software are too similar, one noxious automaton can do much more damage than would occur if we had several alternative life forms.
This argument deserves closer examination. True, BeOS, MacOS, and Linux users were not infected by the Love virus. Had each system had 25% market share, a single virus could only infect 25% of the population."
The ILOVEYOU virus is kindergarden stuff compared to what a real programmer could really do if he/she put their mind to it, but since experienced programmers are (most of the time) fairly matured individuals, but it would only take one fairly good hacker to release a plague on the world...

MARS and RC6 need fast mutipliers to be efficient, which makes them slow on smart-cards, for example.

Prof. Seberry also expected to see an attack against Twofish fairly soon, so there is a good chance it will be discounted.

SERPENT may have been left in only for political reasons. It is written by some very clever cryptoanalysts and it would be a good idea to keep those guys trying to break the other ciphers. The actual cipher isn't particularly likely to go anywhere.

That leaves Rijndael. However, I'm sure that NIST can't pick a European cipher for purely political reasons, as you've all pointed out. The NSA is an advisor to NIST in the contest and I'm sure they'll point out the political aspects of the final choice.

The next cipher I'm going to add implement is going to be Rijndael. I'll probably also have to ad the AES when it is chosen.

I for one will buy it. I am running a small computer network at a behavioral research lab where we work with digitized videos. I dont really care about the processor speed but I need as fast bus as I can get to get as good video streams as possible. After my expirience with VIA's chipsets I will most defenetly buy the 133 mhz boards to maximise our investment in PII's which speed is hinderend by the BX chipsets. The speed difference on our old humble AMD's and Pentiums when I got rid of the TX chipset and installed my old hardware in motherboards with VIA chipset (Aopen A59-Pro)will be my beacon in getting rid of that dreaded Ixxx inside logo. The worst thing about the behavior lab is that the potential users of the behavior software are using windoze as no one has told them that there are other platfroms (hardware and software) that are useable. I would love to be able to use alpha's for our work but WinTels monopoly on the desktop market does not make that an options.

I am greatly in favour of the US Crypto Export Restrictions. I am studying cryptography (they like to call it cryptology) in Denmark and have written a java crypto library called logi.crypto which is available either GPL'd or with a commercial license.

I can only hope that the export restrictions will never be lifted, since they mean that I effectively don't need to compete with anyone in the US.

In fact, before this I worked for an Icelandic software company which was hired as a sub-sub-contractor by a US software company to design and implement the cryptographic portions of a large communications application. They could not hire a US company, which they would probably have done otherwise.

It is also completely silly to suggest that not exporting strong crypto products is going to help "protect the world from terrorists and criminals". I mean, go buy your cryptography stuff in Ireland. There is no reason to think it will be any less capable. Or, if you are a "well funded" organization, hire a few cryptographers of your own. They don't quite grow on trees, but they aren't that hard to find either. I'm sure our friend Shamir is training a few down in Israel.

Really, as people keep hammering on, the only people who are going to stop using cryptography because it is illegal, is the people who are relatively honest anyway. The whole thing does not make any sense, however you look at it.