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False equivalency and appeal to ignorance, followed immediately by another appeal to ignorance. We DO NOT HAVE any long term studies from this artificial meat.

I see, can you point out where I said that we did have any long term studies? You bandy about debate terms like that means something, but dear sir, This is not some debate, especially when you attempt to make points on made up things.

The future is definable once we have facts, but you have NONE!

Am I upsetting you, getting you angry enough to write indecipherable and non parseable comments? One cannot define the future at all, or ever. What a strange statement you make. CAPS are also a great way to make your argument.

There are no long term studies on animals for eating this stuff either.

As an early stage concept, there has to be enough of the product to perform tests. Certainly before animal testing, there will be continuing In Vitro testing. At present, they are working on policy issues, http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/742.... Certainly synthetic meat has been eaten, and is chemically lean meat. The results? Apparently the burger one person ate was pretty good, and another tester said in a blind test, she would have called it meat. That's because it is meat. No harm was done to the victims.

Perhaps you are so stupid you believe that diet has no impact on children, but we have SCIENCE that proves that it does have impact.

I'm beginning to think that you have arguments with people in your head, and make up things for them to say so you can destroy them with a witty and dashing riposte. It is within the realm of possibility that I am quite stupid, but I am quite concerned about the health of children. Certainly the present state of say, bovine meat leads one to concerns about it's health issues.

Here is a very simple product for you to investigate to prove me correct and you an ignorant and inconsiderate prick who is fine with people being harmed by your belief in religion. prenatal vitamins

You then jump right to a false equivalency, and repeat the same appeal to ignorance that can be proven wrong with SCIENCE.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Where on earth did I ever mention anything about prenatal vitamins? What do prenatal vitamins have to do with artificial meats, or much of anything. Vitamins are a class of nutriments that are needed by the body, but in fact are not needed by most people who eat a balanced diet. Can you have a discussion without trying to switch the subject all of the time? It doesn't lend credence to arguments, and I have to waste time pointing it out.

How about comparing this meat to a product like Cigarettes, which were advertised for the better part of a century as beneficial to your health.

You keep bringing up cigarettes as if they were something scientists invented. The health effects of tobacco products were well correlated and exposed as causation even in the mid-late 1850's. But there were groups with a pecuniary interest in growing and selling tobacco products. These advertisements trying to claim that cigarettes were good for you were not put out by scientists, they were put out by tobacco company marketing and ad departments. Here are some for the lulz. I don't see any scientists in that mix, merely a bunch of bullshit. https://www.buzzfeed.com/copyr...

Do you see how ingesting cigarette smoke, or perhaps red dye #5 might be more similar to eating food grown in a lab?

A non-sequitur. Tobacco is a natural substance that you can grow in your house. It's also toxic. And scientists have known for a long time that it is a toxic substance. You need to direct your ire towards the tobacco industry and their lawyers, who betwee

TFAbstract says that WPA2 can be cracked with brute force search, and that long passwords are more secure than short ones. Looking up the home pages of these internationally renowned researchers http://www.brunel.ac.uk/bbs/pe... http://issel.ee.auth.gr/people... http://www.research.lancs.ac.u... reveals that these three claim no other security-focused publications. But perhaps I'm too quick to judge. Somebody pay the man and read their paper. Or is this the two-step get-rich-quick scheme?: - (1) Publish Paywalled Article Exposing Security Holes in Commonly-Used Security Protocol (2) Profit! (PPAESHiCUSP-P)

Time to start numbering each and every boring slashdot joke. Then we can save so much time by typing 6...18...42!1! And imagine how many jokes we can pack into our SIGs! Boy there are going to be some fun times ahead. We are all so smart. So very smart. So repetitively smart. Did I mention how smart we all are?

It's still in the delivery.

> I don't know a single person that doesn't bike because they have to wear a helmet.

I can't find the original article as it was a few years ago but here's a summary:
"Researchers from Lancaster University questioned 1400 people over three years to see what deters us from cycling to work. Arriving with ‘helmet hair’ stopped 27 per cent of women from cycling (...)"
http://www.redonline.co.uk/news/in-the-news/helmet-hair-fear-stops-cyclists

Report link:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/ext-rel/press/LU%20News%20web%20links/Understanding_Walking_%26_Cycling_Report.pdf

LWATCDR inquired:

Okay how about Kompozer and Bluefish http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html and http://kompozer.net/

Bluefish is just a text editor. It's a powerful, capable, lightweight text editor that can handle a huge number of open files simultaneously - but it's just a text editor. Handy for coders, but the OP asked for WYSIWYG editors, not text editors. (Personally, I still use good, ol'd PFE 32 1.01.000.)

Kompozer does a pretty good job of cut-and-paste for tables, and I like the integrated FTP client and the ability to call W3C's HTML validator service from within the app. That said, it's still a beta application, and there hasn't been any development on it since 2009 (which means, among other things, that it's still broken on Linux). On the good foot, it's OS, so anyone with coding skills is free to fix any bugs or add any features they like.

Not an Android app, nor for Canada. But UK readers might like to know that they can get email alerts from http://aurorawatch.lancs.ac.uk/ Not that they are a lot of use if it is cloudy, as it was last night.

I had a Toshiba Portege in 2006 -- it was awesome for the time. With the screen turned around, its form factor was little different from a modern tablet (scroll down for the pic). All Apple did was remove the keyboard, strip away the ports and other useful stuff, and add a touchscreen.

btw - HP also made similar devices that were even more iPad-like in 2002. This page has pics.

I've never seen a definition of "space" that was based on the altitude of the ionosphere before. I've never seen a claim that the ionosphere was at a certain altitude, rather than a range with upper and lower bounds before. Most articles I see give about a 500 to 600 km altitude range, such as http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/iono/ionosphere_intro/

Still, that's the ionosphere, not "space", and it's subject to wide variations of many different periods. TFA fails to show whether the result is a permanent feature or simply the measurement they found. It can hardly be anything other than the latter because there have been many, many measurements of the ionosphere, starting with numerous sounding rockets during the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58. TFA fails to account for their one results being at odds with many others.

And by "space" they mean "outer space", ie. outside the earth's atmosphere. If they meant simply "space", it could be the simple Euclidian definition of 3 extent dimensions. As such, we all exist in "space".

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=344816

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~fittond/ppcjava.html

Google is hard:

Emacs for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+win32)
Faq: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html
Download: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU/windows/emacs/ (The faq contains other links that may be faster for you)

LaTex for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=latex+win32)
Faq/Download info: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~fittond/win32latex/win32latex.html

gcc for Win32 (MinGW for this particular answer, there is cygwin and such as well): (http://www.google.com/search?q=gcc+win32)
Info: http://www.mingw.org/

command line utils for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=unix+utils+win32)
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Includes:
bc, bison, bzip2, diffutils, fileutils, findutils, flex, gawk, grep, gsar110, gzip, indent, jwhois, less, m4, make, patch, recode, rman, sed, shellutils, tar, textutils, unrar, wget, which

To answer your question, my windows machine does just fine when I want to use the unix utilities that I love, not real sure why yours can't, other than googling is hard.

For the record, all of the above web pages were basically the first result from google, I guess I'm feeling Lucky today.

I think most of these are still available, enjoy. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/dixa/r esmeth/away-day/group-ideas.html

This article(PDF Warning) seems to show that the energy efficiency of trains is not in fact substantially better than that of planes or cars - however, one can make the leap (given their data) that the average train (assuming it's more than 50% full) is far better than the average car (assuming only the driver is in the car). At any rate, it's an interesting read and provides some good data. An interesting note is that high speed trains like those mentioned in the article, are comparable in power consumption to planes.

At the risk of sounding redundant/irrelevant, thats called stemming. It brings any word into its "root" form. See http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/ste mming/general/

Also, regex queries would be very difficult to implement on search engines (if not impossible), coz the nature of search is different. In every regex query, the pattern is the one which is pre-processed, while in search engines, the text is pre-processed. Because of the different nature of pre-processing involved, regex on search engines might not be possible.

this is nothing new: it started before the WWI and now there are dozens of companies, universities or hobbyist doing it. It is called: "content analysis", "data mining", "discourse analysis" etc. There is a legend that sais that British intelligence managed to predict quite acurately airstrikes on England based on content analysis of Goebels' radio speeches. Take a look at this links if you are interested. Bibliography of Content Analysis Listings from Communication Abstracts, 1990-1997 Content Analysis Resources web site Text Analysis Info Page - all on text analysis and related topics The discourse analysis page of AI Topics Centre d'analyse des politiques publiques (CAPP) Département de science politique, Université Laval The Center for Social Research Methods: not necesarily content analysis, but it's good to take a look at Research Methods Knowledge Base The Annenberg School for Communication Web Concordances at the English Department of the University of Dundee Companion Website for the book Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus Journal: Language Awareness; has some free issues/articles. The General Inquirer Home Page Journal of Second Language Writing Writing Guides: Conducting Content Analysis at Colorado State University; with a nice adnotated bibliography The Content Analysis Guidebook Online, An Accompaniament to The Content Analysis Guidebook by Kimberley A. Neuendorf. The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Literary and Linguistic Computing eximancer - Practical Text Mining and Concept Mapping Journal Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation: some online articles Content Analysis News and Discussion mailing list archives some Resources related to content analysis and text analysis; updated quite recently: June 30, 2005;

You don't want them to rush things - after all, they only just got around to making Ctrl-S save the file (for definitions of "only just" met by the release of XP).

(Seriously, I still use the ancient PFE32 on the rare occasions I'm in Windows - it's fast, lightweight, and does (almost) everything I want from a text editor, not including word wrapping. It also hasn't been updated for longer than Notepad...)

At present, IPv6 mobility depends on a lot of fiddly detail. However, here are some links on how IPv6 mobility works under Linux and how it is currently intended to work:

• Mobile IPv6 for Linux - Includes initial support for "network mobility" (move whole networks around, not just machines)
  
• A study on transient addressing in Mobile IPv6
  
• British Telecom presentation on Mobile IPv6 using a home base system
  
• IETF working group for Mobile IPv6
  
• Historical Notes: Mobile IPv6 for Linux, in the days of the 2.1 kernels!
  

Quick summary: The user's machine registers with their home router (the home base). When they move to a different network, they notify their home router, which then sets up a transitory IP address on the remote network. The home router then cascades back up the routers the message that the fixed IP address of the mobile machine should now be routed to the transitory IP address, optimizing the routing. When an entire network moves, it notifies its home router in the same way, the only difference being that because you're migrating the router, you also migrate all of the machines attached to it - but none of the machines need to know this or be set up to handle it.

I really like PFE - Programmer's File Editor http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/steveb/cpaap/pfe/def ault.htm.

I believe what he was referring to was the loss of the very first Ariane V, mostly due to a lack of proper engineering review of re-used software. There are several discussions of it on the web.

http://www.dcs.lancs.ac.uk/iono/aurorawatch/rt_act ivity/

Well, let's see... OK, so what you're asking for is that Sun should write a standard for a slimmed-down version of Java, just for PDAs? Say, we could call it Java 2 Micro Edition? And maybe you'd want that standard to be implemented on PocketPC machines?

Wait, it gets better. You can also find a full java implementation (Java 1.3) for iPAQ.

If you want something in between, there's also PersonalJava. It has more features than J2ME, but fewer than a full java. It's nearing end of life though, I'm not sure what will come out to replace it.

There are JVMs for PDAs and cell phones and yes, PocketPC too. They are a very good way of getting your software to run on many portable devices. The only downside is that your code will run slower than something hand-crafted for a particular type of device.

Software Engineering Case Studies / Airbus flight control system

Nobody will ever need more than 640kB.

This is disruptive, at least if the disks production cost/retail price is in line with existing recordable media (DVD/CD).

If this progresses quickly and gets publicity it could kill blu-ray by creating FUD about the lifetime of a 25/50GB disk with a 1TB disk around the corner.

The obvious commercial application is to distribute HD series television using MPEG-2, which would be unwieldy as a stack of blu-ray disks.

Using MPEG-4 one could easily see the "Disney Disk" with 750 or so movies on it. You buy the disk with one key, buy more keys as you want.

It's an excellent backup media. HD's are convenient for backup, but cumbersome for rotating backups with offsite storage (which is why I still use archaic DAT archives even though the media alone costs more than a pair of HDs would).

In theory people are not simply passive consumers of commercial content, but rather creators of their own. As HD cams become affordable, people will want to store stacks of HD content, as they now have stacks of tapes or DVD-Rs of their vacations and children's first steps.

And then there's more wack concepts like being able to store everything you see and hear all your life, which could go through these disks pretty quickly.

Sounds unlikley.

Sounds likely.

Assuming that human beings can affect the global climate (compared with something like major volcanos, or the sun) sounds much more unlikely to be honest.

For good registry use, take a look at the (freeware) text editor PFE. It supports multiple profiles from which you can select at startup via a command-line switch. In fact, PFE is just neat, full stop.

The development tools under windows blow everything else out of the water.

He didn't seem to realise that the "Idle" entry isn't actually a process...

What would you call it instead? It is kind of a process. It just doesn't take part in the normal scheduling process as it is running at DPC/dispatch level. It also doesn't have a normal priority but is ranked as lowest-prio process just below the zero page thread (has priority of 0). Articles and tools saying that the idle thread runs at priority 0 are wrong. For a tad more information look at this explanation of its functionality.

While we're at it, please return the English, Spanish, etc. since they're European... and start speaking your own languages instead - thanks!

I am a statistician of sorts (my training isn't in statistics per se, but that's what I do research on), and I'm sorry to say that I'm not aware of any good online statistics references.

There are some sites that come close.

Mathworld, for example, has some excellent reference material on statistics, but beyond some very basic or introductory material, it tends to become sparse quickly. It's typical of much of what's out there: lots of material on mathematics, but not statistics in particular. I also have ethical objections to Wolfram, and so feel uncomfortable supporting any site hosted by his company.

PlanetMath: is a good alternative to Mathworld, filling in some material that Mathworld lacks. It has the benefit of being open. However, PlanetMath suffers from the problem of being extremely disorganized. Many of the entries seem incomplete or lacking in depth. Finally, like Mathworld, it doesn't treat statistics as much as other branches of math.

HyperStat is a good online resource for introductory statistics. I've actually referred to it a couple of times in my research when I can't remember exactly what some formula is, and don't trust my memory of it. It covers introductory material in depth, but doesn't go into fundamentals or intermediate or advanced material. It's also sort of commercial, disorganized, and poorly designed.

Statsoft Electronic Textbook covers more advanced material, but doesn't seem to provide much explanation or background. It's really more a guide to doing analyses in STATISTICA than anything else.

Finally, I've noticed the Statistics Glossary more and more, but it really is a glossary more than an explanatory reference. It also doesn't get further than very introductory topics.

In short, there is a huge niche for a comprehensive, open, in depth statistics resource ala Mathworld or PlanetMath. Perhaps PlanetMath will become more organized and complete. I've thought about contributing to PlanetMath, but I don't feel completely comfortable with it.

I wonder if slasdot readers will appreciate this saving

Pfft, I was doing this sort of stuff years ago on my BigTrak

I seems like Google has started to use stemming (or something similar). If you search for "linux print", it also finds pages containing "linux printing". IOW it considers word with certain suffixes (probably -ing, -s, -ed etc, depending on wordclass) to be equivalent with their stem, i.e. the word with the suffix stripped off. This isn't such an important thing in English, since there aren't so many different suffixes, but it can be very important for more inflective languages.

I would disagree. Human factors are counted in equations when looking at many multiple linear regression situations using dummy variables.

From here

Dummy Variable (in regression)

In regression analysis we sometimes need to modify the form of non-numeric variables, for example sex, or marital status, to allow their effects to be included in the regression model. This can be done through the creation of dummy variables whose role it is to identify each level of the original variables separately.

So you could include human factors, but I didn't RTFA, so I can't really relate it to this situation.

-s

Also known as the horizon effect.

Funny that I should see this at the top of the /. page, just after reading your message.

I believe you mean "English" spellings for everything, as apposed to "American" spellings for everthing.

Ian Sommerville is probably English. Give him a call and find out. ;-)

BZZZT! Wrong answer. Thanks for playing.

I agree. That professor has just made an appalling impression on me.

The professor should remember who they're working for. I used to use a dictaphone when I was at university (during 1990/93). Had a professor ripped the tape out of a lecture he was being paid to provide, serious words would have been had. This stuff is not their private copyright ready to sell into their latest book (and yes, we had a few "now you must buy my book"-types kicking about), it is a lecture designed to help my education. If I could record it for later note-taking, during the lecture I could just sit and listen. This approach helped me a lot.

Computers? Well, the computer I had at the time was an Atari ST, though part way through this made way for a Mac LC. I wrote my final project on that Mac - a MIDI-based music teaching package. Laptops were dreamland in terms of price, and probably the most common student machine would have been the Amiga A500. That's the most common machine - it wasn't especially common at all to have your own then.

Cheers,
Ian

Ah but he does very much exist... Andy Serkis is a graduate of my very own Lancaster University and did a very marvelous job of portraying gollum.

The animators used actual footage of Serkis acting out the role in a silly skintight body stocking, and the voice is all him. I am particularly impressed by gollum's dialogue with himself

Far back in the mists of time, well about 1990 anyway, there was a talker called Cheeseplant's House. This got really popular for a while, and at my university people would compulsively log on to it to talk. Eventually a user 'shouted' "Alright - this is silly. How many people here are just sitting in the Lab at Lancaster?".

The number of shame-faced heads that suddenly looked up and started glancing about was truly comical to see. And yes, I was one of 'em.

Cheers,
Ian

I bought it back in january, after first learning about AOP. At the time, it was the only book I could find directly on AOP, with a second coming in feb. Otherwise, the only other text source I could find was Generitive Programming.

So I bought it, and I was excited when I began reading. Then I found out it was just a bunch of JSP and other then the first 25 pages, very little content. Now I admit I put it down a good 25 or so pages later and skimmed through the rest, but I was extremely disapointed in it. Instead I've been grabbing all of the ECOOP workshop documentation.

In the end, it was worth the money. No, not for the book, god no! But by getting me excited and reading the ACM Communication articles and then talking to my adviser about it. It turns out the editor for the AOP material in the ACM communications is a professor at my school, and even better is happy to let me help her out next semester (I'm extremely swamped now). So now I'm considering doing the thesis option on my masters. I'll spend the summer reading REAL material.

My opinion: AOP is awesome but the book is a waste of money. Here are a few good readings:

Alternatives to AOP
Generitive Programming chapter
AOP publication
AOD 2002 workshop
ECOOP97

So I'm just trying to figure this out - is this actually broadcasting a signal in a single area, or is the device using cell-network/GPS/whatever to figure out location? The idea of location-area tech has been around for a while. A lot of research has been done on this, like Cornell's Graffiti, ABTA, Intel, and somewherenear , but I haven't seen lot of practical application actually come out.

I ran across something new that does something like this that I have some hope for, called annotated earth. They appear to be in the initial stages still, but the way it works appears to be open (as in encouraging third party software - they seem to be the infrastructure and data for location-aware info). I especially like the Iraqi Weapons of mass destruction thing, good info to have if you're wandering around Iraqi, Hehe. Don't know if it's really going to work, still waiting on mobile devices that can use the technology they've done.

Anyway, I'll be interested in seeing how this goes.

=-H

Great free programs I always install on windows boxes:

TclockEX A genuinely useful enhancement to the taskbar clock. It can show the date and has a resource monitor option, so you can tell at a glance if it's getting to be time for a pre-emptive strike (reboot). Very useful for all versions of windows.

Whisper Whisper is a password manager for windows. It's convenient to have all your passwords stored in one place, and the program itself is intuitive to use.

Transparent Makes icon text backgrounds transparent on the desktop. It's a small thing, but it really improves the look of windows. I've used it on 98 and 2000 and it works well.

Programmer's File Editor For people who need more power than notepad but are unwilling to learn vim, there's PFE, a very nice text editor. It's not vim, but it sure beats the hell out of notepad.

Monkeys learn by imitation.

The monkeys went into the water and noticed it was salty, so started eating stuff with salt. The humans noticed that penicillin killed bacteria by accident, and started eating penicillin.

Intelligence is coming up with methods it has never seen used before and knowing in advance whether or not they are likely to work.

Then not many humans are intelligent. Most ideas that come up fail, whether they be new mousetraps, new medical drugs or whatever. As Edison said, invention is 99% presperation.

Consider Hellen Keller or feral children. They act as beasts until taught to communicate, then they suddenly jump into society with little splash.

That doesn't match what I've read on feral children. Most of them have had strong permenant social problems that would keep them institionialized for the rest of their life. See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics /LECTURE4/4feral.htm

...regrettably time will not permit replying to PFE-related e-mail.

Software Engineering 6th Edition - Ian Sommerville

I'm amazed nobody has mentioned this book, it was the primary text on my Software Engineering degree. It would have probably helped me pass too if I wasn't drinking so much.

Anyway, anyone that's going to even think about doing any sort of technical project management, system design, progamming, testing, specification, etc. should read the relevant chapters. Its my bible.

"COME ON ENGLAND!!"

Naturally, I got zero marks for that exam, and went on to take a degree in something completely different, including a Philosophy minor. Immediately on graduating I got head-hunted by the systems engineering department, and within two year was on the academic staff of the Computing Department.

That's fifteen years ago, and I've been getting paid for writing (and teaching people to write) interesting software ever since. I still don't have any computing qualification. The moral of the story: you don't take a course in quill-cutting to learn how to write great literature. In the Computing Department, when I was a student, they were teaching us to write bar-graph generators in PASCAL on punch-cards to be fed into mainframes; in the Philosophy department they were teaching us to write theorem provers and inference engines in LISP and PROLOG (with a side order on the meta-mathematical basis for the designs of the language interpreters themselves) on micro-computers. Guess which turned out to be more relevent in the real world?

Still going strong - grab your telnet client and have a look, or go here to connect via a Java client.

Cheers,
Ian