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...look how much Los Alamos is gonna owe!

<paranoid rant>

You see, GE could give a shit about wind power. All you have to do is follow the money. First of all check out the Energy Policy Act of 2003, as Senator Domenici (NM) promises it will fix a whole laundry list of problems with our energy supply (real and percieved). Do` we really need a new Under Secretary position for energy and science as well as two new Assistant Secretary positions: one for science and one for nuclear energy, I digress.

Anways Being from New Mexico, the home of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories Don't be so shocked when Domenici's bill is pro nuclear.

Well, John Rice President and CEO GE Power Systems, recently (May 8) sez he's cautiously optimistic that there will be a new nuclear facility in the United States and has spoken with half-dozen major nuclear utilities about building a new reactor .

And I suppose since GE is a member of United States Energy Association and gave about $9 Million in campaign contributions (since 1990), It probably has some say into Domenici's Energy Bill which provisions for up to 8-10 new 1100MW nuclear reactors that The taxpayers (read you and I) would pay, through loans, 50% of the costs to build these. And according to the Congressional Budget Office the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high - well above 50 percent(p.11). The CBO also figures that each of these will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3Billion.

< /paranoid rant >

So why the hell would GE develop it's patents on Wind Turbines when the Good Ol US of A is gonna spend $52.6Billion over the next 10 years (p.1) on the Energy Policy Act of 2003.

Just follow the money....

Good post...but...

WRONG!

The incorrect part of your post:

"It means that the first 92 elements can be found naturally occurring..."

Element 43, Technetium, is not natural. Well...it is possible, but I don't think they're 100% sure.

Los Alamos to get Lightning computer system from Linux Networx

LANL

For more specific technical detail on the supercomputer Linux Networx is building for Los Alamos, go to
LNXI Newsroom

Still plenty of floor space in the new building.

Earth Simulator is impressive in its own reguard, but in no way is the majority of clustering apps going toward these 'specialized' systems. Governments, research labs, etc. want powerful computers that are dirt cheap. Los Alamos's ASCI Q (Installment 1, the Alpha servers) cost over $100,000,000 to build, while their Pink cluster cost about $6,000,000 in hardware. On paper, Pink and ASCI Q are both around 10 teraflops. ASCI Q runs Quadrics on 64-bit 66MHz PCI, Pink is getting an ugprade to Myrinet Lanai 10 on PCI-X (From Lanai 9 on 64/66PCI). Not only that, but Pink runs the open-source, 100% GPL'd Clustermatic software and can be booted in a matter of seconds rather than hours like ASCI Q.

The fact is, systems like ASCI Q and the Earth Simulator just aren't practical. They may look great on paper, but there's not much that they can do that can't be done on x86. Given the choice between paying over a hundred million for a proprietary cluster that might not even be all that reliable (*cough*Q*cough*) and requires expensive software and maintenance contracts, we see companies like Linux Networx offering high-power clusters on common hardware and free software that are a fraction as expensive.

As far as reliability goes, don't get suckered into thinking that proprietary and expensive mean quality. Q's failure rate is almost as high as my old Windows '98 machine hahaha. With the exception of a few missing chillers, Pink seems relatively healthy with only a few minor failures.

If CRAY and NEC want to get into a pissing contest in specs, that's fine. If they offer something that Intel can't, more power to them. Otherwise, the five organizations in the world that own their systems can be proud that they have the most powerful computer on paper for a year or two before someone builds a cheaper x86 cluster that matches or out-performs them.

That means that we're going to have to pay $209,700 for the aprox. 300 nodes in the Space Simulator cluster.

That's nearly 40% of the original entire cost of the cluster! If that isn't a good advertisment to use Linux (at least, as long as it remains free or until SCO's claims actually become founded - hah!), I don't know what is!

That means that we're going to have to pay $209,700 for the aprox. 300 nodes in the Space Simulator cluster.

That's nearly 40% of the original entire cost of the cluster! If that isn't a good advertisment to use Linux (at least, as long as it remains free or until SCO's claims actually become founded - hah!), I don't know what is!

Sorry, but cepstral techniques don't do what the SETI people need them to do. The de-chirping needs to happen coherently (i.e. without any loss of the phase information from the original data and signals that it might contain). The reason for this is that the signal-to-noise of a detected periodic signal is much less if you use an incoherent technique like the cepstrum rather than a coherent one. And since they are looking for very weak signals, they need every bit of S/N that they can get.

OTOH, I have developed a cepstral-like technique to detect binary pulsars in data almost identical to the SETI@home data. You can read about it here or here if you are interested.

And while in the area, go to Los Alamos, New Mexico. At the Bradbury Science Museum, they have lots of interesting stuff, including life-size replicas of the first nuclear bombs.

LANL bought an 80 processor Onyx 4. Check HPC Wire for the story.

It is a neutron star. Evidence suggests that the radius of a neutron star is about 15 km. The fastest spinning pulsar rotates 642 times per second. That would mean the surface is moving at 20% the speed of light -- fast, but not TOO fast. This one is spinning six times slower.

Thanks. Science is a bit of a challenge to write for, because of the tight page constraints, but we do try to keep things as readable as possible.

It has been very interesting to me to watch the NASA publicity engine on this one from the inside. A press release like this is not written by the scientists who are involved. Space Telescope has professionals who do this. In general, though, they do a pretty good job. The best site may be this one, which has much more detail than the short version of the press release.

For those who want more technical detail, our 1999 paper discusses the observations that really confirmed the presence of the planet. The new paper updates this slightly with new constraints based on the white dwarf mass. Together with some work in the intervening years on explain the slight ellipticity of the neutron star/white dwarf orbit (using something called Korzoi pumping), these new results have led to the slightly smaller estimated planet mass.

PS. All of the pulsar timing analysis is done on Linux...

This improper usage really bugs me, too. For everyone who hasn't yet figured it out, (including the Slashdot "editorial" staff)

The proper spelling of Berkeley [berkeley.edu] is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," "Berkely," "Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music [berklee.edu].

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do they think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL [lanl.gov] and LBNL [lbl.gov], the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize [princeton.edu] for inventing the frickin LASER [geocities.com] is a professor there.

Finally, without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. At the very least, the person submitting the article (and the Slashdot "editors") should be able to figure out the proper spelling that way.

The use of spectrometers in discovering hydrogen has long been proven valid (the criteria for proof is all there). This is why astronomers are so confident when claiming that "planet-X", which is a couple hundred thousand light years away, has an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen.

You can do atmospheric measurements with transmitted visible light on far off planets. However, you can't get below the surface measurements.

The main technique the Mars probes have used is neutron spectroscopy. A hydrogen atom is about the same mass as a neutron, so it's good as a moderator. Neutrons are created below the surface, from cosmic ray impacts.
Some earlier data from the Mars Odyssey

LANL and LLNL have actually done research on cancer, unlike SETI@HOME which has done no work at all on cancer.

The University of California is currently a 'Key Sponsor' of SETI@HOME and its Berkeley campus is home to the SETI researchers who set up and use SETI@HOME. The University of California also currently operates both LANL and LLNL.

I'm not familiar with Evil Linux, is it anything like Red Hat?

1. The World's Fastest Computer is trying to figure out this planet,
2. The World's Second-Fastest Computer is a volunteer effort to figure out if anybody's on other planets, cure cancer, and do other good things on this planet, and
3. The Next Fastest Four Computers are trying to figure out how to blow up this planet.

Uhm...what about me?

It's number 90 on the new list (was number 85 when it first came out), is entirely self-built by members of the theoretical astrophysics group here at LANL, and (in re: to a comment below) we've even been able to convince LANL to categorize it as a single computer, instead of 294 smaller ones.

So there you have it, Beowulf in the Top 500.

Pink is the largest LinuxBIOS cluster in the world to date. The only moving parts in each node are cooling fans. This translates into a small savings on hardware, but more importantly means the nodes are by design more reliable thanks to fewer moving parts. Each node is powered by two 2.4GHz Xeon processors with four gigs of RAM and Myrinet 2000 interconnects.

The raw hardware power, while impressive, isn't what makes this cluster unique. The kicker is in the software, more specifically Clustermatic 3 featuring LinuxBIOS. Stuff happens and nodes fail, but thanks to LinuxBIOS they can be back up in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

Additional tools for the frontend node from Linux Networx makes updating nodes super-easy. You can flash each node's BIOS with a single command all in a matter of seconds. BProc allows you to run basic shell commands on any node without even installing a distribution on those nodes. w00t!

What we see here is a big shift away from expensive hardware and proprietary software. The software powering this cluster is 100% GPL, so users save a fortune in software licensing costs alone. And while these P4 nodes in particular aren't exactly cheap, they provide pretty darn good power and are far less expensive than Alpha servers. Also, using the x86 architecture means that consumer boards are not far behind in clustering. In fact, you can check out the LinuxBIOS homepage and see some pretty cheap boards that are supported already. So if you have some spare cash lying around and a couple weekends to kill, you can pick up a cheap board + cpu + memory combo and set it up as a slave node for your desktop machine with the same software these guys use to power this huge cluster.

With the new page table based message passing algorithms (where the message is 'moved' by mapping a page from the sender to the receiver instead of by a byte-by-byte copy) the playing field has been equalized and micro kernels using message passing are now competitive performance wise. Newer technologies allow such memory management tricks to be played transparently over the network, but this will come with a penalty (same with a macro kernel).

We've done message passing for Plan 9 using the Channel/Randezvous abstractions of the Plan 9 threaded model. Look here.

The microkernels of today you're talking about are not the same as the ones that lost the battle. Same as RISCvsCISC -- the differences between the two are smeared as time passes.

If binary makes so much sense for representing information and doing useful work with it, why is it that the fundamental building block in our body uses four base pairs? Is there some advantage to a quadary system that we might be able to learn from? If not, why didn't nature choose a binary system?

His paper "Quantum Algorithms and the Genetic Code" explains that in classical physics one can use a yes/no question to distinguish between two items, and only two. This is why computer systems, and database systems in particular, work so well with a binary system.

Now things get a bit spookier in quantum physics and Patel shows that here a yes/no question can distinguish between four items (don't ask me how...) So the most efficient databases using quantum physics would naturally be encoded in alphabets of four characters. Now DNA is a chemical system obeying quantum physics and it is therefore not so much of a surprise that it too be based on four characters.

It is a remarkable thing that nature spontaneously evolved the most efficient database system from a quantum physics point of view, but after all, what is the survival of the fittest good for?

Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(

Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?

This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.

Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?

Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.

OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting. :)

--LP

As lore would have it, the original USL suit against BSD and Berkely University broke up on the rocks for a similar reason.

As lore would have it, the proper spelling of Berkeley is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," Berkely," Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music.

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do you think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL and LBNL, the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize for inventing the frickin LASER is a professor there.

Without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. If you can't even properly spell the name of the operating system to which you're referring, why even bother to make any comment at all?

The entire physics department here got an email with the subject line "Re: hep-lat 020711 daily received" with the pif attachement.

hep-lat is the Los Alamos eprint Archive subject code for high energy physics on lattice models. The email refers to a paper on "A new proposal for the fermion doubling problem" which is supposedly attached (instead you get the .pif file)

The subject line is matched amazingly well to the recipient list. I thought "that looks interesting, I might have a look even though I probably wasn't supposed to get it."

This is an interesting line of questioning for a couple of reasons.

First, when Selective Availability was active, people did work up means of getting military-level accuracy and better by using things like differential GPS. (See also a project by NASA. There are many other references from the geophysical sciences community.) It was safe, at least then, because the time needed to get a good position fix was on the order of hours. That rate is fine for geophysics.

Second, part of the political and strategic thinking about GPS was to put assets in orbit so they might serve as a target instead of ground-based systems. That is, the mindset at the time was very much one of fighting a nuclear war. The problem of that was in part seen as one of releasing a cataclysm if the nuclear option was exercised. So, it was thought, if juicy enough targets were put in space, an adversary could use a nuclear weapon to destroy those to press the point of their seriousness home without committing to a direct attack and its devastating retaliation. I imagine that was also true of communications satellites.

The USA actually did conduct some atmospheric tests to measure effects of high altitude nuclear blasts. While the results are classified and these were conducted before satellites were widely used, the possibility of nuclear attack is taken seriously enough that designs for military satellites, including GPS, undergo testing for nuclear hardening.

1. Matter radiates away approximately half its mass as it falls into the black hole due to the intense acceleration. While this is incredible efficient (50% mass to energy conversion compared to less than 10% for matter-antimatter reactions), it is released as high energy x-rays or gamma rays which may be difficult to use.
2. Many black holes release huge amounts of energy as magnetic fields, heating up the gas that surrounds them. Here's article at NASA where that's been observed and another one from Los Alamos.

The article doesn't make clear that this is an extremely speculative prediction which requires some highly nonstandard physics results. Indeed, if this accelerator (or cosmic rays for that matter) actually produces black holes it will undoubtedly be considered one of the greatest and most astounding physics discoveries of the past 100 years.

The paper that started all this speculation (which is now presented as fact more often than not) is http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-ph/0106219. In that article, the authors explain that the model requires a version of the universe that has ten dimensions, arranged in such a way that the Planck mass, where gravity merges with other forces, is about 10^3 GeV. Standard physics says that the Planck mass is at 10^19 GeV. Their assumption is 16 orders of magnitude different from the conventional wisdom.

The paper above concludes with the comment, "Collider study of black hole creation would certainly be an astounding pursuit". Indeed, the authors and experimentalists would be guaranteed Nobel prizes if black holes actually form.

Unfortunately, popular articles gloss over the speculative nature of these predictions and we are told that the LHC "should be enough" to create black holes, and that cosmic rays are "probably" creating them right now. The levels of certainty implied by this wording could not be more misleading.

btw - this kinda shows how bs was bush's little thing about saddam using ALUMINUM tubes for reactors.

Just some picky comments on the slate article and the posting. First, the man's name is Grisha Perelman, not Grigori. He is Russian, not Italian. (Even the MIT Math department's Seminar Page gets this one wrong). Second the work spoken about at MIT was written up in two preprints (here and here -- I guess I should say don't even bother reading them without a graduate education in mathematics).

FYI, this work is based on a prescription for proof of the Geometrization Conjecture (which implies the Poincare Conjecture), done by Prof. Richard Hamilton, who was at one of the UC schools at the time, but is now at Columbia University. Professor Hamilton was over 40 when he published his work on the Ricci flow, which is the basis for Dr. Perelman's recent work.

Just some picky comments on the slate article and the posting. First, the man's name is Grisha Perelman, not Grigori. He is Russian, not Italian. (Even the MIT Math department's Seminar Page gets this one wrong). Second the work spoken about at MIT was written up in two preprints (here and here -- I guess I should say don't even bother reading them without a graduate education in mathematics).

FYI, this work is based on a prescription for proof of the Geometrization Conjecture (which implies the Poincare Conjecture), done by Prof. Richard Hamilton, who was at one of the UC schools at the time, but is now at Columbia University. Professor Hamilton was over 40 when he published his work on the Ricci flow, which is the basis for Dr. Perelman's recent work.

I don't think simulating cities is actually as easy as it sounds. It was only a few years ago that we reached the capability to simulate traffic in cities over a day or so. The actual growth of a city over years could take some big doing, or dumbing down of the simulation detail.

Here's the info on the traffic sim:
Los Alamos gains corporate partner for traffic simulation

Incidently, here's an interesting if not mildly amusing 'amatuer' traffic analysis:
Traffic Waves

And a more thorough site on better driving (which is actually pretty sweet- this should be required reading for drivers):
Big City Driver

Happy trails,
Jason

Ok, I feel bad about this...

>is it likely that there is a vast quantity of dark matter resposible for the effects that we are seeing? absolutely -- our, up until now, undisputed theory suggests it, and it has served us well in so many ways that we have no reason to doubt it. is also possible that we may not be able to observe this matter due to the noise and insensitivity of our apparati? we would be naive to believe otherwise.

But DM has multiple problems at galactic scales, which is why people still entertain alternatives.

A nice review is this article .

Still, if i am a betting man, I'll put a lot of money on DM :).

This may be the way of the future. There is quite a bit of research in to dry rock geothermal reservoir engineering. Basicly a hole is drilled down to naturally hot rocks. Water is pumped down at high pressure to fill open joints in the hot rock. A second hole is drilled and the heated water returns for use.

I attended a seminar where one group was attempting to measure neutrino oscillations and found convincing evidence that this happens. In order for neutrinos to oscillate, however, they would have to have some mass. In the model that they proposed, some neutrinos may have mass and some may not. Also, if super symmetry comes into play, you could potentially have some very heavy neutrinos. For some cutting edge theories consult the archives.

For those readers who haven't before encountered state machines:

Los Alamos National Lab has some good info (overview mostly)
Lecture notes from MIT
An interesting research project from The Beast
Some info on how FSMs are used for AI in computer games

If you want more than the Space.com article, read the PDF preprint entitled "Lack of observational evidence for quantum structure of space-time at Planck scales".

Just so people understand what's going on here, this work affects the many (untested) theories that posit some kind of "quantum of distance". There are two basic reasons that people are considering these types of theories:

• At very short distance scales, the two great physical theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics (the Standard Model) are incompatible. Something interesting must occur on the scale of the Planck length = 10^-35 meters.
• Many physicists have an intuitive distaste for the infinite amount of information required to specify the location of a single particle, in a truly continuous universe. Some view the universe as some kind of cellular automaton, again giving rise to a discrete grid and "quantum of distance". Proponents here would be (maybe) Feynman, Fredkin, and (most recently) Wolfram.

Anyway, what the current work does is put a bound on the "graininess" of space. Pretty clever, if correct.

Of the laser gun is Po-210. A milligram of Polonium 210 emits as much alpha radiation as 5g of radium.

To quote LANL Polonium-210 is very dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and special equipment and strict control is necessary. Damage arises from the complete absorption of the energy of the alpha particle into tissue.

The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.

Also polonium 210 is very rare in nature. It is usually produced by bombarding Bismuth 209 with neutrons (typically in a nuclear reactor). In the current form, this weapon is an invitation for radioactive contamination disaster.

Want the details? Ignore the watered-down article and skip right to the research paper.. all greek to me, but has some interesting plots:

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers -- Abstract

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [PDF]

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [Postscript]

-molo

Want the details? Ignore the watered-down article and skip right to the research paper.. all greek to me, but has some interesting plots:

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers -- Abstract

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [PDF]

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [Postscript]

-molo

Want the details? Ignore the watered-down article and skip right to the research paper.. all greek to me, but has some interesting plots:

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers -- Abstract

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [PDF]

Information Entropy and Correlations in Prime Numbers [Postscript]

-molo

Check AWU about the possibilities at these facilities.

Also, check these:

Sandia

Los Alamos

Argonne

Brookhaven

Pacific Northwest

Lawrence Berkeley

Lawrence Livermore

Oak Ridge

And there are other other national labs that I did not mention.

The preprint is at arXiv (e.g. xxx.lanl.gov) for those that don't have a subscription to APL

The phase coherence of light from extragalactic sources - direct evidence against first order Planck scale fluctuations in time and space

You might also find this previous paper interesting by the same authors:

Stringent limits on the existence of Planck time from stellar interferometry

The preprint is at arXiv (e.g. xxx.lanl.gov) for those that don't have a subscription to APL

The phase coherence of light from extragalactic sources - direct evidence against first order Planck scale fluctuations in time and space

You might also find this previous paper interesting by the same authors:

Stringent limits on the existence of Planck time from stellar interferometry

RANT

FUCK Greenpeace.

During the 50s and 60s - the era of atmospheric nuclear testing - we dumped 3300 KILOGRAMS of plutonium.

And didn't just disperse this 3300 kilos of Pu by means of Skylabbing or Columbi-izing a few hundred space probes' worth of nicely-encapsulated RTGs, we dispersed it all by vaporizing it with giant-azz atomic bombs.

If there were any risk to public health posed by the (unlikely) re-entry of a failed space probe and the (even more unlikely) disintegration of a few pounds of Pu in an RTG on re-entry, we'd already be dead, hundreds of times over, because we've already had the worst-case scenario played out, hundreds of times over.

> but that doesn't matter to the general public.

Yeah, you're right, "that doesn't matter to the general public". Scientific illiteracy among the general public is the subject for another rant, another day.

While I think the Shuttle's a waste of time and money, I lament the end of manned space exploration, because when I was growing up in public school, I could at least dream of a day when I could board a rocketship and get away from these morons, forever.

End rant.

Hahaha! When I was working over at LANSCE (TA53) I walked into the beamline area and saw tiny figures down the "tunnel" that were over a mile away on both sides of me and had to stop for a second.... I realized I was IN Half-Life! It was the weirdest feeling.... BTW, This is the real "Black Mesa"

Get rid of BIOS...no more assembler, written in C...networking...graphics...LinuxBIOS?
Well...I'm skeptical about the GUI, I mean, Apple has had the GUI in ROM for years if I read the specs correctly, but, well, I'm just thinking about that glorified christmas tree^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HGUI that runs on too many PCs these days, I mean, you don't want to expand your ROM from 4MB to 4GB just because they wanted to embed Windows XP?

---
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done."
-- Linus Torvalds

3 second Linux-rom boots on PCs by replacing the BIOS ROM ... I can't seem to find them via google, though

Have you tried just putting Linux and BIOS into a Google query? First two results: The LinuxBIOS Home Page and Slashdot | Linux BIOS.

Is it that new? How about the linux bios? www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios

I think I would agree with what seems to be the majority view here ... more complexity leads to more potential areas of failure, however the idea of having a relatively low level OS that you could boot into to examine hardware / obtain drivers could be very useful. Sounds more like a good option, but not for everyday work.

Actually, there are several institutions that have a "photonic" system working. LANL and IBM are the two I can name off-the-top-of-my-head. I feel certain there are universities that have a research unit as well. I know that LANL has successfully transmitted a set of keys a length of 31 miles in 1999 and are currently working on free-space quantum cryptography system. The problem with current quantum cryptography equipment is that there is a limit to the distance a photon can travel through a fiber channel before being absorbed. I believe that the actual distance is approximately 65 km. However, I would encourage you to verify that number.

The most common use for quantum cryptography technology is, as a process for the transmission of the key pairs used to encrypt your data. Any attempt to intercept a key during transmission results in the keys destruction and the notification of the sender and receiver that their communication is being intercepted. The sender receiver can desist in sending a message until the transmission of their keys are successful. Imagine a future, where quantum encryption techniques are used to create sufficiently random and ridiculously large key pairs. However, all of this talk of crytography brings up an interesting thought on how to handle secrets; if more than one person knows your secret....then it isn't really a secret.

I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.

The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.

From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.

HTH,
Matas