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>>> The global response also affirms the prevalent use of DDoS attacks to distract as "smokescreens" in concert with other malicious activities that result in additional compromise Uh - DDoS as smokescreen for malicious activities? That required affirmation? http://wiki.cas.mcmaster.ca/in...

See this paper:

http://www.ece.mcmaster.ca/~hranilovic/woc/resources/local/spie2000b.pdf

So ranges greater then a few thousand meters can only be realized in extremely clear weather?

Everything you said is true, but you're forgetting things like crop failure, weapons maintenance, protection of your hunting grounds against intruders, etc.

FWIW, people on the average live a lot longer and are healthy for a lot longer under modern conditions than they were before urban living became the norm. (Say, 1860.) And people *then* lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with minimal urbanization. (Say 1600.) And people then lived a lot longer and were healthy for a lot longer than people with essentially no urbanization. (See Hobbs, The Leviathan http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaste... , "Nasty, brutish, and short" ).

SuperMongo (SM) has been doing something similar for many years, check their website.

"Free full text" but no link to download the PDF (at least, I don't see it). PDF: http://psych.mcmaster.ca/maure...

then you would trip on something you were not testing. There is a reason free software is pretty much free, it is imperfect. If you want perfect software, go in the aviation industry, where you might still end up with... http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~ba...

Thanks for your polite persistence in bringing these unpleasant facts home to me. I apologize for my intemperate language. As an admirer of Russell, I had no idea that he could ever have made such a horrible suggestion. Like so many other pure thinkers, it seems he had little understanding of human motivation and political realities. (however, I am still sure the idea of a preemptive strike based on game theory originated with von Neumann).

I found what seems a good and balanced summary here: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=russelljournal

Russell is quoted as saying he had supported appeasement in the 1930s but now (in the 1950s) could see that he had been completely wrong in the 1930s. But that did not seem to have suggested to him that he might be completely wrong again in the 1950s! It seems the main thing Russell and Einstein agreed about was that the USSR could not be left to its own devices - which is what happened, and led fairly soon to its downfall.

Next time I'll do my fact-checking first.

You have to use vector potential communications if you want to be able to transmit from a stealth fighters / bombers without the use of a conventional radio signal.

There are more variables in electromagnetism than you learned about in Maxwell's equations. They were edited out by Heaviside because they don't normally have any measurable effect in real world experiments. They only show up in things like a SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) used to detect faint magnetic fields. (The SQUID actually detects the A field, which the B field is the curl of).

Because the knowledge of these additional values (there were 20 original equations, all in quaternion notation) has pretty much been lost, we're missing out on a lot of cool tech. It's my hope that we pick these things back up as this becomes more widely known.

You can transmit a signal that no normal radio will pick up. It needs an actively powered plasma antenna to be received.

I'm sure this thread will have lots of blather about how hip hop lyrics are (not) valid artistic expressions.

To support your argument that Hip Hop follows a long tradtion:

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!

Beowulf (Prologue)

or

Yo! I know you heard of the Scyldings already
When battle went down, the kings were deadly, swords steady
Each one did whatever he said he
Would do, and to grab onto more glory was ready.
Scyld started their line, looked mighty fine
Just a baby found a-bobbin' in a boat
Grew great so kings gave him silver and gold

The Beowulf Rap

No time soon. Despite earlier signs, there has been no legitimate DNA recovery from the Mesozoic, the time of the dinosaurs. All the earlier discoveries from amber of that age have turned out to be bogus, as have claims of obtaining DNA from dinosaur bone (it was contamination). In fact, the story is the same for most younger examples too. The oldest legitimate DNA is no more than a few tens of thousands of years old, and very fragmentary. So, we may get information from mammoths, moas, and giant sloths of the Pleistocene, but apparently nothing from extinct dinosaurs. Check this paper [PDF] and this one [PDF] for short reviews, and this one for a longer review.

I second R, and would also suggest adding in R Commander. Adds a fairly usable GUI simplifying lots of common tasks, while maintaining the flexibility of R.

A point in physics is not the same as an idealized mathematical point. Point particle means it physical attributes live on the scale of the Plank length. Of course you are free to imagine the electron as a classical ball of charge but there are good reasons why physicist tend to no longer cling to that picture. It doesn't make sense to imagine a differentiated shape on a scale where space itself does not have a sub structure anymore.

Having a ball shape means that you have a cross section that you can actually probe - but that is exactly what is missing for point particles (and not for lack of trying).

In the context of the article the whole thing gets even more convoluted because the measurement was done on bound electrons in a molecule. These electrons are not localized and rather represent a charge distribution in a molecular orbital. It is the electrons charge that make the orbitals. Of course the latter themselves have higher order electric moments and all that was determined by the 10 years data gathering is that no intrinsic electron dipole moment contributes to them.

I've never understood the correlation between having a model next to anything, say a smartphone.

...

I know it's supposed to incite buying the object, but I don't see any link.

Some research which might be illuminating:

• Men Take More Risks When Pretty Women Are Around
• Pretty women make men shortsighted (based on this paper: Wilson & Daly: Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future?)
• Ariely & Loewenstein: The heat of the moment: the effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making

The LH2 tankers are well-designed and the drivers highly trained. Many years ago I worked for a major industrial gas company as a designer and had a chance to look at the engineering drawings for a new tanker they were buying. Very impressive. At the time the cost was US$ 1 million.

There was a hydrogen plant explosion a few years ago.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/2021228

http://www.mcmaster.ca/opr/html/opr/media/main/NewsReleases/2005/NR_bunce.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/3044.shtml

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524812.300-giant-eagle-evolved-in-record-time.html

WWII was basically caused by the war reparations demanded by the "winners" of WWI. WWI wasn't as clear cut as WWII; everybody was basically looking for an excuse for war and everyone was working under the assumption that there was going to be a war, so it's no surprise that one started.

It ended up being such a nightmare because both sides lost so many people that the governments were afraid that they'd be overthrown by their own people if they didn't "win" the war, so no one was willing to stop fighting.

Then the US decides to come in, and our assistance allowed France and the UK to declare themselves the winner, and to subjugate the axis countries to the point where they couldn't help but try it again in a few decades.

Lot of people actually saw it coming. Hell, J.M Keynes actually wrote a book that predicted WWII in 1919...It was one of the things that cemented his fame as a great economist.

I think it's safe to say though that Europe lost its taste for war after WWII. It basically ended their reign as world powers, cost them an entire generation of young men (the second in a row), and laid waste to the bulk of the fricking continent.

It's work for hire. By ordinary copyright law it's not yours. It's your employer's, unless you negotiate other arrangements. If you're working on the software for money it pretty clearly isn't yours any more than if you design and build a car at a factory. The manufacturer would probably object if you started driving cars off the lot or sold the engineering designs to other companies, right?

The only details that will matter is who you are negotiating with for better terms: the researcher, the university, someone else (e.g., granting agency), or all three. More than likely, it's the researcher, depending upon the contract they have with the university. You *must* find out what that arrangement is. That arrangement sometimes includes automatic perpetual licensing agreements with the university or sharing of royalties for patented inventions, and a variety of other complications even if the researcher "owns the IP" in a general sense. Generally, commercial == greater complication. It depends upon the university. Fortunately, NSERC isn't an issue. They don't lay claim to work done with the research funds.

Most researchers are going to be open to alternatives and will try to facilitate them for students, as long as they get to continue using the software they've paid to have developed. As other's have suggested, getting an agreement to a GPL, BSD, or similar license might be a way to ensure you can continue to do what you want with the code after your work finishes. But you've got to make sure that a researcher has the ability to allow that kind of licensing via their arrangement with the university.

Whatever you do, don't start the negotiations with an indignant attitude about the situation. Get this clear in your head: the rights you say have been stripped you probably did not have in the first place, if you were being paid for the job. You were operating with a misconception if you thought otherwise.

I looked around, and found this bit of information from McMaster University that might help. It describes a number of situations that can apply at a university (e.g., the difference between work for hire and work that students do in courses). It is likely there are many differences across the country, but it should give you some ideas about the usual situation.

Welcome to the harsh world of gainful employment, young researcher!

Or use them together: Use RExcel and RCommander.

http://mailman.mcmaster.ca/mailman/private/cdn-nucl-l/0712/msg00004.html or did we find more to use in microscopes and other things, like balloons?

What the hell are you on about? Load rejection or loss and a sudden shutdown without a nearly immediate restart can certainly result in Xe buildup requiring a delayed restart. Doesn't matter what caused it. I think the OP was just making the observation that the restart will take time, and will likely cost the utility $$$'s (esp. if they have to import power to meet baseload temporarily or fire up expensive peak assets).

for example -
http://mailman.mcmaster.ca/mailman/private/cdn-nucl-l/0309.gz/msg00002.html

You can call yourself a software engineer in Canada if you are, in fact, a software engineer.

I myself have a Bachelor's degree in Engineering (B.Eng) in the discipline of software that I obtained from McMaster University. These programmes are fairly new (only been around for about ten years) but they are accredited and graduates may go on to obtain their professional engineering license (P.Eng.).

Content of an undergraduate software engineering degree differs from a traditional CS degree in that there is typically a greater focus on development safety-critical systems, rigorous design, theorem-proving and testing, and cross-disciplinary engineering maths and sciences.

Dan.

Ugh. Now that I've read the Wikipedia article on "naked short selling", I'm probably going to have to edit it. It doesn't mention some of the real problems. "Naked short selling" creates fake stock, which is then purchased and owned by someone. And they can vote that stock. This can lead to more votes than there are shares outstanding.

The fake stock created by naked short selling is supposed to be replaced by buying real stock within 13 days. But that's not always happening. "Overstock.com" has had such fake stock outstanding for years, more fake stock than they actually have outstanding.

Here's a New York Times article that discusses the issue. Forbes has also written about this.

The top stocks with fake stock outstanding for long periods are:

• Overstock.com
• Martha Stewart
• Netflix
• Blockbuster
• Delta Airlines

I'm surprised to heat this as "news". We've had a functional solar-powered mesh at McMaster University for years, the product of a research lab: http://owl.mcmaster.ca/~todd/SolarMESH/ Although, even then, I'm surprised to find that this is worth a "research lab" ... it seems like a pretty obvious idea requiring things you can buy at Radio Shack.

No, you don't. Download Ubuntu (which is entirely free software), install onto a new MacBook (which uses the Intel 945GM), and it works, including accelerated 3d.

No binary drivers or daemons or extra downloads required.

If they were serious about the curriculum aspects, they might have looked just outside the U.S. and mentioned McMaster University's Software Engineering and Game Design program. Disclosure: I am involved with that program.

If they were serious about the curriculum aspects, they might have looked just outside the U.S. and mentioned McMaster University's Software Engineering and Game Design program. Disclosure: I am involved with that program.

Eivind.

This is an excellent question. The idea of objects like these comprising dark matter has been tested with the MACHO project ( http://wwwmacho.mcmaster.ca/ ) which attempts to detect objects like this through gravitational lensing events. Unfortunately, the data from this experiment seem to suggest that they don't comprise enough mass to explain Milky Way observations.

Having had malaria countless number of time, almost dying after doctors gave up on me and then barely making it

I'm curious. What did they try to treat you with? Apparently there is a plant based treatment (Sweet wormwood/Artemesian?) that does both prevention and cure and outdoes the conventional solutions but hasn't become widely known yet. Here is a powerpoint with some information: http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/biopharm/ppt/artemi s.ppt. My wife (who is an Herbalist) had us take the stuff while on a trip to Belize. It doesn't prove much but we didn't get Malaria :-)

An addendum of sorts - here is a link that will give you some more information regarding Dr Parnas. I just did a quick search for him on google - I haven't really thought about that project in *years*. And it was interested to see that the project I've been refering to is very near the top of his bio :-) http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/sqrl/parnas.homepg.html

McMaster University was established in 1887. Perhaps you need to do some research before knocking the place.

What exactly was found and where's the pictures?

http://www.mcmaster.ca/ua/opr/nms/newsreleases/200 5/rink.html says: "For nearly 80 years, Gigantopithecus blackii has intrigued scientists, who have pieced together a description using nothing more than a handful of teeth and a set of jawbones."

Sounds conclusive to me. Can't wait to see the detailed picture of the creature.

I don't know if John Locke or any others smoked pot but Thomas Jefferson along with other Founding Fathers grew hemp on thier farms:

Jefferson is credited with several inventions, including the swivel chair, a pedometer, a machine to make fiber from hemp, a letter-copying machine, and the lazy susan.

Cannabis was brought to America during the early colonial period. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both hemp farmers. During the early period of settlement of the New World, everyone owned or used something made of its fibers. Hemp fibers were known as the toughest durable fibers around. Hemp was even used as currency in some cases (Abel, 1982). But, Cannabis is mainly used as an illegal drug in the United States today.

The Monticello Textile Factory
Jefferson's annual goal was 1,200 yards of cloth woven from purchased cotton and wool and hemp produced on his farms. He never sought to make fine cloth; coarse cloth for the summer and winter allotments for the 130 slaves on the Monticello plantation was his only ambition.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine ...
In almost every article of defence we abound. Hemp flourishes even to rankness, so that we need not want cordage...

Ralph Waldo Emerson would be object to be categorized along with Ayn Rand.

Just as there are democrats who disagree with with each other and there are republican who do also not all libertarians agree on everything include Ayn Rand. I don't know much about Rand but some I agree with and others I disagree with. No it's my sister in my family that knows about her and she was very much a Randian. That is until she learned about Objectivism, as a Christian this turned her off. Fact is is that you don't have to be a Randian to be a libertarian.

Ooh here's something I found of John Locke's that mentions hemp:

To the Right Honorable Sir John Sommers
...
And a Swede will no more sell you his Hemp and Pitch, or a Spaniard his Oyl, for less Silver;

And with his sayings, John Locke wouldn't of liked laws outlawing hemp seeing as how he was very much a man of liberty and such a law abridges liberty.

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.
-- John Locke (1632-1704)

Falcon

Ooh and btw do you know where canvas for painters come from? It got it's name from cannabis. Here's a page listing some of the uses of hemp aka cannabis, Cannabis sativa L.

We are developping a Software Engineering and Game Design degree, which is getting under way this September. What would be, in your opinion, the most important skills and knowledge that students could be taught as far as being effective game programmers, designers, architects, etc?
Also, would someone from Blizzard Entertainment like to be on the Advisory Board for this programme?

We are developping a Software Engineering and Game Design degree, which is getting under way this September. What would be, in your opinion, the most important skills and knowledge that students could be taught as far as being effective game programmers, designers, architects, etc?
Also, would someone from Blizzard Entertainment like to be on the Advisory Board for this programme?

McMaster University has a software engineering and game design graduate program here.

It's not exactly graphics and visualization though.

Canada's a world leader in statistical image processing (identifying physical/chemical properties using images/NIR) which has wide-ranging applications in industry (Frito-Lay is using it to detect crunchiness and spiciness in Doritos), but I don't think the OP is looking into that....

I remember some years ago telling my niece and nephew about a book I was reading. It seems the main character, a fellow named Beowulf, liked to drink mead. When he wasn't doing that, he killed monsters.

They heartily approved.

...laura

Going offtopic a bit, but weren't "The Canterbury Tales" written around 1400? I concede it's not easily readable, but I would suggest Middle English is decipherable by literate and fluent Modern English readers with a little glossary work for words that have fallen from use.

Now, Old English, like Beowulf, yeah, that mystifies me.

I personally think DST is idiotic and pointless.

Here is a...semi-serious piece on it

http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller2005040 10806.asp

"Congress passed the first DST law in 1918 and repealed it the next year. Franklin Delano Roosevelt imposed year-round DST for three years during the Second World War. In 1966, Congress approved a uniform DST standard for the whole country. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had the nation go on DST for 15 consecutive months in order to conserve energy. The last president to modify DST was Ronald Reagan, who advanced DST's start date to the first Sunday in April."

"As Michael Downing points out in his new book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, urban businessmen were a major force behind the adoption of DST in the United States. They thought daylight would encourage workers to go shopping on their way home. They also tried to make a case for agriculture, though they didn't bother to consult any actual farmers. One pamphlet argued that DST would benefit the men and women who worked the land because "most farm products are better when gathered with dew on. They are firmer, crisper, than if the sun has dried the dew off." At least that was the claim of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, chaired by department-store magnate A. Lincoln Filene."

"We're also informed that DST helps conserve energy, apparently because people arriving home when the sun is still up don't switch on their lights. Didn't it occur to anybody that maybe they compensate by switching them on earlier in the morning? Moreover, people who arrive home from work an hour earlier during the hot summer months are probably more prone to turning up their air conditioners. According to Downing, the petroleum industry once was "an ardent and generous supporter" of DST because it believed people would hop in their cars and drive for pleasure -- and guzzle more gas.

But the very worst thing about DST is that it's bad for your health. According to Stanley Coren, a sleep expert at the University of British Columbia, the number of traffic accidents and fatal industrial mishaps increase on the Monday after we spring forward. The reason, presumably, is because losing even a single hour of sleep over the weekend makes a lot of people a bit drowsier on what we might usefully call Black Monday. Unfortunately, there's no compensating effect of a super-safe Monday as we go off DST and "fall back" in the autumn."

http://www.mcmaster.ca/inabis98/occupational/coren 0164/two.html

I know the software folks here on /. always want to make excuses about 'its hard' and 'its to complicated', but, it's actually not hard, and not to complicated. complex systems are designed and built every day in the aerospace field, systems that many lives depend on.

Which is precisely why there has never been a software glitch in a plane system. You know, like the TCAS system which saw ghost planes and told pilots to avoid them (noted in IEEE Spectrum), or any of the cases cited here or here. Nope, aerospace engineers never screw up.

We do deploy equipment into life critical situations, so, for our work, 'shit happens' and 'i forgot' just dont exist in the vocabulary.

Funny you should mention life critical because one well known software glitch was the THERAC-25 which killed 6 people due to 2 software bugs.

We use checklists to ensure that all testing covers all forseeable abnormal conditions, up to and including partial failure of various hardware.

Which means your software barfs in unforeseeable situations and in cases of full hardware failure. Thus, your software is not fail-safe at all. Welcome to the real world - shit happens whether you like it or not. The unforeseeable will eventuate and no matter how much redundancy you have it is still possible for all the systems to fail at once. Denying that that possibility exists is unprofessional and dangerous.

I agree that science is more policitized than many people think. But let me just add my two cents worth regarding pseudo-"black box" methods.

One of the reasons Neural Networks were viewed with some doubt was because of their "pseudo-black box" nature. Train it enough and you will get a model that gives you a good fit for your data, but you have no insight as to interpret the results, not least because you will almost never get the same model twice from the same data (the weights will be different every time you train them).

The neural networks idea sounded interesting because of the "cool" biological analogue it has with neurons firing in your brain (and it had interesting jargon to boot).

But if you look at its mathematical description it boils down to doing a simple regression/curve fitting with a limited nonlinear model that uses exponential functions (known in the NN community as "activation functions") like the sigmoid etc. (You can actually derive this if you write out the equations for a simple 1-2 layer neural network).

It spits out data that fits the curve, but tells you nothing about the correlations inside them. In the 1980s, people were attracted to it because of its simplicity and the fact that it seemed to be feasible way of mimicking a human's pattern matching abilities. It was all the rage back then. In the 1990s or so, people started to become aware of its weaknesses and began to look at it more circumspectly.

To give you an example, most credit card companies use Neural Networks to approve credit card applications. They pump your application data through a trained model (based on past classifications done by humans), and it spits out an "Approved" or "Not Approved" flag.

Unfortunately, you have no idea why a certain application is approved or not approved. A neural network model can't tell you that. It's only designed to give you an answer based on the its training weights, i.e. it only models the relationship between Y and X, and not the Y and X spaces themselves.

Instead, if you apply a multivariate statistical method such as PLS (via a NIPALS algorithm), the model will tell you how things are correlated (in a easy to interpret graphical fashion). It will pretty much be doing the same thing as the neural network, except that it models the X and Y spaces simultaneously, compensates for missing data by deriving from the correlation structures; all this by transforming the variables into a latent variable space that captures the maximum covariance in the data. All the equations are transparent and have a solid basis in the mathematics of linear transformations and projections.

And you get the same model each time, so it can tell you exactly why your credit card application was turned down. (Too many unpaid bills, for instance)

It is easy to become enamored of black-box methods (I know I was), but ultimately the methods that survive are the ones built on rigorous mathematical/scientific foundations. (not always possible, especially in areas like economics, but it is something to strive for)

Most ideas and theories get superseded over time, but black-box methods and theories produce the most controversies. Sometimes you can't blame the community for being a little skeptical of them.

That's why it's up to you, me, slashdot, and anyone else who cares about space travel, to make it clear to the public that "Nuclear" is not a dirty word. Odd as it may sound, two thirds of Americans are currently in favor of nuclear power! If we can keep that number rising, perhaps the public will finally ditch their ridiculous fear!

The main arguement for Yucca mountain is that it is a more "secure" place to put all this stuff, and is far away from a major population. But to GET it there, it will be made incredibly vulnerable to attack, and we'll be driving it through cities. Instead of spending all this money on one site whose solution is worse than our current problem, we should be spending it to make sure the sites we have are made more secure.

So, leave aside the difficulty and expense of trying to secure the material against terrorists in the present locations. Leave aside the fact that these facilities are at or beyond capacity already. Leave aside the security advantages to putting all the (bad) eggs in one basket, and REALLY guarding that basket. Fact: IT IS NOT HUMANLY POSSIBLE TO SECURE PRESENT STORAGE FACILITIES ON THE TIMESCALE REQUIRED AGAINST THE RELEVANT THREATS. Even God might find it a challenge. Such threats include not only the threat of terrorists, but natural disasters, and the inexorable passage of time. Furthemore, the threats must be dealt with without the assurance of human intervention to mitigate them!

From my time as an engineering student, and from my sister's work on the 10000 year hydrology model while she was at the NRC, I am far more familiar with the project than the average layman. I am familiar with most of the objections raised by opponents, including the transportation risks, internal security questions, auditability, questions about geologic and hydrologic instability, and the issue of whether even 10000 years is long enough. I even agree with many of them.

To each of them, I respond: the current "solution" is a greater and far more immediate danger, and for the forseeable (~100 year) future THERE IS NO BETTER SOLUTION POSSIBLE (... unless you propose the United States annex Australia; there's a very nice deserted section of the Outback that has better long term geology and hydrology, but the Aussies are understandably not too keen on that).

Yucca mountain may be a flawed plan. In fact, you can even say it sucks in many respects. In fact, I'll do it for you: "The Yucca Mountain plan sucks in many respects." However, I've never heard anyone who objected to it who could seriously present a better, safer, and more "secure" one. Most suggestions consist of saying "These folks made the waste, they should solve the problem; not my problem, and certainly Not In My Back Yard!" While such insistance provides a good method (leaving aside the "all power corrupts but we need the electricity" problem) for shutting down further nuclear construction and thereby eliminating new nuclear waste, it does not solve the problem that already extant wastes represent to all of us. If you have a suggestion for improvement, fine; but if it's not an improvement, you've made a stupid suggestion.

So, what's your plan for preventing waste release for the next 10000 years?

My biggest mistake was dropping Slackware into my CD drive and turning my computer on (all by accident!). Now, I spend myself tinkering with configuration files, downloading programs from Sourceforge, reading man pages, and generally wasting my time.

To quote the Lego Guy quoting British highbrow Bertrand Russell, "Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted time". I kid, I don't consider it wasted time.

Unfortunately, I've screwed systems up so bad so many times over the few years that I've been using Linux that I can't list them. I know that almost every single one of them was fixable had I backed up the file I was screwing with. I think after a year or so of increasing knowledge and increasingly devastating screw-ups that comes with increasing awareness, I've finally learned to back up my files with regularity.

All new Linux users, pay heed, back up your files! man tar. :)

Then, read James Lowen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong_ to see how your mind has unknowingly been filled with nationalist and consumer crap (despite your technical proclivities). Also check out Howard Zinn. Learn to live simply and frugally so you have more options:

If you have started doing all that, by now you are primed to begin to question what education really means.

And further, to even question why people need to work and what it should mean to do useful things.

You'll have time to read great minds like Bertrand Russel and Freeman Dyson.

Then you can accept you are still stuck in a stupid system.

But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a made better place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.

Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?

And, finally, for continual inspiration, read _Voyage From Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan.

Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).

I am a McGill alumnus, so I am biased...

There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.

See this article on McGill University for an idea. Many of the alumni are household names in the U.S.

Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.

The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.

Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.

Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).

So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.

In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.

But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.

Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.

(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)

People are definitely aware of Linux, at least in Canada..

A group at my university, is offering beginner Linux seminars (complete with Knoppix). And from what I understand, the entire faculty of software engineering is also running Linux (needed for some of their courses!).

People are definitely aware of Linux, at least in Canada..

A group at my university, is offering beginner Linux seminars (complete with Knoppix). And from what I understand, the entire faculty of software engineering is also running Linux (needed for some of their courses!).

Veblen's businessperson makes profits not by providing an outlet for the forces of industrialization and social evolution but by distorting them: by engaging in monetary manipulations, by restricting output to keep prices artificially high, and by interfering with the engineers who actually produce goods and services.

Microsoft is a classic example of this. One would be pressed to think of a single innovation from Redmond.

Your logic is flawed on this front.

Caffeine falls into a category of drugs called methylxanthines which have many varied effects. One of these effects is to act on cerebral blood vessels causing them to constrict. This constriction does have relief effects for headaches, since the vast majority of headaches (including stress headaches and migranes) are due, at least in part, to dilation of the small blood vessels in the head and the inflammation this dilation causes. This is one of the reasons that Excedrin has caffeine (another being that caffeine increases your metabolic rate, causing the aspirin to begin acting faster).

However, that has absolutely nothing to do with withdrawal headaches. Caffeine is a mildly-addictive drug, and the mechanism of this dependence is well-known (see here or here). Headaches are a common side-effect of withdrawal, and are even more common than normal in caffeine withdrawal (ever hear of weekend headaches?).

PLEASE: for the sake of everyone who reads Slashdot, do not spread misinformation. Please mod parent down.