Domain: missouri.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to missouri.edu.
Comments · 153
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Re:What a strange filename
That's as myopic and obtuse a statement in defense of "security through obscurity" as I think I've ever seen. Using abasing terms, no less. You fit right in with the PATRIOTic culture!
Hear me now, believe me later: full disclosure is vitally important, and not only to computer security
.Here, comrades, I present to you "good citizen" akmed!
Don't tell him anything you wouldn't tell a cop, though...or your doctor, or your barber, or the waiter, or the barkeep, or the bus driver... [oh, wait, that last group won't be a threat until 2006].
P.S. I surely hope you're not studying to become an IP attorney, or a privacy advocate - though there seems precious little chance of that (bit of luck there, what?).
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Re:Who the hell is paying her? ...Here's a start: White Pages , with addresses and phone numbers.
There appear to be two addresses for Heather MacDonald in New York, NY (her bio says she lives and works there, so perhaps those are the two addresses).
Clicking on the "Find out more about Heather Macdonald" link, it says the resident at both addresses is 28 years old. From her picture in the bio link, it appears that this could be her (she looks to be in her 30s but perhaps all that negative thinking has taken a toll on her appearance).
I tried finding the address of the Manhattan Institute from their web site, but it appears not to be listed. Another Google search ("Manhattan Institute address") found the following page with their address on it, which differs from the two previous addresses, so apparently Ms. MacDonald owns two residences.
Here are maps for both locations .
Note that this took all of a 5-minute search (it is taking longer to write this post than it took to do the digging).
Now, if I wanted to do more damage I could follow the "Search Public Records" link from the White Pages page. This allows you to download Online Detective 3.0, which allows you to search various databases (marriage/divorce, criminal records, DMV records, social security number traces, federal/state records, driver's license reports, asset search, and more). I downloaded this and installed in a roll-backable VM (trust noone) and nowhere on the site does it mention this but (as I assumed) you have to pay for the service. However, for just $9.95 I could have access to the service for 1 day. Imagine the kind of damage you could do in 24 hours, for under ten bucks.
She's gotta be out of her freakin' mind when she says we don't need to worry about privacy. I suppose she has a point -- why worry about what the government can do, when for under ten bucks any Tom, Dick or Harry can do it themselves?
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Re:riight
We just see you putting a**holes like Saddam and the Taliban in power in the first place
I'm not sure we can take "credit" for Saddam Hussein getting into power, although we can certainly take credit for providing some assistance in making Weapons of Mass Destruction(TM).
Didn't you guys back the Shah of Iran, and Khomeni, and Ferdinand Marcos and
...Khomeini? No, I don't think so.
Carlos Castillo Armas? Yes.
Augusto Pinochet? Probably.
And the US has never used it's economic power to force other countries to revise their economies in tune with American interests instead of their own self interest. (Can we say landmine treaty boys and girls? I knew you could!)
I'm not sure how the US not signing the land mine treaty involves forcing other countries to revise their economies; that sounds more like a case of the US applying pressure for "structural adjustment" through the IMF.
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Just an opinion.
I think that these state based no-call lists are just a money grab. Last year Missouri made about 1 million dollars off of fines (here's a small play by play - we went after Miss Cleo!). Yeah, I know, it's not much in a government budget, but that was after the first year and not many people had signed up.
After that 'success', Attorney General Nixon announced his desire to start a No-Spam list, which is kind of silly but it does give the state another group of people to fine. A pretty large group, assuming that they're actually ever able to hunt a spammer down. Granted, it doesn't cost me anything and I have received substantially fewer telemarketing calls (but a lot more calls with silence on the other end...) and I'm not complaining, but what's the real point of this? And why now? This could've been started years ago. Why the sudden push? Anyone else? -
Privacy irony & national securityNote that the FBI, charged by so many with violating people's privacy in every way imaginable, here dropped the ball by bring too cautious about someone's privacy.
You can't win -- bungling cuts both ways.
Anyone wonder why the heck the Minnesota FBI office went to Washington for a piddly search warrant, instead of their friendly local court? Because this was not an ordinary warrant, but a national security warrant designed to investigate suspected terrorists who might not have committed any crime to provide probable cause for a regular warrant. (You know, like Minority Report. OK, it's not that bad. :)
It will be interesting to see who gets blamed once all of the finger-pointing is over.
From NYT by James Risen*:
According to Ms. Rowley's letter and other bureau officials, the Minneapolis field office believed that the French report on Mr. Moussaoui provided enough troubling information about his ties to Islamic extremism to go to court to obtain a search warrant under the federal law that allows the government to carry out searches and surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases. Under the statute, investigators do not have to show that a subject committed a crime, only that they have reason to believe the suspect is engaged in terrorist activity or espionage on behalf of a foreign power or a terrorist organization.
* Another little note -- James Risen with Jeff Gerth were the NYT reporters blamed with stoking the fire over Wen Ho Lee debacle. Of course, lots of people were blamed -- sound familiar? -
All State FOI Laws
I looked around a bit and found this helpful list of all state Freedom of Information laws.
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Re:A little context for the Soup Marbles
A quick search on Google will find this and this andthis as three of the top four results...
You may find that the "truth in advertising" regulations might have come into effect after several companies were caught trying such tricks. There have been many documented cases where advertisers have been even more deceitful than simply putting marbles in a bowl of soup.
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Re:I can do that for a fraction of the cost......
For anyone wanting to go the x10 route instead of this hyped up x10 replacement, check out bottlerocket and BlueLava. Set up a linux server as secure as you want, access it from your handheld, phone, desk, etc. You can probably put it on a port that you broadband provider doesn't block. Or hack it run over email.
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There may be a reason......
If the daf-2 gene has the same effects in fruit flies and mice (and presumably humans), and it controls two separate pathways (reproduction and longevity) in all those organisms, there may be a good reason why the linkage between the two systems is preserved across millions of years of evolution.
Suppose longevity is limited in order to make room in the ecosystem for the next generation, so that older critters (with damaged DNA, or an inability to reproduce) don't crowd out the young?
If only a few young survive, then there may not be enough to perpetuate the species.
Perhaps the two systems are linked because when the link is lost, the species dies out, because there are not enough resources to support both an aged population and a large enough reservoir of young reproductively active critters to ensure against decline?
Is this the whimper that T. S. Eliot wrote about?
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Press Release
The University of Missouri has also released a press release concerning the experiment.
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Press Release
The University of Missouri has also released a press release concerning the experiment.
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Ed Tech
My personal experience echoes what others have said - you'd think that Ed. Tech programs would be paragons of technical literacy themselves, but alas. (My alma mater UW is a case in point.)
For my masters' degree, I chose a long-running distance program at GWU; sort of putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak. I'm looking forward to starting next week, and hope the dialogs are up-to-date and up to my expectations. Other programs I considered were Pepperdine, MU, and Boise State
Another resource to check out of course is ISTE, and I'm sure there are others like it.
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Re:iChatBot, fairly well known IM bot since 8/11/2
I wrote my IM bot in April of 2000:
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~markrages/static/everybu ddy.php3 -
Re:when you are too lazy to hit google
Google helps you find stuff. Google does not give you informed recommendations from your peers. Duh.
Google search for "SSH Secure Services on Windows 2K" (cut and paste job from article title, leaving off /XP)
Result number ten is called "How to setup SSH service on an Windows NT\2000 system." using cygwin etc.
So there. -
Mark of the Beast
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Re:as someone who grew up in arkansas
all this was made by a redneck without a college education. hell i dont even think he had a highschool education.
Sam Walton graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1940.
Guess what school I go to.
Ian -
Re:St. Louis area?
Anyone interested in a Moz party in the St. Louis, MO USA area?
Won't everybody be heading out to Columbia instead? OK, so everybody who wants to come, send email to the MLUG mailing list, and maybe something will happen.
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Re:Something seems off here...Exactly - from the article: The researchers emphasize they are not saying there is no limit to the rise in life expectancy. "There may or may not be some limit at some advanced age -- it is impossible to tell given current empirical data and theoretical knowledge," added Vaupel. "What is clear is that there is no limit that we are about to bump up against."
In other words we're a long way from reaching the limit to life span - which is important for policy makers and actuaries. But, this does not mean that there is no limit to life span, in the absence of other interventions. In fact, life span has a significant genetic component which has been studied in a lot of different organsms, like fruit files and worms where lifespan is controlled by the daf gene family.
In the worm case, it's not the accumulated insults of living that cause death, instead it's like throwing a switch. Alter the switch and you alter life span without changing quality of life. What causes the daf genes to get activated is still not well understood, but it might relate to the timing of having progeny
... after the worms reproduce they tend to die off, while mutant long lived worms tend to put off reproduction. Here are some labs working in aging research) -
Thank youThat was a great answer, I have to say. Now I'm not so sure we think all that differently. Well... Almost.
Well, not really. To be honest, that's what the whole model of western society is built upon. The notion of capitalism, at least in a pure sense, involves profiting by dominating and control environments.
You're absolutely right. And I believe, if the economic system we have didn't exist, there would be almost no room for things like pornography (or environment pollution, or stealing, war or etc. etc.) merely because the incentive wouldn't exist. My one wish is to end that system (Capitalism) in its current incarnation. But that's another topic altogether...I promised myself that when I got out of school, that I would NEVER take a job in the defense industry. But still, talking to people there made me wonder. What happens if there is a hippocratic oath for programmers? What happens to the thousands of programmers who create missiles to kill people?
I'm not sure what you're asking, but I think you're saying "what will they do for work?" That's another economic issue, and I think it is best answered by once again... changing the economic system. I (and people of my thinking) believe that our military budget is really high for a specific reason. Our meaning the U.S., assuming that's where you live. Our defense budget is $385 billion a year currently. That's more than the budgets of all the rest of the world combined. Are we so much in danger? Do we really need to spend that much money on defense? Where does it all go? My answer is, that money is spent in the budget because it continues economic prosperity (in the way of jobs for the military personnel, production and jobs for the defense contractors) and keeps the rest of the population at bay. If that money were spent on other things (education and educational institutions, reformation of the prison system, treatment programs instead of being arrested for drugs, job training and education instead of welfare, etc. etc.), the majority of our populous would become too educated and too empowered, and would turn the tide of the ruling class and the "military industrial complex". I know, I've completely over-simplified this, but you get the point. There is no need to spend $385 billion a year on the defense budget. If those military jobs didn't exist (including your programmer ex-co-workers), then it would release a whole legion of people into the open workforce, and a lot more money (the unused portion of the $385 billion would end up having to go elsewhere, such as the programs I hinted on). These military people could work in these other jobs instead. We already have a crisis on our hands with regards to a nurse shortage all across the country, and especially in California. We have a coming crisis with a lack of K-12 teachers. Many of the teachers we have are already overburdened. There are plenty, plenty of options for employing people. The options just don't tend to make as much money for the ruling class. This is an issue that can be studied for years (I'm still working on it), so I can't go into so much detail right now. But you get the idea. The programmers could be employed doing something else, and especially in a different economic system, where priorities are redirected.But getting back on topic, I don't really feel sorry for them. I can't. Because out of the times that I've visited this studio, and met any porn star, they're usually quite outgoing and happy. I guess that's the image I always see with them, and not any of the humiliation videos or mock-rape, or anything like that.
Well, that's fantastic insight. Unfortunately, I only have impersonal evidence to base my thinking on. I hear programs on the radio, read things here and there, read and think about philosophy, but I have no hands-on conversations to go by. I wish I did.I think that I'm a little bit too obsessed with helping myself, and making sure I make the right choices. One of these days (the next time I go in there and see a pornstar there), I'd really like to ask him/her the question, "Why?"
I have the same obsession. And I completely respect that quality in you. But, I also have an obsession to "save the world". I know... It's gonna end up driving me crazy ;-) But on the other hand, Ghandi seemed to hold himself together. And he's my biggest role model lately. If you do get a chance to talk with one or a few of these people, I would love to hear about it. You don't have to name names, that would be too personal. But all the same. Maybe you could post a story about it on K5? Cause I know it's not something that would go on /.It's kind of ironic trying to justify morality in an economic system that is blind to it.
I agree. I think by now you understand what I think about that system. But, since I'm living inside that system right now, the best I can do is make economic choices that oppose the moral choices I disagree with. It's the best thing we can do as a society, too (boycotts are based on this notion, and some people lately are advocating buying shares of stock in companies, then getting voting power, then changing their policies from the inside... there are other subversive methods to work inside the economic system to change it).For instance, most of my friends that I've known throughout high school and college experimented with drugs. It was never anything really secretive. Most of my friends usually offered me some as a polite gesture. I was never really offended or anything like that. And I never did take them up on their offer.
Too bad ;-)I've found that I prefer all those "bad options" and "bad paths" to be there along the good ones in life. Because at least that way, I don't have to keep wondering what I would have done if the option was there.
How very Zen Buddhist of you :-)The strangest thing about having any sort of affiliation with them is that my outlook on women went exactly the opposite way I thought it would go. I thought I would start seeing women entirely as objects and nothing else.
Well, I'm actually not surprised that this happened. That's because you met the actual woman, whereas the casual porn viewer merely sees impersonal images on a screen. It's good that you met them, I think.But there comes a point where you see so much of it that there's no stimulus to it anymore. Porn has never particularly appealed to me. But seeing so much of it pretty much killed off all the things that it's supposed to trigger.
Well, it's always had stimulus to me, but I kept exploring new things, because I was desensitized to the old things. I think maybe that's what drives the market for the crazier and crazer shit (no pun intended) that we're seeing nowadays. Finally one day I realized that I wasn't living up to my own ethical philosophies, and had to cut all of it out. I'm glad I did. I have a lot more free time now :-) For people like myself, you can never see enough, you keep searching for more and more and new girls, and different weird stuff. Finally, you realize it's like a drug. There is no amount you can possibly take that will fill the hole in you. All it does is create a larger hole.I don't stand speechless and stare at any voluptuous woman that enters the room. I don't envision just sex anymore, it doesn't really do. There has to be someone behind the fantasy, or else it doesn't work. They're just another "picture on the monitor", even if I'm standing right before them, if I don't know anything about them.
Congratulations. You're more enlightened than 90% or more of all men. My hat's off to you.I wish it worked that way for everyone who gets an overdose of it. You start learning that sex isn't the goal of everything. That there are better things to talk about, and better things to pursue.
You also learn that the last thing a beautiful woman wishes to be called is beautiful
Bet your ass! My girlfriend right now is a knockout (at least I think so). One of the things I've learned from her is, guys are essentially really dumb :). Try complimenting her personality instead. *laughs* :-) The best they can generally come up with when approaching her (and from what I get, it never stops for her) is "you're really pretty". Gee. I've never heard that before. Let's go have sex! Incidentally, I'm the guy with the black skull hat, not the feather guy :-)I've never really seen pornography as that evil, though. It's not so much the act of having sex that I see as bad, but the way that people use what they see.
I somewhat agree. I absolutely agree that the act of sex is not bad. It's a very good thing. But what pornography does is to change our attitudes towards sex (subconsciously). So I don't like it. I also don't like it because of the women involved, but I'll never prove that...Ok, this is getting really long now, I'll end it. Take care...
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Re:The principle (sic) concept eludes meThe above post is both insiteful and erudite, but the plan described is especially good against the tsetse fly because of its reproduction strategy.
Most insects shield the next generation from predation using a strategy of sheer numbers. Most of their offspring end up a meal for something else, but a few win the survival lottery and make it to sexual maturity to carry on the next generation.
The Tsetse fly is uses a different strategy: its females produce one progeny at a time, carrying the larva internally through three of its four stages of development, releasing it only to let it pupate and emerge as an adult.
According to this page: , the 'sterile male' technique had been tried before, with little success. The technique described here must be a refinement. In any event, the successful implimentation of the sterile male technique for reduction/eradication of the tsetse fly is especially strong in that it turns one of the fly's strengths (the female's investment in their young) into a weakness.
Extinction is an ugly word, but considering the suffering that the tsetse has brought about since time out of mind, I for one would welcome any reasonable chance to see it go have tea with the passenger pigeon and the dodo. -
Re:Evolutionary balance?Evolution has nothing to do with the differential survival of species, and everything to do with that of genes (individual organisms and close relatives, by extension).
Here's a nice quote on the subject from something I just Googled up:
Recall "suicidal" lemmings. Early biologists believed that lemmings (a) practice mass suicide and (b) that this trait is an adaptation benefiting the group. They reasoned that if the lemming population exceeds the carrying capacity of the local environment (if they exhaust food supplies) that the group will become extinct. To prevent group extinction, lemmings kill themselves. The gene for mass suicide is an adaptation benefiting the group to the disadvantage of the individual.
Richard Dawkins has written about this common misconception at length.This explanation has several problems. First, lemmings don't kill themselves. They migrate to new areas. They are excellent swimmers. By swimming across fjords in groups, an individual lemming is less likely to be swallowed by predators (safety in numbers).
Second, a gene for suicide will not persist. Vehicles (lemmings) with the suicide gene do not reproduce?they kill themselves. In a population of lemmings with suicide genes, consider that a non-suicidal mutation would be very successful. If some lemmings refrain from killing themselves, they would be reproduce more than suicidal individuals and nonsuicidal genes would quickly predominate.
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Re:schools and payment
Most public universities has not grown by much more than 20% in the past 40 years. Many of these same schools have not increase their teaching staff sizes in many fields in that entire time. Most of thouse schools are running with a admin staff that is huge compared with what was needed 40 years ago. For example in 1996 Univ Missouri Columbuia hired 18,204 people (1,599 were faculty). Compare that to the 22,356 students they had enrolled. Its got a hostpital that changes the ratio a bit but most schools are way out of line with the size of admin staff.
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Re:Here's an odd question...
But here's an odd question: why don't the Vietnamese hate the US (in general, on average)?
A good question. I don't know a lot about Vietnamese culture, but I suspect there are several factors. For one thing, the US occupied the south without too much razing and pillaging. If US forces had behaved like the Japanese occupation of Nanking the situation would be different. Another big factor is that the government after withdrawal was fairly rational and progressive, unlike Pol Pot or Chairman Mao. A moderate communist government that isn't a blatant tool for Moscow is not such a bad thing. Yet another factor is that they prevailed in battle. There's also the fact that many of the extremists and nutcases got themselves killed. -
Re:Linux has a strange market
I agree. I've done the Kylix tutorial, and I do not really like Delphi.
I have C++ Builder on Windows and it is a very nifty program. Once it is out for Linux I'll be able to port my game without any changes, if what they say is true.
Once there is a C++ version, and *nix people start learning it, I think it will start being more popular, -
this _IS_NOT_ new.Anyone who's involved with a unversity has been dealing with this sort of thing for years.
Enyclopedia Britanica and many other research sites restrict by IP address, so universities have had to set up authenticating reverse proxies, so that some faculty member/student who's dialing up from home can still access the information.
The fact that this is moving to places other than the education front might be interesting, but I'm guessing that as it's been done on the education front for 6+ years, that the only real news is that someone's willing to set themselves up as mediators.
For more information about reverse proxying, take a look at
http://web.missouri.edu/~engjudy/proxyservers.htm
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Re:X10I haven't used it myself, but I think that people have been using X10 devices with linux for quite some time:
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/
is the bottlerocket homepage. Searches on freshmeat and sourceforge will turn up other packages, I think.
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Re:We won't do that
We think helping GNU parted to get ready is a much nicer way to address this problem.
That would be great. But I have been wondering why parted gets so little recognition these days. When last I used it (to resize a FAT32 partition on an IBM Thinkpad), it Just Worked, which shocked me, considering that nobody in our well-informed Linux users group (MLUG) had apparently ever tried to use it, despite the fact that the "non-destructive resizing" question is a true FAQ.
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Re:DSL v. cable
In my experience, unless your ISP artificially throttles back your available bandwidth, most people will find cable to be significantly faster than DSL. The concept of "shared" bandwidth is lost because in the end, everyone's sharing bandwidth from someone (even DSL). I would venture to say that unless you live in a heavy tech corridor, where all your neighbors have cable modem, you will not likely feel the pinch.
I live in Columbia, Missouri, which is at the high point of one of the largest geek concentration gradients you'll ever see (the university is here, but outside of town you're talking about 80 miles of crops in every direction). Unfortunately, the total number of geeks is not so high that we have chronic bandwidth shortages by Boston area standards, but, whenever the issue comes up on the Mizzou Linux Users Group mailing list, the eventual verdict is that cable modems provide much higher potential bandwidth (e.g., up to 3500kbps), but are much more likely to experience unscheduled down time, at least so far.
Before @Home started throttling upload bandwidth, there were more frequent bandwidth issues apparently due to the presence of many servers that aren't technically allowed by @Home but which were tolerated.
Additionally, cable appears to be more readily available, and is cheaper than DSL access for the amount of bandwidth you get.
With taxes and other dorkiness, the second 12 months of @Home is like $41.96 in our market; I haven't tried to get a better rate from them by threatening to hop onto DSL...yet.
:-) In part because DSL is no cheaper at its cheapest, yet has no bandwidth advantage at all. -
Re:Found two TN3270 clientsYep. My school uses a java version for allowing students to access some of thier records.
look at: this location.
don't know that it will help, but it does exist.
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Re:This should finally kill the new eugenics
The research is pretty clear that there is a genetic component to many aspects of behavior. For example, twin studies have shown a genetic component to bipolar disorder. There is a 57% concordance of bipolar disorder in monozygotic twins, and a 14% concordance in dizygotic twins. Other behaviors linked to genetics include attention deficit, dyslexia, and male homosexuality.
However, most behavior is influenced significantly by non-genetic factors that we don't understand...the other 43% non-concordance of bipolar disorder in monozygotic twins, for instance. In addition to that, there are very few behaviors that are dependent on a single gene mutation alone (Huntington's disease is the only one I can think of).
For a good understanding of where we stand today with behavioral genetics, check out Toward Behavioral Genomics.
Many people link behavioural genomics with racism, but this is incredibly bogus. The strongly conserved genes that make up "racial identity" are limited to those evolved for survival in different environments (too much UV, not enough UV, etc.) Within the "races", there is plenty of genetic diversity and a wide range of different behaviors.
Two things are for sure: if government becomes involved in how parents determing the genetic makeup of their children, there will be trouble.
Secondly, there will be widespread access by parents to this kind of genetic behavioral information, and potentially mechanism to alter the genome of their child. Government won't be able to stop that, it will make the war on drugs look winnable. Reproduction is an exceedingly emotional subject, look at the abortion debate for example. -
I think it's a good idea but...
I think this idea is very good. I think that most of the comments agree on one thing though : Stallman's article doesn't give enough details on the practical side to make it seem real. He (as usualy) defends the ethical side of the problem, and rightly enough describes the way the content should be free (speech) but he leaves a huge blank area in the field of the practical (and technical) implementation of GNUpedia.
I think that Internet and the Open Source community is somehow ready to start such a project (and I don't think it was the case anytime before).
What we need to make it real is a deep deep thinking on the technical/practical side of it. And while we are here, why not talk about how you would technically do it ? I mean, /. readers are probably the most qualified to talk/think about this if not to implement it themselves...
Here is how I would see it : I think that what we realy need in terms of encyclopedia is something that would sit between Shaslcode and QuestionExchange. Something where anyone could post comments, articles, pictures and all the shit, but where every willing people could also judge the pertinence of the content. Say for example that this article is a troll, this other one is "insightfull" and so on. People could also say "this article was usefull to my knowledge". So we would have two level of moderation : one on the "editorial scale" (troll/interesting), and one on the content quality/usefullness.
Why ? Because I think that Stallman is right on one point at least : it needs to be completly free (speech) to be interesting. Doing else would be doing something that has already be done (say britanica for example) and that perhaps doesn't need to be done again.
Making GNUpedia an "open to any post" system is a nice idea, but it also implies that we will have to face A LOT of content submissions. Even if we wanted to create an "editorial board" to decide what would be included and what would not (which we cannot if we want to remain free as in speech) it would be too much work for (volunteers) individuals to "separate the good from the evil".
So what we need is a system that allows anybody to feed it with his/her particular bit of knowledge, and them let the individual reader make the content "worth reading" by moderating it up or down.
Then, after a while, we might (might) have something interesting for anyone. In that case I'm sure it would be the greatest success of Open Source movment (aren't we talking about free knowledge, free information since the very beginning of Open Source ?)
Another thought I have too : why make it web (http) based ? Any rational reason for it ? I think we have now in our hands a better technical way to do it : why not build it as a peer-to-peer network (based on this or that) with a client/server program using Gecko to render the documents ? What do you think ? That was my 2 cents worth thoughts...
PS : Please forgive the english, it's not my mother tongue. -
The Japanese were partially to blame.
Really. I feel I must point out a problem with that.
The Japanese will often use Hiroshima and Nagasaki as devices for pity. It is often overlooked that Japan needed to be stoped as a military prescene in East Asia. Why do you think the Chinese and Koreans hate the Japanese? Maybe you might want to read into subjects like Japan's takeover of Manchuria, and the Rape of Nanjin.
Hell, read about it here: Click me!
Now, does this justify the A bomb? I don't want to be a troll, so I'll leave that to the philosophers.
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Re:VOTE VOTE VOTE or LEAVE and pay taxes elsewhereModeration Totals:Troll=1, Total=1.
...
You forgot to mention the international zionist conspiracy.
Okay; the post wasn't a troll, and isn't simply conspiracy theory, and to attempt to equate it to some kind of racist mentality is just wrong.. Pick up any economics textbook and read up on Fractional Reserve Banking. Here are some slides used in Economics classes at Ohio State. Try a class from Missouri. Or Colorado. Or Columbus State. Don't like those? Try the Britannica. Go the the Fed's website and read about how it works (prepare for reading a LOT). Read about expansion of the money supply in "Money Supply for Dummies ". Pick up a copy of William Greider's Secrets of the Temple -- his book was issued to MBA students at the MIT Sloan School of Business and describes the process which I outlined in my post. For another view, refer to the words of Representative Jack Metcalf.
You can even read the words of a Fed Chairman (William Poole, President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis):
Before 1933, the Federal Reserve did conduct monetary policy by adhering to an external standard-the gold standard. Now, the U.S. dollar is pure fiat money, whose purchasing power is determined by the Fed's decisions and their interactions with the U.S. and world economies.
America DOES have debt-based fiat money, and the elimination of debt eliminates money. It is that simple.
a highly inflationary tax cut,
Now that is an interesting state of affairs. Letting citizens keep their own money is inflationary. He have to take it away via taxes to "save the economy" from the ravages of inflation. Has anyone stopped to think that inflation exists because of hte federal reserve? Inflation is actually devaluation of the currency, and is a consequence of there being "too much money" available. Of course, the reason there is too much money available is because the fractional-reserve banking system, lead and controlled by the Federal Reserve, has created too much money. The Fed buys government debt and gives the treasury credits in its Fed accounts. This acts as "reserves" for lending and as backing for the issusance of currency. It is money created from nothing. Commercial banks borrow money at the Discount Window at the Fed -- again, a debt-for-credit swap. This creates more money out of nothing. Banks make more loans based on deposits and Discount Window loans, making more money from nothing.
The sad thing is, because the U.S. has had a debt-based monetary system since 1933 (and earlier, but only partially), we can never get out of debt because it would destroy the money supply. Before the advent of debt-based money, there was usually little debt on national, corporate or personal scales (wars excepted; they simply printed money to finance early wars). 70% of all business growth was self-financed (financed without borrowing from banks) in the 20s. The Fed put a stop to that by offering loans at below market rates with money created out of thin air.
To pay off the national debt, we will first have to switch back to a commodity-based money system, such as the original silver-backed money system. Commodity money systems don't let the government inflate the money supply at will. The other thing we'd have to do is reform banking. Banks should protect your money, offer useful services, and charge fees for doing so. If you want to invest your money, then do that. Currently, a bank invests 97% or more of your money when you deposit it. This is what causes bank runs; if more than 3% of depositors want to withdraw their money, the bank runs out, because it's given it away to other people. Essentially, when you deposit money at a bank, the bank issues to several people the right to withdraw it. It does this by telling you that you can get it back out, and then loaning the very same money to someone else, who immediately withdraws it to pay for their house or whatever. If the bank runs low on "liquid funds," it borrows from another bank. It may also borrow from the Fed's Discount Window. All the loaning out of the money promised to depositors creates more money on the fly. This process gets recycled several times. I borrow $100k to buy a house. I deposit it at my bank to pay for the construction. The bank then loans it back out to someone else. I write checks; the builder deposits them; his bank loans the money out. Repeat. Because of reserve-fraction regulations made by the Fed, this process has a terminus; but it creates nine dollars for every dollar put into the system (approximately). This is the deposit multipler.
Not a troll. Just the facts.
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Try them!
I think it's a neverending debate because the good question is not "Which one is better as a first language?" The question you should ask yourself is "Which one is better for me?"
I found Python to be better suited for me, and of course I'm trying to convert everyone to Python. But I know there are (lots of) people who prefer Perl.
So, here is my unofficial "Choose between Perl and Pyhton in 2 days" guide:
Day 1
Download and install
Python at http://www.python.org/download/ http://www.perl.com/pub/lang uag e/info/software.html
Download/Browse/Print (whatever suits you) some tutorials
Python at http://www.python.org/doc/current /tu t/tut.html
Perl at http://ww w.c clabs.missouri.edu/things/instruction/perl/perlcou rse.html
Rest of the 2 days:
Follow the tutorials and try to write some very short programs of your own.
Third day:
Go back to work with sore, red eyes.
Later: Learn them both, and C too! -
MPEG-1 version coming up...
In a few moments, I'll have an MPEG-1 version ready for all of you that don't have QuickTime.
This is probably illegal, but I really don't care all that much. The money they'll use to sue me would go to much better use in just putting out an MPEG version. Get with the picture, apple. Not everyone wants to pay $100 for your *still* incomplete OS. I mean COME ON, OS9, and you still don't have any dynamically allocated memory?! Crikey!
Here ya go.
If its not all there when you download it, its because Its not done uploading yet. Have fun. -
In the US...
The Mizzou Linux Users Group in Columbia, MO puts up a good show. It ends up a bit Linux-centric (well, they are a LUG), but tries to include lots of Open Source stuff. Last year, ESR came by and gave one of his famous talks, and it looks like they're working on another really good line up of speakers for this year.
Here's the page -
In the US...
The Mizzou Linux Users Group in Columbia, MO puts up a good show. It ends up a bit Linux-centric (well, they are a LUG), but tries to include lots of Open Source stuff. Last year, ESR came by and gave one of his famous talks, and it looks like they're working on another really good line up of speakers for this year.
Here's the page -
Univ of MissouriAdd UMR to the list of clueless schools. They have blocked Napster at the routers and have claimed/stated that 'use of technologies such as Napster and Gnutella' is against the acceptable use policies. Note - no mention at all of using it for legal/illegal activities, the univ is claiming that any use is against the rules.
Of course, they also state in their acceptable use policy that they can search any attached machine without any due process or notification being required.
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Linux in the MidwestI live in Columbia, Missouri which is driving distance from Kansas City (which is mostly located in Missouri, not Kansas, BTW). I didn't go because they were charging what I considered to be a lot of money to get in. I'm a member of the Mizzou Linux Users Group which has put on two free Linux events in Columbia. Even though Columbia isn't nearly as big as KC, I would guess that we had more than 300 people in attendance. When Eric Raymond gave his speech at our event, the room was packed. My point is not that we did a great job with our event -- in fact, I'll admit that it was poorly planned... pretty much thrown together. Rather, my point is that Linux people, unlike MS users, are not willing to pay $300 (or whatever it was) for information.
I don't think that is being cheap. I think it is reasonable. Why should I pay $300 just so I can go to an event where companies will try to sell me stuff? MLUG's event was free for attendees and very cheap for exhibitors -- I think we just asked for them to donate a door prize.
Had the entry fee for the KC event been $30 or less, I might have gone.
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...or...Actually, my friends and I always thought the proper bastardization of the title "Master of Puppets" was "Pasture of Muppets." Unfortunately, I don't have the artistic skills neccessary to depict Kermit & co. in a field with the Metallica logo atop.
Alternatively, "Pastor of Muppets" makes for a slightly less morbid image. I could have sworn I ran across a band once with an album called "Pastor of Muppets". Anywho, I did a search and came up with this which is equally amusing.
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"What are Gnutella and Freenet?"While this would be a likely first question to pop into the mind of a geek, I doubt the Pastors of Muppets are as familiar with what technology is on the horizon.
Hence, I would strongly suggest pointing them to the Gnutella home page and the Freenet home page. The what is Gnutella? stuff is a little hard to find on their page, and should perhaps be pointed out directly.
It might be well to provide short synopses as well... just in case they, like so many
/.ers, aren't inclined to read before posting. ;-) -
Re:more infoThere is also a page at the University of Missouri that talks about media lifespans:
"Computer reel tapes, VCR tapes, and audio tapes last about as long as a Chevy or a poodle."
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Jon is funny; laugh.> The MPA - along with the music industry, one of the world's
> largest cartels outside of Columbia ...Hee hee. Didn't know Columbia was such a dangerous place. By chance did you mean Colombia?
Earl Higgins
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Re:Not the first study
I must point out that this is not the first work showing brain connectivity. In fact, people have been doing this for a decade with MRI, and before that with more invasive means. For example, Douek et al. (Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, 16(6),923-929:1991) colour mapped myelin fiber orientation in the brain using diffusion weighted MRI.
Well, people in the field know that there has been lots of work going on in this topic (computing the diffusion tensor). It is, after all, a fairly obvious thing to do. What seems to be novel to me about this is that they used the DT to trace out some very long fiber pathways, and they did it with just a wimpy 1.5T Siemens Vision scanner. And the big surprise to me was that the WashU folks beat the MGH group (among others) into print on this topic.
Coupling this information with functional information (regional metabolic activity in the brain also measurable with MRI or PET or SPECT) can provide valuable insight into brain function and dysfunction.
As Barak Pearlmutter mentioned earlier in this thread, this information is an even better fit for techniques that provide much better temporal resolution than fMRI, PET, or SPECT; he mentioned MEG (magnetoencephalogram, although EEG-based methods can also contribute, and I can't help mentioning the amazing new "shoot lasers through the skull and get optical imaging data" technique known as EROS, currently being developed at the University of Missouri and elsewhere.
Jonathan King,
Dept. of Psychology, University of Missouri -
Re:Functional Brain Imaging - with Linux!
This modality - MRI - gives excellent spatial resolution. Unfortunately, it is not so good with temporal information, which can be at best on the order of a second, which is much slower than the brain processes information.
Hi, Barak. Being basically a cognitive electrophysiologist, I, of course, have to agree with this, but I do want to point out that the Raichle paper is phenomenally important in that this is the beginning of doing real dynamic processing studies.
The logic for how to use this data is straight-forward enough; you mention MEG, but another technique that should work really well with this the event-related optical signal (EROS) which was pioneered by Dr. Gabriele Gratton at the University of Missouri, and now spreading rapidly elsewhere.
Our code base, both for signal processing and for visualization, is all developed on Debian GNU/Linux machines (both i386 and Alpha) and will all to be released under the GLP. It is also all being ported to SGIs and to large Linux clusters.
That's great! I think you should issue that as a challenge to many other labs out there.
If you're interested in figuring out how the brain works and want to get a PhD or MS in CS at a really funky department while hacking Linux and playing with gonzo brain imaging data, don't be shy - get in touch.
What he said, except ours is a Psychology department (so the department is psycho rather than funky).
All kidding aside, the geek masses yearning to go to grad school despite the difficulties of being a grad student would be well-advised to take a look at the advances being made in human brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience when mapping out their careers.
Jonathan King,
Department of Psychology, U. of Missouri -
It is already happeningMy field of study is mathematics. Let me first say that generally the math community is pretty good about which papers get published in which journals. From time to time, politics does play a role in what gets published and what does not, but on the whole, it works rather well.
The peer review process is, I think, very effective at picking out the good from the bad. Even if one wants to put all ones journals on the internet, you would still want peer review. Actually, the main reason is more self serving, in that you get a lot more credit for publishing in peer reviewed journals, and you need to publish if you want promotion, tenure, or salary raises.
That being said, the main problem with paper journals is that subscription costs are very high. Actually, in many cases a lot higher than one would think the costs are. There has been a lot of noise about this in the math community.
So switching to internet journals seems like a good idea. In fact, a several established journals are also putting their stuff on the internet, for example, the American Math Society, and those journals published by Springer Verlag. However, you still have to pay the subscription costs. (Springer Verlag's are particularly high.)
Recently, there have been new, internet only, journals. Two that I know of are The Electronic Journal of Probability, and The Electronic Journal of Differential Equations. But I know that there are a lot more. These still employ peer review to look at papers, and have the same standards as regular journals.
If you just want to put your paper on the internet for anyone to look at, there is the Mathematics Archive, which anyone can contribute to. (Actually, it is part of a much larger archive where there are physics papers, etc.) Many many mathematicians, including many prominant ones, put there papers there, as well as sending their papers to journals. This is really a preprint archive.
And of course, you can always make your own web page and put your papers there, just as I have at http://math.missouri.edu/~stephen/prep rints/. Actually, many mathematicians do this.
In the end, I think that this open source idea of publishing is important to reduce costs of publishing. But I don't think that we should get rid of peer review.
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Re:Here is a mirror !
Here is another mirror
max-2.4.5.tar.gz -
Update on Linux software.Tymm Twillman, the author of BottleRocket, has confirmed for me that his software works with this kit. In fact, this is specifically what he wrote it for.
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Re:Firecracker Fun To Play With
Firecracker control drives can be found at: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/
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Linux software.There is linux software for this.
http://mlug.missouri.edu/~tymm/. Probably others will work too, if it's basically standard X10.
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