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I've had pretty good sucess installing Debianon the Acer TravelMate C100. I've put up a page here. You'll find there a quick and dirty touch screen driver that I wrote. There's also the linux wacom page which hopefully be the final home for the touchscreen driver.

Hah. Kids today. I remember HOMR and its e-mail based predecessor RINGO.

"Anything optimized for writing english text is going to be horrible for any other symbol system."

You make it sound as if qwerty is optimized for such symbols. I highly doubt that to be the case.

I struggle with dvorak layouts too, but for one reason and one reason only: I was brought up on qwerty.

I think the measure here is how efficiently someone without prior exposure to other keyboard layouts can use such characters.

The symbol placement on dvoraks is actually quite good, so long as you go for a 'proper' layout and ignore the ANSI layout

When I first became interested in computers, I quickly learned of the deliberate inefficiencies of the QWERTY layout. Since I didn't want to waste my time learning an inefficient layout, I decided to not learn to type on a QWERTY layout. I set my sights on someday learning to type on a Maltron or Dvorak keyboard. But being a teenager with no money and a computer with an integrated QWERTY keyboard, I never attained my goal. Besides, as many programmers will tell you, keyboards with a bend towards the english language make typing code more difficult

Earlier this year, I bought a Happy Hacking keyboard off of ebay, and I simply love it. The compact layout with all the functions available and the "proper" positioning of the CONTROL key has made typing a lot easier and faster with less strain on my hands and wrists.

So now, after 20 years of using computers, I'm going to finally break down and learn to type, because although it may be nice to talk about better layouts for the future, the fact is the vast majority of people just don't want to change.

One interesting project I found a few years back is the RAW project at MIT. It does pretty much the same thing but they are no longer using FPGAs. (They use chips which are similar to FPGAs but specified towards computation.) Their first prototypes used FPGAs though.

Seems like the "programming language" is similar to LabView and such schematic programming languages. (Eg in Matlab you have Simulink.) Apparently there's quite a lot of people who find that easier to work with.

Oh well, it's an interesting field. Let's just hope they don't get a bunch of ludicrous patents that stifle other research in the area.

Tyranny of the First Defector

Canter and Siegel.

I actually remember when these asshats pulled this stunt. Someone should be able to punch them in the stomach on a twice weekly basis.

Actually there are about 100 people worldwide searching for NEOs according to NASA's Ames Research Centre Asteroid Coment Impact Hazards Website.

The most productive NEO search program is the USAF/MIT run LINEAR which has discovered more NEOs than all other search programs combined.

Other search progrms include

• NEAT
• Spacewatch
• Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search (LONEOS)
• Catalina Sky Survey
• Japanese Spaceguard Association (JSGA)
• Asiago DLR Asteroid Survey (ADAS)

I haven't been able to read the article because it's slashdotted, but it makes me wonder why they would have something like the Torino Impact Scale if they weren't going to use it to inform the public. So far only one object has ever has ever been classifed a "1" on the tornio scale, but that doesn't look like it's going to a a problem. But with most NEOs still unidentified the most likely warning we will have is none at all.

Actually there are about 100 people worldwide searching for NEOs according to NASA's Ames Research Centre Asteroid Coment Impact Hazards Website.

The most productive NEO search program is the USAF/MIT run LINEAR which has discovered more NEOs than all other search programs combined.

Other search progrms include

• NEAT
• Spacewatch
• Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search (LONEOS)
• Catalina Sky Survey
• Japanese Spaceguard Association (JSGA)
• Asiago DLR Asteroid Survey (ADAS)

I haven't been able to read the article because it's slashdotted, but it makes me wonder why they would have something like the Torino Impact Scale if they weren't going to use it to inform the public. So far only one object has ever has ever been classifed a "1" on the tornio scale, but that doesn't look like it's going to a a problem. But with most NEOs still unidentified the most likely warning we will have is none at all.

When are we going to get that blasted 'turbo' button back? You know - the one that reduces processor speed so we can play Space War at sane speeds.

Oh... wait...

That effect may be coming much sooner than genuine Mind Reading (if it's even possible).

Mind Reading (as the term is commonly used), implies that the subject's actual, abstract thoughts are understood. This could possibly be more difficult than creating a self-aware AI.

Using some kind of neural-uplink to accelerate your data input speed is a drastically easier challenge- a foolish, wealthy person could even trying having one installed today (no guarantees of fitness or safety, though!)

Look at research like the CyberMonkey. (It mentions a biochip as a less invasive, higher resolution way to perform the procedure)

A willing human could get a bundle of electrodes buried into his cortex, and plugged via a USB interface into your computer. Then, with a lot of practice against a program that gives visible feedback, the subject could learn to control the eletrodes enough to manuver a mouse or keyboard equivalent.

Any guesses as to how many of his existing muscular systems will be paralyzed by the tampering?

A quote from my journal entry:

In the case of weblogs you can claim that 'quality matters' and therefore links and pageviews go to the better weblogs, but that clearly isn't the only answer. There are plenty of weblogs of great quality and low readership. In fact the Power Law applies in much the same way to all social systems where people can express preferences in some way. The end result is a star system and, likely, some abuses as people try to cash in on success. Although the cashing in part might be a little harder than for, say, a sports star pushing Nikes: "I only blog with my Compaq! It gets my vacuous rants right."

As far as I know, the EFF and the LPF (in its heyday) in spite of their efforts, have not been involved in a successful patent-infringement defense (whether the original patent was valid or not).

I'm not going to count on them or on anybody in this yet, as almost all of these are settled out of court (keeping the patent valid to the bane of free/open software development everywhere).

b.t.w., LPF Patent Page -- the patent described in the image at the top (XOR in screen bitmap cursors) is now out of date (filed in '78) and expired. Does that mean someone in XF86 will finally make xor-based cursors?

You might want to check out the League for Programming Freedom

The first link on that page is damn funny. c00k1nG w1tH hAx0r, v0lUm3 0n3

This seems to be similar to the native ability to understand the gist of Yoda-speak. IMHO, this implies there may be considerable flexability in the parsing of natural languages and plasticity in the language areas of a human brain. But, this idea is not new.

OBtopic: A shuttle

• costs $2.1 billion (new)
  
• weights 16,000 lbs (dry dock, no payload)
  

Except that they basicly invented kerberos. Passwords are probably NEVER sent in plain text.

Gee, Dick, that would be because the early adoptors of computer technology, such as MIT had a clue. Oh, you and the University thought you could just buy some stuff from M$ and be done with the work?

Now, my old friend, the Waffle Iron, needs some help understanding part of MIT's system. Someone who tried to mod a public terminal for their own use is likely to be bit by this dog. Hardware capture by additional device is another issue, but I'll bet the MIT folks thought of that too. In any case, someone with enough brains to do all that would have enough brains to avoid stupid stuff like that. There's always someone better and they will get you.

Athena, not Anthea.

Nader is not "more centrist" he is just "middle ranked". There is a world of difference between the two.

Well, he is the compromise. If my wording was sloppy, I apologize. (of course, he is only a compromise in your contrived universe where Nader is more acceptable than Gore to all people who most prefered Bush -- I don't think that was the real world of the 2000 election though).

No irrationality involved. It just turns out to be the best way for them to get what they want.

Sorry, no, as you represented it, it does not get them what they want, it -- in your words -- "breaks the system" and elects their least favorite candiate. How does that get them what they want? Unless all Bush people really preferred Nader over Gore, in which case I suppose Nader really deserved to be elected.

I read the page regarding Kenneth Arrow's thereom (and have read his stuff before), and I don't see anything in it that contradicts the notion that some form of ranking is far preferable to simple plurality. (keep in mind Arrow's conclusion is that the perfect solution is a dictatorship!) Ranking systems may not be perfect (which is all he proves, and I never stated otherwise), but they are a heck of a lot better, and you've provided nothing indicating otherwise.

I can tell you that in the election methods mailing list , where people debate the differences between all these different systems day in and day out (I don't participate, but I've followed it for a while), there is *no* question that ranking is way better than plurality. If you want to argue that ranking is more flawed than plurality there, you'd have a real tough audience. BTW, see this or this or this which all discuss Arrow's theorem and all conclude that that plurality is bad, and either Borda count or Approval (both ranking based systems) is best.

Now if only we could convince them to teach interpersonal skills in college.

The JSE is implemented as preprocessor. Why wait for Sun to add new language features, add your own.

The BSA, AFAIK, is NOT a goverment-sponsered law enforcement agency. I see 'bsa.ORG' not 'bsa.gov' or 'bsa.fbi.gov' The BSA is a trade organization, a bunch of lawyers most likely.

Therefore, they have NO right to go searching through any of my stuff or your stuff. "EULA says they can" my ass.

I'm having a hard time find any case law regarding the BSA (if you find some, post it, I'd be interested) ...tho I did find this quote from one of the BSA VPs last year:

"...the raids would have an immediate effect on the roughly $12 billion in lost revenue from which the Alliance claims its members suffer each year."

So they're LOSING that much, which means that to actually be staying in buisness at that rate, how much MORE do they actually have to be making? I'm not advocating piracy, but suppose they're losing 30% to piracy. That means that they are MAKING 40 BILLION dollars a year in revenue.

I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can provide some information for two of them....

How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs?

Maybe sooner than you think... Autostereoscopic Displays being worked on at MIT's Spatial Imaging Group run on SGI O2s. In answer to your question, we won't be allowed to turn off out televisions when our televisions get user level (and group level?) security installed... This will probably coincide with televisions getting file-level security. I can only imagine having to fill out forms and register with an application/internet service provider in order to upgrade from being a 'user' to being a 'poweruser'... "Damn. I had to pay $49.95 and go take a user-training course to be allowed to turn off my television..."

How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having?

You will note that the design setup for the Mark II Autostereoscopic Display utilizes a video camera to watch the viewers and generate virtual 3D goggles. It's already built into the system design of next-generation 3D televisions...

I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can provide some information for two of them....

How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs?

Maybe sooner than you think... Autostereoscopic Displays being worked on at MIT's Spatial Imaging Group run on SGI O2s. In answer to your question, we won't be allowed to turn off out televisions when our televisions get user level (and group level?) security installed... This will probably coincide with televisions getting file-level security. I can only imagine having to fill out forms and register with an application/internet service provider in order to upgrade from being a 'user' to being a 'poweruser'... "Damn. I had to pay $49.95 and go take a user-training course to be allowed to turn off my television..."

How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having?

You will note that the design setup for the Mark II Autostereoscopic Display utilizes a video camera to watch the viewers and generate virtual 3D goggles. It's already built into the system design of next-generation 3D televisions...

I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I can provide some information for two of them....

How long untill we're not ALLOWED to turn off our TVs?

Maybe sooner than you think... Autostereoscopic Displays being worked on at MIT's Spatial Imaging Group run on SGI O2s. In answer to your question, we won't be allowed to turn off out televisions when our televisions get user level (and group level?) security installed... This will probably coincide with televisions getting file-level security. I can only imagine having to fill out forms and register with an application/internet service provider in order to upgrade from being a 'user' to being a 'poweruser'... "Damn. I had to pay $49.95 and go take a user-training course to be allowed to turn off my television..."

How long before our TVs watch what WE'RE doing so advertisers can see what effect they're having?

You will note that the design setup for the Mark II Autostereoscopic Display utilizes a video camera to watch the viewers and generate virtual 3D goggles. It's already built into the system design of next-generation 3D televisions...

It is to the person looking at the 'eyeball', but a computer is stupid. If the eye retinal pattern matches, which it should being either from a live person, or 'fresh'.

Ah, no. The "pattern" on the retina is actually the tracery of blood vessels in it. These vessels change shape, color and size when no blood is being pumped through them. In addition, the shape of the eyeball changes when it's removed from its socket, which also distorts the pattern. Finally, as other bits of the eye die from lack of nourishment, they change as well; I believe the cornea turns opaque, the lens may get deformed, I think even the vitreous humor changes in important ways, thought I don't recall what.

I wouldnt put that against thives who do armed thieving. They wouldnt care less. 1 dead victin is one less that'll squeal.

Maybe, but only for the most hardened and least risk-averse. Criminals don't tend to be the brightest bulbs around, but they're well aware of the different consequences attached to burglary, aggravated burglary and murder 1. The difference between the first and second is dwarfed by the difference between the second and third.

Personally, I think they're much more likely to simply bypass the doors entirely. Breaking a window is one way, but if that can't be done due to the alarm system they could just take a page from the Beverly Hills burglars of a couple years back -- they just used a chainsaw and cut right through the wall.

The integreation on that level is new, but the rest is mostly what we have now.

Actually, I think it's less new than that. Take a look at what's been done at the MIT Media Lab in their various projects, particularly House_n. They're even getting ready to take the next step and move it out of the lab entirely, building a complete house (with a bathroom!) where people will actually live and work for weeks or months while MIT researchers study the ways in which they interact with the intelligent home.

But you're certainly right that there is no fundamentally new technology here. It's just integration. For that matter, some of my colleagues in the IBM Global Services Wireless e-Business group have been focused on smart homes and smart autos for a couple of years now -- and Global Services is the division of IBM that focuses on real-world integration contracts, not the R&D arm that engages in blue-sky thinking or even the product development arm that builds on spec (the "build it and they will buy" model of most product development).

Nope, no significant innovation here.

It is to the person looking at the 'eyeball', but a computer is stupid. If the eye retinal pattern matches, which it should being either from a live person, or 'fresh'.

Ah, no. The "pattern" on the retina is actually the tracery of blood vessels in it. These vessels change shape, color and size when no blood is being pumped through them. In addition, the shape of the eyeball changes when it's removed from its socket, which also distorts the pattern. Finally, as other bits of the eye die from lack of nourishment, they change as well; I believe the cornea turns opaque, the lens may get deformed, I think even the vitreous humor changes in important ways, thought I don't recall what.

I wouldnt put that against thives who do armed thieving. They wouldnt care less. 1 dead victin is one less that'll squeal.

Maybe, but only for the most hardened and least risk-averse. Criminals don't tend to be the brightest bulbs around, but they're well aware of the different consequences attached to burglary, aggravated burglary and murder 1. The difference between the first and second is dwarfed by the difference between the second and third.

Personally, I think they're much more likely to simply bypass the doors entirely. Breaking a window is one way, but if that can't be done due to the alarm system they could just take a page from the Beverly Hills burglars of a couple years back -- they just used a chainsaw and cut right through the wall.

The integreation on that level is new, but the rest is mostly what we have now.

Actually, I think it's less new than that. Take a look at what's been done at the MIT Media Lab in their various projects, particularly House_n. They're even getting ready to take the next step and move it out of the lab entirely, building a complete house (with a bathroom!) where people will actually live and work for weeks or months while MIT researchers study the ways in which they interact with the intelligent home.

But you're certainly right that there is no fundamentally new technology here. It's just integration. For that matter, some of my colleagues in the IBM Global Services Wireless e-Business group have been focused on smart homes and smart autos for a couple of years now -- and Global Services is the division of IBM that focuses on real-world integration contracts, not the R&D arm that engages in blue-sky thinking or even the product development arm that builds on spec (the "build it and they will buy" model of most product development).

Nope, no significant innovation here.

Miro Jurisic and Alexandra Ellwood wrote an extension called asciiMac for the MacHack '98 Hack Contest, and it won first place. It turned your screen, real-time, into a full-color ascii-art display. I was there. It was amazing and the crowd went wild.

It's lame to reply to oneself but I found a reference discrediting Sapir-Whorf: Steven Pinker.

I have a site dedicated to providing free classical music recordings. The recordings are performances that I've been part of (some are not great, but there are a few real gems), and I'd cleared the legality with the other members of the groups, sound engineers, etc. I'd like to see more people do this, and in the interest of encouraging this, please check out my Free Classical Music archive.

-Ben

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson- sussman-lectures/

The displays used in the Virtual Boy were OEM versions of Reflection Technology's Private Eye.

These were LED-based and used a vibrating mirror to create the image. I assume that as red LED's were much, much cheaper than other colours at the time the virtual boy was made, that was why they used them.

Here is a link to detailed info on the head-up displays used in the Virtual Boy.

Yes, scientific proof like the stuff found at this mysterious crop circle!

Oh, wait.

Guess those 'genuine' crop circles can be human made, too. And considering humans, I'd say it's far more likely that the rest of the 'genuine' ones are just as 'real' as the MIT one.

Was SPACEWAR (this version is via PDP-1 assembler running on a java PDP-1 emulator) written in 1962 by a group calling themselves something like "The Hingham Institute for Space Warfare" the lead programmer was Stephen "Slug" Russell. The program was developed on a PDP-1 computer (the first "minicomputer" which cost 1/10th of other computers of the day (only $100,000)) donated by Digital Equipment Corp. to the students of MIT. More of the history. Steve got to testify on his prior art when Magnavox sued Atari on some related patents.

You can always understand why the people did it. Warner Brothers assured Nolan Bushnell he would still be in charge of Atari before they forced him out. Many of TSR's problems were caused by Gary Gygax's sneaky venture capital guys (not to mention his vindictive ex-wife and the widow of a former partner). Some of the people at the top of Infocom from the very start were only interested in big bucks and wanted to enter the lucrative business software field and leave games behind. The founders of Dragon thought they would have time and money to pursue other projects related to their interests.

Another thing, any company with a successful software product needs to be worried about embrace, extend and extinguish, not just from Microsoft, but from other big software companies. Look at Bleem! versus Sony. You'll always have to look over your shoulder for big, politically connected competitors with an unfair advantage in our mercantilist legal system. Money can help here, money can get you through frivolous lawsuits designed not to be won but to drain the life out of you. Money can even help you when your well-heeled competitors use pressure tactics at retail locations if they stock your product instead of theirs. Face it, in software or videogames and in most other businesses small only remains an option if you manage to remain under the big comglomorates and monopolists radar.

Even a small company can face a hostile take over if any of its operating or startup expenses come from outside sources.

Jason Rennie gave an extremely interesting talk about this at the MIT Spam Conference this month, although he wasn't using quite as direct a method, instead he was looking at MLD - Minimum Length Description. This is a technique to discover features in corpora that allow you to describe the classification of a corpus in the minimum number of details.

Basically it's a way to discover features in emails using compression techniques, so rather than having us SpamAssassin developers have to carefully and manually examine emails to see what's new and interesting about them, MLD techniques can automatically detect these features.

Jason Rennie's web page (talk and paper available) about this is here. Please do read it as it's extremely interesting.

The one downside of it is that Jason said at the end of his talk that it's extremely slow at doing the feature detection. When asked how slow he said that on a reasonably small corpus it took 4 months (although he said it was written in Perl, so a C port is probably a good plan).

In comparison to Bayesian techniques the MLD technique presents a great deal of interest - primarily because I work for a company doing spam filtering at the internet level, and so we can't feasibly do personal training which is what makes Bayesian techniques so great (see the talk I gave at the MIT spam conference). Without the personal training Bayes is only about 90-95% effective, so it should be interesting to see where these techniques lead us.

Did you ever do stuff like this? The equipment that the MIT students used were pretty dangerous, and very difficult to build. I have to wonder why a prankster would go to that length.

It seems some pranksters go to some pretty dangerous lengths to create crop circles. I'm not sure my health and limbs are worth a stupid prank like crop circles, but I guess I'm not those people.

Gerry Sussman (one of the authors of the famous 'Wizard' book taught in beginning computer science classes) has been working on biology-inspired programming paradigms over at MIT. The correspondance between the structure of living systems and computing systems was pointed out by John von Neumann quite at the dawn of both fields, and these notions seem to be alive and well today. In this view, the genome is like the assembly code of a program which, when run, is capable of replicating itself, developing from a single cell, maintaining and healing itself. Wouldn't it be great if we could write computer programs that had these same characteristics? It's an inspiring conception of biological systems and an incredible vision for a future for programming.

Jarod is a bit of a galactic gas-bag, having stated publicly that 'nothing good at all will come from biotechnology', but that information technology is 'almost all good' (interview on NBC, as I remember), but in this interview, I think he's on the mark.

Gerry Sussman (one of the authors of the famous 'Wizard' book taught in beginning computer science classes) has been working on biology-inspired programming paradigms over at MIT. The correspondance between the structure of living systems and computing systems was pointed out by John von Neumann quite at the dawn of both fields, and these notions seem to be alive and well today. In this view, the genome is like the assembly code of a program which, when run, is capable of replicating itself, developing from a single cell, maintaining and healing itself. Wouldn't it be great if we could write computer programs that had these same characteristics? It's an inspiring conception of biological systems and an incredible vision for a future for programming.

Jarod is a bit of a galactic gas-bag, having stated publicly that 'nothing good at all will come from biotechnology', but that information technology is 'almost all good' (interview on NBC, as I remember), but in this interview, I think he's on the mark.

IIRC, most comets are still discovered by lucky amateurs.

That used to be true, but nowadays the LINEAR project picks up most of them. Amateur astronomers still account for a few a year, though. There are a lot of comets out there to be found.

Since the USSR wound down, GEODSS has also been used for finding near-earth asteroids. A few objects show up every month. Here's the list for December, 2002.

MIT's Lincoln Labs also operates an automated skywatch.

Here's an image from GEODSS. The objects that show as streaks are moving relative to the starfield.

If it's out there, one of these systems will pick it up within a few days.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore , Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

That seems to be the consensus. However, like most complex technologies, there were a lot of people involved in the development of what we now call radar. I can't ever really fathom the need to give one cowboy all the credit for what are almost always large collaborative efforts. Anyway, here's a funny anecdote about the invention of the T/R switch.

Francis Wheeler Loomis directed MIT's RadLab for some time starting in 1941. He was later the first director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory (1951-52) (previously Project Charles).

I too found the similarities eery. I haven't found any indication of relations though.

certainly some of tme can be reused (H20 as you and others correctly stated for example). But here are typical applications of different chemicals:

• H20: the vast majority of this is used in cleaning baths. It is always deionized water and ususally is operated in a "flow-through" manner such that there is a big tank where they put wafers and water flows into and out of this tank. 32 Kg of water likely accounts for the fact that these baths are probably kept on (because water is cheap) while wafers are not in there. The other use for this is to create steam, which when exposed to Silicon, creates silicon-dioxide (SiO2) which is typically used as an insulator.
• N2: Okay, this is probably not reused primarily because of the manner it is used. Typically the N2 is used like a hose to dry off wafers (like a gun). This N2 typically is simply added to the 80-some percent of N2 in the ambient air. N2 is used in lesser quantities for replacing bad gasses in vacuum chambers (known as "flushing"), but the fact that this "pure" N2 is mixed with other "bad" gasses, it is probably difficult to use without large amounts of purification. Finally, production facilities probably use this in their storage area (wafer storage) as to avoid unwanted oxides growing on the surface (see below).
• As: this is really bad (as most of you kiddies know) and is used in doping the Si to make it more conductive, etc (along with other chemicals). This is one of the gasses that N2 is used to flush out of the vacuum system.
• HF: This is (afaik) the primary technique (as outlined in the RCA cleaning process to remove native oxides on the surface of the Si. As stated above, when Si comes in contact with water vapor (rich in oxygen), it forms SiO2. Well when Si comes in contact with O2 in ambient air (at a lower concentration), it will also create thinner films of SiO2, and this needs to be removed with something, which HF works very well for. This is typically neutralized and disposed of.

I am inclined to believe that most of the chemicals are not reused, at least in the traditional sense. H2O is cleaned and returned to the ocean, and N2 is cleaned (through air-handling systems) and returned to the atmosphere, but many of these chemicals probably are neutralized (read "made somewhat safe") and disposed of in your local land-fill, or into your local air.

[T]he authors used to have a review wall outside their offices at MIT. University professors from around the world writing in scientific journals said "finally I understand what all this computer science stuff is about; this is the most brilliant book ever. I'm glad that we're using it to teach freshmen now." In the center was a review from Byte magazine: "I didn't understand any of this book."

This is perfect for public access television stations. They often have 5-10 people, all needing to encode their videotapes at the same time. A multichannel encoder would be heaven!

I've been working with MNN, the public access station in New York, NY in building a cheap, open source video server out of an old TiVo. The equipment necessary to program and run television broadcast/cablecast centers is often expensive and proprietary. And unless you do web playback like indymedia or freespeechtv, you have to buy the equipment to play the game.

An open, Linux-based multi-encoder like this (accompanied by an open video server) would do wonders for the community media world!

Look, we already do a fabulous job at recycling automobiles. Over 75% by weight is recovered, either as parts to be reused or material to be refined and used. We did this, moreover, not because of any specific environmental mandate, but because it was economically advantageous to do so.

US automakers are sweating it today because the European Union, in adopting a German political initiative of the early 1990s, has mandated that automakers increase the recycling of automobiles, with targets of 80% to 95%, depending on how you read the regulation (recycled versus recovered).

However you look at it, the mandate is a sop to the environmental lobbies that fails to consider the real environmental effects of automobiles. Consider this: by defining the recycling targets in terms of mass percentages, the automobile industry has been incentivized to increase automobile mass, since there is a significant fraction of the vehicle that cannot be economically recycled. (Note: in the end, everything is recyclable - it's just that it gets expensive to do so; remember, it all started as rocks, petroleum, etc.)

So, even though we might want to increase the fuel economy of an automobile (something that starts with reducing the weight of the car), these recycling mandates point the automakers in the other direction!!

If you want to read some specifics, check these out:

• Legislative history of the EU recycling mandate
• The mandate itself
• Background Materials On Vehicle Recycling Economics - a little dated, but largely accurate still

Jeffrey Shaw, one of the most amazing artists alive. His EVE from 1993 and Golden Calf from 1995 (animation) seem to be good examples of this idea. Techies should study Art!