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Great job title.

And my postman's a customer-focussed peripatetic supply-chain-enablement engineer. He wins "postie of the month" awards quite frequently.

Well, at least you've demonstrated an ability to be a dick. Perhaps you can bring up your research skills next?

About 90 seconds with Google leads me to the details of a packaging Master's program, a history of that school going back 50 years, a long Wikipedia page on the topic and job listings under that title.

Remember: even if your main goal is to be an asshole, knowing even a tiny bit about the topic can help. You want to be an ass, not just look like one.

Are you one of those clowns who thinks it's extreme that your boss will fire you if you fail to show up on time and do your job at work?

I am the boss at my workplace. If I was your boss I'd be asking you how those lab experiments to prove evolution were coming along.

And if I were your employer, I'd respond: pretty fucking good, boss.

By "Eastern bloc" I meant the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe.

This page talks at some length about a Soviet dissident and his reactions to the novel. Basically, he found it hard to believe Orwell lived in Britain, not Russia. That doesn't (much) support my assertion that the Soviet government used the book as a blueprint (or at least, thought it had a lot of good ideas), but I did say "allegedly" :-)

Unfortunately for your hopes of moving to somewhere sane, I live in Britain.

The green is reflected. Red and blue are absorbed. Why plants are green

Do you seriously believe the president is in control of the country's military-industrial complex? Sure, under Bush they got to do it out openly, but the Galileo project actually started during the Clinton years, and for the exact same reason: eliminate the EU economy's dependence on a system controlled by the US military.

GWB simply made completely obvious (even to americans, it finally seems!) what the USA has been doing covertly since the sixties (and will keep on trying to do, but will now find a lot harder).

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, the more exotic the isotope, the shorter its half life (the average time it takes before undergoing beta-decay and transforming into a slightly more stable element). For most elements there are usually just one to two stable forms. All others will decay, and the further in mass you get from the stable forms, the quicker this decay happens. It's kind of hard to make any physical object with a material that exists for a fraction of a second. Second, for any given element there is a lower mass and an upper mass boundary. There is a physical limit to what types of particles one can create. Beyond these boundaries, called the driplines when applied to the entire nuclear chart, particles are 'unstable'. I use unstable in the vernacular nuclear sense; particles will evaporate from the core until the remaing particles are bound. This, as mentioned above, still doesn't mean the particle is 'stable' in the common sense of the word. Lastly, the NSCL cylcotron produces the rarest particles, the particles with the lowest probability for creation (i.e. very low cross section) at a very low rate, sometimes as low as an event per day. The article is about the construction of a next generation nuclear facility at the NSCL. The US as in all other science fields, is gradually falling behind European and Japanese counterparts. The few other other major nuclear labs in the world (not to be confused with the super-expensive high energy facilities like Cern and Fermilab) are bringing online new facilities that will enable nuclear researchers to study more exotic elements, elements with stranger properties closer to that limit of stability. The MSU proposal is located here: http://www.nscl.msu.edu/future/isf/. There is a lot of interesting research to be done. Many of the biggest unanswered questions in physics are in nuclear physics. One mentioned in the article is the creation of elements. We are indeed created from stars, since the big bang left us with just some helium and hydrogen. The other elements are created in nuclear processes that occur in the giant nuclear furnaces of stars. Interested folks should look online for additional information. There is a incredibly large region of the nuclear chart that currently cannot be reached because present beam facilities don't have the energies and intensities to produce the particles at a rate sufficient for research. It would be very neat if we could get there.

I wish that Slashdot editors would not post stories by Roland Piquepaille. He is a paid publicity manager. He is paid to place stories. Do Slashdot editors get paid when they post his stories? They have never said they don't, apparently.

He has apparently succeeded in getting this story in many publications.

This sentence is nonsense: "He's now going further, saying that he wants to build objects 100,000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus." Someone made a mistake somewhere. If there are things that small, they have nothing to do with making isotopes. Neither Roland Piquepaille nor the Slashdot editors have enough knowledge of science that they could see the mistake.

There is apparently nothing particularly new about the apparatus described in the Michigan State University press release.

Apparently the writer of the Michigan State University press release, "Sue Nichols", didn't have the slightest understanding of the subject either, and didn't care, because she said, "Isotopes are the different versions of an element." Maybe she was in a hurry to go shopping. She could have looked on Google for a definition of isotope: "Atoms of the same element that have the same number of protons (same atomic number) but different numbers of neutrons (different atomic masses)."

I would recommend the work of Robert T. Pennock who has written a well-reasoned book on Intelligent Deisgn and it's nonscientific nature. He does so as someone who takes both science and religion seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand he makes a clear refutation of the theory argumebnts.

• Tax Break Prompts Millionaires To Create Private Foundations: Many of these same "feel-good" workers, though, have their own opinion about private foundations. And it isn't pretty. In the best of all worlds, they say, private foundations, like their public counterparts, would help address problems like hunger or illiteracy; in truth, they charge, such charities tend to address the whims and agendas of their benefactors, whose motivations don't always fit the notion of "charity."
• The trustees' perk that keeps on giving: The foundation's accountant, Martin Logies of Sunnyvale, Calif., defended the benefits, saying they had been approved by the foundation's board of directors. But he acknowledged that Sara and Anders Kierulf are the board's only members, and that they approved the benefits for themselves. As to the work the Kierulfs perform for their pay, Logies demurred. "I couldn't give you that information," he said.
• Deduction Ad Absurdum: CEOs Donating Their Own Stock to Their Own Family Foundations: Consistent with their exemption from insider trading law, I find that CEOs' stock gifts occur just prior to significant drops in their firms' stock prices, a pattern that enables the donors to obtain increased personal income tax benefits. This timing is more pronounced when executives donate their own shares to their own family foundations
• Tax Me If You Can: FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith investigates the rampant abuse of tax shelters since the late 1990s. Through interviews with government officials, tax experts, and industry insiders, Smith uncovers an avalanche of bogus transactions -- created by some of America's biggest and most-respected accounting firms, law firms, and investment banks -- that were then aggressively marketed to big corporations and wealthy individuals.
• How Tax Shelters Brought Trouble to Billionaire Clan: The panel's senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, has been probing offshore tax evasion and money laundering for several years. The panel is also looking into how the elite New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP provided legal advice on offshore tax shelters to wealthy individuals, people familiar with the probe say.

Picture here.

Perhaps because there are fundamental problems to be addressed, and the likes of Bloomberg, Gates, and Buffet are nowhere near being like say, Howard Hughes?

It's one thing to appear to be solving problems, and donating money does that nicely. It's another to attempt to make money doing something that is actually hard and expensive.

Solar is very expensive. No, oil at 120 bucks/bbl ain't going to make it competitive. Remember (or find) all those posts from the anti-nuclear people about how nuclear power is just too damned expensive. Now know that solar is more expensive than nuclear.

An additional major factor is government regulation. If you've even looked at half, nay a quarter, of what it takes to get started in the power business you'd understand the staggering barrier this is. Donating money is much easier. Not that it really makes a difference in advancing the state of the art.

The third major barrier is the inculcated belief that the government should be doing this. People generally like to spout "Military-industrial complex" as a bad thing (it is), and some even understand they are referencing a speech by Eisenhower. However, most are entirely ignorant of the fact that he mentioned two specific threats. The second was a scientific-government complex.

Today we are reaping the "benefits" of failing to address BOTH/EITHER of his stated looming threats.

Why should anyone invest million or indeed billions into research that the government may suddenly take up the mantle of and give that money to someone other than you, someone with political connections (which happens under both Democrats and Republicans), that will then undercut you since they have a) government funding and b) government protection? Why, indeed.

The closest we have to people of the Howard Hughes caliber are people like Elon Musk (SpaceX) or ... crap spaced is name - the guy in charge of Virgin, or even perhaps Bigelow (not Bam-Bam). I'd list Rutan but he doesn't have the money behind him - he needs OPM.

Yet, like Hughes, their interests are not in the "mundane" such as terrestrial power generation using "alternative" means. It's in going new places.

Most "alternative energy"[1] advocates are saddles with ideological and political beefs combined with a seeming inability to stifle their expression of those long enough to get real work done. Thus would-be backers tend to shy away and people in general want to back away from such extremism. It boils down to: Those who can't and have money give money so they can feel/appear like they've done something. Those who can't and don't have the money bitch and thus feel like they are "making a difference".

What we need are those who CAN and HAVE the money. Unfortunately, they will run into two major barriers, the hard and the harder one: the laws of physics and the government respectively.

1. The phrase "alternative energy" is itself indicative of and suffering from the ideological slant. Solar and wind are in use, but they have their limits (in particular their sporadic, non-const nature), so they aren't necessarily an "alternative" since they are incomplete solutions yet in place. As a result, "alternative energy" has begun to wear the mantle of "impractical".

1) Use a bootonly install disc and download the packages from ports or simply stick your necessary packages onto a CD/DVD and have sysinstall point to that medium.
2) Take the two iso images and create a DVD image. http://www.pa.msu.edu/~tigner/bsddvd.html

You could do worse than start here:

http://www.cse.msu.edu/~minutsil/iptables.html

Bingo about the drug war. Rolling Stone had a pretty good article on the state of the drug war.

As far as why so much money is spent on security forces, the answer is simple. It's not some grand conspiracy to declare martial law, turn soverignty over to the UN, make Americans dig their own graves in Oklahoma, and then machine gun them to death. It's exactly what Eisenhower warned us of some 46 years ago. It's the Military Industrial Complex. There's no grand conspiracy to oppress the American public, it's just good ol' bilking the government. You've got companies telling the politicians to purchase the latest and greatest technology. The politicians do it, because of the selfish reason of wanting the companies to finance their campaigns, and the altruistic reason that these systems are so spread out, that many congressional districts are connected to the systems (either through factories or military bases), and finally don't care about the cost, since they just spend money regardless if they have it or not. (Thanks to not having a balance budget amendment.) History is replete with examples of weapons systems that just wouldn't die, even after Pentgon stated that they didn't want them. Congressmen that play ball with the companies, are then rewarded upon retirement from congress with a lucrative lobbying positions.

Have you ever read Eisenhower speeches at the end of his presidency? They're damning, and unfortunately ring just as true today as they did some 50 years ago. This the work of the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about. Ike was no peacenik, but he wasn't some blind hawk either. His Cross of Iron speech lays out in stark terms just what the Cold War would cost (and unfortunately what the MI still costs us today). ("Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.") He wasn't saying the Cold War wasn't worth this cost, he made it clear that Soviet threat was real in 1950s and 60s and had to be opposed, but it was an unfortunate cost to pay. Now with the Cold War over, and no peer militaries, it makes you wonder why we still have a budget larger than the next 14 countries combined, and over 8 times our closest rival, China. I'm not saying that we should cut back funding so much that military goes into a fair fight – if the US military is ever in a fair fight, something is gone dreadfully wrong – but just how unbalanced do we really need? At some point there's diminishing returns.

Even "genetic algorithms" are not evolution in the strict Darwinian sense, because people intentionally design algorithms and then let them compete.

Not always. For example, see psoup, Tierra, and Avida.

For this to be truly genetic, the algorithms themselves would have to evolve.

For weather simulations to be truly predictive, the algorithms would need to condense out of the atmosphere.

For traffic simulations to really work, they would need to pave little digital roads and build little digital cars.

For nuclear physics simulations to really be nuclear, they would have to require lead shielding around the computer.

Red Square is located just outside the Kremlin, along it's Eastern wall. In the late 15th Century, people came to this square, called Torg or Market Square, to purchase food, livestock, or other wares. By the late 16th Century, it was renamed Trinity Square, and served as the main entrance to the Kremlin. It got the name Krasnaya Ploschad (Red Square) in 17th Century. In this sense Krasnaya (Red) means beautiful. The Pokrovsky (St. Basil's the Blessed) Cathedral, the Lenin's Mausoleum and the State History Museum are located on Red Square.

Hotel-Rates.com page for Maxima Irbis hotel in Moscow

This sites for a bell foundry in Russia states "Krasny" means "red", and "red" means "beautiful".

Photo tour of Moscow, in which the phrase "Red Square (meaning beautiful square in Russian)" is written.

Another tourist of Moscow reports, "Our first stop is St Basil's Cathedral at the end of Red Square. In Russian, it is Krasne square meaning red or beautiful."

Russian traditional costume seller says, "The word "krasnoye" meaning "red" became identified in the people's minds with "prekrasno-ye" meaning "beautiful". Moscow's most beautiful central square is called "Krasnaya Ploshchad" (Red Square)."

You may notice that Red Square isn't really red...it is paved with black and grey stones. In the Russian language, "Krasny"("red") also meant "beautiful", so "Krasnaya Ploschad" can also be translated as "Beautiful Square". The translation "Red Square" which is now used, was established in the 20th century.

talks about the modern link that still exists between "red" and "beauty"

Eduard Shevardnadze relays to the US State Department Chief of Protocol that krasny can mean "beautiful" as well as "red" -- in 1987.

Russia

Whereas she is on a ventilator, I imagine she is lying in a bed on her back. As such, writing/drawing is probably impractical as either the writing surface would have to be suspended above her so she could see it, or she'd have to write without seeing the paper/surface.

Pointing at a picture or word board is a good idea, but may prove difficult for her if she is tired, weak, heavily medicated (probable for intubated persons), or her arms have IVs. Also keep in mind whether she needs to use glasses for reading - she may not be able to read the board. It is possible to use an "eye-gaze" board, where you use a small number of words/pictures on a large board and there's a hold in the center of the board. As she stares at her 'response' on the board, you look through the hold in the center of the board and determine which direction her eyes are looking to select her response.

Assistive communication device can be hard for persons lying flat on their backIt would need to be suspended above her, and she may still have problems reaching up to hit the buttons. There's also the issue of what do you do when you're not there - hosptital staf won't want this device suspended above her and there's a good chance of it getting lost or broken. If you have an old laptop with mouse, you can download free voice-output communication software called PVoice at http://www.pvoice.org/

My advice is to use a few sign language words. If she can move one hand, the sign YES is to make a fist and 'nod' your fist up and down at the wrist, like someone nodding their head. The word NO is like a two-fingered "spock nerve pinch". The best online resource for sign language is Michigan State Univ "American Sign Language Browser" at http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/browser.ht m They provide a small video snippet for each word which makes it really easy to learn. If course, you'd have to learn a couple signs then teach them to your grandmother. Best of all is that it required no additional gizmos or equipment and you can teach your other family members too so they are able to communicate with her as well. Good luck!

Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex speech.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Heed was not taken and arose it did..

http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/abstracts.html#face3 d We've had this going on at msu for years now. 3d face modeling and such for pin #'s, etc. The 3d face recog technology was demonstrated on local news with the head of our CSE department and the main team members for the project. It's actually pretty cool..but somehow I feel like they're getting shafted while other schools try to do the same thing.

This is going way off topic.

My philosophy teacher in college (Debra Nails, http://www.msu.edu/~nails/, used to teach at Mary Washington) swore up and down that Spinoza was a closet atheist, and that the only way he could carry on conversations with his comptemporaries was to discuss God.

There is some evidence. If you take the premise of his theory about God, then there is no perceived difference between a reality with Spinoza's God existing as the immutable whole of the universe, and a reality that doesn't involve God at all.

Certainly makes me want to break out my copy of Ethics again to see if I remember what I think I read about Spinoza correctly.

You have to pay to enter the United States too. Whether you are entering with a visa or without (Tourist from Visa Waiver Country), you have to fill in an I-94 or I-94W form.

See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas
"TN-1 applicants at land ports-of-entry must also pay a modest I-94 fee."

and http://www.oiss.msu.edu/depts_visasTN.php
"the $6 fee for each I-94 card"

This fee is already included in the ticket, but if you enter by land, you probably have to pay it.

My cat got very sick a few years ago after being bitten by a raccoon. When the local vet couldn't diagnose the problem we took him to the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University. The cat couldn't even stand up and was fading fast so they wanted to give him a transfusion. But when they tried to match his blood type the samples reacted against every donor they checked. So they offered to try an experimental artificial blood.

The artificial blood kept him alive long enough to identify a parasite infection, start him on treatment for the parasites, and let him recover until a natural blood donor could be found and infused. He was hospitalized for over a week but finally recovered and is perfectly healthy now. The interesting side effect is that he bulked up massively since the illness. He's over twenty pounds and extremely muscular. I don't know which artificial blood they used and what other side effects it had, but it seems like it might have more applications beyond just blood replacement for emergencies.

AlpineR

(WTF was Roosevelt sabre-rattling about in 1899, anyway? The Spanish-American War?)

Well, in the speech he was obviously referencing the Civil War, but I think it's real point was calling out the Republican leadership at the time for their isolationism and (arguable) complacency and smugness in victory over Spain in the recently-concluded Spanish-American War (and in which he was a hero). The speech is usually referred to as the "Strenuous Life" speech; if you Google it you'll turn up the text and much analysis. But I think it's generally understood as a call for the United States to take up a more active, aggressive foreign policy, particularly versus the declining European empires.

Ironically, the speech didn't go over too well with the conservative leadership, and depending on who you believe, may have cost Roosevelt -- then the Governor of NY -- a lot of his support within his party. (The fact that he was generally rocking the boat and upsetting the well-oiled machine of NY politics probably didn't help, either.) They pretty much forced him to take the nomination for Vice President to incumbent McKinley, a weak position (compared to governorship of NY) which might have been the end of his political career, except that President McKinley got himself assassinated... and we all know the rest.

I've been able to get armedslack up and running on an arm board with 32 meg of ram. It worked quite well. Eventually ended up with debian-arm for production because of specific glibc and kernel versions which were available. I was able to use NFS and ssh on the ARM system and didn't notice any oddities with the networking stack (2.4 kernel). Some sites below where you can get a few of the arm distros I used.

Snapgear
          http://ftp.snapgear.org/pub/

armedslack
          http://www.armedslack.org/

debian
          http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/
          http://mirrors.midco.net/debian/pool/main/
          http://mirrors.midco.net/debian/pool/main/
          http://ftp.egr.msu.edu/debian/dists/sarge/main/ins taller-arm/current/images/netwinder/

You know, some of us have known for a while that Steve replies to his email, or at least a small subset of the torrents he probably receives every day (a couple of public examples). He's answered a few of the questions I've emailed him over the years, too, and I'm just a regular Slashdotter Joe.

But the more publicity he gets for doing it, and the more people actually try to email him, the less likely he'll be to read and respond, and the less personal it's actually going to get. It's obvious from the numbers. Part of me hates myself for saying this, and I acknowledge that it's elitist as all hell, but I sort of wish these guys (the ones "in the know" about Steve's responsiveness over email) would keep it to themselves. Because if Steve stops answering his email, that's another piece gone of the old Apple spirit.

Of course, I suppose we must all eventually succumb to inevitability—but there's no harm delaying that end, while possible. So please. Enough. Let me suggest we simply appreciate Steve for keeping it real, and not trumpet it all over the blog-o-spierre.

Ugh. Come on, dude. Google is your friend when it comes to this kind of thing. It is not horribly difficult to find the incident that the GP was referring to. Even if the sources are biased, it serves as a launchpad to discover the truth. As for your "one isolated incident" rhetoric, that also happens to be one of the great things about the internet. You can find out things that some people don't necessarily want you to know. As for what to make of it all, you have to judge the evidence and draw your own conclusions.

Sure you can repeat evolution. It's called "setting the fitness criteria repeatedly". If you can match the criteria more than once to solve a given problem then you have repeated evolution. Note: this is for applications of evolutionary theory. When the natural environment sets the criteria for biological systems we call it Natural Selection.

http://www.frams.alife.pl/common/al_evoltips.html

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~evs/ml/OthelloStudPro j/Jan%20Stephen/ml-hw4.html

Repetition can also be observed with fast reproducing species by likewise arbitrarily setting fitness criteria:
http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2006/11/24/evolution-exp eriments-with-bacteria/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_evolutio n
http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

As for "computers never being smarter than their programmers", watch the experiments going on with FPGAs mentioned earlier this week. The results of these regularly generate circuits that depend on undocumented chip behaivors and features/flaws of individual chips: no human would design things that way. All we really need do is build several machines capable of reproducing themselves, supply some feedstock, and watch. True, one can argue that the initial machines were created but since there isn't any predicting what you get several hundred thousand generations down the line, I wouldn't call the end product Designed either.

Why is it dangerous? Do you have anything to support that? Or is it just because of the Hindenburg?

I would guess the refueling infrastructure wouldn't require that much of a change; you'd just have to have pressurized tanks, pumps, etc. The important part is that the vehicles wouldn't all have to be replaced with a totally different technology, as you advocate with your batteries. Hydrogen burns just fine in a slightly modified gasoline engine. Hundreds of millions of cars wouldn't need to be suddenly replaced, and people with older cars could easily modify them to burn the new fuel.

What's wrong with batteries? That's pretty easy.
1) Can't store enough energy (the same thing you say about hydrogen). Has anyone built an all-electric car that can go 400-500 miles without a recharge? If not, then the technology simply isn't ready to use. The best I've heard of was GM's EV-1, which could only go 30-40 miles or so.
2) They take forever to recharge. If I'm taking a weekend road trip, I'm not about to stop every 100 miles and wait 4 hours to recharge my batteries. If it can't be recharged in 5 minutes, it's not ready to use.
3) They're heavy. All-electric cars are very heavy because of the batteries, and that only gives them a pathetic range. Adding more batteries for a better range increases the weight too much.
4) They're expensive. Lead-acid batteries aren't too cheap, but they don't store enough energy. Upgrading to something like Li-ion means an enormous cost.
5) They're not improving fast enough. Sure, I can get 2500 mAh AA batteries for my digital camera now, when I could only get 1800 mAh batteries 4-5 years ago. That's not much improvement when, as I pointed out before, electric cars are WAY behind everything else for range. And you still haven't addressed the recharge time issue: even if you could get 300 miles out of a charge, that's no good if it takes 8 hours to recharge. Very few people are willing to own separate cars for long trips and for commuting.

Lastly, no one wants to move to a new technology just because of some promise of "potential breakthroughs". Sorry, I'm not going to put up with a major pain-in-the-ass technology for 30 years waiting for someone to develop this "super nanocapacitor" so we can finally have the performance with electric that we've had with fossil fuels for almost a century. Develop the new technology first, and then we'll consider it.

As for hydrogen, here's some nice links I found in 10 seconds with Google:

Hydrogen storage in nanotubes - 1998

Hydrogen stored in nano-scale metal-organic frameworks - 2005

Hydrogen stored as solid

Apparently, a lot of real (and expensive) research is being conducted into making hydrogen a realistic replacement for gasoline. That's a lot more than I can say about batteries. From what I see, the idea of an all-electric car has basically been abandoned (though hybrids are certainly becoming very popular).

I'm a control freak? You are an asshat who appears to enjoy making WAGs about other people.

Re-read your own claptrap. And maybe read this thread to get some context... or at least open your eyes while you pretend to read.

I don't give a dingo's kidney if someone wants to pay their bills using company equipment. If they don't have authorization, they can't. It has nothing to do with me. I don't make policy, I just implement it. I'd really like to see that discussion between the billing manager and the GLM... "um, Carlos wants internet access to he can pay his bills".

With regards to "work related" software, where the flying fuck did you read that gem? You are the poster child for ASS-u-ming. You've no idea the federal and state regulations with regards to software, access, information/patient protection measures that are required in the healthcare industry. It's not a matter of CONTROL, it's a matter of CAP or CLIA or MediCal compliance. The biller who whats to pay his bills -- remember him? How's he going to pay after he gets his last paycheck because the lab lost it's MediCal licence for compliance violations and we can no longer collect revenue?

Ignorant prick.

Why NOT be green?

Because, as a great philosopher once said, it's not easy being green.

This page http://www.msu.edu/course/zol/316/tgontreat.htm might shed some light on possible cure. I for one wish to be level headed, maybe that would effect my slashdot profile..

If you read French, the full article are available a few places online, including as part of an obituary for Albert Sauvy. It's a historic article, well worth the read. It's reasonably simple to get through even with relatively basic school French like mine.

To summarize, the article describes how one at the time talked of two worlds, about the whether they would go to war or co-exist, and how one forget that there is a third world. It goes on to explicitly mention the worlds of "western capitalism" and "eastern communism", and ends by in it's final paragraph comparing the third world to the concept of the "Third estate" from the French revolution. The Third estate was "the people", after the nobility (the first estate) and the church/clergy (the second estate).

Sauvy did not explicitly name "western capitalism" as the first world, but the enumeration ended up that way de-facto, most likely because the article several times mentions the worlds of "the west" or "western capitalism" and "the east" or "eastern communism" in that order.

We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of construction of the university's first computer http://www.computing.msu.edu/50years/mistic.html. A panel of the original builders and users was convened to discuss the history. One tidbit which was interesting and relevant to this thread was that they tied a speaker to the sign bit so they could monitor the health of the computer while it was running. Given that output was on paper tape the aural monitoring was useful. I found their choice of the sign bit to be interesting.

I'm not sure what is used in processors currently, but having the links as nanotubes would help the heat transfer within the material also. Nanotubes have a thermal conductivity of around 2000-3000 W/m/K at normal CPU operating temperatures. This is a huge increase when you compare it to the 149 W/m/K for silicon and 318 W/m/K for gold at room temperature.

So the increase in thermal conductivity by just having a proportion of the CPU made from nanotubes could possibly be enough to make up for the shape change. I wouldn't have thought much power would be saved by using nanotubes over any other conductor though. I'd be guessing most of the power loss is in the silicon gates, but I might be wrong.

http://www.pa.msu.edu/cmp/csc/ntproperties/thermal transport.html Carbon Nanotube Thermal Conductivity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon Silicon Thermal Conductivity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold Gold Thermal Conductivity

• 6 GtC/year emitted per year
• 100 kilos per 10" balsam fir (50 years old; that's a bit slow
  of a turn-around for the market, but older trees absorb more carbon).
• 800 trees per acre

The modern GOP (by that I mean since Eisenhower, and Ike wasn't even truly a Republican. He was apolitical -- as the entire military was up until Reagan -- and then ended with his Presidential tenure with the infamous warning of the Military-Industrial Complex. I'd like to see any Republican give such a speech today.) has a long history of dirty tricks, from the Watergate break in, all the way to today. In the 2002 election the GOP jammed the Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire. People went to jail because of that. Race baiting ads as part of their "southern strategy". Challenging legal voters based on bogus "felon lists." Challenging voters to present photo id when it's not a requirement. Informing voters in predominately black neighborhoods that the election was either postponed, or directing them to the wrong precincts. Frankly it's not surprising. The same ones that were running the party back then are the same ones running the party now. Total contempt for democracy. Macavelli would be proud.

No. Democrats don't do these sort of things.. Arguably, because liberals are "too pussy" to cheat, and "too naive" and believe in fair elections.

There was a time when the "Vote Facist for Law and Order" bumper stickers were funny. Now the seem just a bit too truthful.

--
"When the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
-- Richard Nixon, May 19, 1977 interview with Robert Frost

I just checked out screenshots, and ... uck. I mean, seriously.

The graphics of 1996/1997 looked like this and this. The graphics of 2003-present look like this and this.

Which does Second life (this and this) look more like to you? :P Yes, user-created content adds additional optimization challenges. But this is just rather pathetic. All issues of models aside, their lighting and shading models are just crummy.

How is it that Linden Labs, raking in millions per year, can be outdone by open-source MMORPGs with a few hundred players on at a time, like Eternal Lands, in terms of graphics quality? And there's probably better examples than that, as EL doesn't even have normal maps yet, needs to lower their ambient levels, and ought to subdivide some polys that are closed to fixed light sources.

In response to some requests: the lecture was "How to Make a Dinosaur"

I happen to look it up and found this: http://www.unmuseum.org/dnadino.htm

Here is yet another interesting link: http://www.cem.msu.edu/~cem181h/projects/97/clonin g/index.htm

---
I wonder what dyno-burgers taste like :)

This reminds me of that Dilbert strip where Asok explains how "it's not logically possible to prove something can't be done". Wait, I think I'm going into an endless loop while thinking about thinking about thinking about this in the context of string theory.

To clarify, by heirarchial I was refering to HFC.

GA/GP searches a problem space for answers using a distributed hill climbing algorithm. It isn't a magic bullet for all problems, but performs well when the fitness of the solution set is a contiguous function and the slopes of the fitness hyperplane are not too extreme. If the fitness landscape is not contiguous, then GA/GP is unlikely to outperform random search by very much.

For instance: If your problem is "Devise a key that will open this lock", then GA/GP is not a very good way to go about searching because the feedback for whether the solution is good or not is purely binary... it either works, or it doesn't. In a failed attempt there is no "hints" as to whether this failure was closer of further away from any solution. If, however, we can gague how good the solution is in comparison with other attempts, we can hill-climb the fitness landscape and home in on good solutions.

Traditionally, however, GA/GP has been limited by the fact that it tends to home in on 1 good solution, to the exclusion of all others, even if it's not the "best" solution. The algorithms tend to refine a good solution forever, never escaping their local maxima in the fitness landscape. The only way to get them to find another solution is to restart the evolution from the beginning. HFC allows the run to continuously probe the entire solution set and converge on all maxima.

Your question about optimal subsolutions is debated actually. Koza's original premise was that GP works by combining good subtrees in a solution. More recent research has brought this into question, and often random mutation will outperform crossover, or at least come close. There is work being done to see if we can increase the role of solution "building blocks" but there is no concensus. Your NP problem does not need to be highly decomposeable for most GA/GP systems to work, but it does need to have a smooth fitness landscape.

Wow, man, chill out. READ what he wrote. You're one of those annoying people that automatically assume that anyone that disagrees with them is insulting their disability in some way. I have no idea how a small debate about the metrics of enviornmental impact turned into what you perceive as a personal insult. Sigh...you're a fool.

He was merely stating that simply comparing the consumption of gasoline is NOT an accurate way of measuring the environmental impact of a engine. Likewise, he was NOT insulting your lack of funds. The natural order of consumerism is that new technology will inevitably be passed down to end users. You may not adopt them immediately, but in time, you'll own what is now considered a "modern" emissions-control car.

And to take you up on your grand challenge: http://www.egr.msu.edu/erl/emiss/emiss.htm

Take a look at the chart, which was lifted from:
Sun, X., Brereton, G. J., Morrison, K.& Patterson, D. J., "Emissions analysis of small utility engines" SAE Paper 952080, SAE Off-Highway and Powerplant Congress, Milwaukee, Sept 1995. (Also printed in the SAE Publication SP-1112 `Design and Emissions of Small Two- and Four-Stroke Engines,' SAE, 1995 and as a featured article in the SAE publication: `Off-Highway Engineering', Jan 1996, and to appear in the SAE Journal of Engines)
Yes, I verified it.

Basically, what it's saying is that your weed-whacking engine, a close equivalent of the "Lawnboy D410 (2 Hp), 2-stroke (untuned)" is putting out 1500 (CO(gr)/kW-hr). Meanwhile, a "modern" engine is generating less than ONE. Even the 1994 California Emissions Regulations (a relatively lax requirement meant more to weed vehicles with malfunctioning emissions control systems) is 400 CO(gr)/kW-hr. So what does that mean? Your precious engine generates almost 4 times more emissions than a car that can just barely pass a 12 year old emissions requirement, and 1000+ times more than a fully modern and functional vehicle. And that's not even taking in consideration the greater kW-hr efficiency of a car's engine over that of a jury-rigged weed-whacker.

At 128 ounes = 1 gallon, I'd say that your "Green Machine" is easily outclassed by anything short of a vehicle that couldn't even legally drive on the road over 10 years ago.

Good game. And thanks for acting like a victim.

If you were using something like indigo, you would be using a perfectly legal, public domain ink - one of the ones in the "5,000 years old" category. However nowadays much research and development goes into creating new inks. I worked at one such company's research centre, let's call it Company X, for one of my co-ops. Creating a new ink was serious business. So hopefully this can be an overview of what I learned.

In order to create a "clone" ink, you have to match the colours, as most printers are designed to use a certain colour space, which must be matched by the inks used - a mismatch of colours means that your photos won't look quite right. Certain chemical structures absorb light at different wavelengths, and have different absorption patterns. You need to match it very closely, otherwise a Brand Name print and a Knock-Off will look different depending on the light that it is viewed under (Fluorescent vs Sunlight & Incandescent lights). The easiest way to do this is to match the structure of the dye very closely, or at least by finding a related dye that has the same absorption spectrum. Furthermore, the ink has to stick to the surface well enough, be fade-resistant (i.e. not break down with exposure to sunlight), and ideally easy to make. The chemist's job is to design and make said new dyes so that the new dye molecule - and just as importantly the process used to make it - can be patented.

Formulations are another part of the patent. I don't know if you've ever smelled the difference between a Canon brand ink cartridge and a clone (I get mine from piloshop.ca), but they smell very different. Piloshop's ink reeks of what I am fairly sure is ethylene glycol (the price of cheapness). Not only does one have to match the colour with the right chemical dye (or combination of them), one must also make sure that they are properly dissolved, dispersed, have the right consistency, and so forth. Bad formulations lead to ink that chips off, or steaking on the page. This is much like the pharmaceutical industry where it is not just the drug that you use, but what other things you throw in to make it work and be absorbed by the body. (E.g. a certain widely-used drug is sold as the citrate salt to make it work better.)

As for violating the DCMA, you've forgotten what the D stands for: digital. This is chemical. And every company out there is testing their competitor's chemical products. Whether it's a battery company, a drug company, or a plastics company. Every product needs a benchmark, and chances are it was made by the other guys. It can actually be quite simple to find out what some of the chemical components are, however the beauty of what HP's chemists have done is that they've managed to create a simple fingerprint-type comparisson test that uses a relatively small amount of dye. And at a dozen dyes a week, it sounds like it works well.

ampmouse: "Remember that Science can only explain observable events."

Huuuuuuh? You're not a scientist, I hope. What do you think of the theoretical sciences? Many things we know about Space and Time we know without being able to OBSERVE them. Many things we know only because physics/mathematics tells us that it HAS TO BE SO. A good example would be the gravitational lensing of light as it passes massive objects on its way to earth.. That is exactly how we can detect the "black holes" and other super-massives out there, which, due to their very light-sucking nature*, cannot be observed.

That you actually made such a statement is almost as profound as the statement itself. Science explains a lot of things, past and present. I would hardly call the fossil formation of an ancient trilobyte an "observable event" yet, by various means of spectrometry and x-ray crystallography, etc, we can determine exactly how the fossil was formed, exactly how the mineral leaching occurred and replaced the organic substances with stone. Observable? No. Science? Yes.

In fact, many of these fossils are DIRECT EVIDENCE of your so-called "macroevolution" !! All the signs of macroevolution are here! Last time I looked, I didn't see any primordial soup puddled anywhere around here recently.. Those Cro-Magnon fossil bones mean that Cro-Magnon man must not have existed, since we cannot observe them in existence..? Oh wait, how about dinosaurs? Based on your philosophy, they never existed; the fossil bones are "Science" while the actual idea of dinosaurs is "Religion" .. Huuuuuh?

Science is the search for knowledge. Nowhere does anything (except YOU!) state that "Science can only explain observable events." !!! Perhaps you're trying to tell us that science (and/or macroevolution) is faith-based??

Please, stop misleading people already. Just because it is not observable doesn't mean it's not true**. To quote Ed Wuncler III, "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!"

-Weasel5i2

* Not to be confused with "dark-sucking"
** See another reader's "science = TRUTH, religion=FAITH" reply above

Merit is still a HUGE Internet (and Internet2) player in Michigan and surrounding states. Check out their newest (well, coolest-newest) project here: http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0508&L=msunag &D=1&T=0&O=D&P=131. I'd love to set up a LAN party on that baby!

Well sure, to completely colonize a planet we'll need robots for the hard work and humans to make decisions. I'm not suggesting we don't send humans to do it..! But the article suggests we send humans as soon as possible, and that risk sounds a bit big to me.

On the bottom of oceans scientists have found organisms living of hydrogen sulfide, nothing to eat and no light there. This proves organisms might exist that are easy(easier) to send and colonize a planet.

Once we have bacteria that can live on the local chemical composition we can send bacteria that produce other chemicals, including CO2. Then we can send plants etc to get some vegitation.
After the vegitation of course we need robots and humans to build houses and then we can fully colonize it.

But I really don't think sending humans with robots and a big air supply is the best way to do it...

Nope. I didn't say I *approve* of what the idiot has done, but I would still vote for him if I had to choose between Bush or Kerry. For me, it's the choice of two evils.

I would have gone down at least two seperate mental pathways before even getting close to where you are on this. One is that, assuming that I hadn't done any research whatsoever before the 2000 elections so didn't already see this all coming, we'd seen Bush for 4 years and it was a complete disaster. What exactly did he do right during that time. Hell, what did he not do almost *exactly* wrong? You fail it that bad, you lose. Kerry was an unknown (overly, completely, and idiotically unknown, but I digress) but would not have owed his election to an extremist hate group as Bush does. Just look at the treasonous attempts to amend our constitution for the first time in history to specifically discriminate against the one group it's still "ok" to hate. This from the "compassionate, moral" Orwellian asshats.
The second is that Kerry would have been a first termer with a hostile Congress and Bush would have had only one term. Limited damage.

Either one of these would prove Kerry to be less of an evil if you really feel the need to vote that way. No, I didn't vote for either. Not Bush because I actually do my research and I have no interest in being directly (or indirectly for that matter, but emigration ain't easy) responsible for torture and murder camps and the dismantling of the constitution and I'm a decent, moral human being, so I will provide no support whatsoever for terroristic hate groups like the Christian right. Not Kerry, because while he would have been less of an evil, I refuse to piss my vote away in that manner.

No, I think freedom is something we need to get back, from both of these idiotic parties. I don't believe that the government is fascist, though we are starting to head that way, which is a concern. And we're not at a theocracy, though again, we get pretty close sometimes.

We're more or less in agreement on this, but I think you are just beginning to wake up. Fascism and theocracy are the goals of current Republican party. Pretty much every single thing they have done since the 80s were directed straight toward these goals.
It's been on the march since the end of World War 2. I mean have you ever actually read Ike's speech? Fascism was large and on the move and the President of the United States pointed it out as a grave danger in 1961. Nothing had been done to address it, and it has grown to the point that it is the system we're living under today.
Reagan's presidency was when it went into the mainstream and into overdrive. That's when the religious extremists started making their major play and they have continued since then. That's when Neil Bush (of those Bushes) and the rest of his cabal took the country for billions that we're still paying. That's when the whole war on drugs thing got going at the same exact time that the CIA was helping funnel crack to our streets. That's even on their freaking website now, so don't pretend that isn't true. That's when the Vatican first got diplomatic recognition. That's when the poor were demonized and the rich glorified at the same time that they were looting the country. That's when we set up our first torture/murder schools. And for the love of anything holy, look at the Republican congress since that time. Far and away the most corrupt congress we have ever had. It's not like the current Bush popped out of nowhere and magically started acting differently. It's been a steady progression.

How can you possibly say that now, 60 years in, that it's "starting" and a "concern".
Do you not understand what fascism is, or do you just not really care as long as you get yours?

Fortunately for us, these sort of changes happen over a lot longer period than just a couple years. But I guess that doesn't matter since you think Republicans have been doing this ever

Thanks for reminding me of the Nacirema!

Interesting read: "Body Ritual among the Nacirema"

[The] Comanche was a wonderful idea up until about 1989. [...] We started seeing that kind of threat disappear, and then it continued to disappear over the last decade." Commenting on the Schoomaker statement, Defense News wrote on 1 March: "Army officials say the move reflects the more elusive enemies and weapons that have emerged since Comanche was conceived in 1983 to find and fight Soviet tank formations. Stealth, once the RAH-66's biggest selling point, is now deemed unnecessary and expensive.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two finely equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

See http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/prabhakar_indiv_pami .pdf for a discussion of this. It suggests that the chances of "near identical" fingerprints in someone else whose fingerprints are collected carefully is pretty small, but the chance of a match to latent fingerprints (the ones someone left at the scene of a crime) are quite a bit higher. "A few dozen" people being able to leave latent prints that match yours is plausible.