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I don't think there was a dispute that all 4 hoofs are off the ground at one time in the canter/gallop. This is something that can be readily seen by the unaided eye when you watch horses gallop. This moment of suspension was well known by horsemen of the time and was written about in training books of that era. The problem would have been one of determining if all 4 hoofs were off the ground at one time at the trot. See: http://cvm.msu.edu/dressage/articles/mcrep/mcrep12 .htm

Imagine an Eciton Cluster ....

Everyone keeps talking about Sun "working with" Microsoft. I just don't see where this is happening. I don't see "settling a lawsuit" and "partnering" as being the same thing at all.

If you're talking about the cryptic "IP cross-licensing agreement", then why aren't you spitting the same venom at Apple? Because they signed such an agreement with Microsoft as well when they settled their lawsuits against Microsoft in 1997. I don't see this cross-licensing as "working with". This is just an "okay, no more lawsuits" agreement. Sun hasn't given up on fighting MS, they've just given up on fighting them in the courtroom.

Am I missing something?

• Travis Doom named his cats Certain and Impending.

• Luscious N. Delicious changed his name from Scott 5 or 6 years back.

From Research Nebraska

Methane is the second-most abundant greenhouse gas. The world's agricultural livestock produce about 17 percent of the methane in the atmosphere. A byproduct of digestion, cattle and other ruminant animals produce methane when organisms in their stomachs called methanogens break down fiber in grasses and grains they eat.

Here are some pictures of the little critters, and here

At Michigan State, we have a game development organization (Spartasoft) that helps those that want to get into the game industry. People can find others that share interests to work on projects, we have tutorials (3D Studio Max, DirectX) and even get guest speakers (from Microsoft, Image Space (who did Nascar Thunder and F1 for EA), etc). We've had several people graduate and go on to work in the industry as well as get internships. Last year, we had two projects nominated in the Independent Games Festival Student showcase.

The important thing though is that the people that succeed from here are passionate and work extremely hard on their projects. So I don't think guild halls are necessary. But effort and dedication is and that'll carry you regardless of where you go to study.

Note: That's just my personal opinion. I'm just a graduate student and not in the game industry.

At Michigan State, we have a game development organization (Spartasoft) that helps those that want to get into the game industry. People can find others that share interests to work on projects, we have tutorials (3D Studio Max, DirectX) and even get guest speakers (from Microsoft, Image Space (who did Nascar Thunder and F1 for EA), etc). We've had several people graduate and go on to work in the industry as well as get internships. Last year, we had two projects nominated in the Independent Games Festival Student showcase.

The important thing though is that the people that succeed from here are passionate and work extremely hard on their projects. So I don't think guild halls are necessary. But effort and dedication is and that'll carry you regardless of where you go to study.

Note: That's just my personal opinion. I'm just a graduate student and not in the game industry.

I created a php page that I run on localhost apache server. Here is a sample of what the page looks like (the actual appointments, names, birthdays, etc have been changed). It allows me to write what I have to do and save it. Also, what I write in the appointment textbox is read in by the calendar part so the dates are underlined and a tooltip tells me what I have to do (needed when the texbox is full since I don't like to delete record of what I've done either).

I tend to forget to stay organized, so I do it for a while and then have lapses. On MS Windows, I have this as my desktop as well with Active Desktop. On GNU/Linux, I don't know how to do that so it's just my homepage on my browsers. (I might try to do it with superkaramba.) Though, this can't motivate me to stay organized, the constant reminder has been helpful for me.

on a side note, the page looks much better in Mozilla, Opera and MSIE than Konqueror. KHTML doesn't seem to be able to have backgrounds on textboxes, and there are other issues with it in terms of aesthetics.

BIOSAFETY LEVEL 4 is required for work with dangerous and exotic agents which pose a high individual risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening disease.

In IN at my cottage, we call those japanese beetles.

Japanese beetles are smaller, shinier and have ridges on their wing covers. The ones I'm talking about have a dusty appearance and a small horn on their head (we also used to call them "unicorn beetles").

The Nanotube Site

Woodbees are pretty ferocious, and may someday be able to able to eat plastic like that bacteria in _The Andromeda Strain_. They could probably take one of these robots down in a few minutes. Better to have it alert the proper authorities with the proper equipment.

The non-executable bit on memory pages is not supported by the x86 architecture

Wrong. Get your facts straight.

Bit 43 of the x86 segment descriptor table specifies whether a memory segment is executable.

Attempting to assign CS to a nonexecutable (read/write data) segment, i.e. attempting to execute code in a segment not specifically marked as executable, generates an exception. (See also this presentation for an overview of this and many other x86 security features, most of which are, admittedly, ignored by both Windows and Linux.)

And, by the way, this feature has been around since protected mode was introduced on the 80386. That was in 1985, almost 20 years ago.

It has been observed that the reduced contact area offered by solid-state fingerprint sensors do not provide sufficient information (e.g., number of minutiae) for high accuracy user verification. Further, multiple impressions of the same finger acquired by these sensors, may have only a small region of overlap thereby affecting the matching performance of the verification system.

His take seemed to be that this standard was complete in name only, just to have something to show for their efforts. But most of the specialists stopped contributing to it after the MS mess became known.

He understood Microsoft's desire to influence the standards, but most lobbying is done explicitly. I think they reacted so negatively because they were obviously trying to hide their influence, yet pretend to be having an open and impartial standards setting group.

Most of the technology people involved were primarily concerned with making the standard open to even the smallest and poorest businesses and countries worldwide, and when they found out about this they just weren't happy at all.

You, sir, should also be tarred-and-feathered, just like the Tory limeys you and your kind follow in lockstep: Read about it

Sorry, that image just popped into my head ;-)

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual salary for a general practititioner in the greater Chicagoland area is only $128,060. This statement would be correct if you were comparing the average INDIAN CS salary, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the mean annual salary for all Computer and Mathematical Occupations for the greater Chicagoland area is $63,550.

Another area to consider is that all practicing physicians are required to carry professional liability insurance. Premium rates can exceed $100,000 annually for high risk specialties [1], and still run in the $1000's annually for the average MD.

There are many in the medical profession who are much better off financially than the mean, but to make a blanket statement that all practicing physicians make $400K - 800K is just not true.

Two clues, little man:

Aspell

Will to power

Offsite Image

Credit goes to this Fark Photoshop contest

First as the probe comes in, we should broasdcast something like:

We the people of Earth greet you in a spirit of peace and humility

Follow that up with a little Vivalid rather than that Bleargh (which would be the main cause of the conflict).

Then follow up with a Mars-shattering antimatter kaboom!

Walk. Don't run. We come in peace.

Finally the revisionist conspiracy has been exposed! Their shameless attempts at hiding the existence of BoilerPlate will no longer work. At last the world can see BoilerPlate posing with Pancho Villa, instead of only seeing the revisionist version of the picture, where BoilerPlate has been replaced by some nameless revolutionary. Kinda makes one wonder if those US soldiers in Iraq aren't actually BoilerPlate Mark 10's.

Hara Kiri is just the "vulgar" term for Seppuku. Literally translated, hara belly + kiri cutting. Here's a howto guide on how to commit seppuku with a frisbee.

Of course, it didn't occur to me to take a look at the Science section before submitting my own copy of this story (which, since it has several other useful links in it, follows):

Michael Shafer, a graduate student at Michigan State University, took time out for a "short victory dance" upon learning his computer had discovered the 40th known Mersenne prime as part of The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. The number itself is 2**20996011-1 and when expressed in base 10, has 6,320,430 digits (zipped copy). However, this is not necessarily the 40th Mersenne prime; there could be another between the previous largest known prime (M39=2**13466917-1, also discovered by GIMPS) and this one. Also worth noting is the still-standing USD$100,000 EFF prize for the discover of the first prime of at least 10 million (decimal) digits. GIMPS clients are available for various operating systems as well as information on how GIMPS would distribute the prize. A press release on the achievement is available as well as several articles. Of course, this also means there's a new largest known even perfect number in town.

Also a full page ad in my school's campus newspaper yesterday. Tried to find a link, but here's the text...

THE KAZAA REVOLUTION
1990 - Made a compilation tape off the radio.
1992 - Bought my first CD. Went to my first concert.
1995 - Logged onto the net for the first time.
2002 - Discovered Kazaa and peer-to-peer.
2003 - Called a pirate. Joined the revolution.
2004 - Buying all my music on Kazaa.
2006 - Formed a band. Sold first song on Kazaa.
2007 - First sold out gig.

The Kazaa Revolution is about you and the other 60 million fans of music, movies and games. It's a new technology that could make life better for everyone. Lower prices. Unlimited catalogs. A smarter way to buy and share online.
The record and movie industry are trying to stop it. Don't let them.
Go to www.kazaa.com/revolution and change to world of entertainment.

Join the Revolution
www.kazaa.com/revolution

----
With a logo that I won't even pretend to copy via ASCII art.

The thing that shocks me the most about it is how they stress BUYING music online. And throw in the line "The record and movie industry are trying to stop it. Don't let them."

That's like saying "The Federal government is trying to invade your privacy! Don't let them! Instead, send all of your personal information to this website: ~~~~~~". Not that I think buying music is rediculous (have a large CD collection myself).

I'll keep my own opinions about filesharing quiet, but I was really suprised that they'd put this in a college newspaper. I know college campuses are one of the leading "frontiers" (lacking a better word atm) of p2p-filesharing, but I have to wonder how many people will read that and say "Yeah! I want to stop downloading my music and rebel by buying my music online! !Viva la revolution!"

Michigan State University has a few classes in the Computer Science and Telecommunications departments which have game programming as a part of the class. In fact, there's one TC class which is dedicated entirely to game design. They are going to be having a graduate school curriculum similar to Guildhall in the near future.

Additionally, MSU has Spartasoft, which had 2 finalists out of the 10 games selected for the GDC Student Showcase in 2003.

So I guess all those studies about terraforming Mars are another plot, like Capricorn 1 ("we never landed on the moon" :-)

Ninjas are Mammals.

According to data from Michigan State University and Matweb, tensile strength (it shouldn't fly apart) and Young's modulus (it shouldn't stretch too much) are comparable to materials currently used.

Pure zero resistance would prevent electric fields from entering a block of superconductor (the change in magnetic fields will induce eddy currents) to counter any change in the local magnetic field) and this effect is called perfect diamagnetism.

The Meissner effect is different: it's a phase change effect -- it takes energy to expel the magnetic field. If the magnetic field is strong enough, the material may never superconduct. In any case, the transition temperature T_c is actually a function of the local magnetic field.

Furthermore, if you boost the field enough, you can quench the superconductivity and initiate resistance heating -- it can get nasty with high currents. Is the magnetic expulsion perfect? Sometimes it is, and sometimes not, because of flux pinning.

Since we often want to use superconductors to either make high magnetic fields (like in magnetic resonance imagers) or to carry large currents (that induce high magnetic fields) the Meissner Effect, and the magnetic dependence of the transition temperature are important considerations for practical superconductors.

So Flemming's life-saving discovery went unused for more than a decade, because he wasn't greedy.

Flemming isn't the only one:

From Figures in Radiation History: Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Rontgen had discovered X rays, a momentous event that instantly revolutionized the field of physics and medicine...However, he refused to take out any patents in order that the world could freely benefit from his work. At the time of his death, Rontgen was nearly bankrupt from the inflation that followed WW I.

IIRC, the discovery of X-ray technology has been one of the biggest advances in modern medicine. At least it did not languish.

Didn't you idiots listen the first time?

BAN DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!!!

1. A one-page biography of Martin Luther King's life, in Arabic, from my Arabic professor;
2. A chapter from a 25-year-old old book on compiler design, in an advanced CS class.

I just noticed something interesting on the page of an old class I took, too: "Following the advice of earlier students, we have decided to make the textbook for {...} recommended rather than required." Woohoo! Someone finally sees the light!

1. A one-page biography of Martin Luther King's life, in Arabic, from my Arabic professor;
2. A chapter from a 25-year-old old book on compiler design, in an advanced CS class.

I just noticed something interesting on the page of an old class I took, too: "Following the advice of earlier students, we have decided to make the textbook for {...} recommended rather than required." Woohoo! Someone finally sees the light!

1. A one-page biography of Martin Luther King's life, in Arabic, from my Arabic professor;
2. A chapter from a 25-year-old old book on compiler design, in an advanced CS class.

I just noticed something interesting on the page of an old class I took, too: "Following the advice of earlier students, we have decided to make the textbook for {...} recommended rather than required." Woohoo! Someone finally sees the light!

...we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

What crap. You are talking about a company that got it's start from dumpster diving someone else's BASIC. Their whole business model is raping what they call "loss leaders" and publically state they will never enter a "market" untill it's "mature", in other words, they stay out of a technology until someone else has done all the work. Then they come in with the famous $500,000 check to aquire, shutdown or destroy ala Netscape, DRDOS and others. They also advocate "Extreem Programming" in which source code is not touched for the most part, only modified slightly. I imagine that most M$ developer time is put in trying to "integrate" the vast Byzantine raft of other people's code that they have aquired, one way or another. Yeah, and they steal code too, that's why they keep losing lawsuits.

1. Stac
2. Quicktime
3. Eolas
4. and many others collected right here

Either you are deluded enough to think M$ cares about anyone or you are an Astroturfer. What version is the Steve Barkto program up to?

A friend of mine had an idea to write a program that beeps in morse code while you type in Windows applications. I was so intrigued with the idea that I had to try it, and wound up finishing it :)

Morse Code Beeper

Both the source code and compiled binaries can be downloaded from the above site. Enjoy.

Harold

nevermind

http://www.msu.edu/~couilla3/ninja/ninja2.htm

right there

Source:

http://www.msu.edu/~couilla3/ninja/ninja2.htm

Now that English is used for Mass...

It would just figure. Some guy starts a flamewar by comparing MCSE with Vatican II and everyone misses the most important point - Martin Luther beat Vatican II to Mass in the vernacular by about 400 years.

Sorry to nit, but I didn't spend five years as a Lutheran kid at a Catholic school just to let that one pass.

It seems that the failure to apply the thermodynamic limitations to radiation physics has shown up in many experiments involving radiation pressure. Thus Crookes' radiometer has invariably rotated in the opposite sense to the expected one. The black side of the paddles invariably recedes from the light, and many explanations have been offered, but not including that which would seem the most obvious: the absence of radiation pressure on the bright side. Similarly all attempts to observe a steady deflection of a pendulum exposed to a light beam have always only shown a brief effect following the sudden beginning of the illumination. Experimental evidence has been ignored and "explained away" each time as some unexpected artifact, because of the widespread belief that the conventional momentum conservation law must be correct. But this law was recognized by Newton only for material bodies, and he had no information about radiation effects. But the momentum conservation law can be shown not to apply to the interaction of radiation with any material objects.

I also note that it is common to see people who have to control spacecraft (especially those not in earth orbit) say that you cannot neglect the effects of solar radiation pressure on the spacecraft's attitude and trajectory. For example NASA's Microwave Anisotropy Probe plans to use solar radiation pressure for backup attitude control (see page 8) and at the very least, cannot neglect this force on the spacecraft.

I would tend to conclude that this guy doesn't really know what he's talking about.

Shortsighted

One of the reasons DRM is so insane is because it is incredibly short sighted. I have records that are over 50 years old. I can play those records on virtually any turntable out there. Imagine if those records had been made with some sort of primitive DRM that required them to be played on a specific machine or required a call into a company to input a code before they would play. The truth is that most of those record companies don't even exist today. A huge cultural legacy would be lost.

The truth is obsolescence is already built in. Formats change computer file systems change, OSes change, our standards of quality change. My bet is that 50 years from now it will be just as rare to find someone playing mp3 files as it is tto find people playing old records now. You will have find a machine to read a certain kind of hard disk, find a way to read a particular file system, and then to interpret the format. Making those formats closed is virtually insuring the digital death of the music (or the video or whatever data they happen to contain).

I already see this problem with old software and data. I have a ton of programs from the apple ][ days. With some doing I can get that data off the old 5 1/2 inch disks and into an emulator under OS X. Most programs work and I can see the data (mainly high school book reports in appleworks), but it's a lot of effort. Luckily I was pretty good about keeping serial numbers around, but the programs that inevitably fail are the ones with anti-copy copy protection. Even back then the odd sector layout would cause problems on certain disk drives. Now the programs are essentially dead. With enough work I could probably revive them, but who has the time? We see the same problem now with certain cds with bad data written in on purpose to foil copying, but also foil playing on certain systems (actually in this case maybe it is a good thing to prevent Celine Dion from propagating her evil).

I have the same problem with my old Mac data circa 1984/85 even without copy protection. I have data in formats of programs that simply don't exist anymore (does anyone remember Fullwrite...so far ahead of it's time, but doomed by MS Word). My only hope for reading this data is finding an old machine or waiting until someone builds a good 68000 emulator (vmac has a ways to go)

Doing this to music (on purpose no less) is particularly insidious because music is one of the things that should live on as a cultural legacy. When I buy a CD I want it to last and I want to be able to play it whether I am here in LA or in a Kashgari taxi. I doubt that 2053 my grandkids will enjoy my Nada Surf mp3s the way I enjoy my grandfather's Vera Lynn and Tex Williams records, but I would like them to have the chance at listening to them in the first place.

and in other news... every other city on the planet is using Microsoft.

Funny you should mention rational thought, as humans are the only species capable of it. So much for our non-uniqueness, eh?

Agreed! It's worse than you might think. There is some fairly convincing evidence that Great Apes and Cetaceans are capable of rational thought. See The Neurological and Environmental Basis for Differing Intelligences: A Comparison of Primate and Cetacean Mentality.

Koko (a gorilla) tested at 5 year old human level on standardized tests in spite of a species/culture bias (she selected leaves instead of ice cream as something good to eat, and a tree rather than a bed as a good place to sleep for example).

It appears to me that science and technology are the primary differentiators between humans and other rational species. Interestingly, the same groups of humans who most strongly assert that humans bear no resemblance to other species generally tend to oppose science and technology as well!

What you are describing sounds like one of the most basic techniques for biometric authentication. I remember being assigned to write programs to do what you describe for a class several years ago. It was one of the easier assignments we had.

If you are researching the subject, I strongly suggest Biometrics: Personal Identification in Networked Society, and anything else on the subject written or edited by Anil Jain.
(His webpage is here, the webpage of his lab is here).

Dr. Jain is (IMHO) the current leader in biometric research worldwide.

What you are describing sounds like one of the most basic techniques for biometric authentication. I remember being assigned to write programs to do what you describe for a class several years ago. It was one of the easier assignments we had.

If you are researching the subject, I strongly suggest Biometrics: Personal Identification in Networked Society, and anything else on the subject written or edited by Anil Jain.
(His webpage is here, the webpage of his lab is here).

Dr. Jain is (IMHO) the current leader in biometric research worldwide.

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

Top results for one-letter google searches as of Sat May 17
a : Apple
b : B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the ...
c : CNET.com
d : D-Link Systems, Inc.
e : Welcome to E! Online
f : Welcome to F-Secure, Securing the Mobile Enterprise
g : G*Loomis
h : H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
i : Yahoo!
j : J-???
k : KDE Homepage - Conquer your Desktop!
l : LEXPRESS.fr : l'info au quotidien. L'actualité économique, ...
m : 3M Worldwide
n : SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer : Online Learning : ...
o : www.oreilly.com -- Welcome to O'Reilly & Associates -- computer ...
p : Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
q : Q4music.com - The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online
s : GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software ...
t : AT&T
u : The whatUseek Network
v : Welcome to Bobby WorldWide
w : Welcome to the White House
x : Netscape.com
y : Yahoo!
z : HealthAtoZ - Your Family Health Site

Actually, this is incorrect. We started with simple digital organisms that were only capable of self-replication, and put them in an environment where they would get more CPU time (basically have their priority increased) if they performed certain mathematical computations, in this case bitwise boolean logic operations.

The organisms were only given a nand instruction to work with, and combinations of nands (linked together carefully with proper juggling of data) could be used to create any of the others. The equals operation (returns 1 where bits in the two sequences are the same, 0 where they differ) seems to require at least 19 instructions to perform. Its important to note that we did not reward partials solutions -- they either got the correct answer of they didn't.

For those interested, we also have a lot of our data related to the paper on our servers, http://myxo.css.msu.edu/papers/nature2003

Charles Ofria (Second author of the paper, and primary author of the software)

Actually, this is incorrect. We started with simple digital organisms that were only capable of self-replication, and put them in an environment where they would get more CPU time (basically have their priority increased) if they performed certain mathematical computations, in this case bitwise boolean logic operations.

The organisms were only given a nand instruction to work with, and combinations of nands (linked together carefully with proper juggling of data) could be used to create any of the others. The equals operation (returns 1 where bits in the two sequences are the same, 0 where they differ) seems to require at least 19 instructions to perform. Its important to note that we did not reward partials solutions -- they either got the correct answer of they didn't.

For those interested, we also have a lot of our data related to the paper on our servers, http://myxo.css.msu.edu/papers/nature2003

Charles Ofria (Second author of the paper, and primary author of the software)