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I suspect the first priority of the technology *is* for paralyzed people... EEG systems have been helping injured patients redevelop their muscular abilities since the sixties, but games are perhaps the best form of biofeedback to be used in training a patient to manipulate his or her own brainwaves. I'm developing a similar system that is scalable and flexible, as to handle everything from video games to the treatment of ADHD, autism, paralysis, etc...

MS SQL Server 200 is OK. However, it cannot touch Oracle as a large enterprise DB. Oracle's clustering/grid computing is very very good stuff. MS SQL Server just doesn't have it. The fortune 500 I am a senior programmer at uses Oracle ONLY for critical data and it has never let us down. We do have a bunch of MS SQL server boxes up to quad 3.06GHz Xeons with HT, SCSI, etc and they are not bad. Though our DBA's would never stick our critical data in them. They are departmental servers only. We have had issues with MS SQL Server 2000 and memory leaks where the DB had to be brought down to clean up memory. Tons of "transaction logs full" problems even though DTS packages do nightly backups of the DB and transaction logs which should clear them out. It is funny because the transaction logs will be fine for a few weeks and then, wham, they just start to get full and the DTS packages fail. MS SQL Server just flakes and needs to be restarted, or sometimes an OS reboot, then the issue is totally gone for a few more weeks, and it comes back. Oracle may take a little more knowlege to setup, however, once you have that core Oracle skill set, Oracle DB will never let you down. We run Oracle on Linux and Solaris and Oracle just won't die. MS SQL Server also just lost its price advantage over Oracle. Another problem with MS SQL Server 2000 is that it only has failover clustering. In fact MS's next version of SQL Server won't have any better clustering support either. One of the main benefits of clustering is cost/performance. I will agree that SQL Server is acceptable for departmental, however it is not there yet for the enterprise needs for the company I work at, and it sounds as if the next version will not be ready either.

Do use SANS/NAS for your load balanced DB?

Here is another site I found while googling for some more information. This website has a PDF document which seems to explain how the protocol works. However, I have not actually read the paper yet so I have no comment on it (I'm going to bed now. I'll read it in the morning).

First, the actual paper is more informative. The crux of the argument is as follows.

If you have a fat pipe, say 1 to 10GB/s, standard TCP will not fully utilize the bandwidth because the congestion control algorithm throttles the rate. As packets move and there are no errors, the rate increases, but not nearly fast enough. In particular, it takes 1.5 hours of error-free data transfer to reach full capacity, and a single error will cut the connection's bandwidth in half.

BIC-TCP uses a different algorithm for congestion control that is more effective at these speeds.

End of news flash.

-Hope

htmlified link to pdf of paper and webpage for the lazy

Lisong Xu, Khaled Harfoush, and Injong Rhee, "Binary Increase Congestion Control for Fast Long-Distance Networks", To appear in Infocom 2004.

jim

htmlified link to pdf of paper and webpage for the lazy

Lisong Xu, Khaled Harfoush, and Injong Rhee, "Binary Increase Congestion Control for Fast Long-Distance Networks", To appear in Infocom 2004.

jim

I'm in Dr. Rhee's CSC316 (Data Structures for Computer Scientists) course. He absolutely knows his stuff, but he can be very hard to understand sometimes. His website is here, with a picture of the guy that doesn't really do him justice. When he walks into the classroom, I swear he looks like one of the laid-back teachers that will just let you slide by through the course, but he *really* makes you learn the material, inside and out.

Anyway, if you're interested in a link to the original article hosted off of the NCSU servers, it is here.

-bigginal

I'm in Dr. Rhee's CSC316 (Data Structures for Computer Scientists) course. He absolutely knows his stuff, but he can be very hard to understand sometimes. His website is here, with a picture of the guy that doesn't really do him justice. When he walks into the classroom, I swear he looks like one of the laid-back teachers that will just let you slide by through the course, but he *really* makes you learn the material, inside and out.

Anyway, if you're interested in a link to the original article hosted off of the NCSU servers, it is here.

-bigginal

I hope none of you are planning to enroll there because of this. At least in the CS undergraduate department, I've found it to be a soul-sucking waste of time. I wish someone there would teach me something.

Instead of reading it from a blog here it is the source press release at the college. .. Still looking for the actual paper though..

PDF describing Bic-TCP

High-speed networks with large delays present a unique environment where TCP may have a problem utilizing the full bandwidth. Several congestion control proposals have been suggested to remedy this problem. In these protocols, mainly two properties have been considered important: TCP friendliness and bandwidth scalability. That is, a protocol should not take away too much bandwidth from TCP while fully utilizing the full bandwidth of high-speed networks. We presents another important constraint, namely, RTT (round trip time) unfairness where competing flows with different RTTs may consume vastly unfair bandwidth shares. Existing schemes have a severe RTT unfairness problem because the window increase rate gets larger as window grows - ironically the very reason that makes them more scalable. The problem occurs distinctly with drop tail routers where packet loss can be highly synchronized. Bic-TCP is a new protocol that ensures a linear RTT fairness under large windows while offering both scalability and bounded TCP-friendliness. The protocol combines two schemes called additive increase and binary search increase. When the congestion window is large, additive increase with a large increment ensures linear RTT fairness as well as good scalability. Under small congestion windows, binary search increase is designed to provide TCP friendliness.

Yep, it looks like the article makes no sense at all.

Dr. Rhee, who made that comparison, also made another factual error: "TCP was originally designed in the 1980s when Internet speeds were much slower and bandwidths much smaller" -- Tcp was actually invented in 1974. Not that major, but you wouldn't expect a guy who "has been researching network congestion solutions for at least a decade" to miss the mark by so much.

Hopefully the reporter was confused, but since it was a press release, you'd think that it would have had time to go through some review.

1999 Research with references to the IEEE Spectrum article (since I am not now an IEEE member and didn't feel like paying to download the original article).

The page there shows that the referenced article was talking mT - milliTesla, not micro, and showed that risk of children developing leukemia increased with EMF field strength, on the order of .2mT.

Certainly, the condenser stage of an ethanol still can't be effectively fed back to the boiler stage, but it can power other processes in the distillery.

If stirling engines were produced in significant quantities, they would be effective way to capture the waste heat to provide electricity for everything from pumps and lighting to forklift batteries.

A Stirling engine is not a magic device. Its limit is the Carnot efficiency, which no real engine can actually reach. According to the first Google hit I got, ethanol boils at 78.3 C at sea-level pressure; in a vacuum still such as you would need to get more than 95% purity, the temperature would be even lower. At 50 C still condenser temperature and 30 C outside temperature you have precious little delta-T just to move the heat flow. Even if you could get lossless heat transfer the Carnot efficiency of an engine running on that heat flow would be (323-303)/323=6.2%. In practice, it would be stupid to try; you can make toy Stirling engines which run on minuscule temperature differences, but they do not produce useful amounts of work.

Once you've sent the heat to the still (maximum temperature 100 C), you can forget the idea of recovering work from it. The place in the cycle where this is practical is at the high-temperature end, where you can generate steam at 200-500 C and drop it through a turbine to low temperature and pressure. The exhaust steam can heat the still. If you are really smart you will heat the steam boiler with the exhaust from a gas turbine operating at 1000 C or so, and skim useful work out of the heat flow not once but twice.

The waste heat might also be a fine way to warm the fermentation tanks.

For example, reletivly mild heating of most plant waste will yield a watery mixture of methanol and tars. The nitrogen content is left intact as well as the fiberous structure.

Flonix and Puppy. These are both small, and capable of being run off of more than a cd, but they do have bootable isos. They both have flash drive versions, which I have taken looks at while designing my USB pen drive distribution RUNT.

When I'm doing something people don't understand they don't question whether or not I'm doing my job, because it is my job to do all the things people don't understand.

Try this for a start.

So, basically, I call bullshit on not having enough biomass to run the farm equipment. Actually converting farms over is another story.

Not entirely what the poster was after, but interesting nonetheless RUNT is a pretty handy tool that can be made to boot from USB... If I remember correctly there was also possibly to configure ZipSlack to do this

The TEACH Act is meant for situations just like yours. A bit of reading here or here should get you going. It is by no means a smooth path, for instance I cannot copy the laser discs we own, even to preserve them - let alone embed parts of them in power point presentations, like we want to do. One thing I do know is that copyright, as applies to schools is a gradient of gray, never black and neverwhite.

Sera

Everyone seems to be missing the point. The libraries are selling the books rather than putting them on the shelves!

They do this because of commercial pressure. If everyone donated their old CDs and videos to the library, it would be unnecessary to rent or buy any of the older ones; you could borrow them. Somehow the people who want to corrupt the system, apparently publishers, have gotten control over the libraries. Have your ever noticed that the CDs and videos in the library are never the latest albums and movies? Certainly by now some family has decided not to let their children watch "Finding Nemo" any more times.

Everyone posting is so willingly believing that all the donated books are ones no one would want to check out of a library. But that's not so. For example, there are many books I would donate if I knew I could check them out later.

However, the librarians of the Multnomah County Central Library (in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.) have told me that putting a book in their system costs $30, and somehow it is cheaper to buy a new one! Over the years I have often mentioned the illogic in this. But all of them continue parroting the same line.

Consider the doctrine of first sale, in which you are allowed to do anything you want with your legally purchased copyrighted material, if you do not make a copy. Publishers have corrupted the doctrine of first sale so that copying into RAM to listen it or view it has been considered an illegal copy.

You may be right (IANAL either though I will link to some seemingly authorative sources), but I was under the impression that as the creator of a work (or holder of the copyright, should the author have assigned it to you), you gain certain exclusive rights, meaning others are excluded from having those rights unless you grant them permission.

If you follow that link, "how it is used" is not listed among the 5 exclusive rights (3 if the work is art). There are other similar lists publiched, such as this similar one with 6 instead of 5 exclusive rights, though they are very similar.

Now, while having the exclusive right to create and distribute copies might seem to imply that you could, in theory, control who can receive a copy, in practice there is the First Sale Doctrine which allows anyone in possession of a copy to sell or give that copy to anyone else.

Now, some might argue that political climate of the late 90's (that brought the DMCA with zero resistance) and the recent lobbying of the RIAA and MPAA (which is meeting considerable resistance) has allows copyright owners to introduce technological restrictions that effectively restrict how their works are used and who can possess copies. But that sort of analysis is far beyond me.

>XP et al really do lose a lot of time in the overhead it takes to keep two people on any programming task, unit test, and the rest. You might be nearly guaranteed nice code, but what's your opportunity cost? In short, it's having two coders hacking about twice as much

The research doesn't show that. It's about 15% slower, but the quality goes up by 15%. It doesn't take a brainiac to realize that with 15% higher quality, soon you're going faster because you aren't drooling over a debugger screen.

>The problem with MSFS is that it doesn't really teach the judgment necessary to be a good pilot.
Well, duh! MSFS is a set of client software that allows a Macintosh computer to use AFS file space. The developers of the Macintosh Secure File Server never meant for it to teach people how to fly!

C'mon people, if you really want to learn how to fly, don't try to study some file server; learn it like the pros and go to a flight school.

Try p2m.

So if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and the universe is supposed to be 7-15 billion years old (depending on who you ask), how ca n it be 70 billion light years across?

I was curious, but they're not coming anywhere near where I live: Durham/Research Triangle Park. They've covered LA and Dallas, but come on - they are nowhere near my other home town - Washington DC (often rated #3 in the nation)

His "History of the PC" presentation is truly worth seeing, he's presented it to several colleges around the U.S.

In fact, it was "Dr Dave" who brought the first PC prototype to Gates himself. He recalls Ballmer answered the door....

Congrats Dave!

Barry
PS : Adding to his 15 minutes of fame : Final Jeopardy Question

I have been Dr. Bradley's Teaching Assistant http://courses.ncsu.edu/ece/ since January, and it has been a pleasure working for him. He is really a motivation. Down to earth and sharp, thats what makes him different from other famous people. Even as an instructor, he likes to maintain tasteful interaction with his students and the students love him too.

You have to see his "I love me" collection to really appreciate him though :-)

-es

I have been Dr. Bradley's Teaching Assistant http://courses.ncsu.edu/ece/ since January, and it has been a pleasure working for him. He is really a motivation. Down to earth and sharp, thats what makes him different from other famous people. Even as an instructor, he likes to maintain tasteful interaction with his students and the students love him too.

You have to see his "I love me" collection to really appreciate him though :-)

-es

*cough* Alberto Santos Dumont *cough*

Not true at all; the text includes verbage about the copyright holder or their agent. The RIAA is, as you correctly pointed out, a trade group working on behalf of the labels, who generally own or share ownership of the sound recordings.

You're also correct that the settlement money they're collecting is going to lawyers; in fact, they're probably losing money on this. This is because the entire point of this exercise is to educate the populace at large that they are serious about protecting their clients' property. The rationale is that investing the legal bucks now will gradually erode unauthorized sharing of copyrighted materials, and drive consumers to legitimate venues like CDs and legal download services like iTunes. And that, in turn, will generate the income for the labels and the artists. This is the Logic 101, Business 101 and Math 101 of which you speak.

"Why did the RIAA refuse to negotiate with the P2P software vendors so that they could profit from downloads rather than just whining about how bad they are and spending millions of dollars in subpoenas, litigation and press coverage?"

There's a common perception that businesses such as the RIAA are expected to be more altruistic than mere mortals. It's no secret that Napster, Kazaa, etc. knew exactly what they're doing, and that their businesses are fundamentally based on copyright infringement. In your personal dealings, if you find that somebody is actively trying to fuck you over, are you going to make nice nice with them, even if you think that it ultimately might be in your best interests? It's much more satisfying to fuck them right back. As you would behave in your personal life, so do many businesses. RIAA's response can be summarized as "Fuck you; we'll put you out of business and work on launching our own download services." I would do the same.

"According to the RIAA, since their terror campaign started, downloads have fallen over 15% yet CD sales have dropped almost double that. They still claim that the additional drop in sales is due to an "Increase in illegal downloads."

Your dates are a bit off here. Despite a recent drop due to their campaign, file sharing is at an all-time high. The 31% drop in CD sales is over the past couple of years, not in the recent few weeks when there's been a slight drop in file trading. Occam's Razor suggests that if, over the past few years, file sharing has exploded while CD sales have dropped by almost a third, that the two are linked, but many people insist that this is a coincidence that one rarely finds outside of Dickens novels.

NC State shut down their incoming email servers for a few hours due to all the email worms. http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/news/3f426a4b

NC State shut down their incoming email servers for a few hours due to all the email worms. http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/news/3f426a4b

I actually don't want to get into whether or not having source code access improves security. A lot of people firmly believe that openness lends to security (and I happen to agree with them, in general), but some of the arguments against source availability are pretty persuasive too. Let's not get into that right now.

You write...

Apache (the core) isn't resistant to attack because it can be compiled and run just about anywhere. It's resistant because the developers assume that it *will* be attacked and they take that very seriously -- beyond adding features.

Well put. After re-reading my post again, I think you've done a better job of putting your thumb on Schneier's argumeent about the pliability of systems that have well designed security. The point, which I guess I didn't really explain well enough, is that a well designed system sags instead of buckles; it softens instead of shatters. Apache tends to sag & soften; IIS tends to buckle & shatter.

No system can ever be completely resistant to catastrophic failure. I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem are, in a way, proofs of this assertion: no matter how well any system is designed, there are always cases that fall out of the design scope, and will cause Interesting Failures.

This can be a depressing insight. You will never have a perfectly safe system. Ever.

You can respond to that in a couple of ways. One is to say "fuck it, we can't win, so why try"? Another way is to say "we can't anticipate what will happen, but we can try to compartmentalize the damage from certain problem classes." You could say that Microsoft has been moving to the second point of view here, but it's taking them an agonizingly long time to get there, while Apache/Linux/etc have long beeen designed from this point of view.

Interestingly, and to go back to Schneier's excellent article again, this sort of thinking also comes up in real world security considerations. Some of our systems are brittle (the airlines), and single failures can have catastrophic results. Other systems tend to be plastic (the power grid), and catastrophic failures are rare -- because single failures are common, expected, and planned for.

This is why I find all the bleating on by the newscasters & politicians that "the power outage was not the result of terrorism." Well of course it wasn't, this isn't the sort of attack that a small malicious party can pull off. Power stations go out all the time, but normally nobody ever notices. Indeed, it is very, very hard to deliberately bring down a power system: NATO spent a month bombing the power grid & computer netwroks in Yugoslavia, but they never managed to do much more than bring a city like Belgrade down for a few hours before power was restored.

If you want to bring down a whole grid, the best way to do it is by plain dumb luck (or an overwhelming lack of luck, depending on your point of view :-). It was a random fluke that caused yesterday's outage, just as it was random flukes that brought down the grid in the last two major outages, in 1977 & 1965. (On the bright side, that suggests that the mean time between power grid failures may be stretching out... :-). (Incidently, the Presidential Report on the 1965 outage makes for fascinating -- and newly relevant -- reading material).

(To get even further off track, this kind of thing is also why Bayesian spam filters are such a good idea: at the micro level, each filter tends to do a fairly good job of being able to classify each user's patterns. But at a macro level, everyone ends up with a unique profile, and spam crafted to circumvent one user's Bay

odd, i've always ascoiated it with my alma mater. Never heard of the Nazi connection. I figured it was just a group of like items working together much lick a pack of wolves.

In a society where new technology is constantly being invented, medical devices are evolving at a fast pace. The use of complex and sophisticated equipment to monitor patient and diagnose disease are more and more routine in hospitals and clinics. New discoveries in the material science field have led to the improvement in implant devices such as pacemakers, artificial grafts, and artificial organs. Armed with these technological advances, physicians and engineers are able to save more lives and improve the quality of living. However, these new technologies have raised new debates and discussions on morality and ethical issues. Approval and regulation of medical devices, as well as patient's rights and informed consents are just a few of the many issues stirred up by these new developments. This section discusses some of the issues and concerns dealing with medical ethics as well as regulation of medical devices. It also talks about some cases that involved medical device failure, and some of the government's attempts to reduce failure.

Issues and Concerns

As most people know, putting new medical technologies on the market requires repeated clinical tests follow by animal and human tests. Finally the device is approved by the government agency such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In order to fully test the effectiveness of these devices, animal and human testing is necessary at some point. Due to sheer increases in the volume of biomedical research, problems associated with human experimentation gain in importance. This need raises very complicated questions about balancing the patient's right against the overall benefits. On the one hand, human life is precious and needs to be considered a high priority. On the other hand, the new technology could potentially have large social benefits.

In order to ensure the risks of physical and emotional injuries are at a minimum, every clinical study is required to meet comprehensive guidelines and regulations before moving to human experimentations. In addition to the regulations, a patient's rights during a human trial study should be properly protected. The concept of "informed consent" has emerged as a way to control this issue. Under informed consent, patients need to be informed of every aspect of the study, as well as the potential risks involved. This topic is discussed in detail in the informed consent section.

Medical Device Regulation

The first step in medical device regulation is to clearly define all the related terms and categories. A medical device is defined as any equipment used to treat, diagnose, or prevent disease (Jefferys, 2001). It can range from very basic equipment such as needles and syringes to complex devices such as X-ray machines and MRI scanners. In the case of clinical studies where the device has not yet been approved, a series of steps needs to be taken. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for the regulation of these devices. For the new device to be used on human subjects, first an investigational device exemption (IDE), which allows an unapproved device to be used in a research study, needs to be approved by the FDA. After the approval, the devices are then divided into two categories: significant risk and insignificant risk. Devices that pose significant risks include implants and artificial organs. Devices such as glasses and teeth-braces are qualified as insignificant risk devices. Research study that involves devices with significant risk cannot process until the procedure is approved by an institutional review board (IRB) and the FDA, which is based on the informed consent forms (Enderle et al., 2000).

In the UK and Europe, the devices are divided up into three categories: low risk (category I)

I can think of two:

knoppix-usb
and runt.

Knoppix-usb is based on (you guessed it!) and runt is based on slackware.

Won't fit in 32Meg, but I found one that runs around 100Meg called runt. I put it on my Laks watch and was able to boot from it on a computer that supported USB booting. With a boot floppy, I was able to boot other systems that did not support USB booting.

Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer--and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page.

Well they aren't really in the park anymore. They moved into Lucent's old home on CentennialCampus at NC State. That is in the middle of Raleigh. Trivial though...

Well they aren't really in the park anymore. They moved into Lucent's old home on CentennialCampus at NC State. That is in the middle of Raleigh. Trivial though...

That's why they have really smart people working on it.

I don't understand why reading posts like yours frustrate me so much. I gotta work on that.

Hear and watch the story Woz's life from the man himself. He spoke at NC State University on April 26, 2003. http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/woz.html

It covers various ethical dilemmas (as I imagine Engineers do), and as someone else mentioned, goes over some of the more disastrous software creations. If you're interested, such lists usually include the Therac 25 (rollover bug, improper software re-use), the London Ambulance Service (Their newly-ordered, lowest-bidder Computer Aided Dispatch system caused massive problems), and the Ariane 5 rocket (overflow/improper error handling).

OTOH, I agree with you that people should know the conseqences (and likelyhood) of failure, as they clearly don't. There are loads examples on RISKS of people having laser surgery, needing some computerized medical device, and seeing gross examples that those using them have literally no idea the devices are misconfigured, warning of possible malfuctions, etc.

As far as steering, several options I remember hearing their team members discuss throughout the year were actuating the planar sails on the inside of the carbon fiber ribs, some sort of anchor for times when prevailing winds were in unfavorable directions, and changing the mass distribution and inertial characteristics. However, I think the point is that they wanted a simple, lightweight, easily reproducible design; the whole idea of a tumbleweed is based on utilizing what you don't have to bring along (interestingly enough, it was first thought of when a test rovers wheel blew away and escaped the crew out in the desert, I believe).

I remember their presentations mentioning research they did on the atmosphere and typical wind climate, average surface qualities (rock size, etc), and how it would affect their design. The biggest concern I heard judges from industry at the southeast AIAA student conference (http://www.AIAAstudentconference.org) echo was over oddly shaped debris gathering inside the design and weighing it down.

The pictures you see on their website are from the senior design picnic less than a month ago. The actual design is even larger. The wind was calm, but it would only take about a 10 knot gust to start rolling. And yes, the girls in the pictures are real engineering students, and I know them all- don't worry, they're a lot smarter than to let you guys explore any surfaces. But I'll let them know you brought it up. Also, Dustin isn't copping a feel. I think his family was a few yards outside that picture, but it does look sort of funny.

If anyones curious, look up our design project too (http://www.mae.ncsu.edu/courses/Mae478-479/team3/ webpage/frameset.htm) on a hopefully soon-to-be autonomous 200 knot jet aircraft (pretty decent for ~12 lb. thrust). The section pages are still empty, but there are lots of pictures and a couple videos.

As far as steering, several options I remember hearing their team members discuss throughout the year were actuating the planar sails on the inside of the carbon fiber ribs, some sort of anchor for times when prevailing winds were in unfavorable directions, and changing the mass distribution and inertial characteristics. However, I think the point is that they wanted a simple, lightweight, easily reproducible design; the whole idea of a tumbleweed is based on utilizing what you don't have to bring along (interestingly enough, it was first thought of when a test rovers wheel blew away and escaped the crew out in the desert, I believe).

I remember their presentations mentioning research they did on the atmosphere and typical wind climate, average surface qualities (rock size, etc), and how it would affect their design. The biggest concern I heard judges from industry at the southeast AIAA student conference (http://www.AIAAstudentconference.org) echo was over oddly shaped debris gathering inside the design and weighing it down.

The pictures you see on their website are from the senior design picnic less than a month ago. The actual design is even larger. The wind was calm, but it would only take about a 10 knot gust to start rolling. And yes, the girls in the pictures are real engineering students, and I know them all- don't worry, they're a lot smarter than to let you guys explore any surfaces. But I'll let them know you brought it up. Also, Dustin isn't copping a feel. I think his family was a few yards outside that picture, but it does look sort of funny.

If anyones curious, look up our design project too (http://www.mae.ncsu.edu/courses/Mae478-479/team3/ webpage/frameset.htm) on a hopefully soon-to-be autonomous 200 knot jet aircraft (pretty decent for ~12 lb. thrust). The section pages are still empty, but there are lots of pictures and a couple videos.

Found it here. Clever, inexpensive out-of-the-box thinking. Answers to most questions above (location, steering) can probably be solved with undue complication. Compliment this with ARES Mars Airplane, conceived at Langley which could easily follow tumbleweed travels.

Go State, Langley & JPL!

Actually, its conceivable to fit a really, really stripped down boot image on a floppy that would load drivers for a usb device and load an OS from there, no?

Jim Buzbee writes:
"Make what you will about this report, but consider this for a moment: In what other country in the world would this report ever see the light of day?"

Oo! I know! A country whose government realized a long time ago that they could fool 99% of the population -- and simultaneously marginlize the remainder as leftists -- by releasing just enough and/or falsified data to make people think this is evidence of an open government?

Am I right? Do I get a lolipop?

Iran-Contra taught me everything I needed to know about the government's willingness to not only lie to the people and Congress itself but to be proud of doing so. For those who don't remember all the details, this was Oliver North being directed by Ronald Reagan to sell arms to Iran (despite a Congressional ban) and using the proceeds to fund the South American Contras (which was also specifically banned by Congress by way of the Boland Amendment). The Contras were fighting the Sandinistas, a democratically-elected government that wasn't kissing our ass).

Don't get me wrong here... I'm not claiming this data is either falsified or incomplete. But claiming that because we've recieved something from the government is prima facie evidence that we have a government that puts us before it's own perceived interests is nothing short of hilarious.