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Thanks to a pair of very gifted architects, there is some incredible public housing in France. Sure, this technique can produce some basic housing, but nothing like what the Breitman's are creating.

I don't understand your argument, geometry is one of the most difficult mathematical fields, much more difficult than calculus.

Opinions and experiences on what is more difficult will be different for different people.

According to Henri Poincare (in La valeur de la science) there are two kind of mathematicians: analysts and geometers.

It is impossible to study the works of the great mathematicians, or even those of the lesser, without noticing and distinguishing two opposite tendencies, or rather two entirely different kinds of minds. The one sort are above all preoccupied with logic; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The other sort are guided by intuition and at the first stroke make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like hold cavalrymen of the advance guard.

The method is not imposed by the matter treated. Though one often says of the first that they are analysts and calls the others geometers, that does not prevent the one sort from remaining analysts even when they work at geometry, while the others are still geometers even when they occupy themselves with pure analysis. It is the very nature of their mind which makes them logicians or intuitionalists, and they can not lay it aside when they approach a new subject. Nor is it education which has developed in them one of the two tendencies and stifled the other. The mathematician is born, not made, and it seems he is born a geometer or an analyst.

I should like to cite examples and there are surely plenty; but to accentuate the contrast I shall begin with an extreme example, taking the liberty of seeking it in two living mathematicians. M. Meray wants to prove that a binomial equation always has a root, or, in ordinary words, that an angle may always be subdivided. If there is any truth that we think we know by direct intuition, it is this. Who could doubt that an angle may always be divided into any number of equal parts? M. Meray does not look at it that way; in his eyes this proposition is not at all evident and to prove it he needs several pages.

On the other hand, look at Professor Klein: he is studying one of the most abstract questions of the theory of functions to determine whether on a given Riemann surface there always exists a function admitting of given singularities. What does the celebrated German geometer do? He replaces his Riemann surface by a metallic surface whose electric conductivity varies according to certain laws. He connects two of its points with the two poles of a battery. The current, says he, must pass, and the distribution of this current on the surface will define a function whose singularities will be precisely those called for by the enunciation.

Doubtless Professor Klein well knows he has given here only a sketch: nevertheless he has not hesitated to publish it; and he would probably believe he finds in it, if not a rigorous demonstration, at least a kind of moral certainty. A logician would have rejected with horror such a conception, or rather he would not have had to reject it, because in his mind it would never have originated. (PDF English translation)

Well, you can look at error bars on galaxy rotation curve results like this, which is old enough to end up in an intro cosmology course. If it were just visible matter, it would be the curve labeled "disk". If you add the curve "halo" you get the total, with the small measurement error bars shown. Surveys like this show the limits of such halos being just from compact but dark objects.

What you are thinking of is Swarm Robotics. And you misrepresent the field quite insultingly: it was far from a case of plonking down some simple robots and noting "wow, they do all sorts of things we didn't expect!". The entire point was to confirm that the emergent behaviour that had previous been simulated with virtual swarm agents, and prior to that theorised as the cause of insect behaviour, was possible to replicate, and to codify if the physical medium of interaction added any notable additional factors to the swarm behaviour (it does mainly due to computational imitations of the simulation, and computational robotics is now a big and mostly biomimetic field, e.g. using mobile driven whiskers for impact sensing).

What does this have to do with autonomous vehicles? For a start, while autonomous cars are in the minority they will be interacting almost entirely with human drivers. This is the WORST CASE scenario for autonomous vehicles. Once you have a large proportion of vehicles being autonomous, you can begin to have communication between vehicles, and produce behaviour like convoying that is impossible for human-operated or human/autonomous mixes to perform. There are plenty of simulations of large numbers of autonomous vehicles around, mostly to see how to optimise behaviour to produce superior traffic flow; for example removing junction signalling and allowing autonomous vehicles to freely and continuously merge and cross each other is far more efficient than turn-by-turn streamed releases. Papers and reports on this sort of modelling abound. Here's one that turned up after about 5 seconds of googling, with a few hundred thousand of its cohorts available.

I suggest seeing a doctor if you are having problems keeping a thought for longer than a few seconds.

You mean a doctor like Professor G.A. Radvansky, who led a study about doorway amnesia?

As I said, no amount of data can change the mind of people who are determined to not pay attention to data.

Climate scientists publish all the time. They don't "hide their data and methods," nor "share only with people that agree with them"-- the whole point of peer-reviewed research is to publish and get the data out there in the community. I really, really, suggest that you should read the IPCC WG-1 report; http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html ; it won't change your mind (since you've determined you aren't interested in changing your opinions), but at least it will allow you to argue with some actual knowledge, instead of simply parroting the third-hand opinions of people who simply assert that climate scientists are frauds.

...Let's go back to that computer model.

What do you mean by "that" computer model? At the moment I'm aware of nineteen major global circulation models, being run by groups in America, Canada, France, Australia, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea, UK, Norway, and Sweden, but I'm sure that there are more. You talk as if there's one model, that's made one prediction. There are a series of many different global circulation models, run by many different institutions, dating back nearly fifty years. (The earliest real global climate model incorporating convective/radiative transfer with an assumption of constant relative humidity was Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; but I've referenced that so many times I'm tired of it.)

A bunch of amateur software developers

"Amateur." Well, that's a charge that's impossible to refute, since whoever does it, I'm sure you will just say "they're amateurs." One of the major models was the Los Alamos model, for example; their experience in running finite-element supercomputer models of fluid and thermal transfer comes from the fact that they model nuclear weapons explosions. But I'm sure you can say "oh, they're amateurs" if you want to. Yeah, nuclear bombs probably don't even work, it's all a hoax. The National Center for Supercomputer Applications? Amateurs. Yeah, sure.

Pretty much all of the supercomputer centers in the world have worked on climate models over the last fifty years. "Amateurs." Yeah, right. Whatever.

with no source control, no data integrity and no experience with formal software engineering procedures

You know, Los Alamos National Labs pretty much invented formal software engineering procedures on supercomputers. And, yes, they do apply it to climate models. (discussed, among many many many other places, here, for example http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~bbd/IJHPCASpecialIssue05/Drake.pdf or here http://www.nd.edu/~gmadey/sim06/Classnotes/Validation/pope.pdf or here http://www.informs-sim.org/wsc98papers/016.PDF )

And for that matter, the majority of the computer models, including the source code, are publicly available-- many of them are even on the web.

are claiming to model something that is incredibly complex using what is by definition an abstraction. Do you understand what an abstraction is? Doesn't sound like it.

Yes, a computer model involves making abstractions. All equations are abstractions, for that matter, but guess what? Physics still works.

that can home in on a laser, this might not turn out to be such a hot idea. Oh, wait....

Well you've obviously drank the kool-aid. I worked at Monsanto and know exactly what their agenda is. You'd just better pray the Terminator gene NEVER gets in to the wild.

Well, they did name it ITER as in to iterate. Still, it's not fair to paint all of fusion research with that brush. The decision to go with a Tokamak style reactor for ITER wasn't fully supported. I know a Tokamak expert who says it's a huge mistake and eventually left the field for greener pastures.

I suggest you post your question to the code4lib mailing list. It's going to get you much more informed and practical advice. You might even find some people who already have a good workflow who will share their tools.

-Esme

I shall try exactly that. Thank you for directing to that mailing list!

I suggest you post your question to the code4lib mailing list. It's going to get you much more informed and practical advice. You might even find some people who already have a good workflow who will share their tools.

-Esme

Not hard to find. My first Mac OS was 2.1 I think - it was a Mac 512k. Here's a link to get the image. http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/

Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.

For those whose Latin is rusty, try William Whitaker's Words. Cicero's proverb will give you a good laugh.

Comment field in this wonderful slashdot 3.0 posting system ate my HREF. Let's try again in plain text:

http://www.nd.edu/~dhungerm/w14573.pdf

More specifically, Virus doesn't make a lot of sense to pluralize as Latin since it's not a noun representing a single discreet thing.

http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=virus&ending=

Virus mean venom or poison or slime. Just as saying "jellos" or "waters" doesn't make a lot of sense (though there are some situations when we can), pluralizing virus in Latin would be weird. So we borrow it first, make it a complete English word, then we use English rules to pluralize it.

It is indeed "orchestrae" it seems. The word does indeed come via a latin root orchestra, from the Ancient Greek word which transliterates into the English alphabet as orcheestra (/me glares at Slashdot's Unicode filter) according to several etymological dictionaries I checked, so using a Latin plural is at least vaguely appropriate (unlike in the case of words that come directly from Greek). The genitive of orchestra is orchestrae , making it a first declension feminine word; for such words, the plural is equal to the genitive, also orchestrae. Of course, pluralising loanwords in their original language (usually Latin) seems to be something that, although common on online fora (and yes, I just looked that plural up as well just to make sure...), is hardly used in general conversation. Arguably, English long ago moved on from using the original plural, and so the true correct plural is to follow English rules, to end up with "orchestras".

Kind of. To be pedantic (and I hope I remember my Latin correctly), campi is plural of campus, but only in certain cases.
In the original sentence he said "in college campuses (campi?)". "In" triggers the ablative case ("ablative of place"), and plural the plural version of this is "-is" [1][2]. So the correct form would be "in college campis".

So in my opinion he could argue "campus" was now an English word and use say "campuses" in the English fashion, or go Latin all the way.
Not all Latin words ending with -us is -i in plural. All 4th declination nouns have -us in plural as well. E.g. manus /hand.

[1] Ablative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin
[2] Campus is second declination: http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe?campus

This doesn't need to end once you hit the hard limit of silicon, because then the technology for making things that small will mature and you will still be able to get the same number of transistors but for half the price.

We're starting to hit some fundamental limits. The ultimate one, of course, is that at some point atoms are too big, and you need at least one electron per bit of data. We're not quite there yet, but we're getting close. There's serious work on single electron memory cells.

The current big problem is getting rid of the heat. Smaller transistors are possible, but not too many of them can be active at one time. This is why flash memory currently leads in density; at any one time, only a small fraction of the transistors are using power. Even RAM now has serious heat dissipation problems. With CPUs, heat removal dominates design. Chip designers are worried about MIPS/watt, rather than MIPS/cm^2. 3D designs have it worse; getting the heat out of the intermediate layers is very tough.

There's another limit worth bearing in mind - electromigration. After fabrication has put all the atoms where they're supposed to be, they don't always stay there. Some, pulled by electrical and thermal forces, do come off edges and move around. This causes failures over time. The smaller the device, the worse the effects of this process.

gravity is the only purely attractive force

Not necessarily...
Gravity can be repulsive at very high negative pressure (in more than one dimension) http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/Phys171/lectures/repulse.html
But for the purposes of a Gravity Tractor, you are correct, attractive only
/Pedant

That is why the defense of "just following orders" does not work. They were the ones giving the orders.

I'm not sure what you mean by that but there were certainly people executed for carrying out orders they didn't originate themselves. Nuremberg is hardly the epitome of justice, hell the first man to die was convicted of relaying an execution order against a group of Allied commandos captured while conducting military operations in civilian clothing, which made them unlawful combatants still entitled to "humane" treatment under the Geneva conventions but not protected against execution like ordinary uniformed prisoners.

Obviously, should the first German officer tried in an allied war trial be exonerated and released, it would be an embarrassment for the Roosevelt administration. For that reason, the prosecutor and my father sent a wire to Washington, informing the administration of the situation. Shortly thereafter, the prosecuting officer received the reply: "Lacking standard evidence, hearsay will be accepted as evidence in the trial."

http://www.nd.edu/~com_sens/issues/old/v17/v17_n5.html#dostler

Many of the others were convicted of "waging wars of aggression."

After the United States gobbled up California and half of Mexico, and we were stripped down to nothing, territorial expansion suddenly becomes a crime. It's been going on for centuries, and it will still go on.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring#Nuremberg_Diary_.281947.29
Yeah so "justice" at Nuremberg makes a neat bedtime story but reality is important if you're going to cite it as precedent.

I'm tired of this. You apparently wouldn't know a good UI if it bit you, or you're a sell out to MS, or both.

The old Office 2003 interface:
1. Gave buttons and menus
2. Both of which could be customised
3. Automatic customisation based on "most used" stats could be turned off
4. Allowed the display of multiple toolbars at the same time

The new Office 2007 interface:
1. Doesn't allow you to revert to the old interface without 3rd party addons
2. Determines what's on your toolbar for you, and as a user you don't get to customise it. Which means that if you use several functions in a workflow you have to click wildly between ribbon tabs

Take a look at this user's solution: Add everything to the Quick access Toolbar. I mean for pity sake!!!
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101996251033.aspx

You claim the tool bars don't change, but everything I'm reading says they do.

http://oit.nd.edu/helpdesk/office/office2007.shtml
"Contextual Tabs

Certain sets of commands are only relevant when objects of a particular type are being edited. For example, the commands for editing a chart are not relevant until a chart appears in a spreadsheet and the user is focusing on modifying it. Contextual tabs only appear when they are needed and make it much easier to find and use the commands needed for the operation at hand."

I'm going to stop finding evidence that it does because you seem incapable of admitting any kind of mistake.

Frankly whether the commands change based on context, or whether they change based on usage stats is a moot point. If they change they make documenting step by step procedures more difficult, because a reader can't read ahead - the tools just might not be displayed for subsequent steps and if they are you have to jump between toolbars.

No, this is a new UI is a huge step backward - designed by fools for fools and defended by fools. It's not good for new learners, it's not good for power users, and it is less efficient and wastes time compared to the old.

It already is. It holds 70-100% of the genetically modified seed market, and is the largest producer of non-GMO seed, not to mention a major player in Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) and of course pesticides and herbicides.

And if they get their way, soon enough that will be 100% of the crops you eat; produced from GMO seed with the "terminator" gene, fertilized with a synthetic fertilizer, and inundated with synthetic pesticides which destroy soil diversity and in fact make it impossible to grow healthy food.

That was the 8860 Auto Chassis.. I loved that one!
I used to make monster 4x4 trucks with turning radar dishes and all kinds of crazy stuff.
http://www.nd.edu/~lego/grp2/www/graphics/lego/8860.jpg

One of my all-time favourites has to be the great-great grandson of that, the Test Car:

http://www.nd.edu/~lego/grp2/www/graphics/lego/8865.jpg

I've still got that, fully built as the car. And it still looks absolutely fantastic.

T Mobile? I would not be surprised.

The country is definitely Germany. You can get the publication in question from the authors homepage Then take figure 1a (as suggested in hweimer's blog) and lay it over some google map, appropriately scaled.

The data is definitely centered around Germany, but tracks reach to Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland and Cech Republic...

News media are very careful to keep onside with the Whitehouse, Pentagon etc.

I used to think that was the case. But watching over the last twenty years or so I've come to realize that it isn't quite that simple.

For example, during the Monica Lewinsky hoopla, it seemed you couldn't look at a newspaper or turn on a TV without hearing more than you wanted to know about the story. They certainly weren't trying to stay on Clinton's good side, even though he was very popular at the time.

Fast forward a decade, and if you keep your eyes peeled you can catch stories like this:

• The United States has suspended Habis Corpus for "enemy combatants"..
• The Bush administration claims the authority to brand anyone (even US citizens) an "enemy combatant" based only on their say-so, with no recourse and no appeal.
• The Bush administration claims the ability to "render" these "enemy combatants", taking them to undisclosed secret prisons without trial or any public record of what happened to them.
• John Yoo thinks it would be legal to crush an enemy combatant's child's testicles in front of them to get them to talk, the the President were to authorize it.
• Vice president Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice were briefed on Yoo's opinions and used them to craft "enhanced interrogations."
• President Bush was aware of these meeting and approved of them.

So it's not quite as simple as you make it sound.

If a popular president has an extramarital affair, the press shows no fear and shouts it from the rooftops night and day.

But if the least popular president on record (backed by his administration) maintains that he has the inherent authority to kidnap US citizens at will and make them watch while his goons crush their children's testicles, the "free press" covers his butt so well that if you blink you'll miss the story.

--MarkusQ

Jigdo support for sucking down images

Jigdo support for sucking down images

Jigdo support for sucking down images

Jigdo support for sucking down images

Yeah the nano wires of quantum dots sounds very interesting. In my introduction to Nanotech course at school I did a presentation on qunatum dot cellular automata. Essentially they design logic circuits out of precisely laid out circuits of quantum dots. The technology is proof of concept and was awaiting improvements in production technologies . Maybe this will indeed be the key to unlocking 10-20ghz processors (They don't have the same leaky qualities when as densely packed as chips built with MOSFETT. They use electron interactions as a means of propagating signals as opposed to actual current flow) .. Anyhow here is a link to the university doing the research on QCA's for those of you interested... HERE -Ian Roessle

"Education does not promise you money"

http://www.nd.edu/prospective-students/

and scroll down to "find your path". You tell me what they are selling undergraduates.

or, look here and tell me what these institutions are really interested in:

http://www.duke.edu/about.html#Giving%20to%20Duke

You're right thought... it doesn't promise the students money, it's about getting money to the University. It's all about that.

Although not specificially about Linux, this article (PDF 1MB) How to Measure a Large Open Source Distributed System discusses some of these same problems quantitatively, and demonstrates that carefully-tempered download logs can be used to estimate the number of active users of a system.

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb]
(Valley Girl) O-M-G !!!
ALL the women want me.
I AM leet.

Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

http://www.machttp.org/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=6

Like others:

http://www.ld8.org/servers/servers.html

It's 21 years old for Christ's sake. My Wife has a PowerMac 2x 2,5 MHz G5 and it *feels* snappier than that.
The point is BIGGER MHz EVEN BIGGER bloat, we've gained so little.
The constant "arms race" of MHz to bloat makes most gains moof, er - moot.

Further:

http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/plus.shtml

http://lowendmac.com/musings/macplus.shtml

http://macplus.mia.net/

http://www.nd.edu/~jvanderk/sysone/

Mactracker:

http://www.mactracker.ca/

This kinda reminds me of Quantum Dot Cellular Automata. multivalence compounds are arranged like dominos and one of the "electrons" at one of the ends is shifted to represent the zero or one state and then the electron repulsion forces in the molecules propegate down the chain like dominos acting like adders whathave you. http://www.nd.edu/~qcahome/ -ian

Most of the attack on free well I have seen coming from the neuroscience front assume that you must have Cartesian dualism to have free will. In a nutshell, this is Descartes' belief that the soul resides in the body essentially as a "ghost in the machine". The Christian concept of the human person is rather a unity of body and soul, and the concept of strict duality, against which the neuroscientists argue, is clearly inadequate. This situation is not black and white. I believe it is obvious from a moment of introspection that "free will" is neither absolute, nor nonexistent. Certainly, the condition of the body influences the degree to which any decision is "free". Illness, inebriation, addiction, and even simply habit reduce the degree of freedom we have in our actions. To the belief that neuroscience will somehow prove that free will that free will does not exist, I would say that this is silly. Does the body influence our decisions? Absolutely -- anyone who has ever had a drink too many knows this. Does this mean free will does not exist? To assert this is deny all of the evidence of your own existence. Take a look at http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/soul.htm for greater depth.

I knew I was getting old when I first realized that these kids today with their modern legos have it too easy, what with all those crazy custom pieces. Why, when I was a kid, we had to use our imagination to build stuff.Thats how I felt a couple years ago.. Almost every Lego kit I looked at would only build what was on the cover..

My step sons new Technic 8288 Mobile Crane and a bunch of the kits out now remind me more of the old Lego I remember.

Yeah the bricks are different.. most are just sticks with holes you link together but they open up new ways to build.

I remember the Technic 8860 set I had as a kid.
It built a car with working suspension, steering, rear differential, a 2 speed shifting transmission, 4 cylinder engine with a crank and pistons that turned when the car moved.

Some of the stuff I see today is almost as cool as I remember that set was.
I gave what I had left to the kids.. over half the sets are missing but they still have fun with em.

Hey this is all really interesting stuff ...I think getting Intel behind some of the manufacturing technicalities is a major boon to the industry. Nanotubes, if intel's research confirms this, should prove to be useful in many different applications from mass power distribution to an elevator to the heavens.. who knows .. stay tunes.. also as an interesting side note.. VLSI will hit a rock bottom soon... I did a presentation in my Nanotechnology class last Spring on Quantum Dot Cellular Automata . This uses the electromagnetic repulsion of electons to propegate signals across molecules that are arranged in such a way to form logic gates.. http://www.nd.edu/~qcahome/ -Ian ian at ianroessle.org

Look; I have no problems if mom and dad want to keep the little one in their bed. Different people, different cultures have different ideas and I'm all for that. I've never heard any credible suggestion about aural therapy to teach kids breathing techniques before - but maybe there's something to it. (and seriously; as a parent, if you've got anything scientific to back that up I'd be genuinely interested.)

Actually, the PhysicsWeb article is confusing in itself. The first (bold) paragraph says that "the number of people who read news stories on the web decays with time in a power law". The sixth paragraph says that "the overall half-life distribution follows a power law". Perhaps both statements are true, perhaps one of them is inaccurate.

The professor's website doesn't seem to mention this research, so we can't tell what the actual findings were.

mater : mother.

certus : undoubted, certain, sure, settled, resolved, decided / definite

mas maris m. [the male; manly , vigorous].

All translations from http://archives.nd.edu/latgramm.htm

If you do it (and thanks for that), do it correctly. Virus very much is a noun . It means slime, poison, etc. It's just that its gender is neutral, and its plural is virus. And if you don't want to be looked at funnily, its possible to correctly anglicize it to viruses.

Only an insane man would argue that a fuel-air bomb or daisycutter is somehow near equivalent to a nuclear bomb, even one of Hiroshima vintage. To say that about modern day nuclear bombs would be outright false. All one has to do is look at some of the past's above ground bomb tests to know that this is false. Let me present you one:

Operation Crossroads

Take a look at the Baker test (1946), which was part of Operation Crossroads. Notice the mushroom cloud of water - from the site:

At its greatest extent, the water column was 2000 feet (600 m) across, with walls 300 feet (100 m) thick, and 6000 feet (2 km) tall, holding a million tons of water.

Now, let's compare this blast to daisycutters and MOABs - please reference these links:

GBU-43/B "Mother Of All Bombs"

The Daisy Cutter Bomb

MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst)

Now, these sites seem to reference the fact that the destructive area for both of these conventional devices are about "600 yards", or 1800 feet, across. This area is only, at most, the size of just the water column of the Baker test. I can guarantee you that had that test been conducted on a real target, the destructive area (for just blast effects, mind you) would not have been localized just to the column of the mushroom cloud. Please note that the Baker test had only a yield of 23 kilotons. From the Operation Crossroads web page again:

...The closest ship to surface zero was the USS Saratoga. Eight ships were sunk or capsized, eight more were severly damaged. Sunk vessels were the USS Saratoga, USS Arkansas, the Nagato, LSM-60 (obviously), the submarines USS Apogon and USS Pilotfish, the concrete dry dock ARDC-13, and the barge YO-160.

This was only blast effects on the ships, which don't count the radiation aspect. Since MOABs and daisycutters do not have this aspect, I won't post about it here, though it can't really be discounted if you want a comparison of such conventional weapons to nuclear weapons.

Finally, we must also note that the Baker test was only a standard fission bomb test, of relatively low yield (compared to say, the more modern W87 warhead, which has a yield of 300-475 kilotons). One should also note that when a target is selected for these weapons, multiple warheads are targetted for a single target in most cases (since they tend to be larger cities or bases). Even so, a single modern warhead has the equivalent destructive power as 15-20 Baker tests.

How anybody - the media, the layperson, generals, the president - anybody - can equate the two in destructive power, that they can somehow be used (or should be used) interchangibly - is sheer madness. They aren't interchangible, they in no way compare in destructive power, and once you calculate in radiation effects, one can only see that such devices are in fact madness and tributes of hubris to our destructiveness as a species. To claim otherwise is to show a lack of knowledge and humbleness about these devices.

Sometimes I wonder if the test ban treaties over the years have been a wrong thing. By only being able to "test" these devices on computers and such other simulations, we have removed an effective deterrent to the use of these devices. All we have left now are the pictures and movies of past tests. I doubt nothing else could cement the destructive power capabilities in the minds of generals and others, outside of a personally witnessed live test, while at the same sh

On a similar note, we made the contents (lecture slides, video etc.) from Operating Systems online. Would appreciate any comments on whether such efforts are useful to the larger community (http://www.cse.nd.edu/~surendar/teach/spr06/cse30 341/lecture.shtml).

Well, it's certainly not considered a dirty word. Always strikes me as funny that the 'land of the free' treats liberal as a term of political abuse.
Etymology: from latin liber
liber (1) -era -erum [free , independent, unrestrained; free from, exempt].
Source: http://catholic.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl? stem=liber&ending=

Draw your own conclusions...

creationism, ID, and evolution are not even necessarily contradictory.

let's say "God created intelligently, and his creations evolved."

thus picking one of creationism, ID, and evolution would be nonsensical, because if you believed this statement (I do not but that is a digression) then you then "believe" in all 3.

evolution is not a theory that deals with the origins of the universe.

creationism and ID are not beliefs (I did not say theories) that deal with the progression, proliferation, and diversification of life.

how did the universe begin? how did life begin? what was before that?

asimov had a fun story about it called The Last Question that is a nice little read. Arthur C Clarke has a short called The Nine Billion Names of God that isn't terrible reading either.

if this kind of thing interests you, The Abolition of Man might interest you as well, or even Chesterton's Orthodoxy.

The issue is not speech -> spelling, it's spelling -> speech. I read "google" and know how it's pronounced. What is Quaero? Is it pronounced like Spanish and Jose Cuervo? Oh, it's Latin. That helps. How the fuck is it pronounced again? Let's try searching for it. Oops, nothing there. Try the Latin dictionary at http://www.nd.edu/~archives/latin.htm Oops, nothing there, either; just a definition.

Yeah, I'm American, but don't tell me everybody else in the world speaks Latin or I'll cry bullshit.

What's this about a perfect example?

Don't forget the Latin pun - 'invidia' means 'envy'. 'NV', geddit?

I find it absolutely awesome that a large technology company be named after such a groan-inducing bit of wordplay. And it finally explains all the chip names...

Albert Laszlo Barabasi explains it all clearly and succinctly in his book, Linked, which should be required reading by everyone, because networks, with their inherent feedback loops, dynamic decentralized structure, and inherent robustness, exist in all facets of our lives. Understanding that these networks exist, why they exist, and how they work (and more importantly, how they don't work), is increasingly becoming essential to understanding our lives, our roles in life, workplace dynamics, etc - in short, living in today's networked world.

Attempting to move a robust networks away from the model of "intelligence at the ends, stupidity in the middle" will break such robustness, and cause the utility of the network, if not the network itself, to crumble. At best, it will mean even slower communications within the network, at an ever increasing price for both the users and controllers. At worst, it means the dissolution of the network, along with the dissolution of all that depends on that network (economically and socially).

It was Locke who wrote that under the law of nature, every man has "a power not only to preserve his property--that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others." Life and liberty, as well as owned land, were all considered property in Locke's view, and his text spells out very clearly the concept of natural property rights entitled to all men.

Additional information can be found:

William McGurn's essay on the Declaration