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"In November 1970, for example, a tropical cyclone, combined with a high tide, struck southeastern Bangladesh, leaving more than 300,000 people dead and 1.3 million homeless. In May 1985, a comparable cyclone and storm surge hit the same area. "This time," according to IDNDR Director Dr. Olavi Elo, "there was better local dissemination of disaster warnings and the people were better prepared to respond to them. The loss of life, although still high, was 10,000 or about 3% of that in 1970." When a devastating cyclone struck the same area of Bangladesh in May 1994, fewer than 1,000 people died."

"The dramatic difference, according to Roundtable participant Mohammed Saidur Rahman, Director of the Bangladesh Disaster Preparedness Centre, was a new early-warning system that allows radio stations to alert people in low-lying areas."

source

The U.S. does it all the time though they usually topple the guys government first or in the process. Maybe the instant they arrest him they just say he is obviously no longer a head of state.

Manuel Noriega is still rotting in a Federal prison. The story of his unprecedented trial of a head of state on drug trafficking charges.

Saddam is of course sitting in an Iraqi jail under U.S. authority.

The U.S. pretty much grabbed the president of Haiti and put him on a plane to Africa, against his will, while he was still Haiti's President while U.S. backed rebels were closing in on him. Its most books it might be called kidnapping a sovereign head of state.

I don't remember the exact sequencing but I think war crimes charges were laid against Milsoevic while he was still Serbia's head of state.

It is kind of sweet being America since you can have a double standard on everything.

Five or ten minute wait inside. Now I'm counting down the minutes until I can start singing NaNaHeyHey. Been waiting almost four years for this.

By the way, Ohio is smiling:

http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/maher/temp/nort heast_sat_440x297.jpg

Obviously Ohio goes for Kerry. If it were smirking I might predict a
Bush victory.

I'm not sure what to make of the fact that Florida is mooning us.

> America... the land of the free (hence the intellectual thought police), and the home of brave
> (hence the amount of security in the US). What went wrong?
106 years of American Hegemony . Its been "wrong" for a l-o-n-g time! That's in regard to How the US Political-Military-Industrial combine treats the rest of the world, and How it treats its OWN citizens.
.

Hmmm...Maybe if they didn't create so much of that violence.

Those interested in the contest might want to check out these resources for getting started with Inform. And for a short ten-minute adventure, I will engage in some self-publicity and recommend Escape from Station V.

Those interested in the contest might want to check out these resources for getting started with Inform. And for a short ten-minute adventure, I will engage in some self-publicity and recommend Escape from Station V.

More interesting info on Mark Jung-Beeman's website.

How many of those operating systems use Apache?

You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.

You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.

The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.

It makes me sadder still that said people who say the U.S. is evil and makes things bad for its citizens and the rest of the world somehow never give any substantial evidence of that.

Does this count??

They so know that if they were to open up the CLR of their .net Technology, and like, allow people to write their own CLR languages, their stock would plummet.

Um, people can write their own CLR languages. Quite a few have. Hell, they even let Borland play.

Perl

Python

FORTRA

More FORTRAN

SmallTalk alike (SmallScript)

Mondrian

Pascal

Scheme

Mercury

Eiffel

Oberon

Cobol

Ya know what's annoying? Having to type in a bunch of random crap at the end of a message because slashdot does now seem to like having a low number of characters per line.

Well my professor has his dream job, but it wasn't what he dreamed about as a child. He's an academic, but not one of your ivory-tower types, he treks around lawless parts of Africa interviewing warlords. Read all about what he told me about finding your dream job. Names removed for his privacy and mine, but you can figure out who he is if you really care and poke around the net a bit.

This is legislation that will not be enforcable!

Oh, how I wish that was true

• 
  AOL ServerThe Sophisticated One.
  ApacheThe One We All Know and Love.
  BoaThe Fastest One.
  WNThe Indexed One.
  

I grew up a few miles away from the "Schoharie Creek Bridge" in the list. A week after it fell, a bridge a bit further up the creek fell as well. The second abutted my front yard. Both fell due to poor engineering.

In fact, the one next to my house was built across a bend in the creek. When they "fixed" it, (eight years later), they built the new one in the same place. Talk about not learning from past mistakes...

Designing secure and bug-free software is a tedious process, but do-able.

The original argument was that building bridges that don't fall down is also "do-able"... Apparently, that's not the case.

There is no way you can guarentee PERFECTION with ANY amount of checks / tests / standards / whatever. Who's going to run the tests? A HUMAN.

Software or not, humans make mistakes. There's nothing you can do about it. Again, I'm not asserting that MS didn't release a product with "too many" bugs. Just that the goal of "perfection" is WAY beyond reach...

FCG

"i wanted to include a ascii gfx but the lameness filter didnt let me. does he really think someone with karma=excellent does dumb spam posts?"

SVG is the ascii-art of the 21st century.

There are numerous precedents for things such as the Patriot Act. They have usually been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but they have always stuck around until they reached the point of being struck down. For example the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were blatantly unconstitutional and designed to give the government the power to crack down on their opponents. Of course it wasn't taken out until 1840, not exactly a quick response.

Then of course we had the Espionage Act and Sedition Acts during WW1. Similar things in WW2, the relocation of Japanese-Americans... all sorts of precedents have been set in this regard.

Reflections of Unconstitutional Precedence

TImeline of American Hegemony

The goverment does not care if the laws that they pass or the actions that they take are unconstitutional. That is the one thing history has taught us again and again. It doesn't matter at all unless the Supreme Court is going to rule against them. These sorts of unconstitutional practices will be allowed almost without fail. Perhaps years later public opinion will shift and people will add another chapter to the history books on unconsitutional precedents.

Hopefully the SCOTUS gets the balls to do something about it. Although I highly doubt that our current court will become involved. We already know how they rule on major issues that affect our country. The precedent is to allow the govt to do whatever the hell they want, worry about the Constitution later. Especially when the ideologies of the different branches of govt meet.

Some interesting reading:

PerlNET.

Perl for ASP.NET.

Python for .NET.

COBOL for .NET.

Eiffel for .NET.

Scheme for .NET .NET for Linux.

Lameness filter:
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Important Stuff:

Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
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Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.

Almost the entire math department (i.e., the 4th floor of a massive building called Tech) uses GNU/Linux with Gnome for their research projects and simulations. Down on the ground floor, at least one lab is loaded up with GNU/Linux and IceWM (see Intro to EE lab instructions under the "Hardware" section), because they needed real-time responses while running some simulations and such. It's heartening to see my university using OSS.

-- Kurt

Bertrand Meyer is one of the biggest .NET boosters on the planet, and he already oversaw a port of Eiffel to .NET. This was available like a year ago.

There's also a Scheme compiler, called Hotdog, with a .NET backend:

Keep in mind that F# is but one of MANY language research projects going on at Microsoft Research, and there are many more going on at other sites that Microsoft is tangentially involved with.

If the DMCA does in fact prohibit speech like this, there's no way the DMCA is constitutional.

• In 1993, Lawrence Horn hired James Edward Perry to kill his son, so that he could collect the $1.7 million medical malpractice settlement. Perry not only killed the son, but he killed the boy's mother and a nurse as well. Perry was sentenced to death, and Horn to life in prison. In Perry's apartment, police found a copy of Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors published by Paladin Press. The manual, marketed as a work of fact, describes methods of committing murders in detail. Relatives of the victims sue Paladin for "aiding and abetting" the murders.

  The District Court ruled that the First Amendment protected the manual and barred the lawsuit. The Circuit Court overturned the decision saying that the speech is not protected by the First Amendment.

  The Supreme Court upholds the Circuit Court's decision in a split decision.

  The Hit Man Manual

Someone please reassure me that the system works...

AFMs are being used to do alot more than measure nowadays. This summer I worked on Dip-Pen Nanolithography which uses an AFM like a fountian pen of sorts. It's pretty cool stuff, and if that cantilever is off (the piece which holds the "nub" of the pen) then all of the work done could be rendered incorrect... DPN Information

Can you imagine trying to implement Lisp on .Net?

These guys did a Scheme compiler for .NET (and the JVM)... Lisp isn't much different.

As someone who has played around with Flash long enough to know just about all of its limits, I can tell you that creating versions of ancient, 8-bit-or-less games (like Adventure) is probably the most useful application of Flash (in the gaming area).

This is mostly because the performance of Flash scripting is just so incredibly poor that you're pretty much constrained to make games that would have been state of the art 10+ years ago.

Atari 2600 games are great candidates for Flash games, but once you move forward in time to the 8-bit nintendo and, god forbid, the 16-bit super nintendo, you have a really difficult time trying to even muster up even enough processing power to replicate those.

For kicks I spent some time trying to write a Flash port of the original Legend of Zelda (8-bit), and ran into all kinds of performance issues. I've pretty much given that up - partially because of no time to work on it, but mostly because trying to replicate someone else's work (including the idiosyncratic bugs) got boring.

Lastly, don't take my comment to mean that great games can't be made in Flash - they certainly can, but it takes a great deal of cleverness to get around the constraints of the environment.

y'know, anything "for public or commercial viewing" is much more expensive -- unless you live in a country where the FCC is generally disregarded. (As opposed to the US, where we fear for our personal liberty when doing so much as talking in a public forum about using content outside of the letter of its license, or regarding changes we might make to the devices accompanying this license, though we pay for them and use them in the privacy of our homes).

But if you're not in a Free-as-in-to-get-extorted-by-the-media-cartels country, then I guess that's not a consideration.

In the US, a DVD for private viewing an indefinite number of times costs well under twenty bucks, but
"
Screening a film outside of the home requires a license from the film studio or a distributor. Licences range from $125 - $1000 depending on the film.
"
Source
Note that this is from a small, independant film club! And even they're playing strictly by the rules of extortion, because they're afraid not to.

Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US, and do not have to pay protection fees to agencies of extortion sanctioned by the very Federal Government. [1]

Anyway, good luck with everything.

Also: I believe that Microsoft must be annihilated.

~Robert.

ps. Once more, just to make me shudder:
Of course, chances are that in Bolivia you have more personal liberty than you would in the US.

[1]
(A run-down of extortion: We make it so that for what you want, you need to pay more than is reasonable, because we have distribution locked down. If you do not agree to pay our price, you must fear for your personal safety. [As in today's Federal prisons, with whose conditions we are all familiar.])

Don't suppose anyone knows if the Bank of Commerce and Credit International was/is related to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (AKA Bank of Cocaine and Conmen International)?

Still, sounds like they're upholding the proud tradition.

Heidi? Ho!

http://www.qrg.ils.nwu.edu/projects/MarsSim/SimHTM L/info/whats-an-omnivore.html

If we were ment to only eat plants we would not be omnivores, and we would be able to digest plant matter better. Wheather it be by evolution or by design, one of our advanages as humans is being omnivorious.
"Omnivores eat plants, but not all kinds of plants. Unlike herbivores, omnivores can't digest some of the substances in grains or other plants that do not produce fruit."
==>Lazn

Part of SecurID's security is that you need RSA to create the seed for you unless you can copy that seed for your home network and use it there. Since this is your own home network anyway, use S/Key instead for a similar one-time pad security solution:
http://www.ece.nwu.edu/CSEL/skey/skey_eecs.html

Kris

Escape velocity of the moon is 5320 mph, which is probably a little faster than one could reasonably hit a golf ball.

So the next time your radar detector goes off, it might not be a cop, it could be NASA trying to communicate with a Solar Sail!

Here's a question for you in order to help answer your problem. How exactly do you intend to use Flash? Because as much as I love Flash and spend lots of time coding silly fun things, it's not the be-all end-all development tool for web content or web-based training. It is very strong in interactivity, vector graphics, and recently scripting, but every release before Flash MX is incredibly poor at displaying and manipulating text.

So if you at all intend to display large amounts of text (and since this project is a learning tool I am assuming that you are) you might be better off not using Flash at all - especially if money is a concern. Good ol' fashioned HTML will always be easier to create and run faster than any kind of in-Flash text manipulation (Alternatively, if you have interactivity requirements that you'd like to use Flash for, like a quiz, you can always keep the main text HTML and embed individual Flash movies into the page for the interactivity). Now, I really do think that MX is making leaps and bounds in this area, but you said yourself that the price is very high - and I agree with you. Others have suggested the educational version (which is ~$99) and I would also recommend that.

Now I might be reading too much into your question, but you said that "We'd really like to use Flash as our main language." Very few people ever refer to Flash as a "language" (it's mostly seen as an animation tool), and fewer of them would post your question to Slashdot (you might want to try the Flash message boards on were-here or flashkit). So I'm assuming that you or the people on the project have technical experience and are coming from the prospective of programmers. In this case, you might want to consider doing at least some parts in Java. You don't have to pay anything, there's plenty of free tools out there, it can do interactivity, and the download requirement isn't going to be a whole lot larger than the Flash MX player (though that would depend on which version you'd use). The development time would almost certainly be a lot higher, but again that depends on the specific requirements of the project.

In any case, good luck and if you do end up delving into some serious Flash programming, I have a bunch of good links to advanced Flash actionscripting resources off my little university page.

If you think Google is concerned about the loss of ad revenue from the API format, you have forgotten what Google said about the alternative of "parsing the html".

Don't know about you, but I doubt the ads silently dumped during in the html parser phase are doing the advertiser much good. Google could charge more for their ads since they would know that html parser "ad bypass" would not be occuring en masse, since any intelligent googler would write to the API.

Beside, why shouldn't the API support ads also, think about the API ads being interpreted as quality hits when the API specifically requests the ad content.

Google should also rack up savings on CPU utilization, especially for Google Games or GoogleWhacking.

The aggregate amount of interference generated by passengers' spinning CD player motors, laptop LCD displays, CPU clocks, etc. has caused some concern by the FAA. Even low levels of interference can mess with sensitive avionics and communications systems. Most planes weren't built with much shielding in the passenger area because personal electronic devices weren't prevalent when they were manufactured...not to mention the fact that saving weight is paramount in aircraft manufacturing. The only protection is provided by shielding the wires themselves, which is OK but far from ideal. Stray signals can also be picked up by antennae located on the outside of the craft thanks to the multitude of windows that easily leak radio frequencies.

Here's a brief synopsis: http://www.physics.nwu.edu/classes/2001Fall/Phyx13 5-2/22/more.htm. Another good article is here.

No major country wipeouts by asteroids happened in the last few thousand years. 3 million people died in natural disasters in the last two decades(source). I'm just guessing, but I imagine asteroids caused very few of those. Maybe we should concentrate on the ones that cause death rather than the ones that scare people who watch too many movies.

Filtering is trivial, writing & managing filters is easily done (and without needing to know any specific notation), scoring is performed identically, saving text and binaries is accomplished cleanly and with versatility, heck it can even be set to use voice commands and read back material. It honors every obscure usenet convention thown at it (mail-copies-to, X-face, etc.) and follows every good usage guideline plus handles multiple languages with aplomb.

Finally the documentation is simply fantastic. If nothing else this makes it a great program: Clear well-written comprehensive documentation properly laid out, indexed, usefully hyperlinked and always helpful. I can't express how important this is and how useful has been.

Oh yeah, it's a free (as in lucre) Mac application running under both MacOS & MacOS X. However MT-NewsWatcher is good enough friends have kept old Macs just for running it; it's that good.

Filtering is trivial, writing & managing filters is easily done (and without needing to know any specific notation), scoring is performed identically, saving text and binaries is accomplished cleanly and with versatility, heck it can even be set to use voice commands and read back material. It honors every obscure usenet convention thown at it (mail-copies-to, X-face, etc.) and follows every good usage guideline plus handles multiple languages with aplomb.

Finally the documentation is simply fantastic. If nothing else this makes it a great program: Clear well-written comprehensive documentation properly laid out, indexed, usefully hyperlinked and always helpful. I can't express how important this is and how useful has been.

Oh yeah, it's a free (as in lucre) Mac application running under both MacOS & MacOS X. However MT-NewsWatcher is good enough friends have kept old Macs just for running it; it's that good.

OK, here is what I have:

This site used to have some pretty slick plans, but is now gone - however, it still exists in Googles cache here - at least a portion of it.

If you follow the last link (off the cache) entitled "Back to Eric's main hovercraft page", it will take you to this page, which seems to hint at a future "new" site - here is hoping it is true!

a quick search came up with

iCal 3.5
A very dynamic calendar utility that allows you to post dates on your Intra/Internet. November 3rd, 2000 Shareware 1.5MB win32

http://www.brownbearsw.com/ical/icalpage.html

ICal 2.2
ICal is a popular X-based calendar and scheduler application. September 28th, 1998 256.6K

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/pdp/ose/asis/products/TCL/i cal-2.2/ical.html/

JetSync 1.0
Synchronizes your email, calendar (ical), memos and addresses and enables conduits for other types of data. February 22nd, 2000 GPL 213.3K
(I could not find the webpage but palm links to it)

http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~frias/jetsync/

Syncal 0.5
Syncal reads a current ical calendar file, an archived ical calendar file, and a Palm(TM) device DateBook database. April 12th, 1999 GPL 26.1K

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/syncal/

lib ICAL 0.23
Lib ICAL is an open source implementation of the IETF's iCAL Calendaring and Scheduling protocols. March 28th, 2001 MPL 567.9K

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/syncal/

yes I think that there is a lack of servers you can build yourself

companys often want to run servers on their intranet and dont want to far it out to a outside source (palm sells alot of their enterprise servers which do syncing)

personally the only app that runs this well and gets messaging right has been Lotus Notes Domino

frankly it rocks and I am surprised that Ximian have not picked up on this they have a client but no server and the server is where the money is !!

regards

john jones

a quick search came up with

iCal 3.5
A very dynamic calendar utility that allows you to post dates on your Intra/Internet. November 3rd, 2000 Shareware 1.5MB win32

http://www.brownbearsw.com/ical/icalpage.html

ICal 2.2
ICal is a popular X-based calendar and scheduler application. September 28th, 1998 256.6K

http://wwwinfo.cern.ch/pdp/ose/asis/products/TCL/i cal-2.2/ical.html/

JetSync 1.0
Synchronizes your email, calendar (ical), memos and addresses and enables conduits for other types of data. February 22nd, 2000 GPL 213.3K
(I could not find the webpage but palm links to it)

http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~frias/jetsync/

Syncal 0.5
Syncal reads a current ical calendar file, an archived ical calendar file, and a Palm(TM) device DateBook database. April 12th, 1999 GPL 26.1K

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/syncal/

lib ICAL 0.23
Lib ICAL is an open source implementation of the IETF's iCAL Calendaring and Scheduling protocols. March 28th, 2001 MPL 567.9K

http://hopf.math.nwu.edu/syncal/

yes I think that there is a lack of servers you can build yourself

companys often want to run servers on their intranet and dont want to far it out to a outside source (palm sells alot of their enterprise servers which do syncing)

personally the only app that runs this well and gets messaging right has been Lotus Notes Domino

frankly it rocks and I am surprised that Ximian have not picked up on this they have a client but no server and the server is where the money is !!

regards

john jones

Microsoft Software is more popular and so it gets hit more. If linux was just as popular you would see the same thing happen.

You wish. The MSFT-toadying media thought that x.c , a FreeBSD and Linux worm, was going to be the "Next Code Red". My machine got more hits from sadmind/IIS worm (Solaris) than x.c. C'mon, shill-boy, why aren't you toeing the Wagg-Ed line? The truth of the matter lies more in the fact that Windows is more-or-less a software and hardware monoculture. Any flaw in IIS affects *all* of the population. The Linux/Unix/BSD/Solaris population has much greater diversity: a flaw in the WN web server isn't going to affect sites using thttpd. Similarly, there are dozens of Linux email clients in use, from mailx to Pine to mh. I don't think there's a common scripting language amongst the diversity of Linux email clients, and I don't think *any* of them are dopey enough to execute "readme.eml" files.

People that dislike windows and love linux are the reason for this attack. Its these people that are writing the viruses and worms. You've got to be kidding, right? Have you got any evidence whatsoever to back that up?

But what about when machines have been given control over their own replication.

See here, here and here.

I would like to think that humans could at least limit the amount of technology and capability that goes into its creations. But the fact remains, if we give the machines the ability to procreate and self-replicate, we are also giving them the ability of evolution, which once given will conceivably allow for the time when humans will be rendered obsolete.

BTW, I believe that human/machine/computer integration is inescapable due to what might be just another stage in our evolution.

xen

I remember when he showed my B90 class this at nwu last year. He did a series of very interesting lectures - evidently based on a series he did at princeton - about a HUGE variety of topics. Godel, Number Theory, discrepancies in time measurement...

One of the most interesting things he showed us was how to find Pi from a game of pool - no tricks! I forget the exact method, but I think you took two balls of equal mass, hit them together, and looked for how many times the second would hit the wall before stopping. And then you changed the mass ratio to 10-1, then 100-1, and so on.

Schools like Digipen focus mainly on platform programming, eg how to code for the N64. That's fine and dandy, but happens when it takes 4 years to do the curriculum and then the hardware's outdated? http://www.cs.nwu.edu/academics/courses/c95-gd/ind ex.html is worth looking at--it's Northwestern University's current game design course where the focus is on true design. It's a great class!

Communism is where you must share what you have produced, with a gun to your head. If you refuse, you are thrown into jail or killed.

It's amazing how ignorant Americans are about politics. The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics never claimed to be a Communist state; it claimed to be a state which aspired to, and sought to work towards, Communism. The particular flavour of Communism which it sought to work towards was Marxist, but Marx didn't invent Communism as an idea; it had wide currency in his period (see e.g the Paris Commune, and comtemporary papers by Anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin).

In Marx's time Communism was already over a thousand years old, and had been a feature of many of the heretical groups of the middle ages, and of extreme factions during the English Civil War

So, in summary, 'Communism' does not mean the Soviet system; 'Communism' does not mean Marxism-Leninism; and 'Communism' does not mean having a gun held to your head.

Is Open Source a communist idea? Yes, I'm perfectly sure it is. But it is most certainly not a Soviet idea or a Marxist idea.

D. Piner, J. Zhu, F. Xu, and S. Hong, C. A. Mirkin, "Dip-Pen Nanolithography", Science, 1999, 283, 661-63.

Go here for their web page. The are able to write the word 'NU' 50% smaller than what Mr. Hubert was able to accomplish. In addition, they are also trying to do this in parallel, using individually addressable AFM probes.

BTW: the probe tips that was used, can simply be bought here. It's a very established technology dating back more than a decade ago. It is also quite irresponsible that the MSNBC story here and Mr. Hubert's web site gave absolutely NO credit to the work by Northwestern. I guess to the media and the un-knowning public, an invention from MIT sounds a lot sexier than one done by Northwestern. By the way, I'm someone doing research in Micromachining, but I'm not affliated with Northwestern University. In case someone want's to flame me.

I did a little research at Oyez and was suprised at how often the conservative judges on the Supreme Court rule in favor of first ammendment cases. Even after twelve years of Republican appointments, they ruled 9-0 in favor of a constitutional right to burn the flag, found the CDA unconstitutional, upheld the rights of the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi party to hold rallies, upheld the right to cable porn, upheld the right for criminals to sell books about their crimes, and so on. It seems likely the Supreme Court will uphold a right to distribute code. Of course, there could be subtle differences here which, since IANAL I wouln't understand.

I would just like to note there are a number of cluster surveys going on out there. Including one, called the REFLEX survey, that uses the same data, the ROSAT All Sky Survey, as the MACS survey as a starting point.

What makes cluster surveys interesting is not just the scientific output but the various means of finding clusters people are trying. For example, the MACS survey mentioned above uses a Voronoi tesselation of the original X-ray data to detect and find sources. Other surveys use wavelet techniques, such as the SHARC survey (to pick one out of the air) or adaptive kernel smoothing, such as the Northern Sky Optical Cluster Survey.

Is it a bit odd to see what I do for a living on /.

here's a bit on the sims' ai, from what i can remember from will wright's talk at the ai and computer games symposium this spring...

basically, when it comes to everyday actions (taking out trash, eating, etc), the sims are pretty much slaves to their drives - for instance, they eat when hungry, but won't eat in anticipation that they'll be going to work soon and will be hungry afterwards. i don't think the timing of their behaviors ever actually changes from that model.

the targets of their behaviors, on the other hand, definitely get learned. sims form object associations easily - get used to the beds they sleep in, appliances that supply them with food, and so on. it's actually a very cool simulation of getting into a habit of doing things - after sleeping every day in the master bedroom, a sim will only reluctantly sleep on the couch. :)

the implementation is also pretty interesting. the way the sims know where to go for things (how to make food, etc.) is because all active objects in the world 'advertise' what they can do - fridge sends out messages saying "hi, i offer +8 in energy!", easel announces "i offer +2 in fun and art skill!", and so on.

the strength of the message also decays with distance, so a hungry sim will feel the fridge's message very strongly when he's nearby, and weakly if he's far away. this in effect looks like a hill-climbing algorithm - a fridge may put up a 'food' hill of height 8, a grill will produce a hill of height 6, and so on, and the hunger variable in the sim controls how much he's inclined to climb to the 'top' of the food hill, as opposed to doing other things...

Is it:

• A "hack" designed to make IIS look as stupidly slow on carefully "hacked-at" benchmarks as the IIS benchmarks make Apache look?

  No particular flaming intended here; in either direction, this represents "benchmarketing" as opposed to anything realistic.

  It may be as unrealistic to "real world" situations to use a highly tuned combo of TUX and Apache and make IIS "look sick" as it was for Mindcraft to use a heavily tuned IIS to make a poorly-tuned Apache look bad.

• Something that would be embedded into a sophisticated web application framework to make certain cases of page accesses run ravingly fast ?

  In which case someone building the next Slashdot might care, as they need to write finely-tuned code, whereas I, when running a lightly loaded web server at home, will have a hard time detecting differences between Roxen, Apache, Boa, and WN.

• Something that I could run in lieu of Boa as a tiny, fast web server?

This isn't quite a flame; it truly is important for a piece of software that you want people to use to be described in an economical manner that makes it easy for people to determine its relevance.