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The problem with the psudo-latin pluralizing of words is that adding the 'i' only works for some second declension nouns that are in the nominative case. First declension nouns, third declension nouns, second declension neuter nouns, and second declension nouns not in the nominative case do not use 'i' to denote the plural. Most latin nouns are not made plural by adding 'i'. You can see a chart of latin declensions here

As for the rest, you're totally out of your gourd. How is assault with toxic chemicals not still assault? How is a misleading contract and a defective product not fraud?

If you can't figure out the answers yourself, you're hazardously naive.

Read some USA history. Assault and fraud have been illegal for hundreds of years, yet in the 20th century pollution and defective products were legal until specific new laws were created to combat it.

Something that's not forceful and not fraudulent can still be not fair.

About the only times they can get away with xeing complete schmucks and alienating their own customers are when they have government-granted protection from the consequences

Again, you show an astounding historical ignorance, well below even the maligned standards of USA public schooling.

Monopolies WILL happen, even without government aid. But the Libertarian Party, by principle, can never act against a monopolist. That means governance will be ceded to the next company which emerges as a natural monopoly.

(There's nothing wrong with supporting the LP if it's with the understanding that their views will never achieve near dominance, and you only want to encourage a push in that direction)

government-granted monopoly

That's more ignorance, although of a more excusable variety, because fewer people are really aware of what "government" is. "Government" is that which "governs". If that entity which you today label "government" abdicates many of its functions, they will be taken up by other, commercial operations- meaning corporations become the new government.

is this our candidate?

if so.. just rub it all over my face..

I can appreciate the fact that a computer science degree is not supposed to produce a software developer or a system administrator. The problem is that at my university (Ohio State), we only have one big Computer Science program and everyone who wants to be a software developer or a system administrator goes through this program. Very few people in the program actually want to be computer scientists, a fact recognized by faculty.

The numero uno objective of the computer science program at Ohio State is the following:
Graduates will have a thorough grounding in the key principles and practices of computing, and will have applied their software development skills and knowledge of foundational principles to the design and implementation of practical systems consisting of software and/or hardware components to meet customer requirements. more...

So part of the argument you and I are having may be one of semantics, but perhaps it only serves to underscore my particular complaint about many of the academics I have dealt with. You see, they are teaching computer science and believing that they are doing a good job of preparing students for real world software development.

In all honesty, the real problem at my university is probably that many of the faculty are a bunch of old farts with a strong industry disconnect that haven't stayed current with anything past fortran 77 and the waterfall model. In recent years, as we've added new younger faculty, the problem has begun to solve itself but I think we are still a long way away from creating satisfied graduates. Particularly, the old farts still outnumber and outtenure the reformers.

and please do not complain when I write shitty assembler.

heh, yeah, personally I haven't written a lick of assembler since that class. It was a required course, but probably represents something that should be an elective/restructured for people in both computer science and software dev tracks. The old farts seem to think it is important for everyone to know, just like they think everyone needs to know how to design an ALU at the gate level.

In communications, there are more protocol issues to worry about. For modems, there's baud--the number of changes in sound per second (handwaving), the bitrate--each change in sound can represent more than one bit, compression--for example, e-mail and HTML don't often need more than 7 bits to represent its highly non-random content and can be compressed, bits for error-detection/correction--because there is always line noise, etc. so any given byte in a communication may take 6-12 bits (handwaving) to transmit.

Ethernet, token ring, and almost all other networks similarly add overhead to data in the form of headers describing the contents of packets which encapsulate user or application data.

Plus, your data is probably encapsulated in some kind of protocol (SLIP, PPP, IP, TCP, UDP, etc...) which add their own headers and other structure to your data. Individual applications usually need their own headers (content-type/HTTP negotiation for your web browser, SSL, etc), adding more overhead.

And of course, at each part of the communication stack, headers can be added or removed, packets repackaged and possibly reordered, etc. depending on what you are connecting to (the TCP/IP stack for an uplink is very special compared to the one in your Linksys). A poorly written TCP/IP stack in the OS does worse than a good one on the same network and network card (let's ignore PCI bus latency and software modems in the client machine).

In short, pulsing a piece of wire or a fiber x times a second can have very little to the actual data transfer rate as experienced by the user, hence data-link bitrate doesn't translate into experienced bitrate in a particularly quantitative sense. On a wired connection, it is generally safe (handwaving) to assume that it takes 10-15 bits of physical layer to transmit a byte of user data for many applications.

See: http://wks.uts.ohio-state.edu/sysadm_course/html/s ysadm-326.html and http://www.protocols.com/pbook/tcpip2.htm

I don't think much else needs to be said about VoIP. It's wonderful technology and saves a lot of money on telephone bills if you're well connected with broadband. I use VoIP quite a bit, so it's worth mentioning a top VoIP reference on the internet, in fact the most comprehensive info directory on the topic I know of. Also of interest is the FCC (keep the boos down please) webpage on it.

Now where did that come from?

Jesus fucking Christ. From the plants that turned into coal, of course.

Now where did that come from?

Coal generally contains concentrations of uranium of from 1 to 10 parts per million, and from 2 to 4 times as much thorium.

Here. Here Here Here.Here.Here.

Those numbers are just a little high for something that is laid down in sediemnts.

Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

They did identify it as 2M1207 at 230 light years. A quick google suggests this set of coordinates from some Prospero observations in February, coordinates reproduced here (the original file has observation configuration as well):

# Prospero Observation Template File
# Created: 2004 Feb 12 [9:36:32] by saveobs.pl Version 2.2
# For: John Gizis
#
PROJECT=UDEL-04A-0005
IMGTYPE=OBJECT
OBJECT=2M1207
RA=12 07 33.4
DEC=-39 32 54
EQUINOX=2000.0
MODE=DUAL

If you are looking for a more generic build/test runner dashboard than cruise control, take a look at DART. Its free, open source, and makes very few restrictions on those projects which wish to use it.

Here are some example dartboards.

Here is my dart board for the Mobius Project I work on.

Yea, we use it on our continuous build dashboard to test for package cycles everytime a comit is issued. Here's an example.

Yea, we use it on our continuous build dashboard to test for package cycles everytime a comit is issued. Here's an example.

For example, I have written the Representative and Senators who represent me in Congress, advocating for a reform of intellectual property laws so that big companies like Disney can't steamroll anyone who attempts to impose a more rational system. But I also happen to live in California, where a huge slice of the population makes its living off of intellectual property in one way or another. The movie, music, and computer industries all depend on intellectual property for their survival.

The reaction from my representatives in Congress has been a fairly uniform, "We want to respond to new technologies in a way that allows for innovation but respects intellectual property laws." Basically they are concerned that if IP laws are messed with, the bread and butter for their constituents will vanish. It's about them wanting to stay in office, but it's also about them looking out for the economic interests of California.

You can say what you want about people wanting to make a quick buck, but as a small business owner I can categorically say that business is very difficult. It's never easy, and there is always someone ready to take over your market and eat your lunch if you're not careful. That's the nature of free enterprise. When you're in business, you seek every legal advantage you can get, because if you don't, you might not survive. Copyrights and patents do not "have the sole purpose of protecting the little guy from the big guy," or "the big guy from the little guy." They are intended to encourage innovation and spur the economy, while providing for long-term benefits to society.

It seems to me that the goal of all who would like to see the current imbalances in copyright and patent law redressed should be to show Congress and the people at large how current laws favor powerful, entrenched, and (this is vitally important) non-innovative players in the market. We need to show how if we do not change our IP laws, we will collectively be at an economic disadvantage because we have squelched innovation.

If you want to take on big, vested interests, you need to beat them at their own game. You need to show legislators and regular people (I get nervous any time anyone uses the term "The People" because it implies that in a country as large and diverse as the United States somehow there are only two camps - the forces of Evil, and The People) that it makes economic sense to reform intellectual property laws.

p.s. - "Back in the good 'ol days" (1920), the Prohibition Act came into being after more than 27 years of concerted grassroots political effort. Congress didn't just up and decide to enact Prohibition.

I haven't heard of any great indian computer scientist. The good ones will always survive.

http://yarchive.net/nuke/coal_radiation.html

The best one: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html

I left a comfortable job position to try for a Ph.D. at a major US institution. I was offered a full stipend, and it paid for pretty much everything except car insurance and clothing costs.

Unfortunately, when I got there, I found myself outclassed, and without help. Once my advisor came to realize I was not a specialist in the areas he thought I was, he rarely saw me, while discouraging me to look elsewhere.

Finally, my advisor dumped me two months before my contract with him was due to expire, well after the point all the other Ph.D. advisors had already chosen their underlings for the next year. I later found one of my friends in that research group was originally under my advisor as well, and had been dumped just prior to this advisor taking me in.

But it was too late for me. I lost a large amount of personal funding taking out loans to pay for the next two quarters. The politics in the Engineering department there were much worse than those I ever encountered working for the US government. Eventually I received a very good job offer from a private firm, and dropped out with the Masters degree I already had received at another school. But by that point in time, I estimated I wasted well over $10,000 in my own funds waiting for a new advisor I liked to take me in (it is worth noting he did come up with some funds for me, but I left just after this point).

The paranoid should look at two professors' testimony before the US Congress for some insight. The first is the testimony of Dr. David Goodstein about how the US Ph.D. program attempts to only breed elite members like themselves. The second is the testimony of Dr. Norman Matloff (revised since 1998) on how there really is not a Software labor shortage in the US (one section of this paper discusses why American CS students tend not to go for Ph.D. degrees).

Even better than that, xtraceroute implements RFC 1876 dating back to 1996.

Musicology - long history of research, tons of papers, stuff on score analysis and psychoacoustics thats pretty incredible. However, especially for psycho acoustics, theres little research outside of western cultures.

Computer science - Frequently individuals with a hobby that have brought formidible computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields, but are largely ignorant of the works within music departments (see pretty much any IEEE paper on music for examples). Biggest problem is typically lack of statistically valid experiments (like the test sample of 4 pieces in this article).

Ethnomusicology - The first 20 years of the fields existance (~55-~75) was dedicated to this kind of research. Now that computers are powerful enough to do more meaningful analysis, the backlash against this analysis is fading, but any ethnomusicologist can tell you all the pitfalls - especially how critical cultural context is to the analysis.

As for the relationship between music and language, both music and language are tightly tied to culture. In that sense, they are similar. Anything more profound requires an accurate, precise definition of the two terms. This is extremely difficult and a good way to start a fight with ethnomusicologists if your so inclined.

There are serious investigations into making cache optimized algorithms. For example, the matrix transposition and array index bit reversal algorithms have been investigated in two papers. Also, Bailey's 4-step and 6-step FFT algorithms are also cache efficient. The latter example shows that a complex algorithm such as a FFT can be made cache efficient with the sacrafice of only a few extra computations. Perhaps it would be prudent to use a hybrid ray-tracer/polynomial renderer to section each portion of the screen into regions that will only access a particular portion of memory. In fact, texture mapping is a lot like that. But I propose that we section the geometry into sections that are localized in memory. This will require more computation in the form of checking which ray goes where but it might be possible to create a viable ray tracer/polygon renderer that produces images of ray tracing caliber. By polygon renderer I mean the renderers that we currently use in gaming.

Some references about cache efficiency.

Unfortunately, even for people that operate primarily in text, Screen is not a perfect replacement for X (or another GUI). Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself).

As other have mentioned, the CNO cycle is just a catalyst larger stars use to fuse Helium (basically 4p + C12 = He4 + C12 instead of the "normal" method). However since heavier elements are used in the reaction, higher temperatures (core temp >18M kelvin) are needed to initiate the reaction due to a strong positive repulsion force within the nucleus, only larger stars (> ~1.2 solar mass) have core temps high enough to initiate the reactions. Our sun gets about 2% of its energy from CNO, but a 1.2 solar mass star can be up to 50%, and in larger stars it clearly dominates.

Now for the proton-proton chain, nuclear reaction rate is slightly sensitive to core temp ( ~ T**4). However, with CNO the rate is more like T**16. The lifetime of a star is defined by the ratio of how much fuel is has (mass) over its rate of consumption (luminosity). For main sequence stars, the luminosity is rough related to mass**4, so the lifetime of a star is 1/mass**3.

I think there may have been some confusion because typically older stars are heavy element poor (small Z mass fraction). Older stars must also be less massive (if they were large, would consume fuel too quickly and burn out before the old age sets in). These older, heavy-element poor, less massive stars would not have the conditions needed to use the CNO cycle to begin with.

IANAAP, but I did take a few courses in astrophysics, enough to remember this much. I also did not RTFA, not a subscriber to Science News. Any astrophysists out there (or students thereof) able to give an answer?

Reference: http://www-astronomy.mps.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast 162/

As for hyperspace -- ill-defined term, interchangeable with "carried by angels" or "magic beans". You may as well just ask the genie in the witch's mirror to show you the past.

For those who are interested in the physics of sports, here's a pretty in depth one on billiards:
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~penningt/262/ps /apapp.pdf

since we started measuring (~100 years)

last thousand years (p.4)

On geological timescales

420,000 years BP
Particularly interesting is perhaps this bit:

The recent completion of drilling at Vostok station in East Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial-interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds. Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.

Nature has published a lot of interesting reports on the subject over the years and they have an excellent search engine. Give it a shot.

Bonus info on the recession of the world's glaciers. Just because you asked nicely. :-)

And I leave you with this:

These ice cores show a 20th century isotopic enrichment that suggests a large scale warming is underway at low latitudes. The rate of this isotopically inferred warming is amplified at higher elevations over the Tibetan Plateau while amplification in the Andes is latitude dependent with enrichment (warming) increasing equatorward. In concert with this apparent warming, in situ observations reveal that tropical glaciers are currently disappearing.
Tropical glacier and ice core evidence of climate change on annual to millennial time scales..

since we started measuring (~100 years)

last thousand years (p.4)

On geological timescales

420,000 years BP
Particularly interesting is perhaps this bit:

The recent completion of drilling at Vostok station in East Antarctica has allowed the extension of the ice record of atmospheric composition and climate to the past four glacial-interglacial cycles. The succession of changes through each climate cycle and termination was similar, and atmospheric and climate properties oscillated between stable bounds. Interglacial periods differed in temporal evolution and duration. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.

Nature has published a lot of interesting reports on the subject over the years and they have an excellent search engine. Give it a shot.

Bonus info on the recession of the world's glaciers. Just because you asked nicely. :-)

And I leave you with this:

These ice cores show a 20th century isotopic enrichment that suggests a large scale warming is underway at low latitudes. The rate of this isotopically inferred warming is amplified at higher elevations over the Tibetan Plateau while amplification in the Andes is latitude dependent with enrichment (warming) increasing equatorward. In concert with this apparent warming, in situ observations reveal that tropical glaciers are currently disappearing.
Tropical glacier and ice core evidence of climate change on annual to millennial time scales..

Otherwise, life could really be dependent upon RFC 1149.

I'm really sory if my question sounds stupid, but...

I thought that the fact that, time was distorted by variation in relative speed was already proven and actually had to be taking in account with GPS sattelites.

Or did I misunderstand and it is another property of General Relativity, that they are trying to prove.

Murphy(c)

I am a Catholic with an interest in science. I trust the Church, and I trust science. It's true that proof of life on other worlds might throw some Christians into confusion, or make them retreat (further) into denial of legitimate science. But personally, I think it disrespectful to the Creator when we are afraid of looking too closely at the method of creation, for fear of contradicting Scripture. This is not a new idea: "If it happens that the authority of Sacred Scripture is set in opposition to clear and certain reasoning, this must mean that the person who interprets Scripture does not understand it correctly." - St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) Another Augustine quote Faith and Science

It's still a really stupid trait to introduce into the wild

The trait is already in the wild, through "natural" means, so such action wouldn't actually be "introducing" anything.

Just as with antibiotics, you have to be choosy and vary your strategy with herbicides.

prior art = November 1987

And in other news, tomorrow, I'm patenting the misspelling of referrer in electronic comunication.

It supports NFS and CIFS (which is basically the latest iteration of SMB) so it should so you can network with NFS or Samba, Windows/Linux.

Does that mean you're female!? :D

No, it means he's a fan of the inimitable Tora-san.

Cheers,
-j.

Change the way email works. Step one, NO ATTATCHMENTS. Seriously, why the hell are we using email to shuttle files around? It was not designed for this.

This has to be one of the most uneducated, pedantic, and just plain *wrong* posts I've seen, even on slashdot.

The purpose of email is to transfer (communicate) information from userA to userB. Whether that information is ASCII text, html, or base64 encoded binary information is largely irrelevant.

Email is most definitely designed to handle attachments, from a very early age.

1) Traffic is a small cost compared to the cost of labor. Who cares about saving $0.03 worth of traffic that then brings $2 of labor costs publishing files to an FTP server?

2) You have traceability. Most any email program allows you to view the headers of an email.

Get real.

RFC 1323 (TCP Extensions for High Performance)

Keep in mind when DARPA talks about adhoc networks and such, they also have stuff like this in mind...

In 1930 or so, Wolfgang Pauli noticed that in all interactions, this strange combination of variables (what we now call spin) stayed constant through those interactions. But he couldn't fully explain beta-decay, or when the nucleus of an atom spits out an electron ... this 'spin' wasn't conserved.

So, Pauli invents an incredible particle: it has little or no mass, hardly ever interacts with anything, but carries spin. It helped his equations balance.

Naturally, most of the scientific world scoffed at his idea at the time: it implied that hundreds of trillions of these things would be flying through space every second. AND they were undetectable?!? Quite a stretch.

But history bore him out, and neutrinos exist. You can see a history of the neutrino here, for more info, including current discrepancies with our understanding of neutrinos.

Quantum mechanics kinda developed the same way ... crazy math with weird conclusions went AHEAD of experiments, and those experiments bore out the math 5 or 10 years later. I believe the same approach is being taken for the matter in the universe (WMAP predicitons), as well as the higgs boson.

Just my 0.02 euro.

What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading... [And several
other, equally valid points]

I want to expand on this, just a bit, to highlight the problem here.

It seems highly unlikely that the RIAA would allow the end-user to download their database of "song signatures" or hashes or whatever implements this, so that the end-user could filter songs locally, deleting unauthorized songs on the honor system. After all, if the RIAA trusted its customers -- and if the customers were trustworthy -- but that's all water over the dam, isn't it?

So clearly this means uploading either the whole song, or some derived signature, to RIAA, every time you want to trade the file. This means uploading not just music, but any traded file.

And this introduces a chilling effect on free speech. Because the files I might be trading -- or the samizdat that secret Falun Gong supporter Won Ma might be sending to his fellow Chinese dissidents -- might not belong to the RIAA, but might invite government scrutiny for being unpopular dissent.

Certainly, knowing that everything that was traded, from bootleg Pete Seeger protest songs to homemade iMovies juxtaposing images of George Bush and chimpanzees to recordings of parody songs about John Ashcroft's resemblance to Darth Vader, was reported to a central repository -- the RIAA copyright detecting server -- could make that repository an irresistible target of monitoring by unscrupulous government agencies interested in tracking dissent -- whether those agencies are in Beijing or Washington D.C.

Would a government employee or contractor, worried about maintaining a security clearance, feel as free to engage in lawful and even patriotic dissent if he was worried his bosses might be able to monitor the his trading, from his home, excerpts from the documentary Guns & Mothers to which the he had added his own commentary defending his Second Amendment rights? Of course he'd worry -- and thus be discouraged from exercising his constitutional rights under not only the Second but the First Amendment as well!

Might a closeted homosexual worry that trading documentary films about Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay could reveal his sexual orientation and make him subject to blackmail?

Might Christians living in a Muslim theocracy fear persecution for trading Bibles or Christian devotional music?

Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.

Whatever your politics, whether you trade files or not -- and, no, I don't --, this is something you must oppose, for it threatens the liberty of all of us.

Well, we'd have less of them (drones) if we could force those private institutions to drop selective admissions/prestige and start turning the useless drones you claim into more productive citizens. If you havent been paying attention to slashdot, a well known (and far from the Ivy League) "State" university, has dealt with something far from what a drone could know- if you arent comfortable with losing every single advantage elitism brings you.

I get in political discussion with folks who complain about the system not working...when I ask if they write their representatives they say no. I ask if they vote, they say they aren't registered.

I write my representatives. And I vote. Know what? It still doesn't make a damn bit of difference so long as at election time I'm given no real choice.

As Bill Hicks put it, "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs. I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking. Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding both puppets."

They don't listen to the majority, they lose their job.

The majority are easily led around by those in power. Most Americans beleive that Iraq as involved in 9/11 and that we have found weapons of mass destruction in our invasion there. Our "leaders" have gotten people more disturbed about destroying a flag than about destroying the land that the flag represents.

The game is rigged. Third-party candidates are doomed from the start. Any candidate talking about real change is not permitted to get past the primaries - look at how they savaged Dean for speaking truth. Betting on a Senator for re-election is about the safest bet you can make, and Representatives only risk losing their seats if their opposing party gets ahold of the state legislature and manages to redistrict them out.

So, yeah, I vote, I give to the ACLU, I write my Congresscritters, but I don't expect it to make much difference. Me, I'm looking for Yin revolution. And if that don't work...well, that's why there's a rifle in the closet.

Rome's empire-expanding aggression produced short-term economic benefit, but contributed heavily to its long-term decline by producing an economy built on territorial expansion and human suffering. Fingers are pointed at climate change and massive trade deficits, but equally at the burden of maintaining the enormous army required to inflict empire-prolonging violence upon the conquered territories.

Furthermore, it's a false analogy because the current hatred is not between superpowers but between us and individuals whose extremism is motivated in part by our inhumane policies abroad. "Pulling the trigger" against enemies like this simply polarizes every moderate who knew them.

Violence doesn't solve anything, it just delays the problem.

Rome's empire-expanding aggression produced short-term economic benefit, but contributed heavily to its long-term decline by producing an economy built on territorial expansion and human suffering. Fingers are pointed at climate change and massive trade deficits, but equally at the burden of maintaining the enormous army required to inflict empire-prolonging violence upon the conquered territories.

Furthermore, it's a false analogy because the current hatred is not between superpowers but between us and individuals whose extremism is motivated in part by our inhumane policies abroad. "Pulling the trigger" against enemies like this simply polarizes every moderate who knew them.

Violence doesn't solve anything, it just delays the problem.

BTW, for those reminiscing about text-based gopher don't forget GopherVR that came out just as http/html hit. An interesting experiment in 3D virtualization of online resources I've yet to see it equalled for other protocols.

Other now-obscure technologies from the same era:

• ph
• fsp
• wais
• archie
• z39.50
• veronica
• prospero

Try reading RFC 1738 for more on Http.

No usernames/passwords are allowed.
It's funny in this situation MS is the only one following the RFC

If : is omitted, the port defaults to 80. No user name or password is allowed. is an HTTP selector, and is a query string. The is optional, as is the and its preceding "?". If neither nor is present, the "/" may also be omitted.

They are conforming to the RFC. Username/Password is a hack. First people complain that IE doesn't follow RFC, and when they do, you still fucking complain.

Ohio State charges 10 dollars per day for recalled items, and 5 dollars per hour for reserve items.

No one has proved (yet) these plants are unsafe, but our governement wants studies showing they're safe (!unsafe != safe).

Um, yes. Before you go making irreversible changes to the biosystem by introducting new plants, you'd better prove it's safe. Don't fsck with our spaceship's life support system. That's common sense.

If, for some reason I can't fathom, you want to eat GM crops, hey, be my guest. Just grow them in greenhouses with biohazard protections to keep them from spreading.

If we were afraid of using new technology we would still not using the wheel.

Non sequitor. Adopting a technology like the wheel (or room-temperature supercondictors) is a reversable change. Putting poorly-understood transgenic plants into the ecosystem is not.

No, you are incorrect.

the URL standad allows for a username and password, but it is not required. However, the HTTP and HTTPS section of the URL standard specifically disallow the use of a username and password

URL RFC

read section 3 : (some of the text below is garbled, because I dont feel like escaping out all the > and < in the text below, however that does not change the important bits.)

3.3 HTTP
The HTTP URL scheme is used to designate Internet resources accessible using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).

The HTTP protocol is specified elsewhere. This specification only describes the syntax of HTTP URLs.

An HTTP URL takes the form:

http://>:/?

where and are as described in Section 3.1. If : is omitted, the port defaults to 80. No user name or password is allowed. is an HTTP selector, and is a query string. The is optional, as is the and its preceding "?". If neither nor is present, the "/" may also be omitted.

Within the and components, "/", ";", "?" are reserved. The "/" character may be used within HTTP to designate a hierarchical structure.

Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?

This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:

• Humdrum Toolkit - a toolkit used by Stanford, Ohio State, and some other universities
• Finale one of the first visual score editing programs. Proprietarty format hacked by researchers.
• Score the 800 lb gorilla ofthe market. Music publications use this exclusively.
• GUIDO - another notation system developed for and by researchers.

These are just the standards I know of. This site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.

However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.

What do we know about that star and its surroundings? Is it likely to have inhabitable planets...

As cool as it is to find a star that's a twin to ours, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll find a planet even remotely similar to Earth.

For one thing, the article notes that 18 Sco is 4.2 billion years old, while Sol is 4.5 billion years old. If everything else were exactly equal, it would be like stepping back 300 million years back in time. A quick Google finds that one of the more complex forms of life found 300e6 years ago on this planet was the Velvet Worm -- not a species known for its technology.

But even that is unlikely, given the Earth's unusual formation. This planet has an unusual mix of minerals on its crust, plus plate tectonics to keep them mixed, and an iron core that's magnetic enough to keep out the sun's ionizing radiation. Plus, a moon big enough to stir up the oceans, and a tilt to generate asymmetrical solar heating... and all that apparently due to a one-in-a-million collision between a proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet not long after Sol formed.

I can't find the quote, but someone calculated the odds of finding another sentient species as tiny. It's not that it doesn't develop elsewhere in the galaxy... there are billions of chances, so surely more than one came up all 7s. It's just that the distances are so vast, and the chances of favorable development so small, that entire civilizations (or species) could rise and fall by the time their transmissions reach another civilization's satellite dishes.

But still, at less than 50 light years, it would only take a few hundred years to get there and back. Are the generation ships ready yet?

Infiniband. Infiniband. Infiniband.

The Infiniband NICs are made by Mellanox, and IB switches are made by Mellanox, Voltaire, and one other company whose name eludes me. I don't know who developed the OSX drivers (maybe Mellanox, maybe Apple, maybe both), but AFAIK the high-level MPI library that pretty much everybody (including Va. Tech) uses for IB is a channel driver for MPICH developed by D.K. Panda's group at Ohio State. (I know this because Pete Wyckoff, a co-worker of mine at OSC, has done a whole bunch of debugging and stress testing for Panda's crew; his name's on most of their IB-related papers too.)

In short, the only thing Apple might have bought to the table as far as the IB interconnect on the Va. Tech machine is some driver development.

--Troy

Paragraphs, man. They're useful.

Anyway.. no OpenMosix here, this is using MPI. Specifically, on top of DK Panda's MPI libraries, they brought Kazushige Goto in to optimize the BLAS libraries in order to obtain the Top500 ranking of 10+ TF.

Incidentally, the Top500 rankings are based on a standardized LINPACK benchmark and formula, not "raw" processor rankings. I saw another comment that implied the latter.

Other interesting notes:

• With conventional air cooling, the airspeed throughout the facility would have been 60-70MPH+. Try working on a console in a hurricane.
• Dr. Varadarajan is a very very cool guy. He absolutely knows every detail that is going on in this machine, and knows how to make a good story out of it.
• The facility this is in was upgraded to handle 3MW. The current cluster takes around 1.5MW. And you thought your Athlon was hot. :)
• The #1 Top500 machine, the Earth Simulator, not only runs on custom Hitachi vector hardware, but required an entire new building to be built. The facility is a feat in itself, and is a big portion of the cost (for those of you extrapolating cost/performance if it was built at the same time as System X).