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Stillwater is exactly backwoods. It's home to a fairly http://www.okstate.edu/large state university and supposedly has one of the highest rates of PhDs in the nation because of the university. I think this Rural Source is looking to even smaller towns.

IANARedneck, but there are quite a few versatile breeds, mostly rustic ones, like the Salers that can be bred for both. Their meat is excellent, and the milk is also used for making a couple of the best kinds of french cheese. Of course, I'm neither talking of McDo meat non-quality nor of living tasteless milk factories here...

Does it have a function, it surely does, check out this site if you're really interested

Hold on there for a minute. DEC VAXs had DECCALC , email, chat, clusters, paint programs, EDT (like emacs) fortran, etc. etc. in 1979

Unfortunately, all the hardware is probably dead now, and it was very expensive when new. On the other hand, the uptime was better than PCs, and there were no problems with users installing viruses, games, and other crapware at work. Users interfaced with the mainframe with VT100 or better terminals, and these terminals did support graphics so you could see your graph plotted, and it was possible to scan in pictures and display them on a terminal, sort of a pre-gif gif file.

Just because most people don't know the archaology of VAXes does't mean they didn't exist.

It probably takes more than just basepairs to make a Spice Girl (even neglecting the simulation of a Thatcherite childhood). There's also the newly-investigated "methylation" info layer, which modulates the genome's potential codes. And if we're just finding out about methylation, what else lies within?

NMD has already worked just fine in all of our cells for millions of years without big radar installations. Yet another military boondoggle!

<a href="http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/page s/address/t-z/usspace.html">Picture of the Rocket Park</a>
<a href="http://www.themindspill.com/air_space/space/ ASRC/asrc4.html">More pictures of the Rocket Park</a>
<a href="http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/page s/booster/sv-asrc.html">Picture of the Saturn5</a>

<a href="http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/page s/address/t-z/usspace.html">Picture of the Rocket Park</a>
<a href="http://www.themindspill.com/air_space/space/ ASRC/asrc4.html">More pictures of the Rocket Park</a>
<a href="http://aesp.nasa.okstate.edu/fieldguide/page s/booster/sv-asrc.html">Picture of the Saturn5</a>

The field guide has a picture and info about it.

that's the way it is here at Oklahoma State Our CS dept runs solaris and harldy ever goes down, while the rest of the campus (save the arts and sciences office im in, we run solaris as well) runs windows and gets hacked on a regular basis. thats not counting the times it just goes down.

our IT dept is in dire need of some *nix, but our new IT director is all windows. i wont say i havent benefitted from the free M$ software ive gotten through the msdaa he arranged, but our network is a little unstable to say the least.

The article refutes the idea of solar sails designed to use momentum from photons to move a sail through space. The article seems to confuse thermodynamics and mechanics, ignoring the conservation of momentum to make its point. The article makes points out the fact that a perfect reflector would not drop the photons temperature, so it cannot be used as an engine (no temperature drop in a Carnot cycle).

Since a photon's 'temperature' is proportional to its frequency, I guess this is true. If there is no frequency change when the photon is reflected back in the opposite direction from a perfect reflector there is no 'temperature' change. But the direction of the photon is changed by reflection, and momentum must be conserved. an imperfect reflector would probably result in some 'temperature' change. How you could use this in a Carnot cycle I don't know.

The article quotes a Steven Soter: "Steven Soter, an astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York, is open to Gold's idea. He says applying conservation of momentum to photons could be a mistake. 'Light is very different from matter, and one may wonder if the momentum rules are also different.'" Soter works at Hayden planetarium and was a collaborator with the late Carl Sagan. I don't know his background or credentials.

His statement shows a lack of understanding. The momentum of the photons should be p=hf/c. Where p is momentum, h is planck's constant, f is frequency, and c is the speed of light. If the photon is reflected perfectly the sail must pick up twice the original momentum in order to balance out. Momentum has both direction and magnitude. If you start out with one photon moving away fron the sun (call it one unit of momentum) and a stationary sail. After reflection you have one photon moving torwards the sun. The reflected photon has the same magnitude, but opposite direction, or -1 unit of momentum.

But conservation of momentum means that the total system should be the same before as after or one unit (positive direction) total. So to get a total of one positive unit the sail must have two positive units of momentum.

before collision the photon has one positive unit, and the stationary sail has zero units for a total of one positive unit. After collision the photon has one negative unit, the sail has two positive units for a total of one positive units. I think that the conservation of momentum has been tested for photons.

The article also states that the first flight of a solar sail will take place this fall, but the Russians have already launched.

The article also incorrectly explains why most crooke's radiometers move in the direction of the white side, and are propelled by the black side, here is a good link that explains why.

Whew! Both Steven Soter and Thomas Gold seem to have good reputations. I think Gold's arguments about a sail not being a carnot engine are accurate, and are being applied out of context. It does not matter if a solar sail is not a good Carnot engine, any more than it matters if a wind sail on a ship is a good Carnot engine. It does matter that a steamship have a good Carnot engine.

Mr. Soter's quote is disturbingly inaccurate.

This is a strawman argument, anyway. The natural transfer of a genetic information across kingdoms/species/etc. is analogous to the artificial insertion of a gene into a plant, not breeding them together to produce some lame mad science experiment.

Here's a better article:

Of the 51 examined gene fusions that are represented in at least two of the three primary kingdoms (Bacteria, Archaea and Eukaryota), 31 were most probably disseminated by cross-kingdom horizontal gene transfer, whereas 14 appeared to have evolved independently in different kingdoms and two were probably inherited from the common ancestor of modern life forms.

And here is another:

The plant symbiont Bradyrhizobium japonicum has two glutamine synthetase genes, one similar to those found in other bacteria, the other 50% identical to the enzymes from higher plants. When protein sequences encoded by archaeal genomes are used to search protein sequence databases for similar sequences, some sequences have their best match with sequences from eubacteria. The opposite is also true (ref1, ref2, ref3). There are even a few cases where one sequence segment of a protein with an origin in one kingdom is attached to a segment with an origin in another kingdom (ref).

I'm working on a project called sinapse that is a PHP/db portal for students. It's in use by Oklahoma University, Oklahoma State University, and I'm currently working on the Baylor University implementation. However, I've been writing a module for it specifically for teachers to be able to cover the same functions as Blackboard. Sinapse is the only education focused software for this usage AFAIK.

It's an urban legend

Mmmm... teats

It lets the kids individually do an experiment, find any unexplained observations, make a hypothesis, and then go about proving or disproving their hypothesis. All the while documenting everything of course. The kids have a blast because they're actually trying to figure something out and see if their ideas are right. In a single classroom with the same "experiment" there could be 10 or more different hypothesis and even more ways to test them.

The best part of this is that the lab is not scripted. The kids go into this class and actually have to think for themselves. They can't just follow some instructions and get an A. Also they're learning science the way scientists do real work.

We're currently part of a huge Department of Education grant in its 3rd year. If you're interested please go to http://waves.okstate.edu and look around.

Also if any Department of Education brass are reading this. Please don't cut our funding! This stuff actually works. The kids are actually enjoying class.

We do have a (seemingly unautomated) system of discouraging Kaaza users. Once a student has transfered over 500MB of bandwidth within 24 hours, their speed is throttled down to the speed of a 56K modem. When I made the switch to Linux a couple months ago, I downloaded roughly 1.7GB of ISO's -- all in one day. My bandwidth was never reduced, which leads me to believe that they are either not strict about it, or that they actually look to see where the traffic is coming from, and act accordingly

I'm at the better in-state school, and I've worked with the network administration here on solutions to bandwidth problems. The way I understand it, the upstream ISP for both of our colleges will periodically (daily IIRC) send a list of the IP addresses with the highest bandwidth usage to the network administration here. These users are then placed in a sort of "penalty box" -- if it is determined that their high usage is due to not-so-nice things such as P2P, their bandwidth gets throttled back.

Here at OSU, though, they implemented a totally different solution at the beginning of this semester. Students on the ResLife network are now by default placed behind a NAT configuration. If you want a public IP, fine, but you have to register for it. Thus, if you have a public IP and your IP starts sharing illegal files and generating high bandwidth usage, they don't even have to try to figure out who you are. This has been working out nicely so far; it's much better than the old configuration, in which the severely capped ResLife network was so clogged it was hardly usable. Now, there isn't any cap, and available bandwidth is plenty.

We do have a (seemingly unautomated) system of discouraging Kaaza users. Once a student has transfered over 500MB of bandwidth within 24 hours, their speed is throttled down to the speed of a 56K modem. When I made the switch to Linux a couple months ago, I downloaded roughly 1.7GB of ISO's -- all in one day. My bandwidth was never reduced, which leads me to believe that they are either not strict about it, or that they actually look to see where the traffic is coming from, and act accordingly

I'm at the better in-state school, and I've worked with the network administration here on solutions to bandwidth problems. The way I understand it, the upstream ISP for both of our colleges will periodically (daily IIRC) send a list of the IP addresses with the highest bandwidth usage to the network administration here. These users are then placed in a sort of "penalty box" -- if it is determined that their high usage is due to not-so-nice things such as P2P, their bandwidth gets throttled back.

Here at OSU, though, they implemented a totally different solution at the beginning of this semester. Students on the ResLife network are now by default placed behind a NAT configuration. If you want a public IP, fine, but you have to register for it. Thus, if you have a public IP and your IP starts sharing illegal files and generating high bandwidth usage, they don't even have to try to figure out who you are. This has been working out nicely so far; it's much better than the old configuration, in which the severely capped ResLife network was so clogged it was hardly usable. Now, there isn't any cap, and available bandwidth is plenty.

I believe the original poster is referring to the fact that the poisonous part of BVO is the Bromine, and the bromine additive is to make the vegetable oil (which provides the flavor, color, and/or texture) the same density as water... so that the oil won't eventually migrate to the top of your soda.

The original poster then is probably referring to the fact that if a way of mixing oil and water is found, we can then get rid of the bromine and not poison ourselves when drinking Mt. Dew.

However, since Soda is basically CO2 dissolved in water, it makes it kind of hard to create degassed soda q=. So in effect, whatever the outcome this research is, it would not change the status of brominated veggie oil in our favorite soft drinks.

Werd Smiler

1. Elemination of clock skew problems - the clock is a timing signal, but it takes a certain amount of time for the clock signal to propogate around the chip, so as the clock frequency goes up, this becomes a huge problem
2. Average-case Performance Synchronous circuits must be timed to the worst performing elements. Asynchronous circuits have dynamic speeds.
3. Adaptivity to processing and environmental variations Dynamic speed here againg. If temp goes down, circuit speeds up. If supply voltage goes up, speed goes up. Adapts to fastest possible speed for given conditions
4. Component modularity and reuse easier interface because difficulty with timing issues are avoided (handshake signals used instead).
5. Lower system power requirements it takes alot of power to propogate the clock signal, plus spurios transistor transistions are avoided. (MOSFETS only use considerable power when they change states).
6. Reduced noise All activity is locked into a single frequency in synchronous, so big current spikes cause large ammounts of noise. Good analogy is the noise of 50 marching soldiers vs. the noise of 50 people walking at their own pace. The synchronous nature of the soldiers causes the magnitude of the noise to be much greater.

There are three different species of Zebra, including the Quagga , which genetic analysis shows to be a subspecies of the Plains zebra.

The reason for sterility given in the article has to do with if the hybrid creature has an even number of chromosomes.

The beeb and the British Mule org may have said mules are infertile because they have an odd number of chromosomes. But I am skeptical.

Here is an excerpt from a page about the Przewalski Horse

Some authorities feel strongly that the Przewalski horse is the ancestor of all modern breeds. Others point out that it is a different species from the domesticated horse, having 66 chromosomes as compared to the 64 of the domestic horse. They further point out that while crosses between the Przewalski and domestic horses result in a fertile hybrid, the offspring has 65 chromosomes. Subsequent crosses result in 64 chromosomes and bear little resemblance to the Przewalski. The Foundation for the preservation and protection of the Przewalski's Horse, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, report that only a few Przewalski horses are tamable, in proportions similar to a Zebra.

So, even if this site is mistaken to say that the 65 chromosome hybrid is fertile, what if you crossed a 62 chromosome Ass with a 66 chromosome Przewalski's Horse? That hybrid would have 64 chromosomes. Would that make it fertile?

Well one alternative to the Air Conditioner is a ground source heat pump (GHP) which will heat and cool your home without sucking enormous amounts of power from the grid. They are relatively expensive to install, but not insanely so. And the systems last for a very long time.

Iconography is not inherently more understandable. It is more understandable when the icons used are well known and useful. Warchalking marks fall into neither of these. They are not (and most likely never will be) well known, and for most people, they are of no use.

I mean, I'm the kind of person who could benefit from an intentionally open network, but you know what? I'm never going to take the time to learn yet another "standard" written by someone who felt the need to make things much more complex than is necessary. However, if I was in the city, and I saw a sign that said "If you'd like to use my wireless node, the info is: blah blah blah", that'd be easy to use, obvious, and useful to even those who aren't inherently technical people.

Ah, thanks for the info! Found some more here.

The extended numbering (21st, 22nd) for this class sounds a bit unwarrented to me though. Although I can see the PR-perspective...

As a token of my appreciation, here is a picture of my balls.

Not particularly effective as a battle-weapon, no.

or better yet...

Environments are important. You could be a crack hack wizard and still suck because of distractions.

The first and foremost important piece of your work environment is your chair. Make sure it's something you can be comfortable in for hours at a time, especially when coding. Get your feet off the floor and onto something. I personally use a high back leather chair and matching footstool. Medically, having your feet dangling or poorly supported for long periods of time is bad for you. Make sure you can lean back in your chair, and you're not working hunched over.

Match your chair to your desk, with regard to height. Find a working position between the two that's comfortable, or work out a way to get your keyboard lower. Ergonomics, while froofy, aren't a joke.

Noise suppression. If you're a coder, get some good noise cancellation going. Background noise reduction cuts down on a lot of distractions. Even if you're not pumping music into it, having your ears covered will quickly become a sign to people that you're busy. Train the mammals to send email instead of pop into your cube. I personally use Sony's noise reduction earbuds, which by shape alone are a functional earplug.

Lighting is important. I've had several cases of janitor combat by disengaging overhead flourescents in favor of a gentle incandescent lamp. Don't work in the dark, though. Hormonally, humans (and other diurnal creatures (this excludes Solaris admins)) are stimulated into various modes by light levels. One argument you'll be presented with should you decide to tamper with overheads is 'Safety Reasons'. Don't let this slide. It's YOUR work environment. Ground level strip lighting is just as effective, and less intrusive. Use indirect lighting where possible.

If you're in a heavy corporate environment, it's entirely plausible that certain management types will immediately single you out as a deviant, so use caution.

Some ammunition:
Oklahoma State Doc on Ergonomics and Environments: This is a good common sense doc about computer heavy work environments. You can draft a simple checklist based on the contents to see how your work environs stack up.

This document points out something important: OSHA does NOT have a standing (read: enforcable) ruling or standard for computer operation environments. Your employer can simply tell you to take a hike and get away with it. In some cases, I'd say take this up with HR, or rally your like minded coworkers, but given that most corporate HR teams simply don't give a damn, caveat emptor.

In the event your management doesn't go for it, here's a piece on combatting violence in the office.

In any case, do some homework before embarking on this quest. If nothing else, present it in simple financial terms. Personally controlled light environments tend to be less expensive to maintain than mass overhead lighting. No ladders required, less maintenance impact. Lights turned off when cubes are vacated at beer o' clock serve as pro-active energy management.

Single user monitor lamps, like these from Think Geek ($29.99 each) work very well. They did their homework about lighting advantages, as well. This brings cubespace lighting down from the ceiling and into the cube.

The drawback to this, and one of the first things managers (and site security) like to point out, is the reduced light level for the rest of the office. It's a perfectly valid argument, and generally brings lighting wars to a screaming halt. This can be replied to with something simple and inexpensive, like these Mini Lights, which would sit well on the exterior of any cube wall, illuminating the aisle.

As for general office lighting a few well placed torchiere style lamps (check your lamp types, though. Some suck more power than others) provide excellent indirect lighting.

Noise and health

These reports are very interesting, the first is from the EPA,

and the second is from an admin conference of the USA.

http://www.nonoise.org/library/epahlth/epahlth.htm

http://www.nonoise.org/library/suter/suter.htm

But, if you only have limited time this is a quick read:

http://www.pp.okstate.edu/ehs/TRAINING/SSHHH.HTM

The key thing is that certain noises can raise your level of tension and create more stress.
Something none of us can use. Also interesting, is that with prolonged exposure to a specific sound
you can also become 'insensitive' to that frequency. This constitutes a partial hearing loss
that can be permanent.

We shove Jimmy Dean® Homestyle Pork Sausage up Mohammed's ass. Then while the Giver strokes me off I shoot my wad in Mohammed's face, after which we force Mohammed to fellate an 800 pound Chester White, while two Hasidic rabbis shit on Mohammed's back. The Giver pumps Mohammed from behind. After the hog shoots its wad in Mohammed's mouth, and The Giver shoots his up Mohammed's ass, the China White unexpectedly roots out Mohammeds penis and testicles, hungrily biting them off, and gobbling them in a fully porcine manner. We bury the newly castrated Mohammed up to his nose in pig manure. Two AIDS infected Bowery whores stuff their used condoms and clotted tampax down Mohammed's throat, and crack a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 over his skull. We then leave him for the hogs to munch on. Mohammed is swine feed, and by tomorrow, he will be swine manure.

We shove Jimmy Dean® Homestyle Pork Sausage up Mohammed's ass. Then while the Giver strokes me off I shoot my wad in Mohammed's face, after which we force Mohammed to fellate an 800 pound Chester White, while two rabbis shit on Mohammed's back. The Giver pumps Mohammed from behind. After the hog shoots its wad in Mohammed's mouth, and The Giver shoots his up Mohammed's ass, the China White unexpectedly roots out Mohammeds penis and testicles, hungrily biting them off, and gobbling them in a fully porcine manner. We all bury the newly castrated Mohammed up to his nose in pig manure. Two AIDS infected Bowery whores stuff their used condoms and clotted tampax down Mohammed's throat, and crack a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 over his skull. We then leave him for the hogs to munch on. Mohammed is swine feed, and by tomorrow, he will be swine manure.

We shove Jimmy Dean® Homestyle Pork Sausage up Mohammed's ass. Then while the Giver strokes me off I shoot my wad in Mohammed's face, after which we force Mohammed to fellate an 800 pound Chester White, while two rabbis shit on Mohammed's back. The Giver pumps Mohammed from behind. After the hog shoots its wad in Mohammed's mouth, and The Giver shoots his up Mohammed's ass, we all bury Mohammed up to his nose in pig manure. Two AIDS infected Bowery whores stuff their used condoms and clotted tampax down Mohammed's throat, and crack a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 over his skull. We then leave him for the hogs to munch on. Mohammed is swine feed, and by tomorrow, he will be swine manure.

We shove Jimmy Dean® Homestyle Pork Sausage up Mohammed's ass. Then while the Giver strokes me off I shoot my wad in Mohammed's face, after which we force Mohammed to fellate an 800 pound Chester White, while two rabbis shit on Mohammed's back. The Giver pumps Mohammed from behind. After the hog shoots its wad in Mohammed's mouth, and The Giver shoots his up Mohammed's ass, we all bury Mohammed up to his nose in pig manure. Two AIDS infected Bowery whores stuff their used condoms and clotted tampax down Mohammed's throat, and crack a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 over his skull. We then leave him for the hogs to munch on. Mohammed is swine feed, and by tomorrow, he will be swine manure.

Ohhhh, me so goatse!
Ohhhh, me so goatse!
Ohhhh, me so goatse!
me troll you long, long time!

GOATapalooza! Goats! Goats! Goats!

All models are real goats, not like that other link

100% free goat pr0n, no annoying popup windows

goats and llamas

Are you depraved enough to click on the links? Are ya punk?!!

"ok, so I'm lying. At least it't not goat related."

Freakin' holier-than-thou meta-troll!

Just to bring this thread on topic:

GOATapalooza! Goats! Goats! Goats!

All models are real goats, not like that other link

100% free goat pr0n, no annoying popup windows

The current record factorings were done with the GNFS (General Number Field Sieve).

GNFS consists of a sieving phase that searches a fixed set of prime numbers for candidates that have a particular algebraic relationship, modulo the number to be factored. This is followed by a matrix solving phase that creates a large matrix from the candidate values, then solves it to determine the factors.

The sieving phase may be done in distributed fashion, on a large number of processors simultaneously. The matrix solving phase requires massive amounts of storage and is typically performed on a large supercomputer.

Some pointers:

• Integer factorization
• RSA-155 English press release
• Description of the task, from Singh's The Codebook Challenge
• RSA-129 factoring
• What are the best factoring methods in use today? (RSA Security FAQ)
• A Cost-Based Security Analysis of Symmetric and Asymmetric Key Lengths by Bob Silverman

In case you haven't noticed...It isn't easy, and cannot be fully solved using a distributed.net technique.

to factor a 760-bit number in one year would require 215,000 Pentium-class machines, each with 4 Gigabytes of physical RAM.

to factor a 1620-bit number in one year would require 1.6 x 10^15 Pentium-class machines, each with 120 Terrabytes of physical RAM.

Good luck.

For those who want some money but don't know how can start here.

In my technical writing class at Oklahoma State, we were required to submit a packet at the end of the semester with hard copies of ALL our work. We were also required to submit a disk with all our class files on it. From what the professor said in class, the English department is building a database of papers that have been written in that class so that plagairism can be prevented.

---
Am I the only Slashdotter who is sick and tired of losing 9000 karma points every time they moderate?

The tone that I have gathered over the last few weeks is that most of the Newsposters (ie CmdrTaco, John Katz, et al.) are seemingly Gore supporters. To me, this just doesn't make much sense. Why do you want to pay huge amounts of taxes to support a larger, more intrusive government? Why do you want the government to regulate everything from business to agriculture to where you live. It's called Socialism people.

After thinking about the whole situation some more I began to think that perhaps the open-source community is probably fairly liberal given their disdain for corporations. There is nothing wrong with corporations making a product and selling it and getting rich. I thought that is what America is all about. Maybe I'm not as in tune with all things Open Source as I thought, or maybe I'm wrong. Entreprenuerships not Entitlements.

I apologize in advance if I have misrepresented anyone here. Comments or Flames welcome.

acline@okstate.edu

You can read the story in the OKU newspaper, the Daily O'Collegian, here:

OSU police seize student's computer

It's being spun by the OKS administration as the student trying to make money ("don't be an entrepreneur") off of the copyrights, although no evidence has been presented or found for that allegation.

--

If you want to report any other crimes (hint, hint) to the Oklahoma State campus police, just use this nice form:

Report A Crime to OKU

--

There was actually an unmanned MOL test flight just before the project was cancelled. The Gemini capsule it carried was a refurbished one that had flown before and so was the first spacecraft to fly in space twice, about 20 years before the first shuttle flight. Here's a picture of a MOL Gemini and you can see the hatch in the heat shield that would lead back into the main part of the spaecraft. This actually isn't as dodgy as it sounds as during re-entry the heat would melt the hatch shut making it quite secure. Another interesting thing is that the Titan III rocket developed to launch MOL was eventually used to launch the Voyager probes and the Viking spacecraft to Mars. To know what they're currently doing up there, the best source is the Federation of American Scientists site, www.fas.org

Hey, since Katz can do it so can I. I now pronounce today Call-Your-Movie-Theatre Day.

Tell them what you think, but by all means do NOT just follow the ravings of Katz. If you (like me) feel that the movie theatre's are actually right to not allow kids into these shows and the like, call them and tell them you agree!

If you want to get your kids into these shows without you, call and complain.

Whatever you do, don't try to fix the system by lying, cheating, stealing, or getting yourself arrested (or sued) by sneaking someone elses kid into the theatre to see soemthing they are really to young to see.

And on the side: Anyone interested in setting up a Christian version of Slashdot? Email me thomppj@okstate.edu.
Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
bind them around your neck,
write them on the tablet of your heart.