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There are numerous uses for peppers including food, relatively safe weapons (personal defense & crowd control), and as pesticides in farming. Furthermore, medical uses are abundant for capsaicin, including the treatment of wounds, skin disorders, digestive problems, and neuropathy.

So they bred a really hot pepper. Tag as idle and move on, right fellas? I mean it's not about iphones, linux, or obscure physics, so it must not be important.

In fact, this is the very heart of science, and a type of science (plant breeding) that is older, and more important to the long-term survival of the human race, than virtually all others.

Plant breeding is hard, thankless work that most people never even think about (except for the occasional GMO/Non-GMO debate). In some plants, such as trees that take many years to grow and bear fruit, selective breeding programs can take decades just to find one desirable trait for disease resistance. Shawn Mehlenbacher at Oregon State University has spent decades breeding hazelnuts that are resistant to Eastern Filbert Blight so that we don't lose the species of tasty hazelnut that you all enjoy.

This same story is true for virtually all of the food you eat - there is some scientist at some boring agricultural college, at a seed bank, or at a germplasm repository, working his or her life away to make sure that your favorite foods are still available for future generations, and if they have some spare time, breeding them to be bigger, better, and tastier than ever.

Yeah, I was trying to figure out the battery life. The only specs I could find were that the bird uses a two cell lithium polymer accumulators rated at 7.4V and 450mA (I assume they actually mean mAh). whit a little dojiggery on the back of an envelope and I get around 17 minutes if everything runs perfectly. [mAh / (W/V)]*(60m/h) I'm no electronics expert, so feel free to berate me if this is stupid.

The power requirement actually matches pretty closely to that of a laughing gull (http://zoology.science.oregonstate.edu/~warrickd/dialetal97.pdf the chart is on pg 3) which runs at about 55-60 W/Kg. The mecha-bird stops by at 51, but the velocities these are measured at may be different.

What I think is pretty cool is that they're running it on a TI chip with 50MHz and 64kB flash. At mouser the evaluation kit (includes cables and driver) runs for $50. Talk about doing a lot with a little.

In case you missed it above... http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/sumprice.pdf

categorically false. a silver or gold dollar from 1789 to 1917 essentially had a constant value

You can call it "categorically false," but that just makes you someone who hasn't looked into it or a liar. I'll assume the former for now.

That the value was essentially the same in 1789 and 1917 doesn't mean that there were no cycles of inflation and deflation in between. Have a look at page 6 of this presentation. In it I see annual inflation of up to 20% and annual deflation of up to 19% in that time period. Then compare it to the relatively lower (absolute value) inflation after 1917.

Sorry if it doesn't match your preconceived notions of the superiority of gold as a currency.

Bacteria are about as likely to evolve resistance to anti-bacterial soap as we are to evolve resistance to being run over by a bus.

Give us some time. We haven't been driving buses all that long.

If bacteria can live under 4000 feet of volcanic rock I suspect that over the long haul, its the soap that doesn't stand a chance.
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2003/Dec03/bacteria.htm

No it's not. Once every many years the Federal government sets some minimum wage that is decided by negotiation in Congress. Inflation is a factor, but then years of inflation pass. The inflation adjusted minimum wage history shows how it gets lifted periodically to some middle-low value, then decays from there.

I call bullshit. In 1776 inflation rate was about 20%. In 1777 it was 25%. In 1778 it was 30%. During the war of 1812 it hit 20%. In between were periods of deflation in there that hit 20% They may have added up to 14% (it's hard to tell from the document I'm looking at), but there was a hell of a lot of inflation and deflation in those periods and a whole lot of pain because of it. Deflation cripples the economy. Technically telling the true what propagating a false story (the gold standard prevents inflation) is still lying.

The economy was largely stagnant during much of that time and there were repeated depressions that got successively worse until the great depression. Gold isn't money, it's a commodity and its value will fluctuate like any commodity even if you hold large quantities in reserve. That destabilizes the money supply and during those years you got periods of inflation and deflation. If you look at the actual annual inflation/deflation rate (page 6 of this) you will see that prices have been far more stable since we've gone off the gold standard and into an actively managed economy. You'll also see that GDP growth has taken off much more than the total inflation has.

The only way you get a stable value for gold is if you only compare it to gold. Compared to other things its value isn't even close to stable.

http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/14352/cowellewilliam2010.pdf

To be infringing a trademark, there has to be a chance that it would be confusing; that someone would confuse the priest's product with best buy's. They have to be in the same line of business.

To be diluting a trademark, the mark is famous, the holder has exclusive use, the counterparty's use has to detract from or devalue the mark, and it can't be a protected use. (For example: a Journalist is allowed to discuss indicate, criticize, or publish 'unwanted' material and refer to the relevant trademarks when doing so. Coca Cola's trademark of the name Coke cannot be used to prevent journalists from discussing a problem or health risk found with Coke, according to someone's study, or prevent people from identifying their product in literature, or even satire/parody.)

Best Buy doesn't have exclusive use of the name "Squad", or of the colors black and Orange with the use of the word Squad. So there's no exclusive use that's being taken away.

Unless Best Buy also plans to send cease and decist letters to Oregon State next, over their Orange and Black "Cheerleading squad"

And others.....

...Already done. OSU student-developed Ultra-Mobile PC based on a 500MHz ARM Cortex-A8. Now playing Doom II on a campus near me. Not too bad, since when I went to OSU a dozen years ago I had to buy my own $2000 Pentium 75Mhz machine to do computer sci on...

I agree, a link to something like this or or this all of which came from a quick google and give some basic info on mpeg 7 and mention some content ID tech would be helpful as a real source of *something* on this new standard (that I just heard of today)! Damn it editors, do your jobs!

From a quick scan of the program catalog, no. Not even SA courses.

I know a few years ago they used to have what I expect would be an excellent SA course. I know the guy who taught it, and he was an excellent SA whose attitude towards the process was extremely infective. He had people setting up systems and mail servers and what not and tearing them down to see how they ran. The impression I got from him and others was that those who took the course loved it, but he and the course weren't highbrow enough for "computer science". He wasn't a PhD so he had to go...

The main OSU computer stuff is all run by professional staff, as is our college's. One upside compared to "free" student labor is continuity. (I've been running my systems for 18 years -- grad students are here for 3-4 and then poof!)

As far as "system admin" and "CS" at OSU, here's an anecdote that conveys my opinion. One prof here hired a CS MS student to write code to process his data. He would show me copies of his qaulifier exams and we'd chat about linked lists and all the typical CS kinds of things. Then one day he asks me "how do you rename a file"?

Another look into the dark side of OSU EECS: http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/graduate/degreeprograms.html. Do act quickly so you don't miss the application deadline!

Thanks for the reply. I think our disagreement stems in large part from trying to find the balance between acknowledging and accepting general statistical differences and encouraging any individual to reach their full potential. As such, when you say...

Yes, some of the more outrageous claims that boys and girls are just alike, and that they can do exactly the same things, yada yada yada are getting discredited. Finally. I've been hearing that trash for decades.

...I'm worried you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Because it is possible that any particular girl can be just as smart/strong/tall/whatever as an particular boy. How do we, as a society, respect that? To not make outliers of either gender feel like freaks for being taller than women "should" be or short than men "should" be?

On the issue of homosexuality (which I readily acknowledge I introduced to the discussion) I'm not sure what you mean by "Homosexuality is a dead end." I assume you mean that, genetically, homosexuality does not contribute to the propagation of the species, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Assuming that is your position, though, my response is a resounding "So what?"

No one is encouraging children to be homosexual. What is happening is that some (myself included) are promoting a viewpoint that homosexuality is no worse than heterosexuality, meaning people who are gay anyway should be just as respected members of society as people who are not.

Obviously, I'm in the 'homosexuality is not a choice' camp, but my position wouldn't change if it were definitively proven that it were a choice.

As to declining fertility rates, I won't pretend they aren't happening (Google's public data gathering has great graphs) but it corresponds pretty well with inflation adjusted minimum wage, too... I'm not arguing the two have anything to do with each other, but it seems just as likely as the specter of gay marriage.

Bingo. There's actually plenty of active research on what happens to habitats that lose their predators. It of course varies dramatically between habitats, but there's good evidence that humans actually can not (or will not) replicate the effects of these predators in a habitat.

I saw a talk recently by this guy (Bill Ripple) discussing research results that will be coming out fairly soon. Basically, they examined a couple of habitats and found that habitats with predators (wolves and cougars, in the places they did their studies checked) were -dramatically- more healthy than those without.

This seems obvious, but the slides he had were eye-opening, for me. I recommend reading more, though the main research isn't published yet. There is still plenty of good stuff here:
http://www.forestry.oregonstate.edu/wolves/

We lost full-service gas stations when they implemented minimum wage laws

US has had minimum wage laws since 1938.
We didn't lose full-service gas stations until the '70s.

This isn't quite true. Entropy (S) is defined as k*ln(omega) where omega is the number of possible configurations of a given macrostate (ie. fixed pressure, chemical potential, etc.). However, the Gibb's free energy of a system (G) which typically defines whether a system will spontaneously relax to a given macrostate is given by H - TS. That said, a system will relax to that macrostate if the change in free energy (dG = dH - SdT) is negative.

Raising S by transforming to some given macrostate does not necessarily mean a lower G. You see this all the time in many solid-state mixtures. Mixing two elements will cause an increase in entropy, but also may increase in internally stored energy (endothermic mixing) so dH is positive as well as SdT. The result is that you get complex phase diagrams like this atoms dissociate into different phases withing the system lowering entropy but even further lowering enthalpy to reach a minimum G. Of course, when you raise temperature, S dominates so eventually we reach a monophase liquid system.

So to fix what you said, an increase in entropy is always an increase in 'disorder' (more possible microstates in a given macrostate) but this does not always guarantee that the system will spontaneously fall to that state.

I am in no way affiliated with OSU, but recently saw a link to their OSWALD handheld. It's yet another TI OMAP handheld, designed to be hacked on, running Linux. I have no idea if you can get one as a civilian, but it looks great, and appears to be available now.

Second that. Just Downloaded Open Office from them this weekend. And they are an Ubuntu download location (http://ubuntu.osuosl.org/releases/9.04/) I am starting classes this fall with them (gone to 2 other online schools) and it is a nice not to see Microsoft as their email client and having to use all M$ products. With their Network ID you even get shell access. http://onid.oregonstate.edu/

I don't know how economists would calculate Rockefeller's wealth, but that Wikipedia article is citing this page (and two others that present similar methodology):

http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/first5.html

and deriving the $300 billion by translating the amount of the economy Rockefeller had captured in 1916 into a dollar figure based on the modern economy (using inflation, 1 billion 1915 dollars is closer to 20 or 23 billion 2008 dollars:

http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/sahr.htm#_Download_Conversion_Factors_1

). Throw in the enormous growth in the economy and stronger antitrust laws (I'm pretty sure that Microsoft faced stronger enforcement than Standard Oil) and Gates isn't a ridiculous choice. Let's pretend I said richest man in recent history.

http://osu.orst.edu/dept/ncs/photos/minis/bubblessm.jpg
(from http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2004/May04/mariana.htm)

"They found carbon dioxide spewing from rocks under such enormous subsea pressure that it emerged as a bubbling liquid in one site named "champagne vent." And they had to back their equipment away from one ongoing eruption at a site named "Brimstone Pit" when the belching sulfur, acid, boiling water and rocks became too intense."

Anyone have any figures on how many millions of tons of C02 per hour are released by volcanoes? Some of the ones around Guam have apparently been erupting contnously for years. It doesn't all get dissolved, either.

I predict that cap-and-trade, if it happens, will work about like wetlands mitigation. In other words, a totally rigged dog-and-pony show further entrenching the incumbent "stakeholders" at the table of "governance". It will have to, just to pass. Them and a whole new layer of bureaucrats, snitches, and telephone sanitizers.

Just one more nail in the coffin.

Basically, the US has been able to add a steady number of jobs each year regardless of labor conditions.

But unemployment is up, because more people are working multiple jobs. The minimum wage has averaged two thirds of the poverty level since 1959.

he made $6.00 an hour, and he was complaining about being overpaid?

According to a CPI conversion table, $6/hr in 1969 is equivalent to:

$6/hr * 2080 hr/year / .172 * 1.022 = $74,154.42/yr in 2009 ($35.65 / hr)

On what do you base your statement that Pinatubo out performed all man-made emissions? Wikipedia doesn't mention this at all http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo These guys http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/gases/man.html state that man-made emissions of both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide handily exceed volcanic ones by a factor of 150 for CO2 and around 6 for SO2. For some of the heavy metals and Hydrogen compounds, the volcanoes are more of an issue, but certainly not for the CO2 and SO2. As for the 2005 report, I couldn't find it. And so what? If the general consensus amongst "real scientists" is not swayed by the report, perhaps its data and arguments were not persuasive? A single study on a complicated system such as climate, is only a single piece of evidence.

Well, part of the problem is the "magic of compounding" ,,, so our dollar has actually lost about 94% of its' value over 50 years. For examples, just look at comic books or paperbacks, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a gallon of gas, or the minimum wage (50 years ago, it was a buck an hour).

If everything stays "in sync", then everyone survives, and everyone has enough money to participate in the economy. The problem is that we have, as you pointed out, NOT kept wages in line with inflation for a decade (the Bush years), and instead replaced wage growth with debt growth as a way to maintain or "improve" the standard of living - but it was a lie for most people; higher debts are not an improvement.

I agree that the Roth IRA stuff is a little tangential, but I've now bothered to look up the numbers, and there were only $77B in Roth IRAs in 2000. Even taxed at the highest rate (40%) and with nobody contributing to new Roth accounts but only doing a one-time rollover, and with the remaining trillions in non-Roth IRAs never being converted, the income to the government was at most $50B or so spread over the previous two years--a factor, perhaps, but a modest one at best given the differences in deficits (>$200B over several years).

Roth IRA data: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2893/is_4_23/ai_n6171206
Honest deficit data: http://www.craigsteiner.us/articles/32

I had noticed that the "surplus" didn't actually decrease the debt (easy enough to do, if you look at the debt graph), but I appreciate the article pointing out why. Of course, that wasn't unique to Clinton, and it didn't matter for my point (or yours, as far as I know) that Clinton actually ran a surplus--the point, which remains true when one avoids accounting gimmicks, is that Clinton reduced the level of deficit spending over quite a number of years.

But, anyway, back to the question of whether Bush did anything to impact whether the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. First, the point that the poor got a larger fractional tax cut than the rich is not the right number to look at--it's the *fraction of income* not the *fraction of tax* that leads to a flattening or accentuation of wealth differences. From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/08/washington/08tax.html in 2004, the net wealth increase from the tax cuts was about 2% for middle-income people and about 4.5% for the top income bracket. At the same time, it is true that the tax code was more "progressive" afterwards than before when looking at the rates of taxation; it's just that we already barely tax middle-to-lower income folks so that we're out of room to make income more progressive (as opposed to tax levels) while still lowering taxes.

I don't think we actually disagree about debt all that much. People at all income levels go into debt to buy nonessential items, and that always makes it harder to build long-term wealth. To some extent, these are errors in judgment--and to some extent, therefore, saying that if you make these errors you will be in bad shape is a fair way to discourage these sorts of errors. But it is still of concern that people *do* make these sorts of errors and do so on a sufficiently large scale to hobble the entire economy.

The whole economic system is a human construct. People create a certain quantity of goods and services, and they also are entitled (via their income) to some fraction of those goods and services. Surely you are not saying that one cannot distribute the fraction unequally (perhaps "fairly" but unequally), and then from that starting point make it even more unequal. Of course one can do that! The key question is does that *actually* happen, and if so is the decrease in the fraction more than offset by an inexorably linked increase in the total created goods and services (inexorably because the increase comes from the incentive to increase one's own fraction).

Here's an example of such a policy: the minimum wage. The evidence that I can find: http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/IBR/2008/fall/article1.html suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage do not influence employment numbers. Thus, within modest limits at least, altering the minimum wage is a way to influence the fraction of economic output given to various groups. Republicans blocked minimum wage increases until the Democrats had too great of control over Congress. See http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth

Either your diet is *terrible*, or you're taking pills you DO NOT need. Don't believe me? Do some minimal research.

I suggest you do some minimal research on vitamin absorption and aging. (hint - it doesn't get better). You are correct that most under 30's don't need vitamins, but by the time you hit 40, B12, C, and D aren't absorbed as well. For mental functioning, B12 is the big one. You can Google "vitamin absorption aging" and your favorite vitamin, or read a few of these:
B12
B12
C
D

Either your diet is *terrible*, or you're taking pills you DO NOT need. Don't believe me? Do some minimal research.

I suggest you do some minimal research on vitamin absorption and aging. (hint - it doesn't get better). You are correct that most under 30's don't need vitamins, but by the time you hit 40, B12, C, and D aren't absorbed as well. For mental functioning, B12 is the big one. You can Google "vitamin absorption aging" and your favorite vitamin, or read a few of these:
B12
B12
C
D

Still suits? The whole station is a suit. This has been done since Salyut and Mir. The stilling is done by environmental control. Elektron oxygen generators then generate oxygen by splitting it from water.

Wow, it was quite a long time ago, but latches I sell, normally used on carbon fiber race hoods I manufacture were donated to the OSU team to latch the top and bottom halves of the car together.

If you are curious, it's these:
http://deftracing.com/aerocatch_hood_pins/index.htm

I just got a msg on the 26th that they were heading for their first race, but forgot to follow up on it... I see it's on it's way... but they may have had battery problems :(

here's the OSU blog with up to date info:
http://oregonstate.edu/groups/solar/

It's not stealing and it's certainly not piracy. You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way. If you think about harm, it requires an overt act. If Joe punches Bob, that harms him. If Joe steals Bob's CD, that harms Bob because he no longer has the use of that CD. If you think about it, the game companies (plus MPAA and RIAA) are not complaining about people using their products. As a matter of fact, they want as many people as possible to use their products. What they are complaining about is the lack of payment. "Not purchasing" a game does the same harm to them that they do to me by not giving me $50. "Not purchasing" a game does the same harm to them whether I use the game or not.

The copyright monopoly created by our governments is an artificial right of refusal granted to copyright holders. Unlike inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I haven't seen arguments that even come close to persuading me that the right to hoard and control knowledge is a moral one. It is a legal regulation meant to encourage the creation of new works by allowing the creators a method of profiting from them.

John Locke:

No body could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst: [...]

Unauthorized duplication consists of two things:

1. The duplication and use of a copyrighted work -- Obviously the copyright holders of video games want them to reach the largest audience possible. I daresay that the authors would want the most people to enjoy the game as possible, not to simply line their pockets. Say if it were guaranteed that they would never make a single dime, would they like people to play their games and enjoy their creation anyway? Even if not, in what way can the use be said to harm the author if they don't even know about it? Has it to do with privacy, where the author might not want anyone to see their creation, but they will take the harm to their privacy if they get paid for it? That is not an argument that I have heard offered before, but it might have validity.
2. The absence of payment for use of the copyrighted work -- This can obviously by itself not be claimed as a harm, any more than me claiming that you haven't paid me $50 is harming me. This being a cause of harm is predicated on the notion that the $50 is owed to the author. I cannot say to owe someone money without agreeing to it. If I had destroyed or taken their property, that is a wrong unto itself that may be compensated with money. Also if I agree to pay a person money, I can form a contract with them that by my act will make it so that I owe them money for some consideration.

An any rate, I cannot see how people can perpetuate the myth of "billions of dollars lost". What is wrong with the media that they are so eager to report the drivel spouted by the entertainment industry without balancing the story? They count a 13 year old kid as having cost them the full purchase price of $20,000 when he downloaded 1,000 movies. The kid might only get $10 a week in allowance so the most he theoretically could have cost them was $520 in one year. In actuality he might have only purchased a DVD or two, or rented a dozen. I am sorry that I appear alone in ignoring people that make flawed arguments and try to mislead the public.

Seals, their primary food source, are also under pressure because they need the ice to birth.

Really? Because if that's the case, the ones that live down here on the Oregon Coast have been well and truly fscked for quite a few centuries now.

(They get rained on a lot during Winter, if that helps...)

/P

Photons are affected by gravity (they follow the curvature of space caused by massive objects). But, they don't "cause" gravity, because they do not attract other objects. My understanding is that gravity is relational, which is to say, objects exert a "pull" on each other proportional to their mass. So... how can photons be pulled without also pulling? (I'm going on the assumption their pull is exactly zero, and not just infitessimally small.)

Let's start with your followup question: the curvature of space is no more a "mental model" than other objects more modern science, such as photons, DNA, or other galaxies. It is a fact in the following sense: the world around us behaves (to a great accuracy) as if it is "really" curved, there "really are" electrons and photons, "there is" a big molecule called DNA with a double-helix structure etc. If you want, a pattern of dots on a photographic plate is a "fact". The double helix is a mental model that explains this fact. But the distinction is not useful when you're doing physics. If you accept that the goal of physics is to predict the behaviour of the world to a given accuracy, you should also accept that it is not useful to make the distinction between what the world "really is" and what it "appears to be" (for our purposes here -- not as a metaphysical question).

Next, you are confused because you are trying to use two different mental pictures of gravity at the same time, and probably don't have a good mental picture of photons. So I will analyze the situation from the points of view of both Newtonian mechanics+Special relativity and General Relativity. In Newtonian gravity, particles are affected by gravity which is an interaction between all pairs of particles. If A attracts B then B attracts A, in fact with the same magnitude of force. The interaction is proportional to the mass, so an object of "zero mass" won't interact with anything, but such an object doesn't make sense anyway (what happens to F=ma in this case?).

Now what about electromagnetic radiation? You can treat it either as a electric and magnetic fields filling space, or as composed of photons. In either case, it has momentum (do you know about light sails?) and also energy (you can be heated by sunlight!). Special relativity says (E=mc^2) that if you have energy you also have mass. You can now make a naive model in which the elecromagnetic field generates gravity according to its energy density (every small piece of space contains some elecromagentic field, this has energy and hence mass; it is a source of gravity), or you can make a model in which each photon generates gravity according to its mass. In the second case you can even calculate the effect of other masses on the photon -- the deflection you will see for a photon passing near the sum is about half what is observed in practice.

The picture above is not self-consistent. The reason is that Newtonian mechanics allows for action-at-a-distance (gravitational fields propagate at infinite speeds) which cotnradicts relativity. A better picture is that of General Relativity: the space itself is now allowed to change with time. Now there are two separate effects: first, bodies moves along the analogue of "straight lines" in a curved space; second, the curvature of space changes with time -- both under its own effect (gravitational radiation, if you want) and under the effect of the "contents" of space. The "contents" including everything in space. That includes elecromagnetic radiation -- it has mass, momentum, and can act as a source for gravity, by changing the curvature of spacetime.

Part o

At least, unlike other desktop environments, I actually know when a file is going to be copied or moved, and I am not going to go somewhere in a hurry with my USB flash disk only to find that I've only made a bloody shortcut to the file that is about fifty miles away. It happens.

Windows indicates the action by placing a visual cue in the bottom right corner of the icon that is being dragged.

OSX does the same with a very large, green colored cue.

And of course, if you're too dumb to realize this after all this time, you could always read the documentation, or try something new, like right click and drag.

YOU CANNOT OWN DATA!

As a diehard Beaver, I never say this, but just this once:
GO DUCKS!

Actually, I might have thought it once or twice last Saturday when they played USC.

http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~hess/index.html#% 5B%5BSIFT%20Feature%20Detector%5D%5D

These techniques allow you to preprocess the image into a set of feature vectors which can be organized into a database and indexed with some effectiveness.

The console was released for $200 in 1985...

With inflation that puts the console today about $400 or so according to this: http://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/faculty/sahr/cv 2005.pdf

On OSX, I use gpsphotolinker

A gallon.

http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/gasol .htm
http://www.fintrend.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/G asoline_Inflation.asp
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/04/gas oline_prices.html

A clickable map of the Linux kernel. Who says Linux is a rat's nest of calls? I can clearly see it's a dinner plate.

What are you trying to teach the students? If you get a bare microcontroller like a PIC then you quickly have to spend a lot of time teaching electronics so that the students know how to properly connect hardware to collect sensor data and drive motors. You end up explaining different communications protocols (what is this RS232-TTL chip for, what is SPI and I2C, etc.) which may or may not be the purpose of the class. If the purpose is to "build a robot that does task x" then you're better off getting a kit of some sort that has some built-in interfaces for sensor inputs and motor outputs. I've had many years of experience with the Handyboard and must suggest it has a good choice, though $200-250 may be a bit pricey to get started. Oregon State and Atmel have teamed up to produce a system for their EE curriculum that looks promising, though you would have to get in contact with them to see how you might be able to purchase their boards in bulk (they have a website you can order some parts from, base kit is $105). If you want to teach "this is how you program a robot" then you can pick up any programmable robotics set and get going quickly. For younger students that haven't programmed before something more graphical may be better for them (Mindstorms for example, though you don't seem to want this sort of thing). Any way you go you'll probably end up teaching teamwork skills (and you should probably throw in some documentation skills also). There is a freshman program developed around the Handyboard that teaches such skills at Ohio State (dislaimer: I was a TA for this program) which has quite a few materials you may find useful. In summary, make sure you decide on your curriculm, then pick a controller that best fits into both that and your budget.

Humans are called 'big pig' or 'long pig' in cannabalistic cutures.

How about It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.

The problem is, taking into account inflation, in constant dollars, oil costs less today than it did 30 years ago. Yes, even at $4/gallon.

You mean this?

http://lug.oregonstate.edu/albums/firefox-crop-cir cle/mg_5560.sized.jpg

Here's my post on my blog relevant to this: http://oregonstate.edu/~brewsteb/2006/10/24/69/ As follows: "I do not envy the position of the Official Xbox Magazine. In the past, they had an easy business model: do articles, and provide DVDs filled with demos. As practically the only source where you could go to find demos for games before they came out, OXM's success was guaranteed! Fast forward to today, when OXMs biggest selling point has been one-upped by the Marketplace. Now, as soon as a developer has finished the code, it can be pushed to every single connected gamer, without forcing that customer to buy a magazine. More exposure == more profit. Simple! So, now that OXM has lost its exclusive grip on demos, how does it regain that same level of gotta-have-it-ness? For one, it can seek exclusive rights on new game demos, and prevent them from appearing on the Marketplace, at least for a while. This seems like a winner - get the games out before anyone else, and move some magazines. The fundamental shift here, though, is that OXM has now firmly moved from ENABLER to OBSTRUCTOR. Do you understand the distinction? Since my magazine hasn't arrived yet, I cannot play Rainbow 6 because of their exclusive deal. Will my mag get here before the demo hits the Marketplace, anyway? What about everyone else who doesn't subscribe? You and I - we're just plain our of luck... that is, until that blasted e-word finally expires. I, for one, will not be renewing my subscription. The money would go towards supporting the blocking of demos that I otherwise would be able to play. You don't want me to do that, and I don't want me to do that."

According to most of the sources a quick google search picks up, we are paying just about as much for oil now as during the '70s when adjusted for inflation. Maybe a little less, but I suppose it depends on how you define "nearly".
For example:

Oregon State estimate
  California gas prices

How could /. readers forget the Firefox Crop Circle?!?!

As far as I can tell, this is the best evaluation of the various evaluations of human flesh, and it turns out it's like veal. Not pork.

There have been several things that FireFox (or FireFox fans) have done to promote the browser; some rather mundane, such as purchasing ad space in a newspaper, while others have been unique and interesting, such as the FireFox "crop circle".

Aside from word of mouth, what methods of advertising and promotion seem to help the most? Do you ever notice a significant increase in downloads after an advertising campaign? What are your future plans for promoting FireFox, and what weird ideas have people come up with that have had to be turned down?

There's several different kinds of hemophilia. Besides the genetic caused ones (usually platelets will be scarce, nonfunctional or both), lack of certain elements in food intake (see vitamin K) will affect bleeding.