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I gave an example here that arose with software that worked fine in Ubuntu but not in Debian. There is quite a bit of software out there that is very picky about what libraries are used. If you get everything from your repository's package manager or compile them yourself, it's not a huge issue, but if it is not in your repository and you don't want to or can't compile it (e.g.: proprietary software such as Valve's Steam), you have to fall back to other options. This happened to me sufficiently often that I ended up creating the discussed topic, and figured it was worth sharing.

Most daemons from, say, sysv, aren't really dependent on the init system. They're just programs that init happens to run when it feels like it. You can run them manually whenever. For example, if you want to run Debian Squeeze's cups, you can run "/etc/init.d/cups restart" absolutely irrelevant of what the init is.

The daemons Ubuntu uses talk to init for some reason. If init doesn't talk back, they refuse to run. See here for my specifics on it, which links to a bug report on the matter that I'm doubtful will be resolved within the foreseeable future.

That is the way it comes off in my description. That's really more a fault in my description than a fault in the design.

A more apt analogy would be thus: If you want a Prius 99% of the time for the gas mileage, but decide on the fly that you need to burn rubber, you don't need to get out of your car and into another - you just flip a switch and go. The beauty though really comes from the fact that you can get aspects of these things at the same time, without switching.

The best real-world example I can think of is the second item here. You really can't do that with any other distro nearly as cleanly - either I don't have working 3D acceleration, or I don't have a working compiz package. With Bedrock Linux, I had both at the same time without putting any effort into debugging.

You've missed the way it integrates the various chroot'd clients together, which is really the whole point. See the second point here. That was literal barely anything more "apt-get install compiz && pacman -S xorg", throwing compiz in the .xinitrc and running "startx". As another example, it can have an RSS reader from one distro open a page in a browser from a completely different distro, transparently; it all feels like one single cohesive Linux distribution.

I do agree it is niche. It's not for everyone. However, I can't be the only one who has interest in the fact that I can have the vast majority of the system running Debian, nice and stable unchanging, yet still grab something from Arch with nothing more than a single pacman command if I feel like playing with something new.

Other than Ubuntu/Upstart's expectation to have its specific init running (which isn't technically a daemon, I don't think), I've yet to run into issues with conflicting distro-specific daemons. However, until very recently I'm the only one whose actually run it, and I'm sure people will find issues I've not yet thought up. That's why it's still in alpha.

I might have a solution for you. While I agree with many of the responses you've received that it is not an easy problem to solve, I too have similar desire: to keep the benefits of my favorite distro without being restricted to them (for example, being restricted to only the desktop environments/window managers they have available).

I've been working on my own Linux distribution tentatively called "Bedrock Linux" which, in some sense of the word, allows me to pull packages from different Linux distributions. Your request here: "But when Fedora has a better package, or a better version, I should be free to pull that specific part from them, and have it work with all the stuff I pull from Ubuntu" - is quite possible with my Linux distribution.

I'm cheating to achieve this by heavily utilizing chroots and PATH management so that the core of Bedrock Linux will know when and how to run what program from which distribution without having all of the incompatibilities get in the way of each other. I expect most of the people who have responded to you claiming your desire is impossible either didn't think outside the box enough for my solution to the problem, or do not consider it a legitimate solution.

While I would like to emphasize that this entirely works and that I have been using pre-release builds myself for over a year now, I have to admit that sadly the project isn't quite ready for public release yet. The most I have to show for it at the moment are the slides from a presentation I gave on it not too terribly long ago:
http://opensource.osu.edu/sp12/bedrock

If you are interested, feel free to search for "Bedrock Linux" on your preferred internet search engine on a regular basis until the website is up. I am currently working with others on an internal alpha, and hope to have the first public release within a few months, but as I'm sure you understand, I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if it slips past that deadline.

I do not know about windows compatibility. But I programmed for that chip, it supports almost directly programming using openmp, intel cilk or intel TBB.

I benchmarked a prototype version of the card of unstructured memory access kernels (graph algorithms) http://bmi.osu.edu/hpc/papers/Saule12-MTAAP.pdf

We developed recently a web service for recommending papers, reviewers and journals out of the citations of a paper ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ ). Having conflict in the names can be problematic. Many paper recommendation algorithms use the property that two papers share the same authors, they must be somewhat related. Having name conflict lower the quality of that assumption. Though, some database are already disambiguated. For instance DBLP adds an ID to the name in case there is more than one. (but it is a manual process)

Well, as the article pointed out, they are using a much finer grained control of the injection precisely to control knock, injecting fuel in up to three shorter bursts.

This also allows them to space those bursts at precise times during the power stroke, such as when the piston is going down, and the expansion of the initial burst of fuel is losing effectiveness due to combustion chamber expansion reducing the instantaneous pressure. Adding a burst of fuel at that point gets you extra power at what would otherwise be the downward (backside) of the power curve.

Previous approaches to this were attempted with variable valve actuation, (essentially getting rid of the cam shaft and using other means of controlling valves more precisely). Costly, but effective.

This approach (precisely controlling fuel delivery) allows you to shape the combustion profile to the continuously varying cylinder volume and perhaps adjusting that for changes in engine loading as well.

It's also much more demanding on hardware. One of the big drawbacks is it requires a lot of scattered reads out of memory making caching much less effective. You need tons of bandwidth to low latency memory to make it happen. We're still a very long ways out from having this possible in reasonably-priced consumer GPUs.

Yes, it is exactly what Intel Mic card are awesome for. They are generic x86 core with 4-way SMT and a buttload of memory bandwidth. I worked with Knight Ferry prototypes and studied the scalability of the worst case of algorithms for scattered memory access: graph algorithms. (The paper will be published soon but the preprint is available at http://bmi.osu.edu/hpc/papers/Saule12-MTAAP.pdf .) Basically, we achieve close to optimal scalability on most of our tests.

These MIC card are designed to scale in good cases (compact memory and SIMDizable operations such as dense matrix vector multiplication, or image processing) but almost in the bad cases (lots of indirections, accessing caches lines in pathological scenarios such as sparse matrix vector multiplication, graph algorithms.)

I am excited to get a hold on the commercial card (we worked on prototypes) to make a CPU/GPU/MIC comparison.

Yeah, except OSC lost almost all its state funding, had a massive layoff in 2008, and is a hollow shell of its former self.

Nearby ACCAD has a summer camp, but it's limited to girls only.

Gamma ray bursts could ruin our collective day by sterilizing the planet in minutes if one were to happen nearby. Thankfully, that appears to be unlikely.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/gammaray.htm
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Earth_Deemed_Safe_From_Gamma_Ray_Bursts.html

...and why are women suddenly doing better than men?

It's not sudden. In fact, I'm not aware of any evidence that there has been any change over time at all in the male-female gap in college success. Women simply do better in school than men in general. Probably always have and always will.

Women enter college with about the same critical thinking and writing skills as men (Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift, p. 40). They don't choose easier majors than men ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/womcolge.htm ). But: "Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college[...]" ( http://www.nber.org/digest/jan07/w12139.html ) "[...] in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates." ( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?pagewanted=all )

So it absolutely makes sense that women do better than men in most departments at my school, and, yes, it would be a sign that something was wrong if they did worse in one particular department. Women simply do better because they work harder.

No specific examples, but I recall about a quarter of the employers last year from the OSU Engineering Expo followed requiring a Facebook profile access (and provided a link to register) before considering my application. It is not quite universal, but it exists, and with as few jobs as exist today it's significant.

You should probably read this: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/eblj/issues/volume2/number1/20.%20Kominsky%20Note-%20Final%20Book.pdf

It's a good start as to why corporate board elections are so fucked up.

tl;dr: as of 1942 the SEC allowed boards to prevent shareholders from using the proxy materials sent out by the company to propose alternate boards (see the 5th page, numbered 577). You're welcome to propose them yourself, assuming you can find all the other shareholders.

Every now and then an "activist" shareholder like Carl Icahn tries to shake things up. It costs him millions to do so. Of course, the board gets to spend the company's money to defend their position.

If you look at raw numbers, a fraction of a % of the land area of the earth could more than meet ALL of our energy demands - and not just electricity either. Yes, that's at solar electric panel efficiencies.

The problem? The cost of exploiting that resource is currently a couple OOM more than we can afford. Same with drilling for geothermal - for much of the world, you'd have to drill to quite hilarious, thus expensive, depths.

Low grade nuclear waste, in comparison, is easy stuff. And we DO have plans to dispose of the stuff. We have working disposal areas for the low grade stuff.

Heck, disposing of the high grade stuff is mostly a political problem - not an engineering one. My vote is for reprocessing. The remaining waste has a much shorter half life once you've removed the still useful transuranics.

We need both Socialism and Capitalism to build and sustain a great nation.

• Socialism is Preventing Race to the Bottom
• Capitalism is Promoting Race to the Top

Each device I worked on, each firmware release, each line of code, does something useful for many, many people. Some of those people don't even know that audio equipment, leave alone software, is involved with what they are hearing.

Awfully arrogant of you to claim that some people benefit from your work without realizing it, without acknowledging that the same could be true of his. If he adds liquidity to the market, then you save money every time you buy or sell stock (or your 401k/mutual funds do). It's not necessarily true that he does, but you certainly aren't in a position to know. You could read more here, but I suppose that would just get in the way of your populist rage so maybe you'd rather not.

Oh, and you follow it up with another stunning display when you criticize him for not using his real name and then you wish him death in the very next sentence. Wow.

Do you ever buy or sell stock? Perhaps indirectly, through a mutual fund or 401k type plan? If so, then you benefit from high liquidity in the market. HFT and other Wall Street shenanigans do skim from the top, but they also provide liquidity. It's almost certain that the liquidity benefits small market players more than the skimming hurts them. In other words, the money they're skimming comes from the banks and brokers rather than you and me.

For example, take the stock of Red Hat (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=RHT). Yahoo Finance right now shows that, as of the last time the market was open, I could buy 100 shares for $42.56 (that's the "ask" or best current asking price), or I could sell 300 shares for $42.09 (the best available "bid"). That's a bid-ask spread of about 50 cents. That spread is a hidden cost to either buying or selling stock: If you buy and then sell RHT, you will have paid about 50 cents per share just for the privilege, even if nothing in particular happens to the company. Let's split that 50-50 and say that every stock transaction in RHT (buy or sell) costs you 25 cents per share in implied fees.

Those bids and asks are set by individuals and companies who are competing. They want to get a good deal for either buying or selling the stock, but they also know that if they set asking price too high or their bid too low, they'll never make any trades. The more competition there is, the tighter the bid-ask spread will be. HFT and other algorithmic approaches allow firms to set prices on tons of stocks without requiring human attention for each one, which dramatically increases the competition and thus tightens the bid-ask spread.

In this example, if you outlaw HFT and similar trading strategies, maybe RHT will have a spread of $1 intead of 50 cents. Maybe you'll be happy that HFTers aren't making ther 5 cent skim off the top anymore, but it'll be cold comfort when you're paying 25 cents more on each transaction and it's just going to a different Wall Street firm.

If you think I'm exaggerating the effect of computerized trading of the spread, have a look at slide 8 (page 4) of this study: http://fisher.osu.edu/~diether_1/b822/trading_costs_2up.pdf. Starting in 1960, the average bid-ask spread has ben dropping steadily every decade to a small fraction of what it used to be.

Background: I am an actuary trained in quantitative finance. I've never worked in Wall Street or done any HFT or other algo trading.

As per research studies there is no such thing as intrinsic motivation.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm

Monsanto has apparently been forced to change their tune, but they have argued since day one that a crop not dieing when round-up is applied was proof positive that their patented gene had been pilfered.

There was no outcry before GMO because before that, patents for plants were very narrow and quite limited. It just happens that in conjunction with GM efforts, the same parties lobbied hard for broader patent rights.

As far as transfer of RoundUp resistance from Canola, the only evidence I have seen is transfer to other varieties of Canola. This doesn't rise to the standard of transfer to weeds. If you have references to scientific articles please let me know.

Here's one. Note, oilseed rape = Canola before marketing decided the name was unfortunate. Here's another.

This "active learning" has been done long before the iPad with much cheaper devices. http://lt.osu.edu/resources-clickers/ The iPad thing is obviously just a stunt to generate publicity and attract more applicants. The iPad, like all apple products, is never the cheapest way to do anything.

Yes. And the one reference I did find (https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/3714/1/V49N05_188.pdf) tends to support your own findings.

I haven't found anything about the male/female ratio of adult mosquitoes in the wild.

Nonetheless, in the summertime, I fairly frequently find females in my house as they creep through open doors and holes in the screens. I very seldom find a male.

Perhaps it is something to do with life expectancy (do males live shorter lives?), or attraction (obviously, males have no reason to be drawn toward mammals as females are).

I didn't get to breed mosquitoes in school, and my day job is quite well-detached from that concept, so I guess further research is in order. But if killing a solitary male does no real harm to the population, then there's no point in actively hunting them -- especially since they can't eat me.

It sure would make summertime parties much less fun if the impromptu male mosquito hunt were excluded, though. :(

Indeed, in the SIGGRAPH CORE 3D software standard (1977), there were two terms, windows and viewports. I'd have to look it up but if I recall correctly, the 'viewport' referred to the 2D rectangular area on the display (you might say the 'window frame'), and 'window' referred to the same rectangle as defined in the 3D space ('what you saw in the window'). The difference was the projection transform and the clipping. But it's been a long time since I messed with that stuff.

If my recollection is correct, the 'viewport' in that specification was more closely analogous to the 'window' term as presently used. There was some debate at the time, as window was more intuitively related to what we saw on the screen, and other systems (like the XEROX Alto) used the term window.

Carson
Very interesting timeline of computer graphics and animation, starting from essential and preparatory technologies

The image of Santa as a plump man was popularized by "A Visit From St. Nicholas ('Twas the Night Before Christmas)" in 1823:

He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;

And the modern icon is generally credited to Thomas Nast, circa 1880, upon which Haddon Sundblom based his Coca-Cola ads a full 50 years later. At most, Sundblom popularized the red suit, but he was quite an artist in his own right, so calling it a "character created by Coca Cola's marketing division" is both giving their "marketing department" too much credit, as well as doing a disservice to Sundblom. It's more accurate to say that Coca-Cola's advertising used to consist of actual art.

chicago had coyotes before this incident

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/urbcoyot.htm

Ohio State relies on their institutional data policy and Disclosure or Exposure of Personal Information policy. Essentially, any protected information has to be kept on encrypted devices. That worked fairly well, except once they had all their computers encrypted they quit paying the license fees to PGP. They didn't know the software, which they thought was only pre-boot authentication, phoned home and had a DRM time-bomb in it to automatically drop everything Windows was doing, and spend a couple hours decrypting the whole drive after a certain date if the subscription wasn't renewed. I'd be pretty weary of trusting that kind of task to proprietary software, especially if it requires a subscription like ours did. Posted AC for obvious reasons. If it's closed source, you never know what kind of trick the vendor might be able to pull on you.

Ohio State relies on their institutional data policy and Disclosure or Exposure of Personal Information policy. Essentially, any protected information has to be kept on encrypted devices. That worked fairly well, except once they had all their computers encrypted they quit paying the license fees to PGP. They didn't know the software, which they thought was only pre-boot authentication, phoned home and had a DRM time-bomb in it to automatically drop everything Windows was doing, and spend a couple hours decrypting the whole drive after a certain date if the subscription wasn't renewed. I'd be pretty weary of trusting that kind of task to proprietary software, especially if it requires a subscription like ours did. Posted AC for obvious reasons. If it's closed source, you never know what kind of trick the vendor might be able to pull on you.

lim {9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + ... + 9/infinity} equals 1. The ellipses mean that the digits extend to infinity, and so is expressed as the sum of an infinite series, which can only be evaluated as a limit.

The poster you are replying to did not say IQ, he said intelligence. But let's for a second assume that he had said IQ. Would your evidence about someone with a 195 IQ be useful? Well, considering that this is an anecdote from a book called "Outliers" and an outlier is an extreme point in a statistical distribution that doesn't match the rest of the data, I'm going to go with that not being very relevant. And in fact there's a correlation between IQ and income. The exact correlation is unclear, with there being some evidence that there's a diminishing marginal return (that is, at low IQs slightly higher IQ adds a lot of income but as IQ gets higher, adding more IQ doesn't increase the chance of a high income by that much). See for example http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373 (that study actually looked primarily at SAT scores but they have a method of estimating a conversion between the two.) See also the work by Jay Zagorsky which found a correlation between IQ and net wealth (Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for that off the top of my head other than secondary sources such as http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm and I can't find the studies on the OSU website. They used to be at http://www.chrr.osu.edu/surveys but they don't seem to be linked there anymore. This should be good enough for a Slashdot comment.)

The poster you are replying to did not say IQ, he said intelligence. But let's for a second assume that he had said IQ. Would your evidence about someone with a 195 IQ be useful? Well, considering that this is an anecdote from a book called "Outliers" and an outlier is an extreme point in a statistical distribution that doesn't match the rest of the data, I'm going to go with that not being very relevant. And in fact there's a correlation between IQ and income. The exact correlation is unclear, with there being some evidence that there's a diminishing marginal return (that is, at low IQs slightly higher IQ adds a lot of income but as IQ gets higher, adding more IQ doesn't increase the chance of a high income by that much). See for example http://pss.sagepub.com/content/15/6/373 (that study actually looked primarily at SAT scores but they have a method of estimating a conversion between the two.) See also the work by Jay Zagorsky which found a correlation between IQ and net wealth (Unfortunately, I don't have a citation for that off the top of my head other than secondary sources such as http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm and I can't find the studies on the OSU website. They used to be at http://www.chrr.osu.edu/surveys but they don't seem to be linked there anymore. This should be good enough for a Slashdot comment.)

Physorg.com covered this story two days ago. Here is a link to the original article from Ohio State University which sponsored the research.

GPS coordinates are defined in the WGS84 coordinate system. (I spent 3 years writing the coordinate transformation library for the SEDRIS Spatial Reference Model: ISO 18026). See http://standards.sedris.org/#18026 What you are doing when computing the geodesic is solving an elliptic integral. There is a lot of literature on it and generally speaking, there are short, medium and long line solutions depending on how far apart your points are. Different solutions are used in the three cases because many terms in the longer cases are too small to be relevant in the short cases. See ISO 18026 OPERATIONS Section as well as R.H. Rapp Geometric Geodesy Part 1 https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/24333/1/Rapp_Geom_Geod_Vol_I.pdf pg 71 and https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/24409/1/Rapp_Geom_Geod_%20Vol_II.pdf page 1

GPS coordinates are defined in the WGS84 coordinate system. (I spent 3 years writing the coordinate transformation library for the SEDRIS Spatial Reference Model: ISO 18026). See http://standards.sedris.org/#18026 What you are doing when computing the geodesic is solving an elliptic integral. There is a lot of literature on it and generally speaking, there are short, medium and long line solutions depending on how far apart your points are. Different solutions are used in the three cases because many terms in the longer cases are too small to be relevant in the short cases. See ISO 18026 OPERATIONS Section as well as R.H. Rapp Geometric Geodesy Part 1 https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/24333/1/Rapp_Geom_Geod_Vol_I.pdf pg 71 and https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/24409/1/Rapp_Geom_Geod_%20Vol_II.pdf page 1

If an open source program looks exactly like what a fortune 500 company provides, like OpenOffice.org, then it's patent infringement. If it looks substantially different, as seen with GIMP/Photoshop then it's unprofessional. Common sense, people!

In all seriousness though, GIMP really is professional for people who take the time to learn a different program, it's more than good enough for most people's needs, and it's well worth the price. Instead, everyone just runs off to buy the $700 brand-name product they just have to have for work.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm

They don't know anything but they FEEL really good about it

As per research studies there is no such thing as intrinsic motivation.

Did they tell you that your near vision was definitely going to be shot? (There's no "possibly" about it short of changing the laws or refraction of light). If not, sue the SOBs.

And this claim ...

After having LASIK laser eye surgery, most patients no longer need corrective eyewear

... is misleading at best, and at worst a lie. Most patients will eventually need glasses or contacts as their eyes age, though if you were originally near-sighted and DON'T get lasik, you could end up not needing glasses as your eyes change.

9% report no change or worsening of vision afterwards Not worth it. Glasses are safer, and they make you look smart - and this study proves it's more likelyt to be true if you're nearsighted.

• Prevent Race to the Bottom
• Promote Race to the Top

How are they going to use this for protecting crops? If ants are repelled, wasps and bees will be, too, and there goes your pollination.

Corn is pollinated by wind. I'm not going to bother to find sources for each kind of corn, but here's links for maize (American corn), wheat (European corn), and barley barley. (I guess that link only indicates that Barley self-pollinates, not pollinates by wind. whatever.) Rice is also wind-pollinated.

Potatoes don't need to be pollinated at all.

Therefore, if a product is developed from cockroach juice, it might be most useful for these kinds of crops. Note that "cereals" and "roots and tubers" are the 1st and 3rd most produced type of crop.

When I was a kid a golf course near where I lived was doing some digging as part of renovating their course. They discovered what has since been known as the Burning Tree Mastadon. The lead archaeologist Paul E. Hooge ended up being expelled from many of the professional organizations he was a member of, because he helped the owner find a buyer. This was an amazing find and no museums were interested in giving anything like a fair value for it. It was eventually sold for $600,000 to someone in Japan.

Dr. Betty Lise Anderson at The Ohio State University has used her senior design class to develop projects aimed at that exact age group: http://www.ece.osu.edu/~anderson/outreach.html

I counter your ice melting with this Antarctic ice increasing:
Sea Ice May Be On Increase In The Antarctic
Late 20th Century increase in South Pole snow accumulation
South Pole: Ice Core and Snow Accumulation Studies

I'm not worried about global warming. I do however enjoy having clean air to breath. Those of you who have been to China in the last decade know what I'm talking about.

The scanners they run on your computer are not there to look at your personal files, track down copyright infringement, or anything else you might be worried about -- they simply look for OS/software patches and run an anti-virus/malware scan. If you don't run the scan with the agent, you will not have any network access. If you take some of the suggestions here and bypass the security agent, you are violating the AUP and, if caught, could face academic misconduct charges.

I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to scan your computer for anything else (they do not), they would not be able to.

The camera they install in your dorm showers are not there to look at you naked or anything else you might be worried about -- they simply look for faces of non-residents after hours and call the campus police to investigate. If you don't allow the camera to be installed, you will not have any shower access. If you take some of the suggestions here and cover the camera, you are interfering with dorm security and, if caught, could face academic misconduct charges.

I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to look at you naked (they do not), they would not be able to.

My university(Ohio State), tried implementing similar policies last year. They rolled it out to some portion of the student population and said at the forefront that anyone running Mac or Linux was exempt.

As an IT employee at Ohio State, I can assure you that there is more of this in the pipeline since it's mandated by the Board of Trustees.

I can't see comparing what is going on at OSU with what the OP reports at CMU -- Ohio State's efforts to lock down the network and restricted data are quite comprehensive and IT staff, like you, are concerned that it's done properly. Mac/Linux support is on the way -- most vendors do not support it so it's quite difficult for the University to support it. The scanners they run on your computer are not there to look at your personal files, track down copyright infringement, or anything else you might be worried about -- they simply look for OS/software patches and run an anti-virus/malware scan. If you don't run the scan with the agent, you will not have any network access. If you take some of the suggestions here and bypass the security agent, you are violating the AUP and, if caught, could face academic misconduct charges.

I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to scan your computer for anything else (they do not), they would not be able to.

On a related note: Some how, when you connect to the residential network, they can detect some botnet signatures on your machine and will deny you access. Your mac address is blacklisted until you reformat. It runs some utility to make sure you actually have reinstalled before they restore your access.

This isn't magic -- they run typical network vulnerability scanners and block you if a virus or bot responds from your IP. DHCP and switch info tells them your mac address.

My university(Ohio State), tried implementing similar policies last year. They rolled it out to some portion of the student population and said at the forefront that anyone running Mac or Linux was exempt.

As an IT employee at Ohio State, I can assure you that there is more of this in the pipeline since it's mandated by the Board of Trustees.

I can't see comparing what is going on at OSU with what the OP reports at CMU -- Ohio State's efforts to lock down the network and restricted data are quite comprehensive and IT staff, like you, are concerned that it's done properly. Mac/Linux support is on the way -- most vendors do not support it so it's quite difficult for the University to support it. The scanners they run on your computer are not there to look at your personal files, track down copyright infringement, or anything else you might be worried about -- they simply look for OS/software patches and run an anti-virus/malware scan. If you don't run the scan with the agent, you will not have any network access. If you take some of the suggestions here and bypass the security agent, you are violating the AUP and, if caught, could face academic misconduct charges.

I can assure you that the University's IT office is underfunded enough that even if they wanted to go out of their way to scan your computer for anything else (they do not), they would not be able to.

On a related note: Some how, when you connect to the residential network, they can detect some botnet signatures on your machine and will deny you access. Your mac address is blacklisted until you reformat. It runs some utility to make sure you actually have reinstalled before they restore your access.

This isn't magic -- they run typical network vulnerability scanners and block you if a virus or bot responds from your IP. DHCP and switch info tells them your mac address.

Nothing of the sort, but just out of curiosity, how many cocks does a guy have to suck before they're considered at least bi? In our psych courses, we set the bar at 6. Nowadays, of course, we'd say "6, but 3 if you owned a mac."

Look, it's simple - religions should not be telling people who want nothing to do with their superstitions how to run their lives, and they certainly shouldn't be doing it by making claims that are lies, such as "only humans engage in same-sex activities - it's unnatural." This is easily disproven. Just get a bunch of white mice, and let them breed. As succeeding generations get more crowded for space, their behaviour changes, with more and more same-sex encounters. Or, instead of doing this yourself, you can read more about the effects of crowding in this pdf. (page 68)

Still other types of deviant behavior found in crowded rodent populations include inappropriate sexual behavior, often misdirected in regard to sex and age, and social withdrawal, in which some individuals avoid contact and fail to display normal activity. Thus, Calhoun's study of wild Norway rat populations (1962a) showed deviant sexual behavior by some individuals which he called "pansexuals." Their sexual behavior was indiscriminate in regard to the sex and age of the other individuals which they approached and mounted. He also observed the withdrawn individual or "social dropout"--one who entered a state of inactivity and depression and went into a spiral of deteriorating health.

Far from being "unnatural", they're hard-wired to channel at least some of their reproductive energy to non-reproductive ends when reproducing would threaten the survival of the colony. That's hardly "unnatural". So, if you believe in "god the creator", then you have to admit that "god made them that way."

More details on the study are available in this news item from OSU.

Many variables are not considered directly in the analysis (at least in the brief writeup). For example, the sample has more grad students than undergrads, and grad students were found to be less likely to use Facebook. But grad students are selected from academic high(er) achievers, and graduate courses are generally graded with a higher curve than undergrad courses. That alone could explain the correlation. So why do less grad students use Facebook? Perhaps age plays a role (since not so long ago, Facebook was targeted only at undergrads). Similar arguments could be made regarding STEM students, who are more likely to use Facebook, but (I suspect) are also more likely to have lower undergrad GPAs. It is very difficult to compare GPAs across disciplines without controlling for the mean GPA.

I've always wondered if I took a postcard, wrote someone's name and city to be delivered to, and gave it to a random person. Would it ever get there? I'm going to try it tonight.

Hang on, they did this with emails back in 2001 report. There was a person's name, country and occupation I think, and you had to forward it to someone who you thought would be 'closer'. I wonder how different this would be using only Facebook friends or something.

History seems to hint that rather than foster innnovation, religion retards it. Here's an article summary that suggests sectarian fighting between Jews, Christians and Muslim Alexandrians were the last nail in the coffin for the Library - which had fostered people like Heron, the inventor of the steam engine (around 50 BC).

It just makes me want to scream when I think that we lost 1500+ friggin years...

MIT can do that to people. Burnout is a real risk there. But MIT's 6-year graduation rate for undergraduates is 94%. Most students do make it eventually. By comparison, Ohio State is at 68%. The University of California at Santa Barbara (America's best college for sex) is at 65%.

(I didn't go to MIT. Went to Stanford.)