Slashdot Mirror

Per a list of online emulators (written in Java as applets) at http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=129627, there has already been online x86 emulation done for a while: x86 PC Online Emulator: http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/ (try for example: type "c:", then "cd mario", then "mario") PC/XT emulator: http://www.xs4all.nl/~rjoris/retro/ "With Java applets already dead and buried" - umm... I think you are either thinking Java 1.1 or you are exaggerating a bit. While applet development went down quite a bit, there are still an abundance of Java applets around the web and a number of them still being developed. I think that applets will be around and continue to be developed for as long is it is supported in-browser.

No, the VM loads instantaneously. The applets do not. The applets still take a few seconds to download and initialize the correct APIs. For very small Applets this is a marked difference. For larger applets, the difference is far less apparent. For example, if you run these demos, you get to see two loading screens. The first is the Java plugin generating a loading screen. This takes time while the necessary code is downloaded. Then you get to see the program's loading screen as it loads the necessary data files.

Javascript does not have this problem. No loading screen is necessary because code modules are immediately executed as they are loaded. If I chose to have a loading screen, there will be only one loading screen. But I can choose to begin execution immediately if I so choose. I do not have that choice with a Java JAR. At least, not without creating a sophisticated loader program that (ideally) loads fast enough to avoid the applet loader screen.

you already can with JPC... http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/

Why not use JPC to run x86 code in Java. They already do that in an applet! That's bulletproof security for you! http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/

About Godel: J.R. Lucas
The 'Minds, Machines & Godel' and 'Implications of Godel's Theorem' are particularly good.

Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe
A good summary of ID theory from 3 of its main proponents. The philosophical angle is approached more by Stephen Meyer (including his thoughts on Kant) so his essay (the second in this book) and its reference list in particular would interest you. He only alludes to much of the discussion which I, being only an armchair philosopher, have yet to fully discover and appreciate. [But, he does make it clear that there's much written thought on these topics].

Don't mix honours for good public writing with honours for research, see e.g. this. Mayr, Maynard Smith et al each has more weight inside the field than Dawkins and Gould have together. The supporters Gould had in the field was generally extreme left, see this for some of the funnier things I've ever read on that debate.

Tooby/Cosmides description is strengthened by the intelligence researchers's criticism against Gould on his writing on intelligence (far outside his area!). Very similar. (Also a similar thesis as his writing on evolution; Marxism have problems with behaviour being built in/inherited for some reason I don't care about.)

Correction:

... thus, the natural translation from all known theorems of all other theories must be made just to enter them ...

And, to answer how a mathematical truth can be known but not proven:

I suspect that it is because our 'minds' include something more than just material--something akin to a soul. We can see on a 'meta' level that mere machines cannot.

See Minds, Machines & Godel

Also, almost everything else JR Lucas says about Godel is interesting if you're into that kind of thing (and specifically 'reality outruns knowledge' from the 'Implications of Godel's Theorem' essay).

P.S. Since you seem to be a big fan of Kurzweil, you may also appreciate this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minds,_Machines_and_GÃdel http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/mmg.html

[although I seem to differ with Lucas here a little in that I believe that Godel's theorem may in fact limit the human mind the same way that it does machines--just on a different level. I've not made my mind up on this one yet, but even if I had, the conclusion is neither likely nor unlikely to be true and thus could not be trusted. :-)]

Name a few tangible, verifiable predictions that Intelligent Design makes besides just arguing that evolution isn't sufficient to explain X.

There is work being done to calculate specified complexities (and entropies) for systems and subsystems. Once this is done, then one could work out the math to determine the threshold between 'designed' and 'not-provably-designed' and test it on known quantities (i.e., designed and non-designed objects). One can also look at the entire field of forensics as a data point--we are pretty good at determining if deaths are accidental or 'designed' (and if designed, even 'who done it').

Your second "method of knowing" is great on its own, but what you forget is that it also has to be grounded in physical reality, otherwise you're just much adieu about nothing. One could come up with an incredibly complex, self-consistent logic set that doesn't mean anything because it's not based on anything in reality.

Incontrovertible axioms were assumed.

As for your third method of knowing, "spiritual senses, well, you just assert as much with nothing to back it up.

Yes, I agree that the existence of these senses is neither proved nor provable. That piece of knowledge I can only give from personal experience. YMMV.

Also, define "spiritual". And define "higher" as in higher truths. And how can you know there is knowledge and truth that we simply can't, no way, no how, discover if we.... can't discover it?

I was using spiritual, higher, and meta-physical interchangeably (though there are subtle distinctions). You need to fully understand Godel's theorem and the philosophical implications of it before you'll understand how I 'know' this truth exists. But, suffice it to say that the piece of knowledge which says that 'we can't know some things' happens to be one of the pieces of knowledge that we can 'know'. ;-)

See:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html

and specifically this quote is rather interesting:
"If truth can outrun provability, reality can outrun knowledge."

[although, I would modify it a bit to: As truth outruns provability, so reality outruns knowledge].

If you want to understand the math before diving into the philosophy, I'd recommend Nagel's & Newman's _Godel's Proof_.

Calling Secular Humanism a religion is at best a bastardization of the meaning of the word religion. Despite popular claims, the Supreme Court never ruled that secular humanism is a religion. It was only stated as such in a dicta footnote, which is not a binding rule. By its very nature, the secular in secular humanism makes it pretty obvious that it isn't a religion..

Well, it certainly fits the 4th definition given here (if not any of the first 3): http://www.answers.com/religion

and has very well-defined 'tenets' (i.e., doctrine).

...does it run Linux?

Well, find out here.

ta

da

da ...PENGUIN!

Oh, that worked and your browser isn't Google Chrome?
Guess that means your browser runs Linux, too :-)

But the bulk of that figure for Spanish is made up of people living in Latin America, where studies suggest only a relatively small percentage of the population uses the internet. Cuba has only recently begun allowing PCs in private homes. Some countries in Latin America have less than 3% of the population using the internet; Germany has over 40% (Data refers to years 2004-06; Source) Personal computer ownership per 100 is generally much lower than internet usage per 100 in Latin America, suggesting that this is also a market that can't necessarily choose which software is installed on the computers used.

So, in terms of numbers there are certainly more Spanish-speakers out there using the internet, but a lot of them are in situations where internet usage is rationed and/or not entirely under the user's control. In contrast, Germany has a high rate of internet usage and a high take-up of Firefox - and most users are probably using their own machines, not internet cafes or the like. The figures don't, at first, seem to make sense, but when you take into account the low rates of internet usage and computer ownership in the majority of Spanish-speaking countries, it begins to seem less anomalous.

The idea of a "visual" search has been around for some time. These guys at the Univ of Oxford

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/vgoogle/index.html

showed the first working system, using around 10,000 images. They were able to search for repeating objects such as Bill Muarray's tie in the film Groundhog Day. In broad terms, these systems work by identifying "visual words" which are small, recognisable, patches in the images. A "vocabulary" is built up by clustering these visual words, reducing their number from perhaps several hundred per image, to a few thousand in total. Each image is now characterised by which of the visual words apprea within it. Traditional reverse-index techniques used in text retrieval can be applied directly, resulting in rapid query times.

This system is very impressive because they have managed to really increase the scale that they can create the vocab.

Comprehensive Reform in the UK.

As the middle classes grew in the UK, parents detested the 11-plus exam as labelling their offspring as "thick" for not being allowed into a grammar school, so she approved the "comprehensivisation of the school system" - all schools were to be converted into the American style comp
In the immediate post-war period
Britain had a tripartite system of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern
schools, selection taking place by means of a competitive examination. Twenty years later this
was largely replaced by a comprehensive system, with neighbourhood schools that catered for
the whole ability range. Northern Ireland, however, was left out of this process and it continues
to be organized along selective lines until this day. (See Breen, Heath and Whelan, 1999.)

Pipes, Houses& Searches (of various kinds!

The technical schools were encouraged to become universities, so they dropped the trade skills training and started opening new courses.

"Weighing more makes us harder for the aliens to suck out of our cars..."

You could not be more wrong. Read Philip Dick's 1958 short story "Fair Game" to find out why.

(Or if you just want a spoiler, go to http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ousfg/misc/pkd.html and search for Fair Game.)

Isn't this similar to using porn to solve CAPTCHAs? Or how about the Google image Labeler? And for a literary example, this is one part of the plot in Ender's Game, but not as obvious, and a more nefarious.

Using a large amount of real intelligence can make some problems easier, if a human can do it much easier, and some amount of noise is acceptable in the output.

I had a quick look at there, despite transhumanism and all the research into nanotech and talk of singularities. The center and subject is brand new, there first newsletter being April 2006. He's the link to there site, and staff list: Future of Humanity Institute

already can http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/Demo4.html

Google for Character map and you will find things like below: http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/user/iwi/charmap.html Or you can just use the Character map I am sure a lot of window systems have, Gnome I am sure has one.

You might want to read the book, rather than that very short summary of it. You are right that it is essentially unfalsifiable, making it not-science. (Note that most history and anthropology are similarly not-science).

To quickly address some of the issues you mentioned:

There are essentially no groups left on the earth where the split mind is "normal", but there are isolated cases. Some forms of schizophrenia, for example, can be considered as very similar to the split mind. One big reason they are gone today is that the societies they could survive in are gone, replaced with our familiar conscious societies. Another reason is that they were regularly hunted down and killed (many examples in the old testament).

I think you underestimate the quantity and quality of very ancient literature. Take a look at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature: http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/ Some of it is quite good, and most of it is very, very alien to modern readers. There are plenty of examples from other cultures, I just use that as an example because of my interest in cuneiform writings.

The hallucinations involved weren't like the impression of a drug trip that you see on TV, and they weren't random. Think of it like your intuition having a personality and shouting commands in your "ear". More like Baltar's visitors (from the new Battlestar Galactica series) than like Reefer Madness.

In that context, the hallucinations can be a good thing. What if the voice tells you the right time to strike? Or if it tells you to duck because it noticed a sabretooth tiger hunting you while you hunted the mammoth? But even that is misleading, because it assumes someone with our modern narritive/conscious mind with the addition of voices from the reasoning/analyzing portion of our brain.

Sigh.

Please stop posting.

Just because you can't google image search for every text you'd like does not mean they are inaccessible. Sometimes, if there is no facimile edition of the text, or reputable printing, you actually have to go to the library where they are held and work. Shocking, I know. It's called scholarship. I also can't help but notice that you have shifted your argument from the current state of affairs to a "long, long history."

In any case, I suspect you like things with "secret" in the title, so perhaps you should order this? Should you actually want to try some real work, fill out one of these out and go to a reading room.

"Anyone care to elaborate?"

I dunno - you could always ignore the author of TFA and actually listen to some of what Zittrain has to say. Or, if you prefer reading, here. There's really no excuse, when someone has an internet presence like Zittrain's, for ignoring what he's really saying in favour of an audience-member's summary of a presentation.

s/his big words and big ideas/the article author's big words and big ideas/
There, fixed that for ya.

This isn't some grumpy obsessive compulsive guy with a stick up his ass. This is someone who's involved in the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, amongst others. Why not take a look at what he, himself, personally has to say?

But the problem with modern naturalists is that they ignore the works of both Kant and Godel (who essentially proved the same thing from different angles and to different degrees). Godel showed that even mathematics, i.e., formal logic, is limited and there is in fact knowledge that no matter how carefully derived can't be reached by deductive means (and deductive means are stronger than inductive). See:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ and
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html

for some philosophical discussions of the implications of Godel's theorems. In short, "Reality outruns knowledge".

Kant showed that we are always at the mercy of our experience/perception and that there are in fact undiscoverable truths to our natural senses.

Either of these ideas in isolation is plenty sufficient to refute naturalistic atheism (based quite dubiously on Darwin).

But the problem with modern naturalists is that they ignore the works of both Kant and Godel (who essentially proved the same thing from different angles and to different degrees). Godel showed that even mathematics, i.e., formal logic, is limited and there is in fact knowledge that no matter how carefully derived can't be reached by deductive means (and deductive means are stronger than inductive). See:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ and
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html

for some philosophical discussions of the implications of Godel's theorems. In short, "Reality outruns knowledge".

Kant showed that we are always at the mercy of our experience/perception and that there are in fact undiscoverable truths to our natural senses.

Either of these ideas in isolation is plenty sufficient to refute naturalistic atheism (based quite dubiously on Darwin).

Basically, whereas helium is less dense than air and thus raises your voice pitch, sulfur hexafluoride is more dense than air and thus lowers your voice pitch.

Very cool indeed! And sulfur hexafluoride, since it is heavier than air, will also stay down in your lungs unless you try very hard to get it out. Hello asphyxiation. All with the added benefit that it is a tremendously potent greenhouse gas that will never (or extremely slowly) be broken down by any natural process. Now if only everybody tried to be cool by breathing in the stuff and filling fish tanks with it. Most of humanity would win the 2008 Darwin Awards, and the rest of us would enjoy a permanent tropical paradise.

A lot of the stuff in this article about the Sinclair computers is twaddle. As another poster pointed out, the BASIC commands were executed as they were (in Command mode) in order to save memory, parsing effort, etc. Also, both computers had backspace keys. And, in defence of the ZX81 (the Timex 1000) you could buy a word processor for it along with one of the greatest programming achievements I've ever witnessed - Chess in 1k (by Psion, and a free versh). 'Course, you 'Mericans with your fancy 2k of memory were just plain spoilt...

http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/generated/tapeinfo/c/Chess(Psion).html

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

uh, Oxford doesn't have a department of nuclear physics.

There's some additional detail about the custom system they used in a PDF they published:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/publications/pdf/Rutz_crowcams_SOM.pdf

Oops, it might help to have the website of the people doing the arse-cam work: Alex Kacelnik's lab, which has some more info about why these crows are cool.

--Simon

So, the MS-PL is like the BSDL and the MCL is like the GPL.

That's the oversimplification that the Microsoft PR department would like you to accept.

More accurately, the MCL sounds to be like the MPL or CDDL, and the MS-PL sounds like the BSD Protection License. The only effect that a license like that has is to unnessiarily (and for no advantage to the open source community) prevent code reuse - which is one of the reasons why the BSDPL isn't on anyone's approved license list. Basically, MS recreated a license that some guy already made just to be a jerk.

As for "permissive", that generally means that you can re-use the code in any project (open source or proprietary) without having to relicense everything. This license doesn't have that property, so the name is misleading.

The work is dated and I've seen nothing else since, but the idea of providing presentations as videos or audio recordings for review by students who can select, speed up, and extract what they need should have merit.

Here's a quote I picked up a few years back's:

"Apparently, American Psychological Association research has shown that while listening to a speaker, people do the following things:

*18% are really listening to the speaker

*25% are having erotic thoughts

*57% are thinking about something else

(Note: I say "apparently" because I read this in a handout I got at the CPSI conference, and haven't been able to find any actual confirmation of this research on the APA site.)

Most people can speak about 150 words per minute, but can hear and comprehend 900-950 words per minute. So after the first 20 seconds or so of a presentation, the audience will fade in and out and think about other things. So, we were told, you can make this work in your favor by drawing a line down the center of your notepaper and recording "in" thoughts on one side, and the "out" thoughts on the other side. This is supposed to free you from trying to remember "out" thoughts, and encourage you to generate ideas without losing track of the presentation. http://www.corante.com/ideaflow/ 20030201.shtml#21117"

Others have noted some web sites of possible value. Here are several more:

http://www.hardscience.info/

http://library.advanced.org/10170/menuw.htm

http://webphysics.iupui.edu/

http://www.aip.org/education/

http://www.falstad.com/mathphysics.html

http://www.vias.org/feee/index.html

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Indexe s/HistoryTopics.html

http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/geometry/content.htm

http://acept.la.asu.edu/courses/phs110/expmts/toc. html

http://nsac.ca/eng/courses/math1000/index.asp

Hope there's something of value there. Jim

If its minimalist, it has to be this: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/ Chess for a computer with 1K RAM, including the operating system!

You can find lists of words in various languages here:
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/
I don't know anything about the quality or copyright status of this.

You fools! Great Cthulhu is the least of our problems here! Now that this thread has the attention of millions of helpless Slashdot readers, all it would take would be for some idiot to post a link to the original Sumerian text of the Nam-shub of Enki:

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?tex t=c.1.8.2.3&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=c1823.13 4#c1823.134

and another to a popular text to speech translator:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

and countless minds could be permanently re-programmed! Goatse and the Shining Trapezohedron have got nothing on this!

> As I claimed in my post, female circumcision generally refers to
> the removal of the hood. As I claimed, that is absolutely analogous
> to removal of the foreskin.

Not according to the WHO:

"Female genital mutilation (FGM), often referred to as 'female circumcision', comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural, religious or other non-therapeutic reasons."

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en /

(I'd not recommend reading all of that, it's sickening).

Top google results return the same thing.

Also from Oxford university, which carries similar definitions to the WHO:

http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/gazette/previousissues/ 54vol1/Part2

> I understand that the original post referred to "genital mutilation"
> which also includes the kinds of things you are talking about. But
> if you even glanced at my post it should be clear what I am talking
> about and that I am not equating it to complete removal of the clitoris.

As I posted above, if the WHO says they're synonyms then it's a futile arguing anything different.

> Also it should be perfectly clear I'm against any such practices.
> If an adult decides to go out and get himself circumcised, that's
> all good. If someone else does it to him (even if it's when he's a child)
> that's not good at all.

Good, and I pretty much agree with that.

As an intelligent person who lost his virginity at age 18, I'd like to chip in my two cents.

Helpful statistics for conception risks are absurdly difficult to obtain. After a HUGE amount of searching, I found a lot of misleading information: typically, birth control effectivity is not listed as a "per use" risk-- usually it listed as "percentage of women consistently using the contraceptive who get pregnant within a year." So that 2% failure rate of condoms (if it is 2%) is 2% likelihood of a pregnancy within a year if you have sex with average frequency and precautions for a whole year. On the flip side, here's a study putting the per-intercourse baby-making risk at 1 in 36 (http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band64/b64-2.ht ml). Pregnancy the first time around with a Trojan condom? Extremely, extremely unlikely. All the same, I'd rather a girl be on the pill as well.

After checking out the risks, I decided that the chance to experience sex with a like-minded, attractive, intelligent girl my age would be pretty stupid to turn down. So we went for it!

All the same, why are statistics so poorly distributed about this stuff? I've got enough worries just trying to shake my Bible-belt moral conditioning.

Using these words, search engine style indices and techniques can be used to make searching -- by supplying an example image area which can have its words computed -- quite fast.

The key bottle neck here is the clustering stage: reducing the original input of typically hundreds of features per frame -- multiplied by 25 frames per second by minutes, or hours, of video -- to a much smaller set of clusters. It looks like the work in the linked article is using a modified clustering algorithm which does not require all of the data to be in memory at once.

The TRECVID project is a challenge style exercise where groups compete to provide the best search results for a given set of queries where the search material is hours of video.

The romans used short "postcard" messages a lot too. There are a load of examples scanned at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/exhibition/index.s html.

If it's possible to condense a whole book into three paragraphs:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~shil1883/condense.html

Surely it should be possible to do better with 30 minutes of TV?

Stable at room temperature, but may form explosive peroxides if stored in contact with air. Incompatible with oxidizing agents. Decomposes on heating. Flammable. Mixtures of the vapour with air are explosive.

This is a nifty idea, and all, but... I don't think that it's appropriate for terrestrial applications where there might be... air, and... fire involved in the damaging of the material.
The catalyst should help make the monomer cure/polymerize quickly but, by it's very nature (micro-vascular structure holding monomer in reserve), there's a fair amount of very flammable material close to the surface of the material. Also, with a melting point of ~32.5 C (and a flash point of 32; you get some sublimation before you get flow), you're not going to get a lot of flow in e.g. the cold environment of space.
I would call this a step, rather than a solution. Of course, finding a good monomer for an application like this, which is not reactive could be like trying to find a bucket of dry water.

The 3G auction in the UK went well. http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/klemperer/biggestse pt.pdf [pdf] has the details. It was important (apparently) that there were more licenses available than incumbent "big-players". It is mentioned in "The Undercover Economist".

Indeed, since copyright is a violation of Laissez-faire economics by being a coercive monopoly (specifically a government-granted monopoly), it is obviously anti-capitalist. It may be fruitful to contrast your opinion of copyright as "anti-capitalist" with the Copyright Act of 1790, which begins with the introductory words "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". Its motivation was stated in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, but looking at the rationale (see Senate Report No. 104-315) for its extension (see Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) from the original total of 28 years to today's 95 years (corporate ownership), "the continued economic benefits of a healthy surplus balance of trade", there is an obvious shift towards a economic mindset. Actually, there is a complete shift I would rather say. When devised, copyright was never intended as a direct instrument of economics, so its effect as "anti-capitalist" would have been subordinate to its original goal of being an instrument "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Instead, what we see today is rather bizarre. For a truly eerie prospect of what to expect, consider this statement by Mary Bono (see Congressional Record No 139, pages H9951 and H9952):

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed of by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

(Yes, the evidence is there, despite denials). In plain english, and for all practical purposes, there is no limit to copyright protection anymore - by 2018, both houses of the United States Congress will pass a new act to further extend copyright, as a formality. How one concludes that "securing for limited Times" should mean "forever less one day" rather than a reasonable amount of time, as in reasonably within ones life-time, or more meaningfully as in reasonably useful within ones life-time (such as, say, 6 years for software), is beyond me. The economic reasoning behind perpetual copyright is explained by professor Neil W. Netanel (see Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society):

This "neoclassicist" approach posits that, far from simply inducing the creation and dissemination of new expression, copyright serves as a vehicle for directing investment in existing works. Neoclassicists would accordingly treat literary and artistic works as "vendible commodities," best made subject to broad proprietary rights that extend to every conceivable valued use. In this manner, neoclassicists contend, market pricing can direct resource allocation for the marketing and development of existing creative expression in an optimally efficient manner.

I would be inclined to conclude that, in a world of conglomarates, market forces replace Learning as the "optimally efficient manner" by which creative expression can be developed. Obviously, this is utter nonsense, but I would say it captures the essence of what proponents of perpetual copyright would have us believe. The true and unstated objective is, of course, to preserve existing monopolies. As pointed out by Timothy R. Phillips, "The framers assumed, as did Adam Smith, th

(Please ignore previous post - accidental hit of submit instead of preview)

However, if I have to choose between siding with scientists from MIT or Oxford - or "scientists" that got project grants or paid jobs because they mentioned "Global Warming" in their project name - guess what I'll choose... This whole silly thing reminds me of Y2K panic.

FYI, your heroes at MIT/ Oxford seem to agree with global warming and are trying to educate you, but perhaps the real problem is that you don't understand it.

However, if I have to choose between siding with scientists from MIT or Oxford - or "scientists" that got project grants or paid jobs because they mentioned "Global Warming" in their project name - guess what I'll choose... This whole silly thing reminds me of Y2K panic.

FYI, your heroes at MIT/ Oxford seem to agree with global warming and are trying to educate you, but

perhaps the real problem is that you don't understand it.

Funny, I recently noticed some stuff in an old book I wrote:

http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~peet/patent/
 
Pity patents can't be retrospective!

Since when is nickel considered dangerous?

Materials Safety Data Sheet

http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/NI/nickel.html

Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

Good point. However, I think M. F. I. Warehouses Ltd. v. Nattrass is relevant here: 'reckless' is interpreted more liberally than it suggests, as 'without having regard to whether their advertisements are true or false'. It is obvious that 'unlimited' in the advertising is not the same as 'limited to 5 Gb' in the terms and conditions, so it seems reckless in the sense given here.

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/