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"The people" have been infected with HPV for a long while now. In fact, the CDC says 80% of women will be infected by age 50.

That's an epidemic.

We have a chance to stop this disease, or at least cut it down by quite a bit. Why the hell is this an issue?

When the polio vaccine came out were we all wanting to go out and get infected with polio? Of course not! People celebrated the end of a debilitating disease. Why can't we see it like that now?

Oh yeah, that's right. Polio didn't involve sex. And God knows anyone who has sex without procreation in mind is just plain wrong.

Guys, it's the 21st century. Shouldn't we be past this shit?

Let's get real. This is life, not religion. If religion cured warts I'd be all for it.

I'm currently a senior at a top rated public school...

Unless you mean Stuyvesant, this doesn't matter. It's actually better to go to a lower-ranked public high school than to many higher-ranked schools, public or private. The marginal bump you get for going to a "good" high school doesn't mean much to admissions officials, because grading standards are arbitrary and, frankly, because high school is such a poor indicator of future success (the only exceptions to these are at the extraordinary high end -- Stuy, Andover, Exeter, Bronx Bcience -- or where an admissions official knows the school's tough on grading so your 3.9 or whatever it works out to be looks a lot better). On the other hand, you can get geographic and socioeconomic status diversity points if you raised hogs in North Dakota and educational diversity points if that meant going to the same eight-person one-room schoolhouse for K-12.

I look forward to majoring in Electrical Engineering. I've already been accepted into Carnegie Mellon University, so I don't need to worry about any 'safety' schools. However, I still have my sights set on getting into a school such as MIT or Cal Tech.

Well, IvyLeage Engineer, you know that none of these schools are in fact in the Ivy League? That's not to say that they're not prestigious, and certainly not to say that they're not good schools. Honestly, though, I'm surprised you didn't apply to Princeton.

My grades are high (95.6 on a 100 scale), I have several leadership positions in clubs, however I'm pretty sure that's not enough. What else can I do to improve my chances of being accepted there? I've already been deferred from early action at both institutions and I'm afraid it's too late to do much at this point. I'm sure there are other people like me wondering just what it takes to get admitted to a prestigious college.

Congrats on the GPA. I'm almost certain that it won't mean much. The fact that it's on a 100 scale in high school is part of my point -- scales and policies are nowhere near uniform across high schools (they aren't in college, either, but they're closer). The leadership positions in clubs can be meaningless, but they can be great, too. It kind of depends on what you get out of it, and how well you communicate that to the admissions office. I'll assume that you had to submit a personal statement or something. If so, and you feel you did a good job conveying the meaningful life lessons you learned (it doesn't matter if you actually did or not, especially at these schools), then you should be golden. Honestly, though, as I hinted at earlier, your personal life is sometimes more important. The real world is something we all have in common, it's the best objective measure of the challenges you've faced, and it's more likely to resonate with real people (admissions officers are people too). I'd say the only things more valuable on an application are meaningful major academic achievements, standardized test scores, and maybe a really stellar recommendation letter by a faculty member who both knows you well personally and has worked with you extensively.

Unfortunately, I think you were right in that there's not a lot you can do now. If you submitted the applications before you got last semester's grades, you could send them an update. But random extra statements or recommendations at this point just look overly anxious, unless the school has an explicit invitation in its application instructions.

That said, chill out. CMU is a great school. There are people who would, literally, kill to get in there. And if you do get accepted to MIT or CalTech, you might be able to finagle more financial aid out of them by asking them to match what CMU offered. A tactful "Well, I really do love your school. It's just that financing school is important to me, and Carnegie Mellon offered me $10,000 more in grant money per year, so it's a tough choice..." usually does the trick.

Good luck.

There are alternatives to the hypervisor.

"staggering in it's ability to resist all attempts"

virus don't have "abilities"

S: (n) ability (the quality of being able to perform; a quality that permits or facilitates achievement or accomplishment)
S: (n) ability, power (possession of the qualities (especially mental qualities) required to do something or get something done) "danger heightened his powers of discrimination"
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ability

sigh ... you musta missed that English Lit. class, eh?

There is an alternative to hypervisors.

---
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting [the same inane comments they always do]."

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

Thanks, this has the 50-page paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it from years ago: On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772 (PDF). Now, the Foundations of Physics is not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review. The figures present some results that are, on the surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts do a rebuttal, but even though I got a response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened. I am still puzzled by this paper.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

Thanks, this has the 50-page paper I was looking for when I saw this story - I remember it from years ago: On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, With Application to Anomalous Phenomen (1986). Foundations of Physics, 16, No. 8, pp. 721-772 (PDF). Now, the Foundations of Physics is not exactly a top-tier journal, but there is some very minimal peer review. The figures present some results that are, on the surface, somewhat surprising. For example, look at Fig. 2, p. 726. I suggested to CSICOP (the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, that I subscribed to) that they have some of their experts do a rebuttal, but even though I got a response that they'd take it under consideration, it apparently never happened. I am still puzzled by this paper.

Well, if you check one of their papers, you'll find the following sentence, on page 7: "While no statistically significant departures of the variance, skew, kurtosis, or higher moments from the appropriate chance values appear in the overall data, regular patterns of certain finer scale features can be discerned." That's an outright confession of fraud. They are saying they cannot find any evidence if they analyze a statistically significant amount of data, so they pick whatever small sample will suit them. It's as if I threw a coin a million times and said: "Oh look! Here I threw ten heads in sequence!"

Further on, in the next page, they state "Given the correlation of operator intentions with the anomalous mean shifts, it is reasonable to search the data for operator-specific features that might establish some pattern of individual operator contributions to the overall results. Unfortunately, quantitative statistical assessment of these is complicated by the unavoidably wide disparity among the operator database sizes, and by the small signal-to-noise ratio of the raw data, ...", which means they didn't follow a consistent testing protocol and didn't have a standardized method for training their operators. Basically, they are admitting that any statistical correlation in their data is extremely small (which is what "small signal-to-noise ratio of the raw data" means) and they have no way to check if any positive results aren't attributable to insufficient training of their operators.

Of course, if they *did* communicate their results by telepathy, then that would be an extraordinary proof. But what they have published is rather underwhelming, can we assume that if they did have any better results they would have published them?

Where are they. I certainly find NO POSITIVE RESULT WHATSOEVER. Care to do a citation. Peer reviewed journal would be nice.

Not even remotely in the science citation index. Certainly does not look like it.

As for the rest of your drivel, if you had read the ORIGINAL paper from the PEAR team and what they admit you would not be adament on "positive" result. Here is the link already psoted by another psoter

Where are they. I certainly find NO POSITIVE RESULT WHATSOEVER. Care to do a citation. Peer reviewed journal would be nice.

Not even remotely in the science citation index. Certainly does not look like it.

As for the rest of your drivel, if you had read the ORIGINAL paper from the PEAR team and what they admit you would not be adament on "positive" result. Here is the link already psoted by another psoter

That blog isn't even remotely objective or fair to the content of the article (original article here). It ridicules the article for saying that there is "no statistically significant departures of the variance, skew, kurtosis, or higher moments", and acts like this is an admission that there is no statistical significance. In fact, the central point is that there is an extremely statistically significant departure of the MEAN, the first moment. A blog that claims to be about "good math" and "bad math" should not be this blind.

Second, the blog complains because the author says that there is little to be learned from comparing the differences between individual experiment participants, but considering all experimental participants together yields powerful and informative results. The blogger's complaint here is nonsensical.

And third, the blog complains about the author's statement that the results are based on human performance, and therefore attempts to replicate them must use sufficiently large sizes that statistical measures can be used, to account for the fact that sometimes humans can perform a difficult task and sometimes they cannot. A statistical analysis will therefore demonstrate that the results are consistently positive over the long term, even if some days the results are weak. It is silly to complain about this, because this should not be strange to anyone familiar with statistical methods in science.

Consider the stock market, some days it goes up, and some days it goes down, so if you only look on one day you might conclude the stock market is completely random. But if you examine the stock market over a long enough time period, you can see that it consistently goes up. The results found by the PEAR lab are like this.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html

Can we all just back up a second?

Current human emissions are around 7 billion tons per year ref 1 ref 2

The idea is to reduce our net emissions. Sucking 1 billion tons per year out of the air is just dumb (other than via the old fashioned natural way- trees and such). I haven't read TFA but if the prize is indeed for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is a waste of time. What matters is net emissions, and the best way to achieve that is to reduce/capture/avoid the emissions in the first place. You can capture coal CO2 for like a 20% energy/price premium and sequester it. You can go the Greenfuel route and use flue gas to grow algae used for fuel (thus greatly increasing the amt. of energy per unit CO2 emission). Conservation, solar, wind, the usual. Nukes too if you can magically figure out a political solution to widespread nuke opposition.

I can assure you that we are not going to run into a situation of having too little CO2 anytime soon. Current levels are way, way above anything we've seen for 400k years. And they will continue to rise and human emissions continue to increase under business as usual.

One could argue that any efforts that serve to minimize the trend in CO2 levels just might be a good thing. It's a matter of perturbing the system less, not more. I think the geological record shows that when the system is perturbed too hard (comet impacts, solar cycles, etc.), bad things happen (defined as bad if you are a living thing and like to stay that way). I'm not really into gloom and doom, but I do think that planning, foresight, and risk aversion are generally good things.

Dallas county blue for the first time in decades, if I'm not mistaken http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2006/

So, looking at the fluff piece, Windows Vista has:

A BogoMIPS calculator (CPU Cycle Counting).

A Solaris-like scheduling class (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service).

File-based Symbolic Links (1980's Unix anyone?)

A hack to get around priority inversion or an extra layer of queue or something (I/O Completion and Cancellation).

And some I/O priority stuff that, again, various quality Unix kernels have had since god was a boy.

Keep cracking that whip, Bill, don't let the slaves forget where their next meal's coming from.

If you don't mind getting your feet wet with some programming, ChucK is a Java-like audio programming language that can interact with MIDI devices, and is a nice alternative to Csound and Pd for people who want to do sequencing programmatically.

They can't offer you a QOS service to commit bandwidth to you because of all of the 'network neutrality' nonsense.

Keep thinking bandwidth is free and noone has to pay for it. Just don't be surprised when your 'best effort' service takes a minute to load a web page and your bandwidth sensitive services no longer function.

It's not a single photon interfering with itself.

The interference pattern will occur even if there's only one photon in the apparatus at a time (that is, a photon hits the detector before a new one is generated).

See this page for instance.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=redundan t

Sorry, I have to disagree with anyone who claims to be able to touch type on a "keyboard" that has a minimum of 4 keys under any finger at a given time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_type ... or maybe you just have small fingers.

private void String buildMessage(List<String> list) {
    String msg = "";
    for(String item : list) {
        msg += item;
    }
    return msg;
}

35 ldc #8 <String "">
37 astore_2
38 aload_1
39 invokeinterface #9 <Method java/util/List.iterator ()Ljava/util/Iterator;>
44 astore_3
45 aload_3
46 invokeinterface #10 <Method java/util/Iterator.hasNext ()Z>
51 ifeq 88
54 aload_3
55 invokeinterface #11 <Method java/util/Iterator.next ()Ljava/lang/Object;>
60 checkcast #12 java/lang/String
63 astore 4
65 new #13 <Class java/lang/StringBuilder>
68 dup
69 invokenonvirtual #14 <Method java/lang/StringBuilder.<init> ()V>
72 aload_2
73 invokevirtual #15 <Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append (Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;>
76 aload 4
78 invokevirtual #15 <Method java/lang/StringBuilder.append (Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/StringBuilder;>
81 invokevirtual #16 <Method java/lang/StringBuilder.toString ()Ljava/lang/String;>
84 astore_2
85 goto 45

FYI: death throes . Unless, of course, you're talking about wrestling in which case... carry on, good sir!

US Currency has a primitive type of RFID in it already responsive to particular microwave bursts, Its the SPECIFIC ANGLES on the metallic letters on the mylar strip that reflect waves back out through the parcel the money is hidden in. The mylar strip that says "twenty" on it woven into the paper. Its to detect currency on citizens walking through security at airports and in luggage. You never read about it anywhere, but in this post (I am a security snitch). But its true. 60 minutes did expose on how 3rd parties are paid to snitch at airports to the FBI for anyone carrying cash. Ed Bradley on 60 minutes years ago tried carrying 5 thousand and was quickly grabbed after using a few hundred dolalrs to buy a ticket. Typically the cash is confiscated. "USA vs 5,120 Dollars" and you have no rights. No RFID was involved on the 60 minutes episode though. Just an airport employee woman watching his wallet. Car Tire RFID in tires enterring canada is more shocking and evil.
---
TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders ALREADY!

Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.

Yup. My brother works on them (since 2001).

The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) made it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires allowing efficient scanning of moving cars.

Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.

Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.

Taggant chemical research papers :
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)

I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].

It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.

A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFID chips embedded in the tire).
The governement can then either look back in databases to see wheere and when your car drove, and OCR liscense plates at tool or Customs can
build the database up even better without the feds needing to visit your home to get your RFID GUIDs.

More sinister, it is near impossible to buy tires without the vendor in the USA filliung out federal paperwork of what VIN the recipient car is!

Photos of tracking chips before molded deep into tires! :
http://www.sokymat.com/index.php?id=94

PLEASE LOOK AT THAT LINK : Its the same shocking tire material I have been trying to

Optical SETI with intense nanosecond light pulses is the way to go, forget radio!

1. Visible light-emitting and detecting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.

2. Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.

3. Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.

4. Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent.

5. Existing lasers can produce nanosecond pulses that can outshine a star by 30 times.

http://observatory.princeton.edu/oseti/oseti.html

You are wrong: "programming" isn't hard, what is "hard" is finding that unique algorithm that will precisely solve the problem on hand, once you have that, implementing becomes a breeze.

It all boils down to a search for algorithms.

Read up on the following to get an idea of why the "hardness" really exists: Rice's Theorem, the Halting Problem, the Totality problem

The main problem that we run into with AI isn't just the ability to understand the semantic meaning of the word, but to also understand the syntax of a group of words and the context of a sentence.

Take a look at Shakespear's famous quote of "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Breaking "To be or not to be, that is the question" into it's constituent parts, the words themselves are very simplistic with only one word with two syllables. Looking at it semantically, we can understand the individual words, but even these have a plethora of meanings. "Be" itself presents us with a list of meanings. Dictionary.com gives us eleven different meanings, and the top one actually uses the quote itself as an example. Now if we look at the syntax of the words and begin to look at them in more meaningful groupings we extract even more meaning from them. Semantics gives us what the meaning of "to" and "be" and syntax lets us understand that this combination gives us a meaning of life; "to be" is "to be alive". Syntax also gives us more meaning of "the question" as "the most important question" or "the only question that truly matters". Now if we take everything together and place it in the proper context, we are finally looking at this as questioning of weather or not Hamlet should continue to go on with life, or if he should just end it all by committing suicide.

This is where the idea of useing Wikipedia to understand any text becomes usefull. It gives programmers a huge database of information for an AI to draw upon. But, it would also be required to draw it's own conclusions to actually be considered "intelligent".

So, by using Wikipedia to understand the meaning of individual words to build a library of syntactic meaning, relationships like those found on Wordnet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ would be created. From there it should have a better understanding of the context of a message. This would prevent Spamers from using the technique of grouping a half dozen sentences together that individually make sence and get past a filter. The AI would learn that the context for each individual sentence is out of range for each proceding sentence and block it.

No. Neutrinos aren't massive enough to be (most of the) dark matter. See here for a brief but more detailed discussion.

This was first pioneered by Princeton (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) and MIT (http://www.conceptnet.org/). People are building 'conceptnets' all over the place

Not only are they not the first to build a conceptnet, they are also not the first to build one using Wikipedia as their source.

I will contest this personally if they try to patent it.

this kind of technique has been used for a while..

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

and according to my source of AI, wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet
(like all sophisticated software) has been in development since the mid eighties..

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing

If you have any computer skills and really enjoy composing music then linux is at least as good a choice as windows. For starters, you chould checkout Rosegarden ("the closest native equivalent to Cubase® for Linux" according to Sound on Sound). If you prefer a lower-level solution then give ChucK a try. Or maybe you want a compromise of the two, perhaps similar to Max/MSP with a block diagrams interface? Look at Pure Data or jMax

If those don't tickle your fancy then maybe you should take a look at the list of Software Sound Synthesis & Music Composition Packages available for linux! Oh, and if you're completely new to linux then Ubuntu Studio offers a baby spoon-fed approach to creating a linux digital audio workstation (the project is still in its infancy, but it looks promising).

Don't be an idiot. The profit is for Halliburton and other companies "rebuilding" Iraq. It's being paid for partly by Iraqi oil, but mostly by the American taxpayer. The whole war was basically a big excuse to enrich Bush's corporate buddies.

Wouldn't it have been easier to take over the UAE or something? Do you really thing that Bushco is so brilliantly evil that he and DickC schemed up this whole thing years ago in a west Texas oil field for Bush to to enter politics, have his Dad get picked as Reagan's VP so he could be Prez so that W could get elected Governor of Texas and then move to the White House with the help of his brother, who they got elected in Florida so he could rig an election so W could start a war in Iraq so Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton could rebuild it? Wouldn't it be easier to simply have Halliburton rebuild New Orleans or clean up a former military base or something while the first Bush was Prez? Why go through all the trouble of a war?

Of course, you completely disregard the mass graves, the whole 500,000 children dying from preventable diseases before the war (according to UNICEF, not me), Russian intelligence telling Bush that Iraq was going to attack the US, or everyone including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Kofi Anon and Jacques Chiraq all saying that Iraq had WMD's... or were they all in on it too? That's one Hell of a conspiracy you've worked up there!

Of course, I don't think you realize that neither Bush nor Cheney owns any Halliburton stock. Well, they might, but no one knows but their investors. You see, when most public figures enter office, they put all of the $$$ in a blind trust. That means they pay an investor to take care of their money and keep how a secret to everyone, including themselves.

Please, stop with the whole Bush is an evil genius who is strangely enough, too stupid to speak in public bit. It's not cute anymore. Or do you really hate Bush so much that you need to make up shit like this to justify the hatred yourself?

An increase of general wealth in any society retards the growth of the population of the next generation. A self limiting property if prosperity can be spread and sustained. It's a big universe people. We can do this. http://iussp2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submi ssionId=50540

"To be fair, why would you have a problem taking someone's money?"

I don't have a problem with it. I however DO have a problem with slashdotters smug attitude that they're better than everyone else.

Excuse me, but I don't have to "get over" his or your inability to use the right word. Maybe you should take your own advice, and remember the Golden Rule next time.

I don't intend to disagree with your assessment on where "our federal government" is heading to, but your interpretation on "tamper" sounds a little "over-relaxing". According to WordNet, "tamper" means "play around with or alter or falsify, usually secretively or dishonestly". Smashing the RFID sure falls into "alter".

Yes, that's happening and it's insane, but the only gain from running as a less-privileged user would be to force an attacker to find or use a Windows privilege escalation vulnerability.

and also:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss- TroubleWithTriples.pdf
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/index.ht ml

and also:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss- TroubleWithTriples.pdf
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/index.ht ml

That would be open to 'forcing' though, as large groups from one party could conspire to follow persons of interest into the booths. That's getting pretty theoretical, but random important guy's (voting) privacy is just as worthy of protection as everybody else's.

Have you seen Rivest's 3 ballot system? Look here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/new_ voting_prot.html
http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThre eBallotVotingSystem.pdf

I haven't read these, but they popped up while tracking it down:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss- ThreeBallotCritique2v1.5.pdf
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/Defeatin gThreeBallot.pdf

They appear to be of interest.

That would be open to 'forcing' though, as large groups from one party could conspire to follow persons of interest into the booths. That's getting pretty theoretical, but random important guy's (voting) privacy is just as worthy of protection as everybody else's.

Have you seen Rivest's 3 ballot system? Look here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/new_ voting_prot.html
http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~rivest/Rivest-TheThre eBallotVotingSystem.pdf

I haven't read these, but they popped up while tracking it down:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss- ThreeBallotCritique2v1.5.pdf
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/Defeatin gThreeBallot.pdf

They appear to be of interest.

Apple controls fairplay, which is used in the number one music store, and refuses to license it. It got that monopoly by virtue of the fact that they control the DRM formats that can be played by their music play, which has an overwhelming share of the market.

I think that word does not mean what you think it means.

monopoly ((economics) a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller)

you should see these links: http://www.academycomputerservice.com/economics/ch arts.htm http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pics/kuznet3.jpg (trend graph %$ going to those with most $$$$) http://www.lcurve.org/images/LCurveFlier2003.pdf

Elections can be stolen with paper ballot elections. However it is far more work to do so than with a fully electronic election. To steal a paper ballot election, especially if it isn't close, you would likely have to create a large number of fake ballots manually, and then selectively replace your victim's ballots. When there are many hundreds of thousands of ballots, this is a huge task, and cannot be done quickly. And to really cover your tracks you might want to shuffle the ballots, so they are not sorted by choice. Scrambling a deck of 52 cards is hard enough. Imagine hundreds of thousands of ballots. And of course all of these changes would have to match with the vote tallies. Any errors will be obvious, and could be considered evidence for voting fraud.

Contrast this with electronic paperless voting, where a single piece of software can replicate itself through many voting machines, as was shown possible by two Princeton professors. This code can then invisibly alter votes, and then eradicate itself after use. The fraud in this case would be undetectable.

Why do we all need to vote on the same day?
Why do we need to congregate at designated areas?
I can do my banking securely online, why not vote?
Why not have online voting?

Because the day we have online voting is the day I come to your house, put a gun to your head and demand you vote for George W Bush. At least at the polling place, there are poll workers to ensure that no guns make it in, and no reliable reciept makes it out.

Have a look at Three Ballot Voting. Now, there are several critiques of Three Ballot voting out (I just found them, so I haven't read them) which may turn to point out that three ballot voting isn't a good idea, but the main point is that the paper is simple enough that someone can read it and understand the principles at play in an election.

Why do we all need to vote on the same day?
Why do we need to congregate at designated areas?
I can do my banking securely online, why not vote?
Why not have online voting?

Because the day we have online voting is the day I come to your house, put a gun to your head and demand you vote for George W Bush. At least at the polling place, there are poll workers to ensure that no guns make it in, and no reliable reciept makes it out.

Have a look at Three Ballot Voting. Now, there are several critiques of Three Ballot voting out (I just found them, so I haven't read them) which may turn to point out that three ballot voting isn't a good idea, but the main point is that the paper is simple enough that someone can read it and understand the principles at play in an election.

Uh... fearful as in, full of fear? Causing a lot of fear anyway. Pretty common usage. According to this page http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn one of the meanings of fearful is the same as that of fearsome. Blah blah blah. It was a good joke he made.

I hope, you don't mind my ascribing the earlier Anonymous Cowards' quotes to you — you seem to agree with their authors' sentiment.

So, launching thousands of explosive devices into residential areas in Southern Lebanon in the hope of frightening Lebanese civilians to give up purported Hezbollah fighters was not terrorism on the part of the Israeli state?

No, it is not. Unless you can prove, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Can you? I don't think so. In fact some evidence points to just the opposite — the number of Lebanese killed is minuscule compared to Israel's capabilities for death and destruction. Israel's army performed much better, than even NATO did, when they were bombing Serbia to stop Milosevic's thugs.

Generally, when intent is involved in a definition of an act, making an impassionate judgment is very difficult without the perpetrators' taking responsibility and/or stating their goals. Hezbollah, for example, makes it easy to judge its "purported" (LOL!) fighters as terrorists, because it is unabashed about its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians:

We are going to make Israel not safe for Israelis. There will be no place they are safe," Safiadeen told a conference that included the Tehran-based representative of the Palestinian group Hamas and the ambassadors from Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Authority. We will expand attacks," he said. "The people who came to Israel, (they) moved there to live, not to die. If we continue to attack, they will leave.

Whether or not you agree with their goal, their method is terrorism — by definition.

So "disappearing" hundreds of foreign civilians at home and abroad, keeping them incommunicado from family and friends, and resorting to abuse and torture to "make them talk", in violation of international law, is not terrorism on the part of the American state?

Of course not. Not everything you disapprove of is automatically "terrorism". However reprehensible it may be, these disappearings were not terrorism simply because the victims were not targeted as civilians. Even you state, that they were picked (legally or not) to extract information ("make them talk") — which means, their kidnappers believed (mistakingly or not) them to be connected to our enemies and thus automatically non-civilians...

It seems you have a warped definition of "terrorism such that it includes others but excludes, by definition, you and your allies.

My definition is self-consistent and taken directly from a dictionary. Yours (whatever it is — you never stated it) seems simply a bubble of passionate appeal — you are revolted by the gruesome effects of Acts of War and "terrorism" is just the worst label you can slap on it...

I believe I'll listen to Ken Deffeyes

http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/

http://www.amazon.com/Basin-Range-John-McPhee/dp/0 374516901/sr=1-8/qid=1163627933/ref=sr_1_8/002-082 4961-8280833?ie=UTF8&s=books

(This is from something I wrote up earlier this year, regarding a question I asked Professor Kenneth Deffeyes (a proponent of peak oil ideas) during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)

Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.

During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today [edit: nowadays it's actually slightly higher, 62 vs. 58]. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?

In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.

I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2012, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.

Chuck or Marsyas. And it would probably be easier to do something more complicated such as use samples, have multiple threads (well shreds in chuck, you spork a shred) and do other fun stuff. Worth checking both out if you are into playing with audio (chuck has binaries for win and osx, source for linux, while marsyas is compile only).