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"I've not heard comments like that with regard to microeconomics before."

How I work (Krugman)
What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world.

Hey Slashdot Editors: Try Googling a couple of clicks worth before accepting submissions depending on The Guardian's science reporting, please.

From http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/02/0506/0506-cycli cuniverse.htm

"Princeton University
April 25, 2002
New Theory Provides Alternative to Big Bang"

These guys, Tourok and Steinhardt, published this four years ago! News?

The cyclic model has been around for several years, and there is plenty I don't understand about it, but it is distinct from the old big bang-big crunch ideas. The "cycle" is the repeated collision between two sub-universes, called branes. We live in one of these sub-universes. Each collision resets our sub-universe with a new big bang... Our universe is constantly expanding; there is no crunch.

Importantly, the cyclic theory has detectable differences from the standard big bang scenario. For example, primordial gravity waves, detectable through their influence on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, are present in the standard big bang scenario and absent here. Thus their possible detection by a future microwave experiment could rule out this theory.

The purpose of this new work is to argue that the cosmological constant (the factor which make the expansion of the universe accelerate) is naturally small and positive in the cyclic model. This is as we observe it. The standard big bang theory does not make a prediction for the size of the cosmological constant (it's just a parameter), while in string theories the expected size of the constant is vastly larger.

Steinhardt has many materials (including a cartoon movie of the brane collision) on his homepage.

The article is in a newer rolling stone magazine and can be found here. The author is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor of American studies, and his bio (and list of writings) is found here.

There was SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative), which used watermarks, but Prof. Ed Felten and others showed that all SDMI watermarks fell into one of two categories:

1. those that can be ABX'd by golden ears at a statistically significant rate, or
2. those that can be destroyed without harming audio quality more than category 1 watermarks.

It is indeed an (overdue) blessing that people won't be running as Administrator by default, but "cannot" is too strong a word until Microsoft and their application vendors fix the known privilege escalation bugs.

Peter Singer's home page at Princeton University and his Wikipedia entry . From the former:
Q. Elderly people with dementia, or people who have been injured in accidents, may also have no sense of the future. Can they also be killed?

A. When a human being once had a sense of the future, but has now lost it, we should be guided by what he or she would have wanted to happen in these circumstances. So if someone would not have wanted to be kept alive after losing their awareness of their future, we may be justified in ending their life; but if they would not have wanted to be killed under these circumstances, that is an important reason why we should not do so.

In return, we would grant Elektra the exclusive rights to our recordings. As
money from the sales of records came in, we would be allotted a percentage
of the proceeds, known as points. In a typical deal, the band gets thirteen or
fourteen percentage points. We'd have to give a few of our own points
(four perhaps) to the producer of our record (producers typically get a fee
and points). Then we'd be down to ten points. Before calculating the value
of those ten points, however, Electra would subtract a large percentage of
the gross sales to account for free goods, records given away for
promotional and other purposes. Thus, the amount on which our 10 percent
was calculated would be reduced by 20 to 25 percent. So we'd be down
even further, perhaps 10 percent on 75 percent of the wholesale album
revenue. If our CD was sold in stores for fifteen dollars, the band's share of
the revenue might be something between fifty cents and a dollar per CD.
Would we get to keep it? No! Elektra would add up all of the expenses of
9
recording and promoting our album - rock videos, radio promotion, touring
costs, and so on. The total of those costs, which could run into the millions,
would be our recoupable debt to the record company. Our share of each
CD sold would be swallowed up by that debt. .... When it came time to
record and release future albums, any unpaid debt from our past albums
would carry forward. In fact, even if we sold millions of records (in which
case the size of our share would increase), we might never recoup. As one
friend of mine joked, we'd be rock-and-roll sharecroppers. (pp. 34-36)

When I was running Casady and Greene, a now-deceased Mac software company, almost all our developers were getting 15 points. If we blew it and overpaid on the advance, it was our loss. Promo copies weren't charged against the developer - it was an advertising expense. Advertising expenses are part of the reason we took 85% of the pot. An ad ran anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. Tradeshows cost us on the order of $100,000 and we had smallish booths.

Charging the developer for advertising, production, sales, post-sales expenses AND taking 85% would have been immoral. I guess that's why the music industry does it. When I left the company, it had grown from $15,000 in our first year to a couple of million in sales. The business model worked because we weren't greedy - we just wanted to produce something people wanted and make enough to stay in business.

Note that this describes the 30th birthday of the "official" virtual machine product that was announced in 1972. The "unofficial" virtual machine product was CP/67 and that came out in the late 1960s.

Here is a good history of the early days of virtualization:

http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/25paper.pdf

Note that the very first virtual machine monitor was on an IBM 7044 processor. VM/370 had its origins in CP/40 at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center. CP/67 was for the 360/67 and was the first use by IBM customers. CP/67 was never an "official" product, but lots of customers used it.

The current name for the product is z/VM.

In the mid 60's IBM created CP-67 which virtualized the IBM S/360. In the following years the system became VM/370, and has evolved to z/VM today http://www.vm.ibm.com/. VM (the general term for z/VM) is made up of two primary components, VM/CP (control program) and VM/CMS (a mini single user operating system). VM/CMS provided the ground work for being able to administer the system, and provided a nice programming environment in that each VM/CMS user had their own "system" that one could edit, compile and run their programs in an interactive environment (think of a MS-DOS type of model -- then remember that this was in the late 60's).

CMS itself provided some limited simulation of IBM's two other mainframe operating systems OS/360 and DOS. Enough that one could write simple OS or DOS programs and do at least some unit testing. The simulation by CMS was by providing a limited set of the OS and DOS API.

Unlike MVS or DOS, (or even the CP/M, Windows, or *nix families) VM/CP itself does not provide many services directly. VM/CP does not provide any filesystems, any application APIs, etc. All VM/CP really did was to provide a barebone virtual machine and only provide those services one would find on the bare hardware. It was the responsibilty of the operating system running within the virtual machine to provide the application API, filesystems, application memory management, etc. Communication between vm's were originally only via the raw hardware model (channel-to-channel adapters, shared disk volumes, and a method of "punching" virtual cards and sending the virtual cards to another vm's virtual card reader.) As time progressed, VM/CP did provide some API's that allowed very simple messaging between two vm's (first VMCF - Virtual Machine Communication Facility, and then IUCV - Inter User Communication Vehicle).

Early on it was "discovered" that the virtual machine model made a lot of sense as a method to implement VM services. For example if one were to look at a modern VM system, you would see that the entire native VM TCP/IP stack is managed within a small collection of vm's. (Under VM/CP, a vm is called a "userid"). The native VM TCP/IP stack consists of a TCPIP userid that manages the network interface devices, and the TELNET server. The FTP userid implements the FTP protocol, etc. Each userid is totally seperate from the rest of the system and from each other (the tcp/ip socket facility "rides" on top of IUCV in a transparent fashion so that a tcp/ip server is coded the same as on *nix).

Because of the facilities provided by CMS, it is fairly easy to write little servers. For example the orginal LISTSERV server http://www.lsoft.com/products/listserv-history.asp / was written as a CMS application. As well as several native VM webservers.

If one wants to see what is and has been possible in a virtual machine environment, one should at least look at the history of IBM's VM.

For an excellent history of VM http://www.princeton.edu/~melinda/
and the VMSHARE archive, an early BBS used by VM system adminshttp://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare/

No one has ever said that all scientists believe in global warming. Except you, Anonymous troll Coward, and other primitive corporate propaganda worshippers. People who know anything about science know that there's nothing that "all scientists believe", even the exact definition of the scientific method.

I also never said there's a network of "non-believers". I said there's a network of deniers. Though some of the deniers are mere bullshitters, for whom the facts are irrelevant, most deniers have expertise in the facts they deny. They just get paid to lie and deceive.

Anonymous denier Coward, you are tiny, but significant part of that denial network. Your straw man fallacy, your excluded middle fallacy, each is a standard instrument in the Greenhouse denier toolbox. Lindzen, is that you?

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sudhakar/papers/memer r-slashdot-commentary.html

Yea, it was /.'d back in '03. *Kind of* similar.....

"Quantum fluctuations" is a widely recognized phrase in physics, used variously to refer to uncertain outcomes of quantum mechanics:

A book by Edward Nelson of CMU in the Princeton Series in Physics: http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/qf.pdf
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuation
From a physics lecture at the University of Oregon (the mention is about halfway down the page): http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17. html
From Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-64917
From an article in New Scientist: http://www.ldolphin.org/qfoam.html
A paper from the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Roxbury Community College/Harvard: http://www.eduprograms.deas.harvard.edu/reu03_pape rs/Lopez.C.FinReport03.pdf
Theses at Penn State: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/31075.html

A book from the World Scientific Series in Contemporary Chemical Physics: http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/5952.html

My argument fits the term as used in any one of these sources, or in the half-million others that can be found with a two-second Google search.

The definition of theory does not require it to produce a testable prediction. A theory may produce a prediction but it can also just explain a fact. The testable result is the universe we are in. Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and theory" http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

My first thought, but it is actually listed in some dictionaries. Someone already posted a Webster link, and here's one to Wordnet which also lists it as a synonym.

In general, dictionaries are written by theists. (This is a generalization based on the fact that for most of Western Civilization, the population has been nearly entirely theist.) Webster's dictionary was founded by a very well known theist that included Biblical references in many of his definitions. Many theists I've encountered cannot tell the difference between simply not believing in their god, actively believing their god does not exist, and hating their god and denying its existence even though I actually know it's there. So it's understandable that few dictionaries are going to portray atheists accurately or even nonnegatively.

If you want a decent definition of atheism, perhaps it would be best to find it in the atheist population. http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutatheism/p/atheism 101.htm

Or a more scholarly source: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=atheism

On the other hand, one can find definitions that define atheism as the "belief that there is no god and that religion should be suppressed" (http://www.naiadonline.ca/book/01Glossary.htm).

You can see how it's easy to get confused? Fortunately, the atheist population (I hesitate to say community, since any alliances are usually very tenuous and temporary) has defined gradations to allow for the diversity of views within the atheist population. (Note that atheism is simply the lack of belief. Anything beyond that is an individual's philosophy.) The Wikipedia has a very detailed overview of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

Your whole argument is that atheists actively believe your god is false. I can't see why this could possibly be important to you, since all you're doing is arguing over whether someone can be called an atheist or not.

As to your logic, S -> G is equivalent to ~G -> ~S. The negation goes as follows:

~(S->G)
~(~S or G)
~G and S

Converted back into English, you have: Science can prove God exists and God does not exist.

This is useless to us, since nobody is actually denying the original claim. Not that this is terribly relevant, but I thought I ought to correct your error.

I've gotten involved with the Princeton team that competed in the challenge - the cool thing about Princeton's car was that it relied only on GPS and stereo vision (no expensive lasers). The car didn't finish due to a programming bug, but the team took the car back to the course and was able to complete it after the race was over. If you're interested in Princeton's approach and how the car performed in both runs, here's a PDF that explains everything. In general news, DARPA has implied that they are going to announce another challenge soon; all they have said is that it will be "in an urban environment." Should be awesome!

Scores of worker competency:
0, 0, 0, 0, 50, 50, 51, 51, 51

Number of workers: 9
Average competency: 28.1
Number who correctly think they are above the average: 5
Number who represent a majority: 5

Conclusion: a majority of these workers correctly think that they are above average workers.

You're thinking of the median. The generally accepted definition of average is the mean.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=average
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

Of course none of that is what the study was really about, but that never seems to prevent people from miscommunicating the findings.

Confirm doesn't imply 'prove'.

Did you mean Hope Springs Eternal or does what you said have a different meaning?

You switched the topic. You specifically talked about jobs that do "not involve trading time spent working for money". Subsistence farmers do not have "jobs", and they do not work to earn money

Typical slashdot. Mods on crack as usual.

Wikipedia: A petard was a medieval term for a small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications.

How about Wordnet?: petard: a(n) explosive device used to break down a gate or wall

It was also a name for a type of animal trap, a WWII artillery piece, and the word itself comes from the latin for "fart".

(This is from something I wrote up a couple months ago, regarding a question I asked Professor Deffeyes 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. 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 2011, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.

If you use the Hubbert methodology, algebraically (and empirically, based on the US oil peak) peak oil production is indeed achieved at the midpoint of oil depletion.

See here and here for examples.

Prof. Kenneth Deffeyes seems to be retired.

Tim Sweeney had a talk about related stuff at POPL'06, you can check the homepage for his slides.

If you want to read more, check out this FAQ by the people that broke the SDMI digital watermark a few years ago. They also have the actual paper, which I read too, but have since forgotten.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html

http://www.usenix.org/events/sec01/craver.pdf

evolution isn't just change, it's adaptive change.

Sorry, that is just not correct. Evolution is NOT defined in modern biology as adaptive change. Your basic premise is wrong, making your arguments specious.

Funny, I feel the same way about your argument. A quick google shows about a 50/50 split in the definitions which specify "adaptive change" (in some form or another) as opposed to the ones such as you site. To give just a few examples:

• a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage (especially a more advanced or mature stage)
• The change in life over time by adaptation, variation, over-reproduction, and differential survival/reproduction, a process referred to by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace as natural selection.
• The long-term process through which a population of organisms accumulates genetic changes that enable its members to successfully adapt to environmental conditions and to better exploit food resources
• In Darwinian terms a gradual change in phenotypic frequencies in a population that results in individuals with improved reproductive success.

But, as I pointed out, this isn't a problem that can be solved with dueling citations; even starting down that path misses the fundamental point that genetic drift alone can't explain any of the key observations about life:

• It is very diverse
• The diversity is (to a good first approximation) perfectly adaptive
• When you drill down to a more detailed accounting it is still adaptive, but at the level of genes, not individuals or populations (e.g. see Dawkins "Extended Phenotype")
• It is optimal, in the sense that permuting the diversity in any way (e.g. hanging giraffes from cave roofs) would destroy one or more of the points above.

For example, suppose a new school of "economic biologists" broadened the definition of evolution still further, to include (say) a change in the average market value of a member of the species or the number of books in which it is mentioned. What good would that do? Now there would be a whole bunch more things that could cause "evolution" but they would have done nothing to clarify the question--instead, they would have confused things horribly.

And that, pretty much, is what "population genetics" has done. The questions are murky enough at the level of the individual organisms, but by considering populations you effectively average out all the interesting questions and wind up making vacuous statements such as "genetic drift causes evolution" where "genetic drift" is defined (again from your source) as what happens when, by chance "the frequency of an allele may begin to drift toward higher or lower values."

Combining this with your definition of evolution, we have:

The frequency of an allele drifting toward higher or lower values causes changes in the statistics of the presence of genes in a population over time.

Which, as I hope you can see, has no explanatory value whatsoever and makes no testable predictions to speak of (though the converse would be world shaking news).

--MarkusQ

They have been grain-of rice sized for years, mainly for all car tire embedding.

TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders ALREADY! While you drive on highways. Wires in the road and 14 feet above work fine.

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

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).

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.

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 tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.

a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html

(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it inserts usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the embedded LOGI 160 chips that the us Gov scans when you cross Mexican and Canadian borders.)

You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is (or was) very secret.

Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.

The photo of the secret high speed overpass prototype WAS at :
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html ...but the shocking link finally died in July 2004 and the new location 2005 does not have a photo of a RFID bridge underpass RFID database collector. But this 20005 link below does discuss their toll booth

The UCLA paleobiologist in question, Dr. J. William Schopf, has already dealt directly with the ALH84001 Mars meteorite controversy:

In "Cradle of Life," Schopf recounts his involvement in evaluating the evidence for life on Mars, and the events that led to the life on Mars NASA press conference. NASA administrators asked him in January 1995 to assess what geologists at the Johnson Spacecraft Center (JSC) in Houston believed might be microfossils in a chunk of a meteorite thought to have come from Mars. The focus was on tiny, orange pancake-shaped globules of carbonate material. The scientists thought these globules might be Martian "protozoans," but Schopf's analysis showed that their guess was wrong.

"Many of the objects merged one into another in a totally nonbiologic way," Schopf says. "Their overall size range also did not fit biology, and they lacked any of the telltale features—pores, tubules, wall layers, spines, chambers, internal structures—that earmark tiny protozoan shells. In addition, the 'lifelike' traits they did possess could be explained by ordinary inorganic processes.

"I raised these points with the JSC scientists. They seemed to agree. I thought the matter was closed. But more than a year later, at the August 1996 news conference, the same little pancakes were again proffered as evidence of Martian life, this time of bacteria rather than protozoans. Evidently the scientists' minds were set—the facts hadn't changed, only the meaning attached to them."

Several weeks before the press conference, NASA again asked Schopf to evaluate the findings. He studied the evidence three times, and was not impressed.

"Crucial questions had not been asked," he writes. "Articles published earlier and critically relevant to the authors' contentions had been ignored. More plausible ways to explain the findings were given short shrift. The claim of 'evidence for primitive life on early Mars' seemed overblown, ill-conceived."

At the press conference, the JSC scientists presented their findings with the aid of "high-tech cartoon videos," says Schopf, who spoke after them.

"I was wearing my best suit—the one I got married in—looking at hundreds of reporters who wanted me to say there was life on Mars," he says. "I had no doubt my words would prove unwelcome. On a scale of one to 10, I gave each piece of their evidence a score. Some, such as the suggested Mars source of the meteorite, I ranked high. But the evidence for life was weak; I gave it a two. A number of scientists later called me to task for being too generous. One Nobel laureate said I should have ranked the evidence zero!

"This attempt failed to find life at Mars. That does not mean Mars contained no life—just that these scientists didn't find any."

How do respected scientists, from Scheuchzer and Beringer to the JSC team, Make such blunders? One answer, Schopf says, is that scientists have the same "strengths, fears and foibles as everyone" and are not so different from our neighbors. They have great successes and, sometimes, great failures. Mostly, "Cradle of Life" addresses one of science's great successes.

Perhaps Dr. Schopf's newer techniques will also be applied to ALH84001 and th

The UCLA paleobiologist in question, Dr. J. William Schopf, has already dealt directly with the ALH84001 Mars meteorite controversy:

In "Cradle of Life," Schopf recounts his involvement in evaluating the evidence for life on Mars, and the events that led to the life on Mars NASA press conference. NASA administrators asked him in January 1995 to assess what geologists at the Johnson Spacecraft Center (JSC) in Houston believed might be microfossils in a chunk of a meteorite thought to have come from Mars. The focus was on tiny, orange pancake-shaped globules of carbonate material. The scientists thought these globules might be Martian "protozoans," but Schopf's analysis showed that their guess was wrong.

"Many of the objects merged one into another in a totally nonbiologic way," Schopf says. "Their overall size range also did not fit biology, and they lacked any of the telltale features—pores, tubules, wall layers, spines, chambers, internal structures—that earmark tiny protozoan shells. In addition, the 'lifelike' traits they did possess could be explained by ordinary inorganic processes.

"I raised these points with the JSC scientists. They seemed to agree. I thought the matter was closed. But more than a year later, at the August 1996 news conference, the same little pancakes were again proffered as evidence of Martian life, this time of bacteria rather than protozoans. Evidently the scientists' minds were set—the facts hadn't changed, only the meaning attached to them."

Several weeks before the press conference, NASA again asked Schopf to evaluate the findings. He studied the evidence three times, and was not impressed.

"Crucial questions had not been asked," he writes. "Articles published earlier and critically relevant to the authors' contentions had been ignored. More plausible ways to explain the findings were given short shrift. The claim of 'evidence for primitive life on early Mars' seemed overblown, ill-conceived."

At the press conference, the JSC scientists presented their findings with the aid of "high-tech cartoon videos," says Schopf, who spoke after them.

"I was wearing my best suit—the one I got married in—looking at hundreds of reporters who wanted me to say there was life on Mars," he says. "I had no doubt my words would prove unwelcome. On a scale of one to 10, I gave each piece of their evidence a score. Some, such as the suggested Mars source of the meteorite, I ranked high. But the evidence for life was weak; I gave it a two. A number of scientists later called me to task for being too generous. One Nobel laureate said I should have ranked the evidence zero!

"This attempt failed to find life at Mars. That does not mean Mars contained no life—just that these scientists didn't find any."

How do respected scientists, from Scheuchzer and Beringer to the JSC team, Make such blunders? One answer, Schopf says, is that scientists have the same "strengths, fears and foibles as everyone" and are not so different from our neighbors. They have great successes and, sometimes, great failures. Mostly, "Cradle of Life" addresses one of science's great successes.

Perhaps Dr. Schopf's newer techniques will also be applied to ALH84001 and th

Interesting take on this can be found in http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/Tim-POPL. ppt, slides from a POPL talk by Epic's Tim Sweeny. He is talking about what should be found in the next mainstream programming language but in doing so he brings some useful analysis of the Unreal codebase and discussing the kinds of programming errors that they find that sap productivity.

That is one of the problems with the "it must be infinitely reliable": programmers have to make progress. Earlier someone suggested test-driven development. That is a really, really big deal. Then assume you are going to have to have a QA department that is bigger than the programming team.

At the POPL 2006 (Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, an academic conference) last month, Tim Sweeney (of Epic Games and Unreal Engine fame) gave an invited talk on the future of programming languages. You can read his slides online.

It is worth noting that he seems to think that static types, particularly an expressive dependent type system, is the way to go for the future of game development.

So it makes as much logical sense to say "You can enslave blacks because they have dark skin" as to say "You can destroy a foetus because it is not intelligent."

You misrepresent Singer here. He says "I use the term `person' to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future." That implies a certain level of intelligence (in the broad sense of "information processing ability", not IQ).

Under this view you cannot kill cows, but you can have sex with them. No, really. I'm serious.

You ought to read his actual paper to put this idea in context. Certainly having sex with animals is a) common in some societies, and b) if done non-cruelly, less ethically problematic than killing animals for pleasure.

"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." -- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 184

Now, a personal savings account would be a part of a Social Security retirement system. It would be a part of what you would have to retire when you reach retirement age. As you -- as I mentioned to you earlier, we're going to redesign the current system. If you've retired, you don't have anything to worry about -- third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.

FUCK! Do you people give yourselves lobotomies every morning before your coffee?

from http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=coin

Verb

        * S: (v) coin (make up) "coin phrases or words"
        * S: (v) mint, coin, strike (form by stamping, punching, or printing ) "strike coins"; "strike a medal"

There are examples of what you call interspecies evolution though. North and South America were not always connected by the Panama isthmus. Fish could freely swim between the Atlantic and Pacific side and you can see in the fossil record the same species on both sides. Then after the isthmus closed and it was no longer possible to take the easy way between those two oceans species on both sides began do diverge from each other. The fossil record after the closing of the isthmus shows clear drift (called speciation) where the fish on one side became a distinct species from the fish on the other, when only a few million years earlier they were the same.

See http://www.princeton.edu/~innov/dec2004/d2004bassa n.htm for more information. That link to Princeton includes additional informative links at the bottom of the article if you care to learn about evolution. And what I wrote above is only one example of speciation (The proper term for what you call interspeices evloution)

But no, the story relies on the agreed-upon fact that all politicians are liars to bolster a theory that, because the emotion centers are tapped during political speech, the facts do not matter.

Bullshit.

You are misinformed...

Believe what you will, but I'd suggest reading up on Apple's software. Just because they sell it, doesn't mean they wrote it. Heck, I bought Battlefield1942 a few years back from Circuit City. If Circuit City sells it, it must have been written by them, right? Oh wait, it says EA Games on the box, they must have written it. Surprisingly, it was written and developed by DICE, where it was then purchased by EA, then they marketed it to Circuit City, who purchased in bulk, and then sold me the individual game. Just because I bought it from there, doesn't mean they wrote, developed, marketed, then sold it.

This isn't your mom-n-pop corner store where Grandma knits scarves in the back room and sells them from behind the register. Welcome to economics.

There are at least 159 others that have been overlooked.

No, I didn't give any supporting links because I wouldn't know where to begin...

We're talking about thousands of scientific papers going back to the 1930's....

Instead, here are some links to some non-technical introductions:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101matter.html
http://astron.berkeley.edu/~mwhite/darkmatter/dm.h tml
http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/cfcp/primer/d ark.html
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/no de2.html#SECTION00020000000000000000
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/text/darkmatter.txt

No, you probably won't find technical details in these sources, but many of them contain links to more detailed information.

Also, as much as I find your dismissive attitude obnoxious, I am happy to help you explore the actual evidence for dark matter. Feel free to reply to this post with any actual questions.

Doug

Well Galileo is important for two key reasons. Firstly, it's far more accuarte then GPS (on the order of 1m rather than 4-5m). Secondly, GPS is controlled by the Pentagon, they can switch it off (or, more likely, encrypt the signals so they can only be recieved by military personel) whenever they like. Galileo will be under civilian control. There was also talk of it including a relay system for distress signals.

Anyway, back on-topic, "Quaero" is intended to be able to search images and sound. I assume that doesn't just mean search text associated with them, as Google does. Searching an actual image or sound is a very complex procedure to do on the scale of the internet. If you want to see where this technology is at the moment try http://shape.cs.princeton.edu/search.html. It's fun to play with, and maybe even practical for searching, say, an engineering database, but it's a quite primative technology. So no, they aren't second rate, nor doing what "the Americans have done".

I said I'd follow up. I found this paper on exactly what I was talking about. Note that the reference to Clebsch-Gordan is in a footnote because this is offtopic in quantum computing, and note that it appears in this paper because it is specifically about realising reliable qubits in physical systems based on spin. Clebsch-Gordan coefficients are in no way fundamental to understanding quantum computing, but may be useful for people actually building quantum computers (just as you can be an expert in classical computer science without understanding transistors).

Flat fees range from $100 to over $10,000, while royalties to recording owners range between half a cent and three cents for every copy of the track sold. Musical composition licenses typically give "the copyright holder a percentage ownership in the new work's musical composition copyright," as well as an advance of a few thousand dollars on the expected publishing income.

By the late 17th century, though, literally was being used as an intensifier for true statements. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Dryden and Pope for this sense; Jane Austen, in Sanditon, wrote of a stormy night that, "We had been literally rocked in our bed." In these examples, literally is used for the sake of emphasis alone.

...no one seems to have objected to the [figurative] usage until the early 20th century.

Believers in DNA believe in evolution. Humans share many essential genes with fruit flies. It's called conservative homologues. So if you do believe in DNA and all the wonders it has produced for conservatives, such as using DNA evidence to put those criminals on death row.

Yikes! Cobalt-60 is almost as bad as it gets. Cobalt 60 radiation dosages are almost twice as bad as the actual dosage of radiation one would get from the fallout of an actual atomic device which sort of begs the question of what they are doing with it? Are they modeling fallout? Or are they experimenting with dirty bombs? Lining the inside of atomic devices with heavy metals and other elements is a way to create much more radioactive bombs that have long lasting radiation effects.

According to this page and wikipedia, there's a number of non-military applications for Cobalt-60: "As a tracer for cobalt in chemical reactions, as a radioactive source for food irradiation, and as a radioactive source for laboratory use."

What are you pair talking about? A shyster can be any cheat:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=shyster
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=shyster

Where did the Judaism ref com into things?

Justin.

TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders ALREADY!

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

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).

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.

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 tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.

a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html

(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertes usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)

You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.

Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.

The photo of the secret high speed overpass prototype WAS at :
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html ...but the shocking link finally died in July 2004 and the new location 2005 does not have a photo of a RFID bridge underpass RFID database collector. But this 20005 link below does discuss their toll booth RFID tracking uses...

http://www.telematics-wireless.com/site/index1.php

why isn't there a CTO (Congressional Technology Office)? There's ... a non partisan office that exists to advise Congress on budgetary issues ... It's unreasonable to expect that all Congresscritters can be knowledgeable techies. They should have a non partisan agency to advise them about these issues

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, there was such an agency.

The Office of Technology Assessment was such a congressional body, founded in 1972, and it lasted until 1995, when the Gingrich Congress came in, it was disbanded.

More about that here, here, here, and of course on Google.