Slashdot Mirror

As an astronomer/physicist, I have to vote for http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/sm/, which produces graphs which just look much nicer than anything gnuplot or Matlab will spit out (with similar sort of effort, although maybe SM has a slightly weirder scripting language). Not free or open source, but it is, uh, obtainable, if you know what I mean.

Your statement of fact is based on what?

As just one example, PlanetLab.org runs an entire network of open proxies.

http://codeen.cs.princeton.edu/

Because I run a web server with a database that everyone wants to "scrape", I see this kind of rogue spider hiding behind proxy servers that don't read robots.txt and try to hide every day.

I now ban every known -open- proxy IP and aggressively gather lists in order to block access.

However I think his claim that ignoring robots.txt as being "illegal" is unfounded. Civil suits are not the same thing as criminal matters.

In the same paragraph in the letter he both says:

"None of HMS's harvesting source code even mentions the ROBOTS file, let alone obeys it." and

"Yet at least one of the authors of the harvesting system did know about it, since the "RequestDistribution.txt" document in the harvester source code actually contains a reference to the W3C standard for ROBOTS.TXT."

Your honor, I would submit that one or the other of those statements is not true.

And robots.txt is -not- a W3C standard. It is a voluntary agreement among web spider authors.

From:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html

"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it. Consider it a common facility the majority of robot authors offer the WWW community to protect WWW server against unwanted accesses by their robots."

If fact, WC3 -explicity- says on their web site that robots.txt is not a compulsary standard:

http://validator.w3.org/docs/checklink#bot

"Note that /robots.txt rules affect only user agents that honor it; it is not a generic method for access control."

If you're going to accuse your employer of illegal activity, you sure better have your facts right.

I've already blogged about it a little here, but I think the reason the DSM got ignored is because it's unsubstantiated. I mean, does the left really need another raTHer-gate/Quran-desecration mess on its hands? Basically, you have somebody gives a piece of paper to the media, and all of a sudden it's absolutely accurate? I'm sorry, but we need more substantiation to it than that.

Go ahead, mod me flamebait and silence me, if you want. I really don't care.

And not just that, but the effect of the DSM has been overblown. IIRC, the big thing about it was that it said intelligence was being fixed around policy. Not that it was being made up, but that they wanted to pursue a specific course of action, and so they chose to emphasize certain intelligence more than others.

And while we're on that vein, let's not forget that we already had a congressional probe which said the Bush administration did NOT lie about what the intelligence said, the intelligence was wrong. Everybody thought Iraq had WMD, including John Kerry!

That wasn't TCPA, that was SDMI. TCPA is an encryption based technology. SDMI was a watermark based technology. SDMI is all but dead at this point.

I think you are both right. It can mean both very large and vast, or very wicked.

Source

• Start with a Windows 2000/XP system with empty CD drives.

  1. Click the Start button and select Control Panel from the Start Menu.
  2. Double-click on the System control panel icon.
  3. Select the Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button.
  4. Configure Device Manager by clicking "Show hidden devices" and "Devices by connection," both from the View menu.
  5. Insert the Anthony Hamilton CD into the computer and allow the SunnComm software to start. If MediaMax has never been started before on the same computer, the SbcpHid driver should appear on the list for the first time. However, on some systems Windows needs to be rebooted before the driver becomes visible.

  Next, follow these additional steps to disable MediaMax:

  1. Select the SbcpHid driver from the Device Manager list and click "Properties" from the Action Menu.
  2. Click the Driver tab and click the Stop button to disable the driver.
  3. Set the Startup Type to "Disabled" using the dropdown list.

  Also, I'd suggest disabling autorun.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52665, 00.html
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/

I'm a researcher working on high performance computing and have used various configurations of Simultaneous Multithreading (aka Hyperthreading aka CMT) (Intel Xeon, IBM POWER5). The result is always the same - at the end, memory latencies and OS overheads kill most of the gains of instruction level parallelism coming from SMT. Look at it this way - the typical latencies of operations on most modern processors are of the order of 1 nanosecond, whereas DRAM latencies are of the order of 200ns. As long as you can't do anything about this latency, there's no point in cutting down on processing times. There's a very nice paper in this year's ACM SIGMETRICS that gives real experimental data to illustrate this fact - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~yruan/XeonSMT/smt.pdf The paper shows that the speedups obtained using SMT in practice are meagre. The reason that the simulation results coming from the original UWashington research on the subject - http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/ - looked far better was their use of unreasonably large caches in their simulations, and that they completely ignored the OS overhead of enabling SMT - which is non-negligeable - and is a thing that has been pointed out often on the Linux Kernel mailing list as well.

Correct. If you read up on the folks running it (http://www.princeton.edu/~sacraver/, http://www.ee.binghamton.edu/pages/craver.html, http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/), you'll see that much of their research has obvious military and national security applications (see http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/projects.htm l for examples).

Other articles, such as http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/howT.htm, http://inside.binghamton.edu/May-June/10MAY01/frid rich.html, and especially http://inside.binghamton.edu/November-December/13d ec01/security.html point to the common theme of research into countering covertly evil data or programs. This contest, then, could contribute towards this goal by offering numerous known examples of how innocent-looking code could conceal malicious conduct. Presumably this knowledge would/could be rolled into systems for intercepting or identifying actual instances of this kind of sneakiness "in the real world" (ie, our good friend Homeland Security).

I am also captivated by Dr. Fridrich's Rubix cube skills. And to think, I just graduated from SUNY B and never even met her. A shame.

Deconvolution.

FTFA: The team will use a process, called deconvolution, to remedy the situation. Deconvolution is widely used in image processing and involves the reversal of the distortion created by the faulty lens of a camera or other optical devices, like a telescope or microscope.

Until computers can feel gloomy because of gloomy weather, or can be thrilled because the millenium dawns at midnight, five minutes from now, they won't be able to produce performances that truly move us in the same way that human performances do, because that element of unconscious situational communication and solidarity in shared experience is missing.

Personally I think much of the beauty of art is sociological. In the right mood you can see art in a dog squat, but for the most part we stick to admiring what other people admire. A painting is worthless during an artist's lifetime, later sells for $40M after the artist achieves greatness retrospectively, then debate erupts over whether the painting was actually the work of "poorly skilled" forger. But there's no consensus, because everybody reads the tea leaves differently. In other words, the art itself really has little intrinsic value.

Pointless must be a Kiwi euphonism for useless...

No, pointless is standard English for without purpose. No Kiwi about it, and no euphony either, although the idea is amusing.

Surely you have heard, or asked, "What is the point of...?"

PS The word is euphemism.

That's ironic. By equating evangelism with marketing, you echo (unconsciously, I assume) Microsoft's "Your potential, our passion!"

Nope, just echoing the dotcom BS where numerous businesses employed "evangelists", instead of marketing directors. M$ is just one of many.

But they're not the same thing. A marketeer is a hired gun who helps you find a market. An evangelist (in Greek, it means "bringer of good news") is a true believer who wants to make the world a better place. Billy Graham doesn't evangelize because he's worried about empty churches -- he wants to save souls.

Disagree. The formal definition of evangelist is somebody who promotes the christian gospel. Informally, it's just a promotor of something, whether a religion, a product or an idea.

I'm all for Linux advocates thinking less like evangelists and more like marketeers. Then they'd think more about solving the problems of potential Linux users, and less about telling everybody how cool Linux is.

Both are needed, one to promote feedback and continuous improvement, the other to neutralise the mountain of biased BS that M$ and similar companies put out.

It's stupid to pretend M$ and similar companies spending large sums of money trying to kill FOSS mindshare is not harmful. They want to marginalise FOSS. That's not going to happen.

---

GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.

Congratulations everybody, world domination. ;-)

Linear programming was among the first "real" applications of digital computers. I saw Dantzig give a talk about it at an INFORMS conference back in the 1980s.

It seems that in a visit to Von Neumann in 1947 he described LP and the simplex method a bit. (See http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7802.ht ml.) It seems that Von Neumann understood everything pretty much immediately, and even derived the dual solution to LP in the first sitting.

I suppose we all know what Von Neumann did next ...

Linear programming was among the first "real" applications of digital computers. I saw Dantzig give a talk about it at an INFORMS conference back in the 1980s.

It seems that in a visit to Von Neumann in 1947 he described LP and the simplex method a bit. (See http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7802.ht ml.) It seems that Von Neumann understood everything pretty much immediately, and even derived the dual solution to LP in the first sitting.

I suppose we all know what Von Neumann did next ...

To brush me off with broad accusations is totally unfounded and unwarranted; you are making assumptions about my abilities and accuracy to research the subject that is only founded on your personal opinion.

Your assumption that the ability to "evolve" in general is being disputed or questioned by the scientific community is inaccurate, what is in question is the specific assertion that "abiogenesis" is a fact, which it is not, and the assertion that non related species evolve into non related species.

I will spell it out in simple terms so there is no need for speculation:

Abiogenesis: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+Abi ogenesis&btnG=Google+Search/

• The hypothetical process where life spontaneously formed from organic material that had arisen from inorganic material.
• http://www.carm.net/evolution/evoterms.htm/
• A hypothetical organic phenomenon by which living organisms are created from nonliving matter http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn/
• Abiogenesis, in its most general sense, is the hypothetical generation of life from non-living matter. Today, the term is primarily used in the context of biology and the origin of life.Some confusion exists on this topic, because early concepts of abiogenesis were later proven to be incorrect. These early concepts of spontaneous generation (referred to here as "Aristotelian abiogenesis" for clarity) held that living organisms could be "born" out of decaying organic substances, et cetera, whic en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis/

Would there not be geological evidence in rocks of 4 to 3.8 billion years old, if there had been such a soup? The space science studies board believes there should be: '_These speculations on chemical evolution, multiple origins of life, and models of early environmental conditions in the atmosphere and oceans can only be substantiated by the geological record_.' What testimony would have been left behind by the primeval soup in the sedimentary rocks? We can learn this directly from the work of those scientists who take the primeval soup for granted. All methods of simulating the formation of amino acids and other 'building blocks' leave a tarry polymeric material as their most abundant product. Carbon that was once composed of living matter is slightly enriched in 12^C. No chemical reaction, heat, pressure or other treatment to which these ancient rocks may have been subjected can change one of these isotopes to another. Thus the carbon isotope ratio is a reliable and indestructable fingerprint to determine whether carbonaceous material, including kerogen, came from living organisms or by inorganic chemistry from a primordial carbon source.

Sedimentary rocks at Isua in Greenland have been dated at 3.8 billion years ago, a time near the end of the late heavy bombardment. They do indeed contain kerogen. Schidlowski reported that all carbon in these rocks divides distinctly into two groups, one high in 13^C and one depleted in 13^C, with respect to the isotope ratio found in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The kerogen of the very old Isua rocks is depleted in 13^C. This is just what would be expected if the kerogen had been derived from cyano- bacteria-like microorganisms capable of photosynthesis of carbon dioxide and nitrogen by means of an enzyme system to form living matter.

According to the standard model for the origin of life, there are two paths the carbon would follow in the primeval soup. The first is toward forming the ancient protobiont, the remains of which would go to kerogen. The second, and the much more abundant amount, is the tarry material generated in all origin-of-life simulation experiments. No kerog

Ever try to sell a diamond? It's basically impossible (or at least, you can't expect to get more than about 20% of it's *cough* "value").

http://www.princeton.edu/~amoroz/2004/11/have-you- ever-tried-to-sell-diamond.html

When you buy a diamond, you're essentially buying it from DeBeers. They control the diamond market. Jewlery stores, though, don't buy diamonds from DeBeers, they sell them on commission, and can return anything they don't sell.

So, quite aside from the fact that diamonds are, at best, semi-precious in terms of rarity, in order for a jewler to buy your diamond, if they wanted to pay "market price", they'd have to pay you considerably more than they'd pay DeBeers for the same quality diamond, and they'd have to take a risk that they wouldn't have to take buying a diamond from DeBeers (what if your diamond doesn't sell?). Neither is attractive, so the market for selling diamonds is essentially non-existant.

Anyone remember this?

of course, no Mac users have ever been accused of being zealots

apologist: a person who argues to defend or justify some policy or institution
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn2.0?s tage=1&word=apologist

Dear Sir or Madam,

I realize the English might not be your first language and I'm kind of embarrassed that I have to point this out but USian is not a real word. Although at first it may sound correct, the preferred term of referring to a United States citizen is generally American. Please don't think of me as a grammar Nazi, I'm only pointing this out because /. is admittedly US centric.

While calling someone from Brazil, Panama, or Paraguay "American" would indeed be technically correct, citizens of those and other nations on the North & South American continents (in my personal experience) don't readily refer to themselves as "Americans", and you'd probably get strange looks naming them such.

I ask of you not to mistake the average United States citizen calling them self "American" (in the context of being from the US) as arrogance. It is a term that has been used by generations of people from all around the world. I often catch the BBC World News (A British Telecast) on a local channel here in the US. They regularly identify people from my country as "Americans". Another good example is the English language telecast of a Chinese news report that is occasionally on our C-SPAN (a US government public affairs cable channel) network. I guarantee you'll hear the term "American" being used here when titling US citizens. Please accept my apologies for the lack of a hyper-link, I've only caught the broadcast several times and I am unsure what the correct webpage to forward you to would be.

I hope this helps explain things. Using the correct term "American" should make your future posts on Slashdot more clear and meaningful to the other readers. This will ensure the information you are sharing....

...Oh, you're just being a dick.

That's very similar to Europe. They have a higher percentage of broad band usage than the U.S. They also have a higher population density.

Even more interesting but off topic. Compare the population density map of the US to the 2004 election results.

My alma mater, Princeton University, was founded in 1746. We have been known as "the tigers" since before 1900, but the exact year that the mascot began is uncertain.

http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_old/PAW98-99 /14-0421/0421feat.html

Can we use this ring lens to search for a rotating black hole, through which to study the future history of the universe?

It's modded +5 funny, but this is my professor we're talking about. They already did this. See http://www.ee.princeton.edu/CAP/CAP2005/speaker_pr ofiles.html

This "new" approach of achieving fusion using strong electric fields is of much greater significance than just academic interest in fusion research. It may well lead directly to EM-pulse-based clean-fusion bombs that don't need a fallout-producing plutonium atomic-bomb trigger. There are a LOT of ways to produce REALLY strong electromagnetic fields for a fraction of a second and let's face it, many of these can be done in your basement. So...are homemade nukes closer as a result of this discovery?

::digs around for relevant info::

First off, here's the web page for Ron Weiss, the scientist mentioned in the article.

Here's (what I think is) the relevant publication on the topic:

A synthetic multicellular system for programmed pattern formation

Subhayu Basu, Yoram Gerchman, Cynthia H. Collins, Frances H. Arnold and Ron Weiss

Nature 434, 1130-1134 (28 April 2005)

Pattern formation is a hallmark of coordinated cell behaviour in both single and multicellular organisms1, 2, 3. It typically involves cellcell communication and intracellular signal processing. Here we show a synthetic multicellular system in which genetically engineered 'receiver' cells are programmed to form ring-like patterns of differentiation based on chemical gradients of an acyl-homoserine lactone (AHL) signal that is synthesized by 'sender' cells. In receiver cells, 'band-detect' gene networks respond to user-defined ranges of AHL concentrations. By fusing different fluorescent proteins as outputs of network variants, an initially undifferentiated 'lawn' of receivers is engineered to form a bullseye pattern around a sender colony. Other patterns, such as ellipses and clovers, are achieved by placing senders in different configurations. Experimental and theoretical analyses reveal which kinetic parameters most significantly affect ring development over time. Construction and study of such synthetic multicellular systems can improve our quantitative understanding of naturally occurring developmental processes and may foster applications in tissue engineering, biomaterial fabrication and biosensing.

This conference abstract is also pretty darned cool:

Dynamic Control in a Coordinated Multi-Cellular Maze Solving System

Hsu, Allen (Princeton Univ.), Vijayan, Vikram (Princeton Univ.), Fomundam, Lawrence (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County), Gerchman, Yoram (Princeton Univ.), Basu, Subhayu (Princeton Univ.), Karig, David (Princeton Univ.), Hooshangi, Sara (Princeton Univ.), Weiss, Ron (Princeton Univ.)

2005 American Control Conference

Control system theory provides convenient tools and concepts for describing and analyzing complex cell functions. In this paper we demonstrate the use of control theory to forward-engineer a complex synthetic gene network constructed from several modular components. Specifically, we present the design and simulation of a synthetic multi-cellular maze-solving system. Here, bacterial cells are programmed to use artificial cell-to-cell communication and regulatory feedback in order to illuminate the correct path in a user-defined maze of cells arranged on a surface. Simulations were used to analyze the system's spatiotemporal dynamics and sensitivity to various kinetic parameters. Experiments with Escherichia coli were carried out to characterize the diffusion properties of artificial cell-to-cell communication based on bacterial quorum sensing systems. The rational design process and simulation tools employed in this study provide an example for future engineering of complex synthetic gene networks comprising multiple control system motifs.

A bit is a unit of capacity to store information.

Meter (metre), for example,, is officially defined as a distance light travels in vacuum in a certain fraction of a second.

Bit is the information needed to chose between two equally probable options...

But don't feel too bad -- in Google's own collection of definitions only one seems correct -- that by the WordNet people...

It is not only "Asian" think lot of major cos. will buy it. Thay are equaly responsible, what thay are pushing to the end user.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jhalderm/cd3/

GE makes NUKES! It's their job. They crank them out like candy.

If you're going to accuse any company of cranking out any kind of weapons "like candy," at least be sure to include Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Raytheon (in that order), because they are the real big dogs in that industry. Unless you have better information than I do, GE isn't even in the defense market anymore. They sold that off to Lockheed-Martin years ago (please feel free to correct me if you have more recent information). In any case, your panic about BIG, SCARY NUKES just makes you look ignorant.

I've known about a similar technology since 1999 (although I'm not sure it's exactly the same one that Hitachi is using). It's nice that its finally being commercialized. The technical term is "Quantized Magnetic Disk" and you can find a paper here
http://www.princeton.edu/~chouweb/paper7.pdf.

TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders!

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.

The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) makes it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires.

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 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 chips before molded deep into tires! :

http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html

(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertess usually into the url above 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 prototype WAS at :
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html ...but the link finally died in July 2004 and the new location does not have a photo of a RFID bridge underpass collector. But does discuss thhe toll booth RFID uses...

http://www.telematics-wireless.com/site/index1.php ?ln=en&main_id=33

but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.

The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessin

And how many big cats are left? Lion, lynx... lynx is overused and probably won't be picked... Any other names?

If only there were some sort of reference source where you could enter a noun and see all of its hyponyms, like for instance all the hyponyms of cat . (A hyponym of a word is a word that describes a more specific type of that thing. For example, truck and car are hyponyms of vehicle, and sedan is a hyponym of car.)

Anyway, now that I've given away the answers, I want to see Mac OS X "Sabretooth". :-)

And how many big cats are left? Lion, lynx... lynx is overused and probably won't be picked... Any other names?

If only there were some sort of reference source where you could enter a noun and see all of its hyponyms, like for instance all the hyponyms of cat . (A hyponym of a word is a word that describes a more specific type of that thing. For example, truck and car are hyponyms of vehicle, and sedan is a hyponym of car.)

Anyway, now that I've given away the answers, I want to see Mac OS X "Sabretooth". :-)

You designate "appealing to authority" as fallacious. This is an alias for "appealing to misleading authority."

Theological arguments aside, the Christian Bible IS a misleading authority when applied legal argments in the US. The law of the land is based on the Constitution of the United States, not the Bible. This country is most emphatically NOT a theocracy.

The issue at hand is whether or not the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection under the law (14th amendment) and free practice of religion (1st amendment), are being violated by refusing to grant legal recognition to the enduring relationships maintained by one segment of the population. All you accomplish by bringing the Bible into the argument is acknowledge that the prohibition of all marriages other than Christian ones is an establishment of religion, and is therefore explicitly unconstitutional. Invoking religion automatically invalidates your argument from a Constitutional perspective.

The legitimate authorities on Constitutional law are the Constitution and it's amendments, the Federalist Papers, and Supreme Court rulings. Other writings of the framers of the Constitution (such as the private papers of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Hamilton; as well as preceding documents (such as the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Declaration of Independence) are legitimate authorities in the specific instances where they illuminate the mindset and intentions of the Constitution's authors.

The only legitimate place where the Bible can enter a Constitutional law debate at all is in the instances where the Founding Fathers cite it as inspiration; however, all this does is place the Bible on equal footing with other inspriational sources, the most important of these being the writings of Enlightement philosophers such as Hobbes, Voltaire, and Rousseau.

I'd remind you that when the Framers mentioned "God", they were not talking about the God modern fundimentalist Christians worship. The architects of the Constitution were predominantly Deists and Enlightenment scholars, not Christians as a modern Fundimentalist would define it. Their God was "nature's God" (as Jefferson puts it in the Declaration of Independence); this God was viewed a celestial clockmaker who created the Universe and set it in motion, and did not interfere in it's operation thereafter. When they spoke of the "laws of God", they were talking about the laws of Science and Reason as they understood them, not a mass of primitive superstituious gobbledegook.

To dissect your claim that the Christian Bible is a legitimate authority in the Gay Marriage debate:

Is this a matter which I can decide without appeal to expert opinion? If the answer is "yes", then do so. If "no", go to the next question:

Moral issues are not easily decided given the limits of human understanding, so an appeal to authority is useful

Two probems here. First, this is a CONSTITUTIONAL LAW issue, not a MORAL issue. Second, even if it were a moral issue, moral issues ARE easily within the limits of human understanding.

The universal, rational basis of moral behavior is exceedingly simple: do no unnecessary harm to others. Everything else derives from this simple concept. Judeism and Christianity acknowledge this, in a roundabout way (the 10 commandments are mostly just a list of specific ways of harming others, and the Sermon at the Mount Jesus says the s

Does anybody know of any grammar checkers for Linux ???

I think they mean vole as in the animal vole - a vole is kind of like a small rat. Here's something from Wordnet:
"any of various small mouselike rodents of the family Cricetidae (especially of genus Microtus) having a stout short-tailed body and inconspicuous ears and inhabiting fields or meadows" (from Wordnet)

Kind of a slick way to call them a rat, if I do say so myself!

FWIW, the paper this morning was pointing out how this discovery might leave a gaping hole in evolutionary theory. The crux of the problem is that "micro-evolution" as it were, is dependant on an organism's ability to mutate from generation to generation. If a mechanism exists that prevents or corrects mutations across generations, then the theorists may *again* have to go back to the drawing board.

The finding poses a puzzle for evolutionary theory because it corrects mutations, which evolution depends on as generators of novelty. Dr. Meyerowitz said he did not see this posing any problem for evolution because it seems to happen only rarely. "What keeps Darwinian evolution intact is that this only happens when there is something wrong," Dr. Surridge said.

I've read enough of your posts to guess you didn't mean to suggest this "gaping hole" in evolutionary theory implies that creationism is a better alternative, but do watch your rhetoric. This is a violation of Mendel's laws of inheritance, but Mendel was just a monk growing peas. Biology is mind-bogglingly complex. There are so many biological checks and balances, circular pathways, regulator proteins (and proteins that regulate the regulator proteins). If the article had a little more meat regarding the "hothead" gene in question, this would be more interesting. How much different was the mutated protein from the wildtype? If it was just a single base difference, there could have been ten different ways the mutation was repaired. If there were several amino acids difference in the final protein sequence, that would be much more exciting. Okay, after a bit of research I can answer my own question:

"Yet in the Pruitt-Lolle lab, a small but steady percentage of hothead offspring had normal flowers, like their grandparents'. Somehow, the mutation -- a single misspelled "letter" of genetic code in a gene made of 1,782 molecular letters -- was being repaired."

Incidentally, it is much easier than I once thought to create a functional protein from scratch, if you know what you're doing. This guy at Princeton, who gave a seminar at my workplace recently, created proteins made of four alpha helices just by varying the amino acids by polarity. And the most surprising part is that some of these de novo proteins have enzymatic activity! Some can bind to heme and then act as peroxidases. Some act as esterases. It was suggested that perhaps primordial proteins were highly non-specific, or multi-functional, and only later evolved specificity.

I know, even calling this thing "pathological science" is elevating it over its true status (plain old fraud). I think that a) it is time for Slashdot to create a new category called "pathological science" where people who care about such things can discuss them and laugh at them and b) everyone should read this classic paper about pathological science. Pathological science has quite a few recurring themes and hallmarks which would should all be aware of, and when we see them, we should be extra-skeptical. Note that this paper I linked to is a classic, meaning it was published in the days before the concept of nanotech. I think that talking about nanotech in marketing materials should add an extra helping skepticism to any analysis.

I don't know if someone posted about this yet.
But come on noone been able to prove this phenomena in almost 25 years now.

I've seen it a live, a BBC reporter using just his mind to make the graph of a computer
(spinning the equivalent of 1 billion coins a second) go upwards.
Pure mind over matter.
The reporter was every bit sceptical like most of us.
Of course I would love it to test it myself.

Princeton Engineering Anomaly Research

If it was hocus-pocus it would have been scrapped from Princeton University by now.

The Hrobjartsson meta-analysis (the story that you ulitmately link to) is intetersting, but in the end it shows that placebo does not resolve people's sysmptoms (it doesn't actually make people get better), which is not surprising, since we know placebo does not actually have any curative powers! They were looking at placebo in disease state, and we know the basis of disease is almost never something can be wished away,even if you believe the placebo is working.

But whether or not the placebo effect actually alters people's perception is another matter, and not one that I'm convinced has been discredited. Some of my colleagues took this seriously and performed a brain imaging study and found that placebo actually changed the way people's brains perceive pain (they examined placebo analgesia) in those people subject to the placebo effect (report less pain with placebo). Namely, people show less activity in pain-related areas and more activity in "control" areas that may be overriding or dampening pain processing. Mind over experience.

I'm a web developer (PHP, primarily). Web developers get hobs based on their portfolios.

Considering one definition of hob is a small grotesque supernatural creature that makes trouble for human beings, I can see where PHP experience would give you some familiarity with them.

Nope. There are many ways to wrongfully cause someone's death that don't involve premeditation.

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stag e=1&word=murder

Maybe they meant this.

"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams

"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" George Washington

It's hard to believe that men who did not believe that God gave revelation to men (according to your definition of deism), would write this in the document that they signed: " and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them". If your definition is correct, to what would the "Laws of Nature's God" be referring to?

In fact, John Witherspoon, a delegate from New Jersey, was an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland. I think that would disqualify him as a Deist.

Many early settlers who came to the New World were seeking freedom from religion oppression; many of these groups were seperatists from the Church of England. Their frame of reference was The Act of Supremecy of 1534, which recognized the King of England as "the only supreme head of the Church of England". When these colonists formed their own goverment, they wanted to avoid the pitfalls of this union of church and state.

Regardless of their positions on organized religion, the value systems of the vast majority of colonists was unquestionably Christian. Most had not been exposed to Hinduism, or to the teachings of Muhammad. Yes, they were brilliant thinkers, men of reason and judgement, but they also came from a Christian society, and the system of government they architected reflects those basic values.

One of the examples Kahneman cited was research of addmittance process in medical school. According to it, medical school was much better off when making decision just by looking at the application, as opposed to interviewing prospects, because after interview people in charge of admission were much more likely to use their intuition, which led to more mistakes than they would make, have they based their decision on statistics.

Actually, I thought this is the best evidence for a sixth-sense in humans.

California should sink into the Pacific Ocean and get it over with already...

Anybody with even a minuscule ammount of knowledge in the fields of plate tectonics or politcs knows that the western half of California is shifting towards Canada.

[The positive integers] are the solution to the simple linear recurrance equation a_n = a_n-1 + 1 with a_1 = 1.

Whoa! I just thought of something. So since suddenly all /.ers began thinking about the random number generators, were there any fluctuations in the readings?

Has anyone submitted a prediction that Slashdotting the site is a "major event"?

What are your grounds for dismissing the random number generator story? I am interested because what I have read so far on the Princeton site has, at best, not convinced me either way on the matter.

What information have you that causes you to dismiss a serious scientific study to readily?