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There may be reasons to question "the big bang" (e.g. using branes). However, your analogy of a `full coffee cup' is idiotic. There is a (spectulative) theory that a new form of matter (kind of like a Bose condensate) does exist at extremely high density but nothing in that theory prevents more matter from being added to the extremely dense object. Not to be unkind and realizing that a single /. post is not enough evidence with which to work but ... you sound like a kook.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
CTO, Immunix Inc.

This is available in PDF here. Interesting read!

This is patently false. You only believe it to be true because you are obviously an imbecile. Your own quotation of my statement shows that your statement is patently false. MY viewpoint SPECIFICALLY STATES:

"This is acceptable behavior only when the illegitimate action in question is the only recourse you have."

And I gave a specfic case where alternatives existed (Rosa Parks). It really shouldn't be this hard to understand.

You ... are ... an ... idiot. I NEVER said that you should never break the law.

While you got one thing right, you didn't say "you should never break the law". But you did say that you should never break the law when alternatives exist. Read your own quote of....yourself. (above)

YOU are not justified in YOUR action.

What action? I've never claimed to have made any.

You have NOTHING to do with Rosa Parks.

I didn't claim to. From my original post regarding Rosa Parks:
"(And before you start making crazy assumptions: I used Rosa Parks as an example of the problems with your logic, not as an analogy for file traders.)"

Reading comprehesion is not your strongpoint is it?
example
analogy

And, incidentally, if you don't like me insulting you, feel free to use your foes list. You have it for a reason.

I'm not worried about it. All it really does is make you look bad. Ad hominem attacks are the last resort of someone who is loosing an arguement.

This is patently false. You only believe it to be true because you are obviously an imbecile. Your own quotation of my statement shows that your statement is patently false. MY viewpoint SPECIFICALLY STATES:

"This is acceptable behavior only when the illegitimate action in question is the only recourse you have."

And I gave a specfic case where alternatives existed (Rosa Parks). It really shouldn't be this hard to understand.

You ... are ... an ... idiot. I NEVER said that you should never break the law.

While you got one thing right, you didn't say "you should never break the law". But you did say that you should never break the law when alternatives exist. Read your own quote of....yourself. (above)

YOU are not justified in YOUR action.

What action? I've never claimed to have made any.

You have NOTHING to do with Rosa Parks.

I didn't claim to. From my original post regarding Rosa Parks:
"(And before you start making crazy assumptions: I used Rosa Parks as an example of the problems with your logic, not as an analogy for file traders.)"

Reading comprehesion is not your strongpoint is it?
example
analogy

And, incidentally, if you don't like me insulting you, feel free to use your foes list. You have it for a reason.

I'm not worried about it. All it really does is make you look bad. Ad hominem attacks are the last resort of someone who is loosing an arguement.

That still doesn't make it literature. Although you can differ about the definition of "literature", take a look at this definition from WordNet. I think people here are confusing meanings 1 and 3. There is no Nobel prize for any other meaning than #1.

I like the scripting in Grace, but it had quite a learning curve. I found that the python bindings were useful. For scripted plots, supermongo (not free) is popular, but I think Grace is prettier.

I guess that's what would make it attractive to the Bush administration, whose science policy has been called into question. Backing bogus research allows them to point at support of alternative energy sources without taking a risk of actually finding something that might threaten their oil company bedmates.

Probably not.

Try this version.

Not really... microlensing causes an increase in the brightness of the star, not a change in the apperent position.

I'm no expert, but the gory details page notes that the microlensing event does cause a change in the apparent position (see this pic). In fact, you're seeing two distorted copies of the star.

It's just that in this case, there's not enough distance between the distorted images, so they show up as a single, brighter dot where there used to be a single, duller dot.

The AC's exaggerated angular distance can be attributed to the limitations of ASCII art. I can't find a character with an angle that small, although this is a pretty good approximation: ||

Not really... microlensing causes an increase in the brightness of the star, not a change in the apperent position.

I'm no expert, but the gory details page notes that the microlensing event does cause a change in the apparent position (see this pic). In fact, you're seeing two distorted copies of the star.

It's just that in this case, there's not enough distance between the distorted images, so they show up as a single, brighter dot where there used to be a single, duller dot.

The AC's exaggerated angular distance can be attributed to the limitations of ASCII art. I can't find a character with an angle that small, although this is a pretty good approximation: ||

Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
Result sound viewed with -60 threshold
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold

And the following image is a spectrogram of the original "Goodbye Irene" file:

Original sound viewed with -42 threshold

Each of these spectrograms was computed using 1024 point Discrete Fourier Transforms with a factor of 8 overlap. The dimensions of the images are unlabeled, but provide a frequency range of 0Hz - 22050Hz along the vertical axis, and approximately 344 horizontal pixels represent one second of time. Darkness represents the magnitude of the signal at a particular measured frequency.

With significant interest, I can perhaps label these axes for easier reading. Simply keep in mind that the top of the vertical dimension represents 22050 Hz.

Given the sound quality of the result sound provided, utilizing 16-bit quantization with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz is more than adequate. But while the result is promising, it is hardly archival quality in my opinion, due to the obvious digital artifacts.

The dynamic range of this particular music is confined by musical convention and the microphone technology available for the recording. The theoretical 96dB of dynamic range availed by 16-bit quantization is more than sufficient to represent the dynamic range of this particular music (and many others) recorded with similarly early microphony and disc-cutting technology.

The frequency range of the music does not appear (in this result mind you) to have significant musical information above an approximate (but conservative) 11000 Hz. The frequency range availed by a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz is more than adequate to quite faithfully represent this music. To significantly reduce the broadband pops and crackles in the recording, high frequency information is lost. Further, the recording technology available at the time probably could not accurately transduce such frequencies from the original performance either.

The spectrogram reveals that the undulating noise in the result sound occurs at a nearly precise 5Hz. It also reveals that this "noise" is obviously an artifact of the restoration process; it really isn't noise, but the result of a time-varying filter which cuts gaussian lobes into the spectrum of the music from approximately 4000Hz to 9200Hz in a manner somewhat a kin to a wah wah pedal. The lobes can be seen clearly in all of the spectrograms I provided, but they appear more stark as the peak threshold of the spectral plots decrease. Their duration is quite close to .05 seconds.

In my opinion, archives should preserve physical recording media as long as possible to allow transduction techniques to mature. I find the 5Hz filtering artifact present in this result to make the current state of this particular optical transduction process unacceptable for archiving. It would be a shame to replace physical media with music colored with such avoidable artifacts. I am sure that such artifacts can be alleviated and that optical scanning of phonograph records (discs and cylinders) has great promise as a transduction technique.

Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
Result sound viewed with -60 threshold
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold

And the following image is a spectrogram of the original "Goodbye Irene" file:

Original sound viewed with -42 threshold

Each of these spectrograms was computed using 1024 point Discrete Fourier Transforms with a factor of 8 overlap. The dimensions of the images are unlabeled, but provide a frequency range of 0Hz - 22050Hz along the vertical axis, and approximately 344 horizontal pixels represent one second of time. Darkness represents the magnitude of the signal at a particular measured frequency.

With significant interest, I can perhaps label these axes for easier reading. Simply keep in mind that the top of the vertical dimension represents 22050 Hz.

Given the sound quality of the result sound provided, utilizing 16-bit quantization with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz is more than adequate. But while the result is promising, it is hardly archival quality in my opinion, due to the obvious digital artifacts.

The dynamic range of this particular music is confined by musical convention and the microphone technology available for the recording. The theoretical 96dB of dynamic range availed by 16-bit quantization is more than sufficient to represent the dynamic range of this particular music (and many others) recorded with similarly early microphony and disc-cutting technology.

The frequency range of the music does not appear (in this result mind you) to have significant musical information above an approximate (but conservative) 11000 Hz. The frequency range availed by a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz is more than adequate to quite faithfully represent this music. To significantly reduce the broadband pops and crackles in the recording, high frequency information is lost. Further, the recording technology available at the time probably could not accurately transduce such frequencies from the original performance either.

The spectrogram reveals that the undulating noise in the result sound occurs at a nearly precise 5Hz. It also reveals that this "noise" is obviously an artifact of the restoration process; it really isn't noise, but the result of a time-varying filter which cuts gaussian lobes into the spectrum of the music from approximately 4000Hz to 9200Hz in a manner somewhat a kin to a wah wah pedal. The lobes can be seen clearly in all of the spectrograms I provided, but they appear more stark as the peak threshold of the spectral plots decrease. Their duration is quite close to .05 seconds.

In my opinion, archives should preserve physical recording media as long as possible to allow transduction techniques to mature. I find the 5Hz filtering artifact present in this result to make the current state of this particular optical transduction process unacceptable for archiving. It would be a shame to replace physical media with music colored with such avoidable artifacts. I am sure that such artifacts can be alleviated and that optical scanning of phonograph records (discs and cylinders) has great promise as a transduction technique.

Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
Result sound viewed with -60 threshold
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold

And the following image is a spectrogram of the original "Goodbye Irene" file:

Original sound viewed with -42 threshold

Each of these spectrograms was computed using 1024 point Discrete Fourier Transforms with a factor of 8 overlap. The dimensions of the images are unlabeled, but provide a frequency range of 0Hz - 22050Hz along the vertical axis, and approximately 344 horizontal pixels represent one second of time. Darkness represents the magnitude of the signal at a particular measured frequency.

With significant interest, I can perhaps label these axes for easier reading. Simply keep in mind that the top of the vertical dimension represents 22050 Hz.

Given the sound quality of the result sound provided, utilizing 16-bit quantization with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz is more than adequate. But while the result is promising, it is hardly archival quality in my opinion, due to the obvious digital artifacts.

The dynamic range of this particular music is confined by musical convention and the microphone technology available for the recording. The theoretical 96dB of dynamic range availed by 16-bit quantization is more than sufficient to represent the dynamic range of this particular music (and many others) recorded with similarly early microphony and disc-cutting technology.

The frequency range of the music does not appear (in this result mind you) to have significant musical information above an approximate (but conservative) 11000 Hz. The frequency range availed by a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz is more than adequate to quite faithfully represent this music. To significantly reduce the broadband pops and crackles in the recording, high frequency information is lost. Further, the recording technology available at the time probably could not accurately transduce such frequencies from the original performance either.

The spectrogram reveals that the undulating noise in the result sound occurs at a nearly precise 5Hz. It also reveals that this "noise" is obviously an artifact of the restoration process; it really isn't noise, but the result of a time-varying filter which cuts gaussian lobes into the spectrum of the music from approximately 4000Hz to 9200Hz in a manner somewhat a kin to a wah wah pedal. The lobes can be seen clearly in all of the spectrograms I provided, but they appear more stark as the peak threshold of the spectral plots decrease. Their duration is quite close to .05 seconds.

In my opinion, archives should preserve physical recording media as long as possible to allow transduction techniques to mature. I find the 5Hz filtering artifact present in this result to make the current state of this particular optical transduction process unacceptable for archiving. It would be a shame to replace physical media with music colored with such avoidable artifacts. I am sure that such artifacts can be alleviated and that optical scanning of phonograph records (discs and cylinders) has great promise as a transduction technique.

Result sound viewed with -42 threshold
Result sound viewed with -60 threshold
Result sound viewed with -42 threshold

And the following image is a spectrogram of the original "Goodbye Irene" file:

Original sound viewed with -42 threshold

Each of these spectrograms was computed using 1024 point Discrete Fourier Transforms with a factor of 8 overlap. The dimensions of the images are unlabeled, but provide a frequency range of 0Hz - 22050Hz along the vertical axis, and approximately 344 horizontal pixels represent one second of time. Darkness represents the magnitude of the signal at a particular measured frequency.

With significant interest, I can perhaps label these axes for easier reading. Simply keep in mind that the top of the vertical dimension represents 22050 Hz.

Given the sound quality of the result sound provided, utilizing 16-bit quantization with a sampling rate of 44.1Khz is more than adequate. But while the result is promising, it is hardly archival quality in my opinion, due to the obvious digital artifacts.

The dynamic range of this particular music is confined by musical convention and the microphone technology available for the recording. The theoretical 96dB of dynamic range availed by 16-bit quantization is more than sufficient to represent the dynamic range of this particular music (and many others) recorded with similarly early microphony and disc-cutting technology.

The frequency range of the music does not appear (in this result mind you) to have significant musical information above an approximate (but conservative) 11000 Hz. The frequency range availed by a sampling frequency of 44.1 KHz is more than adequate to quite faithfully represent this music. To significantly reduce the broadband pops and crackles in the recording, high frequency information is lost. Further, the recording technology available at the time probably could not accurately transduce such frequencies from the original performance either.

The spectrogram reveals that the undulating noise in the result sound occurs at a nearly precise 5Hz. It also reveals that this "noise" is obviously an artifact of the restoration process; it really isn't noise, but the result of a time-varying filter which cuts gaussian lobes into the spectrum of the music from approximately 4000Hz to 9200Hz in a manner somewhat a kin to a wah wah pedal. The lobes can be seen clearly in all of the spectrograms I provided, but they appear more stark as the peak threshold of the spectral plots decrease. Their duration is quite close to .05 seconds.

In my opinion, archives should preserve physical recording media as long as possible to allow transduction techniques to mature. I find the 5Hz filtering artifact present in this result to make the current state of this particular optical transduction process unacceptable for archiving. It would be a shame to replace physical media with music colored with such avoidable artifacts. I am sure that such artifacts can be alleviated and that optical scanning of phonograph records (discs and cylinders) has great promise as a transduction technique.

3d model search engine

Well it's not exactly the same thing, the article posted before was about Purdue's shape searching engine while this article is about Princeton's 3D model search. Same topic, different search engines.

This image from the "gory details" gives you a quick understanding of what they mean. Pretty cool that they use one star to see the planet around another star.

Hubble can take pretty (for me as a non-astronomer) pictures of objects far away and in the past [...] and yet it can't take a picture of something within our system larger than a pixel.

Now you may start to get a sense of just how mind-freakingly big some interstellar objects are. This logarithmic maps of the universe should help put things in perspective. Once you've got the image, start from the very bottom and work your way up. And keep repeating to yourself, "another order of magnitude... and another order of magnitude... and another..."

this could be all you, slashdot guys. but you'd rather talk about python. there is NO excuse for not wanting the pussy. for not going out and getting some. no excuse. you can give any lame reason, but deep down inside.. YOU ARE A DESPERATE LOSER.

Joe doesn't know any local linux geeks that'll come fix something for a 6 pack of Duff

Maybe if he tried offering Gunniess instead, he would get a better reception?

Oh come on, it's not like you haven't sat down with $RELATIVE_FROM_USA to fix $COMPUTER_PROBLEM and been offered something like crudwiser. Ick.

Refined tastes on technology need not imply a favoritism to non-domestic American beverages. But this is an important facet of software that people leave out: culture.

I view that whole problem with software is not about the number of machines installed. The problem is about people, attitudes and perceptions.

I feel that addressing the difference of community will be the single most challenging task facing popular adoption of tools like Linux. The OS installed on a user's computer is a choice of that user. It is up to you to change that user's attitude. They will put up with horrid quality when they don't know of a better alternative.

In my opinion culture clash between 'Joe Sixpack Windows-User' and everybody else is dramatic. Both the Apple and $FREE_OS communities like to view themselves as fringe or special groups. They celebrate their difference from the mainstream. Pure and unadulterated Windows users form a different community than the users of Apple or $FREE_OS products. They belive the tools they have work and work adequately. The common users are people who are sufficiently content with their pre-packaged choice to not look outside the beige box. Due to bad practices by Microsoft, they also form the largest community of individual personal computer users.

It has been said that the I.Q. of a group is the lowest I.Q. of the members of the group divided by the number of members of that group (think communication overhead when talking with slow people.) Fortunately for the 'Aunt Tillies' of the world, individual users can have quite a solid grasp of basic computer skills. Unfortunately, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance imply a lot of ineria.

While 'Aunt Tillie, CTO/CFO' grasps software quality, their grasp may be of the level of the average car buyer. This is a person who only needs to know about various cars during the rare purchase of a car. In the M$ dominated media of software boxes at your local $MEGA_MART, communicating the benefits of something like Linux or Apple over Microsoft products will require overcoming the established noise level of $ billions in marketing

This is why Microsoft is 50% marketing. This is why commercial Linux distributions are a Good Thing. This is why Apple is still here. The best hackers of the world have been excellent social engineers before anything else. It's time to put that 'social' part to a very good use.

Social engineering of the common man to want quality in software, rather than just settling for third best is possible. After helping run a student organization for Linux users for a few years, I have seen remarkable progress in the quality of various distributions. However, problems with GUI's, driver availability and application compatibility are but small technical hurdles that can be solved with adequate coding.

If you care about software quality then talk to you neighbor. Show off your computers. Maybe even offer them a Guinness while you watch DVDs on your PC with those neighbors. Get the word out.

I would look at the following technologies:
WordNet is well known although not that powerfull.
Common sense is really a beta but still its a big database.
Cyc is really cool, but not all free. Look at cycL the language they developped.

I think a simple thing like having integrated access to wikipedia articles or dictionny.com from the browser would be cool. Amazon I don't know.

I don't know if anyone has posted this yet but Princeton University has had this shape searching technology for quite a while and Purdue seems to capitalizing on it, but here's Princeton's and here's mine Scar Strangled Banter

Slashdot covered the 3d search by Princeton almost two years ago. I didn't find the article too informative so I can't tell for sure if it's the same type of thing or not.

Princeton's CS school has used a search-by-shape applet to search a library of 3D models for years... they showed it off at siggraph a while ago. Check it out here.

Yahoo is their biggest competitor, and they are going for Yahoo's crown jewels [...]

Did you mean family jewels?

For example, if you smoke you get an additional 1000 mR/year (1 R/year) in addition to all the other things in the tobaco.

I call shenanigans.

From Princeton:
The Roentgen (R) is the special unit of exposure, which is the measure of the ionization produced in air by x or gamma radiation.

So, are you saying that a cigarette produces more x-rays or gamma rays than other things that would normally be put into our mouths?

Smoking is bad and causes cancer, but not because it's radioactive.

Next you'll be telling us you know more that he does.

The proofing tools CD also gives you a Dutch grammar-checker, thesaurus, hyphenator and some other tools. Most of these costs far more to develop than a spell-checker.

As I said the "official" list includes hyphenation, and it even comes with hyphenation guidelines for unknown words. Open source people have in fact jumped on this; the open office spell checking will be based on this in future.

Contrary to popular opinion, a spell-checker involves much more than a standard spelling list. You will also need either/both language model tools like a stemmer or agglutinator, OR a list of strings that includes every derivative form of a word (plurals, tenses, and other constructions).
The spellchecker by VanDale lexicografie is included for free with their dictionary. They're the most authorative source of Dutch language lexicography, though there are smaller players like Kluwer and Standaard (Belgian publisher). Mostly, academic research is shared among a conglomerate of industry partners, which includes e.g. VanDale, Kluwer, Standaard and Lernout&Hauspie.

The spell-checking code also has to handle many special cases of text and punctuation, and then it has to have suitable heuristics for determining suggestions based on keyboard layouts and common keying errors. Good spell-checkers also deal with high frequency names as well. They won't be on your government lists.
There are separate lists for high frequency names, as I'm sure you're aware. Also public domain, and available from your friendly neighborhood government statistics bureau.

The main benefit the established publishers have over open source developers and any public domain wordlists are the corpora (collections of published texts) they've collected over the years. They have access to archives of newspapers, transcripts of TV programs etc.; just like the Oxford English Dictionary, they include words in their dictionaries when they've been in significant use for a number of years (5 IIRC).

You might like to check out wordnet btw; a public domain, high quality, language tool, that includes synonyms, hyperonyms, hyponyms, meronyms, etc. and definitions. Good, good stuff. No hyphenation though.

I think most English language spellcheckers suffer quite a bit from the fact that English spelling is pretty fucked up to begin with, and that its grammer is generally described in a bullshit way (the Chomsky stuff, NP, VP, etc. Doesn't help a bit). The grammer check in Office is completely useless; it only ever tells me that "ooh, that's a long sentence" or "hey! that's a passive sentence", kind of like a mix between the paperclip and the "math is hard" barbie doll.

Ok, I'll bite, Mr Troll..

Did you actually read any of the material the site uses as reference?
There's a lot of material out there about the coming oil crisis.
Try a search in Google for "Peak Oil" and read some of the other sites.
Hmm.. maybe a geologist from Princeton might be more convincing than the site I linked to?
Or how about CNN???

The problem with MAD, though, is we've lost both the M and the A. Who else can match our arsenal?

Bottom line: We should still be plenty scared of our Russian friends. Which is just as well. MAD has worked as a deterrent for the past 50 years. As long as we are all scared of each other, nobody is crazy enough to pull the trigger.

This article you linked to is the most prolix, boring piece of crap I have had the misfortune to attempt to read lately.

You know, your computer is not a typewriter, so you really could have rewritten that part of your review...

This is the last place to look at when you've got a situation at hand - and it comes up as the first link when you google for "morning after pill". Shouldn't these guys be charged for seriously misleading people?

BTW, this site has all the correct information about this topic. In case you didn't know, Emmergency Contraception (EC) is a method of birth control when something bad happens, like your rubber breaking.

I looked up liberty with KDict, and sure enough, I couldn't find a thing in the definition that the PATRIOT Act effected.

Then what you need is a better dictionary.

Please enlighten me as to why this is news? This happens every day! It's called lobbying. Is it because it's the mother of all evil megacorps that's doing the lobbying?

Actually, no. Lobbying as an activity implies personal contact by representatives seeking legal or economic favors from a governmental body. Lobbying implies legality--we allow groups, companies and even individuals to lobby the government in accordance with rules designed to reduce abuses.

Offering financial benefits in return for those favors isn't lobbying, it is bribery which is an entirely different matter. Since 1977, the U.S. has had a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits corrupt payments to obtain, direct, or retain business, and the language of the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass the kind of activity described in the article. The FCPA even provides for a private cause of action. The U.S. is also a signatory of the CONVENTION ON COMBATING BRIBERY OF FOREIGN PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS which is certainly broad enough for this, and is administered by the OECD, and there is of course the EU's Criminal Law Convention on Corruption which probably has some application as well.

I acknowledge that you probably meant your comment sarcastically, or perhaps cynically, but this activity is not lobbying, which is an aspect of free speech. It is corruption, and it is a crime. You have the right, and indeed the duty, to demand that Microsoft be investigated and, should it appear that Microsoft's actions were motivated by a corrupt purpose within the meaning of the laws and conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, that they be prosecuted. Bear in mind that these laws penetrate the corporate identity and go after the individuals directly involved, so the potential bite of these laws is quite serious.

Please enlighten me as to why this is news? This happens every day! It's called lobbying. Is it because it's the mother of all evil megacorps that's doing the lobbying?

Actually, no. Lobbying as an activity implies personal contact by representatives seeking legal or economic favors from a governmental body. Lobbying implies legality--we allow groups, companies and even individuals to lobby the government in accordance with rules designed to reduce abuses.

Offering financial benefits in return for those favors isn't lobbying, it is bribery which is an entirely different matter. Since 1977, the U.S. has had a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits corrupt payments to obtain, direct, or retain business, and the language of the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass the kind of activity described in the article. The FCPA even provides for a private cause of action. The U.S. is also a signatory of the CONVENTION ON COMBATING BRIBERY OF FOREIGN PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS which is certainly broad enough for this, and is administered by the OECD, and there is of course the EU's Criminal Law Convention on Corruption which probably has some application as well.

I acknowledge that you probably meant your comment sarcastically, or perhaps cynically, but this activity is not lobbying, which is an aspect of free speech. It is corruption, and it is a crime. You have the right, and indeed the duty, to demand that Microsoft be investigated and, should it appear that Microsoft's actions were motivated by a corrupt purpose within the meaning of the laws and conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory, that they be prosecuted. Bear in mind that these laws penetrate the corporate identity and go after the individuals directly involved, so the potential bite of these laws is quite serious.

I think the biggest beef that developers have with Java regarding its garbage collection is its non-deterministic finalisation. This means that you have no guarantee if or when the memory held by your objects will be freed. There is no way to explicitly free memory allocated by the JVM. This doesn't often matter, except quite a lot.

If you have file handles and other resources you need to free up in an object, you have provide your own method to do so (or override Object.finalize(), remembering of course to call super.finalize(), or you may inadvertantly create a memory leak) and remember to call it explicitly. This is not the best solution.

In C++ determinstic finalization, you are guaranteed that an object's destructor will be called when either a) an object goes out of scope (in the case of a stack based object) or b) you call delete (in the case of a heap based object). You can use the object's destructor to free up resources, as you have the guarantee that it will be called.

I'm not debating the advantages of garbage collection, my major beef here is that Java's creator has taken control away from the developer. Many would find that patronising. I doubt this is a problem in most situations or for most developers, but for those situations where you need to manage your own memory, sorry, you're screwed.

It should also be noted that should you want to use garbage collection with C++, you can use one of the freely available garbage collectors out there, such as this one.

[ CONNECTION RESET BY PEER ]

The noun "perspicacity" has 2 senses in WordNet.

1. shrewdness, astuteness, perspicacity, perspicaciousness -- (intelligence manifested by being astute (as in business dealings))
2. judgment, judgement, sound judgment, sound judgement, perspicacity -- (the capacity to assess situations or circumstances shrewdly and to draw sound conclusions)

My obligitory Google searching turned up a rather unexpected thing...a PDF version of a Princeton undergraduate thesis (warning...336K PDF) on sampling in the recording industry. It's actually been an uninteresting read thus far (quite unlike my undergraduate thesis, that is, unless you like reading about graphical interfaces for Fortran namelists).

It starts off with an interesting history of the development of folk music in this country and how new words were put on standard melodies or lyrics were appropriated into new songs. Continues on to give an overview of the history of sampling. Best quote I've seen thus far: "the current system of copyright misrepresents the creation of music, considering it a purely original act rather then an event in a cultural tradition".

The thesis goes on to propose that fair use laws should be revised and a compulsatory licensing system put in place for sampling similar in structure to current "cover" style licensing to help avoid just the kinds of lawsuits while constructing a creative artistic environment. The application of copyright law in the US is so twisted these days that perhaps a system like this is needed. We really as a country should start some serious rethinking about how old concepts should apply to the modern world.

ed

Go 99 Tigers!

"Although breakage is quite rare, release of the tritium in a single sign could require a decontamination effort costing many thousands of dollars." In other words, they have to seal and decontaminate the affected area. The reason it gets expensive is that if you leave any tritium behind, it can get absorbed through the skin if your hand is damp or even if its humid. If it happens in your house, you're better off throwing away furniture, clothes, carpets in the vicinity or you risk having tritium remain in your house as dust.

(don't forget to call the radiation hotline if you break your toy)

I have to say I believe that the inflation model is going out - especially considering the guy who thought it up has a much better idea now...

Who is Jon von Neumann? If you don't know and are planning on programming you should find out. Worse, if you already have a CS degree and don't know about "von Neumann" architecture then you missed am important topic.

If you want high performance code, you must understand procedural programming and assembly language. You must understand the components of the modern "von Neumann" architecture like RAM, Registeres, L1 cache, L2 cache, ALU etc ....

While everyone has gone OOP (Object Oriented) crazy, the "von Neumann" architecture is NOT optimized for OOP programming. Because modern CPU's have lots of cache, the latency that exists between the CPU and Memory is reduced. This is called "faking" memory bandwidth, read this article on the von Nuemann bottleneck.

Serious coders should learn ASM, then move to a higher level language like 'C' then see how the 'C' statements compile in ASM and then analyze efficiency.

Modern wisdom says, be wasteful, vendors will make bigger/faster machines and we won't have to care that our code is slow, inefficient, and not optimized for the architecture. Keep in mind, you can save substantially on hardware expenditures by hiring good coders that know how to tune and optimize code but, if you don't want to be bothered, just plan on large capital expenditures every couple of years. Also write everything is JAVA and make sure you create indexes on every column of every table in your database for faster lookups.. ( I am joking, don't really do this. )

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pgubook/

It's also being used at Princeton

Yes, it would have an economic impact; no, it's not necessarily appropriate to conclude that it would be a seriously negative one.

The major currencies of the world (US dollar, Euro, Yen, GB Pound, etc.) are not backed by gold as they would have been decades or centuries ago. Without question there are still individuals, corporations, and governments that maintain some of their wealth in the form of gold bullion or other precious metals, but most don't (or shouldn't have!) put all of their eggs in one basket.

Compare the inconvenience and hardship suffered as a result of these temporary economic dislocations with the industrial benefits of having large amounts of low-cost gold available. Gold is incredible stuff--nearly completely corrosion resistant, hypoallergenic, malleable, ductile, electrically conductive...

To take a historical example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the world's largest supply of nitrates came from Chilean saltpeter. There were concerns about the supply running out--Chile supplied something like 60% of the world's nitrates, but those mines were not bottomless. Chilean mining cartels also felt no qualms about gouging the Allies in World War One. Highly unfortunate this was, because the nitrates sourced there were used to produce fertilizers and explosives--both staples of twentieth century life.

The development of the Haber process to generate ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gases changed that. Since the availability of nitrogen fertilizer was no longer limited by the availability of saltpeter deposits, modern agriculture became possible. Also, since any industrialized nation can build their own ammonia plants, the price of nitrates is no longer fixed by a mining cartel.

So--sometimes technological advances can have an economic effect. What does this have to do with jobs moving to India?

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Clear Channel never put out a "Banned Songs List" from corperate.

Oh really, I guess it was up to the DJs to decide what songs they thought that "corperate"(sic) wouldn't want to hear.

There wasn't any order from corperate as much as there was an online groupthink

So I guess it isn't quite censoprship if "corperate"(sic) lets you know the "type" of thing they object to and leaves it up to you to cover your own butts. "Groupthink" is an apropriate word for this, and banning a song like Lennon's "Imagine" after an event like 9-11 shows "groupthink" for the bullshit, bad idea, spineless pandering that it is.

The "ban" on playing the Dixie Chicks was requested by their own fans.

The drop on the playlist began the day following the comment (anticipating any record of a change in sales) and, acknowledging radio play as the advertising that it is, is an example of the power that the radio playlists have over record sales. If the playlist was actually following the popularity of the music rather than a shallow attempt at corporate manipulation of what people should (or should not) buy, then the playlist frequencies would likely reflecty the popular downloads.

AFAICT, they do not.

The "individual sheets" section under the "Figures" heading halfway down the page. It has six seperate images to print seperately.

The wonderful folks at Princeton are keeping track of our activities. Check out the effect of slashdotting on their traffic here.