Slashdot Mirror

The review is not so great in terms of accuracy i.e. there is no emacs (check out acme, sam, ed, and smacme instead) and the 640x480 resolution is nonsense. 9fans certainly isn't so grateful about this review.

Check out the Plan 9 documentation if you are interested in understanding Plan 9.

The review is not so great in terms of accuracy i.e. there is no emacs (check out acme, sam, ed, and smacme instead) and the 640x480 resolution is nonsense. 9fans certainly isn't so grateful about this review.

Check out the Plan 9 documentation if you are interested in understanding Plan 9.

Said article is being mocked on the Plan 9 mailing list: http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2006-July/ 048311.html

Precisely. We already have flapping-wing aircraft, and they fly much more efficiently than birds because we know how to make a rotating joint and nature doesn't. Consequently we flap with economical rotary motion instead of energy-wasting reciprocating motion.

There's a project at Boeing to create a hummingbird-like propulsion system. It says, "Flapping flight may be the wave of the future for aviation." Their system relies on a shape-memory-metal actuator muscle. I'm forgetting at the moment who but there was another group recently that had a big announcement about simulating muscle with shape memory metal systems.

Obviously this is still R&D, but flapping doesn't seem to be down and out just yet. (BTW, I looked it up and a hummingbird wing is just shy of 180 degree rotation with 75% of the lift from the downstroke and 25% of the lift from the upstroke). Energy consumption is high, so portable fusion generators might be a necessary prerequisite for heavy craft.

Any advice, Slashdot?

The parent AC is correct.

Big business turned the Internet (the WWW part principaly) into little more than 'online TV'. Because of all the $$$ at stake, we have probably the best search engine around, Google, drowning in ad driven/cash driven search engine spam ('spamdexing').

If you are searching for something in Google, add site:.edu to your search. By doing that. that should lead you to .edu sites who are there principally to educate rather than sell you something. If you have to do general search, add
-shipping -visa -mc -amex and the like to your search terms to block the 'ad pages'

Good Luck!

P.S. The best search engine would just index the single homepage page served up by the webserver at all 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses (minus the reserved/private/unused ones). The rationale is that if you are paying for webspace and a unique IP address, chances are good you have worthwhile content there. This would eliminate 'spamdexing' in all its forms in one bold stroke. The drawback is that 'online communities' would only be listed by the main IP webserver address and not by the URL which is why Google is in the 'mess' they are in.

If you are doing worthwhile research and want to avoid as much e-commerce as possible in the process, here again are some helpful tips....

add site:.edu in Google searches (mentioned earlier - restrict search to non-profit educational sites)

add -shipping -visa -mc -amex and the like to Google searches (mentioned earlier - helps eliminate product 'ad pages' and leave behind product review pages

search well-known 'info sites' like http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ or http://www.wikipedia.org/ If you can't find the info you want at those two places for free, the content you seek is either not on the Web or (more likely) you have to pay for it to get access. We all know how Net-savvy people hate to pay for anything they find on the Web....

As a last resort, search Google's Usenet interface at http://groups.google.com/ Helpful info can be found there but be prepared to really dig for it! =/

Shape from shading works only on a very narrow set of objects. If you are trying to recover the shape of a marble statue, use shape from shading. If your object has color forget about it.

Not true at all. If you understand the photometric function of the materials in the scene variation due to color can be separated from variation due to shading. Image classification techniques are useful for doing this. This is discussed in the book and elsewhere. We used the technique for Voyager II to measure topography of Uranus and Neptune satellites. Stereo pairs were not often available.

What you are saying amounts to "People have done research into computer vision in the past, therfore any new research into computer vision is soooo not new.

Ding! Wrong again. The lesson is that slashdot editors should be careful to refrain from hyperbolic descriptions of results that are really incremental rather than revolutionary. And readers like you should not swallow the summaries hook line and sinker.

"Dave...stop...stop, will you...stop, Dave...will you stop, Dave...stop, Dave...I'm afraid...I'm afraid, Dave...Dave...my mind is going...I can feel it...I can feel it..." - Hal 9000.

I don't see why we should define self-awareness when cyc, used by the pentagon to predict possible terrorist scenarios ([1]), has already asked "am i human?" ([2] at bottom and [3]). How aware is he?

I have sometimes used GNU Global which makes indexed html pages of the code. Somewhat similar to lxr but there is no setup, just run two commands, gtags and htags. One nice thing about global is that it can be used on any incomplete subset of a software system. Want to just look at the files in the drivers/net/wireless directory in the linux kernel tree? Fine, just run gtags and htags from that directory (and no other setup is necessary).

I have also used NCC which "compiles" each file and makes a index file with information like "function AAA calls functions BBB, CCC and DDD, reads variables EEE, writes variables FFF and GGG". The format is not exactly like that but you get the idea. NCC includes a text mode gopher-like variable usage/function call browser and there is a script to make graphical call graphs (via dot from graphviz). At work I have also used information from ncc files in combination with with information from the map file to find maximum stack usage.

This study (which I just found while writing this) seems to have an interesting analysis of this topic.

Research with Google scholar,

Real research is done by Scopus, Scirus or Citeseer.

Of course, some of those links are available only only subscription but, that is the state of the "free scientific knowledge" for the masses.

It sucks.

Given the content of the article, you're right. It should not have been posted to hardware. On the other hand, how do you know that you can trust your hardware not to corrupt your data?

Soft errors are a genuine problem. It's possible, though unlikely, that a cosmic ray might come whizzing by and flip a bit in DRAM, for example.

How do you know it happened? A '4' in your spreadsheet could become a '6' and you'd never know it. ECC can help, of course.

And while on the subject of trusting hardware not to muck up your data, consider important data sent over a network. This paper looked at how many damaged packets pass both the link level CRC and TCP's checksum. They found that up to 1 in 16 million packets was a damaged packet silently passed to the APP layer. That's good reason to have your app do one final check on the data before using it.

This leads us to the answer to another pressing problem in mathematics - Why Do We Care?

Really, what does this have to do with how we deal with reality? Will we be buying amazing products that are based on this? Breaking encryption? Making pigs fly?

In the the 18th and 19th century, the foundations were laid for something called finite fields, which had little to no impact on reality then. Fast forward to 1960, when a couple of guys figured out a way to use finite fields in a way that enables you to still play a scratched cd, or ensuring your raid-5 is working properly when a disk fails.

So do you still think the mathematicians back in the 18th and 19th century should have done something else, something with direct applications in their time?

All that I can relate is my 'user experience' which is that Adobe actively breaks the PDF standard and/or extends it to break it every few years.

They added new features and new ways of doing things. Such is the cost of progress, you sometimes have to change things.

my investment of $300 is now crippling, because my Acrobat 4.0 won't 'read' the newer PDFs that many organizations are now 'publishing'

That's what Acrobat READER is for. You can have both Acrobat Professional (say 4.0) installed for creating PDFs and the latest reader (or even a 3rd party program!) to read the latest PDFs.

I do NOT want to throw away my editing/creation tool by downloading some crappy 'free reader.'

You don't need to! You can have both installed at once!

Don't believe me? Penn State has both installed on all of the lab PCs on campus. Still don't believe me? See for yourself.

(If you have a Mac I can't verify that you'd have both installed; PSU just has professional in their labs. But it seems like Macs would be even more open to having multiple versions than PCs.)

Also, the Adobe "free" readers have lately become gargantual bloatware monsters, with spyware links and nagware built right into the menu bar.

Then use a third party tool. There are a ton. Ghostscript. Foxit. Or use Acrobat Speed-Up to make it run faster.

Also, at least in my experience, Acrobat Reader 7 is a substantial improvement over 6, so they're getting better about it.

(BTW, what spyware? What nagware in the menu bar? There's a Yahoo link and a item in the help menu to purchase Acrobat, but if you take offense at those I suggest you get a life.)

Ah! I found it! (The chap was using Win95).Get A Macintosh!

Found the urls. Take a look at these, they may help:

128-bit encryption: 0.25 sextillion years. That's barebones SSL. PGP with a 4096 bit key? Right...

The research i've been doing in P2P networks (due to my involvement in the okopipi project) has shocked me. In file sharing, we're living in the STONE AGE. Yes, even with bittorrent (which depends on centralized servers, and there's practically no privacy. And anonymous bittorrent like mutorrent is closed source, who knows if they got a backdoor in there).

EDonkey uses MD4 for hashing, it depends on central servers, and has no anonymity at all. And without mentioning queue # 4892 for a popular file.

Unfortunately for filesharers, file sharing networks based on modern P2P architectures is very scarse. The supernodes / ultrapeers approach is obsolete, easy to disrupt both denial of service and eavesdropping attacks.

The future of P2P is Overlay Networks.

From an architectural point of view, I would recommend the KAD p2p network, which bases its architecture on the relatively-new kadelmia network (See Technical paper on Kadlemia, 2002).

Even then, Kadelmia could be improved because it's based on a Pastry network topology - compared to other topologies like De Bruijn Graphs, proposed by a recent paper in 2003.

And more research is being done dealing with load balancing, anonymity, trust, reputation, etc.

As I said, current peer to peer networks are in the stone age. Someone needs to design a file sharing network based on the latest research, and publish it.

Sorry but this is bullshit. You may wish to read this link and this for more info.

Well, when PowerBooks came out, they had Motorola 68K processors.

The "Power" in PowerBooks referred to the old marketing line, The Power to be your best.

Really? This is just error correction. Reed-Solomon error correction, and even the Chinese Remainder Theorem can be applied to reconstruct data when some has been intentionally or unintentionally punctured.

GCC isn't all that (but it isn't the worst either). It takes more than running on multiple platforms to make something good. In fact, many people a lot more knowledgable than I would say that's a bad thing. :)

http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2006-April /046972.html

The venerable and late C/C++ users journel had a compiler shootout not too long ago and to my recollection GCC was squarely in the middle to lower end of the pack. The microsoft products weren't always first in every test but they placed well against the likes of Borland

Just to try and steer this back on topic I'll point out the Channel9 site on MSH/Monad/PowerShell http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHWiki It's a really great reasource for finding out about what this thing is all about. I have to say I was skeptical for a long while since I tried out the first beta (but didn't really dig in). After seeing some examples (check out the Jeffery Snover videos) I was suitably impressed. Impressed enough that I'd like to see something like it on Unixy things. Like others have said, if only there were a decent native terminal *sigh*

I'm not a patent attorney but I've filed about 40 patents on technology I've developed, written mostly by myself with a patent attorney just doing a final pass over the claims. There is a real art to writing good patent claims and if you're new to it you should get some professional help with at least that part (in addition to reading up on writing patents). In some ways a patent is like a computer program and the claims are the actual code -- the rest is just comments that help make the claims understandable. A court battle revolves completely around the claims. The battle is over whether the defendant's technology "reads" against the plaintiff's claims, and whether the relevant claims are valid, in light of ealier technology ("prior art").

A good prior art search makes your patent much more valuable and you are the best person to do that search, since you understand the subject area. There seems to be a common misconception that other patents are the main place you need to look. In my experience, the earliest prior art is almost never in other patents. For example, the best prior art for hash-based object naming I've seen is in a program called FWKCS that was used with a few BBS systems in the late 1980's. The patents in this area were all filed starting in the mid-1990's. Online mailing lists are a good source of pointers to programs and also descriptions of ideas that themselves constitute prior art, since they are public. Do some searching in Google Groups (formerly usenet groups) and in the archives of specialized mailing lists that are relevant to your topic (e.g., www-talk for early Internet-related ideas).

Academic papers are often an excellent source of prior art. Many papers are available online for free though citseer (http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/). You may also want to join the IEEE and ACM to gain access to their rather complete databases of all their published journal articles. Finally, you should also search in some patent databases. The USPTO has full text search online at their site (https://sportal.uspto.gov/secure/portal/efs-unreg istered). Subscription to a search database such as Delphion (http://www.delphion.com/) is relatively cheap if you only subscribe for a month or two. Note that the important date for a patent is its priority date, which is when it was filed or when an earlier application it is based on was filed. In the US, applicants are allowed to present proof in a court case that they actually had the idea up to a year before their priority date, so you may need to find art a year older than a filing date to be able to argue that a claim is invalid.

Finally, remember that you're searching for art relevant to claims (usually the broadest claims in a patent). Patents are not invalidated, specific sets of claims are. The more you understand what the most essential differences are between what you've done and what others have done before you, the stronger a set of claims you and an experienced patent writer will be able to put together. Good luck!

I can name a number of features I use on a regular basis on Word that are missing from or vastly inferior in OO.o too.

For instance, Word has page view, normal view, outline view, and web view. I like to write in normal view. OO.o doesn't have it. The next-best thing usually in Word is page view with the top and bottom margins collapsed; OO.o doesn't have it. The navigator in OO.o provides some of the usefulness of the outline view in Word, and each lacks benefits of the other.

The track changes feature works a lot better in Word (at least starting with 2002). In OO.o deleting text while recording changes acts like Word 97 and before; it turns the deleted text red and strikethrough. Word 2002 and higher pulls the deleted text out of the body and puts it in a marginal note. In addition to looking nicer and being more readable, this avoids the disruption in format that the former approach causes in where the text flows. (I don't know what approach 2000 takes.)

Or what about a grammar checker? Something else OO.o lacks entirely. (And yes, I know Word's has problems, but at least for me it does a lot more good than harm.)

As well as the "Master Document" concept which I do not think exists in word (or is also very well hidden).

Has been present since at least version 6.0. I've used a master document running Windows 3.1 on a 386.

Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap.

Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. I can't even see how you can get 3 dialogs deep in something related to images. Which doesn't mean that you can't, just that you're not looking in the right place. (This is in 2002.)

The menus are generally much much more intuitive

And yet a fairly common dialog, page setup, moves to Format -> Page. Sure, if you think about it, it fits better there. However, that argument loses its validity when you take into consideration that almost every other program, at least under Windows,* puts it at file->page setup.

* This is an exageration, and I don't want to hear "so-and-so put it in the Window menu!" My point is that it's an established standard that page setup goes in File, and breaking that caused at least me much headache when I was looking for how to set margins.

OO.o has done a great job of using the context menu

Examples?

Actually in my experimentation just now I found one place where OO.o is sorely lacking: right clicking on an edit when using track changes doesn't give you an option to accept or reject.

One last point but one that is important when writing a thesis or technical papers in scientific and engineering fields, the equation editor in Word SUCKS BIG TIME

Agreed. Though I posit that if you're doing that much in equations you shouldn't be using EITHER editor and should drop to your favorite TeX variant.

Actually I posit that if you're doing almost any document you want to look good you should drop to LaTeX, because there are a lot of subtle (e.g. ligatures; compare "fi" in Word or OO.o to "fi" in TeX output) and not-so-subtle things (better line break allocation) that it does while typesetting that make its output, IMO, *MUCH* nicer than a word processor.

It takes a bit to learn, but it's well worth it, and if you're working on either a book or thesis the time spent learning will be insignificant in the total amount worked. In fact, it may save you time long-term.

"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 article that first suggested this approach to one time pads can be found at:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/maurer92conditionallyp erfect.html

The basic idea is that is infeasible to store all of the random bits being broadcast, hence even once you learn what the two parties are sampling, the random bits they recorded are already long gone.

"I'm a PhD student working in computer graphics, and I have to say... where's my pork?"

Big hint. America's Army Bigger hint Biggest hint

A good paper to read is "Pengi: an implementation of a theory of activity", an AI program from the 1980s that played Pengo by actually looking at the screen. It can be done.

Also has to shovel whole guest images to transfer state between systems, which can incur significant bandwidth usage and latency issues.

Ever heard of a SAN? It's not as if whole vmdk's are flying across the wire. We use paging techniques to reduce the latency for transferring the running guest's memory, so typical server "snoozes" during a VMotion over 1G ethernet are measured in milliseconds. And yes, customers do need to plan for the bandwidth needs of VMotion. Many run a separate network; they're willing to pay for an extra gigE card per hardware server for the flexibility of being able to take the hardware down without interrupting any of its services (which is what VMotion gives them, remember).

Plus you have to limit most of your guest requirements ahead of time (example: virtual memory cannot be dynamically resized in an active guest).

I'm not even sure what you think you're talking about here. "Virtual memory" can be overloaded in this context. While the "virtual physical ram" in a guestis not resizable, it doesn't matter, because ESX can transparently shrink or grow the physical ram backing the VM as needed. If you're curious why what you think is a problem isn't, read up a little.

So, ignoring obvious overhead that VMWare's partial emulation technique incurs, you have serious resource distribution issues.

I work in VMware's virtual machine monitor group. You obviously don't know the first thing about the first thing about how our VMM works, but, at the risk of answering a fool in his folly: what does the supposed CPU overhead you're mislabellling a "partial emulation technique" have to do with the present discussion, anyway? Remember, you' comparing to java-based solution; are you implying that JVMs introduce lower overheads? As for "resource distribution issues": name one. Just one. It has to be real, though. No fair using a mish-mash of plausible sounding "issue" keywords like "latency", "bandwidth", "resource", etc., as you've been doing so far.

And for those that do not believe me, I have:

Text processor
Spreadsheet
Presentation creator
Oh, and a great bibliography management system (nor MSOffice or OOo get close enough to this)

Oh, and it also has a sql mode to communicate with SQL databases, and lets not talk about its scripting capabilities! (VBA ppppffft).

According to some show on PBS/Discovery/BBC not that long ago (sorry, don't recall which or what show), they made the seemingly plausible statement that dragon myths were supported by the findings of Cave Bear skeletons, at least for the European dragon myths. These skeletons must have looked ferocious to those that found them after their extinction 15000 years ago, being up to 20 feet long. They certainly bore little resemblance to the current bear population in Europe.

If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank

PageRank ranking function:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/page98pagerank.html

Details on the implementation of PageRank:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/brin98anatomy.html

Both of these papers are extremely outdated, but the PageRank ranking function is by no means a secret.

If you release how you do the ranking function, suddenly every web scrambler in the world screws up the rank

PageRank ranking function:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/page98pagerank.html

Details on the implementation of PageRank:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/brin98anatomy.html

Both of these papers are extremely outdated, but the PageRank ranking function is by no means a secret.

If you read it you'll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn't have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone -- instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent was no better then random chance. A much more interesting interpretation than 50/50.

There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don't interpret the emotional content (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I've found that deals with this topic goes back to:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1589611/0 Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684--712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann.

I've written more about this topic and other sources for the cycle of flames in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.

http://www.rps.psu.edu/hydrogen/form.html

I meant what I said; lower density. Hydrogen does happen to have slightly better energy density (Energy per unit volume.) But only slightly. You need a tank 4 times bigger than that of gasoline to get the same amount of energy from hydrogen.

At the following link you can see a picture of the man (at least I think it's him).

http://www.phys.psu.edu/people/display/index.html? person_id=336;mode=contact

I am intrigued by who this guy is though. He doesn't really seem to be on the radar - very little info to be got from Google. I think he is not a physics prof.
Some sleuthing turned up the following:
1) He's an MIT graduate.
2) He a (very) few published papers on the idea in his slides.
3) He worked for a company called Affymetrix that makes gene microarrays.
4) One of the physics faculty at Penn State, who works on carbon nanotubes, is called Alexander Mayer, but reading his CV, I think this is not the same person.
5) There's some personal info here from a housing ad he posted on a berkely lab page.

OAKLAND HILLS home, furn bdrm & ba avail for visiting scholar, euro style decor, lge closet, desk/computer workstation, DSL, lge secluded patio on 1/3 acre with stunning view, lge liv room, close to trails & Chabot observatory, 36" telescope for use, secure storage, close to pub trans, exc kitchen, share home w/ single, straight professional male homeowner, age 38 w/ no pets, $1,200/mo incl util on a month-to-month basis, pref pros in astrophysics/physics/math, Alex, amayer@alum.mit.edu

That's about all I can find.

If you really want to go behind the theory, you will want to start here. But be prepared to have some really good skills in math, statistics, computer sciences and system administration to understand the articles as they are not intended for general public.

A brief intro of how classical search engines work goes as follows:
Grabbing: A crawler visits pages which it considers important, downloads them and parses them
Analysing: The document receives an identification string and is stored in a reversed index, which is simply a database table with culomns such as "word", "document", "possition", "importance". The "word" culomn is indexed and used for searching.
Searching: Say that you search for the phrase "ask slashdot". The search engine searches the lines with the terms "ask" and "slashdot", looks into the "document" cell and selects only those documents that both terms occure in. Then it looks into the "possition" cell which carries all the possitions of the searched word in each document and discards all the documents that do not have successive "ask" and "slashdot" terms possitions. The resulting documents are then sorted according to the importance cells of the searched terms.

This is how basically all search engine works. The only major difference is usually only in the math used to compute the imprtance. There are also some major optimisations done to speed up the responses. To discuss this would take too long. So if you have any questions feel free to ask. Currently I am part of a team developing a large scale search engine, so you have a chance to get some hot info here :)

Danish keyboard? It's probably something like opt-slash. There used to be a program called KeyCaps that would show you what characters each key was mapped to. It would change as you pressed the shift, option, or control keys (or combos thereof). Apparently in 10.x the same functionality is available via the Keyboard Viewer as part of the international options. There are instructions for accessing it at the bottom of this page.

That wireless LAN! That wireless LAN! I do not like that wireless LAN!

Would you, could you, ping a plane? Would you, could you, ping a train?

I will! I will! I will patent them on a plane, I will patent them on a train. I will patent LANs here and there, I will patent wireless everywhere!

Evolution / natural selection is as simple as this. "What can be, will be." Yes, that's it. This is the principle behind life. Why? If an organism / combination of proteins / grey goo / etc. can multiply, it will. If two different entities need one same resource to multiply, the stronger will get it. Why? If it can get it before the other, it will.

Applying this to the origin of life, a combination of aminoacids which can self-replicate will flourish in comparison of those that don't. In those replications there are flaws, changes or mutations. Those that can multiply, will.

Proteins are nothing but a composition of aminoacids. Aminoacids can be produced "spontaneously" in the right conditions. I'm sure that at some point, enough different aminoacids were present so that a simple chemical reaction
(thunder, UV light) would bond them together.

Why is it difficult to believe in the primordial soup? Let's think about it. According to Ramsey's Theorem in an infinite discrete space, any specific combination of words can be found (this is also known as the infinite monkeys with typewriters writing a work of Shakespeare). So, what happens if we get enough proteins all mixed together, waiting for yet another catalyst?

(I can testify something about the Ramsey's theorem. I know a guy who based a computer research paper on it for pattern recognition. And the thing worked.)

200 million years could be enough time for simple microorganisms to form. The earch is 4.5 billion years old. Think about it.

Have you guys noticed how the book of Genesis starts with... "and the Spirit of God floated above the waters"? I was taught in school that the first lifeforms on earth originated on the surface of the sea.

Maybe the problem with creationists is not that they don't believe in evolution, but that they find it to be physically impossible. Lack of faith perhaps? I wonder, why is it so easy for them to believe that God made Adam and Eve out of a pile of mud, and yet so difficult that God let the aminoacids combine and form simple organisms that would later combine and evolve?

Creationists /ID believers try to use science to disprove evolution, like "aminoacids can be left and right handed, but some of those are poisonous". Well, these areguments can be easily rebated. I googled 5 minutes ago and found David C. Wise's page with a pascal program called "MONKEY", that demonstrates how effective random generation can be.

It was clear your original remark about the use of term "semiotics" was in the context of the Anglosphere. This is a broader concept than the United States. You'll find semiotics - as a category - is a bigger deal in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Re: research relevance. Does (eg) Harnard not count?

I found another article that is very interesting.

Then you consider the emmisions cost of the entire system, production, energy production/transmission and disposal, the current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters hidden by ignorance, smoke and mirrors.

I hear allot of people say that, but I don't buy it. Take a look at how much the Prius and other cars emit over their life time:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/k/x/kxs434/egee/ egee.htm
So I would love to see how 30+ tons of emmisions, which go into a highly mobile transmission medium (air) compare to sticking a couple hundred pounds of batteries in the ground. People need to do more research about this, it is important (as I sit here in 10C weather, when it should really be -20C outside).

They actually are probably a huge contributor to the rate of research since they have enable researchers to more quickly find information.

No.

Looking for research information on Google is like looking using Wikipedia to quote information for a paper.

We researchers use the following (between other) places to do serious research:
Scirus
Citeseer
ACM digital library
JStor
PubMed

There are some other specialized catalogues for Economics (Jstor is quite good) or other non computer science related even directly Elsevier.

Of course your University library may be useful and proceedings tend to help too.

There's even sites dedicated to research literature. Try CiteSeer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/, or even Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/.

Or a building called "a library".

I'm pretty sure that all universities have those, even in China.

How can I do my thesis now? a university student asked on another Chinese website.

How did all grad students complete their theses before the Wikipedia era? As a matter of fact, grads don't refer to encyclopedias when doing research. They refer more often to the literature (books, scientific journals, conference proceedings, etc.)

There's even sites dedicated to research literature. Try CiteSeer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/, or even Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/.

Of coures Wikipedia can help a lot when you want to have a quick reference on subject matter, but there are also much more comprehensive avenues of research that can be used.

Nonsense. PageRank was published in a 1998 paper by Brin and Page.

I know it's kinda random, but my school actually uses them for the physical plant guys to get around - see http://live.psu.edu/still_life/2004_11_11_segway/i ndex.html It's always kinda funny to see them going around on those things, looking embarassed as hell. But then again, it's faster than walking. The size of some of them makes you think a bike would have been better though...

do you mean this one?

http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html

Might have to wait until thier server is functioning again

But your welcome to slashdot effect my site

http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/PhotoAlbum2.html