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"Trebuchet... catapult"

Slashdot readers put a lot of mental effort into being funny. Often Slashdot story comments are dominated by humor.

Another subject: The story to which Slashdot could have linked: Was your ancestor a social climbing soldier in the Hundred Years War?. That story leads to a story that contains a link to the database. I didn't want to post that link because it might be Slashdotted.

A recent BBC program showed that eating prebiotic veg was better than having probiotic yoghurt stuff.

See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/humanbody/truthaboutfood/h ealthy/prebiotics.shtml - main program details
http://www.food.rdg.ac.uk/news#104 - titbit about the PhD researcher used

I think this is because the stomach environment kills the probiotic bacteria and so generating a better environment for your endemic gut bacteria is better - prebiotic vegetables will do this for you.

Site seems to be down - perhaps due to slashdotting?

Nah, more that I'm moving web hosts, and it would finally appear to be taking effect. The real site should be back up again sooner or later - but in the meantime, here's the MINERVA page on the Valve Developer Community.

Some download links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes, I'm using friends in UK academia for download bandwidth. But if old-fashioned HTTP isn't your thing, there's always BitTorrent...

Still, huge thanks for all the comments, and I guess I really should get back to the third and final part of Metastasis. (There will definitely be future chapters, so don't worry.)

(N.B.: Difficulty levels have been tweaked a bit, with an altered skill.cfg which monkeys around with the damage taken and inflicted by the enemies. Try loading standard HL2 maps through the console from MINERVA - it's like a whole different game.)

We're pretty badly off-topic here, but what the hey...

C was first designed and implemented in the time period from 1969-1973. It is hardly a critique of its original designers and implementors that we have learned a lot about programming language design and implementation in the succeeding 30+ years, and that many of the constraints of the computing environment have been weakened or removed during that time. Indeed, some of the original designers of C and UNIX spent a lot of time 10+ years ago developing an alternative language and runtime for writing operating system and application code that fixes the problems with C that I described.

"In fact, when you are coding things like process and memory mangement routines and libraries, it is very handy to be able to do arithmetic with and compare to variables that are not "exactly" the same type, if the comparison or operation otherwise makes sense. Hence, things like the boolean FALSE and integer 0 being equal (which Java will complain about) are handy."

If by "handy", parent meant "tempting" but "error-prone" and "potentially insecure", I think there's about 30 years' experience to back up this claim. Things as fundamental or important as my operating system's process or memory management routines are occasionally broken in particularly dangerous ways because their programmer did something that seemed to "make sense" at the time, even though a "safe" programming language wouldn't allow it. Go look at the changelogs of a recent UNIX kernel for plenty of examples.

"The lack of dynamic type checking, operand checking and bounds checking allows the programmer to write low level or system code that gets out of the way of higher level code." I'm sorry, but I don't know what this means.

"Imagine the performance degradation at the kernel if every comparison was dynamically checked for type, operand and bounds." One would prefer that operations be checked statically whenever possible. This is not so much for performance as because failed runtime checks in low-level code are difficult to handle gracefully. That said, as I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, we have known for a long time how to build programming languages so that a combination of static and runtime type and operand checking will provide some correctness guarantees without signficantly impacting execution performance. IMHO, it's way past time to start using that knowledge.

... with the help of this online english/"science" language companion.

The real task is to transform that sprawling, unreliable beast into something that provides some sort of useful, dependable resource. Machines will be switched off, programs will crash or hang unexpectedly, people will write malicious apps, and through all of that, there is still the possibility of getting some useful work done.

In my personal view, the real failing of the "Grid Computing community" is to try to solve too many problems at once. But what the heck, it gets lots of papers published.

If "grid computing" were saleable, ISPs would be offering off-peak compute time on their server farms, and people would be buying it. They're not.

Most people don't have problems that are suitable for grid compute-farm processing, particularly over WANs. Most companies that do have such problems wouldn't want to make the data that's being processed available to arbitrary client nodes. Neither of these things mean that grid computing is dead.

You're thinking of Kevin "Captain Cyborg" Warwick, a University of Reading (UK) professor. Steve Mann is at UofT (Toronto, Canada). Mann actually does quite a bit of legitimate research in wearable computing (not implants!), but he certainly enjoys the media attention ("Ooh! A cyborg!"). Personally, I find the way he roams the halls of the Sanford Fleming building late at night dressed in all black rather creepy.

Ugh... how awful, he doesn't even use florid language to try and disguise his ideas as something more interesting.
At least fools like Captain Cyborg the genius are good for entertainment after their technology bombs out.

The EU is currently considering a proposal that will prohibit health-related food advertisements until prove (see here) . The only question is: What counts as proof? ;)

I have a feeling that what is hindering advancement with nanotechnology is that same thing that hinders the advancement of stem-cell research and many other fields: politics... which goes hand-in-hand with money and religion and thus brings along paranoia, fear, misunderstanding, etc. ("We shouldn't play God with our genetic code...", "What about creating a gray-goo that will destroy everything on our planet...")

As for having absolutely only minor advancements in nanotech, that's just not true. I've read about stain proof fabrics and windows that can keep dirt particles from clinging, not to mention advancements in carbon nanotubes.

Yes, there are no nano-doctors floating around in our bodies yet, but complexity such as this requires a LOT more research. You can't possibly think that the time from an idea popping into his head to the time it gets created is going to only be 20 years, do you? Look how long it took for us just to get to the moon! And we haven't even been to any other planets yet! I doubt we will see any superbly complex nanomachines (such as the nano-doctors (cell-repairmen), or teeth cleaners, etc...) in our lifetime, but we are still continuing research in the field. Nobody has given up on it.

I'd be interested to know about this humanity you talk of, care to elucidate?
As far as I was aware, the overriding theme of humanity throughout the development of society has been of increasing and ever more complex technology, which has aided us in our everyday lives, and tended to reduce the amount of labour we have to do to acheive a similar level of fulfillment. Clearly it's debateable quite how fulfilling modern life is, but that's an argument for another time. But It still seems to stand that humanity is almost defined by a technological and communicative drive. 'tis what seperates man from beast etc etc

>> It's not too far fetched to see chip implants
>> and "Neuromancer" type gadgets imbedded within
>>our flesh

Possibly not that far off.
There's no need for these to suck our conciousness or individuality away either. The point of the things was an enhanced conciousness so you could do more/access more data. Clearly of course the potential for monitoring technology and other such abuse is enormous (care to have the Total Information Awareness guys data mining america's thought patterns anyone?) but this sort of thing does not have to happen. Just had a bizarre thought....some sort of Seti@home variant that takes up people's spare brain capaccity whilst they sleep :)

>> The chip is coming. Beware the mark.

Always thought that mark was the credit card? Or the .Net passport? or any of a myriad of other things that doomsayers seem to get off on making into "The Mark of The Beast"

your correct according to this site

In 2000, he announced his plan to wire electrodes into his median nerve. This would have two purposes, he could "record" the nerve signal when he moved his hand, as well as attempt to "play back" the impulse and make his hand move on its own.

He hasn't done it yet, his FAQ lists it as scheduled for September.

In 2000, he announced his plan to wire electrodes into his median nerve. This would have two purposes, he could "record" the nerve signal when he moved his hand, as well as attempt to "play back" the impulse and make his hand move on its own.

He hasn't done it yet, his FAQ lists it as scheduled for September.

• http://www.21stcentury.co.uk/robotics/dyson_dc06.a sp
  
• http://www.fp.rdg.ac.uk/equal/AT/reki/REKIslides/R EKIADCttATS/sld018.htm
  
• http://www.thirdage.com/news/archive/991218-02.htm l
  
• And more on Google
  

Screw the asteroids - it's the dang swoopers, dramites and killer satellites that I'm worried about!

my wacky plan to get an army of 3-wheeled cars/vans (just like those ones you see in Italy so often, or those old Robin Reliants) and set them up to march across the world - as a menacing oversized version of Kev's Dwarfs.... Muh hah hah aha...

Okay... So it isn't that funny.

Good place to start if looking into nanotubes--for fun or profit!

Actually science shows us how global temperatures DROP after major volcano blasts. By comparing thr rings on tree trunks (thiner in cold years, wider in warm years) to a record of big blasts (such as here.)

Your turn.

PS why should I blind believe you over 'the greenies'? No doubt you have an agenda to, yet you seem to think you are the only one who knows theirs

From KW's 'Achievements' page:

"Britain's leading profit of the Robot Age" so called by Gillian Anderson (X-Files)

Nice misspelling, there...

That guy on the bus who plays Quake on his notebook computer just got ten times as annoying!

Seriously though, how do you recharge a fuel cell. The howstuffworks article covers hydrogen fuel cells which you recharge by... inserting more hydrogen. They also make water, bad for notebooks. This prototype looks like a sealed system and being billed as a replacement for Li-Ion, which means it's rechargeable and doesn't leak. "Carbon nanotubes" are very cool but there's nearly no mention of an application to new forms of fuel cells in the literature. This press release is great but... where's the science?

Just curious.

I've been reading about all sorts of uses for these carbon nanotubes, the most recently being hyperdense packaging of gases for energy use.

A good summary of some of those uses, and other resources can be found here.

Although the implementation may be more advanced (site says they want to use GPS), but this has already been done before, at the University of Reading, England.

See the ZDNet article here or Slashdot article here or the original academic text
here.
These first uses were to do with intelligent buildings though, for just positional and indentification info, rather than any form of biological monitoring.

• Not only will they pay damages to Hasbro, they will cease selling the products in question (which were for the most part "game packs" of bargain-priced titles). The result is that Hasbro's right to control these intellectual properties - which have been copied, imitated, modified and expanded throughout the history of video game development - has now been established.

Here are some other related links:

The Economics and Management of Technological
MIT: Technology Strategy/Scott Stern
Advances in Global High Technology
Technological Innovation and International Competitiveness
IMD Discovery Events
Related Misc.Books and Articles

Reading has had a prost-grad Sci-Fi program for awhile...since Fall '97 At least they can continue to escape the real world after their undergrad is finished If you want to check it out --> here

I have to agree here, in that BeOS is nice regardless of licensing considerations. Yes, it's nice to have ultimate freedom to tinker, but it's also nice to have a technically superior product, which BeOS definitely is. I can see BeOS doing very nicely thankyou in a few years time, while I know I'm getting bored of religious extremists preaching the GPL whenever GNU/Linux comes into a discussion. It's been said often enough before that many of the advocates of my old favourite - the Amiga - actually did us more harm than good, and I can see the same happening with Linux. Which, nice as it is, isn't a technological breakthrough, it's just UNIX on GPL.

Incidentally, something you guys might want to have a look at - KOSH. OK, I know we're not exactly progressing at the speed of light, but we _are_ doing better than we were a few months ago (honest!) and I see KOSH as a nice halfway house here. Yes, we'd be talking about a corporate product, but not one owned by institutional shareholders, one run by the people who actually depended on it. Net result, you don't get the bloat or the bugs in the same way, simply becuase the boss who let it happen wouldn't survive the next AGM as the users would rip them to bits.

The other thing to consider is the nature of KOSH as an object based OS. So many people seem to like GNU/Linux because they can fiddle to make it work round their needs. Well, same here. Don't need a certain feature? Don't activate the object. Don't like the way one of the objects works? Replace it, as the interfaces are open so it's not _that_ big a hassle.

I KNOW these are only words ATM, and I KNOW how big a challenge we've got ahead of us. But I see more promise in this idea than anything else I've seen, and I'd love to help it work. I can't believe no-one else out there likes the idea, and support from people like you guys is what we need to make it work. Sure, we may well not make it, but we're trying to break new ground, rather than just sitting back and letting the world pass us by, or reinventing the wheel.

Anyway, the latest information is kicking around at this URL if anyone wants a look. Please, we'd love anyone who wnats to join us in the dream.

Greg