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but I think the reason they need absolutely pure is because pure H2O doesn't conduct electricity, but the slightest impurity will).

Whatever gave you that idea? Of course pure water conducts electricity, with a resistance of 18 million ohms.

My roommate in college was blind and, yes, she attended normal classes just like the rest of us. She has even moved on to grad school now. She really didn't need that much assistance - someone to show her to her classes the first few times until she had the route memorized, a friend to tell her the food available in the cafeteria, and someone to translate the written study materials into Braille.

Jaws made her computer eminently usable, and she had a Braille keyboard to print things she could read later along with her normal printer to print for other people. She could listen in class as well as anyone else, and take notes. She was even a research assistant for one of her psych professors.

http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=12533 is a neat article that might give you a bit more insight into blind people in the classroom.

Scantron ballots are a good idea, but people are stupid &/or prone to mistakes and will screw it up.

Adding a computer to the process does not magically prevent mistakes, it just introduces new errors: 60% of voters don't notice changes in their ballot on the review screen, some forget to validate their vote in the review screen, or the touch screens are misaligned making voting difficult, etc.

So not only does electronic voting annihilate any chance of a public oversight, they don't even have any usability advantage.

This is not necessarily surprising or a new idea. A researcher at Rice University (Michael Deem, whom I have heard speak on this) studies the genetic basis for the vaccine and the resulting efficacy in any given year and there are MANY years in which getting a flu vaccine the previous year will actually increase your chances of getting the flu the next, or make it worse. You can find an interesting calculator here: http://www.mwdeem.rice.edu/pepitope/, where there is also a link to his most important paper on it at the bottom (no registration req.). Here is an excerpt:

Vaccine efficacy can even be negative, however, due to original antigenic sin [7-9], the tendency for antibodies produced in response to exposure to infl uenza vaccine antigens to suppress the creation of new, different antibodies in response to exposure to new versions of the infl uenza virus. The efficacy of the annual in fluenza vaccine, and whether original antigenic sin may occur, depends sensitively on how similar the vaccine and circulating viral strains are. Current state of the art measures of antigenic distance are based on ferret antisera hemagglutinin inhibition assays [10-12], and these distances are assumed to correlate well with vaccine efficacies in humans. However, to our knowledge no such good correlation has ever been shown for an experimental or theoretical measure of antigenic distance.

Ever since I heard this talk, and learned that the flu vaccine is actually a random guess each year, I don't bother with it. I'm young, strong, and tough and very very unlikely to die, I figure.

I think you may have slept through a few decades. The ITU says 4.1 billion cellphone subscriptions by the end of 2008.

link

Well over 4 billion have electricity.

The world literacy rate is about 82%: about 5 billion. link

I see lots of people wailing about midichlorians...

Perhaps they are not aware of the theorized origin of mitochondria?

In a nut-shell, they appear to have started as endosymbionts which enabled animals cell precursors to process energy more efficiently, much like legume's can process nitrogen more efficiently because of their own endosymbionts.

The medichlorians simply appear to be an endosymbiont that enhances supernatural abilities. (It is possible that this symbiosis causes structural changes in the host which produces the effects; much like legumes produce root nodules when hosting Sinorhizobium. This would render the "black market midichlorian injection" idea moot-- it would take months of incubation, perhaps years, to develop the needed adaptations resulting from being a host. This may also explain the need to train little jedi school kids when they are still in diapers in order to get full effect as well.

Compared to the stormtrooper armor, this one is at least plausible (in as much as supernatural abilities are plausible to begin with.)

perhaps you are thinking of this guy who they mention on the wikipedia page on the linux mantainer.

I'll bet this guy is is dad.

http://report.rice.edu/sir/faculty.detail?p=6098EF446D2F9399

Device keys have to be issued by the HDCP key authority because all the HDCP device keys have special numeric properties that make the two-way handshake possible. Both sides of the connection have to arrive at the same 56-bit number to successfully encrypt/decrypt stuff. The only way to give out keys that have the correct properties that make them usable is for the HDCP key authority to control distribution of said keys [1]. And if the HDCP key authority revoked this manufacturer's keys once, they're not likely to give them more keys.

I suppose you can try to obtain a different device's HDCP key(s) and program those in. But once the HDCP authority notices that a different device's device keys have been compromised, it may revoke those keys too.

Of course, say it's one of Sony's HDTV models whose HDCP keys get compromised, and the HDCP key authority revokes those keys. Sony HDTV owners will be furious that new Blu-Ray discs don't work on their TV, and Sony will have to issue a firmware update to get new keys and somehow "protect" them better this time. All in all, a total losing proposition.

[1] See http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/pubs/hdcppaper.ps for more info. I read this a while ago and it's pretty foggy now, but it gave a good overview of HDCP and the key/encryption math behind it.

Family friendly means your kids wait until they are mature to make decisions about their sexual futures.

Family friendly means you don't want someone else's values rammed down your throat.

I think Amazon picked sensibly. People say all sorts of stuff about diversity and justice, but when it comes time to buying homes or buying products for their families, they are conservative -- even if liberal in outlook.

One academic at Rice University studied how people vote with their feet, in contrast to what they identify as their political beliefs, in a study about how education breeds segregation because whites with higher education, even very liberal whites, avoid diverse neighborhoods.

If we are going to be scientists about this issue, we should look at the practicalities of pluralism. Pluralism means every group gets their own space; it doesn't mean we find one standard for all people, because that removes their right to have their own opinions.

I suppose the simple way would be to just reduce core voltage and violate setup times. Similar to overclocking this would in many cases work without noticeable errors. I found an article which would indicate that he's indeed looking in that direction: http://legerdemain.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/the-probabilistic-chipsa-heresy "Palem's idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip-specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits"

So that would mean he's using less power for some parts of the chip, where he doesn't need so much accuracy, but providing normal power to other parts.

Interesting concept, but as a chip designer my suspicion is that this will never leave the prototype stage. There have been many ideas like this one before, and there are a few hard barriers which they usually can not overcome: design for test/yield, designflow and competing evolutionary approaches:

Design for Test (DFT) means he'll need to figure out how to automatically generate tests which can identify broken chips. This is a well-understood problem currently, but the "low power areas" of his chips will introduce unknown values to the "high power areas". This means the test coverage will sink, and this in turn means: more defect chips will be identified as operating correctly. (Not operating correctly in the areas in which he needs accuracy, that is.) He might be able to solve this by using more complex more adaptable tests running on better testing hardware - however that means increased test cost, and test cost is a big factor in overall manufacturing costs.

Designflow means he'll need to develop tools which can handle the additional complexity during device development. For example verification is one of the biggest factors in development. Now if you introduce more variability into some parts of the device, then you need to run more tests to investigate how the different outcomes of the "low accuracy areas" effect the "high accuracy areas". With standard digital design you have just one outcome for a digital block - now if you have e.g. 20 different outcomes that could potentially mean you need to run the same test 20 times - one for each result. More time spend in simulation essentially means longer time to market - again a very critical issue.

Competing evolutionary approaches - there are a lot of them already in use. One approach is to just clock-gate certain parts of a chip, or (if leakage is too high) you can even turn-off the power to some parts of the chip. You might just have a part of the device running which checks occasionally if the rest of the device is needed and activates it on demand. (See Freescale's MPC560xS for an example.) You could also just pick a less accurate algorithm for your "fuzzy" tasks (silly example: using 3 decimal points rather than 8 - you could even calculate in advance how much your error could be - less digital logic means less power consumption, too.)

Now having said all that - he may very well find solutions for all these problems and I wish him luck. I just wanted to give an idea of the obstacles he needs to overcome. However so far he just has a prototype - as counter-intuitive this may sound: that's the easy part. Getting to this stage means he has 20% of the problems solved. That's great, but if we hear from this again it will be in a few years at the earliest.

I suppose the simple way would be to just reduce core voltage and violate setup times. Similar to overclocking this would in many cases work without noticeable errors. I found an article which would indicate that he's indeed looking in that direction: http://legerdemain.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/the-probabilistic-chipsa-heresy "Palem's idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip-specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits"

So that would mean he's using less power for some parts of the chip, where he doesn't need so much accuracy, but providing normal power to other parts.

Interesting concept, but as a chip designer my suspicion is that this will never leave the prototype stage. There have been many ideas like this one before, and there are a few hard barriers which they usually can not overcome: design for test/yield, designflow and competing evolutionary approaches:

Design for Test (DFT) means he'll need to figure out how to automatically generate tests which can identify broken chips. This is a well-understood problem currently, but the "low power areas" of his chips will introduce unknown values to the "high power areas". This means the test coverage will sink, and this in turn means: more defect chips will be identified as operating correctly. (Not operating correctly in the areas in which he needs accuracy, that is.) He might be able to solve this by using more complex more adaptable tests running on better testing hardware - however that means increased test cost, and test cost is a big factor in overall manufacturing costs.

Designflow means he'll need to develop tools which can handle the additional complexity during device development. For example verification is one of the biggest factors in development. Now if you introduce more variability into some parts of the device, then you need to run more tests to investigate how the different outcomes of the "low accuracy areas" effect the "high accuracy areas". With standard digital design you have just one outcome for a digital block - now if you have e.g. 20 different outcomes that could potentially mean you need to run the same test 20 times - one for each result. More time spend in simulation essentially means longer time to market - again a very critical issue.

Competing evolutionary approaches - there are a lot of them already in use. One approach is to just clock-gate certain parts of a chip, or (if leakage is too high) you can even turn-off the power to some parts of the chip. You might just have a part of the device running which checks occasionally if the rest of the device is needed and activates it on demand. (See Freescale's MPC560xS for an example.) You could also just pick a less accurate algorithm for your "fuzzy" tasks (silly example: using 3 decimal points rather than 8 - you could even calculate in advance how much your error could be - less digital logic means less power consumption, too.)

Now having said all that - he may very well find solutions for all these problems and I wish him luck. I just wanted to give an idea of the obstacles he needs to overcome. However so far he just has a prototype - as counter-intuitive this may sound: that's the easy part. Getting to this stage means he has 20% of the problems solved. That's great, but if we hear from this again it will be in a few years at the earliest.

Someone should read about fractals.

A customer makes a connection to the bank via SSL. How does the customer know whether or not this encryption succeeds or fails? He has no idea and he has no way of finding out.

The 1% error rate of paper ballots can be read here and many other places. Google "paper ballot error rate".

Also, I have my doubts about the methods from the paper, though I haven't read it. For example, how resistant is the technique with respect to attacks on votes that have been cast by people who, for some reason (such as low technical skills), cannot check the correctness of the result? If someone else is going to do that for them, won't this compromise anonymity of their vote?

There are many techniques out there. Some allow for a voter to verify that his own vote has been counted correctly. Universally verifiable systems allow for a voter to verify that everyone's vote has been counted correctly. No, this does not in general compromise the anonymity of the vote.

Also, don't you feel a bit silly arguing against hypothetical weaknesses of cryptosystems when you haven't even bothered to read the basics? Here's another good paper by Microsoft. Here's another good one from Carnegie Mellon.

Please read these papers. You will see they have carefully thought through the issues you are raising.

Most of these systems operate on a server/client basis. The client can use whichever implementation he desires as long as it implements the algorithm. He can use Microsoft Voter or GNU Vote or whatever he wants. You're not forced to sit down at a voting booth with software you don't trust.

According to this press release, Saint Arnold's Brewing Company is actually working with the student researchers. They supplied them with the brewer's yeast.

New spots are beginning to break out on the face of the Sun and may signal the end of a dry spell in solar activity.

For which I, as a radio amateur will be very happy, as we're currently right at the lowest point of the sunspot cycle . The sun's activity correlates with the "reflectivity" of the layers of the atmosphere. When the layers are "reflective", signals can bounce, with each bounce landing a thousand or so miles away. If you get a few bounces, you can talk to the other side of the world, even on low power. When there's no propagation, you are unlikely to get more than 50 or so miles (groundwave), no matter how much power you pump out (excluding modes like satellite, moonbounce, meteorscatter, etc).

Although the solar dials don't seem to indicate it.

The skin vision thing strikes me as highly unlikely in the "I would expect to have seen some evidence of it occurring, given the amount of time that people have had their eyes close, covered, or damaged" not the "It is a violation of $SOME_PHYSICAL_LAW as we know it" sense.

Light sensitive cells are common enough in various organisms, including in configurations with rudimentary or nonexistent lens structures, so there is no reason to believe that humans having some light sensitive structures on their skin is impossible, I'd just have expected to see more evidence, or even anecdotes, if it were the case.

On the other hand, given the development of clever stuff like the single pixel camera, synthetic aperture radar, and other examples of clever-DSP-making-seemingly-implausible-vision-systems-work-quite-well I would not be at all surprised if the researcher in TFA has some clever ideas about getting usable information out of large, irregular arrays of lensless sensor elements.

http://www.ece.rice.edu/~jpr/com0895-robinson.pdf

This is neither interesting or correct. Even though "NASA hasn't designed a space capsule in 40 years", they have designed and successfully used parachutes all over the solar system.

Here's a picture of the Phoenix Lander with a deployed parachute on it's way to a successful landing this year: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/images/press/9227-PHX_Lander.html Here's how they landed the Mars Rovers using parachutes: http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/mission/spacecraft_edl_parachute.html

In fact, NASA has ongoing parachute development projects. Here's a link to research being done at Rice University that shows how the Orion parachute works: http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=11138

To sum up, you are wrong and ignorant. The Genesis probe failure had nothing to do with parachutes. All you did was notice that two objects of roughly the same shape hit the ground too hard. This is about as intelligent as getting the round peg in the round hole.

Then, showing that you stupidity is matched by your arrogance, you said that the people doing this work were incompetent. All you really showed is that you are a pathetic excuse for a human being, and the only way you can try and build yourself up is by saying nasty things about people who are far better then you. I would be completely unsurprised if you were the kind of jerk who kicks dogs and pushes around small children.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Israel uses tanks and bulldozers to demolish Palestinian houses, often with children inside who are too young to throw rocks.

Israel makes every effort to get the inhabitants out. The claim that Israel often demolishes houses with children inside is a lie.

Arab & Muslim citizens of Israel can vote, run for office, say anything they want, print anything they want, follow any religion they choose, work in any profession they choose, serve on the supreme court, and sue the government (and sometimes win). Doesn't sound like apartheid to me.

The problem is that all of that is a lie. I don't know why you Zionists bother spreading this BS

Uh, that would be because it is true. To begin your research, here's the Wikipedia article on the United Arab List, an Israeli Arab political party that currently has three members in the Knesset. There are currently a total of 12 Arab Members of the Knesset. Supreme Court Justice Salim Joubran is an Arab. Elias Nakhleh, an Arab, served four terms in the Knesset, eventually becoming Deputy Speaker. You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

However, amateur radio people such as myself rub their hands with glee, as a reflective ionosphere means good DX :)
I check the "Space dials" regularly, and can't wait for them to be in the red! 73s.

Bruno suggested that there could be an infinite number of worlds and that they could be inhabited by intelligent life.

For this they burned him at the stake.

Bruno suggested that there could be an infinite number of worlds and that they could be inhabited by intelligent life.

For this they burned him at the stake.

Galileo was only 'shown the instruments' of torture and placed under house arrest.

Bruno is the guy they need to apologize to!

Bruno suggested that there could be an infinite number of worlds and that they could be inhabited by intelligent life.

For this they burned him at the stake.

Galileo was only 'shown the instruments' of torture and placed under house arrest.

Bruno is the guy they need to apologize to!

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~biy/Selected%20papers/NanoLett-H@Cage.pdf Tops out at about 130GPa. With a little cooling, this could be a feasible cage for a tiny little bit of superconducting hydrogen. Neat. However, what we want is buckytubes full of superconducting hydrogen.

There's another side to the Galileo debate - that he was the victim of a political persecution by fellow scientists who felt Galileo was making fools out of them. It was they, not the church, who put forward the idea that Heliocentrism would lead to sun worship. Galileo kept much of his research secret not because he feared the Church, but because he feared the rebuke of his fellow scientists.

Read here:

http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/scheiner.html

Also read this excerpt from Columbia Humanities Professor Robert Nisbet:

http://www.bible-researcher.com/nisbet1.html

Galileo's falling out with the Catholic Church may have been vital - but it sure wasn't about the church accepting a proven point of heliocentricism.

Corpenicus' work proposing the heliocentric hypothesis was after all church sponsored (as was Galileo) and indeed inscribed, IIRC, to the pope of the time.

Galileo had been wrong before, apparently he believed comets to be an atmospheric phenomenon and the great _scientific_ minds of the time were as yet unconvinced. The church was leaving the question of geo- and heliocentricism open rather than making a decree as to the truth of one or other. Galileo by all accounts didn't like that. Despite being called in to the vatican he went ahead and published non-latin work to tell the masses that his theory was the truth - this shows he wasn't trying to convince the learned scholars, incidentally. Kepler had already published on much of the stuff Galileo worked on anyway so the papacy was hardly keeping things in the bag. Possibly the church was wary of following Kepler's hypotheses which appear to have been founded on a sort of Platonic helio-mysticism (eg http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html).

Fine, the papacy over-reacted to Galileo. We got it.

Incidentally - was Galileo right? Is the sun "fixed". I don't think so. Indeed I'm happy with both geocentric and heliocentric descriptions; but in a "sol" centred frame of reference I'm happier with heliocentric maths (though one of the problems with heliocentricism apparently was that it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables).

---
Some comparative sources:
http://galileo.rice.edu/bio/narrative_7.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm

Galileo's falling out with the Catholic Church may have been vital - but it sure wasn't about the church accepting a proven point of heliocentricism.

Corpenicus' work proposing the heliocentric hypothesis was after all church sponsored (as was Galileo) and indeed inscribed, IIRC, to the pope of the time.

Galileo had been wrong before, apparently he believed comets to be an atmospheric phenomenon and the great _scientific_ minds of the time were as yet unconvinced. The church was leaving the question of geo- and heliocentricism open rather than making a decree as to the truth of one or other. Galileo by all accounts didn't like that. Despite being called in to the vatican he went ahead and published non-latin work to tell the masses that his theory was the truth - this shows he wasn't trying to convince the learned scholars, incidentally. Kepler had already published on much of the stuff Galileo worked on anyway so the papacy was hardly keeping things in the bag. Possibly the church was wary of following Kepler's hypotheses which appear to have been founded on a sort of Platonic helio-mysticism (eg http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/kepler.html).

Fine, the papacy over-reacted to Galileo. We got it.

Incidentally - was Galileo right? Is the sun "fixed". I don't think so. Indeed I'm happy with both geocentric and heliocentric descriptions; but in a "sol" centred frame of reference I'm happier with heliocentric maths (though one of the problems with heliocentricism apparently was that it failed to be as accurate as Ptolemy's tables).

---
Some comparative sources:
http://galileo.rice.edu/bio/narrative_7.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06342b.htm

For years, that disaster has been unfolding so slowly that it's been invisible.

Although many regard the Federal Clean Air Act of 1970 (FCAA) as the beginning of air pollution control in the United States, the national quest for clean air began long before.

Despite the multi-pronged clean-air campaign, there is a long way to go. It will take until 2007 to 2010, on the basis of E.P.A. projections, for Connecticut and the rest of the nation to breathe air that meets Federal ozone standards. And reducing airborne soot will take even longer, until 2015 at the earliest.

Yeah... Me too. It's somewhat disturbing when a nation's policies become utterly nonsensical, especially when that nation has shown itself willing to attack other nations without provocation.

From http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika/projects/stoll.html:

"Events, Patterns, and Analysis: Forecasting International Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
[...]
Project Goals:

We believe that the proliferation of news in electronic form as well as a series of advances in information extraction, data mining, statistical machine learning and stochastic modeling have made it possible to predict the outbreak of a serious international conflict by analyzing event data extracted from a multitude of sources over an extended period of time. The goal of our project is to develop techniques to construct extensive event data sets and models necessary to make such predictions. We hope to be able to predict the onset of serious international conflicts four to eight weeks in advance. Specifically, the goals of our research are:

* To design information extraction techniques and build events data sets for use by the entire scientific community.
* To use these events data and develop the algorithmic base for making predictions about the onset of serious conflict.
* To construct explanatory models in the form of dynamic Bayesian networks, building on the existing findings from the scientific study of international relations.

Timely warning of the outbreak of serious conflict can be a key element in conflict resolution. Early warning can provide the time for state and non-state actors to intervene and prevent the outbreak. Thus, we feel our work can be of potential value to the conflict resolution process, even though the focus of our research is predicting the outbreak and evolution of conflict."

This project was funded 2003-2006 by the NSF.

Sounds a bit like the story of the mitochondria

All your base (pairs) belong to us!

The President's pardon powers are absolute.

Quibble: except for cases of impeachment.

Abuses like the Libby case and the Mark Rich case may fuel efforts for a Constitutional amendment limiting pardons, or allowing them to be overturned. I'd imagine an amendment that lets a massive super-majority of Congress (like 75%) override a pardon might not be a bad idea.

I despute the merit of that suggestion, based on what I know of the constitutional convention debates on the issue. The thought was that the President being able to give a swift and certain pardon might facilitate the quieting of rebellions, and (political cronies aside), those who make it all the way through the official DOJ pardon vetting process are generally deserving. "The quality of mercy is not strained"; excessive additional limits seem seem both uncharitable and unwise.

I have a counterproposal (if you're going to amend the constitution): modify the pardon power, so that therafter the president may still use one to exempt anyone from "indictment, trial, judgment or punishment," but that whoever accepts such pardon or clemency shall still suffer "disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of Honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" (while allowing that anyone may refuse such pardon or clemency when proferred). This limits the usefulness of the pardoning of political cronies (since they're effectively banned from the political game ever after), without excessively limiting the potential role in society for rehabilitated criminals who now benefit from the rare exercise of "the benign power".

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

If you read the Alternative Coagulants section in the Rennet article, you'll see there are quite a few options open to vegetarians. If you are a vegetarian, just check the label. If it doesn't mention how the rennet was harvested, you should assume it came from a calf stomach. However, there are many options available that are vegetarian. Just Google "vegetarian cheese" for several useful sites.

I think it's importaint to point out that according to the 2000 census there were slightly more women living in the US then men. Also in general men are slightly more likely to enlist in the US army, and since the country is at war then that would leave even more women outnumber men in internet use.

Once you've thought about that, think of all the initiatives trying to get women interested in computers and computer sciences:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wics/
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/wccce/program04/Papers/mark.h tml
http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/club/girls.html
http://www.awc-hq.org/

We're defiantly not doing those things for young men.

Then due to a natural progression, if you're going to use a computer at all you might as well be online. So of course there's more women using the internet than men.

And don't forget that population of young women addicted to those "women run alt-pornography sites" like the suicide girls and gods girls etc.

In the 1997-98 school year, Washington DC spent $7,138 per pupil in primary and secondary school. This was, of course, 10 years ago--estimates these days go from $9,500 to $13,000 per student, depending on where you look. This is not only sufficient for a quite decent private education, but even (in some places) a quite decent private college education. And yet this is still primary/secondary school we're talking about.

Regardless of where our education expenditures rank against other categories in the GDP, this could still be considered excessive spending, even if the results were acceptable (which, arguably, they aren't). It would be difficult to argue that increased spending would improve the results. If the increase continues, it would simply be cheaper to send all schoolkids--at least, the ones in DC--to one of the cheaper Ivy Leagues to learn their letters and numbers.

In the case of banks, no. When opening an account, banks must, by law be provided with certain documentation which proves who you are. For a quick and dirty list, see this from Rice University (pdf). Note that a matricular consular card IS NOT a valid form of identification yet Bank of America, and others, are being allowed to use it anyway.

So what if BofA has decided to take that risk?

By violating federal law, the government, if it so chose to do so, could suspend or revoke Bank of America's charter or even take it over. If you had accounts with them, would you want them to be risking your money?

And god forbid people trying to make a better life be able to save a few bucks so there children can get a better schooling and become productive tax paying members of the US.

Strawman argument. No one is saying that non-citizens shouldn't be allowed to open accounts. What is being said is that people who shouldn't be here in the first place are being allowed to circumvent the law with the aid and assistance of banks.

no no, lets just spend billions upon billions of dollars throughing out people who will do jobs no locals will.

False argument. While certainly some jobs like maid service in hotels or grunt work on construction sites are jobs that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't do, the issue is that these people have not followed very basic rules to get a green card to work here legally.

Further, the vast majority of their money isn't even spent in this country. It is sent to their home country to support their families which means the money they make is propping up other, corrupt, governments who can't see the way to take care of their own people.

I would also argue that if BofA wants to hold money for people with lttle or no documentation that's their business.

See my above comments. Further, Bank of America is a publicly traded company. They are responsible to the shareholders. By endangering their status they are risking the money of the owners of the company.

Think about how many mutual funds or pension accounts have money invested in Bank of America stock. Imagine what would happen if Bank of America stock gets suspended pending investigations of its activities. Can you say panic?

I got an undergraduate CS degree from Rice University in 1986. It was during my 4 years there that the CS department was created. Previously it had been a program jointly administered by the EE and Mathematical Sciences (aka Applied Math, already separate from the "pure" Mathematics department) departments.

Given this history our courses tended to be cross-listed as CS, EE, and MS courses. We had "real" EE classes and "real" math classes as requirements for graduation. Other classes were real CS courses that some EEs (and fewer Math Scientists) would also take, e.g. Algorithms and Data Structures, Compiler Design, Programming Languages. But others were straight EE (Digital Logic Design) or MS courses (Linear Algebra). Heck, we even had to take a logic class that was listed as a Philosophy course!

We tended to have one or two courses per semester that required programming, but the majority of the work was written (algorithms written in an abstract language, complexity analysis, proofs).

So today I do IT stuff, even much-dreaded web development. But similar to the IT:CS::plumbing:physics comment earlier in this thread, I consider myself a plumber. I don't do much CS. But I feel I have a deeper understanding of what's going on below the surface than folks who've just learned "programming" and I'm confident I can learn any new valves, pipes, and regulators that come along in the future.

Cheers,
Richard

Currently, all these multi-processor mapping activities happens manually, and it really sucks. It would be wonderful if programming languages supported this activity automatically.

That's the whole point of High Performance Fortran (HPF). You tell it what to do, and it figures out how to do the threading and data segregation for you: vector operations, different data models, block vs cyclic storage, load balancing, everything. The compilers are commercial, but they do exist for high-end systems.

-JS

The problem is that stupid companies think programmers with a degree are better, even though there are no university level programming degrees.

Their website has a few pictures at 64x64 pixel resolution:
http://dsp.rice.edu/cs/cscamera

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry.

While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.'

Don't believe the BSD hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Oh, my.

I've apparently touched a nerve or two.

I am so sorry, dear.

Now when you get your blood pressure back under control and can achieve that state of mind that is receptive to learning new things, you really should try reading up on what is known about the pain experience (and probably about withdrawal, habituation, and dependency). Doing so is very likely to improve the quality of the rest of your life, and might even make it possible for you to come to better terms with some of your memories.

As to the severity of your pain experiences, I do not and I have not made any judgment about those. You state that some of the worst were triggered by physiologic withdrawal from opioids. Some other people go through opioid withdrawal without feeling that same kind of intense pain experience. That doesn't deny your experience. It is not an "either - or" kind of thing.

I find it interesting that you somehow know that I have no first hand knowledge of intense pain or of opioid withdrawal. You seem to have very advanced extra sensory perception. Or maybe you are just very, very wrong. Since I'm not about to show off my scars and boo-boos on Slashdot, this is going to remain unresolved. It would be wise of you to learn to live with a certain amount of ambiguity, especially concerning the personal history of strangers.

One other thing-- don't confuse clinical detachment with a lack of empathy. There is no way in hell that I am going to enable drug-seeking behaviors with expressions of sympathy. You've got a damn tough road ahead of you, but apparently from what you have written you have faced as bad or worse and gotten through it. It's stupid to dwell on how bad the problems are. It saps you of the energy you need to meet them and beat them. Deal with it; don't waste time and energy talking about it.

Here is something written more than 100 years ago by a fellow who had just had one leg amputated for tuberculosis of the bone (an excruciatingly painful disease), and was refusing to let the doctors amputate his other leg: Invictus.

In COMP 314 (Rice University's sophomore-level programming & algorithms class, taught this past spring by Prof. Dan Wallach) we TAs solved this problem with Subversion.

An important part of real-world programming is teamwork; in 314 we embrace this and randomly sort students into groups of two for pair programming. The groups change for each project, and each project group gets a spot in a svn repository set up for the course. ACLs keep groups from peeking at one another's changes (for example, see this team list, which is actually just a slice of our Subversion access control file). Students were required to tag their submissions for each of the project milestones: specification, prototype, final; this was how students submitted code for these deadlines. From timestamps we could easily see which groups incurred "slip hours" for late turnins.

There were a number of reported incidences of lost work or conflicting changes which would have been disasters if not for svn, which saved their bacon. Groups that learned to check in early and often knew that accidental deletions or disk failures posed no threat to a successful project submission. A few enterprising teams even used tags and branches to help organize complex development efforts. In all, it was quite a successful adventure and we'll probably do something similar in the future.

In COMP 314 (Rice University's sophomore-level programming & algorithms class, taught this past spring by Prof. Dan Wallach) we TAs solved this problem with Subversion.

An important part of real-world programming is teamwork; in 314 we embrace this and randomly sort students into groups of two for pair programming. The groups change for each project, and each project group gets a spot in a svn repository set up for the course. ACLs keep groups from peeking at one another's changes (for example, see this team list, which is actually just a slice of our Subversion access control file). Students were required to tag their submissions for each of the project milestones: specification, prototype, final; this was how students submitted code for these deadlines. From timestamps we could easily see which groups incurred "slip hours" for late turnins.

There were a number of reported incidences of lost work or conflicting changes which would have been disasters if not for svn, which saved their bacon. Groups that learned to check in early and often knew that accidental deletions or disk failures posed no threat to a successful project submission. A few enterprising teams even used tags and branches to help organize complex development efforts. In all, it was quite a successful adventure and we'll probably do something similar in the future.

In COMP 314 (Rice University's sophomore-level programming & algorithms class, taught this past spring by Prof. Dan Wallach) we TAs solved this problem with Subversion.

An important part of real-world programming is teamwork; in 314 we embrace this and randomly sort students into groups of two for pair programming. The groups change for each project, and each project group gets a spot in a svn repository set up for the course. ACLs keep groups from peeking at one another's changes (for example, see this team list, which is actually just a slice of our Subversion access control file). Students were required to tag their submissions for each of the project milestones: specification, prototype, final; this was how students submitted code for these deadlines. From timestamps we could easily see which groups incurred "slip hours" for late turnins.

There were a number of reported incidences of lost work or conflicting changes which would have been disasters if not for svn, which saved their bacon. Groups that learned to check in early and often knew that accidental deletions or disk failures posed no threat to a successful project submission. A few enterprising teams even used tags and branches to help organize complex development efforts. In all, it was quite a successful adventure and we'll probably do something similar in the future.