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Part 1, pure hyperbole and Bullshit. If there is illegal activity due process will find it and prosecute it, and the Constitution provides the presumption of innocence. Leftists wanted that for their candidate.

Ok... so how is a desire to shut down the free press and a pattern of overt religious discrimination at all compatible with the first amendment? All you have to do is listen to Trump himself to see that he's outright hostile to many provisions of the Bill of Rights. By supporting Trump, the right has lost whatever credibility they once had with regard to being the party that respected the constitution. Under his leadership they are fast becoming authoritarians rather than conservatives.

Your Pelosi quote doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. No democrat has ever said that illegal immigrants cannot commit crimes. It's also frankly ludicrous to see this narrative that immigrants are somehow more crime-prone than any other citizen. The actual data suggests the opposite. Sure, there are serial killers that are immigrants. There are also serial killers that are citizens. The tendency towards violent crime is completely orthogonal to immigrant status, and only fearmongers trying to push a nationalist agenda will tell you otherwise.

Trump himself declared his intent for "a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on." It's a Muslim ban. Stop changing the facts. The whole thing is unconstitutional, and if you are going to claim this is ok, then you should just be honest that you want to abolish the first amendment protections of religion and make Christianity a state-sanctioned religion. That's reprehensible, but at least you'd be consistent then, rather than trying to pretend you give a shit about the constitution while simultaneously defending flagrant abuses by DJT.

Look at the facts on the ACA - it hasn't had a meaningful impact one way or the other on healthcare costs, but it has had a meaningful impact on uninsured numbers. Get away from anecdotes and partisan opinion pieces, look at data, and that's the only conclusion that can be made. It isn't the raging success that Democrats would like to take credit for, but it isn't the sole cause of our problems as Fox News has been claiming for the last several years. Many Republicans actually support the provision that allows coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and some of the law's other aspects. Sure, health care costs are increasing, but who is at fault for that? Those who are refusing to do anything. Look at the numbers since 1960 and you'll see that our recent problem are just the culmination of a trend that's been building for a long, long time: http://hspm.sph.sc.edu/courses...

Healthcare is the single biggest economic issue facing the country right now. Wages generally grow linearly, at least on the scale of human lifetimes, but it's plain as day from that chart that healthcare costs are growing quadratically. This is a real, systemic problem, not just another political football, and people's lives and livelihoods are at stake.

The Democrats are in the minority. They literally have control over no branch of the government right now, so I'm not sure why it's even worth complaining about them. Instead, you should be looking to these Republicans who are so full of promises to actually follow through because they hold all the cards - but they've been playing opposition politics for so long that I'm doubtful that they will get anything meaningful done to address our real problems. I would love to be proven wrong.

As I understand it, the main ageing mechanism that kills them is oxidation of the graphite anode, which starts when the cell is manufactured and isn't appreciably affected by usage except for being accelerated somewhat by being stored at high temperatures with low (20%) charge.

That's complete nonsense.

Li-Ion cells absolutely are severely negatively affected by cycling. (PDF)

That's not to say there isn't calendar fade/degradation of Li-Ion cells. Just that it is far less significant than charge/discharge cycle fade. There is some of both, but that's only a significant concern for long-term standby power applications (not a significant issue for EVs).

Anecdotally, I recently swapped the battery in my cell phone. The replacement unit was new, old-stock. It was 4+ years old, manufactured at the same time as the dying battery it was replacing, but works quite nicely. No doubt it's slightly lower capacity than a newly manufactured battery would be, but not noticeably so.

Sorry, bloggers and authors peddling their own books? Sorry, not convinced.

I tried to select sources that referenced actual numbers. Feel free to cite numbers of your own, but this is such a well-known phenomenon at this point that denying it strikes me as highly unusual.

And how convenient, that the most recent disaster is blamed on Bush...

I don't think it's very fair to blame former President Bush for the financial crisis. Though his 2003 tax cuts included a provision eliminating capital gains tax on certain home sales, which created structures that allowed the real estate and financial markets to become corrupted and eventually collapse, assigning blame to him is like blaming the owner of a gun shop when someone commits a crime using a gun purchased at that shop.

Democrats of the late 1990ies are to blame...

The core cause of the financial crisis was the over-leveraging of securities backed by subprime loans. Given that these loans were overwhelmingly not backed by Fannie Mae and/or Freddie Mac, I'm struggling to determine how the author of that article is making the connection between rules regarding affordable housing access for the poor and minorities and the financial crisis (I do like his books, though). After some cursory Googling, I located this, which, while interesting, isn't especially relevant.

...workforce participation...

This is why.

Republicans don't win the Southern vote, they do, however, appeal to rural constituencies, and the south has more rural areas than the north.

Here are some statistics, from a University of South Carolina webpage, on the rural/urban breakdown in a bunch of Southern states. Hint: none of the Southern states shown ( SC, NC, GA, TN) are more that 40% rural population (and less than 60% urban). The only overwhelmingly "rural" state is Vermont --- the place that elects self-identified Independent/Socialist candidates. While the "Red South" has a bigger rural proportion than some "strong blue" areas, the simplistic narrative that "Republicans win the vote by supporting Rural folks over Urban" is itself a propaganda piece.

The Republican narrative involves constructing an image of a "real" America, folksy and rural and hard-working and self-sufficient [insert picture of white family holding hunting rifles here], versus the "urban welfare moochers" [insert picture of black people, despite the vast majority of welfare recipients being white]. White city folk, with confederate flags on the pickup truck they drive two blocks to the grocery store, are convinced to identify with the "real America," and vote Republican (so those lazy dark-skinned "urban" people don't take all their hard-earned wages). Ignore the fact that rural America receives much more Federal money per capita (few farms would be self-supporting without big Federal ag. subsidies, infrastructure subsidies, etc.), and "Red" states as a whole receive a net influx of benefits paid for by "Blue" state taxes. Appealing to long-standing racial resentment keeps the white South --- including its majority urban population --- voting Republican, to make sure the "urban" people don't get "handouts".

How about this one? http://www.physics.sc.edu/~kunchur/Acoustics-papers.htm

Abstract is:

"Many misconceptions and mysteries surround the perception and reproduction of musical sounds. Specifications such as frequency response and certain common distortions provide an inadequate indication of the sound quality, whereas accuracy in the time domain is known to significantly influence audio transparency. While the upper frequency cutoff of human hearing is around 18 kHz (or even lower in older individuals) a much higher bandwidth and temporal resolution can influence the perception of sound. Non-linearities and temporal complexities in the auditory system negate the simple f ~ 1/t reciprocal relationship between frequency and time. In our group's research -- which lies at the intersection of psychophysics, human hearing, and high-end audio -- we measure the limits of human hearing and relate them to the neurophysiology of the auditory system. These experiments also help to define the criteria for perfect fidelity in a sound-reproduction system. Our recent behavioral studies on human subjects proved that humans can discern timing alterations on a 5 microsecond time scale, indicating that that digital sampling rates used in common consumer audio (such as CD) are insufficient for fully preserving transparency."

That's just the USA, right? How about African regions?

http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/hiv5.htm

Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, there are an estimated 22.5 million (range: 20.9 million–24.3 million; 2007 figures) people infected by HIV with over 2.8 million new infections in 2006. In this region, there were 2.1 million deaths (figure 11 and 12). Ten million young Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 and 3 million children are infected. In contrast to western countries, young African women are more likely to be infected with HIV than young men. According to UNAIDS, 61% of HIV-infected people in sub-Saharan Africa are female and the gap is increasing. Women are being infected with HIV at an earlier age than men in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The differences in infection levels are most pronounced among young people (aged 15 – 24 years) with, on average, 36 young women living with HIV for every 10 young men in sub-Saharan Africa.

Check out this one:

http://www.avert.org/safricastats.htm

From 2008:

65,646 deaths of children age 0-9

http://www.avert.org/hiv-aids-africa.htm

Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV and AIDS than any other region of the world. An estimated 22.5 million people are living with HIV in the region - around two thirds of the global total. In 2009 around 1.3 million people died from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and 1.8 million people became infected with HIV. Since the beginning of the epidemic 14.8 million children have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS.1

The social and economic consequences of the AIDS epidemic are widely felt, not only in the health sector but also in education, industry, agriculture, transport, human resources and the economy in general. The AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa continues to devastate communities, rolling back decades of development progress.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a triple challenge:

        Providing health care, antiretroviral treatment, and support to a growing population of people with HIV-related illnesses.
        Reducing the annual toll of new HIV infections by enabling individuals to protect themselves and others.
        Coping with the impact of millions of AIDS deaths2 on orphans and other survivors, communities, and national development.

Again, it's well worth finding a sure-fire preventive vaccine to protect everyone, regardless of whether or not you personally think they deserve it. Eliminating HIV is good for all health care workers who come into contact with HIV carriers, and for everyone else those health care workers come into contact with, everyone who uses public restrooms (due to the infinitesimal chance of contracting HIV from hard surfaces), everyone who might be a "good samaritan" and help someone at a car accident, a slip-and-fall, work mishap, etc., and for nice folks who have a lying, cheating husband|wife|bf|gf.

white people are the ones with the privilege, the ones who bought and sold black people as slaves

http://www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/1006/article/1091
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4074/is_200601/ai_n17180356/
http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/1995/3037.html

Uh, I'm checking notes from my Bacterial Pathogenesis lectures, and they say that YOU'RE wrong. The University of Southern Carolina med school site also has a page of notes on this matter that agrees with what I've learned; this isn't based soley on the TED talk, this is based on what I've learned from prior experience in bacterial pathology.

http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/mayer/antibiot.htm

"Antibiotics are categorized as bactericidal if they kill the susceptible bacteria or bacteriostatic if they reversibly inhibit the growth of bacteria. In general the use of bactericidal antibiotics is preferred but many factors may dictate the use of a bacteriostatic antibiotic. When a bacteriostatic antibiotic is used the duration of therapy must be sufficient to allow cellular and humoral defense mechanisms to eradicate the bacteria."

Or am I misunderstanding something? Are you a biologist of some sort with experience in the field?

"The dam might have just brought the event forward a year or two."

Or decades, or centuries. It's hard to be sure yet. As the article mentions, there is ample precedent for earthquakes being triggered by the weight of the water behind dams and increase in pore fluid pressure, both in seismically active and relatively inactive areas. If you want to find papers, look for the term "reservoir-induced seismicity". In the high activity case, yeah, maybe it didn't make much difference, because the area could have frequent earthquakes anyway, but in the latter case (less active area) it can make a big difference versus the natural earthquake pattern. Having major earthquakes where they didn't happen before (in human memory) is pretty inconvenient.

Because the earthquake did happen in a fairly seismically active part of China, people should be cautious about interpreting too much into its location near a dam. For an earthquake that big the stress must have built up over a long period of time -- far longer than the dam has been around. It couldn't have been the sole cause. It is still a legitimate question that deserves further study.

This paper [PDF] gives a good description of the physics and evidence behind the process with an example from the Montecello reservoir [PDF] in South Carolina.

This paper, which unfortunately requires a subscription to read, talks specifically about reservoir-induced seismicity in China, especially in regards to the Three Gorges Dam project. It dates from 1998.

"The dam might have just brought the event forward a year or two."

Or decades, or centuries. It's hard to be sure yet. As the article mentions, there is ample precedent for earthquakes being triggered by the weight of the water behind dams and increase in pore fluid pressure, both in seismically active and relatively inactive areas. If you want to find papers, look for the term "reservoir-induced seismicity". In the high activity case, yeah, maybe it didn't make much difference, because the area could have frequent earthquakes anyway, but in the latter case (less active area) it can make a big difference versus the natural earthquake pattern. Having major earthquakes where they didn't happen before (in human memory) is pretty inconvenient.

Because the earthquake did happen in a fairly seismically active part of China, people should be cautious about interpreting too much into its location near a dam. For an earthquake that big the stress must have built up over a long period of time -- far longer than the dam has been around. It couldn't have been the sole cause. It is still a legitimate question that deserves further study.

This paper [PDF] gives a good description of the physics and evidence behind the process with an example from the Montecello reservoir [PDF] in South Carolina.

This paper, which unfortunately requires a subscription to read, talks specifically about reservoir-induced seismicity in China, especially in regards to the Three Gorges Dam project. It dates from 1998.

Oak Tree Behaviour 101:

    Periodically, often in response to an unusually warm and wet period, oak trees will have a mast year. In the mast year acorn production is immensely increased; reports often say exponentially increased, but in my anecdotal experience I'd say about triple normal acorn production. It's normal for the mast year to affect a region rather than individual trees (though you sometimes see it in isolated specimens too) and that's the primary reason to believe this is triggered by weather.

Effects on predators of acorns are reasonably predictable and work to the oak forest's advantage; squirrel populations boom during the mast and then bust the following year when the oaks are recovering from their unusually high energy expenditure and produce little or no acorn yield.

So; in summary: while it's certainly possible that climate change has triggered this particular event, it's normal for oak trees to have occasionally high regional acorn production fluctuations, and it's normal for the squirrels to be starving and freaking out when acorn production is low or nil. No need to panic.

Posting as AC because slashdot frequently refuses to let me be myself. Login, not logged in, still forced to post AC.

That, apparently, would be SC. http://www.sc.edu/

But once we figure that out- and we will- we will be at the next great step forward.

Might take some time though. It seems that the arguments brought forward by TAUBE (1961 !, Computers and Common Sense, the Myth of Thinking Machines) against the feasibility of machine translation still hold and apply to the problem in focus.

CC.

Yes, the article summary used the term incorrectly, but no, 151.20 does not have more significant digits than 222,000 in this case. Both are exact numbers, are not rounded in any way, and so can be thought to have an inifinite number of significant digits.

Before you call me incorrect, please take 2 minutes to look at some lecture notes from an intro VLSI course:

http://www.cse.sc.edu/~jimdavis/Courses/2005-Fall%20CSCE%20613/CSCE613-Week10-Chapter-04-05.pdf

You can clearly see on page 3 (slide 6) that metal1 and metal3 are directly on top of each other. As I stated in a different post, you're confusing metal layer/wire routing in an IC with entire logic devices (transistors/gates/flops). Let me repeat it again for you: metal layers in an IC can cross.

Is this reported elsewhere? It is not clear from the article. In this link http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/chernobyl/papers/moller -et-al-2007-chernobyl-abnormalities.pdf they do not say they are working on the reactor itself, just with in a km of the excusion zone or closer.

Some later historians, such as Howard Zinn, cite the Philippine-American War as an example of American imperialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_W ar/
During the war 4,324 American soldiers died, only 1,000-1,500 of which were due to actual combat; the remainder died of disease. 2,818 were wounded. ... Philippine military deaths are estimated at 20,000 with 16,000 actually counted, while civilian deaths numbered between 250,000 and 1,000,000 Filipinos.
http://www.historyguy.com/PhilipineAmericanwar.htm l/
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is _4_51/ai_56640457/

----------------
Russia? Central Asia? Pardon Moi, but the remainders of Russian Hegemony are not asian, they are central european see,
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?i sbn=0521864038/

-------------

Catholic nations are hardly "christian" for the Protestant US.

_____________

US Imperial power? See http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/class/clis734/webguid es/milbase.htm/
U.S. European Command, in Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany, is responsible for 13 million square miles in 89 countries and territories. This area of responsibility begins at the North Cape of Norway and extends through the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, through most of Europe and parts of the Middle East, to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The Command's mission is to support and advance US interests and policies throughout the region and to provide combat ready land, maritime, and air forces to Allied Command Europe or to US Unified Commands.

Point out another country holding military bases covering 13 mega-miles in Europe, alone. You can't and there isn't any other country with the US power as demonstrated by our basing. Iraq has a base under construction that is larger than the Vatican - because we want control over Oil.... nothing else.

Sadam Hussein has less than 30 days to live - my question: does "W" have a fetish in the killing of people? Think back to the execution of Carla Fay Tucker - where "W" mocked her plea for mercy.

I think "W" is one sick puppy. Tell me you don't agree.

Revenue for monopoly protected goods is maximized at a pricing point where a lot of consumers cannot afford the product.

It's interesting to see this story show up on Slashdot because we've been discussing it here at the university where I work for the past week. A similar hypoxia event occurred off the coast of Myrtle Beach, SC in 2004 and nobody is completely sure what caused it, so it's interesting to see a similar event in progress elsewhere.

"what will be the advantages of paid use of their quantum computer?"

I'm sure the NSA and other government agencies have a passing interest in code breaking, which among other things means being able to factor huge numbers quickly. A quantum computer would (if it contained sufficient logic cells) be able to try all possible factors of a number at the same time, and would thus be able to factor any number almost instantaneously. It would mean the death of most common types of encryption that depend upon the difficulty of factoring as a means of insuring the privacy of data. After all, the government probably has petabytes of encrypted data from their nationwide wiretapping of telephone and Internet communications they would love to be able to decrypt quickly.

You conviently ignored explaining angular unconformities. I like angular uncomformities as a demonstration of old earth as you can walk right up to them and see them with your own eyes and there is little room for "interperation".

A flood very well explains marine deposits thousands of feet above sea level.

I can see that you are not up on the creationist literature. Creationist employ a mechanism called hydrological sorting to explain the sorting that is seen in the fossil record. For example why are no large modern mammal fossils found with dinosaur fossils. You are proposing the opposite of hyrdrological sorting where things are all mixed up and marine fossils are sitting on top of mountains. If that was the case then why not a single instance of a primate fossil in the same bed with a dinosaur? Also keep in mind many of these high elevation beds have signs of Bioturbation. These indications are present over many feet indicating that these organism where not buried and deposited but living in an slowly accumalating depositional zone.

You also ignored the fact that the Grand Canyon is layered with rock of different origins - limestone, sandstone, shale, igneous. How are these layed down by a single super flood. Some of these a layers are cross bedded sandstone, some are wind blown, some have raindrop marks, some have animal tracks and some have fossils.

More example of old earth? Magnetic reversals demonstrated on the spreading seafloor. Documenting long periods of time catching the reversal of the earths magnetic dipole as molten rock is layed down on the seafloor. Or how about ice core samples documenting seasonal transitions tens to several hundred thousands of years. Or large and thick geological deposits that consist primarily of tiny organism fossils such as diotomaceous chert, chalk and many limestones. Or layering of basalt with deposition in between. For example in which one of the these layers represents the global flood.

There sure is some willful denial going on here. I recommend you do some study and scratch in the earth yourself instead of just believing what supports your preconcieved notions and suppositions.

You are not worth debating this because you ignore the hard parts and spout off on tangents. For example you say For anyone to claim that such an event that from a physics standpoint probably cannot be measured or fathomed Are you saying that the flood existed outside of physics? Believe me if you look at the events that occur out in the cosmos such as supernova, solar flares, black holes, star collisions, planet collisions, a flood on a small planet is a tiny event by comparison.

It is you that shrinks God down to puny human size by having to believe in a creation story that a child can see as a fairy story a metaphor at best. Present day young earthers are akin to flat earthers or those who had to believe in geocentric earth. The concept of the earth rotating around the sun was at one time heresy. Good day.

Not really. Many statistical quantities have little to do with the underlying behavior of the specific objects. For example, the Central Limit Theorem says that the average of a large number of trials of an experiment's distribution will approach a bell curve, regardless of the original experiment's distribution. (One example is rolling a dice, and recording the average. With one trial, the distribution is uniform, i.e., you have an equal probability of rolling anything between 1 and 6. With two rolls, you have a low probability of averaging a 1, a relatively high probability of averaging a 3.5, and a low probability of averaging a 6. The higher the number of rolls, the more and more bell-shaped your distribution is. The Java applet on this page demonstrates it.) So, just because a distribution is observed to occur that models the spread of disease/dollars, it doesn't mean that the underlying behavior is predictable.

When you consider a 30 second ad shown during "Desperate Housewives" costs $560,000, and has maybe 10 million regular viewers (that number came from my ass, not always a reliable source), I think having 76 million eyes staring at the ad vomit on Myspace for 100 times as long every day is well worth the $580 million they paid for it.

But that's just me. AdBlock is a wonderful thing. It sure does make Myspace look a little plain though.

~Trajik2600

How much cheaper is cable because of advertisements?

Umm, on the order of 99.9% cheaper. Seriously, the overwhelming majority of costs are paid for by advertising. Consider the difference in production quality (ie, film quality, color quality, etc) of your average PBS show (ie, Painting with Bob Ross, Antique Roadshow) versus the average show on cable (ie, Drawn Together, Chapelle Show, The Daily Show), not to mention the costs of a show on one of the major networks.

Consider what happened with Friends. When the cast of Friends banded together and decided they wanted a million per episode each (~$6M total), NBC said "Sure, no problem." That's because they made $420K per 30-second spot. There are generally 18 of those per 30 minutes, which meant that they made ~$7.56M per episode.

Frankly, I'm willing to tolerate ads and product placement as long as I don't have to pay the actual staggering cost for my entertainment.

These shows are ridiculously overpriced. Do the math- we'll look at the highest-rated show, Desperate Housewives:

Average number of viewers/episode: 17.44mil
Number of ads per show: Probably about 10min of National ads (20 30-second spots), 5 of local ads (10 30-second spots)
Price per 30-second National spot: $560,000
National ad revenue per show: $11.2m
Value/viewer: $.64!

Now, this isn't counting the value of the local ads (which sell in the tens of thousands of $/spot, depending on the market and timeslot), what the show will make in syndication, or DVD sales, but neither is it counting the costs associated with broadcasting television, which are far greater than the cost of hosting a file. I just can't imagine a single show being worth more than a dollar. $2!? I think I'll find [ahem!] other ways to get the shows for a better price point.

I'd gladly pay a quarter for the rights to watch a 30-min show ad-free for 24hrs, encumbered with DRM and everything. If there were a huge database of these shows, I might even go back at a later date and pay to watch them again. A system like that would have to be at LEAST as profitable as broadcast TV, if not moreso...

Since my wife the radiologist has the day off today, I swiveled my chair around and asked her. So here's a bullet list of relevant points combining my editorializing with her systems knowledge:

-Most medical stuff is regulated at a state level (in the US, anyway), not at a federal level, so exercise caution when saying 'it's the law'.

-Radiology films are 11"x17", so you would need a big (and expensive - my wife has a couple thousand old films from her research we'd like to digitize, so I've shopped) scanner to do this.

-Contrary to popular belief, you do not own your medical records; the physician who generated them does. You do, however, have the right to access them and the request a copy. You may be required to pay a fee for the copy, but it's usually something reasonable (e.g. $10). I realize this may raise a ruckus - this isn't flame bait or an ethical statement, it's a statement about the way it is. Deal with it.

-You may request a copy of your films to keep, rather than borrow. Again, there may be a fee.
-Many practices now use PACS systems to handle the images, and can burn a CD of the data that can be read by a radiologist; many even come with the reading software on the CD. As another poster pointed out, the image data will in all likelihood conform to the DICOM standard http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/rorden/dicom.html , and can be shared with your other physicians readily. Because the CD systems are relatively new, many hospitals and imaging centers haven't yet implemented a policy of how to charge for them - so you may be able to get it for free. Or not.

-So, in a nutshell: If you are, for whatever reason, not willing to ask your physician to share the information (which is the best route - physicians are our partners in care, not our adversaries), then request a copy that you own; don't borrow. Present this data to the physician you are seeking a second opinion from. Good luck, and I hope he can treat the arthritis!

Wasn't real sure what the OP meant about the "Ding dong, the witch is dead" song was edited out (had visions of some ultra-PC schmoe saying the song was too graphic and encouraged violence), so I googled up this from imdb.com. Lots of interesting archeological findings there on how the movie was edited (the bit about removing a scene and flipping the image in the scene following to keep the original character positions seems the wildest claim there).

Anyhow, here's the bit on the Witch's dead. Song's still there; apparently an additional performance isn't:

A scene where the four main characters return to the Emerald City with the witch of the west's broomstick (including a reprise of "Ding Dong, The Witch is dead!") was cut. Only the song survived; the footage no longer exists (except a shot or two that can be found in the theatrical trailer).

Interesting case for how even recorded history can be easily lost. I doubt there's a single movie where this isn't the case -- heck, over on the Stella List (discusses Atari 2600 programming), we're trying to relocate an old Java port of the popular Stella ("no relation to the list") Atari 2600 emulator. There's hardly a medium around that keeps a perfect history, even when it's theorhetically possible, even arguably easy to do so.

I'm also reminded of my studies of Mark Twain's composition of The Mysterious Stranger, where scholars try to piece together versions by, among other things, what color pen the MSs use, or Walt Whitman's [famously] continual edits to Leaves of Grass . I'd argue our concept of 'final cuts' is a concept born solely via legacy conventional mediums of expression. Without books editions, film releases, etc, we'd have an even more difficult time discussing what's authoritative.

I'll try to stop now. I'd only initially wanted to show the Oz info, and now I'm about to launch into a diatribe about Edward Albee's desire to open up the arts from the clutches of big business (particularly in NYC's Broadway and off-Broadway theaters) so that the masses can get what he feels is a 'real' education, but at the same time uses that same power of copyright (back into another poster's deal about this all stemming from ramifications from the way IP works) closes down a local-yokel presentation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because he felt one of the actors wasn't believable in the role, not b/c of acting ability but b/c he was too tall for Albee to believe his stage-parents were his actual parents, and b/c the role as written was for a 16 year-old and this guy was 24. Performative art by definition can never, no matter how sessile the script, achieve anything resembling a final cut, intrusions like this one by a living author nonwithstanding.

But I won't mention that, and will simply say the age-old song has not been cut from Wizard of Oz. Now go watch a real movie like Zardoz.

I was deployed with CAP for seven days in Hancock county at Stennis airport, just North of Bay Saint Louis, I think the food / water / shelter thing has been covered by others (when we left, some normalcy was returning, but don't assume there is much there, especially where you are going in MS. I made it for a few minutes one day South of I10 all the way to the coast, and anything South of that rail line just past I10 is FLAT - be prepared.

As to special stuff:

A camelback / hydropack type of water carrier - much better than canteens or water bottles.
Fill with ice water and it's a portable a/c on your back.

I saw others mention a good cooler - invaluable. Ice was hard to come by and worth
it's weight in gold.

Baby wipes, if the water's off, you would be amazed how great a baby wipe shower is (compared to none at all).

Some cheap towels to carry around and wipe your face - the highest temps we met were around 106, w/ near 100% humidity. The biggest problem is that at night the temps and humidity didn't drop much, though you may get some ocean breeze further South. It's amazing how good it feels to wipe yourself off with a real towel when you are pouring sweat like a faucet.

Some cheap washcloths or hand towels for soaking. Sock in ice water and wrap around your neck as you work - will drop your body temp 5 degrees and feels great!

Bug spray - good deet stuff. It is still love bug season,
http://cricket.biol.sc.edu/luvbug.html and they are everywhere.
Also, in general be careful, they've got everything in the manuals down there - bees, copperhead snakes, FIRE ANTS (NO FOOD IN THE TENTS OR YOUR GEAR, BELIEVE ME!) fire ants will eat through a tent floor, gear, and an MRE pack to get to food, and they keep coming back.
If you get them, bleach and Deet the tent floor and that kept them out. I am told that
deet-ing the legs of a cot will keep them off of your bed (if you have one).

Reading material, a radio, etc. My time was 12 on, 12 off, and the 12 off can be hard
with no media available.

Also, if you have the opportunity, grab some MRE's while you can, they are handy and
plenty tasty. If you have the opportunity, get some MOD 24-hour rations (we had pallets of them donated by the British down at Stennis), these have some great accessories like Yorkie bars (awesome) and the pasta w/ meatballs (breakfast?) is quite tasty. Note: MOD meals do not have heaters or utensils, however 15 minutes on the hood of a black truck was all we needed.
There are also a lot of commercial "heater meals" which I am told are pretty good and are much closer to regular food - kind of like a lean cuisine, with a drink in it. These self-heat.

Make sure you decompress when you get back. Many of us suffered from mild PTSD - not because of anything we saw, but because the tempo was so high, and then when we got back home normal life seemed like a crawl.

Here's a link to our safety letter that discusses PTSD.
http://group22.net/safety/Group%2022%20Safety%20No tes-October%202005.pdf

Cel phone coverage was spotty at best, but the data layer of my Sprint phone worked pretty well.

GOOD LUCK!

ROBERT J. WILLIAMS, Capt, CAP
Commander, Palwaukee Composite Squadron (IL049)

Group 22, IL Wing
USAF Auxiliary, Civil Air Patrol

Here

Essentially there are pools of viewers chosen at random, or from some particular demographics, who have devices wired up to their TV sets.

These report to a company which shows were watched.

Given enough of these meters the monitors of the data can extrapolate a viewer figure for each show on the network.

(Obviously these results are advisory at best, and not accurate in any real sense).

After a quick google I found this writeup of one family's experience.

There are possible risks with nanotechnology, especially since we don't have a full grasp of what the newly engineered particles can do.

Gunter Oberdorster at University of Rochester http://www2.envmed.rochester.edu/envmed/tox/facult y/oberdoerster.html found that fullerenes caused "damage" to the brains of fish. Now a researcher from Rice recently gave a lecture here at the U of South Carolina and called some of that research into question, but still you have to wonder. Also, there is the problem of metals from nanopackaging surrounding chemo delivery particles http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=450 possibly collecting in the pancreas. Also research on some particles have suggested that they might cross the blood-brain barrier in humans. While this might be good for dealing with brain tumors http://www.nano.org.uk/thisweek78.htm it also raises the very real possibility that something we don't want in the brain might get there.

While I'm not all about regulating the nano-industry into oblivion, I would rather we treat it with much respect. I know that there is an "Asilomar" style conference on nano in the planning for either late this year or early next year partially sponsored by U of South Carolina http://www.nano.sc.edu/

Let's not assume anything is safe, after all, look what happened when nuclear power was tumpeted as the salvation discovery.

how much of an earthquake, raised landmass or change would you need to move the poles significantly?

I learned in my geology class that the magnetic poles have switched polarity often on the geologic timescale.

In the middle of the Atlantic ocean is a large trough running north/south where two tectonic plates are separating (this is the mechanism that caused the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea). When lava cools, the earth's magnetic field is "recorded" in the rock. Geologists have discovered magnetic "bands" in these rocks that show how the poles have traveled over time.

http://cse.cosm.sc.edu/hses/RthCrust/PlateTec/page s/magnet.htm

JUGHEAD

Jughead is a version of Veronica that has been designed to search gopher menus at a restricted set of gopher holes (e.g., only documents located on the home gopher or only a collection of gopher servers at a particular University). Jughead has many selective uses on gopher, but unlike Veronica, you won't find his name on a Gopher root menu. He is what Ed Krol likes to call "the searcher you never see." He's usually there, however; just look for a search option labeled something like this:

Search all the Gopher menus at this site

That's Jughead, Archie's good buddy, (or, if you prefer, Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display -- another "stretch"). You'll see Jughead implemented all over gopherspace, because he allows quick and effective searching of specific sites.

Now, tell me again, who wasn't where my flame-spewing pal?

My prediction is that historian in 50 or 100 years will say that the greatest terrorist group of the period 2000-2010 was be the Bush administration. Lots of correct predictions are ignored at the time they are made (e.g. Hubbert's Law or the Hubbert Curve, Wegener's 1912 book "The Origins of Continents and Oceans" and continental drift. ) and I do not care if people flame me. Within the next one hundred years, historians will know if there were terrorist cells in Iraq before the invasion (answer: none or essentially none, as the 9/11 commision found but the Bush-fanboys dispute), will terroristic threats be greater or lesser when Bush leaves office than when he entered (answer: greater), and lots of other details at which I cannot even guess right now. This is not the main reason the Bush administration will be labeled as the top terrorist group. The Bush administration and the Congress overreacted to an isolated terroristic attack. They imposed new laws, arrested innocent people, and helped/caused a cultural change which will have echos for the next 50 years. They will continue to press for laws which reduce individual rights and enhance the power of big business (e.g. RIAA). They will continue to use the police, the FBI, the (former) INS, etc. to move the US in the direction of a police state. They will eventually find reason to arrest their critics for criticism of their policies.

What was the alternative to the present situation?
1. We (the US) could have realized that 9/11 was carried out by a small group of crazy people and did not require the government to "go to war with the citizens of the US". "Bin-idiot"'s effect has been magnified greatly by the response of the Bush administration.
2. Attacking Afghanistan was the correct thing to do but we should have send mamy more troups there; the warlords are still in power, the terrorists have access to drug money, the country will fall to terrorists when Bush gets tired of the international terrorists "game" and decides to focus on terrorists in the US, etc.
3. Attacking Iraq was completely stupid unless we are going to invade every country that has an evil government and that we supported at some time in the past. (One could write long essays on this topic.)
4. We could begin to get off the oil addiction. We "have to" support evil governments which control oil because we are "drug"(oil) users who cannot kick our drug. (This is not just aimed at Bush; both parties have supported maintaining evil (mini)empires when they control oil.)

I have done my best to entertain you. Instead of hitting your wife/girlfriend or kids/younger brother, feel free to flame me. Just keep a copy of this post for your grandchildren and see who is laughing then. Happy Saturday.

For more information about orphaned films, you can read the archives of USC's Orphan Film Symposium. This might also be a good place to look for people to contact on this subject. The 2001 symposium had a session on Preservation and Copyright.

For more information about orphaned films, you can read the archives of USC's Orphan Film Symposium. This might also be a good place to look for people to contact on this subject. The 2001 symposium had a session on Preservation and Copyright.

Just because the code is not secure, does that give another person a right to cause harm? It is like saying that if I leave my back door unlocked at night, I am to blame if someone breaks in. I say that is bullshit. I say I have a gun, and if someone breaks in, they are getting shot. And that is how this guy should be treated, as a criminal thug.

I don't have a problem with locking up those who distribute worms and viruses, but I do have a problem with locking up someone just because you can show that they wrote it. It's more like locking up someone just for *OWNING* lockpicks. What should be illegal is using the lockpicks to break into someone's house, not owning them in the first place. Many of the early DOS/Windows viruses contain examples of extremely clever programming with all sorts of alternate applications: crypto programs, AV programs, copyprotection/anti-reverse engineering schemes, etc.

Maybe if it was not for the virus writers, the cost of Windows would be cheaper. Maybe beacuse of the virus writers Microsoft has to spend more money?

No, this is kind of a basic econ 101 thing. When a company has a monopoly, they start charging the "monopoly price" and opposed to the fair market price. While the fair market price is tied to supply and demand, cost of production, etc, the monopoly price is dictated strictly by DEMAND. The monopolist looks at the demand curve for their product and choose the point the maximizes their revenue. Since the windows is a software product as opposed to a car, there is little incremental cost between producing 100,000 copies as opposed to 50,000. These means that the production cost aspect of the monopoly price is pretty much fixed, and the price is dictated almost entirely by demand.

When I went to the University of South Carolina in 1991 the tuition was around $1200.00 per semester, rumor has it that it's over $3000.00 per semester now.

It never ceases to amaze me that someone can be sitting in front of a computer and say something like "rumor has it" and just pull some number out of their ass and throw it on out there.

In fact (i.e. this isn't a rumor) resident tuition at the University of South Carolina for the 2003-2004 academic year is $2,774.00.

Isn't technology wonderful?

And for that email address google turns up this link:
http://spar.research.sc.edu/pdf/USCRF_Board_Member s.pdf
Strangely there is only this google link. Well, there will certainly be more now..

What is a Virus? How does it work?

A virus is a protein sheath (called a capsid) covering genetic information. The protein sheath varies in size and shape, the most famous being the T4 Bacteriophage (picture on the bar on the left). Simply put, the genetic information can be in the form of RNA or DNA. The virus latches onto a host cell and injects its genetic material through the plasma membrane.

Viruses all have different strategies at this point, depending on their structure and target cells.

The most insidious, the retroviruses (of HIV fame), incorporate their genome into the host cell's. When the host cell copies its own DNA, in the process of normal cell division, it copies the code for the virus. Each daughter cell resulting from this mitotic division carries the virus latent in its own DNA. They now, in their normal life cycle, become factories for the retrovirus, pumping out more and more protein encased genetic sequences. Propagation is very thorough.

A simpler virus might only borrow the mechanisms of the cell to replicate itself. The virus would use DNA polymerases and associated enzymes to copy the genome for the viral offspring and RNA polymerase to transcribe mRNA molecules to translate to proteins for the viral capsid. The baby virii are then assembled (the DNA wrapped in the protective capsid) and they exit the cell. Sometimes this results in the death of the cell, other times it does not. The virus doesn't much care whether the cell survives once it has been copied.

The body, however, doesn't take kindly to its cells being hijacked. It doesn't matter if the viral infection doesn't result in the death of any cells. An infection is inefficient; a virus uses a lot of the cell's energy, energy that could be better spent in normal functions. Here's where the immune system comes in.

How does my immune system protect me from Ebola ?

Proteins are the real workhorses in cellular biology. As far as molecules go they're about as diverse as it gets; almost everything a cell does it does with proteins. A protein is coded for by a gene, a sequence of base pairs in the genome. When we make a protein we tend to make more than one at a time (one type of protein, multiple copies). One or more copies in the set get paired with another protein. This other protein, called MHC, has the sole purpose of escorting its pair to the surface of the cell and holding it there. The surface of the cell has hundreds of proteins of various types sticking out. When a virus instructs a cell to make its proteins the cell follows normal procedure and sends some of them to the surface.

The immune system is incredibly complicated. A subset of it is the T cells, which are themselves divided into two groups, Helper T Cells and Cytotoxic T Cells. Cytotoxic T cells are easier to describe; they're often called assassin cells or natural killer cells. Their purpose is to kill anything foreign that they find in the body. The Helper T Cells each have proteins on their surface (called antibodies) that recognize one target (called an antigen). They wander around, checking out all of the other cells in the body, looking for a match. If a Helper T Cell was looking for EVP-1(Evil Virus Protein 1) it would ignore every cell that didn't display EVP-1 on its surface.

If they find a match they know that the cell is infected with Evil Virus, and they signal for the Cytotoxic cells to come do their job. They also reproduce. So imagine you have a million Helper T Cells with random antibodies on their surface. You're betting on the one cell that is looking for EVP-1 into a cell that happens to be infected with a Ev

China is simply following the example of the world's greatest defender of free speech which also secretly monitors internet useage and jails citizens for subversion.

Nothing new to see here, move along ...

For those of you too lazy to click: The maximum coefficient of friction can occur anywhere in the contact area, so that the greater the area, the greater the likelihood of maximum traction.

And yes, underinflated tires increase fuel consumption.

How you managed to conclude a lack on intelligence on my part I'm not sure. I can assure you that the the friction averted by "rolling" is made up for at the axel. Why else do you need bearings?

Now, there are a few courses in OpenCourseWare that have videos of lectures, more organized readings and problem sets...but they're very few. If every course was published in that format, then I'd be impressed...and I don't mean every course MIT teaches, just every course listed in the dang OpenCourseWare site...it's such a waste of time to go, "oooh...this looks like a nice class" only to see that there's nothing in there you can learn from (some of them don't even have pdf lectures, just the syllabus and homework assignements for a textbook you don't have).

Consider it another way. You have a 1/3 chance of getting it right on the first pick. That's means there's a 2/3 change it's one of the other doors. You know it's not the one he showed, which means the 2/3 chance must be for the remaining door.

There's also a bunch of online simulations for this that show it's 2/3 to switch. For instance, here.

Integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory BTW this also includes using secure LDAP authentication!

A quick search at Mac OS X Hints turns up some usefull sources too.

Of course. Because someone expecting solid rock to have no hydrocarbons under it would stop drilling there..not that we can drill dozens or hundreds of kilometers deep anyway.

Dozens yes, although at high cost.

Gold is pointing out that carbon can be much deeper, and availability at the surface is dependent upon deep geology rather than past surface pools of muck.

No one has suggested that oil avaliability is dependant on 'past surface pools of muck'; I really don't understand where you are getting this from. Why hydrocarbons should have been retained in the mantle when every other volatile has been effectively stripped (due to melting and cycling through oceanic crust) is unexplained. Gold's ignorance of the last 40 years of geology shines through; dismissing the entire science of petroleum geology is bad enough for a non-geologist, dismissing plate tectonics, standard planet formation theories, basic physics, and in fact anything that gets in the way of his theory is worse.

Middle East has been greatly disrupted by tectonic activity (90 degree rotation is somewhat drastic), and obviously there are many faults to deeper areas. So the search for "source" rock has actually been the search for rock which met expectations near the reservoirs.

90 degree rotation is not very drastic. And the fact that source rocks have been found, with appropriate thermal conditions and migration pathways is pretty strong evidence, especially as when these rocks are NOT found, there is no oil. This all smacks of special pleading.

Have a read of this:

Petroleum geology, Saudi Arabia.

To read from Gold's site:

If the major volume of the Earth has never been molten, the mantle of the Earth underneath the crust must still contain the diversity of chemistry, the chemical energy sources and the sources of gases and liquids that would be the legacy of an accretion process from diverse and initially cold solids.

Except that mid ocean ridge basalts [which sample the mantle beneath effectively] exhibit an extreme uniformity of compositions. Basic physics also gives us raleigh numbers for the mantle indicating that it is well mixed.

So the same weak points along the Southeast Asia plate edges which cause volcanoes also cause hydrocarbons to become available near the surface.

No, the hydrocarbons are found in the back-arc settings. These are not 'weak points causing volcanoes', it's subducting slab dehydration melting the mantle above. Hawaii is not mentioned by Gold probably for the reason that it is known to have a deep component to it's magma and yet emits little or no methane.

That's right children, remember the REAL USC is in California!

There is some other fake institution that uses those letters, but they are a sad, pathetic school that is barely a shadow of the REAL USC!*

*This post written by a thru-and-thru Clemson student, and all those that know that USC is a school in California!

I am very envious of the students there. I went to USC -- no, not Southern Cali... the other one.

We had such a horrifying network, it was really sad. Since I worked in a group in the CS Dept, all my friends and roommates would yell at me whenever the network went down. And did it go down... Ugh. Literally 2-5 times a week.

Unfortunately, it was not just the School Internet connection that went down, either. We lost connectivity even on our own network many times.

Since I was working on an Astronomy project at the time, I was working with data files that were over 500 MB a piece. I was not allowed to use the network to transmit. Get that... It would be "Wasting too much" bandwidth to use it that way, heh. So I would have killed for Gigabit connectivity.

On an unrelated side-note, I remember when the CS dept blocked Napster... and didn't tell anyone. Man, the papers went nuts when students complained. Then we had to backtrack and say it was a mistake of when the new proxies were installed. Heh.

NASA doesn't deliver satellites for the military anymore.

My understanding was that NASA was behind GPS, which is in active use by the military. See here. Quote: "The US military uses GPS for aircraft and naval navigation, as a component of missile guidance systems, and to track troops and equipment."

As well, this article talks about how NASA and the military are working together on joint projects.

Oh, and there are more producers of launch vehicles than there are producers of x86 compatible processors.

Let's drop this analogy -- I was trying to point out that it was a bad one to begin with. The poster was comparing NASA to a courier.