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It already tanked. At one point, PS3s alone were responsible for over a petaflop of folding power.

As can be seen on the Stanford website, we're still pumping out over a petaflop... but, it's gone way down in the past month. It fluctuates, though... it's basically 40 PS3s to a teraflop. One console pulling out makes a significant difference.

Sipser is a great place to start -- and if that whets your appetite, go farther.

His arguments are quite intuitive and approachable, which is great for introducing the subject, but by deliberately keeping the proofs friendly and short, they are not really ``rigorous'' -- and if you want to do research in this area, you've got to learn rigor somewhere else. I learned a lot from Sipser's book, and then I learned a lot more from Hopcroft, Motwani and Ullman's Intro to Automata Theory. (I'd be happy to tell you what, but I don't want to turn this post into a slashvertisment.)

Are you thinking of the Hilbert Program http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-program/? A really interesting idea, but it ultimately failed due primarily to Goedel's incompleteness proof (though in a talk I recently heard, Saul Kripke shows that Goedel's proof wasn't necessary to bring about its demise--the program fails due to internal inconsistency).

... He certainly looks confused.

I know parent is a joke but of course lots of money has been spent researching how to make such AI programs less annoying.Here's one example and another one. If they take advantage of some of this stuff it could work quite well.

uh, you are so sure of yourself, yet your argument is non-legal nonsense. Here are the tests of fair use:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

The four factors judges consider are:

      1. the purpose and character of your use
      2. the nature of the copyrighted work
      3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
      4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

in this case:

1. clearly transformative, new work - she wins
2. not factual stuff, yet hugely public - a wash
3. it's a small fraction of the work, yet non-trivial - a wash
4. none, not for sale - clearly she wins this one

in short, whether you agree w/ *my* analysis or not, anyone can agree you made no fair use analysis AT ALL, instead tossing out pseudo-legal terms to confuse others, and prop yourself up. which makes it ridiculous to claim "she will lose."

no, not ridiculous:

TROLL.

Very interesting readings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seti%40home#Statistics
But in the field of distributed computing the Folding@home project is much speedier:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding%40Home#Participation

The Seti@home is currently running at speed of 292.544 TeraFLOPS:
http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=sah
The Folding@home is currently running at speed of 1.153 PetaFLOPS:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

Having a reputation for not tolerating fools lightly also curbs the stupid and uninformed from wasting his time and the time of his collaborators. I suppose that's still motivated by insecurity, in that he needs OpenBSD to work well in order for it to pay, although it wouldn't be to prove his superiority.

It's not as if he has Don Knuth's option of simply doing away with email in order to get his work done, he needs to stay up to date. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

The guy he was replying to could have just asked "Theo, I've scoured the mailing list for your opinion on the security of virtualization, I couldn't find any, I've seen a lot of claims by virtualization vendors for increased security benefits on the basis of x, what's your opinion?"

Maybe he should have read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". If he had, he probably wouldn't have spouted a bunch of marketing blurb to Theo and suggest that he implement a feature based on that marketing blurb.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, generates and accelerates electron and positron beams (and when needed, polarized or spin oriented beams) for colliding beam and fixed target experiments. SLAC has literally hundreds of dipole, quadrapole, and sextupole electromagnets placed along their accelerator, beam lines, and storage rings, all for focusing and directing their charged particle beams. If the center of mass of colliding electron and positron beams is high enough (at a collision energy called a "resonance") new particles will be created from the combined beam energies. During the 1990's, SLAC accelerated electrons and positrons to approximately 49 Giga Electron Volts (or GeV) each with their accelerator. After the two beams drifted in evacuated beam lines away from the accelerator, they were directed such that the electron beam and the positron beam approached an interaction point in the center of a large particle detector called SLD, from opposite sides. In the detector, the two beams would collide, creating new chargeless particles called Z-Zero or Z-Naught particles, with a collision energy of about 95.5 GeV. The Z-Zero, before it decays, is about one half as heavy as a silver atom, but quickly decays into a lot of smaller fragments, some charged and others not charged. The mass of that Z-Zero particle represents the direct conversion of the accelerator's energy into matter.

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/detectors/sld.html

In the diagram shown in the link above, look for the e- and e+ labels. Those represent the electron (e-) and positron (e+) beams entering the SLD detector from opposite sides. In the center of the SLD detector is a small cylindrical piece called a Vertex Detector. The center of the vertex detector (a silicon CCD device about the size of a soft drink can with several million pixels in three concentric layers) is where SLAC's electrons actually collided with positrons. The parts of the detector around the Vertex detector are like the layers of an onion. Each layer gathers a different kind of data about the collisions that took place inside the vertex detector at the interaction point. There are a lot of very sophisticated electronics in the layers of all particle detectors, but all of the electronics have one purpose, to gather information about the decay fragments coming from the electron/positron collisions so the events that took place during and immediately after the collision can be reconstructed and analyzed with very sophisticated computers.

Beginning in 1998, SLAC began an experiment called the asymmetric B-meson factory, or "B Factory" for short. In the B Factory, the electron beams run at a little over 9 GeV beam energy, while the positron beams run at only about 3 GeV. Both colliding beams run at very high currents, on the order of two amperes in the electron storage ring, and three amperes in the positron storage ring. The collision of these two high current beams produces millions of B mesons, each with a residual momentum (due to the asymmetric beam energies) that makes it possible for the particle physicists to study more effectively how those B mesons decayed.

Here is a link to more information about "Storage Rings" and their electromagnets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_ring

And here are links to three of SLAC's web pages, where you can learn more about colliding beam physics. BaBar is name of the particle detector used to study their decaying B Mesons, and PEP-II is the storage ring collider used to make those B Mesons.

The PEP-II storage ring collider is at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ad/ADPEPII/ADPEPII.html

The BaBar detector is at: http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/

And SLAC's main web page (the first web page in t

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, generates and accelerates electron and positron beams (and when needed, polarized or spin oriented beams) for colliding beam and fixed target experiments. SLAC has literally hundreds of dipole, quadrapole, and sextupole electromagnets placed along their accelerator, beam lines, and storage rings, all for focusing and directing their charged particle beams. If the center of mass of colliding electron and positron beams is high enough (at a collision energy called a "resonance") new particles will be created from the combined beam energies. During the 1990's, SLAC accelerated electrons and positrons to approximately 49 Giga Electron Volts (or GeV) each with their accelerator. After the two beams drifted in evacuated beam lines away from the accelerator, they were directed such that the electron beam and the positron beam approached an interaction point in the center of a large particle detector called SLD, from opposite sides. In the detector, the two beams would collide, creating new chargeless particles called Z-Zero or Z-Naught particles, with a collision energy of about 95.5 GeV. The Z-Zero, before it decays, is about one half as heavy as a silver atom, but quickly decays into a lot of smaller fragments, some charged and others not charged. The mass of that Z-Zero particle represents the direct conversion of the accelerator's energy into matter.

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/detectors/sld.html

In the diagram shown in the link above, look for the e- and e+ labels. Those represent the electron (e-) and positron (e+) beams entering the SLD detector from opposite sides. In the center of the SLD detector is a small cylindrical piece called a Vertex Detector. The center of the vertex detector (a silicon CCD device about the size of a soft drink can with several million pixels in three concentric layers) is where SLAC's electrons actually collided with positrons. The parts of the detector around the Vertex detector are like the layers of an onion. Each layer gathers a different kind of data about the collisions that took place inside the vertex detector at the interaction point. There are a lot of very sophisticated electronics in the layers of all particle detectors, but all of the electronics have one purpose, to gather information about the decay fragments coming from the electron/positron collisions so the events that took place during and immediately after the collision can be reconstructed and analyzed with very sophisticated computers.

Beginning in 1998, SLAC began an experiment called the asymmetric B-meson factory, or "B Factory" for short. In the B Factory, the electron beams run at a little over 9 GeV beam energy, while the positron beams run at only about 3 GeV. Both colliding beams run at very high currents, on the order of two amperes in the electron storage ring, and three amperes in the positron storage ring. The collision of these two high current beams produces millions of B mesons, each with a residual momentum (due to the asymmetric beam energies) that makes it possible for the particle physicists to study more effectively how those B mesons decayed.

Here is a link to more information about "Storage Rings" and their electromagnets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_ring

And here are links to three of SLAC's web pages, where you can learn more about colliding beam physics. BaBar is name of the particle detector used to study their decaying B Mesons, and PEP-II is the storage ring collider used to make those B Mesons.

The PEP-II storage ring collider is at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ad/ADPEPII/ADPEPII.html

The BaBar detector is at: http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/

And SLAC's main web page (the first web page in t

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, generates and accelerates electron and positron beams (and when needed, polarized or spin oriented beams) for colliding beam and fixed target experiments. SLAC has literally hundreds of dipole, quadrapole, and sextupole electromagnets placed along their accelerator, beam lines, and storage rings, all for focusing and directing their charged particle beams. If the center of mass of colliding electron and positron beams is high enough (at a collision energy called a "resonance") new particles will be created from the combined beam energies. During the 1990's, SLAC accelerated electrons and positrons to approximately 49 Giga Electron Volts (or GeV) each with their accelerator. After the two beams drifted in evacuated beam lines away from the accelerator, they were directed such that the electron beam and the positron beam approached an interaction point in the center of a large particle detector called SLD, from opposite sides. In the detector, the two beams would collide, creating new chargeless particles called Z-Zero or Z-Naught particles, with a collision energy of about 95.5 GeV. The Z-Zero, before it decays, is about one half as heavy as a silver atom, but quickly decays into a lot of smaller fragments, some charged and others not charged. The mass of that Z-Zero particle represents the direct conversion of the accelerator's energy into matter.

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/detectors/sld.html

In the diagram shown in the link above, look for the e- and e+ labels. Those represent the electron (e-) and positron (e+) beams entering the SLD detector from opposite sides. In the center of the SLD detector is a small cylindrical piece called a Vertex Detector. The center of the vertex detector (a silicon CCD device about the size of a soft drink can with several million pixels in three concentric layers) is where SLAC's electrons actually collided with positrons. The parts of the detector around the Vertex detector are like the layers of an onion. Each layer gathers a different kind of data about the collisions that took place inside the vertex detector at the interaction point. There are a lot of very sophisticated electronics in the layers of all particle detectors, but all of the electronics have one purpose, to gather information about the decay fragments coming from the electron/positron collisions so the events that took place during and immediately after the collision can be reconstructed and analyzed with very sophisticated computers.

Beginning in 1998, SLAC began an experiment called the asymmetric B-meson factory, or "B Factory" for short. In the B Factory, the electron beams run at a little over 9 GeV beam energy, while the positron beams run at only about 3 GeV. Both colliding beams run at very high currents, on the order of two amperes in the electron storage ring, and three amperes in the positron storage ring. The collision of these two high current beams produces millions of B mesons, each with a residual momentum (due to the asymmetric beam energies) that makes it possible for the particle physicists to study more effectively how those B mesons decayed.

Here is a link to more information about "Storage Rings" and their electromagnets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_ring

And here are links to three of SLAC's web pages, where you can learn more about colliding beam physics. BaBar is name of the particle detector used to study their decaying B Mesons, and PEP-II is the storage ring collider used to make those B Mesons.

The PEP-II storage ring collider is at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ad/ADPEPII/ADPEPII.html

The BaBar detector is at: http://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/babar/

And SLAC's main web page (the first web page in t

Here you go. It's a decent summary of the situation, albeit not the most in-depth.

You can take a look at the original patent, too, but that would require a second click.

Perhaps you government should worry about not supporting Latin American dictatorships first: http://wais.stanford.edu/USA/us_supportforladictators8303.html http://www.zompist.com/latam.html

I puzzled over this for a while, because that's the first time someone has asked me that particular question. I'm not a philosopher by training, and my own experience picking up the subject wasn't ideal. (At the same time, it's positively criminal that this kind of fundamental critical thinking is no longer taught in schools...)

Anyway, I've cobbled together some ideas, but this might be unhelpful. Sorry!

Philosophy is usually taught by the reading of primary texts. This is because you're expected to make novel contributions of thought (at the graduate level, anyway) since the point is not to "know" the material but to learn how to think.

Then I remembered that a friend (who is a philosopher) recommended using encylopedias of philosophy specifically for the purpose of studying for philosophy exams -- where the point is to know the material. The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy is good and free, while the Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy is very good and very non-free. For a pretty technical introduction, either one should serve nicely. Wikipedia is also sometimes decent, as usual. As for the subject, most of my post was about epistemology, and IMHO that's a good place to get one's feet wet.

For a whole lot of detail, the same friend has a study guide for epistemology, as well as notes for a short class he taught on philosophical apologetics. That class used Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion as a primary text.

Some popular texts do exist also. I haven't read Mortimer J. Adler's Ten Philosophical Mistakes but it comes highly recommended. Though Adler was not a groundbreaking philosopher, he was an important figure for his superlative ability to accurately bring complex ideas to a popular audience.

I also rather enjoyed Moral Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly in Mid-Air.

One final thought: perhaps try Antony Flew's God and Philosophy, 2005 edition. While Contemporary Debates merely presents views, this book was written by the leading atheist philosopher of the 20th century, arguing stridently in favor of atheism... yet counterbalanced by the fact that the author has now become a theist.

Enjoy. Drop me a line if you'd like to talk about how things turn out. (I'm a terrible correspondent, though, as you may have guessed. =)

I once watched some videos of Douglas Englebart demonstrating a mouse operated hypertext system back in the sixties. If there is prior art in any of that, I would think that blows these trolls out of the water.

Those can be viewed here: http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

...but then I got smarter. Donate your CPU cycles to something that actually produces useful results instead, e.g.

http://folding.stanford.edu/

The datacenter prohibits photography but that doesn't mean we can't take a peek... These are all from google image searches, and not from the actual slashdot installation.

The webservers look almost exactly like the rack on the left in this picture: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/unix/farm/orlov.jpg minus the fiber. The rack they're in looks almost exactly like this: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/img/83/i07/8307cover_Rackable.JPG

The database server looks just like the top machine in this picture: http://gallery.bioteam.net/gallery/bioteamBDC/DSCN1760

Many Bothans died to bring us this information. Some cars not for use with some sets.

Hot grits, soviet russia, penisbird, godwin's law, first post, etc. etc.

Platelet storage time: 5 days max.

They need your platlets. Give the ABC apheresis way. Thank you.

Microsoft is unlikely to enforce it's patents, but what should scare us are the other Patent Houses where their business model is based on litigation. They are the dangerous ones...

Parent is correct - copyright is never "registered" in USA. Trademarks can be registered, but even this is not required to be protected. Know thy rights:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/index.html

Someone seriously needs to give one of the guys from the article a hand http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/october10/gifs/SAFOD12-CarryingCore_4477.jpg It looks like that core is about to break him in half. And there you go, typical construction site, one guy working... two guys watching, in this case, taking pictures.

The 'n' suffix indicates a possessive form. Which makes no sense so it must mean some other form. Which, I have no idea.

Nope, it's not the possessive form. Theoretically, the words in Finnish sentences can come in any order : the -n is an ending that marks the object of the phrase, ie, what is thrown.

"Heitän tuolin". Again, have a look at the suffixes. Lord only knows why, but now we threw out one T and added an N to the verb.

Except it's not a small majority of people. A bit of quick searching reveals a slide presentation about this very subject which references the study and has lots of great links. It looks like a well-documented phenomenon to me.

Are you sure about that?

Either you're worryingly ignorant or are trolling, in which case I just bit.

Do you buy consoles for other purposes?

Not to sound like an ass or anything, do you happen to have a link quoting that?

This site has comments seeming to esitmate a 35% capacity factor for an off-shore program.
Wiki talks about both on-shore and off shore, and for capacity factor mentions 'A well-sited wind generator will have a capacity factor of about 35%.' You'd tend to think that if off-shore had that much better of a capacity factor they'd mention it.

Offshore wind assessment for California: This project alone could produce 9.7 TWh annually (39% capacity factor),

Because they are many plants. A set of windfarms in different locations also can produce in a "mostly demand based" fashion.

They still can't without building three times as many watts of capacity as you would have to for a nuclear plant, and still likely have to build a storage system to level peaks out.

I consider myself a wierd green. If I had my way, I'd be building nuclear plants as quickly as I could in favor of shutting down coal plants, starting with the most polluting per kWh. Yes, I'd do some more research into breeding reactors and reproccessing facilities. It's quite possible to reduce the amount of nuclear waste by an order of magnitude - matter of fact some of our oldest rods are getting cool enough that the measures needed handle the residual radiation are vastly reduced, making reprocessing a much cheaper task.

Sure, build wind and solar farms where it makes sense - it just doesn't make sense in many areas yet.

http://hci.stanford.edu/research/mashups/index.html

Source-code examples of APIs enable developers to quickly gain a gestalt understanding of a librarys functionality, and they support organically creating applications by incrementally modifying a functional starting point. As an increasing number of web sites provide APIs, significant latent value lies in connecting the complementary representations between site and service in essence, enabling sites themselves to be the example corpus. We introduce d.mix, a tool for creating web mashups that leverages this site-to-service correspondence. With d.mix, users browse annotated web sites and select elements to sample. d.mixs sampling mechanism generates the underlying service calls that yield those elements. This code can be edited, executed, and shared in d.mixs wiki-based hosting environment. This sampling approach leverages pre-existing web sites as example sets and supports fluid composition and modification of examples. An initial study with eight participants found d.mix to enable rapid experimentation, and suggested avenues for improving its annotation mechanism.

Only if you reject dualism and think that a human being is purely material.

You don't have to embrace dualism to disagree with the GP's claim. You just have to reject the notion of epiphenomenalism.

You and I are probably interested in the same problems, judging by your Swinburne reference, but I don't think that one's philosophical predilections toward monism or dualism say anything definitive about their beliefs about epiphenomenalism, nor does denying it require positing a soul (see Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind for an example.) Both seem to be inherently confused and artificial strictures of thought that don't say anything profound in the moral sphere (and I don't believe there's anything profound to say in the metaphysical sphere.)

If you haven't read any D.Z. Phillips, I'd recommend his Wittgenstein and Religion for an interesting and unconventional perspective on this subject.

Without a model release signed by the girl (and her parents if under 18) the counselor will lose the case. Use of someone's image in a commercial context requires a model release from any identifiable people in the image.

Just in case you are not just trolling, none of the clients are "useless". The GPU and PS3 clients produce completed work units, no further processing required. Just to pull some meaningless numbers out of thin air, consider that the x86 or PPC clients can be used to crunch on 100% of the available work units. The PS3 may be able to process ~75% and the GPU client possibly 50%. You will be able to get answers to all of your questions here.

The Folding@Home project ("FAH") is dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases which result from protein misfolding and aggregation, and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general. Here, we briefly describe our goals, what we are doing, and some highlights so far.

We feel strongly that a distributed computing project must not just run calculations on millions of PC's, but d.c. projects must produce results, especially in the form of peer reviewed publications, public lectures, and other ways to disseminate the results from FAH to the greater scientific community. Below, we also detail our progress in these areas as well.

The Folding@Home project ("FAH") is dedicated to understanding protein folding, the diseases which result from protein misfolding and aggregation, and novel computational ways to develop new drugs in general. Here, we briefly describe our goals, what we are doing, and some highlights so far.

We feel strongly that a distributed computing project must not just run calculations on millions of PC's, but d.c. projects must produce results, especially in the form of peer reviewed publications, public lectures, and other ways to disseminate the results from FAH to the greater scientific community. Below, we also detail our progress in these areas as well.

How does RedHat sell licenses if all their software is freely available? Because the customers want to have someone to call if things go wrong... AKA support. This is especially true of corporations.

Don't you think the GPL folks would be quick to invoke their copyright protections if, for example, Microsoft took a bunch of GPL code, added their own functionality and sold it without releasing the source?

Microsoft's "services for UNIX" pack qualifies for "here is a list of companies that make a LOT of money from sales or support of GPL'ed code" material?! Are you serious? I suspect sales of "services for UNIX" accounts for a teensie percentage of Microsoft's sales.

I know Novell is now a linux distributor, but how much money do they make from sales of linux alone? Does it really qualify as a "LOT"?

Solaris has been pretty great but most of SUN's revenue is from their hardware. Can you even purchase Solaris by itself anymore or is it just freely available ie no direct revenue.

IBM makes some of their money off of mainframes. Do they sell just linux? How much revenue do sales of linux alone bring in for them? Also you do realize they also make microprocessors of all sorts as well as other chips and they have one of the largest chip fabs in the world? They are not all about just selling computers.

IBM certainly does guard its IP. I have worked with them directly and NDA's had to be in place. Maybe they formed an alliance along some portion of their large business but not across the entire company.

How come I can only see RedHat's knowledgebase if I have purchased RHEL? If I purchased RHEL and slurped their knowledgebase and posted it on an open server somewhere, what do you think they would do? RedHat certainly guards their IP as well.

And SUN like IBM manufactures hardware and they do indeed guard that information. Just because they happen to make available some of their software as GPL'd does NOT mean that they do not have IP that is guarded.

In short, I understand what you are saying, that you believe DMCA is not only superfluous but also hindering to the consumer. But your examples were poorly chosen other than the fact that they were indeed guarding their IP before DMCA existed. These companies do employ an array of things from patents to copyrights to trademarks to trade secrets to protect their IP and I don't believe that they would eschew DMCA if it were applicable. As far as I know they may have already made use of DMCA.

You are right. Copyrights do encourage progress BY making it lucrative to create new works. Fair Use does allow derivative works but one of the factors in determining whether Fair Use applies is the effect on the market... AKA money for the authors.

About fair use, this link has a pretty good summary: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html

"Incorrect. it'd be easier without having to bypass. However, creating an artificial barrier with anti-circumvention is only a short term solution for protecting copyrights. Which means it's not really a solution at all."

All security by its nature is "short term".

"Wow, that's not even remotely analogous. "

It disputes the slash-meme of there being "force".

"Actually no. We used to have a fair use right to copy software, but due to encryption we no longer do. "

Slashdot plays lawyer again. Read this and this (pay attention to question 7)

"I don't even understand how that's even relevant."

It's accepting the razor without accepting the blades too.

"Once again, pure nonsense"

Retort retort, I'll be nice.

"My point, which you failed to refute, is that the DMCA does not protect copyrights. it protects business models. "

Several points all with holes in them. Poke, poke.

"The overwhelming success of P2P and bittorrent proves that."

According to you it doesn't.

"And furthermore, if anything is causing the decay of our society it's governments locking up of thoughts and ideas... not the use of those thoughts and ideas."

Only on slashdot would making a living be considered "locking up". You can use those thoughts and ideas within the confines of the rules society (not government, society) has agreed upon.

The effect you describe is a relativistic effect. It becomes relevant at high velocities, a significant fraction of the speed of light. Constant acceleration has already been employed by ion thrusters such as those used by Deep Space 1. The topic of this thread, getting to mars in a week, makes for an interesting press release, but the technology is really more interesting. It's presumably offering a much higher specific impulse, allowing a wider range of mass trade offs than possible with engines that have a lower specific impulse. Lower thrusts and slightly longer trip times would still be dramatically shorter than the six months (or longer) trip times discussed for other plans (i.e. Mars Direct plans an eight month transit time to Mars). The photon engine technology could be applied, for example, to a trip plan that featured a six week transit time to Mars, reducing the engine and power plant mass.

Unfortunately it isn't clear how the technology described would be applied to a Mars type of mission (e.g. any non-formation-flying mission where the photon engine would be used to provide significant and arbitrary velocity delta for solo ships. The "thrust" appears to occur between the mirrors, which the good doctor apparently plans to place on different spacecraft for stationkeeping. Perhaps one of the mirrors could be mounted on the moon or something. Dunno. The details seem to be absent. You would think this could be explained in a way that we geeks could understand. "Amplifying" chambers. Yeah. Right. Zero mass. Amplify that all you want and you still get zero thrust.

Why don't you actually look at some of the papers the folding@home team have written before shouting out so foolishly that F@H is worthless.
http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html

Donald Knuth's open letter explains the issues.

I want an Donald Knuth signature MMIX chip.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.htm l

AMD does not have market leadership, so they can make radical gambles for better efficiencies to attempt for better marketshare.

From what I can recall, Intel fellow Bob Colwell mentioned the CPU designers could integrate ethernet onboard but they faced a fight from the ethernet chip group which have their own marketshare, budget and design group.

I suppose that as long as chipsets (Northbridges and Southbridges) make money for Intel, memory controllers will stay on the Northbridge and use more power than having memory controllers on CPU.

Bob Colwell presentation:
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/ 040218-ee380-100.asx

"Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University created this humorous, yet informative, review of copyright principles delivered through the words of the very folks we can thank for nearly endless copyright terms."

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/documentary-film-prog ram/film/a-fair-y-use-tale

He had an rare kind of pancreatic cancer, that happens to be curable. His doctors knew the cure, not him.

Here is a classic paper on the style and advantages of functional programming:

http://www.math.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.htm l

Also, John Backus' Turing Aware lecture, "Can Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style?"

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backu s.pdf

Try Jon Claerbout's free books ( http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/prof , especially "Imaging the Earth's Interior") and the Madagascar package for seismic data processing, modeling and inversion: http://rsf.sourceforge.net/ , GPL-ed.

I have a sneaking suspicion that China would in fact have ICBM's that can reach the US. They are making spacecraft now, and the technology isn't very different, except that instead of trying to escape Earth's gravity, you are merely trying to lob it up very high and have its return trip land on a target.

Decided to do some quick research before I hit Submit...they've had missiles that could reach the US for over 20 years, just not all of it. Seems things are changing this year...

"Due to begin deployment this year is the standard Dong Feng-31, or CSS-9, whose limited range of 4,500 miles allows it to reach Alaska or Hawaii. But the more advanced and road-mobile Dong Feng-31A, due to begin deployment in 2007, will have a range of 7,000 miles, making it the first Chinese ICBM that could hit Washington, D.C., Paris or Madrid.

Also in development is the Julang-2 (JL-2), a submarine-launched version of the DF-31 that would be deployed in 2007-10. Beijing plans to build five to seven Jin-class (Type 094) nuclear-powered subs, each of which will carry up to 16 JL-2s.

Experts say the DF-31A family represents a quantum leap in Chinese ICBM capability. The missiles will replace 20 two-stage liquid-fueled Dong Feng-5, or CSS-4, rockets that entered service some 25 years ago. The silo-based DF-5s, with a range of 5,200 miles, can hit most of Europe and Australia, and the western United States. Moreover, their fixed locations makes them vulnerable to a pre-emptive U.S. strike."

http://cisac.stanford.edu/news/experts_judge_likel y_effects_of_new_icbm_on_chinas_nuclear_policies_2 0060807/

Also in 2003, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications built the PS 2 Cluster for about $50,000.

To prove a crime, the State must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you intentionally or knowingly possessed a controlled substance as defined by the relevant law. If you possess it, you may not do so intentionally (it was left at your house by a guest, and you had no knowledge of it). You still have to be proven guilty.

For simple posession, yes. In order to prove someone guilty of possession with intent to distribute you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that both they possessed said substance AND that they intended to distribute it. If you fail to prove either condition beyond a reasonable doubt, then you have not proven the case for posession with intent to distribute.

There is no actual burden shift, because you do not accept the burden of proving your innocence to the level of beyond a reasonable doubt.

OK, maybe the burden doesn't shift to me, but it certainly shifts away from the prosecution which means that it is not meeting the standard of reasonable doubt.

Finally, it is not impossible to prove intent.

Not only is it impossible to prove what my intent is, it's impossible to prove that I am capable of intent at all. Go ask a philosopher how he knows you're not a zombie.

LOL, Influenza has killed more people than the black plague and you say it is not very dangerous

http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/