Slashdot Mirror

Faster Than Light (FTL) communication at all F@#)(*s up causality.

One big problem with a lot of these so-called news sites is that they imply that there is some sort of a global conspiracy on to somehow subjugate the Hindus.

You mean like the BBC (which is usually leftist pro-Islamist), and buffalo.edu, and rediff?Whose pot have you been smoking dude? I never quoted any sites with a possibility of partisanship, not without qualification. I restrict to scholarly papers and reliable articles on the subject, citing views and opinions violently censored by the lefties running India today.

Since you mention "Conspiracy Theories", did you know that it is the left wing hate rag (misidentifying itself as) the "Dalit Voice" that routinely touts anti-Semitic Conspiracy theories in India? DId you know that they equate Hindus with Jews and call both slime? Did you know that their leader, a hatemonger named VT Rajshekhar, sells copies of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (an infamous anti-Semitic conspiracy hoax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_ Elders_of_Zion)

Did you know that Muslim newspapers like "Slasat" and "Milligazette" routinely claim that there is a "vast global conspiracy" of Hindus and Zionist bankers to "secretly take over the world" (in the style of the infamous anti-Semitic forgery the protocols of the learned elders of Zion)? Did you know that Evangelical missionaries, inspired by the protocols, are circulating forged documents alleging that RSS is secretly controlling the government in India?

Did you know that Communists on Indian television routinely "compare" Jews to Hindus, calling both "Filthy" "Lazy" and "Greedy"? Here is an article by Professor Nathan Katz at Florida International University, Miami about it (http://www.jcpa.org/cjc/cjc-katz-f05.htm), note the paragraph:

During my last stay in India I was watching television one night. I tuned in a bit late and heard a person in a discussion program saying: 'The Jews are just like the Brahmins.' I smiled until he continued, saying that: 'The Brahmins are as bad as the Jews. They are bloodsuckers like the Jews and a blight on humanity.' Then I saw that his name was framed at the bottom of the screen and that he was one of the leaders of the Communist party. It was Marx's essay on the Jewish question that he was spouting back and applying to the Brahmins.

So Communists are the real Nazi bigots, not Hindus.

They believe that a lot of people are now part of this conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy in the sense that there is no great secrecy. The India-bashing lobbies operate quite openly. You should read reports by the (non-Hindu) American Jewish Committee (http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2005/11/17/pane lPromotesUnderstanding)

How about the Simon Weisenthal Center in the United States? No Hindus there either. They studied and endorsed the HAF report (reported here, a non-NRI site http://www.pacificmagazine.net/news/2006/07/18/was hingtondc-second-annual-report-on-hindu-human-righ ts-released)
that clearly shows that Hindus are being heavily and mercilessly persecuted. Read the full damn report here (http://www.hinduamericanfoundation.org/reports.ht m#hhr2005).

What "Conspiracy Theory"? There is no conspiracy. It's all being done quite openly. Numerous anti-hindu forces, the leftists, Islamists and some radical Evangelical missionaries, have come together to persecute Hindus.

About the Godhra massacre - many of the so-called leftist news sites which you claim to ha

Women's voices are harder to understand by nature because A. there are fewer harmonics of the fundamental within your hearing range, and B. the F2 formants in males are more likely to fall within an area of more sensitive hearing below or near 2kHz, while the female formants tend towards the upper 2kHz range, which is an area of reduced sensitivity in humans.

While psychoacoustic models might reduce that 2kHz-5kHz dipped frequency range further, it seems unlikely that it would do so unless the level were very low compared with the rest of the sound, as it would diminish speech intelligibility significantly. Thus, it seems likely that the difference you are noticing is either caused by a bass boost at the radio station (or in your car stereo), which would increase the intelligibility of the male voice, or, in the case of DJ voices, is caused by a poor choice of microphones on the part of the radio station with scooped midrange response.

Yes, YouTube does horrible aboninations to their audio, but that's not typical of radio. Most radio stations, however, generally do not use data compression in their audio (or at least nowhere I've worked or talked to the engineers did). Storage is really cheap, so you'd have to be an idiot to cut corners in sound quality just to save a little bit of storage space. (Internet radio is the exception for obvious bandwidth reasons.) They do use dynamic compression, however, which will naturally create a bit of a bass boost, again, increasing the intelligibility of the male voice more than that of the female voice, and making it harder to hear consonants in general. This dynamic compression improves the ability to hear/understand voice and music in noisy conditions. That's why they use such compression.

in my travels i can across this javascript-based RSA cryptography demo. if you want to use it, hit Generate, then send the first two numbers (Modulus and Public Exponent) to whoever you want to talk to. they have to do the same. you enter their modulus and exponent into another window to encrypt.

the code is BSD-licensed. i've been meaning to write a larger javascript app to hold your keys and everyone elses' in a single window, and with a click of a button create a block of XML that you can copy+paste to a file to store the keys, but i havent got around to it.

I have not looked in to photorefractive polymers in years. Here is some good information:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/moerner/prpgen.html

Jamey

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Too easy, I hope the Stanford Business School is up to snuff for you.

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/podgende r.shtml

Second research item down: Diverse Backgrounds and Personalities Can Strengthen Groups

Really, history is full of the dangers of group thought. You need to show why IT is different, not the other way around.

Where did you pull that number out of?

His ass. Using breeders means you can use more expensive uranium, from lower-quality ore, and once you get to around $400-500/lb, it becomes economical to extract it from seawater. There's enough fissile uranium in seawater to supply the world's current electrical needs for, literally, millions of years.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen. html

That was a joke...right?

Sony Gamers Day:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15521 3

Gametrailers coverage:

http://www.gametrailers.com/sonygday2k7.php

Uncharted: Drake's fortune
Ratchet And Clank
Heavenly Sword
Warhawk
Lair
Singstar
Folklore
SOCOM

PS3 Home online world:

http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=4865

PS3 FoldingAtHome dominates:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= osstats

What the hell were you talking about again?

And that's just this month for Sony and the PS3. The amazing quality and almost virtually defect free hardware despite tens of thousands of PS3s running 24/7 playing games and folding. Or the massive manufacturing cost savings Sony is already achieving. The amazing free dedicated server PSN gaming. BluRay winning the format war.

And we aren't even to the big exclusives FFXIII,MGS4,Killzone later this year at E3...

Oh, right, you get your gaming news from Zonk...

What I mean by "discarding non-interesting stuff" is not actually delete the data from disk. If this were the case, what need would be for 15 PB of storage ? The thing is that what the LHC people (and the whole physics community) want very badly is some signature of new physics. That means either Higgs, or supersymmetric partners of known particles, or even microscopic black holes (most people are skeptical about that, but look anyway at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?r awcmd=f+a+thomas+and+giddings&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE= to see how many times it has been cited. That gives an idea of how many papers have been written on the subject) The "non-interesting stuff" will be used to improve current limits on experimental data, but if nothing genuinely new will be found it is very likely that the LHC will be the last large particle accelerator ever built.

Yes, and based on another limited and expensive resource about to peak and go into depletion: Uranium

Which, of course, is a lie

as we would have to put a 1 megawatt nuke plant

Hint: no nuclear power plant produces as little as "1 megawatt".

Hint #2: over 50 years the existing power generation infrastructure will be replaced ANYWAY. Guess we might as well abandon civilization entirely, since according to you there's no way we can build replacement plants fast enough, right?

Now, go home and do some puch ups.

Now go home and learn the concepts of "honesty" and "numeracy".

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive -negative/ Great point - This plays off the idea of positive & negative freedoms. While you have the freedom and capacity (mental & physical) to make these modifications they also have the right to say that with these modifications you've made to your own property you are now unable to utilize our network. They make the rules, it's their network that you subscribe to. Anyone reading this that lives in the USA should know this - if you don't agree with or wish to support this then don't consume it, don't allow capitalism to foster and strive there and if enough people are also dissatisfied then the company (in this case Microsoft) will have to alter their original plans. This is the idea of market logic and capitalism.

Hmm... then the judge is in good company: Don Knuth does his emailing offline too...

Turns out he's no slouch when it comes to technology.

Really? Are you sure? Stanford doesn't think so.

And that took me about 3 seconds to find.

Not true. Stanford just published the results of a study that compared diets, and measured more subjects over a longer period of time than any previous study. They found that people on Atkins not only lost twice as much weight as the others, but also had bigger improvements in cholesterol and other risk factors than the other subjects.

http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2007/march/d iet.html

I've seen Dr. Gardner speak, and he's really big on statistical relevance. This is the most thorough and scientific study of diets to date, and it favors a "fad" diet.

Enjoy!

Try 20 rounds against the computer on your own, then 20 rounds using this script to generate your choice:

perl -e '@a=qw(rock paper scissors); map { print "$_) $a[rand(@a)]\n"} (1..20)'

This board has still more "crunching" performance than older generations, but the power usage is insane:
http://forum.folding-community.org/fpost185371.htm l#185371
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html

Using the same password for all online stuff is indeed a bad idea, but you can still do that if you use PwdHash. http://crypto.stanford.edu/PwdHash/
PwdHash is a browser extension that converts the entered password into a domain-specific password. This means that the same password will be converted into a different password on different websites.

I use this tool plus SplashID (http://www.splashdata.com/splashid/) which I have installed on my PDA and PC to store others passwords and PIN codes.

What's the over/under that this technology will be bought by ford / gm and killed in development?

• Research, publications at Lund University
• Research at Chalmers University of Technology
• Research at Stanford University
• Research, publications at University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Research at University of California, Berkeley

The purpose of dark matter is not just to explain spiral galaxy rotational curves. The bigger problem is the energy budget of the universe.

If you ONLY read the NASA press releases with colorized images, that is, I am afraid your problem. There is over-whelming evidence for the existance of dark matter and what are scientists to do if the only thing that puts dark matter on a \.er's mind is just a pretty picture. If you are interested, go to arxiv.org and search for results from dark matter experiments and read the papers. Yes, they are technical. Yes, it produced many PhDs -- not a bad thing, last time I checked. And yes, the experimental evidence is overwhelming.

The number of people working on dark matter experiments, greatly exceeds the number of dark matter theorists, probably by an order of magnitude actually. This is *the* one field in astro-particle physics, where there is great wealth of data and that data is driving the evolution of the field. In particle physics, this is not the case! There is no data on particles which might form dark matter! There are too many theories! Hopefully, the tables will turn when the LHC at CERN turns on next year!

I should also point out that this is one of the "nicest" sort of theoretical astrophysics papers there is. It suggests a possible phenomena that produces an experimental signature in space experiments like or AMS.

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

The Planet CCRMA distro (actually it's a pile of RPMS, that turns Fedora Core into, effectively, a whole new distro) combines all the greatest Linux audio tools with a low-latency kernel and fully configured JACK and ALSA setups.

Setting up all the tools on a general purpose machine can be very tedious, so I dedicated a machine to music with this.

I slapped a couple M-Audio Delta 1010s in there and now I have a 16-Track recording studio on the cheap. It's great!

wget is patient... :)

Linux: It's Not Just For Computer Geeks Anymore

By Carl Lumma | May 2007

You might think there's no way a free operating system written by volunteers could compete when it comes to music production. But in the past couple of years, all the tools you need to make music have arrived on Linux.

For years, Linux has enjoyed market leadership as a server operating system -- Google's servers run it, for starters -- while struggling with the stigma that it isn't polished enough for desktop use. Those days are over, and word is getting out. Linux is quickly becoming the OS you'd set up for your grandmother, with no fuss over activation, software updates, or viruses. Unlike any version of Windows or Mac OS, Linux is open-source. What does this mean to musicians? For starters, there are no company secrets to keep or non-disclosure agreements to sign, so software developers and users alike can get on the same page very quickly, speeding the flow of bug fixes and feature additions.

Linux demands more nuts-and-bolts computer knowledge for pro audio than for web browsing, but if you've ever tried to troubleshoot a latency or driver issue on a store-bought laptop, you're probably still listening. If you upgrade your hard drive, you won't have to reactivate all your apps due to the hardware change, and when you discover a cool tool or workflow, you can share it with friends without them shelling out hundreds of dollars or resorting to piracy. With the exception of Linux versions that include commercial tech support, most everything in the Linux world is free for the asking, Many developers accept voluntary donations, which we encourage you to make.

HOW IS IT DONE?

Let's look over the shoulder of Aaron Krister-Johnson, the keyboardist and choir director at Temple Sholom in Chicago. He also composes incidental music for local theater, and is half of the electronica duo Divide by Pi, Keyboard's June '04 unsigned artist of the month. The core of his home studio is a PC running Linux (see Figure 1).

To obtain Linux, you download a particular distribution or "distro," which is a particular version of Linux someone put together, for free or a donation. Some distros are available boxed at very low cost. Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) is popular for home-computer tasks, but Aaron uses Zenwalk (www.zenwalk.org). Software compiled for a particular distro will only run on that distro, so most come with several free applications that you can install along with the basic OS. We recommend Fedora (www.fedoraproject.org), because you can then install the Planet CCRMA package (ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software), which includes just about every Linux audio application in existence.

Speaking of music applications, the most popular DAW for Linux is Ardour, and Aaron also uses JACK (see "You Don't Know JACK?" below), a soft synth called ZynSubAddFx, and an arpeggiator he wrote called Pymidichaos. Some distros come with binaries -- apps that have been compiled, i.e. converted from the programming language the developers used to the ones and zeroes computers understand at their innermost level. Three such distros are meant to provide install-and-go solutions for Linux-curious musicians: Studio to Go (www.ferventsoftware.com), Musix (www.musix.org.ar/en) and 64Studio (www.64studio.com).

But sooner or later (most likely sooner), you're going to have to take some groovy, free program you've downloaded and compile it yourself. This is where musicians used to commercial software might get scared off. Fear not, and remember that all the actual pr

From the paper: The use-case scenario is to find mutual acquaintances between two people. More specifically, the query is as follows: give me a list of people known to both Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Beckett. If that's really all there is to it then there's nothing new here other than some acronyms. It may be interesting research but apart from the RDF syntax there is nothing new here worthty of the PR hype.

Fast queries over 7 billion triples may sound like a breakthrough but systems like http://monetdb.cwi.nl/projects/monetdb/MonetDB/Ver sion4/Documentation/mel/index.html have been able to do that kind of thing blindingly fast for many years. Once you store everything as a BAT (binary association table), 20-way joins that would choke an ordinary RDBMS become easy.

The weakness of MonetDB-like systems is generally that they don't do well in the face of OLTP style transactional update patterns. They are optimized for loading data once and reading many times, not dealing with a steady stream of queries and updates, and typically you have no choice but to resort to http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html style parallel index construction, which is most of what the technical report goes into.

It specifically stated to use your periphial vision and not to look. There were other parts of the manual that covered how to prepare yourself to kill a human, this part was directly related to killing WITHOUT the enemy making a sound or turning his or her head around at the last second. Do the test, look at people from behind, you'll be surprised (they'll do a quick head turn and look you right in the eyes)...

P.S., be open minded about ideas that are outside of the scope of "science", I'm thinking the whole idea of a 6th sense goes along with the idea of quantum mechanics, specifically quantum entanglement. There is much we don't know, and a lot to be explored. Just because we can't show how it works now doesn't mean it can not exist.

Quantum Entanglement

The air inside the ball was probably at its saturation pressure all of the time. It only could escape through slow leaks.

It is well recognized that mercury vaporizes readily at room temperature. It just doesn't reach a very high vapor pressure (0.001 mm mercury pressure).

It would be hard to get myself out of the US more often.... I live outside of the US and my definition of liberal is of the economic and personal kid.

They regularly describe themselves as liberal in the editorials and articles, particularly around individual's freedom and economic policy. Basic tennets of liberalism match pretty well to what the economist stands for IMO. This isn't woolly liberalism of a wet blanket kind, its the direct "torture is wrong, restriction of liberty is wrong, government interference with economies almost always goes pear shaped" kind.

Maybe you might need to read the Economist a bit more :)

The 250.000 comes from "over 250,000 users have signed up for the Folding@Home project". So about 150.000 haven't finnished their first work unit yet. That means they didn't have it running for approximately 8 hours to complete a WU (within the 2 days deadline) yet.

From what I can tell, F@H touched on this a while ago. I was reading the PS3 F@H articles, browsing through the "what good does F@H do?" and the "F@H is just a feel-good project" comments and looking at the results page when I stumbled across the above PDF and thought "Hey, that looks like something slashdot just reported on."

From what I can tell, F@H touched on this a while ago. I was reading the PS3 F@H articles, browsing through the "what good does F@H do?" and the "F@H is just a feel-good project" comments and looking at the results page when I stumbled across the above PDF and thought "Hey, that looks like something slashdot just reported on."

Really - no heat? According to F@H's own FAQ, they anticipate that your PS3 is consuming 200W while running. I'm certain all that power is going somewhere...

"This is scientific research that will eventually be patented..."

Um... from the FAQ:

Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them? Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.

According to this page, they are at about 691 teraflops with the PS3 producing 388 of those. I'm kinda confused on where they get the 250,000 number as that page also says there are about 30,000 active CPUs and about 100,000 total (as in 70,000 CPUs once participated but haven't returned data in five days). I mean, there's barely 250,000 total active CPUs including all platforms.

According to the folding@home OS stats page, a total of 99712 PS3s contributed as of 25 Apr 2007. Where did the 250,000 come from?

More evidence that Donald Knuth http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.ht ml was made a little more in God's image than the rest of us.

I enjoy the Stanford CS Colloquium.

The article doesn't actually link to the subject sites, so here you are: fora.tv and ResearchChannel.

Patents are *supposed* to lead to investments. However, in reality patents are more than not used to stiffle innovation. In reality, the huge profits those companies make go primarily into marketing, NOT R&D.

And the relatively small investment (compared to the overall profits and what goes to other departemtns like marketing and the legal teams) that remains, is that really the best return one can get? Is that the most efficient (in terms of being beneficial to the populace at large instead of being most beneficial for the monopolist) we can get?

This was not a NASA experiment per se, it was a Stanford experiment. The original press release can be found here. The official stanford website also lists preliminary findings here.

This was not a NASA experiment per se, it was a Stanford experiment. The original press release can be found here. The official stanford website also lists preliminary findings here.

True, it did take a while. But I'd like to think it was worth the wait. Also, for those who care, here is a link to the Stanford page http://einstein.stanford.edu/ it has the same info as the article along with more stuff about the project.

This could make a great historical demonstration of Ben Franklin's lightning/kite experiment when lightning "improves" the efficiency of the system by finding the shortest path to ground by dropping 500MW for 1 sec down a 40MW cable. (Don't touch the key hanging on the end). The instant heating to 28,000C might also cause a few issues. Lightning can be formed in man circumstances, so watching out for cumulo nimbus clouds and pulling down the system isn't a sure bet.

The only thing I could find on lightning in their information was in the pdf:

"Generator and tether performance depend on a good lightning storm detection system. Surge protection schemes and hardening of the control systems are also under examination."

I am a proponent of Open, Renewable and Baseload Reliable systems.

Much of what's in there is the classic telco dream - virtual circuits, charged by usage. What's being proposed is not the next Internet. It's the next ISDN.

Remember what went wrong with ISDN in the United States. The US telcos tried to use it as a way to get away from flat-rate pricing for local voice calls. That made it a non-starter for voice. The data pricing was so high it wasn't even feasible for data in the era of dial-up.

The Stanford "clean slate" document is basically "ISDN 2.0". Or, at the bulk level, "ATM 2.0".

• "Flows as first-class citizens. One innovation that we believe to be important is the recognition of flows in the network. We believe flows should be treated as first-class citizens, perhaps replacing the packet as the predominant unit for manipulation inside switches and routers." Virtual circuits. They're BAACK. The excuse is congestion control. The real reason is billing.
• "The current Internet has not converged on a balance between regulation and competition; observe, for example, the fact that six of the seven largest national ISPs in 2002 have since undergone corporate restructuring. They are simply not profitable." Ah, now the agenda appears - find some way to reduce buyer power and increase prices. That's what this is really all about. Overall, the communications industry is in better shape than the airline industry or the auto industry.
• "The Internet provides no support for determining the value of a packet to the sender, receiver, or service provider." That's what telcos really want, especially the wireless ones, who just love how much they can overcharge on a per-bit basis for SMS messages.
• "Finally, the lack of economic primitives in the current Internet makes charging for traffic, and micropayments in particular, a challenge to implement." Telco thinking again. Ever notice how all the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect them? There's nobody running around saying "If only I could send 5 cents to anybody I wanted..."

From their own words, the agenda is clear - create a billable Internet where the price of each service can be cranked up by the service provider to the point that maximizes the provider's revenue.

There are times when I'm embarrassed that I graduated from Stanford computer science. This is one of them.

Designed over 30 years ago, the success of the Internet is a testament to the foresight of
a handful of visionary researchers. Hundreds of millions of users rely on it for business
and pleasure; and it is now hard to imagine a world without it.

But our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its
shortcomings. Some of the shortcomings are self-evident, such as the plague of security
breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. Even without attacks, service is
often not available due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. And its
behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. Other short-
comings are less obvious: The Internet was designed for computers in fixed locations, and
is ill-suited to support mobile end-hosts; it uses packet-switching making it hard to take
advantage of improvements in optical switching technology; it neither ensures anonymity,
nor facilitates accountability; and the demise and restructuring of most network service
providers suggests that providing network service is not profitable.

In summary, we dont believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is
often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and
unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

I thought the problem that's limiting the current chip density is heat dissipation due to leakage current, rather than the number of device we can squeeze into a die. btw, pls help with a google analytics study (STATS252).

How about foreign countries, especially developing world, if their computer is not powerful enough to run VISTA... btw, please click on this stanford link for a test on google analytics assignment.

Zenoss
Cacti
BixData
MRTG
etc, etc, etc...


This site has the biggest database of NMS's around.

Intriguing. Looking at this paper, which was what I could find in a hurry, wind power has a theoretical potential around 72TW, at 80m. Enough for electricity (currently, around 2TW), even if only a small fraction is caught.

Total influx from the sun (which is the ultimate limit for wind, solar hydro etc) is about 174.0 PW. Compare to our total energy use, around 14TW. You have about 4 orders of magnitude of leeway there :)

As can be seen from the wiki page, they peaked in the late 1950s. They don't closely mirror the global mean temperature.

Climatoligists already know about sunspots. As can be seen from this chart, most of the recent increase in temperatures are due to humans.

This article is yet another "we have a new chemistry and it's gonna be really cheap real soon now" article. Here's the real deal in solar power.

Yesterday, Mark Pinto from Applied Materials gave a talk in EE380 at Stanford on where they're going. Applied Materials is the biggest maker of semiconductor fab equipment, and they've branched out into making fab equipment for display panels and then solar cells.

To get costs down for big flat panel displays is a manufacturing technology problem. Applied Materials went at it in typical semiconductor-fab fashion - scaling up the fab size. They're now making panels of about 5 square meters in area. These are then cut up into 50-inch TV sets.

Once they got that working, they adapted the huge machinery involved to making solar panels. This turned out to work quite well. Since they're adapting a process that produces higher-quality product than a solar cell, they don't have significant quality problems. The solar-cell only makers tend to have spotty quality; he pointed out that with some solar panels, not all the cells are exactly the same color, which indicates trouble in the coating process.

With size and quality working, the next step is volume. They're about to build the first "40 megawatt fab", one that produces in a year enough solar panels to generate 40 megawatts. These are big panels, 2.2m x 2.6m. The price of the electricity produced should be just about even with peak-hour energy costs in Spain, where this is going. Energy payback (when you get more energy out than was required to make the panel) is about two years. That plant comes on line in 2008.

The next step is the "gigawatt fab", a scale-up of that plant. This is part of Applied Materials' "Solar Strategy". Their position is that the technology is here; it's just necessary to get it into volume production, real volume production. Which is what Applied Materials is good at.

Now we're talking about serious production volume. Three or four such plants could build enough solar cells to cover Southern California's air conditioning energy load in five years.

Meanwhile, they have investments in some other technologies, including a "roll to roll" flexible solar cell technology, and some exotic ideas like tinted glass windows that also generate power. But they don't need a breakthrough. The current technology is good enough to be profitable, so they can start making product and shipping it in volume, while research proceeds on lowering the cost further. Pinto pointed out that about half the cost of solar power is now installation, and that needs to move beyond "a guy with a pickup truck".

So that's what's really happening. Big machines in big factories built by big companies cranking out big solar panels in big volume. Which is how you solve big problems.

I think you understood the definition reasonably well. God is indeed the universe. God is also everything that is not described by the word "Universe". God is not restricted by time or space, those things are just parts of God. God is the all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-knowing all. If your definition of the universe, or of God, has any exclusions, that's not the God I'm talking about. God is all.

Pantheism has existed in many forms for over 2000 years. We don't know when the Chandogya Unpanishad was written, but it is at least that old and perhaps much older. Accusing me of playing semantics, of redefining words, is not useful. I'm using the same definition that various religions in China and India have been continuously using since at least 8 BC. It's a very popular definition among scientists who are religious, because it does not contradict observable phenomena. For example, the problem of evil does not exist for pantheists.

I think you might have strong religious beliefs, like every other atheist I've ever met. Perhaps to you, God MUST be an anthropomorphic phantasm - this may be an article of faith to you, just as it is to Christians and Muslims. Are you willing to consider other ideas? If the nature of your non-existent God is not open to debate, that's a religious position, not an open-minded or scientific position.

If you cannot consider any other form of God, then you do not have an "absence of religion" - far from it. How one defines God is the essence of one's religion. It is the entire point of theology; to know God. I'm not trying to insult you, here, I am quite willing to respect any belief system that doesn't go around murdering people and destroying things in the name of God. Many people who attend my church call themselves atheists and also call themselves members of the UU religion. Many people consider Jains and Buddhists to be atheists. So-called "elite" taoists consider themselves to be religious atheists and are very proud of this.

I'm very willing to consider that a person might have a form of atheism that is not religious, but I don't think I've met any yet. All the forms of atheism that I've encountered are centered around unproveable premises, a faith unsupported by objective evidence.

If you really want to know more about pantheism (I'm actually more interested in discussing atheism, because it is much more puzzling to me; pantheism seems totally self-evident and obviously correct) I recommend this entry in the Stanford encylopedia of philosophy. I just read it, and although it's long and might bore you I thought it did a good job of representing Schopenhauer's dismissal of pantheism as a religion (very similar to your "semantic" objections) - and it's certainly less boring than reading Schopenhauer! :P It's got some discussion of the really hard problems of pantheist theology too, the places where we all disagree with each other (sort of like how all the Christian sects constantly squabble over things nobody else really cares about).

Some people say pantheism and atheism are the same thing; sort of like in "The Incredibles" when the guy says "when everybody is special, nobody is." I guess that's Schopenhauer's argument in a nutshell - if everything is divine, nothing is. I disagree, and I think you might also.

I just referenced Schopenhauer and Disney in the same post. I'm not sure if that's good or bad...