Slashdot Mirror

Come on guys, shouldn't every coder have at least some vague idea of what the Halting Problem is, not to mention its implications for computing in particular and the limits of what is knowable in general.

Hilbert's Program is dead! Since 1931! Quick, somebody inform Slashdot! :)

For a (past) contest targeting the specific scenario I described above, see the Obfustcated V contest, which was the inspiration for Xcott's contest. The winning entry manages to only show its bias on the day of the election itself, but not before, so that it can satisfy serious testing.

For the last few years my interest in high-energy physics has been rather casual, so I'm not going to pretend to know the most widely accepted numbers for things like dark energy fractions and neutrino masses. In fact, if MINOS data have only been recently released, some of the numbers might change, since they usually result from global fits to all available data, so we might have to wait a few months to see what effect, if any, this has on predominant models.

As for the Sun measurements - the first spectrum measured probably will be for Solar neutrinos, since besides nuclear reactors and thermonuclear explosions, that is our most intense neutrino source. Do you know of some serious uncertainties in solar nuclear physics, so that you would expect major surprises in that spectrum?

From what my grad school friends, who worked on the IceCube project, told me, the exiting type of events they look in neutrino astronomy are the very energetic ones - basically those that can only be produced by a handful of exotic processes. For such high-energy neutrinos, their incoming direction can be determined precisely enough to follow up with other types of telescopes in hopes of determining the actual source. It's a game of very small numbers, but the idea is that these events should easily stand out from any background.

Your mention of multipole moments of solar mass distribution again does remind me of sun-quake measurements, but I'm not sure how sensitive they actually are.

Agreed.
"Biopiracy refers to the "monopolisation of genetic resources" according to the show's organisers. It is also defined as the unauthorised use of biological resources by organisations such as corporations, universities and governments."
Guess the question is, what does it mean by unauthorised? Who's authorising or not authorising here? Do the award givers just mean anyone they don't like? Who are the award givers?
From their own website:
"The Coalition Against Biopiracy is an informal group of civil society and peoples' organizations that first came together at the 1995 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Jakarta."

This isn't giving me the warm fuzzies yet, don't know about you...still, nice logo of a pirate ship with a barcode on the sail.

Providing a freely searchable, non-patented database of genetic infomation would seem to be extremely charitable from my point of view, and valuable to non-profit and for-profit organisations alike...and indeed something that Google could probably offer significant help to. From the nominations own website: " Google's massive computer power and cutting-edge data-mining capacity make it a logical partner for Craig Venter and his ever-expanding collection of DNA samples taken from humans, animals and microbes living in soil, sea and air" - well, yes, quite. Doesn't make them evil, does it?
It's also not far from the Stanford Folding project which personally I actively support with my CPU time - http://stanford.edu/folding for info.

""Google, in cooperation with Craig Venter, are developing plans to make all of our genomes Googlable to facilitate the brave new world of private genetically-tailored medicines," would seem to be idiocy. What about the human genome project? Do they (I'm still not clear who "they" are in this article, so bear with me) mean they want to stop any and all genetic therapies?

The line "Jim Thomas, from ETC Group, which is one of the organisers behind the awards ceremony, said that Google's recent moves around storing consumer information could land it in hot water with privacy campaigners of all kinds. "The new 'we want to store everyone's information online' mission statement is going to get very controversial if they extend that to genomic information. " suggests that the authors are at best confused. Collaborating on a genomics database is very very different from suggesting that Google are intending to take any individual's personal genetic information and somehow tie it into their browsing habits.
What's more, it's not clear Google are actually doing *anything*:
"The original source for the alleged collaboration between Google and Venter is The Google Story by Pulitzer Prize winner David Vise. However Google has previously refused to comment on the issue and Venter has denied any ongoing relationship. Google did not respond in time for this story."

I'd venture that some relatively unknown pressure group figured that if they intimated Google were doing some shady big brother type operation, they'd get a few headlines...I work for Big Pharma (opinions my own, not representing employer etc etc etc) but I've an open mind and I think this is bollocks...

The fact you used "war" and "fair" in the same sentence is an oxymoron. When you join the military, I'd like you to still have the philosophy that if one of theirs dies, one of ours dies too. The point of war is not to be fair, but to win. How do you win? Kill more of them than they kill of us. I'm not the type of guy that wants to go with China because I saw a Chinese person look at me weird at the grocery store, but I do have to say that war is necessary to keep order.

War is not completely evil. Hypothetically speaking, say there was a dictator who was committing mass genocide. If we stay idle, isn't that as evil as the dictator who commits this genocide?

It's horrible that roughly 32-38,000 have died in the Iraqi war, but what is this number compared to the execution of 600,000 Iraqi civilians under Saddam? Or the 100,000 Kurds? Or the 500,000 Iranians? Deaths under Hussein

There are no missing links because there are no links.

That concept echos back to the Great Chain of Being, an Aristotelian concept that pre-dates the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and which continues to be a favorite today among those for whom the concept of "a billion years ago" equates to that vague, amorphous period of "sometime before last Thursday."

The specimen under consideration may very well be neither a direct decendent of any currently characterized species nor a direct ancestor of any (including of our own). Differentiating closely releated species is tough (see lumpers and splitters) and there is no answer key in the back of the book.

Better yet, store video as a sequence of light fields, and then project the field using an array of projectors onto a diffuse screen with microlenses to create an auto-stereoscopic display. (Sorry, I can't remember off the top of my head which site had the info about the microlens diffuse screen projection) I've also seen a demonstration where one places a microlens sheet over a specially generated image to create a nice "stereo" view, much like holograms but in full color.

I understand that the person you are talking about has never heard of email, but did you know that Donald Knuth, computer science god etc etc does not have an email address?

In the end, this won't make a bit of difference in the U.S. until it costs corporations money.

Look at patents. People knowledgable about patents and software have almost universally criticized software & business method patents, but the only reason congress and the patent office is starting to look at it is because its costing big corporations money.

You see, the trouble is, when you have people like Alan Greespan saying more copyrights and patents are vital to the U.S.'s economic growth, when congress perceives the entertainment industry as being the growth engine for the U.S. economy, then its tough for congress to vote against these kinds of laws.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/Speeches/2 003/20030404/default.htm
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/march3/ greenspan-33.html

Until these same companies feel a pinch from the DMCA, it doesn't matter what the real impact of the law is, it's the message that's carried by the press, by the fed chairman, by the heads of industry such as Bill Gates that will determine the fate of the DMCA.

You can; look at Brook GPU and libSh.

Of course, the basic isn't exactly brand new -- some of us have been writing shaders to handle heavy duty math for a while. The difference is that up until now, most real support for this has been more or less experimental (e.g. the Brook system for doing numeric processing on GPUs. Brook is also sufficiently different from an average programming language that it's probably fairly difficult to put to use in quite a few situations.

Having a physics-oriented framework will probably make this capability quite a bit easier to apply in quite a few more situations, which is clearly a good thing (especially for nVidia and perhaps ATI, of course).

The part I find interesting is that Intel has taken a big part of the low-end graphics market. Now nVidia is working at taking more of the computing high-end market. I can see it now: a game that does all the computing on a couple of big nVidia chips, and then displays the results via Intel integrated graphics...

Depends on how you interpret it. Google started as an academic publication, which is public. The system has certainly grown and changed since then, and improved, and much of that is secret. However, some generalizations of what they do, and particular pieces are patented. I believe this statement is saying that the general system is patented, but many of the scoring details, which is what's relevant in the case, are secret. So... yes, it can be both - you don't have to patent full systems and every detail. And you can also improve upon a patented system and keep those parts secret.

Lao Tzu was a senior contemporary of Confucius.

Indeed. How can you get fired from a company you started? (see 2nd story)

I didn't say it was RIGHT (or wrong), just that it is economically rational.

Not all human behavior is economically rational but it rarely hurts to look at economics for a 1st approxiamation as to why people do things ... just as long as you also look at stuff like morality too.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/

They've folded proteins whose kinetics are 1st order (ie. small enough proteins).

The folding problem is the one of the hardest ones. So don't get all blustery about it not being a solved problem. Cancer hasn't been cured yet either.

"The only way I know to really change Window's behavior is to disable the pagefile"

App specific, but look at http://suif.stanford.edu/pub/keepresident/faq.html

Basically, the idea is that you tell the OS to always keep at least such and such an amount of the application in RAM. I'm fairly certain that MS apps (e.g. IE and Outlook) already do this for you. It's part of what makes them so spiffy compared to non-Microsoft alternatives.

Which is why she is trying to find evidence that video games are bad, than, for example, campaigning to stop children from watching television, when there is plenty of evidence and an existing consensus that TV does a lot of harm to children:

http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/yourchild/tv.htm http://www.stanford.edu/dept/bingschool/rsrchart/b andura.htm http://www.apa.org/releases/childrenads.html

Even reseachers who say TV can be good, emphasise that only applies to VERY restricted viewing:

http://www.aap.org/family/tv1.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3506854.stm

You are looking for something like GPUbench http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/gpubench/ , which contains bandwidth test amongst other things.
  ,

Remember, the current Cell implementation is a PowerPC with eight (seven for bad chips) "Synergistic Processing Elements", which are relatively conventional CPUs tied to 256K of uncached memory but with hardware to support asynchronous scatter-gather copy to and from main memory. This is very different hardware from the PS2. It's not going to be an easy emulation.

Trying to get the NVidia part to emulate the PS2's VS1 and GS units will be a neat trick; the graphics power is there, but in a very different form. It's a reasonable porting job, but straightforward emulation at the binary level is tough.

There's kind of a "build it and they will come" attitude from some of the Cell people. They're not quite sure how to use all those little isolated processors effectively, but hope someone will figure it out.

We'll all know more after GDC in two weeks.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclea r-faq.html

Good links, mahn! I usually check-out the status of Gravity Probe B, as I think that learning more about gravity and magnetism are what will help us get off this crazy rock. Glad to see there are more of those kinds of projects still on the horizon.

Stuart Cheshire's "It's the latency, stupid".

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latenc y.html

Keep it public and do automatic email confirmations. We have enough circlejerk communities.

Please point to one study that shows the left bias of NPR News.

Humans can't help but be bias, this is due to them being human.

NPR's news is written and recited by humans.

Therefore NPR is bias.

Bias isn't always obvious and is rarely on purpose. The UCLA study on bias found that journalists often will use the WORDING of a story to slant it one way or another. For instance, they'll say that Newt Gengrich "gained notoriety for his time as house leader" instead of saying "he was the house leader." Of course, this is not word for word from the study, please read it before deciding how much you believe it.

Getting back to your request, the study states that NPR does indeed have bias but not much more-so than the average publication such as Time magazine, for instance.

I equate being a partisan to having a mental disorder, due to a study I read on how the rational thinking center of the brain of a partisan literally shuts down when exposed to a differing viewpoint. The reason partisan journalists are bias is because they think all facts point towards their viewpoint as "truth."

The brain will cut off information input at some point because if we really knew how many variables we DIDN'T know, we'd never make any decisions. That's why I don't vote :)

And for those that do not believe me, I have:

Text processor
Spreadsheet
Presentation creator
Oh, and a great bibliography management system (nor MSOffice or OOo get close enough to this)

Oh, and it also has a sql mode to communicate with SQL databases, and lets not talk about its scripting capabilities! (VBA ppppffft).

Maybe you should check your references before calling someone an idiot for spelling it "Ockham"? See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for instance (see point 2). Occam is the French spelling of the very English name of William of Ockham. Maybe the patronization was justified?

Let me say that first I am not convinced ethanol is the answer but the subsidy issue is not the reason.
Check this one out. http://pangea.stanford.edu/ESYS/Energy%20seminars/ patzek_ethanol.pdf
Subsidies are a whole different animal.
First we pay at the pump less than half of the cost of a gallon of gas. Our tax dollars pay the rest. Second we pay in many other ways like: subsidies for exploration, subsidies for new fuel mixes, studies on future supply, tax breaks, etc..
Agribusiness is not the only pig at the trough. From a quick look it seems agribiz is sucking about 19 billion a year out of us and oil totals are a little more elusive but look to be a close contender. The links I provided were found with a quick google on subsidies for the industries in question.

This one is pretty informative.
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/10-9-95/oilsubsidy. html

A report developed by Greenpeace.
The Executive Summary of the report "Fueling Global Warming:
Federal Subsidies to Oil in the United States" is available at
the address: http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/oil/fdsub.html

The full report is available in Adobe Acrobat format at the
address: http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/oil/fdsuboil.pd f

(appendixes available in Adobe Acrobat format at the address:
http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/oil/fdsubapp.pd f)

Note--the full report plus appendixes is appox 180 pages.

This one states (fairly closely) the real cost of a gallon of gas.
http://www.distributiondrive.com/Article4.html

Now I haven't looked closely at this situation in 15 years or so but it seems the arguement hasn't changed much. Subsidies are a bad idea and so is nitrate fertilizer.

does it come preloaded with Folding@Home?

Interesting, since I work in Higher ed. Hold on while I check Protege which I use to map our enterprise. Oh, I see that over 80% of our logical servers are running Linux, either Debian, Red Hat AS or Cent OS. It appears that we are using typo 3 for our CMS. It also looks like we are using uPortal for our web portal and CAS for our Web ISO. Looks like we're using Nagios for monitoring, plus other open source projects in various areas. I also see heavy dependance and use of PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Let me check what services have given us the most trouble. Oh, I see it's our closed source applications.

But, I guess they know best. So I had better shut all of this down.

I think it's time to apply this to our friendly ISPs. My how history repeats itself.

Let me take a stab at trying to explain the thinking behind this. It's a pretty damn cool idea if you ask me (disclosure: I do work for VMware)

A virtual appliance is a virtual machine that is configured to act like an appliance.

First, check out http://suif.stanford.edu/collective/ which talks about some of the research around this concept.

The gist of this idea at least in my view is that you can design more powerful, more manageable and more usable software when you can control the entire software stack, including OS and all applications running on it. TiVo is a cannonical example of this. It's based on Linux, updates and manages itself, and the good folks at TiVo can get the benefits of Linux without having to write software that has to support 7 distributions and 15 kernel patches. Of course TiVo is a physical entity, which has its advantages (easy to plug into your cable box, comes with a remote control), but also has its disadvantages (cost of hardware, can't download a TiVo over the internet).

So the idea then is to marry the benefits of hardware appliance with software. I personally think it gets even more interesting when you start to look into the realm of server virtual appliances. Wouldn't it be nice to just go to a website and download a fully configured, self-managing mail server/web server/file server/network security box/proxy server/vpn server etc. etc? No configuration hassles, if done right it can manage itself. Its also a pretty amazingly useful way to bring the benefits of Linux and open source to the masses IMO. If Linux can be installed just like an application, and have a very low maintenance burden, it seems like that might really help continue to accelerate its adoption.

Anyhow, hope this helps explain what a "virtual appliance" is supposed to be all about.

MMIX!. 256 general purpose registers, 32 special purpose, simple calling convention, and bitwise matrix multiplies. All we need is some real sillicon.

I believe one of the criteria for fair use is that it doesn't cause economic harm.

The impact on the market is considered as a factor, but it is by no means the only factor, and other factors can easily outweigh it.

Consider a book review that uses a few quotes from the book to show that it is utterly factually incorrect. That review could clearly cause significant economic harm, and yet it is still fair use because the other factors outweigh the impact on the market.

No problem, we could switch over to the Flat Tax very quickly. Take your income, subtract your personal and dependent deductions (well over $40K for a family of four), and pay a percentage of what's left (usually 17% in American proposals). Besides saving $billions in labor, it will likely increase compliance as it will be less worthwhile to dodge it.

Unfortunately, reformers are split between the Flat Tax and Fair Tax, aka national sales tax. The problem with the Fair Tax plan is that it will require the repeal of the income tax amendment, which will take years under the best circumstances. The Flat Tax requires no constitutional changes. At the very least the Flat Tax could be used as a stopgap measure. Then there's the slight problem of Congress losing the ability to sell tax loopholes to lobbyists (awww). Personally I think wiping out the source of much of the corruption in Washington is a Good Thing.

Wikipedia Flat Tax.

I recently attended a talk that was part of a PhD student's oral defense. He detailed a really nice streaming video system that is congestion optimized instead of rate optimized called CoDiO. I asked him how long he thinks it would take to market this, but I think he said that they're still working out the kinks in the practical application. So yeah, the technology is definitely there to stream video over P2P, but I don't know about DRM. Then again... regular terrestrial TV broadcasts aren't hampered with copy protection as far as I know, so maybe the DRM is unnecessary for broadcasts with commercials?

Which isn't always a bad thing

There's other information regarding the votes besides this particular audit. You may consider U.C. Berkely a leftist institution, but their Quantitative Methods Research Team has quite a bit of credentials. U.I.Chicago, Notre Dame, Cortnell, U. Penn., U. of Wisconsin, Stanford, and Princeton might also be in a blue states, but they are also very highly respected. Other schools that have weighed in include Temple, U. of Utah and Southern Methodist U. Mathematical arguments like this may not sway dick and jane, but I would expect them to have more credence with the slashdot crowd:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Exit_Pol ls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf (PDF)

The exit pollster of record for the 2004 election was the Edison/Mitofsky consortium. Their national
poll results projected a Kerry victory by 3.0%, whereas the official count had Bush winning by 2.5%.
Several methods have been used to estimate the probability that the national exit poll results would be as
different as they were from the national popular vote by random chance. These estimates range from 1
in 16.5 million to 1 in 1,240. No matter how one calculates it, the discrepancy cannot be attributed to
chance.

There are Three Primary Explanations for the Discrepancies:
1. Statistical Sampling Error - or Chance
We agree with Edison/Mitofsky that the first possible cause, random statistical sampling error, can be
ruled out.
2. Inaccurate Exit Polls
This is the theory that Edison/Mitofsky put forth. They hypothesize that the reason the exit polls were so
biased towards Kerry was because Bush voters were more reluctant to respond to exit polls than Kerry
voters. Edison/Mitofsky did not come close to justifying this position, however, even though they have
access to the raw, unadjusted, precinct-specific data set. The data that Edison/Mitofsky did offer in their
report show how implausible this theory is.
3. Inaccurate Election Results
Edison/Mitofsky did not even consider this hypothesis, and thus made no effort to contradict it. Some of
Edison/Mitofsky's exit poll data may be construed as affirmative evidence for inaccurate election
results. We conclude that the hypothesis that the voters' intent was not accurately recorded or counted
cannot be ruled out and needs further investigation.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu:7101/

The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade,
respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch
voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush's support in
Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net gain of
81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm
Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He should
have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 -
a difference of 19,300 votes.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the
significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting
cannot be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a county's use of
electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for
President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this
appearing in a population where the true difference is zero - less than once
in a thousand chances."


http://wand.stanford.edu/elections/us/FL2004/WandF lorida2004.pdf (PDF)

Baiman concluded that the probability that these discrepancies would simultaneously occur in just the
most critical st

*grumble* *grumble* make me work *grumble* :-P

I don't have the info handy, and I'm having some trouble finding it. The person who testified was a major entity in the government's control of nuclear energy, but I'm afraid I don't remember who.

Until I find the info, here are similar thoughts echoed by Bernard Cohen:

"The reason is that some very rich uranium deposits have now been found in Canada, like 3% ore vs 0.2 % which is the richest U.S. ore. Australia is also producing low cost uranium. If you mean at costs less than $50 per pound, which is the historic high (adjusted for inflation), it is probably safe to say there is enough for at least 100 years. "

Except that the worst estimates say that if we switched over to 100% nuclear today, we'd have about 100 years of fuel for the most basic power plants.

At, and here's an important bit, present fuel costs.

As fuel costs increase, reserves go up, because stuff that wasn't worth exploiting before now is. Fuel costs don't even have to increase too much before uranium extraction from seawater becomes economical, to about $400/lb. The amount of uranium in the oceans at this moment is enough to power the entire world's current energy demand for 7 million years, about 5E9 tons of the stuff.

There's enough uranium around that by the time we run out of it, we'll be able to construct large-scale solar power satellites and ginormous groundside microwave rectennas. And we don't have to confine ourselves to uranium; there's even more thorium around than uranium, and while that won't sustain a chain reaction, it'll fission just fine in an energy amplifier, and you can breed more fissile fuel in the process.

It's doubtful that we'll ever get fusion working, but there's so much fission fuel around capable of driving one plant design or another that if we haven't figured out solar collection satellites by the time we start feeling the pinch of running out of it, we'll deserve to go extinct.

Details.

"He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource."

Uranium recovery from seawater.

Regardless, from a legal perspective, this is a copyright issue, not a theft issue. Since it is a copyright issue, this case is a clear cut, open and shut case. There is zero, repeat zero possibility that Perfect 10 will win this suit, though they may get a temporary stock boost in the short term by winning the first round....

This case does not differ substantively from Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. which was decided by the 9th circuit (California). That case found that image thumbnails by commercial search engines are fair use. This judge is actually ruling in a way that is contrary to a ruling by his own circuit on a case that's almost identical! Unless Google's lawyers are completely incompetent, this is the sort of case that, if decided in Perfect 10's favor, has basically a 100% chance of being overturned on appeal....

IANALBIPOOSD.

Here's the case in a nutshell. Perfect 10's copyrighted images are being appropriated by others. Google indexes them and displays the thumbnails of them. Since Perfect 10 didn't give Google permission to display those images (as you noted in your post, they don't allow Google to index their images), when Google displays the thumbnails they are, under our current copyright laws, breaking the law.

This is similar to the case brought against Kinko's for creating coursepacks (see Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corporation. Kinko's made partial copies of course material and sold it to students. Kinko's believed these coursepacks were allowed by educational fair use rules. Kinko's, like Google in this case, didn't make complete copies. They only copied pieces of the material to help students get to the heart of the material. Google doesn't copy the entire copyrighted image, just enough to get the important part. The courts ruled against Kinko's, and the judge here said it's likely the courts will also rule against Google.

The biggest difference is, in the case against Kinko's, they were the ones taking direct action. The Kinko's case would apply more directly if someone had come to Kinko's and said, "Hey, we've got these great coursebooks for sale. If you point people our way, by giving away the first five pages with a link to us, we'll give you five cents for each copy we sell. You have to make copies of the first five pages yourself, though."

There are some other differences, too. Kinko's directly profited, whereas Google only indirectly profits (from advertising). The judge agreed that that part of the case is weak. But you don't have to make money to be infringing a copyright. That may help Google avoid paying as much in damages, but that's about all it means.

Maybe Rumsfeld didn't get the memo, but that's not surprising considering that he doesn't even use e-mail.

That doesn't necessarily mean he's ineffective at what he does or computer illiterate, considering that Don Knuth doesn't either.

... taking off your sandals and striking yourselfon the head until you bleed:

http://www.physorg.com/news10978.html

Warmer than a Hot Tub: Atlantic Ocean Temperatures Much Higher - Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107F (42C)--about 25F (14C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub.

Ooops.. and that was normal back then? With oceans like that how much ice do you think was floating in them?

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/vars un.html

Mike Flaugher: It is my personal belief that with the beginning of Sunspot Cycle 23, we MAY be entering into a period of climate disturbance similar to that in the early 1800's, and POSSIBLY like that of the three major disturbances of the last millennium, the Wolf, Sporer and Maunder Minimums. The latter possibility we will not know with certainty for several decades. Solar Cycle 23, however, appears at this time poised to begin a major downshift in solar levels which may well cause reactions in the stratosphere and, through mechanisms now being studied as illustrated in some of the articles above, a series of reactions in the lower atmosphere. I believe that the manifestation of these changes may soon be felt as a shifting of weather patterns of moisture, dryness, and temperature.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/i xnewstop.html

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research. Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

Ooops. How are we going to turn down the Sun?

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

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was an unusually warm period during the European Medieval period, lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century. It has been argued a better name would be the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. The MWP is often involved in contentious discussions of global warming and the greenhouse effect.

Ooops. We've obviously already have been there - much to the chagrin of one or the other faction trying to justify social change by predicting dire climatic consequences. These factions - as the Wikipedia goes on - of course are hard at work trying to find ways to paint the current warming trend as something novel and unique even in view of literally rock-solid past evidence. The Wikipedia is another btw another good starting point for the debate between the global cooling/warming factions and the CO2 doomsday prophets.

While we're at it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_Climatic_Opt imum

Some more warming in timeframe of 9000 to 5000 years B.P (Before present, before 1950 CE that is):

The Holocene Climate Optimum was a warm period during roughly the interval 9,000 to 5,000 years B.P.. This event has also been known by many other names, including: Hypisthermal, Altithermal, Climatic Optimum, Holocene Optimum, Holocene Thermal Maximum, and Holocene Megathermal.

Temperature variations during the

i recently went through this drill in searching for my first job after graduate school. i did an extensive amount of research in the process, based on which i can state the following (general--YMMV) observations:

a) average pay for a person with given qualifications can vary widely (>20%), even within a given industry.

b) average pay can, and does, vary widely between industries (e.g. aerospace vs. electrical engineering).

c) despite how they may act upon initial contact, HR people are not your friends. their job is to make you feel like they're your buddy, and to create the appearance of "it's you and me against The Man," where "The Man" is the company in question, early on in the negotiation process.

d) after getting the go-ahead from the hiring manager, HR's job is to get you on board for the lowest possible amount of money. if you think about it, doing things significantly differently would be financially irresponsible from the company's standpoint in most cases.

e) do your homework. that way you can counter glib and/or arbitrary assertions from the HR person about salary with tangible facts. even then they will likely not concede an inch verbally, but it does make a difference.

f) in case it is not clear from points b) through e) above, HR people are weasels. i was incredibly lucky to receive seven offers from seven interviews. with one small exception, this was the case in all of them.

g) whoever names a number first during the negotiation process generally loses.

although the title makes it sound very much like a huckster's manual, jack chapman's book is actually pretty decent and worth a look. some of its advice may be inapplicable or unworkable for you, but it's a good place to start. you can find it at most big bookstores for about $10. (no, i have no affiliation whatsoever with him.)

some universities' career offices publish historical starting salaries for their graduates online. if this isn't your first job, these numbers may not be directly relevant to you, but it's another piece of information. stanford MIT.

other salary links: the wall street journal published two surveys in the november 5, 2004 issue, one showing average salary by location, another by degree/education, for computer engineers. my two links are both dead, but if you have access to a library or a subscription to the WSJ archives, those are worth a look.

cost-of-living calculators one, two, three, four, five. that last one is a general link to the ACCRA index. it is not published for free on the web AFAIK, but if you google around you may find snapshots posted in various places.)

finally, general salary negotiation advice links: one, two, three.

be prepared, and good luck! /CF

I used to work at SNF. Industry and small businesses were also allowed to use the lab. I has some very modern equipment but it is mainly for prototype. Once you have a working sample it then can be sent to a fab house for a production run if you get funding. It is not exactly cheap but a small project could be done w/o alot of investment. It all depends on how complicated your process is.

Even the crudest, most conservative estimates indicate that there is enough available uranium to last several billion years at current worldwide energy usage rates.

Sadly, this is exactly what the RIAA wants us to do . . . buy it again. There is (obviously) a market for digital (mp3, mp4, etc) music copies. By ripping CDs, even for our own personal use and enjoyment, we are affecting the market for digital music. Granted, charging people for the digital copy as well as the physical copy seems highly dubious, ripping, or digitally backing up our music might not be a fair use. Take a look at this Stanford site http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter9/9-a.html describing the nature of fair use. As a person who regularly rips CDs for personal enjoyment on my ipod, I sure something . . . a court decision, legislation . . . ensures we don't have to pay twice. What a sad world that would be . . .

Your conclusion is a bit off; for most of what you say, I reply: "Exactamundo." That last paragraph, though, is an environmentalist's wet dream and suggests a need for lessons in basic economics and engineering.

Where there is a demand there will probably be a supply. Given coal and the sun (and all the myriad ways of harnessing energy therefrom) as well as existing and severalpotential nuclear energies there is no reason to expect "mini-mansions", modern manufacturing nor "agri-business" to decline alongside petroleum and its' distillates. While I've taken blacksmithing as a hobby, I fully expect that my other hobbies, automotive repair, photography, welding, woodworking and programming (I don't sleep well) to continue to be inexpensive diversions for my sons and daughters well into the next millenium.

Perhaps you've been bitten by the year 2000 bug and not quite healed the infection, or, alternately you've spent too much time buried in your Foxfire books, or perhaps you've read Friday once too often. In any regard, there's not cause to worry that society is going to collapse any time soon. There's quite enough energy to keep us entertained and heated (or air conditioned) for a century or twelve, assuming we don't breed ourselves into extinction (albeit not necessarily as cheaply as you and I enjoy).

p.s. Strip-mining isn't necessarily an environmental nightmare. (Having grown up in Alaska fairly close to Healy, I was aware of Usibelli Coal Mine and their efforts, but I was shocked at the grammar of the page I referenced; what are they teaching those kids in Healy? I don't profess to be an english professor, but I am shocked!)

What do you say to scientists like these that say the Sun may be just as, if not more responsible for, Global Warming, if it exists, than CO2 emissions? Kind of hard to wave the Kyoto treaty at the Sun and expect it to care. Despite claims to the contrary, plenty of people are still unconvinced, and not because they're sticking their heads in the sand...