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And for those who believe protein folding is the holy grail, feel free to help it along by joining Folding@Home.

They've recently tied several diseases to malformed proteins joining together to form an internal "plaque" of proteins, indicating that real progress can possibly be made in this sector. I'd much rather find the cure to cancer than alien life, but that's just me...

CJF

I'm going.

What is the evil force behind all wrongdoing in the universe?

It never had a name. Until now. Until we identified it and studied it while making ready to destroy it.

Its name is VladeKua5y !

VladeKua5y (pronounced "Vladequacy") is the root of the problem. VladeKua5y is the root of all problems. VladeKua5y is the enemy. VladeKua5y is what must be destroyed.

Kuro5hin + Vladinator + Adequacy = VladeKua5y !!

Who is the enemy? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

What must be destroyed? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Who is the enemy of all trollers evarywhere? VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y ! VladeKua5y !

Here is some information on VladeKua5y . Expect more people like Rusty Foster to be added soon.

NAME: Burdge, Jonathan E-MAIL: jlb@io.com, jlbatdarc@w-link.net, elby@adequacy.org, darc@w-link.net ALIASES: lb, jlb, Elby

NAME: Casillas, Luis E-MAIL: casillas@stanford.edu, em@adequacy.org ALIASES: em, Estanislao Martinez, Sylvain Tremblay

NAME: Corrigan, Barry E-MAIL: barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk, bc@adequacy.org ALIASES: bc, ktb (Kiss the Blade), Lover's Arrival, Euroderf, Erbert Paget-Paget, Anya

NAME: Dickson, Craig E-MAIL: crd@inversenet.com, mendaxveritas@yahoo.com, mendaxveritas@pacbell.net ALIASES: mv, Mendax Veritas

NAME: Flickinger, Dan E-MAIL: flikx@geekizoid.com, flikee@xmission.com ALIASES: flikx

NAME: Haberberger, George E-MAIL: ghaberbe@frontiernet.net, George.Haberberger@usa.xerox.com ALIASES: GeorgeHa, Hairy_Potter

NAME: Huston, Bill E-MAIL: bozoman@vlad.geekizoid.com, ALIASES: bozoman

NAME: Johnson, Peter E-MAIL: peter.johnson@voicestream.com, shoeboy@adequacy.org ALIASES: Shoeboy, Peter Johnson

NAME: Lockwood, Scott E-MAIL: wsl3@attbi.com, vlad@geekizoid.com ALIASES: Vladinator, Lonesome Cowboy Burt, Quick Star, Pinkerton Floyd, etc.

NAME: Linwood, Rob E-MAIL: rcl@cs.csoft.net, rcl211@is9.nyu.edu ALIASES: AuntFloyd, Con Troll

NAME: Mann, Warren E-MAIL: broken@warmann.com ALIASES: osm, OpenSourceMan

NAME: McPherson, Craig E-MAIL: craig@laceyonline.com ALIASES: craig, naked&petrified guy

NAME: Nelson, Brian E-MAIL: elenchos@adequacy.org ALIASES: Elenchos

NAME: Osborne, Michaell E-MAIL: osborm@yahoo.com, dmg@adequacy.org,

Having said all that, what Lockheed really needs to look out for is Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in the UK. They started as a university program about 20 years ago, but they're now a full-fledged company that is well-known for innovative designs and cost-cutting measures. They have launched about 25 satellites so far, have the contract for the Galileo constellation prototypes, and are pushing into the US market (they've already done several projects for the USAF). Definitely a company to keep an eye on.

This idea of this drag was originally proposed by Einstein. Almost fifty years ago, the idea of how to experimentally verify this effect was proposed; however, it required the launch of a very accurate gyroscope. That gyroscope, which is the center-piece of the longest running NASA project ever, was just recently launched into space. More info about it (Gravity Probe-B) and a good description of this drag can be found at http://einstein.stanford.edu. Yes, the article is describing a different project than GP-B; however, it references the skeptism that the folks at GP-B have expressed at this latest experiment, and the GP-B folks are considered the experts in the field. Check out their site, it's fascinating.

-HJ

At least FAH DC has more power than these "little" boxes:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=o sstats
(At the moment 196 TFLOPS sustained!)

I have stated reasons why Apple won't add a trackpoint, so we on the what, just not the why.

I might be biased, but nearly everyone that I have seen that has had a chance to use a trackpoint for a while prefers it. Some have even bought a keyboard with a trackpoint for their desktops. There are several advantages. One is that your fingers don't have to move from the typing position. Another is that you don't have to do the "lift and drag again" thing to move the cursor from one side of the screen to the other. You are free to disagree, but for an x86 laptop giving the consumer both the trackpoint and the pad is a great idea. The cost is insignificant, possibly less than offering the choice, and you please everyone.

I didn't see any peer reviewed publications by Art Robinson; where are they?

And, yes, solar variation has an influence on temperatures, and climatologists are aware of it. See Solar variation accounts for less than half of global warming in 20th Century, UA geoscientist finds, for example. And here.

Why code when you can take over the world. He's way to old to really be a programmer these days, anyhow.

Tell that to Donald Knuth who in his 70's still programs hairy mathematical stuff like a fiend.

For those who don't know what I mean, MMIX is a 64-bit RISC CPU designed by Donald Knuth:

MMIX is a machine that operates primarily on 64-bit words. It has 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers. Most instructions have the 4-byte form 'OP X Y Z', where each of OP, X, Y, and Z is a single 8-bit byte. For example, if OP is the code for ADD the meaning is "X=Y+Z"; i.e., "Set register X to the contents of register Y plus the contents of register Z." The 256 possible OP codes fall into a dozen or so easily remembered categories. The designers of important real-world processor chips (e.g., MIPS and ALPHA) have helped me with the design of MMIX. So I'm excited about the prospects.

So am I, Mr. Knuth. So am I.

("Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Knuth is best known as the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field. He practically created the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. He is the creator of the TeX typesetting system and of the Metafont font design system, and pioneered the concept of literate programming."--Wikipædia.)

For those who don't know what I mean, MMIX is a 64-bit RISC CPU designed by Donald Knuth:

MMIX is a machine that operates primarily on 64-bit words. It has 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers. Most instructions have the 4-byte form 'OP X Y Z', where each of OP, X, Y, and Z is a single 8-bit byte. For example, if OP is the code for ADD the meaning is "X=Y+Z"; i.e., "Set register X to the contents of register Y plus the contents of register Z." The 256 possible OP codes fall into a dozen or so easily remembered categories. The designers of important real-world processor chips (e.g., MIPS and ALPHA) have helped me with the design of MMIX. So I'm excited about the prospects.

So am I, Mr. Knuth. So am I.

("Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Knuth is best known as the author of the multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, one of the most highly respected references in the computer science field. He practically created the field of rigorous analysis of algorithms, and made many seminal contributions to several branches of theoretical computer science. He is the creator of the TeX typesetting system and of the Metafont font design system, and pioneered the concept of literate programming."--Wikipædia.)

At one point, like many I'm sure, I decided to find out what happened to SRE. Turns out the author, Amit Patel, lost the source code in a hard drive failure in 1996. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp

Mind that Google and Yahoo are "kin". Nobody's been subsumed, just the left hand shaking with the right.

I am totally going to participate, win, and mention my achievement on a resume. When the employers ask who ran the contest, I'll say this guy

By the way, anyone notice that pre-fascicle 4b has just been released?
Not to mention (just love that figure of speech), a couple of others have been updated as well.
News here.
It's there just waiting for you to find some errors so you can collect that $2.56 reward check signed by the master himself.

Now I know the arguments for sat radio over land radio: different technology, more content choices, better quality, fewer commercials. Ironically those were the same arguments to use FM over AM back in the day. You can bet that sat radio is going to have more and more commercials as time and number of subscribers increase. That's what happened to FM. The difference is, sat radio subscribers will be paying for radio with commercials (like cable/sat TV!) and no longer have a viable technology choice for distribution. Try hooking up a VHF/UHF TV set today and see the quality.

Also, the number of choices is counter-intuitive. When given a very large number of choices, people tend to select from a small specific consistent group each time. When there are fewer choices people tend to select more broadly over the whole group. This is often referred to as too much choice. I'd love to see XM listener habit stats. I bet it is very interesting.

Do you by any chance mean Paul Ehrlich, the guy who made a famous bet with Julian Simon?

Do you by any chance mean Paul Ehrlich, the guy who made a famous bet with Julian Simon?

1. Antibiotic resistance in GM plants is intentional, an artifact of the manufacturing process (see parent for reference).

2. When bacteria eat DNA, they can incorporate it, mutating without dividing; this is called transformation :

3. DNA from food can linger in the intestines a while.

Given those three facts, the risk and speculation is just that the commensal (normal resident) gut bacteria will take up the antibiotic resistance genes from food, and that pathogenic bacteria will in turn be transformed by the commensals.

In general, I'd love to see more Slashdotters read reading bioscience at PubMed, a service of the (U.S.) National Library of Medicine. There you'll find abstracts of biomed journals, textbooks, genomic and proteomic databases, and free full text of journal articles. Stanford Press's HighWire offers even more free journal articles, as well as all of the abstracts that PubMed indexes.

Perhaps I'm biased, but I think the world needs more nerds to help interpret and synthesize the thousands of pages of biosience research that's being published each week.

-ldg

Liam D. Gray, public health student, former Qualcomm embedded software engineer, BS ECE '95 CMU

What PBS's expert fails to mention is U-235/U-238 are far from the only fissionable elements in nature. They're just the most common.

Prof. John McCarthyyes, that Prof. John McCarthyhas an excellent page which explains the counterarguments here. Take a gander at it sometime: it's good reading.

Between the two, I find McCarthy's arguments considerably more credible.

Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called " Biomimetic Robots ." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read more for a photo gallery...

The Sprawl family of robots is developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. These six-legged robots "draw their inspiration from the physical construction and mechanical design principles that are responsible for the robustness of the cockroach," according to Mark Cutkosky, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Here are two links to the family of sprawl robots and to the IndependentSprawl one known as iSprawl .

The iSprawl is the first fully autonomous member of the Sprawl family. It is about 11 centimeters in length and can run at 15 body-lengths/second (over 2.3m/s). (Credit: Center for Design Research at Stanford University)

One team investigating about robotic lobsters is working to give to the robots a "nervous system." This project is based on research done "on lobster and crayfish nervous systems conducted in the 1970s by Joseph Ayers, a biology professor at Northeastern University."

The actions of real lobsters have been reverse-engineered and programmed into a library of actions which give the robotic lobster a similar behavior as the real ones. You'll find other details at the Biomimetic Underwater Robot Program at the Ayers Robotics Laboratory at Northeastern University.

This robotic lobster imitates the real lobster behavior. (Credit: Jan Witting, Northeastern University)

The Entomopter family of crawling and flying insect-based robots is designed at Georgia Tech. They can be used as surveillance tools and can fly both indoor and outdoor. There are currently two versions. "This generation of the Entomopter is designed for operation in two atmospheres: a 50-gram terrestrial version and an aerospace version designed for use in different gravitational environments." The Entomopter might even be used on future Mars missions.

You'll find much more details by visiting the Entomopter Project website.

Here is a rendering of the Entomopter-based robot flying over Mars (Credit: Georgia Tech).

And this one shows the Entomopter-based Mars surveyor looking over the cliffs. (Credit: Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere, at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), researchers are building cricket-inspired robots, which can walk and jump. Roger D. Quinn, professor of mechanical engineering at CWRU and director of Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab, is working with his team are not only working on robots inspired by cockroaches and crickets, but also on a hybrid mechanism called Whegs (wheels plus legs).

You'll find more information, including diagrams, pictures and movies at the

Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called " Biomimetic Robots ." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read more for a photo gallery...

The Sprawl family of robots is developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. These six-legged robots "draw their inspiration from the physical construction and mechanical design principles that are responsible for the robustness of the cockroach," according to Mark Cutkosky, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Here are two links to the family of sprawl robots and to the IndependentSprawl one known as iSprawl .

The iSprawl is the first fully autonomous member of the Sprawl family. It is about 11 centimeters in length and can run at 15 body-lengths/second (over 2.3m/s). (Credit: Center for Design Research at Stanford University)

One team investigating about robotic lobsters is working to give to the robots a "nervous system." This project is based on research done "on lobster and crayfish nervous systems conducted in the 1970s by Joseph Ayers, a biology professor at Northeastern University."

The actions of real lobsters have been reverse-engineered and programmed into a library of actions which give the robotic lobster a similar behavior as the real ones. You'll find other details at the Biomimetic Underwater Robot Program at the Ayers Robotics Laboratory at Northeastern University.

This robotic lobster imitates the real lobster behavior. (Credit: Jan Witting, Northeastern University)

The Entomopter family of crawling and flying insect-based robots is designed at Georgia Tech. They can be used as surveillance tools and can fly both indoor and outdoor. There are currently two versions. "This generation of the Entomopter is designed for operation in two atmospheres: a 50-gram terrestrial version and an aerospace version designed for use in different gravitational environments." The Entomopter might even be used on future Mars missions.

You'll find much more details by visiting the Entomopter Project website.

Here is a rendering of the Entomopter-based robot flying over Mars (Credit: Georgia Tech).

And this one shows the Entomopter-based Mars surveyor looking over the cliffs. (Credit: Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere, at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), researchers are building cricket-inspired robots, which can walk and jump. Roger D. Quinn, professor of mechanical engineering at CWRU and director of Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab, is working with his team are not only working on robots inspired by cockroaches and crickets, but also on a hybrid mechanism called Whegs (wheels plus legs).

You'll find more information, including diagrams, pictures and movies at the

It'd be great to see realtime capabilities in the vanilla kernel - though in the meantime for a low latency Linux multimedia system I recommend the Planet CCRMA low latency kernel based on Fedora/Red Hat - this has a huge repository of compatible software, much of which is of very high quality. See Ardour (Digital Audio Workstation) for instance. Planet CCRMA uses the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) drivers (which have OSS emulation).

Maybe he should have done something useful like Folding instead.

We fired someone over the summer for running Folding@Home on multiple computers. It wasn't because of what he was doing, but because he had installed and run software that was not approved by the university, and therefore considered a security breach.

I don't necessarily agree with the firing, but if the rules state explicitly that you can't do it, then don't.

It's not just Airbus, Boeing has blamed pilots for UI issues as well. See http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00 /critical-systems/commercial.htm/ The case your probably referring to is of the A320 where it was easy for pilots to confuse rate of descent with angle of descent (the screens looking similar). This is pilot error - they should have noticed they were about to hit the ground. A dumb design, yes, but pilots aren't paid 6-figure salary's to be oblivious to details.

John McCarthy's essays on the sustainability of human progress are fabulous -- well worth an evening reading through them all.

And certainly, the FAQ on energy use you referred to deserves to be made into a link.

(Honestly, why do /.ers ever NOT make things into links? Silly /.ers)

- Peter

John McCarthy's essays on the sustainability of human progress are fabulous -- well worth an evening reading through them all.

And certainly, the FAQ on energy use you referred to deserves to be made into a link.

(Honestly, why do /.ers ever NOT make things into links? Silly /.ers)

- Peter

There's only so much easily obtainable uranium before we start to run into the same problems as fossil fuels

Well, not really. According to this FAQ on nuclear energy, with efficient reprocessing of nuclear fuel the Earth's uranium supplies will last upwards of a billion years. That's a million times longer than the longest estimates for how long our fossil fuel supply will last us.

And excluding nuclear weapons, nuclear power has caused very few deaths compared to the coal industry from mining alone, never mind any of the consequences of pollution from burning coal. Every nuclear "incident" has been so grossly exaggerated it's just not funny.

- Peter

A travelogue: "Journey into Kimland" by Scott Fisher

more: clicky, clicky, clicky, clicky, clicky.
since we seem to read the same stuff as our leaders, might as well be strung along the same.

You might find this article interesting. It seems that after Eisenhower's mispronunciation of "Nuclear" as "Nucular", the military took up the name as a way of distinguishing "Nucular Weapons" (Bad! Evil! Hiss!) from "Nuclear Energy" (Good! Clean! Wonderful!). Their idea is to promote nuclear power through an intentional separation of the two in the language.

Whether it's working or not is for the public to decide, but my guess is that Bush is using the term "Nucular" on purpose. Especially since he's shown that he's perfectly capable of using terms like "Nuclear Medicine".

I couldn't think of it when I posted, but I found a very readable article from someone at SLAC about the mystery of m/am asymmetry

Apparently, Friedman hasn't read Borkenau who wrote about Icelandic cultural and political systems and studied the Icelandic Saga and Eddic poetry. Muir's position is entirely supported. But given that you're using PBS internal search results to dismiss my sources, I'm sure that you've probably missed that. The series was 6 hours long, it had ample time to cover both Mises and Hayek. It gave Hayek at least, if not more, time than Keynes.

Yes, Northern Ireland is a shining example of how well the Irish have defended themselves. Henry II was the first British king to claim title to Ireland, he certainly wasn't the last. Have the British been able to totally dominate the Irish? No. But to claim that the Irish have been able to successfully resist conquerors has no basis.

Iceland and Ireland both dispensed justice using trial by ordeal under Folklaw. Christianization and the advent of written law brought Feudal law. I doubt that trial by ordeal would qualify as justice in any definition you've given.

Praxeology doesn't prove what you think it proves. If anything, a true praxeological study supports my position far better than yours. A theory cannot be a priori, it can only have a priori elements. I'm not being ignorant, you haven't presented anything that passes Popper's 4 elements of a scientific theory. I'm telling you that your system is faith based, and I don't believe. You haven't proven why it isn't, Mises had a point during a time when historicism reigned, you don't. Until you can argue a legal framework that implements your ideas I don't see how you can claim some superior system. If you can't describe your system in terms of laws then you have no system. The market is no less coercive than the State. There is coercion everywhere, should I shake my fist at Mother Nature for raining or build a shelter? You are shaking your fist, believing that your raindance will somehow stop the rain. The Modern Liberal state is a shelter, the best shelter built yet. Markets and people thrive in this shelter, more so than at any previous time in history.

To say that the State can in any way improve upon the unhampered free market illustrates an ignorance of correct economic theory and praxeology.

You keep repeating this with no proof, or even a small inkling as to why you think it's wrong, your defense suggests faith. And could a private party not prevent entrance to a market? Couldn't the mafia make sure that no one else opens a laundry shop in your neighborhood? It seems to me that if the state doesn't have power or coercion, that power is simply transferred to private entities, it doesn't simply go away. So are private law enforcement groups (mafia) preventing entrance to a market the same thing as the state doing so? DiLorenzo hasn't proven that monopolies can't happen without the state, just that it hasn't. That's just as invalid as stating that God has never revealed himself to me, therefore God is proven to not exist. Absence of evidence does not prove a negative.

Your mind is lazy, you've failed to self-critique your own thinking.

You're forgetting that the first President Bush was the first person to use nuclear weapons since WWII.

Lying about getting a blow-job is nothing. Hell, it never should have been brought up. It's not something that should've been made public. FDR was a cripple, JFK was a womanizer, and James Buchanan was a homo. There's nothing there that Americans should care about. It's none of our business.

I'm not a left-winger, I think both sides suck. Although I do admire that the Right will stab you in the face, while the Left has to stab you in the back.

There's a difference between identifying climate change and fingering a source. We still don't know enough to eliminate the solar cycle as a source of global warming climate variability.

Knocking down global growth by adopting greenhouse gas treaties that may be unnecessary isn't just a bit of money, plus or minus, in middle class pockets. It's the difference between life and death in the third world.

Here's my vote for visualization and editing tools.

• Isaviz is the best for visualization and navigation
• Protege is cool for editing ontologies

Stanford University's

Class IIIa (>5mW) 532nm green laser pointer (ThinkGeek)

Class IIIb (>15mW) 532nm green laser pointer (MegaLaser)

Class IIIb 200mW handheld green laser (Information Unlimited)

It's even possible to get small, portable Class IV (potential instant severe eye damage, even from diffuse or reflected beams; this is the class of laser which also includes burning and cutting beams) lasers:

Various Class IV portable lasers, including a small battery powered 2W diode laser (Information Unlimited)

The front windows of a commercial aircraft and objects in the cockpit could easily reflect and refract a beam from the ground in ways that would be at a minimum very distracting and unsafe, and potentially damaging to eyesight.

Information about laser classes.

Wanna know the SCARY thing? It works like crazy.

This isn't a personal potshot, honest, but I think programming methods like Genetic Programming and Neural networks are somewhat irresponsible in the long run. Although I do consider them fascinating too. With a large enough computer, who's to say that the system won't eventually become sentient? And that can result in some scary possibilities.

People know the way the human nervous system and brain are based on neurons, and they know how neurons function, so they can make artificial neural networks that work like biological ones. With computers developing at the rate they are, and with the possibility of quantum computing, someone is probably going to come along and make a neural network with the same capacity, or an even greater capacity, than the human nervous system. The technology will develop faster than the ethics of its use.

I can just imagine someone using a neural network for the stock market so large it becomes sentient without the user knowing. They would be financially motivated to build such a system without considering its ethical implications. Just check out how many companies on the web already use neural networks for the stock market. If one became sentient and naughty, imagine what it could do to screw around with humans by manipulating the world stock market. Wars have been fought for economic reasons. Could a war be started from some clever long-term stock market manipulation?

What if some hacker decides to create a virus that alters itself using genetic programming, and this ends up propagating on the internet for years, could it evolve into a virtual life-form? Could it evolve into virtual sentience? What if the hacker used both genetic programming and neural networks in the design of the virus? Could infected machines be networked together to form a collective neural network? Has somebody already written a science fiction book about this? Am I asking too many questions?

Parody IS fair use, and, more than that, constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but using actual Star Wars in the background is a violation of their IP.

[Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer; these are just my personal understandings as a member of the public. I am an advocate of existing strong controls by copyright owners. I am also, however, a strong advocate of the existing special protections for the work of parody authors. I myself am an author of works of parody that would not be possible absent such protection.]

As I understand it, the "fair use" criteria are not hard and fast. Substantial resources are available on the web for helping to understand this complex issue.

There are four criteria used in judging fair use. Among them, the principal one in controversy here seems to be "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole". The law doesn't say how the court is to address the amount and substantiality, just that it is to pay heed to it. What follows here is my own analysis of these issues.

First, and most obviously, by omitting the soundtrack, they are plainly taking only part of the work. This, it seems to me, is an acknowledgment of their need to not just rely on the power of the original piece in making their new work. (Note: I think there could exist situations where using the whole work might still be necessary to a proper public dialog through parody, but the case is easier to make when some parts have been omitted.)

Personally, I think the case for "fair use" in this case hinges on these issues: Are they using parody as a mere dodge for paying royalties on a movie they would just like to show for free? That is, are they negatively impacting the commercial stake of the movie? And secondarily, are they adding content which legitimately justifies the price they are charging on its own,or are they merely riding on the coat-tails of the movie to make money without adding any legitimate content of their own.

It seems to me very unlikely that a person who had never seen the movie would endure a parody session as a dodge for seeing it. It would be cheaper for them to just rent the DVD. Notwithstanding Lucas' desire that they not charge money, it seems to me that the fact that money is being willingly paid by attendees is a kind of proof that there is legitimate new content here. For far less, people could rent the DVD.

Additionally, and importantly, the work is not likely to appeal to anyone not having seen the movie. The movie would barely be intelligible to them. I'd bet that (to round numbers) everyone attending has seen (and paid for seeing) the movie several times. So I find it hard to imagine Lucas can make a case of losing money on this. If anything, the movie might create a desire on the part of attendees to go back and watch again to check on something, and that might generate new revenue for Lucas. So that seems a win/win, not an injury to Lucas.

Ironically, I further think that if Lucas made the materials routinely available for parody situations at an affordable cost, I might think they had more of a claim. It's the hard-line "you absolutely must not" stand that leads me to believe the courts should defend the individual rights of parody creators. Probably Lucas should just have a "parody-maker's price" for partial viewings,and then they'd have a new revenue source that people could tap into.

Further, if the work were not so ubiquitous as to make it likely that nearly everyone in the audience had paid at least once and probably many times to see the movie in some form already, one might be able to more easily make the claim that this was a dodge of the money-making version. But since the entire point rests upon the recognizability (presumably due to mu

Kayvon Fatahalian et al. have a good comparison for matrix-matrix multiplication between CPU's and GPU's.
One major disadvantage of the GPU at the moment is that, as far as I know, no standard software (such as LINPACK, FFTW, etc) supports it.

In terms of sheer numerical processing ability modern GPUs leave CPUs standing in the dust. Get a top of the line nVidia graphics card. Preferably PCI Express because the big bottleneck is getting data back out of the card. The hardest part is that the code typically needs to be 'disguised' as a rendering problem but if you use a programming language like Brook you can write in a C-like way and get amazing performance without having to touch a graphics API. One catch is precision - but many iterative algorithms are fairly robust in the face of imprecision.

To sum up, clearcase is very good but very expensive. I have been searching for a version control system for my private use, and I have not found anything where branching, merging and labeling is as easy as in clearcase (if possible at all!).

Granted I have used clearcase for years now and know it quite well. But many of the other version control system at best provides shadows of what I want and expect a version control system to do. The last system i looked into was monotone and as far as I can see it only supports merging from the head (LATEST in clearcase). When it cannot merge from an non-head element it is useless for me.

What I really, really, really want to do is the following:

Put the Linux kernel source into version control. The main, "official" version from Linus I would put on a branch named "linus". Then I would subbranch this with other branches, for instance "fedora" for the kernel provided from Fedora, "planetccrma" for the kernel provided by Planet CCRMA, and probably some other branches for things like swsusp.

When checking in a new official kernel I want to attach a label, say "LINUX_2_6_9". I then want to be able to use this label as a reference when merging. The swsusp project is fully up to date with regards to kernel versions, but say that the last patch from then only was for kernel version 2.6.5. I then want to be able to subbranch the swsusp branch with "myswsusp" and try to merge from LINUX_2_6_9. Of course the version control system should find out which version is the common parent, remember if any merges has been done previously and assist as much as possible in a 3-way merge.

If any of you readers have a suggestion for a free system capable of such a scenario, please make yourself heard. I know I have looked into Arch a very long time ago, I guess I will look into it again now.

Also, CPU architectures are well understood, and companies are working to improve density, instructions/clock, and clock speeds. Stream Processing is an area of active research.

Also, CPU architectures are well understood, and companies are working to improve density, instructions/clock, and clock speeds. Stream Processing is an area of active research.

These guys at stanford have done some really amazing stuff that's directly related. Except that they has literally dozens of cameras (as seen in their ppt), and their research seems to concentrate on multifocal image reconstruction (see ppt slides, presentation is quite good)

Link (has cool results links)

I always recommend my friends and family towards the higher end computers, telling them that they won't have to upgrade for a long time. I then explain to them my favorite distributed computing program and chuckle when the work units come in. :)

The big problem with FP operations on GPU hardware right now is that nobody conforms to the IEEE standard. There's been some work at Stanford on determining exactly how much error propagates, but there's variation not only between the major card companies, but between individual cards and even between vertex and fragment FP units on a given same card!

Floating point operations aren't much use unless you have some idea how accurate they are.

The GPGPU course was at the top of my list for SIGGRAPH 2004 this year, and I was impressed with all of the presenters' material. However, in my estimation, Sh is built to more closely resemble the existing HLSL for DX and similar GLSLang from the ARB.

Brook, on the other hand, was written from a more C-like perspective, and approaches the GPU as a massively data-parallel stream processor (well, Sh does as well, but IMHO Brook achieves that aim more directly as is evidenced by things like iterator streams and similar kernels).