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Folding@Home is a great cause. We all know this. Finding a cure for a terrible disease is very noble.

But to really make it that much better you could sign up using my name and team number and help me crush the competition and fold the most protiens. Just install Folding@Home and use Screen Name: PRIME1 & Team#: 2630

If you are already using it from Google and just running the default setting make the change today. You will feel better knowing you helped out a good cause.

You can check my team stats here as you can see I need some help to get ahead. I thank you for your support.

Folding@Home is a great cause. We all know this. Finding a cure for a terrible disease is very noble.

But to really make it that much better you could sign up using my name and team number and help me crush the competition and fold the most protiens. Just install Folding@Home and use Screen Name: PRIME1 & Team#: 2630

If you are already using it from Google and just running the default setting make the change today. You will feel better knowing you helped out a good cause.

You can check my team stats here as you can see I need some help to get ahead. I thank you for your support.

Or am I just missing the sarcasm?

Protien folding is how protiens are self assembled. When this assembly process goes wrong it leads to diseases like Alzheimer's. While your DNA does provide the blue print for proteins in your body the study of protein folding is not the modification of DNA.

Folding@Home seeks to understand the process of protein folding and look for a cure in places where proteins fold incorrectly.

Click Here For More Info

Not cooler, but better. More important ones, like folding, for instance. A very (VERY) small chance of finding intelligent life out there isn't quite worth it, I don't think.

Proteins are biological polymers that are produced in living cells; they are composed of amino acids whose sequence is translated from DNA. The reason why the genome is of such great interest is that proteins provide the "molecular machinery" of the cell, to put things crudely; the genome provides a blueprint on how to assemble proteins, and the diversity of proteins gives rise to much of the cellular functionality essential for life.

Determining the 3D structure of proteins is a very hard but essential part of learning how they work. Unfortunately, knowing the sequence of a protein (which you can derive from DNA) only gives hints about the 3D structure. There are a number of large computational projects such as Folding@Home and Blue Gene that are devoted to predicting protein folding from a 1D sequence of amino acids to a 3D structure.

X-ray crystallography is the traditional way of determining the structure of proteins; you basically analyze the diffraction pattern of X-rays from a crystal of the protein of interest.

Now to your question: a multispan transmembrane protein is a protein that typically sits in the cell membrane that encloses the cell (alternatively, there are other internal membranes as well). Most of these proteins pass through the membrane several times, back and forth. These proteins are very important because they are involved in cell signalling and transport of substances into and out of the cell; ion channels are a prime example of transmembrane proteins. But transmembrane proteins are also notoriously difficult to study and crystallize because they do not solubilize without detergents, and are challenging to reconstitute in their native form.

If you look in the Protein Data Bank, there are lots of proteins that have been crystallized; but only a very small portion of them are transmembrane. This year's Nobel prize in part recognizes advances in studying the structure and function of these important proteins.

Read more about electroosomtic pumping here.

The pdfs are a bit dense, but still very interesting.

This whole debate strikes me as quite similar to the old Avoirdupois vs. Troy measurement debate. The ratios are even comparable: The Troy ounce is about 1.1 Avoirdupolis ounces. The same potential for consumer confusion also exists: if someone was used to dealing with Troy ounces, and purchased gold from someone who chose to use Avoirdupolis ounces, it would appear that they were getting far more for their money than they actually were.

This situation was finally resolved by making it clear in what context each measurement would be used. Gold is measured in Troy ounces; most other things are measured in Avoirdupolis ounces. Some threshhold cases might cause confusion (say, consumers buying a gold watch...), but the default case is to assume Avoirdupolis when units aren't measured, except when dealing with gold directly.

I think we could apply this to the Kilobit problem. Clearly, the general public doesn't need to know about the 2^10 notation. On the other hand, that notation is far too convenient for computer people to abandon it (or to start trying to use politically correct units). So I support the above poster's suggestion of "Long" and "Short" kilobytes (as proposed by Donald Knuth, see http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/news99.htm l). Every day users will probably use short kilobytes without specifying 'short'; computer designers will probably use long kilobytes without specifying 'long'; and the threshhold cases can specify which are being used. (While new hard drives may not need to say "160 short gigabytes" prominently on the front, they could include that information in the footnotes.

Knuth retired from his position at Stanford as part of a program of eliminating all commitments that might keep him from working on the remaining volumes of The Art of Computer Programming. He certainly hasn't stopped work. In fact, he's already circulating drafts of several sections of Volume 4, his first new work (other than revision of volumes 1-3) on TAOCP in many years. Progress report here.

Or of course, someone could also use a replacement attack as a previous developer's article discussed.

Even if you've had good experience with a modulator (let's here it), the issue is still naked: why must I, Joe Honest Consumer, purchase previously uncessary equipment in order to view (buy a new TV) or to exercise my free use rights (buy a modulator and sidestep Macrovision)?

Last time I checked, Knuth was still writing books. When did he die? Atleast as of August 29th, 2003 he appears to be still kicking Donald Knuth News

"It seems that, according to scientific philosophy today (and I say this as an observer, not a scientist), you still can't really believe this is _the_ truth about something. You have to keep thinking, "it might _not_ be true"."

I think basically that's right, it's just a matter of what theories we decide to keep testing to the limit to try to find any inconsistencies. For instance, when a new method of atomic mass spectroscopy is invented no one says 'hey I bet we could use this to test Dalton's theory of atoms down to the fraction of an AMU!', even though it could very well be used to do that. The reason we don't is because no one expects to find anything that would invalidate the atomic theory of elements. We know, however, that there must be something "beyond" Einstein's relativity in the same way that the orbit of mercury reveals a breakdown of Newtonian Physics. This experiment with Cassini was in a way looking for Einstein's 'Mercury problem'. The fact that it has not found any inconsistency with GR (along with countless other experiments done in the past century) is a testament to, not only our lack of tools to measure with extreme enough precision the physical phenomena effected by GR but also to the greatness of the theory of General Relativity itself. We will continue to test Einstein though, in December Gravity Probe B will be launched, using ultrahigh precision quartz sphere gyroscopes, it will be able to measure certain effects of GR to the parts per million range. Science is a search for ever greater truth.

"It seems that, according to scientific philosophy today (and I say this as an observer, not a scientist), you still can't really believe this is _the_ truth about something. You have to keep thinking, "it might _not_ be true"."

I think basically that's right, it's just a matter of what theories we decide to keep testing to the limit to try to find any inconsistencies. For instance, when a new method of atomic mass spectroscopy is invented no one says 'hey I bet we could use this to test Dalton's theory of atoms down to the fraction of an AMU!', even though it could very well be used to do that. The reason we don't is because no one expects to find anything that would invalidate the atomic theory of elements. We know, however, that there must be something "beyond" Einstein's relativity in the same way that the orbit of mercury reveals a breakdown of Newtonian Physics. This experiment with Cassini was in a way looking for Einstein's 'Mercury problem'. The fact that it has not found any inconsistency with GR (along with countless other experiments done in the past century) is a testament to, not only our lack of tools to measure with extreme enough precision the physical phenomena effected by GR but also to the greatness of the theory of General Relativity itself. We will continue to test Einstein though, in December Gravity Probe B will be launched, using ultrahigh precision quartz sphere gyroscopes, it will be able to measure certain effects of GR to the parts per million range. Science is a search for ever greater truth.

Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.

At least you called it a big load of crap without doing ANY research to the contrary.
For instance, at Stanford University, freshman are compelled to live on campus.

You obviously don't HAVE to live on campus, but if you still have to pay and have a room (and a meal plan). IIRC from my applying days, several "upper-tier" universities have a similar policy

In other words, nice try but no cigar.

You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google. I switched to Google exclusively when it was still in beta.

eh sonny? What's that?

I was on here when Yahoo was located at http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ (which is now a 404). Akebono's main page aknowledges that this was Yahoo's former home.

Let me get my cane...

You don't remember Alta Vista, Yahoo, or the countless others before Google. I switched to Google exclusively when it was still in beta.

eh sonny? What's that?

I was on here when Yahoo was located at http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo/ (which is now a 404). Akebono's main page aknowledges that this was Yahoo's former home.

Let me get my cane...

Here is how to set up high end linux audio. Read the site. They prefer linux because they can add low-latency patches.

Yup. This is why introducing uncertainty in order to conceal what is being shared should be part of the basic protocol.

...books are always out-of-date and tend to be dumbed down...

Only if you buy the dumb, out-of-date ones. The trick is to choose books whose information value does not decrease over time.

Hehe :) Despite his manner he's right: certainly other particle physics experiments have been using distributed computing to analyse their data, not using a Grid (BaBar for example, eh Grid Geek? ;)). Like the LHC, the initial aim is data distribution rather than accessing processing resources...

It should be noted that there has never been a flaw discovered with SSL (well besides just long running brute force computation for the host private key, and long running brute force computation for the negotiated Diffie-Hellman key using vulnerabilities in the encryption layer). Just flaws with certain implementations of SSL. The most recent one (I believe) being the timing attack against SSL implementations that short-circuitted the key checking function when the first incorrect bit was encountered, allowing a malicious host to keep firing off fake keys and measuring response time to determine which bits were off.

SQL injection is a major issue with lots of websites (although for some I've visited its been kind of a feature ;-) ). I personally would suggest just setting up proper MVC seperation. Through chrooted non-superuser jails, creation of a DMZ, only piping information back and forth from your DMZ to your intranet through a system with only port forwarders in place for the services you need and nothing else, and try using RPC or CORBA instead of SQL from your webservers. Also, a good suggestion for User/Pass verification over an insecure network is to use SRP. Just some tips. Have fun.

Stanford has Unix cluster with 105 machines in one room, plus a few smaller sized clusters. I'm sure there's plenty of documentation if you search for "Sweet Hall".

list of machines

"Since when is taking a photograph or replica of a statue the same as using a crane to hoist it away?"

I got this in my inbox yesterday:

Voter Verification Newsletter - Vol 1, Number 11

David L. Dill (elections@chicory.stanford.edu) September 21, 2003 http://www.verifiedvoting.org

For previous newsletters, see http://www.verifiedvoting.org/news.asp

It's been over three weeks since my last newsletter! Lots of things have been happening, but I haven't had time to write about them. Here are a few of them.

IEEE VOTING SYSTEM STANDARD
---

A seemingly obscure standards subcommittee of IEEE may determine whether we have trustworthy voting systems or not. And things are not going well.

IEEE is the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers." It is a highly respected organization with a huge number of electrical engineers, many of whom have substantial expertise in computer-related topics. It is reasonable to expect that IEEE involvement in voting technology would be a good thing.

There is an IEEE standards committee (called P1583) that is writing standards for voting systems, including security standards for DREs. (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/1583/) Although this committee may seem obscure, this standard may very well be the basis for future Federal regulation of voting equipment.

Recently, several voter-verifiable-audit-trail advocates with strong technology credentials have joined the P1583 committee in an effort to ensure the standard requires an adequate level of security. I am one of them.

Unfortunately, many of the current members on the committee are working very hard to prevent us from contributing to the standard. As we have gotten more involved, the tactics have become more extreme. The standard is now being rushed to a vote by the Standards Association, in an apparent attempt to freeze it before our most important suggestions can be incorporated. Many of the suggestions we HAVE made are dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons, and rules seem to be made up on the fly to exclude us from the standards-writing process.

So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has taken an interest in e-voting and in the behavior of the P1583 committee as well. They issued a press release on Friday (see http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20030919_eff_ pr.php), along with an action alert for IEEE members (http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/IEEE/). You can send a letter expressing your views, too (it will be especially effective if you are an IEEE member).

There will be more updates on this topic, no doubt.

Today I got this follow-up & correction:

There is a correction to the Voter Verification Newsletter emailed last night. I was writing about the IEEE P1583 voting equipment standards committee. Here is what I said:

So far as I can see, the committee is controlled by voting companies -- the chair of the committee works for ES&S, and even the IEEE standards people on the committee, including the president of the Standards Association, voted with them as a block in a teleconference earlier this week.

In fact, the president was not in the teleconference and, so far as I know, is not a member of the committee. The individual in question, Don Heirman, is a CANDIDATE for president of the Standards Association in the IEEE election that is currently underway.

Sorry,
David Dill

Found it!

-B

haha fanboy, Apple was just a fruit when this mouse came out

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Archive/patent /Mouse.html

I'm giving up on debating global warming on Slashdot, it seems just about everyone is convinced its bunk. With the weather getting more and more extreme, could you at least understand why we are worried?

Well, I just wanted to make everyone aware of the new distributed project - www.climateprediction.net.
Whether you agree with the theory of human caused global warming or not, with this you can help getting the world scientific community more accurate climate models.

Unfortunately only a Windows client available at the moment, but a Linux one is in development. Personally I think this project and the
Folding at Home distributed project are much more deserving of peoples' clock cycles than Seti or distributed.net.

Cheers,
Lars

MEDIA KIT: Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist

For instance, I've heard that common every day american english conveys approximately 1.2 bits of information per word... meaning that the least redundant approximation of human speech would need that bit rate to represent it.

No, the entropy of English is ~1 bit per character, not ~1 bit per word.

Here's one reference

here

so whats wrong with loopback?

• Nobody is born knowing this stuff.
• You've forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
• If it's not obvious to them, it's not obvious.
• A computer is a means to an end. The person you're helping probably cares mostly about the end. This is reasonable.
• Their knowledge of the computer is grounded in what they can do and see -- when I do this, it does that. They need to develop a deeper understanding, of course, but this can only happen slowly, and not through abstract theory but through the real, concrete situations they encounter in their work.
• By the time they ask you for help, they've probably tried several different things. As a result, their computer might be in a strange state. That's not their fault.
• Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You've forgotten how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able to do for you.
• Knowledge lives in communities, not individuals. A computer user who's not part of a community of computer users is going to have a harder time of it than one who is.

Didn't Microsoft try to buy Intuit, only to be blocked for antitrust reasons?

Simple arithmetic is all that is necessary here. If I had $10 and you had $10 and you then gave me $1 I'd have $11 and you'd have $9 i.e. I got richer you got poorer. Whilst this doesn't take into account money supply, nor inflation, I'm sure you understand the fundamentals now, and are probably a more deft economist than Milton Friedman, so you can now go and ruin the economy of the european country of your choice.

Less speed
More Fans/Noise
Less attractive case
Larger/heavier case.

Really good idea. The canonical criticisms, as described by OS teachers I had (hint: one of them WAS Mendel...):

• Unnecessary - Unix FFS improved (a few years after LSFS came out) by adding clusters and cylendar clustars, reaching almost the same performance.
• CPU-intensive. Requires a background daemon to reclaim disk space (~10% of disk access was this daemon, IIRC). Being Slashdotters who hate even the CPU cycles Winmodems consume...
• Poor performance in common cases. LSFS is lightning-fast writing, comprable to other filesystems reading small files, and dog slow reading large files because of how they fragment. When the paper was written, writes and small reads (logs) were very important; lately, large reads (e.g. on-disk databases/swap, large datasets) have become more important.

That's "Nucular", bubba.

;-)

Festival doesn't quite cut it...because making new, custom voices for it is a laborous, time consuming process

You probably don't need a complete, general-purpose voice for home automation. Making a limited domain voice seems pretty straightforward.

But to your point about Festival - was there an easy system for making a general-purpose voice on the Amiga? There's a ton of detail in one of those files, extracted from typically pain-staking analysis. I think AT&T has a research system for analyzing hours of recorded speach and using a voice recognition engine to boot-strap the process, but I'm not aware of a system that makes Festival look bad.

BTW, the Festvox demo page has a US female voice.

er, why would you think that? intellectual property has only become stronger over the last 20, 100, 500 years.

government regulation of economic rights parallels economic growth. when agriculture became the dominant economic model, feudalism and land-rights became entrenched. when capitalism and the industrial revolution made their debut, property rights becamed enshrined by the state. now that we are heading into a "post-industrial" (don't blame me for that phrase), information-based economy, intellectual property rights will becomed entrenched.

let's face it: the opensource folks like us are the diggers and godwinists of the information revolution. we will impact the nature of property rights, but not abolish them.

doubt me? read up on the diggers and william godwin. sounds like the oss movement today, right?

But the uniformity of the syntax of lisp (actually VERY traditional, going back to 1958...) is one of its major advantages.

I agree that Lisp's syntax makes many things easy -- stuff that can't be done as elegantly in other languages -- but it's not that old. Google for "M-Expressions"; example links: here and here.

Free, or I'll do Without!

Honestly, I can live without most things. Sure, I listen to music, and I watch DVDs, and I play video games, but only while they're free. (I mooch from my friends) Were these friends to suddenly become unavailable, I would do without.

Same goes for web content. I enjoy slashdot, but I'd give it up in a second before I'd spend one red cent.

I've been running folding@home on a K6-233, and it takes about a week to do one work unit. Could be what you're looking for.

Yes, the rights of the artist are protected by default, but I don't see them being infriged in this case. This is fair use and hopefully the case will be thrown away from the court.

In some cases, the amount of material copied is so small (or "de minimis") that the court permits it without even conducting a fair use analysis. For example, in the motion picture Seven, several copyrighted photographs appeared in the film, prompting the copyright owner of the photographs to sue the producer of the movie. The court held that the photos "appear fleetingly and are obscured, severely out of focus, and virtually unidentifiable." The court excused the use of the photographs as "de minimis" and a fair use analysis was not required. ( Sandoval v. New Line Cinema Corp., 147 F.3d 215 (2d Cir. 1998).)

See Stanford Copyright & Fair Use site for more details

In this GTA case the graffiti does not form a significant portion of the game and most people will not notice them.

No Linux version for "months." How about folding at home for those of you disappointed masses.

Owens @ UC Davis

Akeley and Hanrahan @ Stanford

amazing what google can pull up. here's a website about Engelbart's demo of the first mouse

Funny comparison, TAOCP/SICP to Old/New Testament... I suppose Don Knuth doesn't transform you into stone if you can't solve your HM50-rated exercise; neither will SICP raise the dead, although good software design can certainly prevent the loss of many an innocent life...
The allusion to the Bible reminds me that here is a link to the thoughts of Knuth on religion (he is a committed Christian), if you are interested.

Jochen

P.S. (warning, joke!):
Q: How does a blind programmer tell whether his colleague is a BASIC loser or a Scheme poet when he uses his terminal?
A: The SHIFT+8/9 keys are worn out... :-)

That red Jeep has nothing to do with the Grand Challenge. That's Navlab 11, the Robotics Institute's latest test vehicle. the Robotics Institute, headed by Charles Thorpe, took a look at the Grand Challenge and decided to pass. He told me "If we entered, we'd have to win", and since he's mostly Government-funded, he'd need another source of funding, which he didn't have. Whittaker, who heads a related but separate operation, the Field Robotics Center, decided to do it on his own.

Whittaker issues a constant stream of trival press releases, like Team Equipped with Laptops and Office Equipment. We have considerable respect for the Robotics Institute at CMU, but this is becoming embarassing.

We take Team Caltech seriously, but not Whittaker's operation.

We will give a presentation on September 24, in EE380 at Stanford, on how we're doing it, and will show our vehicle, which isn't vaporware.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

For those that want to read about the issue deeply, I highly recommend Lawrence Lessig's book: The Future of Ideas: The fate of the commons in a connected world.

A short answer to your request would be to get Learn to Program with Java by John Smiley to teach the Java language and program construction in the easiest manner ever written. The method taught is very accessible for those who've never written a line of code. Have your students follow the instructions in Don't Fear The OOP! for fun and insight. Then, make the brilliant Teach Yourself Object Oriented Programming in 21 Days by Anthony Sintes the real goal of your course. The first 7 days covers OOP as you won't find in other books, then the following 7 days covers how to design/structure/test applications in OOP. The last 7 days is a fun project building an application using the OOP principles already taught. These two books should cover what your students need. If by chance you run out of time and they don't finish the OOP book, you should still be able to get them through the first 7 days of the material and still finish the Smiley book (which is necessary for the fundamentals). Your students can then continue to finish the Sintes book if they find Java/OOP is something they wish to pursue further.

For students who require more instruction in programming fundamentals, you'll have to be more considerate. More consideration requires a longer answer to your request. You know that OOP is the most important aspect of learning this discipline, but you're stuck with a chicken and egg situation. How can one learn how to build solutions (algorithms/applications) to problems without knowing how to express those ideas first in a language's syntax and semantics? As you've said, your students are assumed to have no programming experience. Well, as a child, before you learned how to speak your mind, you first had to learn HOW to say things.

I would first recommend giving your students a crash course in syntax and semantics. Don't worry if they don't know what to DO with the syntax yet. They first need to become familiar with the alphabet and sentence structures of the language before they can learn how to express their ideas in that language. I'm going to diverge from the rest of the slashdot crowd here by recommending that you use a CBT (Computer Based Training) for this step. It's the quickest way to your goal (about 8-20 hours of computer time) and the interactivity will keep their attention even though the material is very dry (in contrast to the Smiley book). They can run the CBT over and over again until the message of language's rules sink in. This will be most effective with your guidance in filling in the missing information (CBT text is purposely kept terse in order to maximize retention and in order not to lose the user's attention). Use CBTs as homework, or in conjunction with other homework. There are various worthwhile CBTs out there, Smartforce/Smartcertify's or Netg's first module on Java should suffice. Or, Joe Grip's whole set of Java instruction (about 10 hours of computer time, though they claim 5).

If your students really are beginners, I'd even encourage getting a CBT on not just syntax, but on basic programming concepts (iteration, selection, sequence, algorithms...etc). Smartforce/Smartcertify has something on that called Programming Fundamentals or you can get a copy of COMPTONS PROGRAMMING MADE EASY (though you'll need to ignore some minor bugs, not that textb

I suppose it is probably too late to inject comments and have them moderated to the point of visibility as the madness has largely subsided... but here's to futile acts ;-) I was not really intending Storage to make a big splash right now, I wanted to keep it low-key, but I guess the damage is done so I might as well comment. I'm sorry that I didn't have time to put up a more technically-oriented exposition of Storage. *shrug*

• Slashdot has focused almost exclusively on the "database backing". Guys, this is an implementation detail. Its an important one, but I didn't start off this design thinking "lets write a database backed filesystem store". A set of design goals was established (largely mirrored in the features page). Storage is a lot more than just a database backed XML store. Please read the features page. The "searchable" stuff is nice, but equally important is providing persistent objects, uniform access (the same URI for a local storage node works globally assuming your computer has a publicly accessible IP address), an improved model for revision and "saving", the ability to localize filesystem resources, and due to a standard object format greater transparency of filesystem resources to the OS which will be useful in weakening the barrier between "apps" and "desktop" found in PCs (and not so much in, say, cell phones and pdas). This is also a key piece in an overall design of the desktop's interaction structure which I haven't had time to write up for the web.
• I'm not trying to make any claims to being the first or being highly innovative, but I am happy to make claims about improving the user experience. That said, contrary to what people are saying, to my knowledge other than the superficial layer of database backing, Storage's features do not have a "one to one" correspondence with any existing system, BFS and the only vaguely specified Windows Future Filesystem included. Most importantly these components do not seem to be a part of the same overall interaction design model that Storage is intended to support. Storage is just a stepping stone, albeit a pretty disruptive one.
• I've been quiet about this project, even inside GNOME. Storage as written today was primarily written by a team of Stanford students as their CS senior project. I've since been working with a few good GNOME developers including the person working on Medusa (Curtis) and the Epiphany maintainer (Marco). They were independently developing a metadata system for GNOME, which it looks like we may implement on top of Storage as a first major test of its capabilities. But nothing is certain right now. But the short story is that although storage is being developed by GNOME developers and I serve as usability project lead, its not an official GNOME module at this point. GNOME developers would need to corporately buy into both the Storage vision and the overall desktop design. This may never happen, and if it does, its going to be very slow in the coming.

Some technical notes... that site is sparse on technical information so I'll fill in some for the curious.

• The data store is backed by Postgresql. Postgresql rocks, though some of the features like instant notification of object changes and live queries do not fill well with existing SQL. We have ways to do all of this using Postgresql extensions, but sometimes its a little tricky and/or hackish.
• A lot of the proposed interface will rise and fall based on the quality of the NL processing. Storage is currently using some pretty cutting edge linguistics theories and tools... notably working within the basic LinGo framework. This includes using theories/systems like HPSG (Head-Phrase Structure Grammar), MRS (minimal recursion semantics), and being able to use a set of existing wide-coverage grammars such as the ERG (English Resource Gramm