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Too bad PostgreSQL is a PITA to install on Win32.

Wake up. This is 2005, not 1999. Postgresql-on-Cygwin era is over man. Read this. PostgreSQL is easiest to install, easier than MySQL or Oracle!

Installation\maintenance: MySQL > PostgreSQL; MySQL is easier to set up

Well yes, for the scientific community it's common knowledge (at least IMHO) that these papers are HARD to prove wrong, most are assumed true, but then again, what I learned most about image processing was in these papers. They do contain very valuable information, and a lot of these are works based upon previous works. (This is how science is done right now).

Even when some of these papers could be wrong in their conclusions, or maybe one or two algorithm flaws, but it was papers like these (image processing, etc) that contributed to technology used today, like MPEG4 video.

My point is, unlike these which are done with scientific methodology, in *medical* "research papers" there's oh so much money at stake. I'm sure the article could have said "most medicine research papers are wrong", and I would have believed that.

But science is much more than medicine, and as a scientist, I find it an insult to stain the name of Science because of commercial vias in medical research.

Curiously, I googled for "bias in medical research" (with quotes) and here's the top result, of 426 search results:
Bias in Medical Research by Maria Spicer.

In contrast, googling for "bias in image processing research" (with quotes) yielded no results.

Of course, google is only a very statistical method for finding out whether something exists or not, but I think you get my point.

TRAUMA is very interesting topic.
I would encourage you to get educated about
projects like mk-ultra, monarch, sar (satanic ritual abuse).

http://educate-yourself.org/mc/
http://www.trance-formation.com/aboutcathy.htm
http://www.savethemales.ca/000683.html
http://www.suite101.com/articles.cfm/ritual_abuse

This may be the most important subject to read about today...

So, I have to remember some freakin' obscure chess move to save my player? I think BluRay is Corbamite.

Apparently EA didn't think it was such a huge hit. A PS2 version was planned, but cancelled.

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/computer_game_ companies/74668

Some choice quotes from the article: "source at EA says 'we did expect something which would be suitable for children to play'"

"...the head honchos at EA. After this bomb they cancelled the PS2 versions quickly, citing spiralling development costs, poor PC sales and the need to return money to investors..."

As for whether it was original...well, it certainly wasn't a sequel to another game. And this may be a matter of opinion and where you draw the line, but I count as original taking something familiar and giving it a different twist.

"West Side Story" lifted its plot from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet". Did that make it unoriginal? Stale? A cheap knock-off?

Was "My Fair Lady" a tired re-hash of "Pygmalion"?

Was Shakespeare's "Julius Ceasar" unoriginal because it lifted its plot from history?

Was "The Matrix" unoriginal because it borrowed so liberally from every philosophy, religion and myth under the sun?

I think what makes originality is not so much what you borrow from as what you do with it. That which is new is merely that which is old, rearranged in a novel way.

(i.e. A report for work)

Here's another thing that bothers me about common usage. ;-) (Sorry to pick on you.)

The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."

Repeat after me:
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."

The abbreviation to use if you mean "for example" is "e.g.". The abbreviation "i.e." stands for (the Latin of) "that is."

I.e., "i.e." is used when you are rephrasing, clarifying, etc. what was already said. The sentence "i.e. A report for work", if taken literally, means that the only documents that matter to you are reports for work.

For more information, see, e.g., http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/8707/52862, http://www.planetoid.org/grammar_for_geeks/ie_vs_e g.html, or http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f /ievseg.htm. (Note the use of "e.g." for "for example.")

(Sorry, I go on this rant periodically. Don't take it personally.)

To be fair, the short story they actually stole the plot of the movie from, "With Folded Hands" was actually pretty good (not written by Asimov, of course.) Of course, that was actually a grim, cautionary tale about the nanny-state rather than an action adventure story.

Found his page about the language too. Its from 2001 though so it may have changed a lot. The language described there seems to be heavily based on Finnish indeed.

Don't ask me why, I barely could bring myself to answering this one, OK?

Next time you start to post something, think back to that feeling and really focus on it... and then maybe you'll stop typing.

here and here and here.

All of these talk about NPP (net production). On the NASA image, it the relative picture is misleading since there is not that much NPP in the tundra or deserts!

Anyway, the 50% is not made up. 50% of all land plant growth equievelence seems close to being accurate. The oceans are quite baren now (and the volume of the Pacific is equal to the volume of the Moon). Now that China is getting fat, we can only see the NPP skyrocket (meat calorie production requires about 9x plant calorie input).

As someone said, "People are not pigs. People will eat anything".

I especially disagree with their position on drug patents which (given how much of the actual research is paid for with tax dollars) is down right hypocritical.

-- MarkusQ

The solution in that case was to take their money before they ever got it.

Actually, the federal withholding tax came about because of World War II. "By early 1943, in the middle of a world war, most Americans realized the treasury needed money quickly and agreed that current collection at the source would provide the needed revenue." For more information, see this interesting article.

As a result of the withholding tax, we lost "the tax year at the end of time." Luckily, we'll never get there.

Some links (click the 1's). Some are for dylexics but still relevent for all since pretty much all of us are capable of visual thought...:

I tried some of the Lebanese stuff once. It'll definitely put some hair on your ass!

The table service was nice, but in general, I didn't care for the coffee. The spices they put in it wasn't to my taste, but you definitely knew you were drinking coffee. It's worth trying, if only for exploration's sake.

Miscellaneous links:

• Arabic Coffee in General
  A Recipe
  How everyone does it

Hey, If we're gonna be wired, we might as well do it right

Ten years ago when you heard Howard Stern you knew you were close to NY City. Now you just know you're near some city (or maybe a medium sized town).

I'll agree NY radio has quantity, but not variety. It's the Wal*Mart quantity/variety formula...plenty of stuff so long as it's stuff that Wal*Mart wants to sell you. NY has plenty of radio so long as you like what Infinity/Clearchannel is pushing that day.

Richard Neer wrote a great book about the rise and fall of FM radio in NY. His book covers just a part of the story of the decline of variety in NY radio, and only marginally about the FCC rules changes over the years.

I will agree that I'm better off in NY than most other markets. WFUV-FM (90.7) is my refuge from programmed schlock. However, radio in general in NY has gone downhill in variety and quality in the past twenty years, and that is sad.

Question is, Mr. AC, are you involved in open source programming? Because if not, then you're not the "artist" that Bruce refers to himself as. Doesn't make you any worse, but you're not an artist.

When you follow his 'programming is art' argument you drag every coder into the pretentious arthouse bullshit. The guy starving in the gutter for his 'art' is good, the graphic artist who makes money designing magazine ads is a 'sellout'.

Stop projecting. Get a grip, and move on. Like you say, at least you have your job...

I'd agree with Kline on one hand that Sturgeon's Law is being enforced - 90 percent of everything is crap.

However, the notion that publishers are filtering with my best interests in mind is also part of that 90 percent.Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

And beyond that even, I'd have to say that one man's treasure is another man's garbage.

No not carbon, the half-life is too short.

Here are two articles on how dinosaur finds ages are determined, the first in general, the second on radiometric dating specifically.

Dating Fossils

Radiometric Dating

No not carbon, the half-life is too short.

Here are two articles on how dinosaur finds ages are determined, the first in general, the second on radiometric dating specifically.

Dating Fossils

Radiometric Dating

Working at a college with roughly the same bandwidth, I can tell you from experience that when our traffic went unchecked Housing's draw destroyed the network. Culprits? P2P.

Let's not even get into the legality of trading music. Personally, I could care less. However, when it every student's dowloads are glogging 40-70Mbps of downloads ALL DAY LONG, IT IS A PROBLEM! Our email servers would not recieve off campus email. We couldn't sync off-site copies of our DNS. We couldn't access off-site Web sites, much less download updates and drivers for our systems or do any online journal research.

Ever since we blocked and/or limited P2P traffic, life (network wise) on campus has been a lot nicer. If you want to do P2P... hook up your modem, pay for an account with an ISP that doesn't limit downloads and have at it... that way only you have to deal with the slow speeds, not everyone else.

P2P use on campus is a classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons.

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. Now we have artificial hearts (pop-up warning), artificial lungs, and artificial kidneys. (I mean that we as a society have them available to us as a technology, not that we as individuals actually have those things inside us, though some of us no doubt do.)

How long before we also have artificial skin to hold our artificial hair? How long before we decide what to put in our artifcial stomachs with our artificial brains?

The human race is about to step aside to make room for the cybernetically enhanced. May God have mercy on our souls. My one request is that none of my organs run anything made by Microsoft. See you in the future.

except there is no such thing as an open source Umm Kalthoum

Interesting... Click this Link to see it.

(War over religion) You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend. - Richard Jeni

Or, in the case of the Reign of Terror and/or sundry ``Communist'' regimes, killing each other for having an ``imaginary friend.''

imagine that... or that... or that...

These sound a lot like the PowerPC boards that have been used to keep the Amiga alive (well, almost) after the 680x0 chips became old news.

There's a load of links at http://www.suite101.com/linkcat egory.cfm/amiga/4027 if any one's interested.

Basically, the system libraries are all replaced with versions that use the PowerPC for anything remotely complicated, while any older programs just go on using the original processor.

-

When a star collapses the matter begins to implode upon a point, eventually crossing the point where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a black hole is formed. The edge of this black hole is what we call the event horizon - anything passing within the event horizon cannot ever escape. The simple solution is described by the Schwartzchild metric.

The matter however is still collapsing to a point at the centre of the black hole. According to general relativity there is nothing to stop this collapse and we end up with a point of infinite density and zero volume - a singularity.

However when you come to rotating black holes (described by the Kerr metric) there are differences. The angular momentum of a collapsing star is conserved, and this causes the black hole's event horizon to bulge out along the equitorial plane, much like the Earth has a slight bulge around its equator. Indeed, the central singularity itself forms a torus rather than a point when the black hole is rotating.

As angular momentum is increased this bulge gets bigger and the polar size of the event horizon shrinks, until eventually you are left without an event horizon at all, but just a torus-shaped singularity, which is said to be "naked".

Of course, whether a naked singularity can ever exist is an open question. There is something called the "Cosmic Censorship Principle" which states that the laws of physics will never allow a naked singularity to form, but the final answer is "we don't know".

Also of interest is that since the naked singularity would be in the shape of a torus you could theoretically pass through the centre of the torus and find yourself somewhere completely different, possibly even in another universe!

For a fairly technical intro to black holes and singularities, see this article at suite101.

When a star collapses the matter begins to implode upon a point, eventually crossing the point where the escape velocity becomes greater than the speed of light and a black hole is formed. The edge of this black hole is what we call the event horizon - anything passing within the event horizon cannot ever escape. The simple solution is described by the Schwartzchild metric.

The matter however is still collapsing to a point at the centre of the black hole. According to general relativity there is nothing to stop this collapse and we end up with a point of infinite density and zero volume - a singularity.

However when you come to rotating black holes (described by the Kerr metric) there are differences. The angular momentum of a collapsing star is conserved, and this causes the black hole's event horizon to bulge out along the equitorial plane, much like the Earth has a slight bulge around its equator. Indeed, the central singularity itself forms a torus rather than a point when the black hole is rotating.

As angular momentum is increased this bulge gets bigger and the polar size of the event horizon shrinks, until eventually you are left without an event horizon at all, but just a torus-shaped singularity, which is said to be "naked".

Of course, whether a naked singularity can ever exist is an open question. There is something called the "Cosmic Censorship Principle" which states that the laws of physics will never allow a naked singularity to form, but the final answer is "we don't know".

Also of interest is that since the naked singularity would be in the shape of a torus you could theoretically pass through the centre of the torus and find yourself somewhere completely different, possibly even in another universe!

For a fairly technical intro to black holes and singularities, see this article at suite101.

At these sites:

• GameBytes
• Suite 101

A pity I missed this one, it's always nice to know what companies are planning to do, and a large percentage of game development goes on in Europe.

If you're interested...

---

Nancy Kress' "Beggars in Spain" (handy, this Google thing) deals with "genetically-bred humans vs. natural humans " and how changing a gene involves other changes in genes and finally in society.
__

Squeak has a lot going for it, but familiarity for Windows users is not on the list. Probably a better choice would be Dolphin Smalltalk; it "feels like Windows" (a good thing in this case), it's a real Smalltalk, it comes with good tutorial documentation, and there's a free (as in beer) version available.

Good news: Smalltalk was designed (back in the 1970s, assuming computers as powerful as we have today!) to be a programming language for kids. Bad news: Really smart kids took to it like fish to water, but most really struggled.

Those of us who cut our teeth on punch cards and Teletypes were used to command line (or worse) interfaces and text programs. Today's kids aren't; even typing Smalltalk programs may bore them.

Consider Stagecast Creator or Toon Talk as a couple of purely visual development environments. They're more suited towards development of games and simulations, but that's a plus if the goal is to get your children excited about programming (probably the right target at first).

Here are a couple of stories about teaching kids to program: This one from Kids Domain has a lot of links to resources, while this one from Suite101.com is an interview (with fewer but entirely distinct links).

You can check out an excellent article (and references for further reading) by Mike Huben on the subject at Suite101, titled Globalism, Neoliberalism, and Corporatism.

Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from

You can check out an excellent article (and references for further reading) by Mike Huben on the subject at Suite101, titled Globalism, Neoliberalism, and Corporatism.

Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from