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Still, it would be nice to have some major shakeup in physics... there really haven't been any in my lifetime.

How old are you?
Inflation as a solution to cosmic microwave anisotropy

Problems with General Relativity: Dark Matter?

Dark Energy. 90% of everything.

Pioneer anomaly.

Every year, in every field, we answer more and more questions. However, every answer raises many more questions. We are still exploring our ignorance, but we know more about it every day. What are you doing to help?

nVidia has been doing this for a while now. In fact, there are finally getting to be interesting implementations like GNU software radio on GPUs:

An Implementation of a FIR Filter on a GPU

I wrote a (unfortunatly, closed source) filesystem that was remarkably similar to this once. Generally these types of filesystems are used when you're constantly writing new data. You're going to be eating the space anyway, but you want the reliability of syncronous writes with the performance of asyncronous cached writes. Reading from these filesystems is incredibly slow in comparison.

The version I wrote took advantage of the client's bursty IO pattern and used the slow periods to offload the data to an ext2 filesystem on a seperate disk. Hopefully your system memory was large enough that the offload to the secondary filesystem happened without any disk reads. Once that was done, the older sections of log could be re-used.... But only once the disk filled up and wrapped back to the beginning, because you want to keep your writes (essentially... There's other timing tricks you can play to get more speed) sequential.

There's been lots of research done on this method of write structuring. Look for papers on the "TRAIL" project (also closed source), for example.

Dyson had made a set of points, one of which was:
"Point 3. If a society is very highly developed technologically, it must emit intense infrared radiation, not necessarily a planetary spectrum, but necessarily a large intensity of infrared radiation, whether or not this society wishes to communicate. Consequently, we should use infrared radiation, as a signpost indicating priority areas toward which we should direct searches by radio and other techniques."

There was some discussion which eventually led to the following exchange:

OLIVER: Why do you suggest civilizations must of necessity produce large amounts of infrared radiation? It seems to me that the infrared radiation that would be produced by even a very much farther advanced civilization than ours would be negligible compared to their primary star. For example, in California, which has a very high usage of electricity, the power generation at the present time is only 0.1 percent of the sunlight falling on the state.

DYSON: What I am saying is that the civilizations which are observable to us will have this character.

OLIVER: But you are suggesting, are you not, that the infrared emission will be an observable characteristic? I am suggesting it is far down in the stellar noise.

DYSON: No, I am saying that the generation of large amounts of infrared radiation is not necessarily an accompaniment of a high civilization at all. Only if it occurs is it something we can see.

MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.

DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.

The reason that Dyson didn't go along with this is because he still tended to view "advanced" civilizations as those operating on the basis of "biological" systems (remember this is 1971!) rather than engineered computational systems which can function at a much wider temperature range (in fact Likharev's "Rapid Single Flux Quantum Logic" (based on Josephson junctions) *have* to operate at temperatures much closer to those Minsky suggests). Thus AIs constructed of such devices would emit IR at a temperatures much lower than "primitive" civilizations (i.e. "wet" brain based) which function at the liquid water temperatures that Dyson tended to prefer.

The theories behind Matrioshka Brains are in large part based on Minsky's observation, which are in turn related to Dyson's perspective reagarding Dyson "spheres" (really shells). They are however updated to recognize the fact that computational architectures which can support intelligence (and therefore advanced civilizations) can operate over a much wider temperature range (both higher and lower) than liquid water can provide.

The complete proceedings from the conference can be purchased from Amazon for $3-7.

Since the dawn of the Automobile Revolution, automobile marques have been proactive in their approach to appeal to certain segments of society. By targeting these groups, automakers would find a much higher loyalty rate in an increasingly unloyal industry. Even today this tradition continues, with companies such as Toyota appealing to the youth market with its Scion brand, BMW and Mercedes appealing to the affluent market, Buick appealing to the understated senior market, and Subaru and Volvo appealing to the aging hippy market. One demographic spoken for by a large multinational automaker that often raises a bit of controversy, however, is the gay and lesbian market. It is within these confines that Honda finds its must staunch loyalists.

The connection stems much further than their not-so-subtle "H" logo. Since the inception of Honda by founder Kilimanjaro Honda in Tokyo, Japan in 1948, Honda has had a long line of successful industry firsts. Honda's first products imported to the United States were motorcycles capable of producing almost twice as much horsepower as their American brethren. Sold out of a small shop in San Francisco, their demographic was clear. From day one, Honda coined the term "Crotch Rocket" to target the gay and lesbian community. It wasn't long before Honda had made its first inroads in gaining market share in the vital west coast community.

While commercially successful, Honda didn't wish to fight a one-front war against Christians. In 1962, Honda started producing the HX100, their first entry into the area of gas powered lawn mowers. This allowed residents to show off their sexual preference to neighbors when not commuting. The new market, however, was something Honda was not experienced in, and proved to be initially unsuccessful. Honda faced several lawsuits alleging their lawnmowers oxidized almost instantly when mowing over damp grass.

It wasn't before long that founder Honda realized that the next battle would have to be fought in the ever-expanding industry of automobiles. In 1972, Honda began offering the United States its first car, the Honda Civic. While industry brass wanted to call it the "Civic Lesson," for the lesson it was trying to teach regarding the homosexual agenda, "Lesson" was eventually dropped from the title before release. Honda's experience in the lawn equipment market proved beneficial in their foray into automobiles, as the first generation of Civic Lessons were powered by their 49cc lawnmower engines producing a then-respectable 20 horsepower.

The response from the homosexual community was very positive, and sales of Civic Lessons matched other popular rivals in the west coast market from Toyota and AMC. Initial figures had pinned sales at achieving a 53% homosexual rate of buyers of Civic Lessons, a figure that has yet to be beat. The Civic Lesson proved to be a remarkable car for the homosexual market, as these families did not have any children and thus did not need room for a back seat. Honda foresaw new potential, however, with gay and lesbian

Knoppix 4.0 is brand spanking new release only as a 4GB ISO that at last check had a 230:1140 seed to downloader ratio. I think that is why there is little to no info about it.

As for the review, if you are at all familiar with Knoppix then it is just the same Knoppix with a huge load of packages, some GUI improvements, and some new functionality brought about by using packages & configuration info from Knoppix derivatives (like Kanotix) that was then accepted by Klaus Knoppix & fed back into Knoppix mainline. I felt that Knoppix 3.9 was ugly and now 4.0 uses KDE 3.4.1 with the Plastik widget style as default as opposed to previous release which used Keramik on KDE 3.4.0. Those folks who were missing GNOME can now use GNOME 2.8 since it has been missing for at least 18 months. Knoppix 4.0 uses a older more stable snapshot of UnionFS and will now not crash or exhibit strange filesystem behaviors like 3.9 did. V4.0 includes OO.o 2.0 beta, KOffice & if I recall correctly, abiword & gnumeric so it looks like office apps are all covered. If you want specifics on the packages, then look to the package list file on the Knoppix mirrors.

Knoppix users & newbies should also note that installing Knoppix to the HD is not recommended since something tends to break. In Knoppix 3.9, networking was broken due to a missing link in /etc/rc*.d. In past releases new users that installed Knoppix also experienced fstab problems in regards to optical drives and had difficulties in using the Debian package system since at that time Knoppix was a mixture of Debian stable/testing/unstable. Knoppix 4.0 is using Debian unstable for all of its packages, so maintenance of the HD should be easier than before. So far the only thing broken in a HD install of Knoppix 4.0 is manpages functionality. man ls or man vi works on DVD but is broken when run from the HD install.

Like most special conference releases (ex: Knoppix 3.8 Cebit Edition), Knoppix 4.0 DVD edition from LinuxTag, is standardized in German but contains support for many languages. A boot time cheat code of: knoppix lang=us will force it to load in US English. A more permanent method is to hexedit the ISO and change the lang=de entries to lang=us. Again like most conference releases, Klaus Knopper did not officially release the DVD as in is only for sale at LinuxTag for 5 euros. As a FOSS project, it is legal to distribute the ISO and this is what someone has done. You can find torrent trackers, screenshot galleries, and more info at the Knoppix 4.0 DVD Knoppix.net forum thread about.

I've already had a quantum computer for a while. Of course, it only works one bit at a time and needs a lot of cats. Here's a picture of it: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~scott/Quantum/schrodin ger.png

Yeah, but strangely if you read the actual paper from Microsoft, you'll notice that the point's that Brad claims are "garbage" are referenced from one of Brad's own paper's on BitTorrent!!

True, the paper referenced is from 2003, but even so...the assumptions aren't garbage...just a little oudated...

The paper Brad wrote can be seen here. It does indicate that some version of BitTorrent (whatever version existed in 1993) used a Tit-For-Tat scheme.

At no point in the Microsoft paper do they claim that their research is based on the CURRENT version of BitTorrent.

On access virus scanning is better achieved with something like the AV file system.
http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/project-antivirusfs.h tml
I think it's just a matter of time before someone developes a way to add your own signatures to a AV signature database much like adding known spammers to an access.db file. McAfee, and others, would no longer be needed.

I'm surprised I haven't seen the words "embrace and extend" regarding Macromedia's interest in Eclipse. Anyone proficient with Eclipse doesn't need flash. The difference between content provided by Jakarta, Jboss, et el and flash is as different as using a computer vs. watching TV

If you are a 3D gamer, you must try the controller at least once. You might never go back to keyboard and mouse!

I've included the top links for info on its drivers, use, and interface.

http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/parodies/s tuperspace.pdf

I did some research on worms in school. Here's a report, and here's a presentation.

I did some research on worms in school. Here's a report, and here's a presentation.

"Sometimes, it's an institutional thing, as noted by postings to this article about certain countries offering entire courses centered around this competition."

Like these ones, for instance:

http://www.cse.unr.edu/~westphal/spring2005/cs491F /
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/392/
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/csx98/
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dodds/ACM/homeACM.html

Or maybe not.... :p

He says it's all moot now.

This SECOND post was omitted from the original copy that was posted here on Slashdot:

From: jmsatb5 at aol.com
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 11:03:38 +0000 (UTC)
Lines: 36

Actually...belay everything I just said.

In the 24 hours between the time I composed the prior note, and sent it, and it made its way through the moderation software, two things happened:

1) I heard from a trusted source that Paramount is giving the Trek TV world a rest for maybe one to two years, depending on circumstances, no matter who would come along to run it. So it's not right to have folks putting in time doing something that ultimately would be pointless, I don't think that's a proper use of anybody's time.

2) At the same time as the above, an offer came in to run a new TV series for fall of '06, and since there's no way anything Trek can happen in the interim, I've said yes (now we have to negotiate the deal, but that should be fairly straightforward).

So on two counts, the whole thing is kind of moot.

We can reconvene a year or two down the road to see where this takes us, but in the interim...my apologies for waking everybody up in the middle of the night.

As you were.

Thanks and with great chagrinedness --

jms

You should have kept watching. Compared to the rest of the series, the first season of B5 did kinda suck. It was mainly an introduction to the rest of the series.

As to the perks of visiting new planets, I never cared for it. After they visit the mafia planet and leave a device behind that would allow them to reverse engineer the basics of all their advanced tech, they crack a joke and fade to black. Part of what B5 was great at is showing there are consequences for your actions. To this day if I hear someone ask "What do you want?" I chuckle inside thinking "answer that question VERY carefully."

It's too bad the thing is moot. http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/pipermail/b5jms/2005- February/005497.html

Actually...belay everything I just said.

In the 24 hours between the time I composed the prior note, and sent
it, and it made its way through the moderation software, two things
happened:

1) I heard from a trusted source that Paramount is giving the Trek TV
world a rest for maybe one to two years, depending on circumstances, no
matter who would come along to run it. So it's not right to have folks
putting in time doing something that ultimately would be pointless, I
don't think that's a proper use of anybody's time.

2) At the same time as the above, an offer came in to run a new TV
series for fall of '06, and since there's no way anything Trek can
happen in the interim, I've said yes (now we have to negotiate the
deal, but that should be fairly straightforward).

So on two counts, the whole thing is kind of moot.

We can reconvene a year or two down the road to see where this takes
us, but in the interim...my apologies for waking everybody up in the
middle of the night.

As you were.

Thanks and with great chagrinedness --

>...ARM-like procs at 400MHz each with something like 400MBs or more available memory bandwidth per proc.

This could have been done already with ordinary procs; it hasn't because once you hit an area that's serialized, your app winds up effectively running at 400MHz on a single proc. (More of a problem for desktop applications rather than server applications.)

>Of course the extreme limit would be to have millions of 1 bit processors, but I don't think that anyone is proposing that just yet.

How about 64k worth in the form of the Thinking Machine's Connection Machine CM-1?

STI and Conductus were successful in marketing PASSIVE HTS components (analog filters for cellular basestation receivers) and their main accomplishment was, actually, making "normal" systems engineers not to be scared of having a cooler in the system (providing a reliable cooler was also important ;-) ). The brilliant marketing gimmick was that they actually packaged a traditional filter and a switch in parallel with their SC filter in the same box, so if the cooler would fail the system would fall back to the traditional normal design, with some loss of capacity, of course, but at least it would still function.

As to digital logic, it is REALLY hard to make reproducible Josephson jucntions (active elements in SCE circuits) in HTS. One can make 2-4 of them for SQUID sensors (and it is a bit market for HTS too), but for digital stuff you need thousands and millions of them. In certain way HTS vs. LTS is similar to GaAs vs. CMOS -- it is easy to make a really nice, but simple, analog front-end in one, but the other can handle much more processing.

Replacing metal wiring on transistor chips with superconductor wiring will not help that much, yes, part of the RC constant which takes care of wire resistance, will be gone, but you'd still dissipate F*CV^2/2 power to charge/discharge the line. To fully utilize SCE logic one needs to use SCE active elements (current-sensitive JJs, not voltage-sensitive transistors).

I forsee the day that a user will be able to use a superconducting set of electronics on the desk.

Me too! ;-) It definitely can be done IF some larger system is built and verified first, then technology becomes a commodity. Check out, for example, this presentation by my former advisor and one of the godfathers of the whole field, seach for PeT workstation... ;-)

Paul B.

P.S. There is another fundamental reason to chose LTS, rather than HTS superconductors. The beauty of SFQ logic is that it uses almost quantum-limited amount of energy per switch. When one starts increasing temperature, thermal noise becomes too high (yes, even at 77K) and the main advantage -- tiny energy dissipation, which allows for very dense packaging -- goes away.

The atmosphere is similar to what the Earth's primitive atmosphere is thought to have been. Carbon chemistry under these conditions could give rise to the basic building blocks of life as we know it. Methane (CH4) and ethane (C2H6) react with ultraviolet light from the Sun to form more complex hydrocarbons, a photochemical smog. Some of these complex hydrocarbons may precititate [sic] out of the atmosphere, and form a surface layer rich in organic compounds.

Titan is cold, with a surface temperature of about 95K. Any water is frozen...

So I hope people don't get the impression that life won't be discovered there someday, it may just be isolated to hydrothermal vents below the surface and to a few species of hardy microbes.

Im not exactly sure if this is what you want, but if you have a Mac and Macromedia Director then you can go here

That may not be of any help at all, but it might work. I have not use Director, nor do I know its limitations, so, it may not work. I dont even know if that little script can do what you want it to do.

Yes! Click here for proof!

BitTorrent trackers just give you a way of finding peers who are downloading the same file - they are *not* necessary for data verification. A P2P search network like CRL would allow you to find peers that are interested in the same (verifiable) filename in a completely decentralized way. You could then use BitTorrent's parallel, incentive-based download mechanism to retrieve the file.

One humuna humuna humna...
Two humuna humuna humna...
Three humuna humuna humna...

Enjoy!

Good grief! Are you serious? I think a "police budget" can stretch to *zero* dollars to install Linux and mount your super 31337 ReiserFS drive.

The only way you've any chance of hiding your Pr0n is by using an encrypted filesystem like CryptFS, an encrypted loopback or whatever...

'Between Coca and Cocaine' by Paul Gootenberg, a Professor at Stony Brook.

You might want to check out datalog programming in XSB. XSB uses "tabling", which is a form of memoization of prior calls, to optimize datalog programming.

It's interesting that the mutation has been found in the Asian population, but I'm concerned that the article places an emphasis on ideas of race, which has been an obsolete scientific term since genetic research in the 1940s and 50s.

Race and the idea of race have are not medical ideas. The reason why so many Europeans (not merely Caucasians) have one or two copies of the mutant gene is because of the bottle neck of the black plague throughout Europe. It afforded them some or cmplete resistance to it. It is entirely possible that the Chinese people found to have the gene may have these ancestors themselves. As Chinese "asians" are just as much a mix of people from different places as "caucasians".

There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.

Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person. And of that variable amount, 85 per cent of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another 9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the two people being from what we call separate races. Any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent (or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up.
Info taken from here.

I am not a lawyer - so please consult one. There is a common law cause of action in tort for invasion of privacy. Basically you sue the person, and hope for punitive damages since your actual compensatory damages are small. I would think you'd be able to find a lawyer to take this case on a contingency basis (usually 1/3 of recovery).

See http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~tony/334/ethics/Privacy. html

It's always like this. There is an economic "theory" called The Fool In The Shower.

Basically, economies react fairly slow in many/most circumstances (bad things happen faster than good things usually). For example, an economic policy enacted by one President may not see fruition until after he is out of office. Similarly, some Presidents may be attributed growth in the economy when the result is, in actuality, at least partially attributable to the President in office before him.

I've written one myself that kicks ass, if I do say so myself. All who have used it agree.

Needs the .NET framework though.

thread on neowin: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=17 5813 <--should lack spaces
my site: http://www.ic.sunysb.edu/stu/msowul

I think this applies to managing software projects as well. Do you think anyone saw this coming?

The advantage of a quantum computer, is that we know how to run certain algorithms with a better big-O running time than on any classical computer. It doesn't matter if a quantum computer gets fewer operations per seconds than a classical computer, it'll still win for factoring large numbers.

Now, there's a different field of study called "Rapid Single Flux", where one tries to built very small classical computing devices that take advantage of quantum mechanics, but don't have the big-O advantages of quantum computing.

Here's a link.

(Mr * Vr ^ 2)/2 = (Me * Ve ^ 2)/2

Part of what I was trying to illustrate (in my albeit quite verbose response :) ) is that this equation is incorrect -- or, at the very least, it is not the Energy equation and it is not the Momentum equation, so where does it come from?

You cannot equate the KE "going to the left" with the KE "going to the right", perhaps partly because KE is a scalar quantity which has no direction. The Energy equation for the rocket involves the conversion of Fuel's Potential Chemical Energy into Kinetic Energy (all without direction).

Let me give an example. I think we both agree on the Law of Conservation of Momentum, which is:

Mr*Vr + Me*Ve = 0
Hence, Mr*Vr = -Me*Ve

Dividing your KE equation "Mr*Vr^2 = Me*Ve^2" by "Mr*Vr = -Me*Ve", after simplification (on each side, an M and a V cancel), we get:

Vr = -Ve

This implies that "Mr = Me", which I think is unlikely for most rockets. Most rockets are much more massive than their exhaust: i.e. "Mr > Me" and, therefore, in order for momentum to be conserved, the exhaust velocity must be much greater than the rocket velocity: i.e. "Ve > Vr".

Hence, since we both agree on the conservation of momentum, your "KE_left = KE_right" equation seems to be incorrect.

mv2 ~= (Mr * Vr ^ 2) ~= (Me * Ve ^ 2)

I'm still not sure what "m" and "v" are here, since "Mr != Me" and "Vr != Ve". What is "m" the mass of? What is "v" the velocity of?

<--- Action Reaction --->

KE is not directional, so Action-Reaction does not apply to Energy, it only applies to Momentum.

Squaring the velocities changes them from a vector (which may have a negative value) to a positive scalar value.

True. In the general definition of KE, "V^2" represents the vector dot product "V*V" which is equivalent to squaring the magnitude of the velocity vector.

In 4 dimensions all matter "travels" (although that's an incorrect term, it's really just a vector length) at light speed. Thus 'v = light speed'. We'll represent 'v' as the constant 'c'.

"Light speed" is a measurement of distance over time (299,792,458 m/s). i.e. every second, light travels a certain number of meters. So I'm wondering, when an object is at rest in our frame of reference, where are the meters that the object is traversing every second?

2. There's a good reason why we can't change our vector to a negative value for the dimension of time. Consider a two dimensional vector problem. Let's say we are on a space ship speeding along the X axis at 10 meters per second. Now let's say we turn our space ship sideways and start thrusting along the Y axis. How much thrust must be applied along the Y axis to negate and/or reverse my velocity along the X axis?

By definition, they are all orthogonal dimensions so movement along one does not affect the other, though I do not see how that illustrates why we can't go backwards in time if it is just another dimension.

I've read other similar explanations of Quantum Tunneling and quanta existing in multiple states simultaneously. Recently, I've read about quantum entanglement which illustrates a fascinating experiment that I'd love to play around with. Unfortunately, I still don't really understand them, and I have a great need to suspend belief until I can prove it to myself.

I'm not necessarily sure about the "mind-over-matter" stuff, but I certainly have no difficulty in considering that thought is non-deterministic in nature. What if we really *did* have multiple possible thoughts, but the one we actually think gets materialized by external or internal input? What if that's the core to intuition? I have X number of thoughts, and external stimuli forces thought Y into existence because it's based on the reality present arou

Fallon, NV (master)
George, WA (yes, that's a real town)
Middletown, CA
Searchlight, NV

Ask any pilot or oceangoing navigator, it's really cool tech for its time.

Here's some info on how it works

If you detected a photon, then you did something physical to collapse the wave function. So it doesn't matter if you throw the data away or not, the physical interaction still occured

You do just mean in the case when the information has propagated to some irreversible environment (like a macroscopic detector) right?

Cause there are quantum eraser experiments where the 'observer' is a photon or some other microscopic particle. The information that the particle holds about the superpostition can be erased and the superposition remains for the rest of us

MgB2 is a standard low temp. superconductor with a Tc of only ~40 Kelvin.

As pfdietz pointed out below, MgB2 is so much easier to work with than HTS ceramics. Its discovery is considered the next big thing in the field since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, not because of increased Tc, but because it can be deposited using standard semiconductor tools and one does not have to worry about grain size/orientation/etc.


Whaaa? HTS (high temp. superconductors) are perfectly suited to "digital apps" in many situations. A company called STI makes HT superconducting filters for cell phone antennas in order to increase data bandwidth and and decrease service dropout by making their recievers more sensitive.

STI/Conductus filters are purely passive devices, there is not a single Josephson junction nor a single cold logic gate. As a matter of fact filters themselves are rather simple, their main achievement is development and mass-production of relatively low cost and reliable cryocoolers. And of course they are not used in "cell phone antennas", rather in "cell phone *base station* antennas", big difference! :-)

But when I was talking about "digital" I meant exactly the stuff from your second link. Search for a guy named Paul Bunyk there , look at my user ID and then decided if I have something to say about those matters... ;-)

Am I the only one who has no idea what this is? SuperConductor Electronics.

Paul B.

Pardon, but wtf are you talking about?

Search for MgB2...

Yes....and...? MgB2 is a standard low temp. superconductor with a Tc of only ~40 Kelvin. ...except possibly for digital apps where HTS sucked big time

Whaaa? HTS (high temp. superconductors) are perfectly suited to "digital apps" in many situations. A company called STI makes HT superconducting filters for cell phone antennas in order to increase data bandwidth and and decrease service dropout by making their recievers more sensitive. And Josephson Junctions make up some of the fastest digital IC's in existance at many hundreds of gigahertz.

And I actually used to work in SCE...

Am I the only one who has no idea what this is?

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...:

What chemicals, fuels and water are needed to get silicon to the point where it is pure enought to make wafers? I think it would seem absurdly high too - that is the point of these kind of articles - people don't realize how much toxic, man made materials it takes to make a PC or an MP3 player.
And for those saying "the water can be recycled" ah, yeah, not exactly its much easier to dump toxic crap into water during the manufacturing processes than to remove it afterwards, a la MTBE which people can detect in water at less than a few parts per billion, not to mention other stuff that is ruining the world's fresh water Great Lakes Food Chain
More water stuff... you want water - pay up, you serfs
bwater

Yes, the environment is indeed self-purifying, I never said it wasn't, but just not fast enough to account for the amount of toxins that released. Actually, I should have been more specific - there are two kinds of toxins, some cumulative, some not.

A simple Google search came up with a ton of pages supporting this, like this one should that shows the accumulation of toxins in marine biology ("Non-cumulative toxins do not increase in concentration in the body, even if the organism is chronically exposed to the toxin. Conversely, cumulative toxins, tend to increase in concentration, and are often associated with a specific tissue, e.g., cadmium tends to increase over time in the digestive gland of blue crabs."). this link, this link and this one also talk about the cumulative nature of pollution. etc.etc.

So where are your links?

I agree that a single mutated frog isn't PROOF that pollution is involved, that mutations will occur to surrounding mammals, whatever, BUT it should at least make you stop and think for a second, asks questions, etc., instead of just shrug and ignore it completely - which is what I was getting at.

Sadly, you're just as bad as those environmentalists you attack... ignoring everybody else.

I think Zen is about freedom -- freedom from thought, desire, emotions, dualities (good/bad, for instance), etc. I think the reasoning is, if you're not overly concerned with the minutae of the day, you'll have a much better time of it. Which may or may not be what you were saying, I'm not exactly sure.

From The Sutra of Hui-neng, Chapter 4:

"To keep our mind free from defilement under all circumstances is called 'Idea-lessness'. Our mind should stand aloof from circumstances, and on no account should we allow them to influence the function of our mind. But it is a great mistake to suppress our mind from all thinking; for even if we succeed in getting rid of all thoughts, and die immediately thereafter, still we shall be reincarnated elsewhere..."

Meaning (I suppose), if you stop thinking, by definition, you're dead, and you'll just come back as something else, b/c you haven't hit Nirvana yet.

Check out theConstruction Toy Homepage for some nice pice (thanks to google).

I especially liked the 8040 set with three possible models and my favourite, the 8851 Pneumatic powered Excavator.

Check out theConstruction Toy Homepage for some nice pice (thanks to google).

I especially liked the 8040 set with three possible models and my favourite, the 8851 Pneumatic powered Excavator.

Check out theConstruction Toy Homepage for some nice pice (thanks to google).

I especially liked the 8040 set with three possible models and my favourite, the 8851 Pneumatic powered Excavator.

stripe club

Stony Brook University has had this feature in the dorms for over 3 years already

Good job being biased on state colleges, slashbribe

Here: Mirror

Funny. I spent four hours yesterday trying to figure out how to get rid of the Red Hat Gnome main icon and get back to the good old foot. And now this story comes out on Slashdot. The hat had been bothering me for a long time. Finally wrote a page describing the fix. We hate the red fedora