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A further clarification: Einstein submitted his 1936 paper to Physical Review, but after a negative response from the referee, he published it in the Journal of the Franklin Institute instead. This was in the early days of peer review: he was actually surprised and offended that the editor at Physical Review had shown the manuscript to another physicist. There's a slideshow about it here.

No, it doesn't work that way. GE crops (as well as new non-GE crops) are patented. In fact, Monsanto's first GE soybean is already off patent and generics developed.

http://citeseer.uark.edu:8080/...

They already have options that they worked on back in 1993.

putting QWERTY on the screen is stupid, you have to use a different input method, the clock face is the one that makes a lot of sense.

Something is very, very wrong if a state of 3 million people only has 6 CS teachers.

They have more than 6 CS teachers. The 6 teachers is limited to high school alone, and that doesn't seem unusual to me.

So one is saying trust Monsanto (or Syngenta or Pioneer or any of the other seed companies that always get neglected for some reason). I am, however, saying the evidence is overwhelming that genetically engineered crops are safe and effective (and yes, contrary to the conspiracy theories claiming that Monsanto somehow owns the concept of genetic engineering, this includes research that has nothing to do with corporations) and that genetic engineering has been thoroughly demonstrated to be a useful tool for crop improvement. Those are two totally different statements; don't pretend otherwise.

Why can't Monsanto open source everything?

Why can't they work for free you mean? I can think of a few reasons.

You know, if you really want more GE crops that are free to use besides the ones going off patent, and I for one sure do, then you should demand that the scientifically unjustified over-regulation of GE crops be reworked to facilitate more publicly funded GE crops. Thus far, only one university developed GE crop has been released: the Rainbow papaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i. There is also Bt eggplant in Bangladesh which is non-corporate. There's plenty of research, but no ability to bring it to the market anymore thanks to over regulation. There's something very wrong when university research cannot be used and only corporations can overcome the regulatory hurdles.

driven by Big Agrochem trying to make shitloads of money,

You mean like every other conventionally bred seed they also sell? Better take a stand against conventional breeding. Or maybe you mean Golden Rice, developed by the International Rice Research Institute, or the Rainbow Payaya, developed by the University of Hawai'i, or any number of other GMOs I could mention that have bugger all to do with corporations and are developed by independent university, public, or NGO scientists (who nonetheless are likewise opposed while anti-GMO people ignore them or have the gall to accuse them of being corporate or even vandalize publicly funded GMO research).

acquire copyrights and patents on key food crops

You mean like conventional breeding already does and has been for a long time? You mean the patents that expire and are used in public domain works? By the way, do you have a fair alternative?

'bundle' their own special seeds with their own special pesticides and weedkillers.

Like conventional breeding? Also, selling two products that go together is immoral now? Really? Guess Nintendo must be absolutely abominable for selling gaming systems and the games that go with them for decades, those monsters. By the way, are you referring to the special herbicide (not insecticide as you wrongly imply) that went off patent in 2000? And furthermore, did it ever occur to you that maybe farmers have adopted the herbicide tolerant crops in such large number for a good reason?

You don't even want to take a tiny, tiny risk of killing off pollinating insects or having 'terminator' genes or antibiotic markers jump species.

The refusal to accept any risk at all is a flawed ideology. That's the kind of thought that leads people to refusing vaccines on a 'risk aversion basis.' When one considers your rational of terminator genes (never even been used) and horizontal gene transfer (common only on an evolutionary time frame, and no more or less likely to happen to a transgene than any other gene; maybe I say we ban conventional breeding because I don't want rice sd-1 to jump species hmm? What risk do you see the NPTII gene you refer to having anyway?), your argument falls apart completely.

only if you own shares in big agro (unless you think buying expensive seed and complimentary chemicals from multinationals and not being able to re-plant harvested seed is somehow going to cure third world hunger).

You forgot increased yield, decreased insecticide, safer for farmers and consumers, lower environment impact by replacing harsher herbicide and soil degrading tillage, and saving an entire industry from a devastating virus. You mean beside those benefits you conveniently neglected to mention? And even if none of that were the case, you'd still be wrong because you'd be saying that the present use of a technology is not good therefore there is no good use for it. That's completely absurd, and made all the mor

The problem is that the happy hooker is a lie, pretty woman is not reality-TV. No mentally stable, non-self-loathing woman with options will choose to be come a prostitute.

I won't necessarily accuse you of lying, but multiple studies show the opposite of what you claim in places where prostitution has been legalized (most of the negative aspects of prostitution are precisely because it's illegal):

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16398/
"Sex workers interviewed in 2003 (after legalisation) were compared to a prior study of this population conducted in 1991 (before official regulation of the sex industry)." ... "Overall, the sex workers reported roughly equivalent job satisfaction to Australian women"
I.e. legalized prostitution workers have the same job satisfaction as other working women.

http://newswire.uark.edu/article.aspx?id=16181
“The findings suggest that these women are not forced into the prostitution market but rather choose to enter it for many of the same reasons that people enter the conventional job market – money, stability, autonomy and even job satisfaction.”

That's the population density if you take everyone out of the cities and spread them thin across all the land. Where the people actually are is what matters

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Population_map_of_Finland.svg

http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/catalog/national/images/maps/Population.dir/USpop1990.gif

I use robocopy on Windows, it's a lot like rsync. With vshadow+robocopy you can back up a live Windows computer just like you can do to on a Linux box with an rsync script:

http://ithelp.cveg.uark.edu/IT_Help/Documents_files/backup.pdf

And isn't Time Machine OSX-only?

We're using big boy computers here, everyone. That means whatever backup solution you specify has to make backups in a format that is fully usable by a range of free (and ideally open-source) tools.

For Linux PCs I use rsync (with ssh, I do all network backups because in Linux, it's even easier and more convenient than external drives). For Windows I use vshadow and robocopy (pretty much the closest Windows equivalent to rsync - makes plain file backups with NTFS permissions preserved, and those tools are on the Windows CD so restoration is easy - as long as the hard drive can be accessed without network drivers and isn't encrypted, hence no network backups, I just use a plain eSATA drive).

A) No. Only the population centers of Wyoming are, because the outlying population density doesn't warrant a cell tower.
B) I don't live in Wyoming. I live in MI, and I live amid many dead zones.
C) 100% of Finland? Or 100% of the INHABITED areas. http://finland.fi//finfo/images/people/popumap_b.gif Unlike Finland, most of the US is NOT tundra. Places in the US which are sparsely populated still have a thousand people in the radius of a cell tower http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/catalog/national/images/maps/Population.dir/USpop1990.gif. I once made a call from a place where I could see 50km for 270 degrees and nothing behind me. I could count the mercury vapor lights in that area. 100. Someone paid to have that area covered. It probably wasn't the people who lived there. It was probably the other 250 zillion cellphone users in America.
D) I'm not complaining. I would have paid $100 for that one call, so my bills subsidizing Wyoming farmers pays me back eventually.

I think you need to get some price information. Liquid Nitrogen does NOT cost $300/gallon

I wondered about that too. To make a guess about the answer, I had to find some maps showing US population density. Here's one (in PDF format) from the US government (I wish it had the year). Here's one from a .edu for 1990 levels. And here's one from Time magazine done in a unique fashion.

At first I thought this easily backed up my suspicion that, as you put it, the "spread out America" excuse doesn't work so well.

But then I checked out a global map of population distribution and now, after all this effort, I'm firmly back in the "not sure" category. Bring up the full-size map and compare Europe and Japan with the USA. Perhaps for New York, New Jersey, much of Florida and California there's not much excuse. Anywhere else in the USA and it's not so clear to me.

Standing at the bow of a small open boat with an outboard motor with a non-exploding harpoon and a gun in your hand is probably one of the scariest experiences I can imagine. I've heard some really frightening tales from Eskimo whaling captains.

What is it with you and your "factory killing ships"? Are you some kind of nut? Or do you have Eskimo people confused with the Japanese "scientific" whaling expeditions?

Do some fucking research before you spout off with your nonsense. A Google search for "eskimo whaling techniques" brings up lots of good explanations on how whaling is done in modern Eskimo communities. From http://luna.pos.to/whale/iwc_chair06_6.html see "Regarding the Alaska Eskimo bowhead whale subsistence hunt, it was reported that subsistence hunters make every effort to dispatch the whale as quickly as possible to provide a humane death for the whale, to reduce the chance of losing the whale, and to reduce the amount of time hunters in small boats must spend in the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean. It was further reported that the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission has undertaken an extensive program to upgrade the safety and humaneness of its traditional weapons used in the hunt."

Other sources of information to help with your prejudiced ignorance:
http://www.uark.edu/misc/jcdixon/Historic_Whaling/ Research/Multidisciplinary/Whaling_societies.htm
http://depts.washington.edu/rural/RURAL/advice/dte vukpaper.html
http://www.iwcoffice.org/index.htm

This patent is completely obvious. GIS existed well before 1999. I graduated High School in '99 and we were doing GIS in the school for 2 years already. GIS databases were already searchable and at least a capable as what we see in google mashups now. And if I remember right several GIS companies were already doing webapps for local communities that had GIS departments.

My city had an online map of the city with searching by addresses, districts, and zones. The Center for Advanced Spacial Technologies at the University of Arkansas already had web interfaces to search and view their geo data.

This is a classic example of a patent where they take something that is already being done widely in industry and say, "that, but with the internet."

You might want to subscribe to LABMGR and ask your question there. It's a listserv for college sysadmins.

Dont tell that to my professor.

the local computer store guys got on here again this year.

http://www3.uark.edu/bkst/pumpkin/ was last year's pumpkin.

We did a new pumpkin PC this year just in time for Halloween...

This time it can see via webcam eyes (thanks logitech), breath through its nose via case fan, and talk out its mouth via speaker system. The insides are made of a custom power supply and mac-mini Core Duo system. The lighting is made of neon wiring thanks to Startech.com mutant mods.

Take a look: http://www3.uark.edu/bkst/pumpkin/

There is a link there to last year's 2005 pumpkin, and this year's 2006 mac-o-lantern. Check out the last page with a video of the pumpkin in action with the webcam and singing the Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven video.

They don't want the truth to come out, to tarnish Sam Walton's reputation with reality.

1. The Walton family donated $50 million to outfit the University of Arkansas's business school with new classrooms and faculty positions.
2. The Walton family donated $300 million (pending matching funds, which were later met) to found an honors college, complete with endowments for scholarships and tenured faculty positions. At the time, it was the largest gift in the history of American higher education. (Maybe still, but I don't know with the renovations going on at Oklahoma State's athletic complex.)

Is it a pittance compared to the billions that Wal-Mart makes every year? Probably, but Wal-Mart has definitely improved the quality of education at my former school. In my book, that indicates that the Waltons can't be the horsemen of the apocalypse.

More animal fat in the diet meant not only additional energy, but also a source of ready-formed long chain PUFAs, including AA, DTA(docosatetraenoic acid (DTA, C22:4, w-3), and DHA. These three fatty acids together make up over 90% of the long chain PUFA (i.e. the structurally significant and biochemically active fat) found in the brain gray matter of all mammalian species. (Sinclair, 1975)

Layered Deposition

Lithification

Tilting and uplift

Erosion

Layered Depoistion (again)

Lithification (again)

Erosion (again) etc.

If you are looking for Geologist makeing more sense than Hovind check out Glenn Morton a former yec, who could not honestly uphold the yec philosphy after the evaluating a preponderance of evidence.

With this crazy looking thing: Jack-o-lantern computer

It has a built in motherboard, case fans, dvd burner, internet, wireless keyboard and mouse, the works. Pretty powerful for just being a pumpkin IMO... They even posted the instructions on how to build your own if you are so inclined Heh..

Maybe with those centrino drivers we can get this thing running wireless in linux:
Centrino pumpkin pc

I think this is a better halloween challenge: the Pumpkin PC

look how awesome the fans look in the eyes and system just overall is top notch.

Funny you should bring that up, here are a couple of articles that are very interesting on the subject...

Univ of Arkansas
National Geographic

My great grandfather had a mode of transportation that ran on grass.

Ms. Armstrong interviewed IT professionals at one Fortune 500 company . Based on this one set of interviews, she drew her conclusions. Maybe, just maybe, the actual environment had something to do with the women leaving. It also explains her ridiculous initial number of 41%.

Let's wait until some real scientists have a real study, shall we?

Thalia

In a school lab, we had up to sixteen people playing as various shapes (eyeball, arcade game, taxi, boot, and one other) over an AppleTalk network. The fun was that MazeWars+ had four different levels (each level had an elevator to every other level) , and included four types of robots (one was a TARDIS that you could use to teleport randomly in the same level (much fun to teleport your opponent unexpectly), another was a Shadow Killer (only saw the shadow in the maze), a dummy (immobile target), and a very dumb AI robot)).

A later version of Maze was Super Maze Wars, with color and other features. Apple shipped it with some Macintosh models.

One nifty thing about the software is that it came with a disk label for an "official copy" of the game. Very thoughtful of them.

A French language website has screenshots of MazeWars+, along with other early Macintosh applications.

Yes, most of Canada is empty, but the population is a tenth the US's. That thin belt that runs through southern Ontario and Quebec has population densities comparable to the eastern US and the west coast. (See here. Note metric vs. US units.) The Canadian prairies have similar population density to the US midwest and southwest.

They've had that for a while!

Didn't we have one of those darn Razorbacks in da Whitehouse[.com] a few years ago?

Not true, as there have even been instances of AutoRun worms on MacOS. MacAddict apologized quite a bit for that one...

anyway, while I doubt anyone has tried to correlate IQ with political affiliation, the FACT of the matter is that Republicans are more educated than Democrats (as a group). Of course one can argue that education != intelligence, but lacking any IQ data, this is what we have to work with.

Finally, I have no idea who Phil Henry is. Given the context, I assume you are referring to Phil HenDRIE, a popular talk-radio host. I have two news-flashes for you: Phil Hendrie is a self-admitted SOCIALIST (he voted for Gore by the way), and second, his show is an ACT, and the joke is on you.

The Archos Jukebox Recorder with the Rockbox open-source replacement firmware has several features designed for blind. I haven't used them, so I can't comment, but you might try posting a question on the rockbox list for further details.

I noticed this as well. I reported it to them via their Contact Us link. But the really weird thing is if you Google for it you get a good number of results. And Intel's site isn't the only one!

Check out this page. There's a professor who apparently went to this university! And here's another professor.

Finally I consulted the umsystem web site it's self and proved me correct. But it's really odd that there's so many people refering to it as Columbus. I lived there for apx. 2 years (and went to college for 1 semester - after Rolla for 2 1/2 years. Incidentally Rolla was lower which is funny given that Rolla has the better Comp. Sci. department) and NEVER heard ANYONE refer to it as Columbus. Anyway, I don't live in Missouri any more, but I was born and raised there: and went to Parkway North high school, just incase anyone feels the need to ask :).

And then compare that map with a population density map and you might get an idea as to exactly how few people are in those big blocks of red.

"The Russians had a whole lot better equipment than those who claim conspiracy, and they didn't say a word," Buzz replied. I have to say that for a cold war atmosphere of 1969, he makes a brilliant point. For anyone who gets the chance, he is a really good speaker. Unlike a lot of people out there who insist upon being heard, he is incredibly well educated (Ph.D. from MIT), experienced (how many of us have been to the moon, anyway?), and a very entertaining guy.

...and he throws a great left hook. :)

"I mean, one cow, at this point, when grazing, can clear an entire square mile of pasture and be set for the day. I think."

It's not that bad. I was curious myself since a relative of mine has a small dairy operation (~60 head on ~300 acres, probably less on both). So, from a webpage from a U. Arkansas argonomy class it looks like about 80 acres of pasture will be fine for 60 head of cattle for a month. So we're talking 60x the cattle for 30x the time on 1/8th the land. But the required acreage naturally increases if you're ranching on shitty west Texas desert compared to my relative's dairy farm in Iowa. How much I don't know, I'm not in the cattle business.

Good: Having the teacher give the give the lecture as a power point presentation with a LCD projector. The slides can then be published on the web for later consumption.

My B.S. degree is in Electrical Engineering. I have found that many topics can be discussed using PowerPoint, but examples are typically lost in translation. Most professors that use PowerPoint talk around the examples with an inadequate level of depth such that the printable notes are not sufficient to replicate the work outside of class.

Personally, I don't foresee many fields entirely leaving the realm of chalk/marker and board in the near future. The "traditional" learning style requires that instructors pace themselves with handwriting, whereas a preprepared slide collection usually results in a mind-boggling flight through material. My suggestions to those faculty insisting upon using PowerPoint and other technological conveniences are thus:

1. Technology is meant to be an aid, not a crutch. Having material on a slide does not absolve an instructor from explaining said material at an appropriate level.

2. Use animated graphics rather than static ones when describing the motion of an object. One example is to include arrows rotating around a magnet to indicate field lines.

3. Slow down. Some people out there like to have time to read the slide.

But isn't it a little bit early?

Researcher Tahirih Motazedian apparently uncovered proof quite some time ago...

well, turns out she's not a confirmed researcher yet, but a student... check out this girl's
photo, she looks pretty young to me...

immagine all the discoveries she has the potential to make once she enters full-time as a researcher...

I am graduate student, and as a part of my masters thesis, I am involved in the development of a behaviral modeling environment . We are using the programing language python, and the GUI toolkit QT and PyQT. The choice of these technologies has made our tool fairly generic as it runs without a glitch on Linux, Solaris and win2k. We have not tested it on other platforms but it should work on all the platforms which run python. Python is a really cool programing language and PyQT makes cross-platform GUI development really easy. We have developed fairly involved GUIs using PyQT, like a Topology Editor, Schematic Editor (to capture the design and topology of circuits) etc. I would strongly recommend python and PyQt to someone interested in developing cross-platform applications (with GUIs)

I'd have to take that listing with a big grain of salt. Notice how there are almost no deaths reported in the 20th century (and almost no incidents at all in the last 50 years) despite the fact that the population was at least 4 times greater than in the 19th century, where total carnage was reported. The great thing about the Internet is that you can find pages to back any argument. For example:

From here:

There are some old Chinese records of people being killed by falling meteorites, but there is no record of meteorite deaths in modern times. Elizabeth Hodges, of Sylacauga, Alabama, was given a terrible bruise on the side by a falling meteorite in 1954, and a young boy was struck in the head by a meteorite that had been slowed down by the leaves of a banana plant in Uganda in 1992. The Nakhla meteorite killed a dog when it fell in Egypt in 1911.

And from here:

Some researchers claim to have found reports in Chinese annals of people being killed by meteorites including tens of thousand of people in the 15th century. Many of the stories of meteorite fatalities are probably untrue. Some undoubtedly are due to hailstones rather than meteorites which, even today, can result in a large number of deaths, such as the 92 people killed in Bangladesh on 14 April 1986.

Is it good to have eating contests where people send themselves to the hospital? Is it good to have contests like the World's Strongest Man? Or how about Mr. Puni-verse? Is it good to have contests like the Olympics?

I'm just poking fun here, but my point is: Competition is part of human nature. No matter how worthwhile, odd, unhealthy, or just plain crazy. I can't think of anything we don't compete for or about, somewhere in some culture.

I see your point, that when bad behavior is glorified, more people will behave badly, but intellect will never fully triumph over human nature (i.e., we'll never become Vulcans. But that's a good thing).

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At the dawn of life, as now but to a greater degree, the vast majority (if not all) of life on the planet was anaerobic. Terra's early atmosphere was composed primarily of water vapor (H2O), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), monoxide (CO), molecular Nitrogen (N2), Hydrogen (H2), and Hydrogen Chloride (HCl) with only trace amounts of reactive molecular Oxygen (O2). Life was well along when oxygen producing microbes appeared and started poisoning the anaerobes.

Here is a story about experiments that show that anaerobes could survive on Mars now.