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To be fair - what else were they going to hack?

SunOS. SunOS had a TCP/IP stack and a version of NFS running in 1985.

Please describe exact process of "decaying"

It is well described in the Standard Model of particle physics. But it wouldn't surprise me if you claim that is not correct LMAO.

, and what movement with constant speed has anything to do with gravity.
While at it, explain why relative to muon frame of reference Earth, moving at close to c, does not experience dilation, but instead contraction, and why it is not the other way?

Explained

Assuming all sweat instantly vaporised, a typical adult could shed energy at a rate of 1kW through sweat, based on the energy required to do the phase transition and amount of sweat, but that's not realistic as not all of it evaporated. I calculated it independently, but also see http://c21.phas.ubc.ca/article..., but is likely to be around 100W as an order of magnitude, for actual evaporative loss, as 30W is about the base level even when not sweating. The metabolic output of a human is about 100W, but somewhat less if you are sitting down, which you need to do if you have your feet in water. Feet don't have great blood flow, and are only a small proportion of the body, so at rest you are only going to be losing maybe 10W through your feet in cold water, based on the blood flow through the feet. It's an order of magnitude less than from actually sweating, and a fraction of just overall evaporative loss when not even sweating. Wetting your body with extra water is effectively sweating from an energy balance point of view. The major effect of putting your feet in cold water is from how it feels, and the fact that you are definitely not exercising when doing it, so your heat generation has fallen.

The final irony, though, is that putting your feet in cold water is being suggested by some as a way to lose weight when you are not exercising, as it increases the metabolic rate (and heat output) over just sitting there with warm feet. I have no idea if it is actually effective.

So what was your point about my understanding of physics again?

The initial papers were published from Stanford, quite a few years ago (and so are hidden form the internet).

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/ Here's a page for SIFT, and early image keypoint detector

I remember seeing one at the Radio Shack too, only I was too young to buy it. My first computer program was something I wrote on a piece of paper after I conned my mom into buying me the Basic book for the TRS-80. I lied to her one day and told her I was going to the park, and instead rode my bike halfway across the county to type it in. She'd have had a heart attack if she knew. I was 9 years old.

So as one fan to another, here's something for you. =)

It turns out that drugs or hypnosis are not at all required to create a false memory:

http://news.ubc.ca/2015/11/18/research-pokes-holes-in-police-tactics-to-obtain-confessions-of-crime/

No, the hysterical part is where you have no idea what is known about gravity and seem to think that the unknown part is so vast as to include unicorns and wizardry. Anti-gravity is next to meaningless in GR, and even if negative mass exists it would not behave the way you want it to.

Analogy time. This is like saying that because there is some dispute about the authorship of Shakespeare's works, therefore it's possible that they were written by Queen Elisabeth. That relativity breaks down in certain conditions and on certain scales is not evidence against its validity. Newton's formulation of gravity was accurate enough that it took centuries of observation to propose a more accurate model, and Einstein's description of the geometry of spacetime improves on the Newtonian by many orders of magnitude. There is no conclusive proof that somewhere beyond the error bars there are dragons to be found, but there is no reason to believe they would be a macroscopic phenomenon, and plenty of evidence against it. If you would like to remedy your ignorance, I suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on General Relativity and Anti-gravity, followed by Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler[pdf].

A police bullpen or typing pool may be fine in a big open area. The same goes for sales and marketing types. However, if you're talking about any work which requires stretches of concentrated effort then it's just a Bad Idea. Engineers? No. Programmers? No. Accountants? No. Any kind of researcher? No.

Have you ever seen a picture of an engineering/drafting office from say... anywhere between the late 1800's and the mid/late 1980's (when draftsmen started to be replaced by computers and the size of said offices began to shrink dramatically)? Big ass open plan offices - sometimes thousands of square feet of big ass open plan offices. The same goes for accounting departments. One of Frank Lloyd Wright's most celebrated designs (from 1936) had a big ass open plan office as it's centerpiece.
 
We went to the bloody moon in vehicles designed in big ass open plan offices.
 
Somewhere in my book collection, I have a book intended for professional engineers and engineering managers from the 1950's... which devotes three whole chapters to the knotty problem of laying out (invariably open plan) engineering offices and drafting rooms - mapping a 3d object onto a 2d arrangement of desks and drafting tables.
 

This is the only real reason they're pushing this model. It's a clear terminus of the erosion that's led us from offices, to cubicles, to the little half walls, to just acres of desks.

I don't know where this idea came from that "everyone had a private office until Evil Management latched onto the open plan" comes from, but it's complete bull. Private offices have long been the exception, proof that one was senior enough to rate one and to have Made It, not the rule.

Ooh! I was just reading about this! Dunno if any of that work will actually result in a product that can get better results from simpler lenses, though.

24. (1) Anyone whose rights or freedoms, as guaranteed by this Charter, have been infringed or denied may apply to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.

(2) Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

You can see a list of admitted and excluded evidence cases decided by the Supreme Court of Canada under section 24(2) on pages 25-26 of this pdf. In some cases, NOT admitting the evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. Like most things Canadian, it's a compromise.

partial extract

A UBC study of Quebec’s 32-year ban on fast food advertising found that people in that province bought less junk food and their children tend to weigh less than their North American counterparts.

“That regulation effectively reduced fast food consumption in households by as much as 13 per cent each week,” says Asst. Prof. Tirtha Dhar, a marketing expert at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.

In the first study of its kind, Dhar investigated the impact of the world’s first and oldest advertising ban on fastfood. Enacted in 1980, Quebec legislation prohibits advertising of products such as toys and fast food which target children in print and electronic media. In the past decade, other countries have followed suit with similar bans, among them Norway, Sweden, Greece and the U.K.

Dhar says the annual drop in household fast food purchases represents the equivalent of US $88 million in 2010 dollars. "In terms of meals, that reduction represents 13 and 18 billion fewer fast-food calories a year."

Billions and billions of calories not served ...

the actual law (warning pdf) which is actually a consumer protection law.

non-pdf version

No more weekend cartoon shows with kids going "I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It-I-want-It" for the latest piece of plastic junk.

Of course, you have to deal with stupid language laws that treat English as a disease.

They put me on methylphenedate. Then they put me on Risperdone to control the psychosis induced by methylphenedate. The drugs are horrible. The only thing worse is Prednizone.

Phenotropil is effective in small doses, with fewer and less severe side effects. I did the pharmacology myself, with lots of Googling. Psychosis isn't a side effect--Phenotropil sharply controls, reduces, and prevents dementia--but INSOMNIA sure as hell is!

Okay, I found better drugs. But the drugs still have bad side effects. Let's face it: Insomnia is bad. I have always had delayed sleep phase disorder (self-diagnosis): if I don't rigidly discipline my sleep, any deviation causes me to stay awake. Stay up until 10:30? Become no longer tired, until 1-2am, then sleep until noon--and continue to do this until I somehow fix my sleep cycle, so I can't ever have a night out. On-call fucking sucks. And now, due to further conditioning, I not only can't sleep early, but I can't stay in bed past 7am; I'm sleep-deprived because my body refuses to get more than 4-6 hours of sleep!

I could take sleep drugs. Melatonin no longer works: after some occasional use, it now only works in high doses; and both high doses and chronic use cause my nuts to ache for extended periods, which I thought was just me sleeping on my side or something... until I found out melatonin affects testosterone production and can be bad for the testicles. Whoops. Valerian... I ran through a railroad crossing barrier. Ambien and Allegra I've seen do the same: you're incredibly fucking high, but you feel fine... until you crash into a parked car, or smile and nod while a pedestrian wanders in front of you. Thud.

That doesn't mean drugs are BAD; they're risk. You risk side effects against a disease. Is your ADHD worse than ... potential insomnia? Potential minor psychosis? Psychosis can be MAJOR if you're prone to dementia. Sleep drugs may not ruin your life; out of millions of cases, I know one person who almost died because Ambien affects him for 10 hours and he didn't know that. Of course you should take life-saving drugs, and life-enhancing drugs, if the side effects don't occur or are less bad than your symptoms.

I think we should drop back to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and floatation-REST as our first attempts for ADHD and Aspergers and insomnia. CBT is a particular sticking point in insomnia: bad sleep hygiene is terrible, and parents are horrible parents for forcing their kids into bed. Go to bed even if you're not tired? Fuck you, mom. If you're not asleep in 10 minutes, GET OUT OF BED. Don't do other things in bed. Wake your ass up in the morning; if you're tired, too bad. Get up. When you're sleepy, you'll sleep at night.

So yeah. Let's eject this ADHD magic pill bullshit. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, physical activity, and flotation-REST to start; move up to lighter drugs (lighter side effects, even if less effective), and then into the heavy shit (methylphenedate, adderall, drug cocktails). Throwing methylphenedate down someone's throat as a first option is like launching MIRV nukes three seconds after someone stands and shakes his fist at the UN table.

A modern Richard Guindon cartoon that best represents this Slashdot story ... an urban legend ... [1998, archived] essay on teachers' and students' increasingly virtual role in a tech society ... a mad hunt for the original 1963 New Yorker cartoon that started it all ... and an ugly mouse squeak toy.

I read somewhere that some humans can actually play perfect checkers. When you think about it, there aren't really that many possible moves. not anywhere close to chess anyway. I'm not sure if it's factually correct that the best players can play perfectly, but this reference says that the reigning champion hasn't lost a game in 40 years. That's pretty impressive.

This is not much to go on but slide 13 has a bit on the vortex development:

http://fire.pppl.gov/FPA12_Richardson_GF.pdf

This thesis though should hit the sweet spot:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~jgregson/images/JamesGregsonMAScThesis.pdf

Cthulu is not evil, just amoral or uncaring.

And little microorganisms: http://science.ubc.ca/news/697

You only want to do the symbolic gesture, cause you dont actually want to give up your A/C, your furnace, your comfortable house outside the city the requires a commute, your high tech toys.

You are an unethical and dishonest debater, trying to create a false dichotomy. I drive a car that gets 50mpg easily. It is big enough, safe enough and fast enough to serve my purposes and gets me from A to B comfortably. Contrast that with someone who drives a 12mpg suv as a single occupant commuter vehicle and who almost never uses 95% of the space or capability. That is waste.

Consider the CIRS building at the University of British Columbia. It is a net producer of energy, and a net consumer of CO2. Consider passive houses, that consume 90% less energy than a regular house and yet cost about the same as a regular house when components are built in a factory. When such technologies are available, it is waste not to use them.

http://www.ubc.ca/okanagan/fccs/about/links/resources/arthistory/what.html

Professionals use professional equipment like MATLAB or Solidworks. I know, it's not 1851 Moby Dick, we use computers for this shit now. But you have to know HOW to use it, and when.

Best practices in Engineering are to use two computers and two different programs (if possible, using two different architectures and OSes). You then check to see if your first-order approximation was about the same.

So your hand calculations give you a rough idea, then the computers will give you the precision. You then round up to the next size. Otherwise you get things like Cave-On-Foods. Computers give you the exact answer to the question you asked, which isn't always the question you MEANT to ask.

That's explained in the last half of your last year.

The average person will gladly lie, cheat, and steal (or worse), and is only stopped by immediate negative consequences for those actions. The average person should not be trusted - they'd take everything you had if they reasonably believed they could get away with it forever.

That is an argument that leads to fascism via technocracy. If it really were true we would never have developed as a civilization because the one thing necessary for civilization to work is trust. Not trust based on some version of hellfire and brimstone but the trust that while men are imperfect, we are fundamentally good-natured.

Take a look at his research interests and recent publications. It appears he might know a thing or two about it.

These days, the traditional role played by a discipline (more accurately, the role that people who probably have no actual knowledge of a discipline assume that it has played) means very little. I don't know anything about Forestry, but I know enough about academia to say that if people or departments think they can carve out a new niche for themselves even in a seemingly unrelated area of research, they will. It means more money and even the survival of the discipline as a whole.

In my own area (chemical engineering), bio this and that has been hot for years. Now we're all going crazy for energy applications like fuel cells, solar cells, and photocatalysis. Only 10% or so of the faculty members in my department work on "traditional" chemical engineering topics.

On human interaction in teaching (physics in college in fact), check out this 2.5 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg . A great study on how this leads to more learning than lecturing is this article from the journal Science: "Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html . Briefly, they compared 2 novice physics instructors who were trained in cognitive science (and thus how people learn) and who taught with a variety of non-lecture methods to an experienced, well-regarded lecturer. The students of the novice instructors had two standard deviations more learning. Note that the third author is a Nobel Laureate, U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching), and currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education. For more on these methods, see "Don't Lecture Me," http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/ . This work deserves to be more widely known.

The Canadians walked away from Kyoto; shall we ask if they, too, are anti-science?

Your unspoken assumption that Canadians walked away from Kyoto for scientific reasons is a neat summary of all your other unspoken assumptions, and a neat proxy for how wrong you are on them as well. There's a nice summary of the actual situation here: http://www.politics.ubc.ca/fileadmin/user_upload/poli_sci/Faculty/harrison/Canada_US_august.pdf

At least in physics there is a HUGE body of evidence that telling is basically not teaching, be it lectures or videos. That is, one must confront student misconceptions and more generally understand how people learn. We don't learn deeply by watching. Seriously, what elite athlete learned by watching and listening?

Try out these links:

"Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/

"Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html

"Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (the author is both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. University Professor of the Year; he's currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education)

It is a sad commentary that methods that have rigorously been shown to work, like http://modeling.asu.edu/ , could really use more funding when Khan gets such funding on just the publicity.

At least in physics there is a HUGE body of evidence that telling is basically not teaching, be it lectures or videos. That is, one must confront student misconceptions and more generally understand how people learn. We don't learn deeply by watching. Seriously, what elite athlete learned by watching and listening?

Try out these links:

"Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/

"Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html

"Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (the author is both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. University Professor of the Year; he's currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education)

It is a sad commentary that methods that have rigorously been shown to work, like http://modeling.asu.edu/ , could really use more funding when Khan gets such funding on just the publicity.

Well done Russia. Finally some competition in space research area.

Here in this reality, there's never been a lack of competition - the ESA, among many others, has been launching research birds for decades. Hell, even Canada has launched a small space telescope.
 

Maybe this will also get NASA some badly needed funds.

NASA has plenty of funds. What NASA doesn't have is consistently competent management, accounting, or engineering. Yes, engineering. If they don't do their jobs rights, including cost and risk estimation and development planning, then the others can't do theirs either. (Yes, bean counting is part of engineering.) Exacerbating the impact of NASA's inability to consistently and reasonably project cost and schedule is Congress and the general public insisting that each and every NASA project be groundbreaking and cutting edge, be on budget and on schedule, and have a 100% success rate. (In the real world, you get to pick two as the saying goes.)
 
When you expect an agency to accomplish three impossible things before breakfast (and NASA is nearly unique among US government agencies in this respect) - you're setting the stage for problems. It shouldn't surprise anyone therefore when problems regularly occur.

• Practices and conclusions based on objective data rather than—as is frequently the case in education—anecdote or tradition. This includes using the results of prior research, such as work on how people learn.
• Disseminating results in a scholarly manner and copying and building upon what works. Too often in education, particularly at the postsecondary level, everything is reinvented, often in a highly flawed form, every time a different instructor teaches a course. (I call this problem “reinventing the square wheel.”)
• Fully utilizing modern technology. Just as we are always looking for ways to use technology to advance scientific research, we need to do the same in education.

At best, Khan Academy only does the third of these.

• Practices and conclusions based on objective data rather than—as is frequently the case in education—anecdote or tradition. This includes using the results of prior research, such as work on how people learn.
• Disseminating results in a scholarly manner and copying and building upon what works. Too often in education, particularly at the postsecondary level, everything is reinvented, often in a highly flawed form, every time a different instructor teaches a course. (I call this problem “reinventing the square wheel.”)
• Fully utilizing modern technology. Just as we are always looking for ways to use technology to advance scientific research, we need to do the same in education.

At best, Khan Academy only does the third of these.

Actually, I believe that after the Big Bang but before the first galaxies, there was a rather long period which were know as the dark ages".

You can see radiation from the big bang, but you can't see the light. Ever. The big bang itself didn't make any light. Photons simply couldn't exist in those conditions.

I think this is the research paper in question:
http://finance.sauder.ubc.ca/~kaili/llz_MS.pdf

I only skimmed it but I can't find anything to say they determined the testosterone levels by anything other than age.
Why they even talk about hormones I'm not sure, from my reading they just seem to be looking at age.

It's as if the author believed that as long as every time they talked about testosterone as long as they used the phrase "testosterone levels, proxied by age" then it made it correct.
I counted varients on that phrase turning up 13 times in that paper.

Have I missed something or would that paper have been vastly vastly more accuratly named if they're called it "Deal or No Deal: Age and the Mergers and Acquisitions Game"

If you teach physics, I hope that you've looked at what Physics Education Research (PER) has done. These physicists have shown how to teach this difficult subject much more effectively. One nice starting point is "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf .The author, Carl Wieman, has a Nobel Prize, was Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities) and is currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President (for science education). If you're into video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI is quite good (the lecturer, Eric Mazur, is "only" a full professor at Harvard; of course there are many pubs too). Finally, the general portal to PER is http://www.compadre.org/per/ .

As a college professor (economics), I take pretty seriously the work of physicists like Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001, U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities), 2004; and currently associate science adviser to the President) and Eric Mazur (Harvard). They and many other serious physicists have carefully studied how students learn in their field. They've found that things like clickers, correctly used, and simulations can indeed aid learning in deep ways. Here's some links to summaries of their work: http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf (Mazur -- short, in the journal Science) http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (Wieman -- longer) Here's a key part of the primary literature; it has more than 1,000 cites: http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf (the most frequent method of "interactive engagement" is clickers). Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.

Idiot. There are no Chinese Yuan in the SDR basket (http://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/SDR.html). The Yuan is not a freely tradeable currency, so it can't be a part of the basket. It's 11% JPY -- Japanese Yen, that is.
And it's not based on GDP, but on some intransparent calculation by the IMF (http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/sdr.HTM), which is politically influenced, simply because the IMF was set up by the US and is not a truly independent, international institution.
You got two of the most basic facts of international finance wrong. Stop being such a smart ass.

There is already a liquid mercury telescope at UBC in Canada - the Large Zenith Telescope. With a 6 meter diameter, it's one of the largest telescopes in the world. Of course, it's limited to viewing only a narrow range of angles near the zenith, due to gravitational constraints. Even so, it was stunningly cheap compared to other telescopes of its size, and provides decent value for money.
http://www.astro.ubc.ca/lmt/lzt
If freezing the mercury would help, you can be sure they thought of it. It's not just freezing to provide a fixed surface, though. As others noted, the surface reflectivity of a metal changes on freezing, and there are too many geometric distortions associated with the phase change so that polishing would be required after freezing (just like for glass). Furthermore, metals have large thermal expansion coefficients, so a metal-based mirror (whether frozen mercury or frozen silver, etc.) would need extraordinarily good thermal management, which is difficult to provide in a structure which is necessarily open to the atmosphere. Glasses are used for telescope mirrors partly because they have much fewer thermal issues (many other advantages, also).

the BC of comparable Google renown is the Canadian province British Columbia, which isn't exactly a university

However, believe it or not, there is a University of British Columbia, so there could well be professors living somewhere in British Columbia who could be described as "BC Professor".

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~heidrich/Papers/EG.04.pdf
"Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System".

500 megapixels for $1600 versus scanning-back cameras that cost tens of thousands. Make the error correction a little bit simpler by rotating the scanning back ninety degrees for four 4-color shots (16 exposures), overlaying them, and taking the median pixel values, at the expense of some resolution.

There are four considerable challenges here, though, not just one, and this project could stall on any of them:
Image capture
Projection determination & georeferencing
Digitizing features & establishing topology
Geocoding

You mean like this? http://cyclevancouver.ubc.ca/ Yes, google really should do something like that as an integrated feature of google maps. (As useful as that tool is, it sometimes tells you to bike sideways off bridges.)

Towards the end of the web page they say that they stitched all the images together using this software.
I personally use this free program for photo stitching, but if you look around with google, you can find plenty of them to use.

Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!

Oh, yeah? Where's your badge?

I posted the above anonymously by accident. Anyways, I forgot that for the van den Doel paper, there was also an on-line Java applet demonstrating the technique:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~kvdoel/icad2004/

Download the paper. Check the citations. Right there, several previous papers on the topic of liquid sound synthesis.

For example, this one from 2004 which I'd read previously is cited:

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~kvdoel/publications/prep04.pdf

I'm sure this is awesome research. Don't ruin it by surrounding it in claims that are not true.

(It seems it's just the Slashdot summary saying this, I don't see any claims of "first" in the article or the paper..)

How fast are they going relative to some arbitrarily fixed point in the universe?

I am also manipulating a soda container at 552 km/s (1.23M mph), relative to the CMB rest frame. Most highly trained soda operators are capable of this.

Yes, and if you continue such acceleration, there would be really serious time dilation. With constant 1-g acceleration the subjective time to go 100 light years is just over 9 years.

Having said that, I don't think that is how people will do long distance travel - the dangers of collisions is very strong. (Anything you collide with is basically turned into energy, a 1 kg rock would have the energy of a multi-megaton bomb.) Going to the stars will take either multi-generational ships or manipulating space time.

This concept was pioneered in the canadian MOST(Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) mission. MOST is a suitcase-sized satellite build on a modest budget but still achieved some significant scientific results. Kepler follows in its footsteps with a larger and more powerful implementation.

The software architect for MOST is Henry Spencer

> History will prove you a loony.

Not before history proves you to be unread in science.

The VM takes a ridiculous amount of time to start up

A quick test: On http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~harrison/Java/sorting-demo.html you'll find 16 applets [yay for algorithm animation]. It took "a few seconds" to load that page for me. Assuming _everything_ is JVM startup time, it's 0.25 seconds per applet. While that is slow, it's isn't exactly ludicrous speed; err... lack-of-speed.

it's really intrusive when it sits in your system tray and constantly announces its new updates.

Try the Linux version instead ;)

So for all the OSS advocates out there, stop and think for a minute before you bash Java applets.

I love them. In part for the prospect of 100% Free Software client side web applets. Also, I think they're just painful enough to code that you only do it if you have to*. At least, I haven't seen people do their entire site in a java applet.

What I have seen is the sorting algorithms demo, and an app which shows move sequences on a rubik's cube. I think both are reasonable candidates for apps delivered in a browser.

* whether that's an applet thing or a property of the core language, I don't know, but I have my own opinion.

Anyone remember this shit? http://axion.physics.ubc.ca/ppp-linux.html

No kidding. See this reference about engineering human-powered flight: http://www.mech.ubc.ca/~hph/faq.htm#14

"We have built our own test rig that measures power output of a pilot over a minute duration. We have plotted the results of numerous potential pilots against their weight. A successful candidate is one that falls above a power requirement curve (power vs. weight). ... We have had people vomit after these one-minute tests. In similar tests in the United States they have had one person have a mild heart attack."

And that's for one minute of (theoretical) flight... incredible.

The Initiative is already being rolled out. I'm at one of the first-round target schools in a department that won CWSEI funding, and have been involved in several of the curriculum-revision committees.

CWSEI is focused on undergraduate science education, both for science students and non-science students. The general plans is:
1. Articulate what we want students to learn
2. Figure out what they're actually learning
3. Fix things
4. Share everything that works with other department/schools

Step 1 has been pretty easy for the courses I've been involved with revising, although it can get pretty funny to see different schools of thought battling it out over what matters most (facts? ability to apply in novel situations? general "science" mindset? problem-solving?)

Step 2 is a bit of a nightmare, but is necessary to figure out if you're actually being effective or not (Step 2 & 3 are iterative until satisfactory, then progress to Step 4). How do you effectively test comprehension vs test taking-ability vs fact retention? It's a bit easier to fix the "Did we teach them or did they already know?" by doing before-and-after tests, but that still doesn't eliminate the keeners going out and self-teaching (no bad prof has ever defeated my desire to learn!)

Step 3 is also a challenge -- in big classes (Natural Disasters can have up to 400 students) it's almost impossible to have one-on-one interactions, they're undergrads so presumably parental-involvement isn't key for learning, the TA-hours to do good grading of neat projects is prohibitive, etc. This is where tech solutions come in: if everyone takes immediate multiple-choice quizzes throughout via clickers, or has to talk with their neighbours to decide on an answer, then we've got them interacting/thinking/talking inside class hours. ...kinda lame so far, but if you've got good ideas that fit within our ridiculous budget, I promise I'll try 'em out!

For Step 4, what works? U Colorado's physics department was where Carl started this idea, so they've got some pretty cool toys that help students practice concepts they heard in lecture even outside of lab sections. As for my department, no solutions yet...

Your memory seems fine: I've also seen a slowdown in hard drive capacity gains since 2001. It's still growing exponentially but at a slower rate (went from doubling every ~14 months to ~19).