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Nobody is forcing anyone in Eastern Europe to be criminal, that's a ridiculous claim. So many Gypsies in Eastern Europe live in poverty because those countries are, by European Union standards, quite poor themselves. A lot of people there live in poverty - some of them are Gypsies.

Poverty IS the major cause of crime.
There's no better proof of that than observing exact same practices as done by the poor and by the rich.
In the case of the poor it's a crime.
In the case of the rich, at worst it's a "legal issue". At best it's "aggressive and shrewd business practice".

And that's disregarding the epigenetic burden of generations of poverty (all them fun diseases that weren't really a burden on poor people before all food became cheap processed carbs and fats), inherited psychological trauma and downright segregational injury one might "luck into" by choosing to be born poor.
Particularly when choosing to be born into a poor country where such health issues will tend to be ignored, untreated or too expensive to treat - for much longer than in the rich countries.

Which is where you should look for that "forcing".
Much like with those stereotypes of belligerent Irish drunkards and criminals - the real cause for prejudice may actually be older prejudice from centuries ago.

We've been deploying autonomous attack vehicles for 70+ years. The V2 was autonomous. ICBMs are autonomous. Cruise missiles are autonomous. Barage balloons are autonomous. Even gps/laser guided bombs are autonomous. Radar/IR guided surface to air and AA missiles are autonomous

If you need a vehicle to fly to a place, dump a ton of munitions and fly back we can handle that pretty easily. Even Air to Air combat is now handled by AI. http://magazine.uc.edu/editors... There are no sensors that a human pilot will have that aren't already provided by the aircraft or could be adequately processed entirely locally without any opportunity for jamming.

It will also be nearly impossible to completely jam communication. And laser based communication would be impossible to jam beyond the horizon from the ground if the aircraft was at altitude. Just setup a relay network of autonomous drones communicating by laser. It's not like you're risking a pilot. And if something manages to take a shot at a relay, you have a new target.

It's strange how they don't mention the solutions of the 3-body problem explored in the 19th century by G W Hill: see e.g. "Hill's Lunar Equations and the Three-Body Problem": K R Meyer, D S Schmidt, Jnl of Differential Equations 1982, 44, 263-272 https://math.uc.edu/~meyer/jde82.pdf. Part of his work was one of the first things published in the American Journal of Mathematics, (G W Hill, in American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1878), pp. 5-26).

Over the course of your lifetime, Europe and America will have drifted about 20 feet further apart.

(Best estimate seems to be 5-10 cm/yr. Split the difference and multiply by 75 years; that's about 5.6 metres.)

here are my two algorithms for ncaa football and basketball.
http://homepages.uc.edu/~carrahle/rankFootball.py
http://homepages.uc.edu/~carrahle/ncaa.py
the first uses a hits model, so multi component ranking while the latter uses principle component analysis.
i agree, with the above comment 70-80 seems high. I actually went through a somewhat lengthy projection to latent space learning phase to try and better rank information about teams. instead of simply using win/loss through multiple years (also weighting time distance) i also used the full box scores such as rebounds, shots on, fouls etc for each player. And didnt come near that accuracy. My end conclusions is that especially for basketball, the teams are just too turbulent to be very consistently accurate with. none-the-less good luck. I think this is why we don't use PCA to seed bowl games in football, simply put, people are better at ranking.

here are my two algorithms for ncaa football and basketball.
http://homepages.uc.edu/~carrahle/rankFootball.py
http://homepages.uc.edu/~carrahle/ncaa.py
the first uses a hits model, so multi component ranking while the latter uses principle component analysis.
i agree, with the above comment 70-80 seems high. I actually went through a somewhat lengthy projection to latent space learning phase to try and better rank information about teams. instead of simply using win/loss through multiple years (also weighting time distance) i also used the full box scores such as rebounds, shots on, fouls etc for each player. And didnt come near that accuracy. My end conclusions is that especially for basketball, the teams are just too turbulent to be very consistently accurate with. none-the-less good luck. I think this is why we don't use PCA to seed bowl games in football, simply put, people are better at ranking.

"but nobody has died from Fukushima"
By that same definition, people smoking tobacco and breathing in asbestos right now have not died, so those substances are perfectly safe, right? That argument has worked for those respective industries for a while. What are you going to do when people smarten up to the delayed incubation trick? Just move to the next talking point, I suppose . . .

"From JUST West Virginia"
Because we all know that every state has identical levels of coal mining . . . But, really, mining? Because we all know that there are absolutely no risks to uranium mining. Oh, and there are absolutely no additional risks to residents close to uranium mines that residents close to coal mines don't have to worry about . . .

(money laundering and dope dealing going on with it)

You mean exactly like with the real, traditional, cold hard cash?

There are laws and procedures to prevent using traditional cash for such things. Go to your bank and deposit $50,000 in small bills. If you are not a retailer, expect trouble. That's exactly why Bitcoin is taking off like a rocket among criminals - payments are anonymous.

Yet another example is taxation. Imagine that I designed a gizmo for you, and you paid me 100 bitcoins for that. As a contractor, I should include this revenue into my estimated taxes. But what is the value of those bitcoins, and at what time do we calculate them? That would be similar to getting paid in Canadian dollars, Yens, etc.

Alternatively, we can treat them as a security transaction, as if you paid me for my work with 100 shares of a certain company. Perhaps that's how it should be treated. But the catch is that this security is not registered! Even then you have to pay the tax on it, at its current value - which can't be determined because there is no established market for it. Your own pet exchange in the basement, where you dial whatever prices you want, doesn't count - that's why securities laws exist.

But on top of that, why would I want to pay taxes if I can get away with it? The bitcoins are tied to a number of my "account" that nobody can associate with me.

Government-issued currency has fewer problems of this sort. In essence, by using it you submit to a certain level of monitoring, but in return you are given certainty. For most people it's a trade they don't even think twice about. I'm not concerned that the government knows that my paycheck cleared. I will report it in my tax papers anyway. But the guy who sells drugs to homicidal maniacs ought to be concerned. An ideal libertarian currency - like Bitcoin - produces the same effects that humans discovered over the course of thousands of years that we know currencies. Bitcoin will also repeat all the mistakes of earlier currencies that it can technically do, just because there are always people who benefit from doing so and people who are just sheep ready for fleecing.

OpenBSD IPSEC audit effort http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/opendoku/doku.php?id=start

This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/022,089, filed Dec. 22, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,386,464 which is a division of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/780,486, filed Feb. 17, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,194,419 which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/348,355, filed Jul. 7, 1999 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,916), which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/962,997, filed Nov. 2, 1997 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,369).

A continuation application gets the same precedence date as the original patent but validity time from the date of acceptance. The Wikipedia article referenced, whilst lacking some citations seems to be correct (at least it's current version) as you can verify against the the Patent office FAQ

This is an extremely evil patent.

University of Cincinnati article about frog foam and photsynthesis.

Does. I'm actually the president of an organization that prominently supports and promotes free software (Laboratory for Recreational Computing).

http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/

You Ohioans have it all wrong. A Laboratory for Recreational Computing ( http://larc.unt.edu/ ) should have at least a dozen high end workstations with dual monitors dual booting Windows XP/Vista and a big screen TV with a couch, PS3, and 360.

Does. I'm actually the president of an organization that prominently supports and promotes free software (Laboratory for Recreational Computing). http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/

I've been using git to track and propagate my various linux/osx home directories. I use it because I can maintain different branches (one for each machine), and propagate changes rather than whole files between them. This is very nice for config files where the content may be very similar between machines, but differ in a few areas here and there. I maintain files on 6 different machines, and have a master public server I use to push and pull from. If I change a file and commit it, and want to propagate the change to all my other machines, I use this script which I hacked up to do it for me:
http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/~jeremy/propagate-commit.sh

It takes as its argument a commit id, and will propagate the commit to all other branches in your repo. I'm sure it can be modified to work differently and/or be more configurable.

Performance wise, git is fast as hell. And it compresses object very well. Plus you get versioning of course ;)

http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/~adam/multicore.PNG Why is this such a big deal...?

The SEC is aware of the problem and has given indications that it may reconsider its position heretofore that canceling a planned trade made under the "safe harbor" (under (10b5-1(c)(1)(i)(B)(3)) does not constitute insider trading, even if the person was aware of the inside information when canceling the trade.

This safe-harbor provides, in pertinent part, that "[t]he contract, instruction, or plan ... [must] not permit the person to exercise any subsequent influence over how, when, or whether to effect purchases or sales; provided, in addition, that any other person who, pursuant to the contract, instruction, or plan, did exercise such influence must not have been aware of the material nonpublic information when doing so."

There are THREE important things to keep in mind about this:

(1) the "loophole" is created by the SEC's interpretation of the rule, not the rule itself;

(2) either the rule or the SEC's interpretation may be changed at nearly any time with relative ease; and

(3) given the right facts, a court may yet find persons using these directed-selling plans guilty of insider trading, in spite of the SEC's interpretation of the rule, if that person violated the substance and spirit of the separate Rule 10b-5 (which is the rule prohibiting insider trading). This article provides readers with a good introduction to the subject.

I thought it was more to do with the orbitals of the electrons rather than the atomic number of the atom, and the orbitals of the electrons depend on the crystalline arrangement of atoms, and whether they have been ionised or not. Even different ions of the same atom will have a different
  absorption spectrum and emission spectrum. So no atom has one unique color, but may have a series of wavelengths of light that it can emit, which our sight would perceive as a mix of red, green or blue wavelengths, but provide us with a specific visual interpretation (eg. greenish-blue).

while the wall street weenies, the lawyers and the "environmental education" majors held as paragons of success?

http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/34ActRls/rule17f-2.html

That is what the SEC says in their insider trading page,but the actual rule is 10b5-2 which enumerates those covered other than the insider as his or her spouse, parent, child, or sibling;. However I was not aware that the Supreme Court has tilted the playing field to the SEC by creatively interpreting 10b to allow the SEC to create a duty between the insider and the person who receives the information, not the duty between the insider and the shareholders of the company. This is a stupid ruling because it creates a burden on the receiver of information where they might not know the information is material or non-public but still be held criminally responsible for acting on the information. This flies is the face of both the letter and intent of the law which is to ensure that those with a fudiciary responsibility to the investors and in possession of material inside information do not disclose that information non-uniformly or enrich themselves personally by acting on the information before it is disclosed. Btw if you are interested the ruling it is here.(PDF)

There's an interesting treatment of pretty much exactly this question in Section III (OBJECTIVE METHODS OF DETERMINING THE FAIR MARKET VALUE OF AN ASSET AND SUBJECTIVE ALTERNATIVES) of The Extreme Home Renovation Giveaway: Constructive Justification for Tax-Free Home Improvements on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Two rather old cases are presented where the IRS did allow a subjective valuation of prize income rather than the actual fair market value.

In addition to that excellent explanation, I would like to add that making yogurt at home is very simple. Here is a site that gives the details: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/yogurt _making/YOGURT2000.htm. Here is another informative article: http://homecooking.about.com/library/archive/bldai ry9.htm

So why on earth is it so hard for The Feds to track who purchases larges quantities of these securities before such solicitations are made

They're offshore. There have been warnings in the UK about these scams, which mention that many of the stocks touted in the spams are restricted stocks in the US, and cannot be sold on the US markets but can be sold to unscrupulous and unsuspecting foreigners alike under Regulation S.

It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.

Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend < 1/2 liter batches to start) and to share your successes with friends while they're fresh.

--MarkusQ

It was about a year ago and a quick scan through my bookmarks failed to turn up a link, though I did find bookmarks to a few things he had linked to here and here which should help you get started. I'll post back if I come across the blog itself.

Cheese making, from the little I dabbled in it, seems to be quite fun. Be prepared to make some mistakes (I'd recommend --MarkusQ

This is by far the best cheese making page I've ever come across on the net.

as credible as Timecube or David Icke.

Here's the damn Presidential Executive Order in question. Published on the WhiteHouse.Gov website itself.

The directive itself is rather opaque, reffering to 13(b)(3)(A) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended (15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A)), but reading those sections reveals that they do in fact say what it is claimed the directive says - that the President was granting the Director of National Intelligence the Presidential Authority to immunize companies from Securities Exchange laws that they can LIE TO THE PUBLIC and legally deny that they did what they did on National Security grounds.

It seems that the remaining 29% who still support president Bush are suffering from some pretty severe cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive Dissonace: "People who are involuntarily exposed to information that increases dissonance are likely to discount that information, either by ignoring it, misinterpreting it, or denying it.

-

This is NOT the IRS playing the media, this is based on a company filing a report with the SEC... following the legally established rules (see 13(l)) that the company must "disclose to the public on a rapid and current basis such additional information concerning material changes in the financial condition or operations..."

I haven't heard any complaints from my step-sister. She was required to get Adobe Creative Suite, Form Z, and some other software, but it was all under student pricing.

When I was an undergrad, DAAP students were the kids who you'd never see because they were constantly in studio and pulling all nighters. It seems things don't change much, as my stepsister is constantly working on stuff. Even during the holidays when the family was all home for break, she'd be using her laptop and working on projects.

My stepsister's figured out how to work the support issue - there's an Apple store in the local mall, so students tend to take their laptops in, and they all have Apple care plans. Admittedly, she's figured out how to work the store reps (usually through her feminine charms) so that she's on her third PowerBook, getting her first one replaced for some wireless and dead pixel issues, and I'm not sure how she talked them into replacting her TiBook for an AlBook . . .

Support is also addressed by the fact that every student has a laptop, so there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the studio and the dorms among students . . .

I haven't heard any complaints from my step-sister. She was required to get Adobe Creative Suite, Form Z, and some other software, but it was all under student pricing.

When I was an undergrad, DAAP students were the kids who you'd never see because they were constantly in studio and pulling all nighters. It seems things don't change much, as my stepsister is constantly working on stuff. Even during the holidays when the family was all home for break, she'd be using her laptop and working on projects.

My stepsister's figured out how to work the support issue - there's an Apple store in the local mall, so students tend to take their laptops in, and they all have Apple care plans. Admittedly, she's figured out how to work the store reps (usually through her feminine charms) so that she's on her third PowerBook, getting her first one replaced for some wireless and dead pixel issues, and I'm not sure how she talked them into replacting her TiBook for an AlBook . . .

Support is also addressed by the fact that every student has a laptop, so there's a lot of knowledge sharing in the studio and the dorms among students . . .

check the university of cincinnati's design school http://www.design.uc.edu/

they did is 5-6 years ago when i was an adjunct prof. there was bitching, there are broken laptops and theft, but it's gone pretty well. special purchasing deals were worked out for the students with apple and dell and with software companies.

Isn't new genetic information what natural selection uses to drive natural evolution's development of new life forms?

In short, no. Natural selection merely alters the gene frequencies within a population. Indeed, if a new mutation is beneficial to an organism, natural selection will tend to favour that mutation and increase its presence within the population. Natural selection also works to alter the frequencies of existing genes, as seen during the industrial revolution in England with moths (explaination here)

Above poster said University of Cincinnati, not University of Dayton. Search for
UC in google and the first entry you will see will be University of Cincinnati,
the Bearcats. http://www.uc.edu/

UC = University of Cincinnati, at least per the domain registry. www.uc.edu

University of Kentucky researchers have discovered a way to reduce the overall power consumption of transistors

Of course, that made me curious enough to go look up the y-combinator.

Found this:
http://www.ece.uc.edu/~franco/C511/html/Scheme/yco mb.html

My head hurts...

http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~guptaa0/barry.mov

Two of my law school profs used these (although it was before I arrived). They co-wrote a paper on it called "Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning".

Their experience was part of a NY Times story in early 2004. (Story text from law school to avoid registration.)

If anyone wants more information on Prof. Caron and Dr. Gely's experience with these you can read the aforementioned paper.

- Neil Wehneman

Evolution on a grand scale has been unobservable not unproven because frankly no one lives that long (well, maybe except for Dick Clark). On a smaller scale, evolution has been observed. The English Peppered Moth is one example of micro evolution. But not all things in the science require direct observation in order to be proven. In the absence of direct observation there is indirect observation. Usually though, more indirect evidence than direct evidence must be gathered to prove something.

For example, Einstein's general theory of relativity postulates that things traveling at higher speeds are moving in slower time reference. Indirectly, the general theory explains both the sun's corona during an eclipse and Mercury's irregular orbit, but until the invention of both atomic clocks and high speed jet travel, this behavior was unobservable.

Perhaps the SEC just hasn't enforced it for their case? The law is on the books, let me find it for you right now.

Perhaps they complied with the law but decided in spite of it still stayed private?

It is Section XII(g) of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Linky.

Good ol' "Interstate Commerce"-related laws.

I don't think I used the word "open" so I didn't really mean anything "by 'open'" because...I didn't use "open." It's the same thing that convinced Google(ooo, on topic) to make an IPO. Here's a quote from some article on the Google thing:

``It's a terrible place to be in because you get all the disadvantages of being a public company and none of the advantages,'' said Scott Spector, an attorney with Fenwick & West in Palo Alto. ``I can't imagine the company wanting to be in that situation.''

I hope you are wrong. I don't think we can function as a collective group of shut-ins, plus that sounds rather depressing to me. It's not to say that one cannot build relationships in a virtual world but I believe they are fundamentally different.

It's really a case of the law of unintended consequences; I don't pretend to understand the human genome nor is there any scientific evidence that I know of from the scientific community regarding a potential consequence but for the sake of argument...

To me it doesn't seem unreasonable to suspect that on a genetic level we require direct human interaction for survival. Obviously, millenia of evolutionary selection promoted the interaction of human beings. Societies formed because they gave people a better chance to survive, now what if there were chemical interactions occuring as well. What if, over that time, Homo sapiens became chemically dependant on other Homo sapiens. There is already evidence suggesting that "" women with semen in their reproductive tract felt happier than women without"; there is more going on here than meets the eye and as both a society and as geeks it's something that needs to be watched.

Interesting response but I hope for all our sakes you are wrong with the direction where are taking...

Actually hackers were very smart, they went for a stupid public institution that still uses social security numbers as student ids and doesn't have the money nor the brains (you'd think a university would at least have that) to protect students' and employees' information. Why bother and go for commercial institutions like banks or why mess with FBI and DOD when you have hundreds of thousands of SSN protected by idiots in IT who couldn't find better jobs in the private sector.
Note: UC just spent millions building shopping and recreation areas around campus but they couldn't afford enough to protect their data. If you need to see your and public money mismanaged and thrown away, just go to UC.

I went to the University of Cincinnati and studied Mechanical Engineering. UC and many other engineering colleges have co-op programs where students work every other quarter in some kind of engineering office. I was able to easily pay all of my educational expenses. Also, after graduation many employers look favorably on the 6 or 7 quarters of work experience.

I did live at home, so my expenses did not include room and board.

Since then, college tuition has gone up a great extent. But a cursory check of tuition at UC (less than $3K/qtr for state residents) shows that I could still go there and pay my own way by working in the co-op program.

how much publicly-funded researchers should be required to disclose - should they be allowed to generate 'closed-source' solutions at the taxpayers' expense?

It's worth noting that, while it makes sense that taxpayer-funded research should generate 'open-source' solutions, federal law dictates otherwise.

The Bayh-Dole Act was passed 25 years ago, which dictates:

Universities were encouraged to collaborate commercial concerns to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federal funding.

It was clearly stated that universities may elect to retain title to inventions developer through government funding.

Universities must file patents on inventions they elect to own.

So in other words the government has dictated since 1980 that government-funded research should not produce open-source solutions, necessarily, as the results of research are to be considered private-sector profit-generating centers for the host universities. (The implications for the 'next BSD4.3 TCP/IP stack', or similar advanced research, are obvious.)

Anyway, regarding the 'hockey stick' controversy, Tim Lambert's weblog is worth a read.

The actin-myosin fibers in the muscle run on ATP, but the muscle cell generates this itself. The fuel used by the cell is carbohydrates and fats, which is turned into energy (ATP) for the fibers and other processes. The energy-generating process can be either anaerobic (fermentation) or aerobic (respiration). For more information, look here.

Watch this video for 'corporativism' http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~guptaa0/barry.mov

For anybody who is interested, here's a theory (bottom of the page): "one theory says the moon formed when a big, molten chunk of crust was knocked/blown off from the rest of the planet". And much more info about it.

Here is a diagram showing the orbit of a typical near-Earth asteroid.

Google knows all.

I found the gspot here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

In words: stick your finger in about 2 inches and curl it upward. now I finally know why chicks like it doggy style so much!!!

I'm sure Xerox PARC pre-dates all of this by a couple of years.