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Here's the downside to melted-permafrost agricultural area:

Insects may possibly more-than-negate any increase in crop fertility as their populations explode due to warmer climates.

See also the great epsilon shortage.

"U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200707.html#20070702

"Dozens of employers asked to compare American engineers to their much-vaunted colleagues from India and [Red China] agreed that 'in education, training, quality of work, you name it, in every which way, Americans are better'. Even the best schools in those countries 'don't hold a candle to our best schools.', he continues. Newly hired American university graduates 'become productive within 30 days or so. If you hire a graduate of an Indian university, it takes between 3 and 6 months for them to become productive.'"
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200801.html#20080104

"Dynamic" US engineers vs. "transactional" foreign engineers.
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051213
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200512.html#20051227
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200601.html#20060110

Gifted individuals account for only 5% of H-1B visa holders at most, so cutting the numbers of H-1B visas from the current 110K to 2,000 or fewer per year and auctioning them off monthly to the highest bidders on the basis of compensation would improve the likelihood that the best and brightest would be welcomed. Cutting them to 1,000 per year would begin to bring back the huge pool of unemployed and under-employed US citizen science and tech workers toward full employment, and thus boost the economy. If all else fails, we should set the bar by conducting multiple IQ tests and admit those whose average scores exceed 160 (or aggregate ACT score above 34 or aggregate SAT score above 1560 or "new" aggregate SAT score above 2100 or aggregate GRE above 1615).
http://www.kermitrose.com/econ200705.html#20070513
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/NotBestAndBrightest3.txt

"the mean literacy test score for U.S. adults (272) was 2 points above the mean for all adults in the 20 country survey (270)... Larger, statistically significant, literacy gaps between us and them unfold when you separate immigrant from native-born test takers, as is done in 17 high income countries surveyed by ETS. U.S. natives scored 8 points above the average native of the 17 high income countries. U.S. immigrants scored 16 points below the average immigrant in the 17 countries." --- Edwin S. Rubenstein 2005-12-22 _V Dare_ "The stupid American? Think again"
http://www.vdare.com/rubenstein/051222_nd.htm

It's impossible to make a case that executives should continue turning their backs on some of the best science, tech, engineering and math talent in the world and instead hire lower-quality, low-skill, cheaper labor from over-seas.

"I've mentioned the TIMSS test, for instance, which showed that if [Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming] -- none of which has a substantial under-class -- had been treated as separate nations, each of them would have been out-scored only by Singapore (professor David Berliner, 'Our Schools Versus Theirs', Washington Post, 2001 January 28)... This [both the TIMSS and PISA tests] once again shows, tragically, that the U.S.A. is not doing enough to bring up the educational performance of its under-class. But if one takes the white score as 'main-stream', the U.S.A. would rank 7th out of 27, instead of 18th."
http://www.k

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years.

The money goes to salaries of the executives. A cool half million dollars or more for the CEO to be exact. I wonder how productive should they be to justify such salaries? That money can easily go to hire 5 top notch C++ coders...

Did the CEO help broker deals that generated the $66 million, or did the coders? If the executives were able to talk Google into a deal that brings in $66mil, surely they are worth $.5mil

Welcome to reality, where paying executives and paying coders is not an either/or proposition. In any substantive organization you need people creating the product and you need people monetizing the product. Take away either aspect and you have a poorly-funded organization that, let's face it, won't be able to churn out as much cool stuff because the coders will have to spend most of their time working at jobs to pay for their hobby time.

I know this is rare on /., but a sports comparison: Tiger Woods' endorsement deals pay him about $100mil a year. Sounds obscene compared to what "associates" in the retail locations are making or *gasp* the $6/month (or whatever the number is) that little Asians are getting paid. However, according to this paper (sorry it's a PDF), his indiscretions have cost $5-12bil in wealth. (The numbers are in line with another report that stated Nike's estimated Tiger-driven revenues are roughly 10 times what they pay him, but I couldn't find that link today.) So he gets paid a high amount, but generates much more revenue than that and that revenue is fairly directly attributed to his association.

So... let's say Mozilla pays their CEO $200k, which is a good salary in most parts of the country. And this lesser-paid, potentially lesser-connected CEO can't bring in a fat Google deal. Yay! You saved one third or a million dollars but it cost you tens of millions. Is that a good deal?

Bullshit to you - Its only revisionist if you fail to note I am talking about California - not the entire USA.

California required the use of oxygenates in its clean-air gasoline program in 1992 (and eliminations of lead additives). MTBE is an Ether which have been found to be cleaner than Alcohol additives. ethanol produces 54% more CO2 as global warming pollutant than gasoline. I clearly remember MTBEs sold to Californian voters as the solution to clean air emissions. www.arb.ca.gov/

"The California Air Resources Board predicted that the addition of oxygenates to fuels would reduce ozone precursors by 15%, reduce benzene emissions by 50% and reduce CO emissions by 11%; these reductions are equivalent to removing emissions from 3.5 million vehicles."
http://mtbe.ucdavis.edu/page2.html

Thanks, I found more details in this paper.

I'm convinced that some companies deliberately post jobs that they have no intention to fill just so they can say they can't find qualified candidates in the US.

Yes, that's exactly consistent with Norm Matloff's conclusions in his Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.

Everyone posting here with claimed expertise on this subject of skilled student (and H-1B, not H1-B) immigration in high-tech has already read that document, right? (I've worked in I.T. in Canada for the past decade; everything Matloff documented in the U.S. also applies here, in my own experience.)

>> it will take a HUGE amount of money
>> there is no more fucking money
>> pissed away 3 trillion dollars
>> This is money that we don't have.

You seem obsessed with money.
If you feel the strain that bad, do what I do... Dye Sublimation printers have only gotten cheaper and cheaper.
http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/2004-2005/how-to-counterfeit

.. We need open source software so that the voting process is transparent. I'll stick to any location I can find that still uses paper ballots otherwise. I also seem to remember these machines being trivially easy to tinker with.

I wanted to mod you insightful but I thought it may be better to let you know that an open source voting system already exists. A security analysis (pdf warning) has been performed and the ACT Electoral Commission has full details of the the behaviour of the code you can download.

You should also check out Open Voting Consortium because we are all friends so lets help each other be free.

You guys are ten years too late. Back in the 1970s, when computers ran on 8080 processors, the company Micro-Soft (which is what they were called when they were in Albuquerque before the name change to Microsoft and the move to Washington) had an operating system and a basic interpreter that were widely pirated, reverse engineered, and otherwise ripped-off. At the time, I was running an MITS Altair. This thing started with 256 bytes of RAM, but we eventually upgraded it to, I think, 8k bytes. After loading a few hundred bytes of boot code in using the panel switches, it would suck Micro-Soft's "Disk Basic" boot loader in off the first sector of the 8" floppy drive, then load the OS and BASIC interpreter. It was so nice when we finally burned that first boot loader into a ROM! By 1976, Bill was pissed about people ripping his wares, and he wrote a famous letter about it. This may have happened before you were wearing nappies, but you should still be embarrassed about laughing at the author. I now ROFL at your childish and uninformed antics!

Yes, but that wasn't MS-DOS. MS-DOS did not exist until Microsoft contracted with IBM to supply the OS for IBM's new PC (which Microsoft already had a contract to supply a Basic and a C compiler for). Microsoft bought the rights to what would become MS-DOS off of another company that had developed it as QDOS.
So, what you were using was something completely unrelated (except for the fact that it came from the same company) to what would later be MS-DOS. What Bill Gates was pissed about was people ripping off his (and Paul Allen's) Basic compiler. The original posters were correct and you are incorrect.

You guys are ten years too late. Back in the 1970s, when computers ran on 8080 processors, the company Micro-Soft (which is what they were called when they were in Albuquerque before the name change to Microsoft and the move to Washington) had an operating system and a basic interpreter that were widely pirated, reverse engineered, and otherwise ripped-off. At the time, I was running an MITS Altair. This thing started with 256 bytes of RAM, but we eventually upgraded it to, I think, 8k bytes. After loading a few hundred bytes of boot code in using the panel switches, it would suck Micro-Soft's "Disk Basic" boot loader in off the first sector of the 8" floppy drive, then load the OS and BASIC interpreter. It was so nice when we finally burned that first boot loader into a ROM! By 1976, Bill was pissed about people ripping his wares, and he wrote a famous letter about it. This may have happened before you were wearing nappies, but you should still be embarrassed about laughing at the author. I now ROFL at your childish and uninformed antics!

Look at the hypoxic zone in the Gulf Mexico, and tell me organic food is not more healthy.

Look at the meat-packing plants that moved away from large urban centres like Chicago and to small towns (and thus away from large city media and scrutiny), where illegal aliens are used as slave labour (and even recruited by company brass) mass slaughtering cattle sickened by corn on CAFOs), and tell me organic food is not more healthy.

The arguments against organic food are legion; it's a shame that this study lacks a larger view of the health benefits beyond nutrition of organic food.

11 or so years ago I worked for an MPEG encoder company called Heuris. We made a software-based MPEG encoder. This was back before the DVD boom, and one thing I did was spend a lot of time on digital video discussion lists (this was in the days before discussion boards and the SPAM boom) answering questions about MPEG and DVD.

This helped build goodwill toward me and us, helped establish our credibility, and led to sales and multiple press and analyst inquiries (which then led to articles which led to sales). Many of these posts were informative enough that they are still around (Google "mpeg heuris leary") or go to...

http://listproc.ucdavis.edu/archives/digvid-l/digvid-l.log9810/0190.html

You have to strike a balance between being commercial and being informative and knowing when it's OK to get a bit commercial.

Yes, I read your post. The problem (for you) is that you are not my only source of information on the subject.

It is NOT about pushing down wages.

It IS about hiring from a better candidate pool.

If that were true, they wouldn't have pressed the government to eliminate the "prevailing wage" stipulations. Moreover, it's demonstrably false.

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Mich.pdf

• 1. Applicant Screening on Skill SetsWhen the industry lobbyists started their first push for expansion of the H-1B program in 1997, they attributed the claimed labor shortage to an insufficient number of students in college computer science curricula.141 Yet when confronted with evidence such as we saw earlier that there is no shortage of programmers and engineers, i.e. no shortage of bodies, the industry changed their story. They have replied that it is not a shortage of such workers in general, but rather a shortage of workers with very specific skill sets. During the debate on ACWIA 98, for instance, the skill de jour was Java, a new programming language, and it was claimed that even though there may be lots of programmers in the U.S., there was a shortage of Java programmers. Other skills often cited by the industry as being in short supply were the SAP database language, the UNIX operating system, and various others.

• For example, an employer may find that it cannot hire the workers it needs because it cannot afford to pay the new, higher wages that scarcity has produced. From the perspective of an individual employer, this situation looks like a shortage: It can no
  longer find workers at the wages they have been paying. It is also a crisis for them. From the perspective of the economist
  and perhaps even of the industry, there is no shortage, just higher wages.

The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.

This is a lie. It's about big employers wanting to drive down wages. The issue has been settled. There is no shortage of IT workers. There is no shortage of skilled IT workers. There is a shortage of cheap IT labor.

People have been caught tailoring job listings to exclude Americans so that they can hire a cheap Indian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx--jNQYNgA
http://www.programmersguild.org/rir/pittsburghtribune_24june2007.html

The H1-B pool in the US tends to be higher quality, on average, than the general pool of all applicants in the US. So you get to automatically have a selection applied, and the pool is higher quality.

Repeating this bullshit doesn't make it the truth. You are not telling me that MIT, CMU, Rutgers, Pitt and any other first rate U.S. College/University doesn't produce graduates of the same or better caliber than the University of Calcutta.

LK

From http://dhc.ucdavis.edu/convocation/ESW07/Border%20Crossings.htm:

One of the significant negative repercussions presented by the large number of illegal immigrants is the burden it places on the health care system. Over half of all undocumented workers are uninsured, and use of emergency-room facilities by uninsured patients has led to a massive increase in uncompensated hospital costs. Current legislation legally binds hospitals to treat all patients in emergency situations; such legislation, however is severely under funded, such that, in last five years, more than 84 California hospitals have been forced to shut down due to financial strain.

Am I advocating denying them emergency-room services? No. But the longer we go without meaningful border security, the worse this problem will get. There's nothing mean-spirited about requiring people to live, go to school, and get their healthcare in the country of which they are actually citizens.

My first reaction when browsing through the article was disgust about the measure being used. I couldn't see the value of graphs about the number of symbols used by different file-system modules. So vfat doesn't use kprintf, woo-fucking-hoo!

But then, the Hamming distance and hierarchical structure struck a chord. Huh, so NFS, uses a very different set of symbols than, ext3. (ok, this may be biased by NFS using a metric fuckton of external symbols where ext3 uses less), which implies that NFS is pretty different, internally, than ext3.

So now, I agree that such a visualisation, while very abstract from the implementation details, can be pretty useful to have a (very) rough overview of the filesystems and their code structure. And I think we need more abstract overviews like this.

Reminds me of Code Swarm, which creates a movie of commits to a repository.

• a language extended from C99,
• a platform (hardware + OpenCL-aware device driver), and
• a compiler and runtime (which may decide where to send a compute task at run time).

If you're writing an OpenCL-aware device device driver for a GPU, you'll probably need to wait a bit for some open source examples. It's reasonably likely that there will be some included in Darwin (once updated for Snow Leopard).

Look to the LLVM project (sponsored heavily by Apple and others) for an open source compiler which will (if it doesn't already) know about OpenCL.

It sounds like you might be looking for a higher level API which allows you to more easily use the OpenCL, or possibly for language bindings to Java or Python perhaps? I suspect you'll see those coming along, once Apple ships Snow Leopard, and people have a chance to kick the tires, and then integrate LLMV into their tool chains, extend various higher level API, bridge to Java and whatnot.

The earliest high level API to take easy and broad advantage of OpenCL will probably be from Apple, of course. They'll likely provide some nicely automatic ways to take advantage of OpenCL without programming the OpenCL C API directly. As a Cocoa programmer, you'll be using various high level objects, maybe an indexer for example, which have been taught new OpenCL tricks. You'll just recompile your program and it will tap the GPU as appropriate and if available. The Cocoa implementation is closed source, but people will see what's possible and emulate it in various open source libraries, on other platforms, for Java and other languages.

Here's a good place to start: OpenCL - Parallel Computing on the GPU and CPU. Follow up with a google search.

I didn't know for sure, but my guess was that you are in Europe. But at least I don't need to tell you about introduced species, since your country is full of rabbits by now :-) And indeed you have lots of land.

Good that your government is reasonable at least in this respect. As I mentioned, I personally could live with laws like that, where you can get a permit as long as you can show a good reason. This implies that you trust your government to hold its end of the bargain; that's a tough sell in the USA.

I thought you still have some alligators there, but shooting those is a very risky proposition in itself (unless you have a BFG-9000 :-) Here you can have bears of several kinds, mountain lions, wild pigs, wolves (very few, they are protected) and coyotes - these can attack you personally, and such attacks are not uncommon. If you worry about plants then you have to deal with birds and squirrels of many types. If you need to protect livestock then you have squirrels again (cows step into their burrows and break legs) then coyotes and panthers; black vultures are known to attack newborn cattle but not much can be done about that because they are protected species. North America has several kinds of poisonous snakes, and if it becomes necessary to kill a snake (near or inside a house) it practically requires a firearm because you don't want to come close (unless you are a trained snake handler.) Rattlesnakes in CA are plentiful and require no protection. For a quick summary, bears and snakes are the most dangerous animals in the USA. Other animals, encountered in the wild, will prefer to run away from you if they can (and will attack you otherwise.) Unfortunately if those animals wander into a city their habits change, and then even a cowardly coyote can attack a child (that happens regularly in CA, one fatality so far, see the coyote link above.)

I didn't know for sure, but my guess was that you are in Europe. But at least I don't need to tell you about introduced species, since your country is full of rabbits by now :-) And indeed you have lots of land.

Good that your government is reasonable at least in this respect. As I mentioned, I personally could live with laws like that, where you can get a permit as long as you can show a good reason. This implies that you trust your government to hold its end of the bargain; that's a tough sell in the USA.

I thought you still have some alligators there, but shooting those is a very risky proposition in itself (unless you have a BFG-9000 :-) Here you can have bears of several kinds, mountain lions, wild pigs, wolves (very few, they are protected) and coyotes - these can attack you personally, and such attacks are not uncommon. If you worry about plants then you have to deal with birds and squirrels of many types. If you need to protect livestock then you have squirrels again (cows step into their burrows and break legs) then coyotes and panthers; black vultures are known to attack newborn cattle but not much can be done about that because they are protected species. North America has several kinds of poisonous snakes, and if it becomes necessary to kill a snake (near or inside a house) it practically requires a firearm because you don't want to come close (unless you are a trained snake handler.) Rattlesnakes in CA are plentiful and require no protection. For a quick summary, bears and snakes are the most dangerous animals in the USA. Other animals, encountered in the wild, will prefer to run away from you if they can (and will attack you otherwise.) Unfortunately if those animals wander into a city their habits change, and then even a cowardly coyote can attack a child (that happens regularly in CA, one fatality so far, see the coyote link above.)

One small problem with this: Stupid people waste money so many stupid people end up poor. How do you tell the wasteful stupid poor man from the unlucky or helpless poor man?

It's like with helping the poor. If you want to help, give the money to the poor. Not to some charity funds which will, or will not spend the money wisely.

The last time I gave a poor man on the corner $5 he quickly turned into the poor drunkard on the corner.

How do I know that if I give a person with programming skills $5 he won't turn around write some closed source code VB thing?

This never would have happened back in the good old days of the Princeton IAS machine. People took good care of their computers then. And kept track of them. You never would have caught a scientist taking one home.

And children respected their parents, and a dollar was a dollar, and we had wonderful music--not this modern stuff, it's noise, I tell you, just noise.

I absolutely think personal transit should be door-to-door. And I think it would be cost-effective.

Around 1990, Mark A. Delucchi at UC Davis did studies on the social costs of automobiles . These include things like health costs from accidents and air pollution, taxes for highway maintenance, time lost in traffic jams, and so on. His calculations showed Americans were spending somewhere between $1.6 trillion and $3.2 trillion each year for highway transportation. (Even counting just the actual direct monetary costs, he counted between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion.)

Now I understand that there is a lot of profit too, like all the money doctors, insurers, etc. are making off this stuff, but nobody argues we should encourage smoking so doctors can get richer (and who makes money from a traffic jam?).

I think we can use those trillions much more effectively than having combustion vehicles careening all over the place.

The old "there a shortage of skilled labor" myth.

First off, all we have is the anecdotal exposition of one person.

See my other posts on the skills shortage. I've posted this before:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/itaa.real.html [ucdavis.edu]

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/essay.html [fastcompany.com]

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?708&bus [upenn.edu]

http://techtoil.org/wiki/doku.php?id=articles:shortage_myth [techtoil.org]

All companies want are disposable interchangeable people who will work for nothing. This concept is doomed.

What, exactly, Bjarne, is the definition of a qualified developer? Developer of what? Software for what?

The entire concept of a "software engineer" or "developer" is meaningless. Take for example the statement "I am an Engineer". That statement is so broad to be meaningless. What type? Electrical? OK, what type? AC or DC? Electronic? Computer? Servo systems? Architectural electrical? Power grids?

Do you get my point?

Ok, now to developer. Database applications. Financial systems. HR. Medical systems. Commercial systems. Academic records. I've had a5-6 IT and development jobs and each domain was unique requiring becoming a psuedo expert in a few short months. Expecting a "one size fits all" approach to work is a recipe for failure.

So before we prescribe a solution, we need to determine what exactly we are trying to solve.

When I see slashdot stories like this, I'm always hopeful that someone will post links to relevant and insightful research information that I might use to glean more insight into how intelligence works. I do realize that this last sentence might not have been overly intelligent, but I do have a notion that the human brain (in fact all mammalian brains) function as several highly integrated processors might. I've tried finding discussions and research along these lines, but it would seem non-existent or not accessible to me.

When we think of the memory functions learned through H.M. and others, it seems like we are seeing the function of wetware applications and how they interact as well as what part of the brain provides processing for them... if you can think of the brain that way.

If anyone is interested, I also have a notion that much of the interlinking of processes can be represented as a large (read complex) cascade of FSM whose states are processed out of band of actual data. That is to say that the complex state of external processes drives or guides data processing in any given process inside the brain.

I probably sound like I'm talking out of an orifice, but thanks for the look up reference.

For others: Here is a search at UCDavis for Yonelinas

My displeasure with Palin in this case(like my displeasure with McCain in the "3 million dollar overhead projector" case) is not about spending policy, it is about disingenuous rhetoric.

I may or may not agree, depending on the instance; but I fully support people debating the merits of various projects, either in the broad sense of "what are the principles that guide what we do and do not pay for and how?" or in the narrow "is this particular project worth it or not?" sense. What I find objectionable, though, is people batting at strawmen rather than doing that.

In this case, the "Fruit fly research in Paris, France", as best I can tell, appears to have been Rep. Mike Thompson, D-California's $742,764 for research on the olive fruit fly. As it happens, that fly is a rather pernicious invasive species in California, where it has been spreading through the olive crop for the last decade or so. Personally, I'm of the opinion that large scale pest management, like national defence or law enforcement, is something that is very imperfectly, at best, handled by the private sector(if you are trying to wipe out an invasive species, a single farmer who attempts to free ride can serve as a harbor, etc. The feds have also achieved some notable successes in the area, particularly the Screwworm eradication starting in the 50s) That said, I'm totally open to disagreement with that, or the assertion that it should be handled through the department of agriculture rather than an earmark, or whatever. What annoys me is that, rather than an actual position on spending, we just got a soundbite and a snicker.

That is what annoys me. I agree that we spend too much, and we do a very poor job of examining our spending; but that is part of why exercises like this one annoy me. Soundbite sniping might be a good way to kill a particular program, especially if it has an amusing name, or involves something that you can get a knee jerk reaction to; but it is corrosive to any kind of national dialogue about spending. If we plan to reign in spending, we need leaders who will stand up and support reasons that underlie spending decisions, rather than working according to ad-hoc emotional appeals.

The Earth has been cooling for the last several years as solar activity has been lessening.

Not trolling, just pointing out scientific data that disputes that temperatures on earth are cooling. I will put the links here and everyone can form their own opinion. I personally had not seen this before so chances many others have not either.

(Note the chart was posted in 2006 yet does not show temperatures from 2000 - 2008. Some might find this disturbing, however I would suggest that the trend in the graph would suggest that the temperature is probably even warmer, not cooler.)

Here is the link to Global Temperature Anomalies.

This quote from the above link makes me believe these numbers are in reality more realistic as they increase the area of the earth covered over time. Mental note to self, if other posts about temperature are made, are they reducing sampling area or increasing sampling area by their choice of areas to cover.

After testing several cut offs, it was decided to exclude regions with a normalized sampling error of 0.5. The amount of global area excluded is greatest in the 19th century, when it is 20%-30%. For the 20th century the area excluded is 20% or less, and after 1950 it is less than 15%.

Even more on topic...

P.S. I came across the Temperature Anomaly chart from 1860 through 2000 in this document on Solar Current Feedback by M.A. Vukcevic MSc. I found his article on Evidences of a multi resonant system within solar periodic activity very interesting. Check out his conclusion where he states that while it cannot be conclusively proven, it should be a matter of further scientific consideration.

This reminded me of Albert Einstein's, spooky action at a distance which he studied and postulated on from 1935 - 1955 and Bell's theorem which he published in 1964, yet it was not until June 1997 when Dr. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues of the University of Geneva was able to show that a connection did exist between two photons over 6 miles apart.

I think it is amazing what Einstein (and many others even today) can prove with just mathematics. So often these great individuals come up with theories that are so out there, that they are derided by other jealous scientists. How many theories are here today that many are making fun of that will prove to be correct 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years from today?

Unlike scientists today, Einstein did not have access to the computers that we have today...imagine if he had, had access to computers.

Some believe that Bell's Theorem proves something, others believe it does not. One of the reasons cited is the inability of current science to monitor all the photons in the 1997 experiment, thus extra assumptions were required. I prefer not to look at it all as black or white, rather accept the results as phenomenal as they are with the caveat that more is left for science to explain. Who knows, perhaps it will tie in to String theory, Quantum theory of Gravity or some other theory related to either time, speed or mass.

All in all, its pretty interesting stuff IMO so I decided to share the links, enjoy.

Just get rid of it.

There is no labor shortage to begin with in the first place:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/itaa.real.html

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/essay.html

http://www.upenn.edu/researchatpenn/article.php?708&bus

http://techtoil.org/wiki/doku.php?id=articles:shortage_myth

True, technology books ARE always out of date, but whilst it's a truism that things are always changing, it's also true that there's an linear relationship with the degree to which they stay the same. (I believe the French have a neat saying that encapsulates this notion.)

The MULTICS pentest paper and it's review 30 years later are cases in point. See also Thompson, K., "Reflections on Trusting Trust", a matter which Kaminsky, D., has recently demonstrated is as true today as it was then (in a context which is completely different, yet exactly the same.)

Have something displaying one of these or others you find.

From the /. article just before this one.
http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Xaos does autozoom and continually refreshes.
http://wmi.math.u-szeged.hu/xaos/doku.php

I like electric sheep
http://www.electricsheep.org/

Galaxy simulator
http://kornelix.squarespace.com/galaxy/

There is absolutely no scientific evidence that shows gay man are more likely to be inclined to sexually abuse a child. People continue to perpetrate the myths put out by various conservative groups. The facts are laid out (in very long-winded and detailed fashion) on that page and many others but here's the highlight:

The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children.

Please stop spreading lies based on misrepresenting data and understand that it is nothing but old propaganda long debunked.

I am against child abuse just as much as anyone, but the more I hear about this issue the more it makes me think that the laws are asking society to perfect hypocrisy. On the one hand we have music videos which are basically soft-porn, magazines on supermarket shelves at child's-eye level which are no less sexually explicit, but now we have artists charged and art exhibitions canceled because they have photographs of naked children.

Ok, I personally have no inclination of visiting such an exhibition - I don't agree with the idea, but to make that illegal is ridiculous.

My point is, so what if someone can render a CG image of a child or adult so cleverly so that it is 'real'? We are missing the point. Laws are meant to protect people from harm, not electrons. There has to be proof that there is a causative link between such an image and an abuse of a child. Nobody is going around arresting paintings of people being slaughtered or whatever. The Louvre, for example, contains numerous, magnificent works of art which depict terrible deeds - but they are not regarded as obscene.

There is a difference between child molestation and paedophilia. One is a criminal act, the other is a psychiatric illness. Why are we criminalizing a medical condition?

As to "telepathic spies," the Army's remote viewing program (a.k.a. STARGATE) shouldn't be regarded as a failure. It's an interesting topic, difficult to research due to an abundance of pseudo-science, but there are valid academic studies which conclude that the phenomenon is real. Oddly, remote-viewing success seems to be related to local sidereal time (pdf). The Telepathy episode of National Geographic's Naked Science examines some of the program's achievements and features Joe McMoneagle, who was agent 001 of the Stargate program, doing a successful demonstration.

DARPA deserves credit for being open-minded about a topic so easy to ridicule.

Risking the wrath of responders who will claim I don't know the difference between California and Illinois (I do. I got my bachelors in CA, and I'm getting my PhD in IL), I'll mention that at UC Davis, old computers (and other interesting equiptment) are sent to the UC Davis Bargain Barn where they're sold.

I'm not sure I'd say that about ESP.

Jessica Utts, one of the statisticians involved in the government projects, has said that:

I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent questions about how this ability works. I am confident that the questions are no more elusive than any other questions in science dealing with small to medium sized effects, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade.

If you visit the webpages of the various research departments related to visualisation and parallel processing, then you can find many research papers related to this and other topics:

A study of parallel techniques for visualisation.

A parallel visualization pipeline for Terascale earthquake simulation

Scientific Discovery through Advanced Visualization

A case study in Supernovae Simulation Data

It's just amazing to find out how much is going on inside a star - not just the fusion of Hydrogen and Helium atoms, but intense magnetic fields that drive rivers of liquid Hydrogen and Helium through rising and falling convection cells, which in turn create new magnetic fields.

If you visit the webpages of the various research departments related to visualisation and parallel processing, then you can find many research papers related to this and other topics:

A study of parallel techniques for visualisation.

A parallel visualization pipeline for Terascale earthquake simulation

Scientific Discovery through Advanced Visualization

A case study in Supernovae Simulation Data

It's just amazing to find out how much is going on inside a star - not just the fusion of Hydrogen and Helium atoms, but intense magnetic fields that drive rivers of liquid Hydrogen and Helium through rising and falling convection cells, which in turn create new magnetic fields.

If you visit the webpages of the various research departments related to visualisation and parallel processing, then you can find many research papers related to this and other topics:

A study of parallel techniques for visualisation.

A parallel visualization pipeline for Terascale earthquake simulation

Scientific Discovery through Advanced Visualization

A case study in Supernovae Simulation Data

It's just amazing to find out how much is going on inside a star - not just the fusion of Hydrogen and Helium atoms, but intense magnetic fields that drive rivers of liquid Hydrogen and Helium through rising and falling convection cells, which in turn create new magnetic fields.

Fascinating stuff. I'm still amazed that we have underwater cables at all. I had be shown a map of existing cables before I believed it. http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/index.htm http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zhuk/maps/alcatel_large.gif

That I don't fully understand (IANAQP), but this link gets me part of the way.

In short, and with suitable hand waving, absorbing a positive energy regular particle of a virtual pair without absorbing the negative energy particle would break the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

I missed out on doing a CS degree, so I pass no judgement on the following link's veracity, but it does provide an interesting perspective on the conventional wisdom of the development job market

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html/

What is it with intetnet sites (slashdot, news sites, digg etc) having fascinating articles but no cool pictures to back them up?

Did anyone else groan intensely last year when 'worlds largest squid has been caught!' articles came up with no pictures?
"Meteor smashes into datacentre"
"Worlds largest seal clubs man in Alaska"
"100ft tall hot woman with massive breasts seen naked crossing major highway"
"Worlds coolest event happens! No pictures here!"

Anyhow to get the rant over with,.........
http://ucdcms.ucdavis.edu/solar2/photos/

That site is an existing site with one of these fascinating reactors, I found the site some time last year (and had a hell of a time finding the damn link in my history too) check it out purely for the cool factor, good stuff.

Fucking Europeans man...Sometimes I hope a 2nd bubonic plague hits.

I mean 100 years of research, and nothing.

Have you actually researched it, or are you just asserting such to be the case?

Quoting statistician Jessica Utts:

I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent questions about how this ability works. I am confident that the questions are no more elusive than any other questions in science dealing with small to medium sized effects, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade.

Quoting parapsychologist Dean Radin (who's book, Conscious Universe, gives a reasonable layman's overview of results to date):

Most of the commonly repeated skeptical reactions to psi research are extreme views, driven by the belief that psi is impossible. The effect of repeatedly seeing skeptical dismissals of the research, in college textbooks and in prominent scientific journals, has diminished mainstream academic interest in this topic. However, informed opinions, even among skeptics, shows that virtually all of the past skeptical arguments against psi have dissolved in the face of overwhelming positive evidence, or they are based on incredibly distorted versions of the actual research.

Quoting Deborah L. Delanoy, of the department of psychology in the University of Edinburgh:

In conclusion, the findings from these meta-analyses suggest that consistent trends and patterns are to be found in the database. The consistency of outcomes found in the ganzfeld research, the robust PK effects, the modifying variables revealed by the precognition database, the variety of target systems displaying DMILS effects and the correlations found with personality traits are all indicative of lawful relationships. Given these relationships it is difficult to dismiss the findings as ``merely an unexplained departure from a theoretical chance baseline'' p. 301 [23]. Whether these effects will prove to represent some combination of currently unrecognised statistical problems, undetected methodological artefacts, or, as seems increasingly likely, a genuinely new, hitherto unrecognised characteristic of mind or consciousness remains to be seen.

I was very happy before I met you, and I still am just as happy after. Well, maybe more, the Raspberry Ice after dinner was very very good.

But you are trolly as ever, with still no argument to stand on other than your overinflated opinion.

I, however, can provide evidence that remittances back to the country of origin is going up. The deal has substantially changed on both sides, we don't provide the opportunity we once did, and immigrants are not taking the deal we are offering.

http://migration.ucdavis.edu/MN/data/remittances/aboutremit.html

What have you got troll?

Nothing.

http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/Cosmology/albrecht/Myinfo/Research%20Publications.pdf Here are his credentials. Not shut up before you talk, and do some research.

The original story is posted here. Comments welcome on our blog.

The original story is posted here. Comments welcome on our blog.

There is little doubt that resistance to roundup is showing up in weeds. It is less likely that it is coming from any kind of gene transfer between crop and weed species than simply from evolved resistance within weed species themselves, due to heavy reliance on roundup. Roundup resistance crop species contribute to this by encouraging more use of Roundup. http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.las so?id=6820&title=Roundup%20Resistance%20Armors%20W eeds

did a quick search, looks like this is the author: http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/author/M.Longo
PhD physics, teaches U of MI
another quick search of the article, and doesn't look like he mentions "Fingers of God" or Doppler at all. Outside the scope of the paper?
i really wish people would stop w. the dumb ass soviet russia overlords bs
perhaps that way, i could actually weed thru and see what the physicists have to to say on this.