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From the part called "Problem is economic" here http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id =8521 "A 1989 National Science Foundation internal report argued a need to limit growth in doctoral salaries in science and engineering, and proposed as a solution bringing in more foreign students and scholars. It recognized the negative impact this would have on domestic student enrollment: "(If) doctoral studies are failing to appeal to...the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay. The relatively modest salary premium for acquiring a (science and engineering) doctorate may be too low to attract a number of able potential graduate students."

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
                                          by Rob Sanchez
                              October 21, 2005 No. 1352
---

Today I talked to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA to get some inside information about why the Senate Judiciary approved more H-1B and green card visas. He said the word is out in Washington DC that this was the result of intense lobbying by Microsoft. Last week lobbyists from Microsoft went to every Congressional office to lobby for more visas. Some people on Capitol Hill are actually referring to the Senate proposal as the "Bill Gates" bill.

---

My source for the "Bill Gates Act" is this "Job Destruction Newsletter," sent out to a free e-mail list by Rob Sanchez. Although the Newsletter is archived at his web site:

http://www.zazona.com/

This recent one is not there yet.

Rob got his information from Roy Beck:

http://www.numbersusa.com/index

Prof. Norman Matloff of Univ of Calif.

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

also sent this information out to his free e-mail list.

I consider all of these people reliable and well-informed, in contrast to the pro-industry propaganda found in MSM [Main Stream Media].

I can't suggest stories to /. since they apparently dump all attempted contributions from Win XP users, a bug that is not being addressed currently according to their bug list. - The wrong way to attack Microsoft, IMHO.

I would be grateful if you or someone would attempt to post this info, and even more the following time-critical info [e-mail from Norm Matloff: ]

---

To: programmer mailing list

I urge you to call and express your opinion, pro or con. (Obviously I support Byrd on this issue.)

Yes, CALL. And make sure you talk to someone who handles immigration, NOT whoever answers the phone.

The sample message below is far too complicated. CONGRESS DOESN'T CARE ABOUT REASONING OR LOGIC; all they understand is pressure. Keep your message short, just a couple of sentences. But make sure they understand that you feel STRONGLY about this issue.

Norm

----- Forwarded message from Sandra Gunn

Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:15:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Sandra Gunn
Reply-To: Sandra Gunn
To: matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu
Subject: URGENT ALERT! Senate Voting Tommorrow on Amdt to Stop Foreign Worker/Immigration Increase

URGENT ALERT FROM FAIR!

Senate Voting Tomorrow on Amendment to Strip Foreign Worker/Immigration Increase from Deficit Reduction Bill

Call your Senators Immediately and Urge a YES Vote for the
Byrd Amendment

THIS JUST IN...Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) has decided to offer an amendment tomorrow to the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 (S. 1932) that will strip out language added by the Judiciary Committee that sells out American workers by expanding employment-based visas, H-1B high tech worker visas and accompanying family members by an estimated 368,000 per year.

PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS IMMEDIATELY AND URGE A YES VOTE FOR THE BYRD AMENDMENT.

This will come up tomorrow, so we have less than 24 hours
to make an impact. If you call during business hours, ask to speak with or leave a message for the legislative assistant handling immigration. If calling after business hours, please leave a message on your senators' voicemail.

Call the Capitol
Switchboard (202-224-3121) and ask to be connected, or find direct phone numbers on our web site at

http://capwiz.com/fair/dbq/officials/

I fail to see what is unethical about it. I find it unethical to force companies to hire expensive and bad american IT people instead of cheap and good foreign ones.

Heh. Yes, it's hard to spot your agenda. American IT workers bad. Foreign IT workers good. I thought most of us were beyond that kind of stuff.

I would agree with you if the H1-B hire were underpaid (like the outsourcing of some clothes/shoes factories) but AFAIK that's not the case.

PDF alert, if you're really interested in learning something about the subject (my guess is you're not).

Maybe it's just that most slashdotters don't read articles, but I did read the article and it seems an environmental problem of some concern.

Invasive species are a big problem. Those who deal with kudzu in the Southeastern US or zebra mussels in the Great Lakes know this.

A pure ramjet first stage saves you a huge amount of fuel while greatly reducing the engineering requirements for the upper stages. Sled and catapult tech has been around forever that would get to mach 0.5 - 1 with large loads at moderate (2 -4 g) acceleration. Then you can get to about mach 2 - 3 at a substantial upward vector and 90- 120kft with fairly simple designs. The second stage then drops out the back (internal carriage greatly reduces boil-off of cryogenic fuel and has other positive effects such as reducing the needed strength of the 2nd stage - the nose has much less air to push through at the release altitude, and the 1st stage provides some lateral support as well). The first stage can then descend, slow and deploy parafoils for a glider landing at its home base. This strategy allows the first stage to be almost instantly reusable and to employ cheap, non cryogenic fuel. The first stage has extremely low drag, high top speed, low landing speed, low complexity, high manufaturability and with proper design can be made to allow a safe abort at any part of the flight.

http://www.skyramp.org/ has some interesting although not sufficiently technical stuff on catapults (for ramjet launch a horizontal design is fine)

http://mae.ucdavis.edu/faculty/sarigul/aiaa2001-46 19.pdf
Critically reviews many air launch proposals and provides an internal carrige on standard cargo plane method that allegedly solves the problems. (By their standards the 15% Skylon mass fraction (41 MT craft with a 275 MT takeoff weight) is unlikely, particularly in an SSTO craft with landing gear. Bond tends to overpromise, as the first two iterations of HOTOL show.)

There are a lot of other things that have been proposed that do not and will not work. SSTO does not work. To achieve the >93% fuel fraction the craft has to be fat, but to achieve low drag it has to be thin. Scramjets have been on the drawing boards for decades and the designs are too fussy, the fuel consumption too high, the start speeds are too high and the materials needed are too expensive and hard to work with.

Catapult/ramjet first stage with internal additional stage(s) is the most nearly optimal plan I have seen that does not depend on unobtanium, unproven technology or gazillion-dollar ground facilities.

He thinks AIDS might not be caused by HIV but by some critical mass/combination of retroviruses.

If that's a strange thought, consider the possiblity that retroviruses alter social structure after reading this about AIDS neuropathy:

As with rabies, it appears some sexually transmitted diseases have evolved the ability to alter the amygdala of their victims so as to facilitate their transmission. In the case of rabies, the amygdala alterations generate aggressive behavior, matching the mode of transmission of the virus which tends to be via bites. Sexually transmitted diseases should produce different changes in the amygdala enhancing, not aggressive, but rather sexual behavior.

Here is evidence that increased indiscriminate sexual behavior is an extended phenotype of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus affected by amygdalar damage in the infected population:

Kluver-Bucy syndrome is described below as involving: "a profound reduction in the animals aggression and fear, a hypoemotionality, a tendency to over react to any visual stimulus, hypersexuality and an excessive oral tendency (i.e. mouthing any objects). The monkeys also tended to eat meat and feces." Note further that " destruction of the amygdala alone was sufficient enough to produce the symptoms of the Kluver-Bucy syndrome."

Finally note although the full hypersexuality component of Kluver-Bucy syndrome in humans is rare and may require damage to tissues adjacent to the amygdala, as well as the amygdala, that damage from HIV (HTLV-III) infection focuses on the amygdala, radiating outward in its degenerative effect to include all tissues destroyed in the 1930's experiments of Kluver and Bucy .

http://www.aegis.com/pubs/aidsline/1987/jul/M87702 77.html
"Subacute encephalomyelitis of AIDS and its relation to HTLV-III infection."
...
Subacute encephalitis was mainly distributed in the frontal (58%) and temporal (69%) lobes, basal ganglia (77%), amygdala (80%) , and hippocampus (64%).

(It should be noted that Simon LeVay also observed systematic differences in the brain structures of homosexuals who died of AIDS although he did not attribute such differences to HIV infection per se but rather to congenital homosexual orientation. LeVay appears not to consider the possibility that changes in brain structure might be due to a pathogen in addition to HIV.)

http://neuroscience.ucdavis.edu/amaral/Emery_Home_ Page.html
"I recently joined the lab of Dr David Amaral, Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, where I am further investigating the role of the amygdala in monkey social behavior. We are looking at whether excitotoxic lesions (ibotenic acid) of the whole amygdala disrupt normal social behavior and communication in rhesus monkeys. The link between the amygdala and social behavior began with the work of Kluver and Bucy in the 1930's, when they lesioned the entire anterior temporal lobe (including temporal pole, amygdala, hippocampal formation and basal ganglia). They found a profound reduction in the animals aggression and fear, a
hypoemotionality, a tendency to over react to any visual stimulus, hypersexuality and an excessive oral tendency (i.e. mouthing any objects). The monkeys also tended to eat meat and feces. These results were replicated many times and it was found that destruction of the amygdala alone was sufficient e

You are entirely correct. I should perhaps have been more specific, but didn't think it necessary, since I mentioned fonts only in passing. I wasn't thinking of how to install fonts and so (which truly is a mess, although I have managed to do so, and I'm just a regular geek with education in comletely different disciplines), but of how the fonts are handled, and how well they end up being suitable for reading by a human. This is a complex issue, but you really only have to compare a document produced in Word to one produced with LaTeX to decide which you prefer. If they use the same font, you'll usually prefer LaTeX (there are add-ons for Word to make it support ligatures and stuff, though).

Oh, and TeX does seem to (probably through pdftex) support OpenType.

I go to UC Davis and our bus system, Unitrans, is pretty well-known.

From the Wikipedia entry:
The system is well known throughout the area for its use of several distinctive ex-London Transport double decker buses, as well as its fleet of modern natural gas single-decks. Ridership exceeds 3 million passenger-trips per year on 16 weekday and 4 Saturday routes. Current (2004) fares are $1.00 for the general public and free to undergraduate University students.

I go to UC Davis and our bus system, Unitrans, is pretty well-known.

From the Wikipedia entry:
The system is well known throughout the area for its use of several distinctive ex-London Transport double decker buses, as well as its fleet of modern natural gas single-decks. Ridership exceeds 3 million passenger-trips per year on 16 weekday and 4 Saturday routes. Current (2004) fares are $1.00 for the general public and free to undergraduate University students.

After all, who doesn't think the IT folks in their office are the most valuable of the bunch?

The mass of lower-middle-class wannabees taking computer science courses reminds me of the fad of training people to be keypunch operators in the 1970's. It was popular by the time it was obsolete. So computer science isn't quite obsolete yet. But where keypunching became technically obsolete most programming jobs in the West are becoming economically obsoleted by the Third World.

Whether the undergrads are right to shy away from CS depends on what else they are doing. If they're smoking dope or studying Critical Theory or Gender Studies they'll be SOL (poop out of luck) in the job market. Go find Norman Matloff's home page and read about the careers available for CS grads: lots of CS grads don't get jobs writing code. While searching for the reference I came across these two articles by Norman I also recommend: see this article or this one in rebuttal to an economist.

It only makes sense that if you lower the price paid for CS grads with H-1B visas and off-shoring, you are going to discourage knowledgable people (middle class college freshmen) from majoring in CS. That women and people of color are now being conned into working super-long hours for modest pay is just deja vu all over again.

To quote Norman Matloff:

the U.S. has more engineers per capita than any other nation in the world except Israel. ... Rather than recognizing these engineers, the industry is laying them off, by the hundreds of thousands--but saying we need MORE of them!

After all, who doesn't think the IT folks in their office are the most valuable of the bunch?

The mass of lower-middle-class wannabees taking computer science courses reminds me of the fad of training people to be keypunch operators in the 1970's. It was popular by the time it was obsolete. So computer science isn't quite obsolete yet. But where keypunching became technically obsolete most programming jobs in the West are becoming economically obsoleted by the Third World.

Whether the undergrads are right to shy away from CS depends on what else they are doing. If they're smoking dope or studying Critical Theory or Gender Studies they'll be SOL (poop out of luck) in the job market. Go find Norman Matloff's home page and read about the careers available for CS grads: lots of CS grads don't get jobs writing code. While searching for the reference I came across these two articles by Norman I also recommend: see this article or this one in rebuttal to an economist.

It only makes sense that if you lower the price paid for CS grads with H-1B visas and off-shoring, you are going to discourage knowledgable people (middle class college freshmen) from majoring in CS. That women and people of color are now being conned into working super-long hours for modest pay is just deja vu all over again.

To quote Norman Matloff:

the U.S. has more engineers per capita than any other nation in the world except Israel. ... Rather than recognizing these engineers, the industry is laying them off, by the hundreds of thousands--but saying we need MORE of them!

I'm a native of California, so I'm a bit biased, but when I went looking for schools, I concentrated on schools on the West Coast. Of the schools I found, UC Davis seemed to have a very strong visualization program. They have an "institute" which means that sub-division of Computer Science that is more or less independant of a lot of the other politics in the department. (http://www.idav.ucdavis.edu/) They say they do graphics, but that's a small subset of what they do, which is primarily viz based stuff. I've toured their facilities twice, and they have some interesting stuff. In one lab they have four screens stuck together to form a larger screen about 2m x 2m (or so). In another lab, they have a lot of 3D interactive equipment, and a huge screen in there that takes up an entire wall. (Almost 4m x 4m, I'd say.) They can use gloves and 3D goggles to "look" around and manipulate the enviroment. They also have an older 3D scanner, and they're getting in another 3D (with three walls covered with screens, as well as the floor) that will be called "The Cave" and allow them to work with Geologists to display their data in a large 3D interactive enviroment.

They guarantee that you will have desk space as a grad student (bonus), and they try hard to help you get financial aid. The profs are very nice in that department, especially Ken Day, who is in charge over there. Nice guy.

The only real reason I didn't go was that I didn't want to do viz! I opted for a more "well-rounded" department so I could explore a bit first before settling on a discipline.

http://idav.ucdavis.edu/

One of the best graphics labs in the nation in one of the best towns in the nation.

Let me be first to refute this straw-man argument. :)

Actually, I don't know of any technologies that can compress analog signals the way you can compress digital signals into things such as zip files, mp3 files, jpeg images, mpeg movies. Compression is the key here.

This is the reason for the move, compression technology, that only works with quantized/digital signals.

So you can understand where the FCC is coming from, but what are the costs to your freedom? When everything is fully digital, it's a hell of a world, because you're setting up yourself for utter exploitation. You can no longer turn on your VCR and excersize fair use by recording a tv show. Soon such notions as going to public libraries and reading a book without paying for it will be crimes. If your grandfathers that built the libraries could only see what kind of world we are ending up with.

So even though technology justifies the moves, you just simply can't trust the government or the "people with money in the government who are like foxes loose in a hencage." Exemples are recent decisions such as the DMCA, copyright term extensions to 90 years, or not having to share data cables lines like utility lines to create competition and level playing field. Every power is concentrating in the hands of a few, and the way it goes those who already "own" the power, get to own more, and those who are in "debt" they are just sinking deeper into exponential compound interest. This "property" world, that's nice because it motivates people to care, it is still not a self equilibrating world, but an exponentially unstable one - I wonder when they'll change the tax laws into flat taxation, because they are already eliminating dividend and property taxes. The end result of letting the instability get out of hand is that only a single "owner" controls everything, and everyone else is resentful. Way to create wars and revolutions. Which is how history has happened so far - get a democracy (like the greeks,) get invaded by a dictator (persians), then all you have is emperors from there on (Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Elizabeth) from there on, who either get murdered and the cycle goes on, or have a dynasty for a while keep vassals and rule by utter force. Wash, rinse and repeat - french revolution, Napoleon, back to Louis the who knows what. So how is this cycle gonna go for the US? Independence war, Nixon, then whi? Wait, they stopped Nixon, with his secret service above the secret service, cuz there were still Russians around, but what about next time? Is rule by iron-fist the only way for a stable, peaceful world, where everybody except a single ruler gets to suffer? This is the bigger issue with such changes.

While there is analog tv, there is such a thing as a concept of "free" content, that you can even legally record via your VCR. What a change from 20 years ago.

Jobs, 50, said he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon but dropped out after only eight months because it was too expensive for his working-class family. He said his real education started when he "dropped in" on whatever classes interested him -- including calligraphy.'

The facts are that a large number of students leave college due to family finance problems.

Many poor, uneducated kids end up on the streets, in jail, or working at the local department store for 40 years.

Steve Jobs managed to attend classes that grasped his interest .. with the goal of education. And at the same time he was able to help out his family financially.

Wouldn't it be great if more kids were able to do that? Jobs wasn't a drain, and he had to sacrifice his college education for his family.

Most college kids are a major drain on their family. I know I was.

An Amorphophallus titanum named "Tabitha the Titan" bloomed last August at University of California, Davis. Two more, "Ted" & "Tammy," are expected to bloom again this summer. That's a whole lot of stink.

When I were a lad, we had portables that could barely play Adventure let alone this new fangled Zork thing.

Kids these days don't know how good they have it.

There are many approaches. A big problem has been avoiding "popping", when an area suddenly is rendered with more detail.

Again, this is well understood. It just takes plenty of computer power to drive it.

Microsoft seems to be paving the way for game developers to use their specialized hardware. When the PS2 first came out, the development tools were weak, and it took about two years for developers to get the tools in place to use it effectively. The original XBox is basically a PC; you can develop, test, and debug on Win2K, then rebuild for the XBox target. The new XBox won't be like that; the target is drastically different from the development environment. So Microsoft has to do and promote more middleware development.

Get a used PDA and a portable keyboard, such as this.

They are small, easy to carry and really work well. You can download one of the many opensource light-weight wordprocessors out there and use it quite easily in any environment.

Even the older Palms come with IR options, and so communication is not a problem.

Unless you're going to be churning out megs of text daily, it would do quite well.

from here

DARPA funded WolfPack technology is a soda can sized pod, deployed about 1 per sq. km, is designed to replace or supplement similar technologies that currently reside in aircraft. Because of proximity to enemy radios, less power is required to jam signals. Ad-hoc networking and multi-hop routing are used to control and retrieve data from the network, which can also monitor enemy communications in addition to jamming them. The pods are designed to last for about 2 months.

Regarding your aside, I dug up the material. It's at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_s Ec6.2.7. Specifically, Intel only wanted 3.0+, not 4.0+, but there was another firm that only hired 3.8+. Excerpt about a great programmer who couldn't get a job:

"A year earlier I had pushed them to hire a UCD grad whose GPA was only 2.9, and the company had subsequently reported to me that he had turned out to be one of their top programmers. Yet even then they decided not to hire my new ``case,'' the one with a GPA of 3.4."

I went to UCDavis, and all the students I knew loved Norm Matloff. He speaks Chinese, he was one of the first to do heavy research on supporting Chinese characters in software, and if I recall correctly, his wife is Chinese (I couldn't find it anywhere on his webpage to back that part up).

Here's his Chinese software page:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/chinese.html

I hate to use the classic "but I have lots of black friends!" anti-racist argument here, but I think he has earned it. I think the reason your friends don't want him as their advisor is because he is one of the toughest Prof's at Davis, and he isn't going to give out a free ride through grad school.

Of course, you have been modded up, and no one is going to read my reply, so the false prejudiced accusation is what people will see. But again, this IS slashdot. The first to respond is always right!

As an aside, he was also a big reason that Intel Corp. in Sacramento changed their stance on G.P.A. being the major deciding factor in hiring a student. They used to throw out all resumes that were under a 4.0 G.P.A. (they had THAT many applying). Dr. Matloff basically showed them that the students that could REALLY program weren't the ones getting A's. He has a paper somewhere on his site, but again, no one is going to read this reply anyway!

See the ratings for each first run episode of Enterprise here:
http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~mvrojo/entratings.htm

Note the rapid decline from 12 million viewers in the first season and the slow, steady decline in the following seasons.

Actually, the proofs under discussion are not generated by a computer nor do they use "computer reasoning systems" like Prolog. These are computer-aided proofs, where the outline of the general argument is constucted by a (human) mathematician, but some of the details are reduced to computations, which are done by computer. I don't know in what language these particular computations were done, but I know that the computations for the computer-aided proof of the double-bubble conjecture was done in C++, and the source code is available if you want to have a look. I am familiar with other such computer-aided proofs that use a diverse set of languages, including C, assembly, Perl, GAP, Magnus, Mathematica, AXIOM, and many others. Mathematicians, like other researchers, tend to have diverse opinions about what suitable computational tools are and also tend to use the tools with which they are most familiar, even if that tool is not really optimal for that computational task.

Actually, the proofs under discussion are not generated by a computer nor do they use "computer reasoning systems" like Prolog. These are computer-aided proofs, where the outline of the general argument is constucted by a (human) mathematician, but some of the details are reduced to computations, which are done by computer. I don't know in what language these particular computations were done, but I know that the computations for the computer-aided proof of the double-bubble conjecture was done in C++, and the source code is available if you want to have a look. I am familiar with other such computer-aided proofs that use a diverse set of languages, including C, assembly, Perl, GAP, Magnus, Mathematica, AXIOM, and many others. Mathematicians, like other researchers, tend to have diverse opinions about what suitable computational tools are and also tend to use the tools with which they are most familiar, even if that tool is not really optimal for that computational task.

Poly is having massive financial problems. Notice the layoffs of the older professors for the cheap new hires/grad students. Poly might have a year left. Obviously you do not know about the dorm overruns and how the corrupt administrators at Poly blew away the Othmer endowment by sweet heart deals with contractor associates. There is no more money left.

BTW, schools like Columbia Mund School of Engineering, the CS dept of MIT, CMU, et. al. are reporting massive declines in enrollment as well so there soon will not be any more CS studies in this country as school after school close their departments for lack of enrollment. Read Norman Matloff, PhD. before you open your mouth.

If that's $64,000 question, I'd say the $1,000,000 question is: Does anyone care? Signs point to fuck no!

Yes, particles and antiparticles are both created and absorbed in equal proportions. Hawking radiation works because the particle/antiparticle that gets absorbed has negative energy, while the one that is radiated away has positive energy; the one that falls in acquires negative energy because it falls in. See this explanation by gravitational physicist Steve Carlip.

I am not familiar with American TV rating systems, but this site seems to indicate that the season average for season three was 3,8 million and that the average for season four is 3,1 million thus far. Which is a wee bit less than five million..

12216463006127794810775396403128843926736142422307 5246409537660469964558090568 61569077485126904041824640546847438710050537492630 0211252045279090179843593936 65081567696785664085904567474142 [...] 122164630061277948107753964031288439267 36142422307524640953766046996455809056861569077485 1269040418246405468474387100 50537492630021125204527909017984359393665081567696 785664085904567474142 If you care for all of them you can get them here.

The latest episode had 3.2 million viewers, almost twice as many as watched the latest episode of Star Trek Enterprise.

Bullcrap. The most recent Enterprise episode 'United' had 2.8 million viewers. 2.8 * 2 = 5.6, not 3.2. Enterprise generally gets around 3 million viewers - the average for this season so far is 3.08 million (source). In other words... Enterprise would thrive on Sci-Fi. Or anywhere where it actually gets ANY advertising.

United we stand, divided we fall.

"We?" What's this "we" stuff, AC? Who are you? My guess is you're the EFF paid intern/astroturfer sent to pump up this quarter's fund-raising drive at "key, major friendly sites/web communities."

What makes them an anachronism? How could they change to become relevant again? Be specific.

Wow! "Academic Background," much? Wait, lemme get out my Number Two Pencil here so I can answer.

OK.

Ummmm, hey, here's an idea:

Move the hell back to DC! You're a Lobbying Organization, ferchrissake!! Why in a hundred years would I give a donation to a lobbying organization based on the West Coast?

Here read this, consult with your bosses, and get back to us.

Or not.

This is incorrect. Particles and antiparticles are equally likely to fall into the black hole. What is true is that the negative energy particle (which can be either matter or antimatter) always falls into the black hole -- and it becomes the negative-energy particle by virtue of falling into the hole (thus explaining why that's always the one that falls in).

See this explanation.

Well, they have two choices: examine the bits of the raw jpeg and attempt to find and exploit any redundancy present, or, as you stated, decode the jpeg's blocks and re-encode them using a different process.

I don't know which process they're using (haven't found any details yet) but Arithmetic codes are much more efficient than Huffman codes (and much slower!). One problem with Huffman codes is that each codeword must be at least one bit long. No input symbol (letter, digit, value) can be coded to a size less than one bit. So if you're using Huffman to code 8-bit ASCII text on a letter-by-letter basis, for example, you'll never do better than 8:1 compression.

Arithmetic codes allow for coding an input symbol to sizes less than one bit by representing a source (image, string of numbers, etc.) as a very long number. As each input from the source is coded, the number is worked out to greater precision.

So, in a nutshell, were they to replace the Huffman pass in JPEG they could very likely obtain a higher compression rate. How high I don't know.

Personally, I'm intrigued by this. Has anyone found information at the PTO on this "patent-pending" technology? I looked but didn't find anything.

-Josh Senecal http://graphics.cs.ucdavis.edu/~jgseneca

So it looks like Celeron takes it. You should sell your AMD stock now.

It is amazing where Slashdot takes me some days.

From Landmarks In Digital Computing: A Smithsonian Pictorial History:

Hobbyists who successfully put together their Altairs ended up with a blue, box-shaped machine that measured 17x18x7 inches. To enter programs or data, one set the toggle switches on the front. There was no keyboard, video terminal or paper tape reader. All programming was in the machine code of binary digits. The first Altairs came with only 256 bytes of memory; they also lacked output devices such as printers. Results of a program were indicated by the pattern of flashing lights on the front panel.

Some Starlink corn wound up being made into supermarket burrito shells. Starlink was engineered to make its own pesticide and was intended only for animal feed and non-food uses. The problem was that it looks just like regular corn.

Now the stuff didn't turn out to be seriously poisonous to humans but it was nonetheless not intended to enter the food supply.

Researchers at UC Davis have also recently made headlines trying to forecast earthquakes (Press release). I wonder if we're on the brink of a new understanding of earth's geophysical processes.

It was definitely harder for me to get in the door for that first job, though. I got lucky in many respects, whereas other folks from higher profile programs had an easier in. For the most part, though, I agree with the folks here saying your first job matters more than your degree. After my first job, experience and social networking were definitely more important than the degree itself.

On the other hand, I didn't want to finish with a B.S., I wanted to go back to grad school and eventually get into teaching at the college level. So after having been a part of the workforce for a few years, I applied to Ph.D. programs at several well known schools.

Despite my having very good grades and excellent references, most of them turned me down flat. I'm reasonable sure the primary reason was my undergraduate degree -- when you're competing with 9 other people for one slot in the program, it's easy to get tossed out for not having a degree from a well known university. My work supervisor at the time got his Ph.D. in CS from CMU, one of the programs to which I was applying. He wrote one of my recommendations. I got in. I think if he hadn't, they probably would have turned me away because of my undergraduate degree as well.

So I do think what program you're in does matter. It's also been my recent experience that the undergrads at the high profile program really do learn a lot more than I did in my undergraduate program. That doesn't mean it's true in all cases, but it certainly is true in my limited experience.

When I first applied to undergrad programs, I was accepted at several well-known programs, but I decided I wanted to go to smaller, more personal school instead. I liked the program I was in, but if I had a chance to do it over again, I would choose a different school.

Shorter summary: Granter of degree is not destiny, but is an important component of same.

Hope that helps!

Read http://www.pubpat.org/ and http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~devanbu/FSP.htm

There will be a time when these patents expire and the commons will be richer

"It sets levels for all countries at the time the treaty was written. The lower-tier countries still have a limit on their production - its just not as tight as the largest producers."

Where do you see this in the protocol? I can't find it.

http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL10/Warming/text .html gives different perspectives on the treaty.

Phychic powers have been studied for centuries. No one has made any convincing argument or presented any substantial evidence in this area.

I suggest you read the evidence first, and then comment. You can start here.

Allow me to quote from the first article there:

"Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted."

And:

"It is recommended that future experiments focus on understanding how this phenomenon works, and on how to make it as useful as possible. There is little benefit to continuing experiments designed to offer proof, since there is little more to be offered to anyone who does not accept the current collection of data."

Some mistakes in the data for my school, too. Univ of California, Davis is reported as having no wireless network, but I'm on it right now!

"this is the ITAA?"

Remember them making all those tech worker shortage projections right in the middle of the dot com collapse? 1.6 Million, 900K, then 600K.

At the same time the tech industry was laying off workers faster than you can imagine. They did it to promote their H-1B agenda.. Note: They're still at it.

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage...."The congressional General Accounting Office found ``serious analytical and methodological weaknesses'' in the [ITAA/Dept. of Commerce] reports.";

The ITAA was counting all the positions held by Computer consultants and contractors as UNFILLED!!
Yikes !!!

---

Now for a little bit about the ITAA with electronic voting and Mr. Miller's pitch to the electronic machine manufacturers. August 22, 2003, Democracy for Sale, CHEAP!

"Harris Miller (ITAA) Gives the intro spiel about the company and how it can help the industry stave off short-term attacks" from academics and "activists".

"Harris: .. And there can be two scenarios there: The companies may want to hide behind me, they dont want to say anything... frequently that happens in a trade association, you dont want to talk about the issues as individual companies. We have that issue right now with the Buy America Act, for example in congress. No company wants to act like its against Buy America -- even though theyre all against it so I take all the heat for them."

"this is the ITAA?"

Remember them making all those tech worker shortage projections right in the middle of the dot com collapse? 1.6 Million, 900K, then 600K.

At the same time the tech industry was laying off workers faster than you can imagine. They did it to promote their H-1B agenda.. Note: They're still at it.

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage...."The congressional General Accounting Office found ``serious analytical and methodological weaknesses'' in the [ITAA/Dept. of Commerce] reports.";

The ITAA was counting all the positions held by Computer consultants and contractors as UNFILLED!!
Yikes !!!

---

Now for a little bit about the ITAA with electronic voting and Mr. Miller's pitch to the electronic machine manufacturers. August 22, 2003, Democracy for Sale, CHEAP!

"Harris Miller (ITAA) Gives the intro spiel about the company and how it can help the industry stave off short-term attacks" from academics and "activists".

"Harris: .. And there can be two scenarios there: The companies may want to hide behind me, they dont want to say anything... frequently that happens in a trade association, you dont want to talk about the issues as individual companies. We have that issue right now with the Buy America Act, for example in congress. No company wants to act like its against Buy America -- even though theyre all against it so I take all the heat for them."

Still, a centrifuge would be cheaper, and you can rent time on them already. Common centrifuges used for training of military pilots are designed to about 20G (since getting past that point would surely kill the trainee). Centrifuges for experimental work, like this one can do up to 75G.

Added convenience of a centrifuge is that you do your experiments on the ground, surrounded by your test equipment, power sources, and whatever else you need. Compare that to a drop test where you have to build a completely standalone package.

So the designers of that Genesis probe only had to call UC Davis and arrange for some test time. That's what they haven't done, and that's what ultimately caused the failure.

From The Jobs Crunch we see why this is important:

From 1996-1998, 28% of new hiring for programmer jobs went to H-1b workers. That rose to 50% in 1999 and according to some expert estimates, 90% in 2001.

As a result, by 2002, there were over 463,000 H-1b workers employed in US information technology programming jobs--a job category with fewer than 3 million workers in total. (And that figure doesn't include people who recently used guest worker programs to obtain green cards and workers using other guest worker visas.)

Well, perhaps God has written fewer lines of code, but as far as usefulness is concerned, I'll take existence over cool tech any day.

I know that I recycle my Ni-Cd and Li-Ion batteries, but there are those that just chuck them in the trash. Most of the time, they are just incinerated, releaseing cadmium and other nasties into the atmosphere. Indeed, most incinerators have radiation detectors to stop the incidental incineration of radioactive material, but I'm not sure that I trust that everything works as planned.

Also, how many times have you seen batteries discarded and run over by cars in the street. Granted, most of these cells would be perminantly affixed to the device that they are powering, but you know corporations, anything to make a buck. I would give it max 10 years before you start seeing universal Po-AA cells that power legacy devices.

The other problem with using a radioactive source for your power is that if it does escape its confines, then it can easily become ingested. The largest potential risk from this exposure comes from alpha-emitters. They may be blocked by microlayers of dead skin, but if you swallow them they uptake and make residence in your soft tissue or bone and continue to irradiate local tissue for as long as they're active.

I personally would veto this technology, it's hard enough to stop smoke detectors from going in landfills already, do we really need to put more nuclear material into the water supply?

As an option, I would still like to see better solid hydrogen encapsulation for fuel cells. We already have capacity enough to generate a significant amount of hydrogen from plants like Solar 2 in the California desert.

Looks like I need to spend a few years building up an immunity to iocane powder