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the South Pole cannot be claimed yet the US base (McMurdo Base) on the very Pole gives real control.

Well, actually, McMurdo isn't on the south pole, but on Hut Point Peninsula on Ross Island. (http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/mcmurdo/ )

I'm having a hard time understanding the difficulty. Libraries around the country can do it, why can't yours?

The Dutch courts have ruled that the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a worldwide analogue of the RIAA), can not sue Kazaa for the transgressions of its users (e.g.). This means Kazaa will be available for legal filesharing, and the recording industry must go after individuals who engage in illegal filesharing.

The Dutch make up about 20% of the world's filesharing individuals, according to the article.

damm the slashdot drinking game... its 1pm here and I'd be drunk allready!

Absolutely not! Only through open and honest (painful) discussion of the merits and weaknesses of anything can it be strengthened. If it was too weak in the first place, it will not stand up to the scrutiny- otherwise it will be strengthened.

Take some time to read this paper for enlightenment on why open discussion by people with differing viewpoints is a good thing.

Funny thing is that closed source people don't want discussion of their warts...I would think OS would be different.

Fine. I'll spend all of 5 mintues with Google News since you're incapable of doing so yourself:

Reuters AlertNet
United Press International
The Chicago Maroon.
The Cornell Daily Sun
The Diamondback
The Massachusettes Daily Collegian

The last 4 are university newspapers who had people there.
"Oh, no! That must mean they're biased since they're filthy protesters!"

Face it. People like you have blinders on. If someone says something that disagrees with your worldview, you'll loudly trump about how they're a liar and biased. In that way, you're exactly like the Iraqi Information Minister, going on and on about how there are no infidels in Baghdad's airport and how they're being killed in streets even as coallition forces roll over the countryside. Think, research, and stop making kneejerk, assinine posts accusing someone else of lying when you can't be bothered to verify the information yourself.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Maroon reports the University of Chicago is facing a problem with students who aren't potty-trained. Nate Claxton, who appeared on a panel at the university's Center for Gender Studies, said that, in the Maroon's words, he "knew people who had contracted bladder infections because choosing a gender bathroom bothered them so much that they did not go to the bathroom all day." Here are some more highlights from the panel:

Members of Feminist Majority, Queers & Associates, and the Center for Gender Studies organized the panel as part of the Coalition for a Queer Safe Campus. "Going to the bathroom is a moment where definition is very important in choosing a door," said Mary Anne Case, one of the panelists.

She pointed out that many women's restrooms have a caricature of a person in a dress on it. "Going into it implies that we are willing to be associated with that image. There are only two [images] to choose from. This moment involves an act of self-labeling."

The feminists, "queers" and gender studiers want unisex bathrooms:

Ana Minyan, the moderator of the panel, said that bathrooms will be called gender-neutral, rather than co-ed, because, "this terminology is generally used to refer to two sexes while the gender-neutral tends to be associated with more diversity and fluidity within the sex-gender continuum. As our aim is to make everyone, no matter what their gender and/or sexual persona is, more comfortable, we are using the term gender-neutral."

One Roger Simon thinks it's a great idea: "I believe that if all parts of the body were treated equally, and there was not so much emphasis on genitalia, than people could move beyond gender differences and grow mentally and socially." Well, call us small-minded, but the idea of going to the bathroom and having a girl at the next urinal doesn't exactly put us at ease.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq /cmosfaq.OneSpaceorTwo.html
http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/topics/doublesp ace.htm
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onetw ospaces.htm
http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/011803.htm

Both the MLA and Chicago Manual of Style suggest one space after punctuation while using a compensatory font (ie, not-monospaced). Two spaces after a period is very out of style. Yeah I know - shocked the hell out of me when I learned it a couple years ago too.

As easy as one, two, three.

As easy as one, two, three.

As easy as one, two, three.

"Impressive" to your uncle must mean something along the lines of "capable of destroying all humanity." Which is, I admit, one possible definition. A bit sick, though.

Ebola is so scary because of how little would have to change for it to become "impressive". Ebola is an incredibly efficient killer, way more than smallpox's 30%-50% fatality rates. The Ebola that's around right now would be nothing compared to that incubated in an (infectious) victim for 6 months before the victim bled out. You could see epidemics wipe out entire countries in just a few years, if such a virus existed.

There are some interesting models for Ebola infection. They're all pretty scary.
Here's one, in an Excel spreadsheet. Your uncle may have higher standards, but I get a bit freaked out when mathematical models start predicting 80% population losses.

FWIW, there are alot of interesting papers out there, if you want some hair-raising science...

P.S. AIDS is not a virus, its a syndrome caused by the HIV.

CHESS
By Greg Kasavin

The latest offering in the rapidly overflowing strategy genre is hard evidence that strategy games need a real overhaul, and fast. Chess, a small-scale tactical turn-based strategy game, attempts to adopt the age-old "easy to learn, difficult to master" parameter made popular by Tetris. But the game's cumbersome play mechanics and superficial depth and detail all add up to a game that won't keep you busy for long.

. . .

If you are interested in theory of computation, you should read Lance Fortnow's

My favorite ten complexity theorems of the past decade.

It's a survey, but it has all the references if you want to know more about a result.

put da homo page for da 11 yr old to goatse.cx, da 12 yr old ta good ole tubgirlD0Tcom an da 15 yr old ta trusty consumti0n Juncti0n "WHAT'S YOUR DYSFUNCTION?". aLL d0ZE sITES aRE aT d0ZE mATURITY lEVELS (and so am I being a tROUTSPEAKING tR0LL. Thanks and have a nice day. Then send them all out for a nice k0REAN mASSAGE. tHANK YOU! hAVE a gUD n1TE!!! n0W aLL bOW dOWN aND sAY tHANKS fOR tHIS hISTORICALLY iNEVITABLE pOST tO tEH sATURDAY n1TE tR0LL. Peace OUt motherfukers!

The number one defacto problem with sample based studies is that we know for a fact that people who take part in surveys are not necessarily representative of everyone else. The magnitude of this problem is debated (see John Brehm's book The Phantom Respondents).

Read the social science classic Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research by King, Keohane, and Verba.

Chapter 5 on "What to Avoid" explains how selection bias works, and why, for example, asking 40,000 people who agree to have their computers monitored by a commercial research marketing group is probably a heavily biased sample.

That being said, its interesting to note that the same research firm notes that while file sharing has an impact on record sales, the music industry is still to blame for declining sales.

This makes a lot of sense, though, seeing as U of C's curriculum is a lot more theory based than most. A CS major's preliminary course is taught in Scheme. We use strange things like ML. Heck, the CS building is connected to the math building.

NSIT, like Princeton, also leaves something to be desired. Like the 2 or 3 major email malfunctions that occur every year.

Of course, the CS department's own machines do always seem to be running smoothly...

--Stephen

This makes a lot of sense, though, seeing as U of C's curriculum is a lot more theory based than most. A CS major's preliminary course is taught in Scheme. We use strange things like ML. Heck, the CS building is connected to the math building.

NSIT, like Princeton, also leaves something to be desired. Like the 2 or 3 major email malfunctions that occur every year.

Of course, the CS department's own machines do always seem to be running smoothly...

--Stephen

You don't keed to be Kreskin to look into Microsoft's future. Even a child knows that Microsoft is dying. All major marketing surveys show that Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim.

Due to the troubles of Santa Claus, scientific investigations and so on, Christmas went out of business and was taken over by Microsoft. Now Rudolph is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

The numbers continue to decline for Santa but Microsoft may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for Microsoft continues in a head spinning downward spiral. In truth, for all practical purposes Microsoft is already dead. It is a dead man walking. It's a fact: Microsoft is dying.

I used this very tool (but preferred PilOTP) while at my previous job as an equity analyst for a famous investment bank. The bank firewalled *all* outgoing connections except http/https, but did provide an outgoing telnet proxy. Like the original poster, I didn't care whether the firm's IT group spied on the content of my telnet sessions, but did care about the password for my home Linux box getting stored in some logfile. So I dug up an OTP telnet daemon through Google and happily telneted without divulging my password to anyone. Fortunately, my current job lets me ssh out with no trouble.

The truth is that there is no alternative to MS unless your computing needs are either too esoteric or too specialized.

GNU/Linux still has a long way to go in order to reach the ordinary user. OSX is not designed for workgroups (see more of my comments on this).

It's a pitty that after half a century of computer innovation and brillant discoveries in the art and science of computing, all that we have to brag about is OSX's Expose (a feature that Windows sported for years before) and MS Windows.

The parent behind this lawsuit:

Ron Baiman
205 S. Humphrey
Oak Park, IL
708-445-9052
rbaiman@uic.edu>

Source of parent name: This article and these Oak Park Board of Education meeting minutes.
Source of address and phone number: This message.
Corroborating source plus e-mail address: This.

Disclaimer: This information was provided for those who wish to contact Mr. Baiman to express their opinions and/or discuss this matter in a legal manner. It is not posted for any other purpose. The contact information may be incorrect or outdated and I do not guarantee its accuracy.

Use configuration management so you can control and know exactly what is running on your systems.

Papers have been written about automating patch management using cfengine and a database.

A slightly alternative and more precise examination of the economic study of social behavior can be found in the works of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker.

You can read an interview with him here, or examine his book Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment, or check out his Nobel Prize speech.

-Fred

As I said over on my blog,

I don't see the problems that Mr. Miller raises at LawMeme coming to fruition. I think that Aaron went too far in suggesting that users should be able to determine where their money is spent. They made that decision when they decided what to listen to. The system should be automated to pay the users whose work was played most. Your vote was clicking play.

-R

One of my friends in college had a lab job working for Martha McClintock. Primarily, Professor McClintock focuses on the evolutionary function of hormone-behavior interactions, particularly their role in sexual selection. If you look at her c.v., she's done a lot of work with rats.

This was my friend's fabulous job at her lab. He would introduce a female rat into a cage with a male rat. He would watch while the two rats did or did not have sex. He would photograph them immediately after the act, particularly the female's fur (I can't remember why). Then he would take the female rat and douche it. Yes, all day long he would douche and watch rats fornicate.

Worst. Job. Ever.

There is a big difference between observing children and teens professionally for 10 years and saying, "I was a kid or teen for 10 years, so I know everything about it."

Please don't put quotes around that sentence as if that is literally what I said. :)

I don't question that you know a great deal about kids and I respect your knowledge and experience. Neither do I claim to know more than you about this subject; that's just silly. I just don't think your experience automatically makes you right on this particular issue.

You claim to have repeatedly observed a causal relationship between violent video games and violent kids. I find such a claim to be extraordinary given the large body of inconclusive research in that area.

If you have evidence that helps cut through the complexity of this issue, than please share it. If you have knowledge that makes clear what all of these studies (performed by people specifically focused on the issue of violent media and its effects on children) could not, I want to hear it.

Merely mentioning that you have a lot of experience with children is not enough to convince me.

Accents are optional for capital letters.

These things are such a scam. Everyone should read this article.

Entourage IMAP configuration

And I've used IMAP on Outlook for years: Outlook IMAP Setup

http://astro.uchicago.edu/home/web/valdes/pilot/pi lOTP/

Even though it refers to the Original USR Palm Pilot, it works on my Handspring Visor Deluxe (PalmOS 3.1H3)

beaucoup

If you ask me, it's because it is easy to blue-sky some possible scenarios and get credit for breaking new ground, and also not be held accountable for any demonstrable results from your research. Or is it just me?

Your complaint is unjustified for two reasons: (1) You misunderstand what ethicists do, and (2) you mis-represnt what most of their work deals with.

(1) Why not come up with some practical solutions to existing problems of discrimination, civil rights, etc?

Ethicists are not lawyers, or politicians, or political theorists (for the most part), or economists, or political activists. It is not their job to come up with "practical solutions" any more than it is Stephen Hawking's job to design cheaper lasers, or safer cars. Ethicists deal with theoretical questions about what actions are right or wrong, and which states of affairs are good or bad. Actually making the world a better place is an entirely different activity, just as designing cars is a different activity than investigating the laws of physics.

(2) ...because it is easy to blue-sky some possible scenarios...

Feynman spoke and wrote about nano-tech long before it became anything like a reality. He also did a whole lot of very important work in theoretical physics. Likewise if you take a look through a typical ethics journal (like this one) you will find that most of the articles deal with real contemporary problems like the nature of political feedom, the problems of abortion and euthenasia, and so on. Sometimes people who do ethics also like to think about ethical problems that will soon be apon us, but which are not quite here yet. If that was all they did then you might have a real ground for complaint, but in fact it is only a small part of what they do.

Black Box Voting

The source code for the software used in one voting machine was discovered on the Internet, on an unprotected FTP site belonging to Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems Inc. The software, when compiled and run in tests, showed that it appears to be the code used in the company's AccuVote-TS touch-screen terminals.

This software has been analyzed in detail at Truthout.org: How to Rig an Election in the United States. I think your stomach will start turning just a couple paragraphs in. No, let me start it turning for you: the backend database for this state-of-the-art touch-screen votiong machine is Microsoft Access. But that's only part of the story. Wait until you read about the hidden tables. More details here: How We Discovered The Backdoor. The actual code from the FTP site is here: Original Data.

I don't know about you, but I became a little nauseous reading this.... It's quite the yee-opener.

Some more on "problematic" election results:
Florida Ballots Project

Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

NY TImes: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say

The most stomach churning thing of all, I think, is the Christian Right connection to Deibold and ES&S.

If you find this stuff credible, spread the word around.

S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary
Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon

FORTRAN is most assuredly NOT dead. Just ask anybody involved in scientific computing. One good example of a modern scientific code, that is under heavy development, and is written in FORTRAN is FLASH.

As long as you are in the Chicago area, you might as well check out Fermi Lab (though it looks like security is a little more of a pain recently) and The Museum of Science and Industry.

A quick dictionary search reveals that 'signature' in French is feminine, hence its abbreviation 'sig' should also be feminine, leaving 'une sig' as the correct ending for this particular sig. Now that its grammatical correctness has been established, we may go back to wondering about its twisted logic...

A quick dictionary search reveals that 'signature' in French is feminine, hence its abbreviation 'sig' should also be feminine, leaving 'une sig' as the correct ending for this particular sig. Now that its grammatical correctness has been established, we may go back to wondering about its twisted logic...

Maybe the French government just doesn't want people confusing e-mail with enamel. :)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), "critique" became a transitive verb in 1751 with the publication of The History of Pompey the Little by Francis Coventry.

The usage occurs in the introduction:

BUT besides these, there is another set, who never read any modern books at all. They, wise men, are so deep in the learned languages, that they can pay no regard to what has been published within these last thousand years. The world is grown old ; mens geniusses are degenerated ; the writers of this age are too contemptible for their notice, and they have no hopes of any better to succeed them. Yet these gentlemen of profound erudition will contentedly read any trash, that is disguised in a learned language, and the worst ribaldry of Aristophanes, shall be critiqued and commented on by men, who turn up their noses at Gulliver or Joseph Andrews.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.), "critique" became a transitive verb in 1751 with the publication of The History of Pompey the Little by Francis Coventry.

The usage occurs in the introduction:

BUT besides these, there is another set, who never read any modern books at all. They, wise men, are so deep in the learned languages, that they can pay no regard to what has been published within these last thousand years. The world is grown old ; mens geniusses are degenerated ; the writers of this age are too contemptible for their notice, and they have no hopes of any better to succeed them. Yet these gentlemen of profound erudition will contentedly read any trash, that is disguised in a learned language, and the worst ribaldry of Aristophanes, shall be critiqued and commented on by men, who turn up their noses at Gulliver or Joseph Andrews.

I'm getting a $2000 stipend from my university to work on my project this summer. All I had to do was write a proposal. I also entered the project to a student research competition and got $200 in prize money ($200 for a 5 page paper and two 10 minute presentations isn't that bad -would've been $500 if I'd gotten 1st place though). Apart from that, I got a $1000 "donation" to add a new feature, about $200 worth in contract work related to the project, and $40 in user donations. On the other hand, I lost a bunch of money through the cafepress shop (see sig).

But this fall, I'll be transferring to a university that's going to cost me a shi*t load of money, and it's going to be difficult for me to justify spending the usual 15-40 hours/week on the project, without some kind of serious funding (which I doubt I'll find).

Well, there are 40 physicists here, and no more than 5 of them use anything else. From what I have heard from the Astrophysical Journal, they have their own SGML-based production system, so I'm sure they're quite capable of handling Word documents when necessary. In fact, a quick check of their author guidelines shows that Word and WordPerfect are listed second after LaTeX.

UCP will accept manuscripts prepared with the Microsoft Word or WordPerfect processors; however, authors must note that these applications are not designed for the preparation of highly technical, math-intensive manuscripts. LaTeX is recommended for articles containing substantial math. Due to the limitations of these processors, authors are urged to read the following instructions carefully to avoid publication delays and to reduce conversion errors.

They go on to give very normal production notes, including a recommendation of MathType for those who simply can't use LaTeX for math. I'm guessing that the less computer-savvy older generation probably usually use a grad student or two as co-authors who can handle LaTeX. So while yes, you could say they are discouraging anything but LaTeX, they are also providing production instructions for the vast majority who know a lot about physics, but very little about typesetting.

When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States,

And considering that (as you correctly quote) he was of the "information wants to free" crowd, it makes it even less likely that he wrote the copyright and patent clause, although what you quote was written 26 years after the US constitution and may reflect a change of heart.

Quoting more from the same document, his ambivalance becomes clearer.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.

The Networking Services and Information Technologies (NSIT) folk at the University of Chicago distribute a connectivity package during orientation week that includes Mozilla. The package also includes stuff like Eudora, though. Also the public computers in the Reynolds Club are made by Sun, so there's no IE there.

You can see a picture here.

Actually, it matters a lot.

The RIAA has begun a program of legal action to enforce their copyrights against individuals. They have the legal right to do because of new laws predicated on the assertion that copyright law protects the intellectual property of the inventor.

This is a new formulation that was worked out against the widespread adoption of photocopiers, which publishers incorrectly saw as a threat to their livelihood (and played out over and over again as publishers reacted to each new individually enabling technology from audio tape to DAT to VCRs to the internet and PVRs).

What publishers anticipated was their own irrelevance.

Under the original formulation and purpose of copyright law, "temporary monopolies" are granted to "further the progress of science and the useful arts." An idea is not property and it cannot be owned:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself...Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property." - Thomas Jefferson

More than any proceeding technology, the internet obviates the role publishers play in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts. And the RIAA and MPAA know they are dying interests, struggling viciously to maintain power, and desperately trying to restructure the argument to protect their lucrative but now irrelevant middleman roles.

The term "intellectual property" is but part of the battle. Other critical elements include the term "theft:" it is not stealing to copy a copyrighted work (or manufacture a patented product), it is technically a copyright or patent violation. But how much more colorful and instructive it is to, in parallel construction, adopt the term "Guerilla Anti-Trust." Similarly those Anti-Trust Guerrillas are not themselves "Pirating" Granted Temporary Monopolies but waging a guerilla war against the Pirates of the Public Domain.

The vast, vast majority of the population has an intuitive understanding that copying a song does not take anything from anyone and is therefore not theft, "as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me." They are correct, but it would be ultimately highly unprofitable to the publishing industry were that understanding to remain intuitive. The publishing industry (music, movie, books) face an expensive restructuring as their massive physical plant investment (the printing presses, distribution systems, stores and theaters) is inexorably devalued by emerging information technologies.

They are making a bold attempt to replace by law the value that technology has taken away. It is as if buggy whip manufacturers had passed a law that all cars must have one, or more so as if a manufacturer of patent air got a law passed making it illegal to breathe the free stuff. The first step was easy -- buying new laws, and in our democracy that's relatively straight-forward. They simply pay off the right congress people and hand over verbatim drafts of the laws they want (DMCA, 1976 copyright extension act, NET, etc.) Phase two is the one critically addressed by this question: how to convince the public that everything they've always known to be true about ideas is false. The way to do that is semantics, to reformulate the language of the discussion so the underlying assumptions in the words themselves match their goals. So patents and copyrights become "Intellectual Property" and copying becomes "theft" and "Piracy." Everyone knows it's wrong to "steal property" and so, if a song is property, and copying it is stealing it, copying a song is wrong; it's theft "just like walking into a record store and stealing a CD."

Except it's still obviously not like that at all.

So by repetition, by changing the language, by force they

Great post - I couldn't have said it better myself. Perhaps a link to your source could make it even more credible.

Lets set aside the Hydrogen lift into the ozone for a moment and consider Hydrogen clusters.

What is the net reaction of a Hydrogen cluster, like H3+ or H9+(H2), with ozone.

Hydrogen Cluster Resources:
Brief Introduction to H3+
mbarbatti.sites.uol.com.br/cluster/A1.pdf
mbarbatti.sites.uol.com.br/cluster

If H2 is a concern to the ozone layer, is H3+ structrures a concern? They are larger. They occur naturally on Moon.