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I most absolutely recommend you read "More Guns, Less Crime - Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws", by John R. Lott Jr.

Here's an address where you can read a bit about the book... http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/1 3530.ctl

Mr Lott's book is a very dry, analytical look at the hard numbers involved. This text in particular, is hated by the gun control lobby for the way it looks at the numbers... then challenges the extremists' point of view by looking at the numbers using their arguments. The key is not in which numbers either side chooses to include. It lies in which numbers one side or the other chooses to EXCLUDE, in order to come up with "the solution" they want.

I found this to be an excellent resource to back up many discussions between myself and my non-shooting friends.

You can judge for yourself if you think it is biased either way. Personally, I dont think it is, given the NATURE of the attacks against Mr. Lott's findings.

Ken Cormack
NRA Member

Q: It just seems to defy common sense that crimes likely to involve guns would be reduced by allowing more people to carry guns. How do you explain the results?

A: Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate--as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.

every year there's a new obsession. In 2000 it was Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and one of the big-point items was a rocket.

Probably wouldn't be quite what you would expect it to be there. Fraternies at the U of C are... well, still at the U of C.

Not that that's bad. It's just instead instead of sitting up drinking until 4 am talking about Red Wings, etc., we'd stay up drinking until 4am talking about if Socrates had a death wish at his trial, and how closely Calvin & Hobbes represented their respective namesakes, 17th century philosphers, John Calvin & Thomas Hobbes.

I should know: I was item #153 (complete with flock of sheep) for the 1993 Hunt. Got us (Snell-Hitchcock) 165 points, the win, & my picture in the Chicago Sun-Times. :-)

(Of course, I was glad my mother couldn't make out what exactly the picture was supposed to be off or what was going on.)

-Bill

Probably wouldn't be quite what you would expect it to be there. Fraternies at the U of C are... well, still at the U of C.

Not that that's bad. It's just instead instead of sitting up drinking until 4 am talking about Red Wings, etc., we'd stay up drinking until 4am talking about if Socrates had a death wish at his trial, and how closely Calvin & Hobbes represented their respective namesakes, 17th century philosphers, John Calvin & Thomas Hobbes.

I should know: I was item #153 (complete with flock of sheep) for the 1993 Hunt. Got us (Snell-Hitchcock) 165 points, the win, & my picture in the Chicago Sun-Times. :-)

(Of course, I was glad my mother couldn't make out what exactly the picture was supposed to be off or what was going on.)

-Bill

There are better places to go in Chicagoland if you're interested in technology history. Like the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where the first web browser (Mosaic) was developed. Or the University of Chicago, the site of the Manhattan Project, where the first atomic pile was developed and the first artificial nuclear chain reaction occurred. Or the Fermi national accelerator laboratory. Or the Argonne national laboratory. Or the Northwestern University Institute for Nanotechnology. Or the Northwestern University's International Center for Advanced Internet Research. The first sandwich transistor was also designed here, while William Shockley was in town for New Year's Eve, 1947/8.

Also, the MoSaI is a damn sight more than $9, especially now that they encourage you to buy "city passes", which are a combined ticket for the MoSaI, the Field museum, the Shedd aquarium, the Adler planetarium, the Art Institute, the Historical Society, and probably a whole fucking slew of other things.

... and while you're in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, you should also be sure to check the nearby birthplace of the "atomic age" (location of the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; "Where the End of the World Began!" [this last link'll have to do since I couldn't find a picture of the t-shirt I'm referring to]). It's not far at all.

Fourth, Einstein introduced some constant in the relativity's equations so that the universe is static, which was his deep belief.

This is the cosmological constant, which he later abandoned (I think because it was realised that the Universe is expanding - previously they didn't think it was). It's now thought that this constant, which is associated with the energy density of vacuum, is associated with the dark matter (the existence of which has recently been verified) which is slowing the expansion of the Universe.

His abandoning of this idea is often called his greatest mistake.

Regarding old people w/ cell phones...

Your answers are here and here.

Regarding old people w/ cell phones...

Your answers are here and here.

Actually I want to add to this. The majority here are not lawyers in any capacity, and the advice you see here reflects that fact. There's a reason it takes several years to be a lawyer. And no Websters(TM) isn't going to make anyone an instant lawyer. If the "/." are going to be true to what they profess to believe (the results of a "/." poll come to mind)? Then they need to have a firmer grasp of both the legal, and political system. A court, nor a politician is going to be impressed by your ability to yell at the top of your voice "I want my rights!", or "You evil people are taking away my rights!". The opposition has a firm grasp of both processes, and the results reflect that fact. The "/." wants to change things? Then drag yourself out of your self-imposed isolation, and study the law and politics with the same fevor that you devoted to technical issues, otherwise you'll lose face when you complain about the results..

US Legal resource

Danish law in english

Foregn law resources

US guide to Denmark

The US political process & advocacy

Any legitimate statistics to back that up, bucko?
I'm not the original poster but here is a study with a few statistics Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns (warning: this is a PDF) - his was a national study on a county-by-county basis evaluating the effect of right-to-carry laws. It found that counties that introduced right-to-carry laws saw a murder fall by 8.5%, rape fall by 5% and aggrevated assault fall by 7%. You'll have to read the study itself to evaluate it's methodology & raw data - most competing studies that dispute his claims have been done on a state by state rather than county by county basis (such as the study commisioned by the Brady Campaign to disprove Lott's findings). The reason he chose to do it by county is that in many of the state laws counties or munipalities that dominate certain counties have broad discretion in how they issue permits - other state laws explicitly exempt certain localities. For example how good is state data from Pennsylvania in measuring the effect of handgun legislation when Philidelphia (where much of the crime occurs) is exempted from the state law.

How many crimes have you heard of thwarted because someone brandished a Smith and Wesson
Personally only a few - they show up in the local paper from time to time. Of course completely deterred crimes where not even an attempt was made would be impossible to measure except by inference (as in Lott's study) National polls indicate that people use guns defensively against criminal attacks somwhere between 760,000 and 3.5 million times per year (Kleck, Gary and marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun" 86 Journal of Criminal Law and Ciminology 86 - fall 1995). Data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey from 1979 to 1987 indicate that the risk for serious injury from a criminal attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun (Southwick, 1996).

How much will it cost you to learn not to split infinitives?

Actually, according to the Chicago Manual of Style (the traditional keeper of such rules in the editing trade), splitting infinitives is now permitted. The prohibition originated with stuffy linguistic purists who valued syntactic ideals over clarity. Since clear communication is the real purpose of language, as of the 14th edition of the CMS the prohibition has been expunged.
(you think you know grammar nazis? I'm married to an editor!)

How does the cameras sensors not melt and achieve good accuracy by staring into the sun ? Surely they must be cooled off, but how ?

Oddly enough, the CCD's generally are not cooled at all. The amount of light falling on the detector is actually not that great. Remember that each pixel corresponds to less than 0.1 x 0.1 arcsec, which means it covers about one-billionth of the solar surface (and hence the flux is one billion times less than integrated sunlight). Then you start taking very small slices in wavelength (0.01 nm or less, compared to the 100's of nanometers over the sun's emission peak in the visible wavelengths). Toss in a polarizer too (though they didn't use one in these observations), and next thing you know, you are running out of photons! That's why we need a big (by solar telescope standards) 4-meter telescope like the ATST ( http://atst.nso.edu).

The exposure times in observations like these are also very short, on the order of 20 milliseconds or less, so there is no time for the dark current to build up during a long exposure (this is why nighttime CCD's, with exposures of minutes or hours, are often cooled). For some applications, even simple video rate CCD's can be used (the problem often being the small number of pixels).

As you might surmise, even if the detector isn't getting hit with that many photons, a lot of extra light is going through the telescope. Getting rid of waste heat IS a problem, and, as is the case with the Swedish Tower, often the main body of the telescope (entrance aperture -> main mirror -> instrument feed) is kept in a vacuum to reduce currents from heated air in the optical path. However, the Swedish Tower appears to be at the limit for the size of the entrance window (must be of optical quality and with minimal stress) that can be used (the entrance window is the size of the main lens on the Yerkes telescope - the world's biggest refractor). That is why bigger telescopes like the GREGOR (1.5 m) and ATST (4 m) will be open, like nighttime telescopes, and will have to use different methods of thermal control. We can't go bigger than four meters now because of the limits of our thermal control capabilities.

Ah good, someone got in before me :) It is definatly a good idea to separate out the GUI part when dealing with cross-platform applications, since a lot of portability problems reside there.

In all honesty, I don't recommand Qt or wxWindows - they are great toolkits, but you lose out heavily on productivity compared to visual development environments with GUI builders. While both of these have associated builder tools, I don't consider them very mature of capable compared to VB or Delphi/C Builder. There is also a write-once-debug-and-tweak-everywhere concern (just getting wxWindows looking good on Windows and Solaris takes some effort).

Java is a great choice as it is supported on many platforms, has powerful GUI classes, a couple of builder products, and has several means for client/server support, including CORBA. But for UI applications it isn't hugely productive (strangely enough).

Some of your other options include ParaGUI and SDL, gTk, GraphApp, V, Mozilla's XPToolkit and XUL, and WideStudio.

I have grappled with exactly this question (legacy C/C++ needing to go cross platform with GUIs), and the best answer I've come up with so far is to keep your main code in C/C++ (since you have the legacy code AND the skills), define a clear UI abstraction layer, and create the UI in a scripting language such as Tcl or Python. Use SWIG to tie the script to native C functions.

I have more experience with Tcl/Tk, and believe it is more widely portable (especially the GUI consistency), but it is slower and arguably more difficult to program than Python. Still, this depends on what skills you can acquire, and what your UI requirements are.

Prechelt has an empirical comparison of some languages, including C/C++, Python, Tcl and Perl, and most importantly he has productivity figures! Keith Waclena has a Language Crisis page of comparisons, and Doug Bagley hosts the Great Computer Language Shootout. There are all invaluable resources for determining a balance between portability, functionality and productivity.

In the DOI, when they say that all men are created equal, do you think that means they are created with an equal height, an equal hair color, and an equal amount of wealth?

This truth does not, imho, imply any rights whatsoever.

We are talking about the proper interpretation of the DOI, which he was instrumental in constructing. So I'd suggest that his opinion would trump either of ours.

I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff.

the government has one regard in which it is required to treat all Americans as equals. That regard is the fourteenth amendment.

Exactly. I'm sure the poster you're replying to didn't actually read the decision or much of the legal analysis of that decision that followed, with most constitutional scholars (including many conservatives) being quite critical of the decision. If the decision made so much sense, why was the Court compelled to stress that the decision should not be seen as precedent?

Don't you mean this?

--quirky

Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002
To: "Members of the University Community"
From: "Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer"
Reply-to: security+dmca@uchicago.edu
Subject: Warning About Copyright Violations

----

Letter to the University Community

Over the last several years a number of "peer to peer"
applications have been developed that allow users to
participate in a file sharing "community". These programs
allow users to search the network for files that may
interest them, and to bring those files to their own
computers. This downloading generally is not a problem for
the University (although it puts users at risk personally if
they are found to posses copyrighted materials they have not
obtained legally).

Most of these programs also automatically share files from
the user's disk to other users worldwide if the user does
not take specific actions to prevent this. The traffic such
sharing generates can easily cause problems for other users
at the University, and thus violate the Eligibility and
Acceptable Use Policy. Potentially more serious, sharing
copyrighted materials without a license can subject the user
and the University to legal sanctions. Since most file-
sharing programs install themselves with worldwide sharing
turned on by default, it is very easy for users of such
programs to find themselves in serious trouble with the
University and with copyright holders. The University will
not protect individuals who distribute copyrighted material
without an appropriate license. Federal law requires that
the University take action when notified that someone on its
network is distributing copyrighted materials.

If you are using one of these applications and are on the
university's network (including its modem pool), you should
consider removing it from your system. If you choose not to
remove the application, you should IMMEDIATELY ensure that
your system is set to prevent the application from acting as
a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.

Failure to restrict the application in this way, whether you
are aware of the violation or not, will result in your
machine being removed from the network until the copyright
violation is rectified. It will also cause a report to be
sent to University Human Resources Management, the Dean of
Students, or the Provost's Office, as appropriate, as part
of a disciplinary action within the University. Additionally,
legal action may be taken against you by the holder of the
copyright for the material that was found on your system.

Further information on how to prevent illegal file sharing
can be found at:

http://security.uchicago.edu/peer-to-peer/no_files hare.shtml

Paul Sereno, for instance, has led expeditions into places like Niger, Morocco and Patagonia. The politics add an extra variable which makes it a pain in the ass to dig in another country, some countries more than others, so most American palentologists stay here. Also, it's a bitch to transport the fossils long distances after they're dug up. There's plenty of stuff to find here, so it's not really a problem.

They were definitely not predominantly here.

(Conscious of the fact that we're getting more and more offtopic...)

Most people don't have nearly enough sex to be able to burn any signifigant amount of calories from it. Vigorous sexual activity burns around 6 to 7 calories per minute, but most people aren't doing pelvic thrusts continuously for a half hour to an hour.

And if you are, regularly... dude, don't you have a problem with chafing?

Actually, this is not necessarily the case. If the losing party pays both sides legal fees, it doesn't discourage lawsuits or encourage lawsuits, it just makes them more risky.

Imagine that court costs to each party are $5. If I feel that I need to be compensated $10 for an injustice, previously I would think "Hey, I'll pay $5 to win $10! But I could lose $5 and not gain $10 at all." You weigh your options and sue.

Now, you could win $10 for the suit and $5 for your fees, but you could also lose $5 for your cost and $5 for their cost. New upside is $15, more incentive to sue. New downside is a lose of $10. Less incentive to sue.

There are huge amounts of economic research on this. Check out the works of Coase. Extensive economic research in regards to law.

Anyway, end result, nothing really changes except it makes suing a more risky venture. (which one could argue rich people would undertake more often because they can afford to lose, but that opens a whole huge other economic debate)

I just saw Susan Lindquist (as far as I know, the woman who came up with this whole idea) give a talk on Hsp90 (the protein in question) yesterday. Since NewScientist isn't exactly forthcoming with the article, here are a few alternate resources.

• Nature Science Update
• The Nature article that started it all. Check out the Full Text if you want the full story (but you'd better be a biologist if you want to understand it).
• Lindquist's HHMI page

Slashdot used to let you type in &#whatever to get any Unicode character you wanted... it seems to filter them out now :(

voila.fr for instance usually seems to not use an accent at all

Well, that seems to be their domain name, and originally, you couldn't have non-ASCII chars in domain names (and even now, it seems like it's a huge hassle and nobody does it). voila.hu's a Hungarian site... I don't expect them to get it perfect, especially since they don't use the grave accent in their language :) (Whereas they do use the acute accent... it makes a short vowel long). (But it does seem like they should at least be consistent between the magazine and the webpage :) I bet the problem is that ISO 8859-2 doesn't have the à character). But anyways, the French word is voilà... see a French dictionary.

I do know how to access these characters using the US and US Extended keymaps, but that's not a good solution to me.

Ah, okay... I thought you just meant that you needed to be able to type foreign characters, but keep the familiar US English layout for the majority of your typing, rather than wanting to duplicate the Windows US-International layout. In that case, hopefully the Technote will help... but I think it's a bit unfair to list the lack of a Windows-specific keyboard layout as a bad point against OSX :)

Is odd that there is no Ð or yes

Nobody cares about Icelandic ;) I find it strange that ISO 8859-1 included ð and , but left out oe and OE, since the latter's used in French, which is a much bigger Western European language than Icelandic. Ah well... 8859-15 adds them in (while keeping ð/)... ½,¼ will be oe,OE in 8859-15, or 1/4,1/2 in 8859-1.

I work at UChicago (Carlstrom, the professor here, is my advisor). For more information about CMB polarisation, I reccomend Wayne Hu's (a theorists) webpages at http://background.uchicago.edu.

He provides an excellent lay (and more complicated,
if you're interested) introduction to what's going on here.

Essentially, it boils down to the fact that people
have been looking for this phenomenon for 20 years, and if someone finally said conclusively, "It's not there" that means the last few decades of cosmology would literally have been back to the drawing board.

This really is an exciting timne in cosmology.

To learn more about this work and to develop the background that would satisfy your curiosity, I suggest taking the time to do some research, e.g. by checking out the websites for the principles involved in this project. There's also some excellent cosmological primers available on the web that go over some of this stuff; see e.g. Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial (here and especially here) as well as Wayne Hu's Introduction to the Cosmic Microwave Background.

To go through your concerns one by one:

1. The U.S., in concert with other nations, already maintains an extensive set of scientific facilities in Antarctica, in the form of permanent bases at the South Pole and at McMurdo Sound and Palmer Station. These facilities are manned and operated year-round. Their purpose is to provide logistical support for the scores of short- and long-term scientific projects that take place in Antarctica, such as the one described in this article. In other words, the issue of logistical support for such a project in Antarctica really isn't an issue; an entire organizational/logistical apparatus has been running for many years to provide this capability for science as a whole, and they'll only be one of many projects each year that will take advantage of it.

2. There is already a significant amount of observational evidence for the presence of what's referred to here as "dark energy." One hint of the presence of such an energy component to the Universe comes from trying to reconcile two observations: the first is that cosmic microwave background data indicates that the large-scale geometry of space is flat; the second is that the matter density of the universe (both in baryons, or normal matter, and in unknown dark matter, not to be confused with "dark energy"), measured via a broad variety of techniques, can only provide about 20% of the mass-energy density required to make the large-scale geometry be as flat as is observed. What's the other 80%? If it can't be matter of some sort, then what is it? When this is combined with recent observations that the expansion of the universe is accelerating -- something only possible if such a "dark energy" component to the mass-energy density of the universe is present -- one is forced to take this possibility seriously. (there's a lot more to be said about this issue, but only if someone cares)

3. The telescope will not solely look at one spot on the sky.

4. Lighting is not really an issue; this is not a visible light telescope, but rather a microwave telescope. There are significant noise issues that will have to be confronted in the data analysis, but not really from day vs. night problems.

"Well, yes, he suspended habeas corpus...and the Constitution said he could. Article I, Section 9, Clause 2:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

And in Ex parte Milligan, we learned that the Constitution gives him the right to suspend Habeus Corpus only when the courts cease to function. Milligan was set free. Have a nice day.

"he did, in fact, suspend the right of habeas corpus"

Later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, I might add. See Ex parte Milligan. For the lazy, Ex parte Milligan was a declaration by the Supreme Court following the Civil War which stated a number of things, not the least of which were: the military cannot act as a judiciary in any place where the courts are able to function, no one (not even the President) may suspend Habeus Corpus so long as there is a functional government, and last but not least - the military cannot try a citizen who is not connected with the military.

This is, of course, something that was overlooked when Jose Padilla, who is an American citizen, and supposedly has some rights, was transferred to a military brig with little more than casual remarks from the government (Bush called him a "bad guy" - yes, he really did use those words).

I read up on this a while back.
Now, if I could just get my hands on one :)

"Pollen drift is a real problem, especially with maize," Harl said. "It places these countries in an extremely difficult position."

...but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

While Jefferson certainly didn't think that it is a fundamental right to control your works, copyright history didn't start there.

For a fuller perspective, including the sources of attitudes that most corporations prefer, I can highly recommend Mark Rose's Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright which traces the creation of the notion of copyright as a property (and the subsequent question about whether it should be permanent).

He started a group known as The Amateur Sky Survey, which has been working on software for analyzing the images from his cameras. After three years of scanning the celestial equator, we published a paper containing over 10 million measurements of stars in several passbands. You can read a preprint or the paper itself if you subscribe to PASP.

Based on our experience, I'd say that one of the hardest things about turning a backyard observatory into a serious scientific instrument is the bookkeeping: carefully recording all the necessary information and calibrating your results against the standard catalogs is a real pain, and doesn't have the same sex appeal as building the hardware or the software. But it's just as necessary.

But give me a break, clean water? food? China has gotten past that stage a long time ago.

Yeah, a long time ago, like 1970? Only about 30 MILLION people starved to death in China during the 60's.

Thomas Jefferson actually wrote that it would be wrong if people treated ideas as property. So the "original intention of intellectual property laws" seems sort of an oxymoron, but then terms like piracy and theft don't really make much sence either. I think pirates used to kill people.

She is used for the definite neuter, ~. He is used for the indefinite neuter, ~.

Thanks.

On the other hand, I have found some of the responses educational.

One angle is the "follow the money" angle

Another, equally viable, is the "See the Source Code" angle.

As seen in this PDF file, property rights are often considered as a "bundle of sticks", a collection of rights which taken collectively create the concept of property and ownership. (although this is usually seen in land and realty situations, I can see how it applies elsewhere)

This ties directly into the license vs ownership arguments, etc. and would have to be sorted out in detail

"Can you give me any reference that morality specifically denotes the religious? Clearly Christianity is the basis for the Western take on morality, but I think you are making an unwarranted linguistic leap."

No I can't give you a reference off the [sic] of my head. It's just what I was thought [sic] in school. Morality is a religious term, ethics is a secular term. Even terms like good and evil are religous terms.

The content creators will do whatever they can to control their content (remember, THEY own it, WE do not ... we purchase a right to enjoy the content which until recently was able to be shifted into various formats).

"the perilous irony of the digital age."

There is no irony here, Michael. The fact of the matter is that this country was founded as, and will always be, a pirate nation. As much as our government enjoys defaming China and like nations for the rampant piracy within their boundaries, from the beginning of copyright law in the United States the laws were purposefully worded in order to stimulate the society and promote the progress of the arts. Thomas Jefferson best explains the copyright clause of the Constitution in an 1813 letter.

"Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody."

The framers understood that it is absolutely necessary to protect the ideas of an individual, for the purpose of encouraging the creators in society to create, but such protection should not, and must not be extended beyond the point where they are beneficial to society. This is why the Constitution portions out 'limited times' of protection as the sole enumerated power granted to the congress in order 'to promote the progress of science and useful arts.'

The tactics of Disney, and like distributors, are an affront to the tenets which this country was founded on. Their most recent success, the CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) was the last straw for some Americans, and the arguments will finally be heard by the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, challenging the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act) The extension of copyrights for ideas created decades ago is not an attempt to promote progress, and it is stretching the definition of 'limited terms'. In fact, as Federal Circuit Judge Richard Posner noted, "creative works are both an input and an output in the creative process; if you raise the cost of the input, you get less output." It is easy to forget how much of the creative process depends on the works of others, for inspiration and motivation. Judge Posner eloquently posits the belief that at a certain point, protection of source material will begin to hinder more than help the arts which it attempts to nurture. This has obvious occurred in the case of the CTEA. There is no societal benefit to extending the copyright of Mickey Mouse. Walt Disney will certainly not be inclined to create more work. And at the same time, those in our society who would have used the new material that entered the public domain as a source for their creativity have been stifled. Consider what the greatness of Shakespeare would be if Hollingshed had been lost or hidden from him.

View the whole essay here.

...literally.

Homer Jumps the Shark.

I am one of the authors of a competing paper on RX J1856 that was published yesterday, as well as a co-discoverer of the pulsar in 3C58. In my opinion these results, while definitely a possibility are certainly very preliminary. And in fact, there are other possibilities that make quite a bit more sense.

In the case of RX J1856, there is a ~15% chance that the lack of pulsations (one of the biggest reasons for suspecting a quark star) is simply the result of an unfortunate emitting geometry or viewing alignment. Given that there are ~7 objects known that are similar to RX J1856, having at least one of them in this 15% seems quite likely to me -- and avoids having to invoke a new form of "star stuff".

As for 3C58, the neutron star cooling problem can be mitigated (but not completely removed) by assuming a larger age for the supernova remnant (and therefore the neutron star) -- which expansion measurements and pulsar timing measurements also suggest.

In other words, there are simpler explanations for the facts. Although those explanations certainly wouldn't get as much press...

This would take a lot of the stuffing out of the 2nd-amendment lobby, unless you really buy that "home defense" stuff. Poopycock! I mean, it's been shown that a gun in your home is more likely to kill you or a family member than an intruder.

This is a false statement based on junk science and outright lies. You can read a better study here.

In fact, the very actions of the politicos who want to take your guns call you a liar. Why would Rosie 'for the children' O'Donnel hire an armed man to guard her kids if she really believed that guns are unsafe?

When the Mayor of Chicago, where guns have been illegal since the 1970's, feels his city is safe enough for him to give up his four armed guards and police cars in front of his family's houses, I'll consider giving up my gun. Until then, I'm as safe as the Mayor and safer than you.

It is still turn-based... so what?

Another take from the Todd Mundt Show
Todd Mundt had on his show today a marine biologist purports the changes in global climate follow the decline of marine species, not the rise in other aspects of society, including logging. The marine biologist and paleontologist was Dr Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Another write up of his research is here

The C method of rubber band shooting is quite impressive, however the description in the parent post is a little hard to follow.

For those of you interested, here is a page describing the C method in greater detail: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~alain/magictalk-wis dom/discussions/shooting_rubber_band.html

--McVerne

For example, the discovery of Santa's flying reindeer would be a big step on the road to understanding the physics of his journey, akin in chemistry to discovering the transuranic series, and would have much more impact than finding yet another sign of a stressed creator. For example, the CIA would be absolutely fascinated to get a handle one someone who ``knows when you've been naughty''.

``But seriously folks,'' add to this the 250,000+ species known from fossils and it should be clear that at least every 8th-to-80th transitional form should have shown up in the fossil record we've exhumed so far (BTW, the above ref cites TL Erwin in The Tropical Forest Canopy within Biodiversity, 1988, NAP (WA DC) for a generous ceiling of 30 million species, mostly insects). If we had equal parts transitional and stable species (really, we need many times that because most attempted changes would fail according to any reasonable theory), for example, there should be an absolute scratching minimum of about 2,000 known transitional species discovered in the fossil record by now.

While we're having fun, take DM Raup's figure of 99.9% ( Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? , 1991, WW Norton NY - see this too for commentary and a ceiling of 40M species) extinct species, there should be at least 20 transitional species alive today, and using the 10-30 million species range vs 2 million known, we should have found somewhere between 1 and 4 of those by now.

Maybe one of those is Santa's reindeer? Which, BTW, are probably female...

And, well, make sure that 250,000 line program is written in something marketable like Java, C or C++. Your offers will diminish if you're playing around with non-corporate languages like Perl.

Not true.

In college, for my senior AI project, I developed a large application in Perl to watch a user surf the web and suggest related materially. Kinda like Netscape "What's Related", but when Netscape was Mosaic. Since these were the day before proxy servers, before CPAN had built up much steam, the application was pretty large.

As the AI dept at my school where some slanted towards theory and AI at the time, the two other languages I used the most where Scheme and Lisp.

I got a job, a good one at that, no problem, and no it wasn't doing CGIs. In fact, even though I work for a large-ish web company now, my first job wasn't web-centric at all. Looking back, I wish I had gotten more exposure to C/C++, but that's not difficult to make up for with a few good book, and the exposure they gave to theory, helped make up for it.

So IMHO using Perl and other "non-corporate" languages does not condem you to being a CGI monkey. (Note if all you do during college is Perl CGIs, and that's all you really got, that however, is a different matter...)

Anyway my two cents,
-Bill

there's a good FAQ on this here A bit heavy on anti-creationist polemic, but it still contains a readable introduction to modern abiogenesis theory.

Try this essay for balance. If you enjoy sarcasm, this one is amusing as well.

I can't resist my own separate dig at this page, it's just asking for it:

Even at 1 chance in 4.29 x 10[E]40, a self-replicator could have turned up surprisingly early. [...] So, if on our prebiotic earth we have a billion peptides growing simultaneously, that reduces the time taken to generate our replicator significantly.

As a GSV I get to choose my own name

a. the Yahoo! case only came out the way it did because Yahoo! is incorporated in France. Otherwise there is no jurisdiction.

b. Zippo v. Zippo.com governs jurisdiction in the U.S. The gist is that simple delivery of web pages (browsing) does not get one jurisdiction but active content does.

c. See Prof. Jack Goldsmith at U of Chicago Law School for lots on this.

The University of Chicago has a year long master's program aimed at individuals who do not have a bachelors in CS. A few of my friends went through it after their BA's and had a positive experience.

-Bill
U of C '97