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That post is ignorant at best, but more likely just racist.

Offensive, possibly. But racist, no. Racist would be that joke applied to a someone of Korean descent, as Koreans have little to do with the Viet Cong but happen to be ethnically related (very broadly) to Vietnamese. Would it be racist to make a "Heil Hitler" joke about a German? And if so, how about a Swede? I realize it's a lost cause, but I just wish the word "racism" were used more accurately rather than as a blanket term for "based on stereotypes".

And to characterize the joke as "ignorant" is also an absurd misuse of the term. I can't imagine that anyone who knows the signifance of the term "Charlie" in relation to Vietnam (and thus understands the joke) would confuse a 35-year-old first-generation immigrant Vietnamese American with a communist guerilla.

It was a silly, offensive joke based on cultural stereotypes. Just leave it at that. And just for the record, I'm a bit of an aficionado of Vietnamese culture, I'm part Asian, and I thought it was funny. (Though I would never repeat it in front of a Vietnamese person.)

Sometimes, people who fled totalitarian countries are the most ardent supporters of American freedoms. I can't read into the heart and mind of Viet Dinh, but your post is contemptible.

Unfortunately, such people aren't immune to engaging in the same mindset they sought to flee: Little Saigon, 1999 And the Cuban refuguee community in Florida isn't much better behaved, in my opinion.

Hello Cliff,

Given your interest in the emerging topic of formulating a corporate policy for developing and deploying free/open source software, I have been asked to speak on this subject recently, specifically for audiences such as the University of California IT Leadership Council (CIOs and senior staff at the 10 UC campuses--this is the business and operations side of the UC, a >100K employee >$10B/yr enterprise, not the academic research side) and others. My focus is less of a "why to invest in F/OSS" but more of a "given that you want to invest in F/OSS, here's what to consider and how to proceed".

I have a presentation (PDF, PPT) on my Web site from this presentation, if that may be of value to you. You can find it here.

Hope this helps.

Walt Scacchi
Institute for Software Research
School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
F/OSS Research Site

Hello Cliff,

Given your interest in the emerging topic of formulating a corporate policy for developing and deploying free/open source software, I have been asked to speak on this subject recently, specifically for audiences such as the University of California IT Leadership Council (CIOs and senior staff at the 10 UC campuses--this is the business and operations side of the UC, a >100K employee >$10B/yr enterprise, not the academic research side) and others. My focus is less of a "why to invest in F/OSS" but more of a "given that you want to invest in F/OSS, here's what to consider and how to proceed".

I have a presentation (PDF, PPT) on my Web site from this presentation, if that may be of value to you. You can find it here.

Hope this helps.

Walt Scacchi
Institute for Software Research
School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
F/OSS Research Site

Hello Cliff,

Given your interest in the emerging topic of formulating a corporate policy for developing and deploying free/open source software, I have been asked to speak on this subject recently, specifically for audiences such as the University of California IT Leadership Council (CIOs and senior staff at the 10 UC campuses--this is the business and operations side of the UC, a >100K employee >$10B/yr enterprise, not the academic research side) and others. My focus is less of a "why to invest in F/OSS" but more of a "given that you want to invest in F/OSS, here's what to consider and how to proceed".

I have a presentation (PDF, PPT) on my Web site from this presentation, if that may be of value to you. You can find it here.

Hope this helps.

Walt Scacchi
Institute for Software Research
School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
F/OSS Research Site

Yes, it's a Chinese game originally, but people in the West almost entirely use Japanese terminology to discuss the game.

http://www.reg.uci.edu/registrar/soc/fees.html

That's $2k a quarter, $6k a year. And this is only since the 30% increase last summer -- it was only $4k before that.

It might cost you $25k/year total to attend school in CA, but most of that is cost of living, which was my original point.

The Null style /.../ is simply an empty set of constraints. From an architectural perspective, the null style describes a system in which there are no distinguished boundaries between components. ...

The Null style /.../ is simply an empty set of constraints. From an architectural perspective, the null style describes a system in which there are no distinguished boundaries between components. ...

Here are some links. See esp. the REST Wiki:
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web - REST
Debate foams over SOAP 1.2 - REST versus SOAP
How To Convert Rpc To Rest
http://www.xfront.com/ - REST Tutorial, XML et al - Roger Costello's site
ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XML, Web Services, and the REST Architecture
Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon - REST - Transport, transfer and coordination in HTTP
O'Reilly Network: REST vs. SOAP at Amazon [June 24, 2003]
Paul Prescod's REST Resources
Reliable delivery in HTTP - REST
REST A Web-Centric Approach to State Transition - Paul Prescod
REST could burst SOAP's bubble - Hoobler
REST Faq - Alternative to SOAP XML
REST SlideShow: Representational State Transfer: An Architectural Style for Distributed Hypermedia Interaction
REST wiki - Representational State Transfer - alternative to SOAP XML
rest-discuss Message 2330 - ROP vs RPC vs OOP pt 1
Roots of REST - SOAP Debate - Paul Prescod Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages :Message 1314 of 1646
Roy T. Fielding - REST Architect
Sean McGrath BLOG - REST proponent
W3C mailing-list search service on REST
Why you should not use RPC for GET
xml-dev - Re: [xml-dev] SOAP-RPC and REST and security
XML.com: In a Lather About Security - SOAP security vs REST security
Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages : 2371-2428 of 2428

Here are some links. See esp. the REST Wiki:
Adam Bosworth's Weblog: Learning to REST
Bitworking - The Well-Formed Web - REST
Debate foams over SOAP 1.2 - REST versus SOAP
How To Convert Rpc To Rest
http://www.xfront.com/ - REST Tutorial, XML et al - Roger Costello's site
ITworld.com - XML IN PRACTICE - XML, Web Services, and the REST Architecture
Mark Baker, Tech Curmudgeon - REST - Transport, transfer and coordination in HTTP
O'Reilly Network: REST vs. SOAP at Amazon [June 24, 2003]
Paul Prescod's REST Resources
Reliable delivery in HTTP - REST
REST A Web-Centric Approach to State Transition - Paul Prescod
REST could burst SOAP's bubble - Hoobler
REST Faq - Alternative to SOAP XML
REST SlideShow: Representational State Transfer: An Architectural Style for Distributed Hypermedia Interaction
REST wiki - Representational State Transfer - alternative to SOAP XML
rest-discuss Message 2330 - ROP vs RPC vs OOP pt 1
Roots of REST - SOAP Debate - Paul Prescod Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages :Message 1314 of 1646
Roy T. Fielding - REST Architect
Sean McGrath BLOG - REST proponent
W3C mailing-list search service on REST
Why you should not use RPC for GET
xml-dev - Re: [xml-dev] SOAP-RPC and REST and security
XML.com: In a Lather About Security - SOAP security vs REST security
Yahoo! Groups : rest-discuss Messages : 2371-2428 of 2428

SF is a thought experiment in the social realm, technology included, and you shouldn't expect much less. Robinson is using utopian ideas influenced in large part by Fredric Jameson [among others], which means he's fairly well-informed on large-scale social trends. (Not to mention making probably the best literary adaptation of geomorphology to Mars.) SF usually tends to either the utopian or dystopian or some mix, because that's a big part of what makes it exploratory and entertaining. The interesting thing about the politics of the Mars trilogy is that he's examining how the new frontier will play out, given the dominant social trends of the past few hundred years... Not really meant to be predictive, merely plausible and instructive.

The idea of the 'time slip' is interesting from the point of view of how people removed from 'the old country' deal with new frontier conditions and old traditions [he's very focussed on the history of the American West]. If his use of ideology seems alien to you, that's part of what he's getting at. Deal with it.

[P.S. -- ever hear of satellites? Naw, just an SF pipe dream.]

One good way to minimize gerrymandering is to create compact districts. This is a requirement that districts be roughly uniform in shape (like a hexagon or circle).

Interesting, I've read several reports (here and here) discussing that there will be too little oil for global warming. According to the stories all of the petroleum reserves will run out before the atmosphere heats up enough to have any effect. I guess this just goes to show that atmospheric chemistry isn't always an exact science.

What we bike riders really need is:

1) Tires that don't go flat!

Get $10 tyre-liners like Mr Tuffy's. Ever since I started using them a year and a half ago (and only in my rear tyre, to boot!), I've had zero punctures despite commuting five times a week through streets littered with broken beer bottles.

And in the rare event that you do get a flat, use a CO2 inflator to cut out the most frustrating part of on-road flat repair: pumping.

2) Something to keep the rain and road dirt from putting a big skunk stripe up our backs when riding in wet climates. There are fenders, but they don't work well.

Maybe you're using the cheapo snap-on plastic types. Get the real thing and they eliminate every drop of spray. They don't look so conspicuous either if you get them in black (unless you have fancy candy-coloured tyres).

3) The ability to fold the frame so that it can fit in the back of a small car or on the bus.

Plenty of options available for you here. Probably the best and most popular are the Brompton and the Bike Friday. And if you're really hardcore (but obviously you're not), check out S&S frame couplings.

4) Brakes that work in the rain.

Pssst. I'll let you in on a secret. Use the front brake, it's really not that dangerous.

5) Tires that don't go flat. So important, I'm saying it twice.

Well, I wouldn't recommend solid tyres but hey, if you really want them, it's a free country.

We don't need auto transmissions, $150 helmets, $1500 frames that weigh next to nothing, and stupid yuppie mommies who want to pass stupid yuppie mommie laws to protect us for our own good.

Agreed on all those points.

In fact, I HATE bicycle helmets. "But," the yuppies tell me, "you NEED a helmet for safety! It should be illegal to ride without one."

Well I'll agree that it should be your choice whether or not to wear a helment, but still it's pretty stupid not to wear one. It's your head -- don't go suing somone for not having told you about the risks when you go crack your skull on the pavement.

The same people who say this think nothing about strapping two skinny long little boards to their feet and flying down an snow-covered mountain at 50 MPH with nothing on their heads but designer sunglasses!

Umm...I guess you haven't been on a ski slope recently, because the biggest trend these days is for everyone to be wearing helments. In fact, it's almost a fashion statement now regardless of which demographic you fit into -- they're all going for the freeride / x-ski look. But hey, as a ski patroller, I'm all for it if it saves lives and minimises injuries.

First of all, this sound is based on observations of the microwave background radiation, which didn't come into existence until 300,000 years after the big bang. You will note that the article states "when it [the universe] was just 18 million light years across" Imagine beating a drum that big, and you'll see why the pitch is so low. So the big bang may or may not have been a "bang" but 300,000 years later, the sound made was a hum.

Really, the relevant signal to listen to is the background signal of gravitational waves. These actually correspond rather directly to (faint) sound waves, since they induce mechanical disturbances as they pass through matter. By now, of course, most of these will have stretched to the dimensions of the universe, and be more or less undetectable, even in principle. Some theories predict the existence of higher frequency waves going back to the first moments of the big bang. We can look forward to detecting some higher frequency waves in the next five to ten years, from the various interferometers coming online. This is serious science, and could provide insights into not only the origins of the universe, but also supernovae, and the dynamics of black holes and neutron stars. Not to mention curiosities that may occur unheralded. Something akin to the advent of radio astronomy may be in store for us.

There's also (presumably) a neutrino background, from about one second after the big bang. This will be very hard to detect, until we build a big sister to AMANDA covering icy orb, perhaps ganymede :) Some folks seem to be trying to detect it indirectly via the microwave background.

Physicists are entitled to a little fun now and then, anyway. It also helps to bring cosmology a little closer to the general public. It certainly isn't as if this researcher had to get a peer reviewed grant of many thousands of dollars to produce such "trivial" results: he simply did some starightforward processing on data that was already available, quite possibly in his spare time on his own computer. Oh, and I would definitely classify this as more useful/pertinent then that (admittedly a bit silly) "color of the universe stuff"!

It is not the case that "any" sound can be created, or that there is no relationship to the original, when scaling by 100,000. Many (most) relationships are preserved in this sort of operation. Indeed, a familiar example would be to speed up or slow down normal speech; it remains understandable.

Science starts with the presumption of ignorance, and then proceeds to discover what the universe can tell us about itself. Many slashdotters could take a lesson from this.

The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison

So many studies are done about consumer behavior and advertisers' tactics and, yet, consumers behave exactly as they did before. For example, research by Elizabeth Loftus at UCI has shown that advertisers like Disney routinely implant memories into us. In one of her studies, subjects even believes that they had seen Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Even after this was widely reported by the media, Disney ads have stayed the same and are still as likely to "fall prey" to them.

Obviously, the benefits to advertisers and consumers are quite asymmetrical from all this research. Advertisers can actually refine their techniques and perhaps learn new ones. Consumers, on the other hand, may be a little more educated but they certainly are more easily seduced. While this is not absolutely bad and may even be good in some ways, the fact remains that with increasingly power research tools like fMRI mentioned here, the potential for corporations to absolutely manipulate us increases. I'm sure that things will work out in the future, as they have always done. However, research into "defenses" against memory implantation, et al does need to be conducted.

Building multiprocessor chips, or chips from arrays of processors has become a fairly hot design approach. There are a number of companies using it. It seems to be especially popular in the reconfigurable computing area. There is an interesting paper here. These processors go well beyond the current crop of dual CPU core chips like the P4, Power 5, and Ultrasparc IV.

Clearspeed's chip is a static 64 processor array chip aimed at FPU intensive applications, but there are many more things that you can do with array designs.

Mathstar is building a reconfigurable chip with hundreds of elements availble in various mixes of processors, memory blocks and other components. They are trying to replace ASICs and FPGAs as a platform for some part needs. There was a story on their architecture in EE Times a couple of months ago.

Intel is wokring on an array based processor aimed at the radio / communications market. I will be interested to see if their work with these chips ends up being used in other Intel chips. That could be deadly. So, the Pentium-X sucks at that task today? [Morph] Not now!

Phillips has what they call Silicon Hive technology which is another reconfigurable processor of functional blocks.

There have been plenty of companies using arrays and reconfigurable techniques too, like Altera and Chameleon.

Sun bought up a start up and is developing massivly multithreaded processors based on the start-up's technology. They call it Throughput Computing. They claim that in about two years they will have a chip 30x faster than todays designs. I'll be very interested to see if they can do that.

The next couple of years should be very interesting on the processor front.

While not the original interpretation, I prefer to think of the WWW as a giant state engine with all possible pages (including possible dynamically-generated content) as already created and available. Then as you navigate from one page to another, i.e., are transferred from page to page, you are changing from one state to another.

This way of envisioning the WWW is called Representational State Transfer(REST) and is documented by Roy Fielding, one of the WWW's architects, in his doctoral dissertation.

This is not the original interpretation, however, and in both HTTP 1.0 - RFC 1945 and HTTP /1.1 - RFC 2068 the term "transfer" is used in the original sense of transferring data.

A definite no-no for standards. Here is proof.
Netscape put that shit in, just like too much other crap like frames.

Here are people requesting alternatives at w3.org

I use nmh with exmh as a GUI. It does all the above: sort by most recent, symbolic links to multiple directories, etc. The O'Reilly book is now freely (beer) available on the Web.

Information on goats

They think webmail is going to be more popular than imap, or pop3 mail boxes.

If Microsoft lets its market share for desktop-based e-mail clients slip, it could be short-sighted.

I use web-based mail at work (iPlanet/SIMS) and web-based mail (Yahoo) at home as my primary mail-reader. I have broadband in both locations and the responsiveness of web-based e-mail conpared to desktop e-mail clients is negligible.

My work-at-home CEO has satellite at home. He can't use the web-based product because the interactive sluggishness from delay and packet loss would kill his productivity. SSH-tunneled POP works great for him because his local e-mail client (Outlook) downloads new e-mail in the background and sends messages out in the background while he is composing/reading mail quickly in the foreground.

When I administered e-mail for a dialup ISP, the primary method our users preferred to access their e-mail was POP to Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. It is painfully slow to browse through e-mail over a dialup connection. There are still millions of dialup users out there. They are the majority of users on the Internet.

If people use wireless devices in the future, their experience will be more similar to dialup/satellite than broadband, and they'll demand a product that isn't web-based-only. Some of the ideas brought to light by Central or similar technologies could satisfy both broadband/fixed and narrowband/mobile users.

Microsoft makes an excellent user interface for e-mail. They're good at that. Their enterprise/corporate customers may continue to pay for it. Other products like M2, Evolution, and Mozilla will help fill the consumer niche if they open it up. If it weren't for Microsoft's early monopoly bundling tactics vs Netscape Navigator (founded on a "beta/intro is free, production version costs money" business model), we might not have nor expect free browser and e-mail software. We're spoiled. If it weren't for security or playform supportissues, more of us Slashdotters might use Outlook Express.

-ez

PS: I lied. My primary mail reader is MH.

mh or nmh, depending on which machine I happen to be logged into.

In 1999, electricity cost the state $7.4 billion, in 2000, $32 billion, and in 2001 it will be $65 billion, according to George Brown of the PUC (LA Times, April 9). (from here)

Seems reasonable to me.

Something like this has been done before, only with something much more evil, Microsoft Barney. While the hacked Barney doesn't have freeform language, it does have freeform movement and can be remotely controlled.

Wow, the amount of time I wasted just by following that link...

I saw this picture with a nice landscape. Decided to investigate and after a bit of Googling it turns out it's from somewhere in Kamioka, Japan. That's where physicists from around the world built this huge toy which they call Super-Kamiokande.
Some pretty impressive pictures, especially when you see that they built many of these to make this, just to fill it with water (warning huge pic, here's a smaller one), and conduct experiments into neutrinos, dark matter, and other cool stuff like that... Wow.

There you go, just learnt a few things, and added Kamioka to my list of places to visit ;)

current dna testing relies on "marker" regions which are supposed to be present in a unique combination for each individual. however, because this is not a whole sequence comparison, there is a small chance of a false positive error but smaller than that of false positives using fingerprints. Indeed the marker regions were selected because they were (relatively) fast to test and did not give away information about the suspect (eg. race or eye colour, although one of the markers was later found to be linked to diabetes).

i think that this technology will eventually find its way into our courtrooms, and this is good. what would be bad is if we thought that any technology was so perfect that we didn't need a trial and we could go out hunting bad guys on their dna evidence alone.

there is no substitute for a public trial where all the evidence gets laid out on the table and a reasonable judge ensures that all parties are treated fairly. if that doesn't happen for the least of our citizens, then it's time to go find another country to live and work in. I've moved countries twice, and i'm always watching with my overnight bag under my desk.

beyond crime there are benign uses for dna identification. the Army DNA registry would also serve as a way to identify the dead, who have been blown up beyond recognition. this gives valuable closure for families and loved ones.

paternity testing now requires that you have a live man to take a sample from. with this new tech you could get the dna fingerprint from the inside of a locket or something.

the way i see it, leaving dna is like a form of subconscious, automatic grafitti. we are always tagging our environment with the words "i wuz here."

it's just that these days, there might be people around who care to read it.

The article lists several more sources for information:

• Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Boston: MIT Press. 2003.
• Becker, Henry J. Who's Wired and Who's not? The Future of Children Vol 10 No 2; 2000.
• Warschauer, Mark. Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide. First Monday Vol 7 no 7; 2002.
• Athena Alliance
• Center for Scoial Informatics
• Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit
• Community Technology Centers Network
• Digital Divide Network

Microsoft Barney isn't too bad. In fact, it can be pretty cool.

For a civil case, no. To effectively use the DMCA, maybe. For the details on what the requirements are to complain, see:

http://copyright.lib.uci.edu/pdmcaiv.html#a

A user agent that wishes to authenticate itself with a server -- usually, but not necessarily, after receiving a 401 response--does so by including an Authorization request-header field with the request.
RFC 2616, HTTP 1.1

It is really simple: When a user wants to see something, he issues a GET. This is idempotent and doesn't carry any kind of state except what the client explicitly provides, like the URI, the preferred format and language, and his credentials. If he wants to perfom some destructive operation, he uses POST, PUT or DELETE. Again, all that's neccessary for the server to know is in the headers and the payload, where applicable.

Listen, web developers: Using HTTP the way it was meant to actually works. You don't need kludges like cookies or GET with lots of parameters where what you do has nothing to do with GETting a resource. It even makes lots of nasty problems go away, like the back-button breaking your app. Try reading and understanding the actual specs, or the diss of the guy who wrote (some of) them.

Rather crude, but highly effective.

It seems unlikely that the SGI is the first Linux cluster with global shared memory. There are plenty of distributed shared memory systems in software, some of them open source. You can find a list here. For most computations and most hardware, you are probably still better off with MPI or PVM rather than shared memory.

Note also that there are several high speed interconnects for Linux clusters available from many different vendors, including InfiniBand, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and Myrinet.

Ideally, someone, probably an academic, should make a repository of spam available for testing. Software spam filters can say things like, "Correctly classified 99.9% of the email in the UCI spambase 1999-08-20 repository"

Something like say, the UCI Machine Learning Repository. In fact, look at the UCI spambaseA couple of problems with the UCI spambase. Too old / out of date. And too small.

I looks like there is a more recent community effort going on over a SpamArchive

Looks like you should have googled.

Ideally, someone, probably an academic, should make a repository of spam available for testing. Software spam filters can say things like, "Correctly classified 99.9% of the email in the UCI spambase 1999-08-20 repository"

Something like say, the UCI Machine Learning Repository. In fact, look at the UCI spambaseA couple of problems with the UCI spambase. Too old / out of date. And too small.

I looks like there is a more recent community effort going on over a SpamArchive

Looks like you should have googled.

Well, Thomas Jefferson disagreed with you, and explained why.

...ideas cannot be communicated and shared unless someone creates a physical symbolic representation of that idea: by speaking, writing, singing, painting, etc. That physical representation of the idea can, in fact, be owned.

You don't 'own' soundwaves, or the light bouncing off a screen or a peice of paper, and that's how ideas are communicated. Further, once you've communicated an idea to someone, (a) you haven't lost your copy, and (b) they can't voluntarily forget it. An idea is entirely unlike any kind of physical object that can be owned.

Indeed the Constitution does not describe patents and copyrights in terms of property. It's not a natural, recognized right; they are granted 'to promote the progress of science and the useful arts'.

Univ Calif, Irvine's CS dept has a Bioinformatics specialty/emphasis for graduate students.

UCI's Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics
UCI ICS Informatics in Biology and Medicine

They just got a $4.2M grant from the NIH to strengthen and consolidate their Bioinformatics group. Maybe they'll offer scholarships.

Univ Calif, Irvine's CS dept has a Bioinformatics specialty/emphasis for graduate students.

UCI's Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics
UCI ICS Informatics in Biology and Medicine

They just got a $4.2M grant from the NIH to strengthen and consolidate their Bioinformatics group. Maybe they'll offer scholarships.

Univ Calif, Irvine's CS dept has a Bioinformatics specialty/emphasis for graduate students.

UCI's Institute of Genomics and Bioinformatics
UCI ICS Informatics in Biology and Medicine

They just got a $4.2M grant from the NIH to strengthen and consolidate their Bioinformatics group. Maybe they'll offer scholarships.

Juice wasn't by Wirth, but rather Dr. Franz of UCI. It automatically "refactored" code to compress it. It is for Oberon, which is terribly unfortunate.

Well, you can write a deterministic quick sort that runs worse-case O(n^2). However, There is a completely deterministic Quick Sort that runs in O(n log n) time based on median-of-medians.

Note that you can take up to O(n) to select your pivot of a set of n elements and not change the analysis of quick sort (since it takes O(n) to divide the elements into greater-than-pivot, equal-to-pivot, and less-than-pivot). Consider the slightly simpler quickselect problem of finding the median in O(n) time. Clearly, if you can find the median in O(n) time, then there is a quicksort algorithm that runs in O(n log n) that uses that median algorithm to select its pivot.

Eppstein's lecture notes on O(n) quickselect.

Avrim Blum's lecture notes for cross-check.

Phil Gibbons has notes split across two days: Day 1 and Day 1

... including the HD of your Linux PC (which should be able to support AAC "any day now") ...

Do you mean, like this one? Playa - The AAC Decoder/Player

"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: lessons for philosophy of science"

it's a very common misconception, but the fact is that a well-written test (eg. the MMPI) will always be better than a human "expert" (eg. a psychologist).

Hammerhead sharks can detect subtle electric fields -- the "hammers" are actually sensor arrays, which the sharks use to find the bioelectric signature of prey animals buried in the mud. The sharks also follow geo-electric paths to feeding grounds.

What they're really claiming is the world's smallest solid state light emmitter. I guess if you define a nanotube as the smallest possible solid state structure, there you go.

Dr. Wilson Ho has been doing this for a while at UCI with individual atoms.

You really should check that out. It's hard to believe, but true.

Go is the game.

Remember him next time you need to tile a bathroom!

However, neutrinos are not sufficient to account for dark matter, and dark matter itself is not sufficient to account for the observed deviations of the shapes of galaxies from what is expected.

Here's a paper that compares (in the context of wireless networks) DSDV-SQ, TORA, DSR, and AODV-LL protocols for how well they make use of shortest paths, number of packets successfully delievered, ability to deal with dropped nodes/connections, and routing overhead (as either packets or bytes).

1. Some. Depends on what you wind up doing. A PhD will get you higher wages, but don't do it for the money. One of my professors began his first lecture with the question, "Why are you all here? Why are you CS majors?" One guy obligingly responded, "For the money!" The prof. said, "No! If you were just here for the money, you'd be taking pre-law or pre-med. No, you're here because it's easy!" Don't go for a degree for the money, do it because you enjoy it.
2. If you get a double-E, you'll be a hell of a lot more employable than any CS degree. Remember this about employment: the HR department wants to check off the box that says you've got a 4 year degree, but the hiring manager doesn't care about that. The hiring manager wants someone who can do the job. That EE will expose you to programming and a little bit of program design (although that'll be weaker than what a CS would show you), but you'll have a boatload more math and physics, meaning that you'll have opportunities that no CS grad would have, while being able to do a lot of the entry-level grunt coding that a CS degree would qualify you for. The real question is, what interests you more: designing and implementing software systems, or desigingn and implementing electrical systems?
3. Yes.
4. Absolutely. Admissions officers love to see extracurricular activities when they're coupled with good grades (it shows you are motivated and that you can do classwork even when you're burdened with extra work). Scholarships vary wildly, and applying for them is one of the few things high school guidance counselors are okay at.
5. Oh yeah, I wouldn't undo my university experience (blatant plug, there). Not only was the coursework excellent, but the social aspect -- making friends and connections, for one thing -- was very helpful. Ultimately, the value of higher education is greater than just a degree and a salary; it's in personal development as well.
6. Nope, sorry