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Is anybody here old enough to share his/her impressions of the first Star Trek shown, back in '66 ? it would be like magic, back then. Today we consider cell phones, digital recording devices and palmtop computers as everyday reality, but back then, it must have been very jaw-dropping, to say the least.

Yes, I am aware that a single highly speculative paper had been written, imagining a network that could survive a nuclear war. But, I believe, the guy who wrote it was not one of creators of the Arpanet. I specifically chose the word "built" as opposed to "designed" in anticipation of questions from those who heard an echo of this early paper.

The reason I mentioned this meme is that it is so entertaining that it is often repeated in the more entertaining form, that, "the internet was built to survive a nuclear war". I mentioned it as an example of an example where the falsehood has more power than the truth -- because it is entertaining.

Three more data points - one worrying, one inspiring, one hopeful (in a recursive way).

This one will make you feel worse, it reviews how the DNC compromised on a deal with Michigan, resulting in a 2004 commision that will try to remove the grassroots firewall of IA and NH. If that happens, just give the media the power to nominate the presidential candidates and be done with it.

The inspiring data point -- the existence proof that is John Edwards. The link goes to his 5 minute withdrawal speech in RealVideo format. See also the clip on lobbyists. A discussion of Caucusgate has raised the possibility that voters were neither apathetic or deluded, that they may in fact have voted for Edwards and that he should be the nominee right now.

Which leads to the hopeful data point -- in the 19th century. We have been here before, link:

" The Political Intention of the Primary System

When the direct primary was introduced late in the 19th century, the vast majority of elective offices for Congress, state legislatures, city councils, county supervisors, sheriffs, and so forth were not competitive. Electoral manipulation (gerrymandering, for example) and group traditions (the urban Irish were Democrats while Midwestern Germans were Republicans) had created party bastions almost everywhere, and voters, then as now, loyally supported the candidates of their party.

Nomination assured election, and, in most cases, party leaders and political notables used personal loyalties and patronage to control the caucus and convention delegates who did the nominating. The result of such control was office-holders who were more responsive to the party leaders - who could deny them renomination - than they were to an electorate which would rarely defeat them in the general election.

The reinforcing elements of this system of party government were pierced by the direct nominating primary because it eliminated the support party leaders received from the electorate's partisanship. The nominating primary never asked voters to cross party lines. It allowed them to select preferred candidates within their party; and then support them again in the general election. It promised to weaken party leaders by increasing the chance of selecting candidates who were not beholden to party leaders for the nomination.

The hoped-for effects of the primary were not immediate. Slating, endorsements, control over money and other electoral resources, and the commitment and cohesiveness of party cadres gave party leaders continued influence over nominations. In time, however, the influence of traditional party leaders and notables was significantly reduced.

A Problem with Primaries

The grandest vision of the reformers went unrealized because primaries developed their own nominating elite: the few who bothered to vote in them. In the typical contemporary primary, turnout rarely exceeds 30 percent of the eligible electorate. In very low salience, off-year primaries such as 1998 participation may not exceed 20 percent of the potential electorate. The problem with such low participation is the unrepresentativeness of those who take part ..."

Depressing? Not quite. We have almost 100 years of data for this next round of reform. We have live data that defies conventional explanation (caucus-specific inspiration and primary-specific apathy?!). These are necessary conditions for reform. We are still eight months from the General Election and five months from the conventions.

You say there is a huge population of "smart" students, but are they also motivated? Right now you say they're just getting by taking the easiest classes possible, which leads me to think that they're largely unmotivated. Thus if you tighten the curriculum, they're more likely to give up than try harder.

As someone who went through the same dumbed-down-Calculus experience with some friends...

1. If your lecture is dumbed down, read the textbook for the details
2. Read ahead
3. Talk to your professor, and ask him for a separate, more challenging curriculum
4. Go online and find more Math to learn; try some linear algebra or real analysis, for example
5. Above all, don't rest on your laurels, and don't rely on the curriculum -- I can't believe how much time I "wasted" in high school, when in retrospect I could have been using some free time to learn some really cool shit...

- shadowmatter

You say there is a huge population of "smart" students, but are they also motivated? Right now you say they're just getting by taking the easiest classes possible, which leads me to think that they're largely unmotivated. Thus if you tighten the curriculum, they're more likely to give up than try harder.

As someone who went through the same dumbed-down-Calculus experience with some friends...

1. If your lecture is dumbed down, read the textbook for the details
2. Read ahead
3. Talk to your professor, and ask him for a separate, more challenging curriculum
4. Go online and find more Math to learn; try some linear algebra or real analysis, for example
5. Above all, don't rest on your laurels, and don't rely on the curriculum -- I can't believe how much time I "wasted" in high school, when in retrospect I could have been using some free time to learn some really cool shit...

- shadowmatter

You say there is a huge population of "smart" students, but are they also motivated? Right now you say they're just getting by taking the easiest classes possible, which leads me to think that they're largely unmotivated. Thus if you tighten the curriculum, they're more likely to give up than try harder.

As someone who went through the same dumbed-down-Calculus experience with some friends...

1. If your lecture is dumbed down, read the textbook for the details
2. Read ahead
3. Talk to your professor, and ask him for a separate, more challenging curriculum
4. Go online and find more Math to learn; try some linear algebra or real analysis, for example
5. Above all, don't rest on your laurels, and don't rely on the curriculum -- I can't believe how much time I "wasted" in high school, when in retrospect I could have been using some free time to learn some really cool shit...

- shadowmatter

The Chinese mafia has essentially taken over the islands

UCLA Asia institute rankings of corruption. Note that Hong Kong is viewed as being less corrupt than Japan.

Oh, and some place called the United States.

This is BS. The latest and best estimate of the age of the universe is from the WMAP data, which gave a result of 13.7 billion years. This was actually close to the lower (more recent) end of generally accepted estimates. Neither the original Hubble Deep Field nor this image has had any significant effect on estimates of the time of the Big Bang.

You're right on-- the change in firing rate relative to the baseline firing rate is very important. Also, there is some reason to think (logically and biologically) that some ensembles of neurons fire synchronously with each other and asynchronously from other ensembles of neurons. By using synchrony of firing, they gain computational power and allow for variable binding, thus allowing more formally logical computations to happen than just autocorrelation our boolean operations.

If I have four neurons, and one represents "red," one represents "green," one represents "square" and one represents "circle," then it is very difficult to tell (based on the sustained activity of the neurons alone) whether they are responding to a red circle and a green square or a red square and a green circle. This is called "the binding problem" and, at least in neural networks, can be solved by distributing the firing patterns of the neurons over time. So, "red" and "circle" fire in synch, then rest while "green" and "square" fire in synch and then rest while "red" and "circle"... etc. Notice that you could even have "red" bound with both "circle" and "square" by being active over two epochs, thus allowing for dynamic binding of variables, etc.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that if we can figure out how some of this temporal synchrony dimension is exploited in the brain, then we should be able to harness that computational power through silicon transistors like the one described in this article and build modules that could replace damaged regions of the brain.

Hello folks,

I've read the full article at Arxiv.org and it sounds promising. But I see no code... and the algorithm description looks much too complicated for me to bother trying to implement it just to see how well it works.

It would be really nice at this stage to have some working code to throw some real messages on.

I've scoured the author's personal pages (which seem to be here and here)
but can't find anything there either...

Hello Misters Boykin & Roychowdhury, what about some working code?

And please don't forget: I may be lazy, but you are ugly and I can always try working harder... :-)

Hello folks,

I've read the full article at Arxiv.org and it sounds promising. But I see no code... and the algorithm description looks much too complicated for me to bother trying to implement it just to see how well it works.

It would be really nice at this stage to have some working code to throw some real messages on.

I've scoured the author's personal pages (which seem to be here and here)
but can't find anything there either...

Hello Misters Boykin & Roychowdhury, what about some working code?

And please don't forget: I may be lazy, but you are ugly and I can always try working harder... :-)

It is. Anyone who hasn't seen the movies of stars orbiting around the (presumed) black hole (3 million solar masses in a tiny volume) at the centre of our own galaxy should go here or here right now.

There are a number of experiments that show that an object exists at a particular location with an enormous mass and an incredibly small radius. No other object than a black hole fits the data, so we take this indirect evidence as proof of the existence of black holes. From my point of view, the best evidence is the orbit of stars around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Check out a movie here.

Well I'll be darned. I'd never seen one of those before (I'm 25), but I guess they really were doing that up until a few years before I was born.

Gould rocked the boat in a discipline that wasn't exactly ready for it. And made money doing it. Man, I can figure why his "peer group" decided the best thing to do was dismiss him as a "Marxist."

I've only seen Gould's politics discussed regarding why Gould did nonserious straw man arguments (and claims of racism regarding intelligence researchers) -- not as ad hominem arguments. If there are other examples (as you repeatedly claim), please give references.

What I said is that you'll be hard-pressed to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics.

OK, that is your position. Let's take an example:
I'm fanatic about sushi. Since I'm a self-professed fanatic my opinions can be disregarded regarding, say, city planning?

You find more or less large amounts of politics everywhere. And some people stand mostly above it -- and some don't. Your theories that Gould was hounded by his evol biology critics in a way that was as intellectually dishonest as he himself do need support... something you refuse to give.

Again -- I've read people livid about his dishonest way of arguing, but I've not seen personal attacks without Gould starting.

Either support your claims that the evol biology critics of Gould acted at his low level -- or shut up. (As the US English idiom so non-charmingly put it: "S..t or get off the pot!")

(You didn't want to comment on that you claim that Gould misrepresents reality in his books -- which makes them uninteresting to people interested in learning about the world!?)

Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.

Religious people (christans, marxists, etc) have problems of some kind with part of personality and intelligence being built in. (Don't explain -- I couldn't care less about old testament exegetics or the positions of young and old Marx.)

At least, the marxists are the only critics that I've seen. Can you give references to many others?

Anyway, the criticism of Gould's books from prominent biologists should be much, much more than the criticism of Wilson's writing...

(Since it is outside their area I assume that few biologists have commented on the "mismeasure" book -- I just note that Gould was accused of doing straw man attacks by both intelligence researchers and evolutionary biologists...)

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

There was a lot of criticism of Gould, claiming he did straw man attacks from people like Ernst, George Williams, E O Wilson, Trivers, Maynard Smith, Hamilton.

The more people I meet from East Europe, the more I am convinced that the two worlds were much more similar than what we westerners were raised to believe.
People from former East Germany don't shun their origins as people from Nazi Germany would have (see 79qm DDR, which I am told is a quite precise account of the facts by East Germans). Some are even fond of the old eastern flag. A Czech girl told me that, visiting San Francisco, she was appalled by seeing American girls executing a Spartakiad. They were cheerleaders.

There were abuses of human rights on both fields, sometimes specular in type if not in magnitude; McCarthy in the US, stalinist purges in the USSR (Ok, McCarthy never got to that magnitude); invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary there, coups in Greece and Chile here; Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the USSR (Ok, the USSR was fighting the good fight and the US not, but their methods did not differ much, and civilians suffered most in both cases).

On the other hand, things went on pretty normally for average people on both sides. It was dangerous being against communism in the USSR as much as it was being a communist in the US, and the likelihood of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to lose their elections was pretty much the same as the American Communist Party's to win them.

This is not to say "everybody's a human-right criminal, blast human rights, they were all good fellas".
It is to say that, instead of laughing at propaganda crap in other countries, you should think what propaganda they fed you as truth; that is the most dangerous, as nobody is out there telling you how ludicrous lies you are being exposed to. For instance some may be interested in what was going on in 1984.

One thing is watching Goebbels on the Discovery Channel with a Brit telling you what a jerk he was, another one is being a German, who had been on the brink of starvation before nazism, that has no other information channels than the nazi state's, that stands in a cheering crowd, and who, when Joseph asks, "Wolles Sie den totalen Krieg?", cannot help shouting "Ja!".

End users always complain about this attitude without understanding the reasons behind it.

First of all, thank you for quoting me out of context.

Second, thank you for assuming I have never been on that side of the counter. I was the entire help desk for about 200 people, in an office environment with several industry-specialized applications. I took all service calls, provided all tier-1 support, and filled out all service tickets for our two techs. We also supported the phone system.

Yes, it would increase the number of possible causes... it might be the Netscape, IE, or Mozilla cache that needed to be cleared. It might be the coding on the site, which was IE compliant but not HTML compliant. It might be that the browser brought the whole system to its knees... or the user might be running Mozilla.

Truth is, (1) If IE is still an option, most people will use it because they are familiar with it. (2) If you remove IE as an option, you don't have an additional application to support and you reduce the number of ridiculous things that can happen (but you annoy some users who don't want to use something unfamiliar, no matter what the reason). But at the end of the day, if you give your users (who are students doing a lot of research via the web) only the choices of IE or Netscape 4.77 (I'm not kidding here) to save yourself work, you're not servicing your customers.

That was the point of the profile anecdote... this four-person team admins a lab of 60 computers with about 150 registered (and paying... $40/quarter plus printing) users, a lending library of about 7 laptops and four projectors, and about 50 desktops in various offices throughout the building, along with hosting a low-hit-rate, primarily static-content website. The sysadmin guy *might* have a heavy workload. The Audio-visual services guy definitely doesn't, and still can't seem to get better than 90% reliability on getting to a room with a laptop and projector *before* the class starts. The hardware guy would have about a full-time workload if he had the budget to replace or repair broken computers. The web admin would rather make many other people learn to code Cold Fusion than learning to admin PHP (no, he doesn't develop the content... that's up to volunteers and contractors).

I've spent a lot of time educating my fellow students about how to get help from the lab... i.e. have some clue what you're asking for, be specific, listen to what they say... but it goes both ways.

The problem with evolutionists is that well It is simply an attempt remove any reference to GOD in life and project arrogant people as "gods".

I'm not going to dignify that with an answer. It's just too stupid for words.

The fact is there is NONE absolutely no evidence at all of the BIG BANG.

Some people like to check their facts before arguing a point. Other people like to pull things out of their ass and pass them off as facts. You seem to be shaping up to be the latter.

It took google 0.05 seconds to return 208,000 results for "evidence for the big bang". Here's the first link: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.ht ml#BBevidence.

Scientists have not yet explained the big bang other than it may have happened but don't know where the original mass came from and that is where every evolution, big bang, small bang, spread theory, alien theory, big suns theory, super mass theory, goes wrong.

Uhuh... So let me get this straught. Your argument is, as follows:

1. Science doesn't adequately explain why the big bang occured.
2. ???
3. Therefore I'm right!

Perverting and bastardizing the laws of physics to prove a point for selfish reasons is not science. It is false diseased conjecture and it belongs with all of those religious fruitcake cults you seem to have the misfortune of running into too all the time.

Isn't that what you were doing with the "Second Law of Themodynamics" argument you rattled on about for so long?

Religious relics are false(what?).

Oh, I was just talking about all of the pieces of wood and nails and such that were passed off as religious artifacts in the middle ages. I was just pointing out that there have been far more faked religious artifacts throughout history then there has been faked scientific evidence.

No offence intended, at all. Any scientist that fakes evidence is no more a scientist than a priest who fakes a religious relic is a priest.

One of the reasons Creationism is plausibleto me is it has a scientific explanation of what was, is, and is to become with no gaps. no postulating. Any questions can be answered. Any other theory I have read major has problems.

There's a large problem with Creationism as a scientific theory. It's not.

You can believe in Creationism, yes. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. But it's not science. It's not a theory that can be disproved through observation. Ergo, it is not a scientific theory.

One BIG one that you hit upon was the bridging hominids Where are the hominids? Where are the skeletons? Where are the bones in the opposable thumbs of the hominids?. There has not been a single skeleton found or partial one found.

Um, yes there has. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html

Meanhwile there have been thousands of skeletons found of humans.

Skeletons. Not fossils. Skeletons decay; they're biological. When preserved in a pyramid or in a grave, they last longer, but they still decay. Skeletons don't last a million years, so obviously there are no skeletons of early man/ape.

There are, however, fossils. Fossilisation is a very rare process where the bones are gradually replaced by rock. How many fossils of humans are there? No more proportionally than earlier species.

But go ahead if you want your 10^1000th great grandfather to be a chimp. Be my guest. My oldest ancestor had no belly button and named chimps.

I don't think it's a matter of "want" on my part. More that it's a fact of life. The majority of the evidence points toward me having an ape-like ancestor. Of course, I'm not directly descended from chimps, and nor do I believe that's the case. However, the overwhelming evidence points to me and the

Media Center PC? Try Macintosh TV

Tablet PC? I have a Fujitsu Sytlistic 1200 tablet PC from 1997.

PocketPC? The Newton did more in 1993 than most PDAs of today. If development had continued...

XBox? Ok it's a game console -- like an Atari. Oh. It's a computer-based console? Try the Pippen (from '95).

Media Player 9? What's so special about it? QuickTime was revolutionary in 1991.

If anything MS is painfully aware that they need to divest themselves of a PC-only mentality and are inovating in a wide number of areas at an alarming rate to ensure that they don't end up with all of their eggs in one basket.

Have you heard of the Digital Hub?

Were you intentionally listing things that were innovative only by Microsoft's definition of the term?

It is intersting to note that the stock market is a chaotic system too. That's why you don't see any models predicting the price of Gold or any other stock on January 12, 2005 at 1:43 PM to within ten cents per ounce... or even a dollar per ounce. He who can do that rules the market. If these people truely had the ability to create models which accurately predict the dynamics of chaotic systems they'd test them first in the stock market. That they don't says volumes.

Well, actually, someone there is applying this stuff to the stock market.

It is well established that the US helped Iraq develop biological weapons back in the 80's when they were being treated as allies, including the shipment of anthrax. A quick search on Google turns up many reports of this. Here are but two:

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/ussuppliedgerms. html

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38 87.htm

NetBSD/68k, supports 68k cpus and various free cluster architectures.

Appleseed, supports OS 8.6 - 9.x on PPC.

Quite a few older PCI Powermacs can be coaxed to run OS X 10.1.x using XPostFacto and some patience. Won't support XGrid for now, but the other free suspects will work.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the NIMS website, which has a lot more pretty pictures.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the NIMS website, which has a lot more pretty pictures.

As the article says, the treebot is part of a "Networked Infomechanical System", a type of wireless sensor network, developed by the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. The forest network is used to develop practical wireless sensing technology while simultaneously providing an example of its utility. The use of a mobile network node in a wireless sensor network requires some engineering of the multihop message routing protocol, since such networks are usually assumed to have stationary nodes. I don't know what they've done to address this; it could be anything from MANET-style routing (e.g., AODV, in which they accept the resulting increase in route establishment overhead), to a quasi-static approach in which the treebot reassociates to the network every time it stops.

As the article says, the treebot is part of a "Networked Infomechanical System", a type of wireless sensor network, developed by the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. The forest network is used to develop practical wireless sensing technology while simultaneously providing an example of its utility. The use of a mobile network node in a wireless sensor network requires some engineering of the multihop message routing protocol, since such networks are usually assumed to have stationary nodes. I don't know what they've done to address this; it could be anything from MANET-style routing (e.g., AODV, in which they accept the resulting increase in route establishment overhead), to a quasi-static approach in which the treebot reassociates to the network every time it stops.

What this article really doens't say much about is that NIMS isn't just an open source program for controlling robots, it's a program developed by grants given to UCLA to develop AI, or Ambient Intelligence in this isntance. This robot isn't entirely remote controlled, and though the article touches on continual monitoring, it doesn't say that it's using open source robot AI developed by UCLA.

For more info about NIMS:

UCLA doc in PDF

Google HTML Cache

You must be the first one that has ever mentioned 'creationist' and 'communist' in the same sentence.

This criticism from the idealists (religious and political) assumes that all the researchers are either intellectually dishonest (in a conspiracy) or total idiots that fail to realize obvious facts (that are pointed out by the idealists).

Let's take an international example of what I'm writing about...
Leftwing ideology needs (I don't know why) that the majority of personality and talents (not physical talents?) are based on culture and not inherited. Look up e.g. Lysenko. This is contradicted by modern research in the psychology (intelligence research) and evolutionary biology. Marxists have spent lots of time arguing against that research -- in popular media and not in serious publications... (Gould, Lewontin, etc.)

Regarding your examples:
Societies rotten with corruption (like Argentina) don't work well no matter how they are organized... Are there any non-capitalist democracies? Are there any modern non-capitalist societies without large amounts of corruption? Etc, etc, etc ad nauseum. The standard answer here is that capitalist societies are disgusting places -- and that the only thing worse are the alternatives. You have certainly heard that argument multiple times.

What is your point regarding Japan?

I could note that Japan presently doesn't need to pay for an expensive military which, considering their neighbours, they certainly would need without USA. For historical reasons Japan probably finds it advantageous to keep a low profile in both military capabilities and in foreign policy... the present situation is probably better than most alternatives -- from a japanese perspective. Are you claiming USA would military invade a democracy if Japan started to build their own defence? There is no historical example of war between democracies. Please show good support for any such claim.

It do sound like a normal leftwing conspiracy theory (everything bad on the planet is because of USA).

And WHY must a national debt be a bad thing?! Are you a troll?! Is it bad to e.g. borrow money to buy a machine for your company or a house to live in? Investments that give a larger return than the interest is often a good thing.

(India used to have a non-capitalist economy. It didn't work well, like all ways of organizing economies without large capitalist influences.)

I think that was all.

"...changes to data by the Commerce Department now show the economy first contracted in the third quarter of 2000, rather than the first quarter of 2001."

I have been studying japanese for about 5 years. I first bought an old Canon Wordtank(IDX-9600) in Den Den Mura (osaka's version of akihabara), and it served me well for my first year or two of study. Then it simply couldnt keep up. Word and Meaning only dictionaries arent great if you want to really learn a language. Some of the recently new dictionaries ($350+) range have awesome dictionaries, various word lookups methods, and great explanations/examples (in japanese/english), a thesaurus, and more, which are all extremely helpful. The 9600 has some explanations, but its poor in comparison to the newer models, like the IDF-4600 , at 45,000yen.

Another alternative is JWPce. I've been using it for about 4-5 years now and its a great quick desktop japanese dictionary. Its real basis is the word processor, which i rarely use, but the dictionary is quick and easy. It runs on a PocketPC as well. I got in the habit of using it before translation sites on the web became popular, so they might be of good use as well. WWWJDIC is very good.

There is a big catch to comparing the 9600 with some of the newer models (most available only in japan), that for a beginner, good luck using it. They are not meant for an int'l user, and are mostly in japanese. Menu's, explanations, etc are mostly in japanese. Once you get to 3rd year or so, you would probably do fine.

But the question of paper vs. electronic dictionary? I dont think you realize how time consuming large paper kanji dictionaries are. And wait til you are translating a 20,000 character essay. There will be kanji you dont know, and it will take hours and hours. Electronic lookup is your best hope.

Suggested Solution: Start off with a cheap Wordtank 9600 (or the like) and JWPce and websites. If you are always in front of a computer somewhere, you dont need to pocket dictionary. If you are travelling through japan, or are not often able to access the internet when you need to lookup something, its worth it. But for your first couple years, basic kanji lookup and word definitions is all you need to know. If you are still studying japanese in 3+ years, you will want/need an upgrade... especially if you travel there. By then, the IDF-4600 will be old and outdated, and you'll want whatever is the newest model.

Good luck learning japanese. If you are in the US, and you want to "touch-and-feel" good japanese dictionaries and cant get to japan, check if you live near a mitsuwa store, which is a huge japanese grocery store. There is usually a japanese only bookstore adjacent to it, which will have some dictionaries to look at. Expect high prices though.

If (by some strange coincidence) you're running a windows CE-based palm, you could give JWPce a shot - it is written more as a word processor, but it has kanji lookups and a pretty decent dictionary. It's GPL and will also run on regular windows if you want to give it a quick run-by.

I believe they did have some ideas, then the US said they'd nuke them if they tried.

Wireless sensor networks are not new; there is even a textbook published recently on them (Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures and Protocols). Many corporations have active WSN programs, including:

Motorola

Ember and

Figure 8 Wireless.

University research programs, in addition to Berkeley, include:

UCLA WINS

MIT uAMPS

plus those sposored by DARPA.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, was designed to support such networks. The ZigBee Alliance, an industrial consortium of over 60 companies, is the marketing and compliance arm of the 802.15.4 standard, as the Wi-Fi Alliance is to 802.11. The vitality of the ZigBee Alliance, which had over 350 attendees at its recent open house in Silicon Valley, is an indication that this technology is moving from research into commercialization; the commercialization of wireless sensor networks is the real significance of the Wired article.

It was a pretty good article, but very weak on the Hindenburg details, many people seem to aggree these days that it was not the hydrogen that exploded, but the fabric.

Of course the Hindenburg is a fine example of how important a picture could be. Only thirty seven people died (97 lived), yet the burning fireball caught on film managed to kill decent method of long range travel. Of course there are a couple of other problems with airships, like they don't do too well in strong winds, and they take a lot of "man handling" at the field, but in some applications they might make good sense.

Is sequenced and is on its way to being sequenced. This will probably be placed in the public domain too... Crap.

No problem with the ad-hom. I'll add another if you like.

Why? What would that add what to the discussion?

There just weren't mega-corps -- the technology didn't exist. The industrial revolution allowed for these mega-corps to exist, thus allowing for non-government sanctioned monopolies to exist.

You can't possibly be serious! How on Earth do you think many of the voyages to discover the Atlantic passage to India got funded (and unwhittingly discovering the N & S America)? Some were funded by monarchies but many others were funded by huge trading companies with deep pockets.

The East Indian Trading Company ruled a whole frigging country for decades! All of this before the 1800's I might add. There will and always have been groups of people with tons of money to throw around to promote their own interests at the expense of others.

Ah, here we are, found that link. It's interesting, I promise. Go have a look.

He could achieve this goal by devaluing the dollar to 1/5 of its current value (or so).

There's about $0.6 trillion in circulation in the US. Supposing for simplicity's sake that multiplying the available currency by 5 would devalue the currency to 1/5 of its current value, that means we need an additional 2.4 trillion dollars.

A dollar bill is 66x156mm, so that currency has an area of about 24,710 square km. Now, New Hampshire is roughly 24,000 square km.

I think we can safely conclude that his plan involves covering New Hampshire with a microwave collector constructed entirely from dollar bills.

See this website:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.ht ml

This is an in-depth analysis of the arguments that Lerner presents in his book.

Lots of scientists question the Big Bang theory, all the time. Most of them come away with their questions answered by it. Many others come away thinking that there are still questions that science needs to address. A very few come away believing that their questions haven't been adequately answered, or that there is a better answer. It's just that the Big Bang theory is a simple, straightforward theory that happens to describe the observations we see, and does a very good job of explaining a number of disparate observations. Some still disagree with it, and indeed one of them wrote a review article in the latest issue of "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics". They aren't ignored; they just don't have the weight of evidence on their side at the moment!

There's no conspiracy going on here. Move along.

-Rob

a) Moratorium.--No State or political subdivision thereof shall impose any of the following taxes during the period beginning on October 1, 1998, and ending 3 years after the date of the enactment of this Act--

(1) taxes on Internet access, unless such tax was generally imposed and actually enforced prior to October 1, 1998; and

(2) multiple or discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce.

Perhaps this is true for static data (as in a bunch of source code), you can insert a watermark into code, which will create a dynamic watermark (i.e. something that depends on the runtime operation of the program). To make a long story short, you cannot easily remove it by rearranging binary code, and it's difficult (i.e. NP-complete for those in the know) to analyze the software to remove. Tack on the fact you can tamperproof the code (i.e. make the behavior of the program depend on the existence of the watermark), and you have a pretty difficult path to walk if you want to remove it.

More info can be found in this paper, if you're into reading that sort of thing.

No Java, no JSP man. Simply use PHP for web development.
Forget Java man and go to PHP!

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).
This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

Moreover, PHP is getting the object oriented features of Java language.

The real usefulness of Java is 'Java applets' which run on client browsers but on the server side you simply use PHP.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

(Java is just another language. The PHP project needs millions of Java programmers who can add the Java's language features like inner classes, static, private, protected and others to PHP. PHP already has some of java' features).
Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Read the benchmars of Java JSP and PHP. PHP tops in the speed!!

Read the doc here and mirrors at [1], [2], [3], [4].

If this were an OS to OS comparison between Windows and OS X, perhaps we wouldn't be getting so frothed up. But this is hardware, and dammit, PC hardware is supposed to *always* be cheaper than Mac hardware!

To summarize what others have said:

1) Dell gave UT a sweetheart deal

2) Apple gave VT a sweetheart deal

3) Nobody has dredged up any information to indicate that the $38M UT spent includes the cost of a building. As csoto pointed out:"A "Center" at UT is a special term for a particular type of organized unit, often a research unit. It does not necessarily mean this place gets its own building. In fact, at UT, space is such a premium that most "Centers" don't have their own (yeah the place is huge, but has lots of people). In fact, I'd venture to guess that NO center has its own building."

4) Hardware is only a portion of the total cost, obviously. UT and VT have set up their supercomputing projects differently. This again is obvious.

5) The really important point of all this is that VT manage to put together a very powerful supercomputing cluster using Macs at a cost that in no way can be considered more expensive than if they'd used PC hardware.

You can argue that costs would have been cheaper had they built their own, or used PCs from some source cheaper than Dell. But they still would have had to deal with labor costs in assembling the PCs, or higher maintenance costs associated with keeping all of those commodity PCs running properly.

UCLA is already using OS X to run Beowulf-style clusters. Tokyo University is replacing over 1,100 Linux PCs with OS X boxes.

Even the total cost of installing, operating, and maintaining large numbers of Macs running OS X is cheaper than either PCs running Windows or PCs running Linux, people often seem incapable of absorbing that information.

You can talk all you want about the Reality Distortion Field, but the truth is that Apple is always working against an incredibly strong bias that says Apple is always more expensive.

That's simply no longer true.

• IBM Refuses To Indemnify Linux Users
• Red Hat's Mad Matt Vs. Humongous SCO Lawsuit

There's actually a very interesting academic treatise on this exact point here.
However, I believe that people get the government they deserve.
Somewhat akin to the theory that it was, in fact, that the climate made survival difficult, and thus requiring ingenuity and organization, but not so brutal that all that was possible was survival, the reason Northern Europeans came to dominate the world. Those who lived in nice climates with abundant food had no incentive to improve their lot, while those in brutal ones like North America, the Arctic, most of Asia (Siberia, Mongolia, central China, etc.) were too busy surviving to thrive.

""So which car would go faster, a red one or a blue one?" The blue one of course because it absorbs more of the higher freq. light than the red one. "

No, the red one is faster. Remember the Doppler Shift: the car that is red is the one that has already passed you.

To summarize:

• Property has two components, right to use and a right to exclude others from using. It is similar for both property and intellectual property.
• Property is a limit on the freedom of others. (for example, you don't have the right to sleep in my backyard).
• Traditional property--"If people have the right to exclude others from their land, they'll have more incentive to invest effort in improving the land." Intellectual property--"giving people the right to exclude others from new works or inventions will give people an incentive to invest effort in creating and inventing."
• Rivalrous and unrivalrous uses. This is the concept that is probably the most different between traditional property and intellectual property. To wit, if you take apples from my apple tree, I have lost the ability to sell that apple. But that is not true if you copy a MP3 from my hard drive. Volokh gives an example that shows the effect of nonrivalrous uses. Imagine a water well which has enough water such that everyone in the neighborhood can take water from it without siphoning it dry. Since drilling a well takes time and money, many in a neighborhood will rely on someone else to dig a well for them, and pay a fee for that service. But if others take from the well without paying, it discourages people from digging a well to begin with.

Just looking at this picture, you can see a switch protruding from the case, and two uncovered connectors.

Back in the Army, we built a car radio in a ammo box, to protect it from the usual wear & tear in a combat vehicle, and to camouflage it, because listening to the radio other than our MIL SPEC'ed ones was not something terribly tolerated.
But - we built it with rubber spacers between the casing and radio, a nice flap to protect the connectors, "hostile environment" jacks, and so on. And it survived 4 years of military service in different vehicles, in different climates, and always handled by my drivers (a durability test by itself).

Sad to look at that case mod (such a fad these days), but nice to remember bygone days, even if they weren't all happy.

an anonymous coward, not any longer on active duty