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Having attended a public university (go bruins), I find the idea of universities profiting from publicly funded research offensive. From my personal experience, I know there were enough politicians within the UC system. Let's nip this thing now rather than encourage more professional politicians to be drawn to our centers of higher learning by the profit motive.

Cheers,
-- RLJ

throwing money at a (social) problem never makes it go away, and usually makes it bigger.

That is a rather sweeping generalisation to make, but not germane, in any case.

I recommend you go against the grain and read the article which talks about how open source software might help to bridge the digital devide, rather than jumping off on this tangent.

The deeper problem is that most of the lower classes have no interest in the culture of the net, and if given computers would not take advantage of the rich human content of the web.

Really? You got any research to back that up? Do you want to read the UCLA internet usage report which was on slashdot a month or so ago?

I'm certain that poor people are proportionally less interested in the slashdotesque, and therefore, more likely than not, are proportionally less interested in whatever aspects of net culture the typical slashdot reader favors.

The root problem is that the lower class is comprised mostly of poor civic citizens,

Calvinist prick.

There is a digital divide, but it is a symptom of a larger cultural divide, and giving out computers will not fix the problem.

When did I propose giving anyone computers? I compared the lack of computers (not given away) with the lack of health care (theoretically given away.) When I was talking about how our resources would best be spent, I was talking about technical time/inventiveness, not money - although, certainly, technical inventiveness can be sold.

The article is not about giving computers away - it is about how open source software may help reduce the cost (I said required economic sacrifices) for the poor/minorities to get computers.

Anyone who has a nagging pain in their wrists should learn how to use a keyboard properly.

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times(free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA , Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd [dibona.com] on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 [mailto] was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article [nytimes.com] on the New York Times [nytimes.com] (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT [mit.edu], UCLA [ucla.edu], Purdue [purdue.edu], Duke [duke.edu], UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie [google.com], an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

• The open textbook project
• open mind publishing
• The Wikipedia

It's more like the last 4 years, not the last 10 years, that "geekitude has become sexy and associated with financial success" and that only lasted for a few years.

I have an alternative genetic hypothesis, and the chutzpah to put it forth, which most people wouldn't, even though it has more evidence to support it than Byrna Siegel's. The Wired article also reports:

In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.

What genetic change has occured in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world more than other times in history over the last decade?

Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.

For the relevance of immigration to the potential etiology of autism-related diseases one need only look at the impact of global transport on ecosystem mixing the world over. The fact that male infants are the primary victims of autism should point to intraspecific ecological competition since, particularly in terrestrial vertebrates, males are the primary gender within which direct intraspecific competition occurs. Indeed, when we look for the physically verifiable signs of autism, we find the brain organ most clearly affected is the amygdala -- the most primitive aspect of the mammalian brain -- most directly involved in pheromonal communication -- most directly linked to the testicles by virtue of the fact that it shrinks by almost 30% upon castration in males, something that occurs in no other neuronal structure.

Furthermore, the primary increases in autism are most observable among the more stereotypically genetically recessive populations. This points to the potential mechanism being some form of extended phenotypic genetic dominance whose manifesation is intraspecific parasitic castration.

Potentially humorous, but factually incorrect.

Purdue's estimated cost for 1 year (for in state students) is $12,000. That's tuition + room + board + books + misc. fees.

UCLA costs about the same.

You could sent two students to either Purdue or UCLA for less than the cost for 1 student at Duke.

The University of Illinois is also more expensive.

Posted by chrisd
on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM

from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.

akiaki007 was among many who wrote in
to say: "Check out this
article
on the New York Times (free reg, blah
blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include
MIT, UCLA,
Purdue, Duke,
UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group

DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for
crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news
briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide
my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

One theory is that the martian atmosphere has been erroded by solar winds. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a substantial magnetic field to deflect solar winds and protect its atmosphere.

Although the Hindenburg disaster is the posterchild for the flammability and hence perceived danger of Hydrogen, you might want to read ``Hydrogen Didn't Cause Hindenburg Fire''

My biggest problem with modern science (physics and astrophysics in particular) is this truly inane method of making "conjectural" observations

No, your biggest problem is reading about modern science on Slashdot. C'mon, people! Jeez, I understand when Terri Gross screws up her science interviews, but we ought to be able to do better. These commments (even the highly rated ones) are the worst description of cosmology I've seen in a long time. Bleah.

Okay, so let's start with this one.

Doesn't it make a LOT more sense to think that dark matter is just the stuff floating around that doesn't have any light bouncing off of it?

That's one possibility. In fact, that is exactly the MACHO (Massive Compact Halo Objects) hypothesis. Okay, quick primer on dark matter: First, there are two kinds of dark matter:

• The stuff that must be in galaxies to explain their rotation curves
  
• The stuff that would have to be there to make the universe flat
  

The first kind really has to be there, because we can measure its gravitational effect directly. But it ain't stars (we can see them), and it ain't dust or gas, because we can "see" that when we look through it. So that leaves large agglomerations of regular matter (MACHOS) or weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS). WIMPS could be massive neutrinos, but the best estimate for neutrino mass probably isn't enough to account for it. And yes, the term MACHOS was chosen in response to the term WIMPS.

As for the second kind, the only "evidence" for that has until recently been theoretical. If the inflationary hypothesis is correct, the chances of the universe being as flat as we see it but not exactly flat are very very small. That of course is pretty limited evidence.

However, recent measurements of several separate parameters are starting to converge on a cohesive picture. The universe is flat, but has a term (referred to as "Dark Energy", "cosmological constant", or sometimes "quintessence") which accounts for about a third of the energy of the universe and will cause it to expand forever.

Here are some useful URLs:

• Cosmological constant
  
• Cosmology primer
  
• Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial
  

Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

I've seen some screenshots and they don't look that hot, have a look for yourself

I vote the guy who made that the least likely to ever have sex...

http://toys.r.us ? I would make it a backwards 'R,' but my keyboard got stuck.

Given that the Cyrillic letter whose glyph looks like a reversed Latin R ('', charentity Я) says 'ya' in Russian (see the TETIS story and ndex.ru), the correct hostname would be toys.ya.us.

The Hindenburg was hygrongen filled wasnt it?

Yes, and its skin was painted with rocket fuel, which was probably the real cause of the disaster.

http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh/

He's a lawyer now, and I don't get the impression that he's done much with computers the past few years, except computer law, of course.

To all who discuss about the good and bad of music exchange over the internet, I refer to this, mirrored here for an economist's perspective on why napster/gnutella/morpheus etc... are good things.

Read this , mirrored here for an economist's perspective on why napster is good.

I wonder if they do have a facility to emulate the /. effect. I didn't see anything in the projects list, although there was one project that I guess is close
(although they concentrate on blocking the traffic surge rather than handling the load).

...by the names of those three Gods of Hindu pantheon, namely those who are the Creator (Brahma), the Destroyer (Shiva) and the Preserver (Vishnu).

Not quite so funny when you consider the following:

Did Al Gore Win After All? US Newspapers Would Rather Not Say.

Media Supresses News That Bush Lost Election to Gore.

Palast Clarifies "Gore Won" Statements.

The NORC Florida Ballot Study.

It turns out that it's more difficult to get it right than one would first think. A number of the ideas posted to this discussion have already been incorporated in Andy's system; he has also addressed a number of other issues that haven't been discussed. See his HotOS paper for a bit more information.

Disclaimer: I'm deeply involved in the project. So naturally I think it's cool.

And moderators, please mod me as redundant AFTER you mod the parent up to informative. The Anonymous Coward wrote:

The Hindenburg's demise was not a result of an initial hydrogen-fueled explosion.

It caught fire because of the way the airship was designed, and how it dissipated the electrostatic charge that built up on the outer skin.

The ship's skin was a series of panels that were stitched (not really, more like tied) together. When the landing lines are lowered, the charge in these panels are supposed to flow through the entire skin of the airship and down the landing lines.
Because of poor design/construction, some of these panels retained their electric charge because of poor contact with their surrounding panels. The voltage between the charged panels and the non-charged panels was great enough to produce a spark.

BUT... the spark did NOT ignite the hydrogen.
The spark ignited the SKIN.
Since the skin had to be reflective to reflect heat, the germans coated the skin with a mixture that contained aluminum oxide powder.

Sound familiar? Aluminum oxide powder is used as solid rocket booster propellant in the space shuttle.

It was the fire on the skin that ignited the hydrogen cells. Hydrogen burns clear, and is barely visible in daylight. The initial fire on the airship was orange-red.

The Hindenburg disaster was not caused by the use of hydrogen, but rather by the material used on the skin of the zeppelin.

A really well thought out paper against facial recognition systems in public places can be found here.

It makes all the problems with public facial recognition quite clear.

I imagine that airport patrons identified as "terrorists" by the face recognition system would be detained by security, have their ID rigorously checked and have their luggage rigorously inspected. (With high levels of accuracy, this would amount to a few people per airport per day.) I do not imagine that they would be shot on sight. Inconveniencing (and embarrassing) a few patrons at each airport every day is certainly not a good thing, but it is hardly self-evident that it would be intolerable.

I am not a big fan of universal use of face recognition technology for the reasons outlined in Phil Agre's excellent essay on that subject (linked at the bottom of the Schneier piece as well). But we all understand that some compromises have to be made to make air travel secure. If this is the best argument against using face recognition at airports, it's not a good one.

As for the automated network administration thing, AppleTalk networks did that from day one. That approach didn't scale (too much broadcasting), and the security was lousy (a more fundamental problem with plug-in and go).

Incidentally, this case really frightens me.

http://www.linux.ucla.edu/~dimator/WolfMPTEST0915. exe

I'll do my part...

Washington Post reports that Jimmy Hoffa is still missing! Haven't we known this for a long time now?

My first year at my high school I helped create a computer club called, F.L.A.T.T. (Forest Lake Area Technology Team).

Our teacher bought various cheap 486s, and whatever parts we could scrap up from varios local schools.

We did so much there. I had already knew a bit or two about computers before then, but this was like a crash course. If we wanted computers for the club we had to build them and get them working with what we had. I had a Mac Plus at home and didn't have much knowledge of PCs, but within 3 months I understood IRQ conflicts, RAM types, processors. I could install Windows 3.11 on a 386 blindfolded with both arms behind my back.

We practiced programming and the club grew. Unfourtunately it shrunk when I left to attend college early. It gave me more computer experience than any other experience so far. It was the best, I learned so much by spending many nights after school trying to get hardware and software configs to work.

The only somewhat mention of our group on the web is at the parrell mac computing site AppleSeed

To give a very rough idea of why Space stuff is both hard and expensive, here's a small article on what a satellite has to go through:

To give some idea of the environment a satellite has to work in, try this.

First, to simulate launch, attack a chain to your satellite-wannabe and drag it around behind your car on a rough road for 2 minutes at about 30 mph. It should be switched off throughout, then switched on immediately before the next bit.

Stick it in a tumble drier for a minute, to simulate the tumbling after separation. It should be able to right itself after you take it out if attitude control is important (like so you can point antennae towards earth....)

Stick it in the freezer, turned to max Cold. Then, while it's at -20F, take it out and stick it in an oven at about 250F. After a few cycles, half an hour of each, then put it in the microwave and set it on "high" for 10 minutes. Repeat continuously for the period it's supposed to operate, and it should work without a hitch throughout.

I can't think of an easy way to simulate vacuum (you get some interesting outgassing with many components, shorts, conductive glunk accumulating everywhere), but the above should be enough for a basic test. More complex and realistic ones are much tougher to pass.

(The above based upon personal observations at our clean room, and vibration, vacuum-and-heat torture chambers etc for FedSat-1, a Scientific research micro-satellite based on SIL components due to go up on a NASDA H-2A booster next year).

I'm just team-leading the software development BTW, I'm no hardware junkie. Programming for a 5-year life cycle where errant cosmic rays not just may but will randomly flip bits, and it's still gotta work, is non-trivial, but doable. Kinda neat and really interesting too.

In space, no-one can go up there to press CTRL-ALT-DEL.

Yan

Gilina: "I can't believe you're not Sebacean."
John: "Human. It's kinda like Sebacean, but we haven't conquered other worlds yet, so we just kick the crap out of each other."

Farscape, PK Tech Girl

Runner up goes to Black Lab Linux.

Now, if they'll just get AA fonts

Just a note that the Qt-port of mozilla already anti-aliases fonts. The port is not nearly usable yet, but if you want to try it:

http://www.linux.ucla.edu/~dimator/qt-mozilla/

(PS:
I have Mozilla 0.9.2 installed right now, and it's way slower...
Really? On my machine, Mozilla takes less time to startup, and less time to load pages... I'll put up with the extra bloat that it does have for the best site rendering on *nix.)


---

2) The Hindenburgh (Gas tanks tend to burn, pressurized gas cylinders tend to explode)

How are you wrong? Let me count the ways:

1) The Hindenburg did not burn because it was full of hydrogen. It would have burned had it been filled with helium. Some guy at NASA proved it.

2) Gas tanks do not tend to burn. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of them not burning all over the world right now. You probably have several hundred very near you as you read this (in automobiles, in lawnmowers, etc.).

3) Pressurized gas cylinders do not tend to explode. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of them not exploding all over the world right now. You probably have several dozen very near you as you read this (fire extinguishers, propane tanks, medical oxygen tanks, helium tanks to blow up [inflate] children's ballons, etc.).

4) The Hindenburg was not a gas tank, nor was it a pressurized gas cylinder.

5) Nothing about the Hindenburg has anything to do with the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel. The Hindenburg ran on kerosene. Saying the Hindenburg "proves" hydrogen is dangerous is like saying the Kursk "proves" nuclear power is dangerous since it was a nuclear sub (or that Three Mile Island "proves" that electricity is dangerous since that's what it was making).

And as for your first point about all the energy used to "make" the hydrogen, you miss the point entirely. There are dozens of ways we can (and do) make hydrogen, some better than others. There is only one way to make gasoline. At least hydrogen will give us some options, one of which is make it from gasoline as needed.

This is one scary book that everybody should read. The Russian author, Ken Alibek, moved to Alabama (where I live) where he was a consultant after his defection to the US Army Chemical/Biological Warfare Group at Fort McClellan in Anniston, so I have actually followed this story fairly closely. Dr. Alibek is basically the guy behind the drive to vaccinate the US Army against anthrax, which has caused quite a furor over the past few years. A slide show he gave/gives fairly frequently is here and his Congressional testimony is here... it's VERY interesting reading. If Dr. Alibek's writings don't induce a rising sense of worry in the back of your mind, just keep reading here.

I didn't see any mention of the best Beowulf clutstering project of Macs, so to "Think Different": Project Appleseed, put together by the physics department at UCLA. They've accomplished phenomenal speeds, etc.; mostly, it's just as possible on Macs as it is on anything else.

In fact, they have even developed a drag-n-drop interface for setting up Beowulf jobs.

Further, your notion that the US approach of science and technology as a "side-effect" is no longer true. Here's an excerpt from an article on Japan's technology policy, which can be found here:

"Traditionally, the public sector in most countries has been an important source of funding for basic scientific research.(6) As recently as 1995, the Japanese government contributed 22 percent of the nation's U.S. $140 billion in total R&D expenditures, while the U.S. government chipped in 35 percent of that country's U.S. $179 billion in R&D expenditures.(7) At first glance, it would appear that government support for basic research is alive and well."

"However, if we examine the numbers more carefully, we find that funding for "pure science" is indeed drying up. If one considers purchasing power parity, Japan's total R&D expenditures for 1995 are cut nearly in half, to U.S. $78 billion.(8) Even if we assume that the bulk of public money goes to fund basic scientific research, this means that only U.S. $17 billion is available for this purpose each year."

"By comparison, using the same assumption, the U.S. government is providing roughly U.S. $63 billion on behalf of basic science. The important element here, however, is the decline in military outlays on behalf of scientific research resulting from the end of the Cold War. Not only have overall budgets been cut, but there has been a fundamental change in philosophy regarding the most efficient way to obtain leading-edge technology."

"Given the limited applicability of products typically funded by the U.S. government, whether for military or aerospace applications, it is often hard to justify massive government investment in the basic research underlying such products. It is far more economical to rely on the private sector for such research, and simply tailor the resulting technology to military needs or purchase the end products outright. Consequently, there has been a shift from a "spin off" to a spin on" policy. Rather than the government financing basic scientific research through Pentagon programs such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which gave birth to the Internet, and then "spinning off" the resulting technologies for private sector commercialization, it is increasingly turning to the private sector for "dual use" technologies that it can "spin on" into military applications."

As for seeds of destruction, how is it that after supporting Japan's defense needs for over 50 years, the United States hasn't been eclipsed by Japan economically?

Remember the 1980s, when suddenly every American businessman was reading books about Japanese business practices? Well, the Americans learned a lot, and managed to make painful changes that turned the American economy around.

Unfortunately, Japan is having a tougher time making the infrastructure changes it really needs. Japan's banking industry is a mess, and the Keiretsu system has shown weakness throughout the 1990s.

Finally, your contention that a Japanese military would become "unbeatable within 25 years" is pure conjecture, and the thought that the Japanese could have a working missile defense system within 10 years is fantasy. There are many primarily political reasons this is true, as this National Bureau of Asian Research paper indicates.

If you want to talk about Asian superpowers, think China, my friend.

http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/mgi/campaign /2000/la/general/assess/auerbach/website/.

Amazingly enough, he doesn't have a degree in science.

Just wait until he discovers LEO satellites...

This post is informative, but since I'm not going to create an account no moderator will ever read it or moderate it up.

Phil Agre, who edits the Red Rock Eater News Service, has put together a wonderful essay on helping people use computers without oppressing them that should be read by anyone teaching any sort of computer skills to another person or group, regardless of the ages involved.

Phil Agre, who edits the Red Rock Eater News Service, has put together a wonderful essay on helping people use computers without oppressing them that should be read by anyone teaching any sort of computer skills to another person or group, regardless of the ages involved.

Phil Agre, who edits the Red Rock Eater News Service, has put together a wonderful essay on helping people use computers without oppressing them that should be read by anyone teaching any sort of computer skills to another person or group, regardless of the ages involved.

General Electric did the "star in a jar" thing at the 1964 World's Fair. They actually had a working pulsed magnetic fusion system on display. Nowhere near breakeven, but real.

(I know of at least one project with Conexant and UCLA directed at using photonic crystals to point cell-phone antenna output away from the head for just this reason.)

Please don't interpret "I don't like Linux" as "I think Windows is better than Linux", because I don't like Windows either. I think they're both half-assed solutions to a really difficult problem, and I think we can do better.

ah yes, real computing by definition excludes photoshop... of course.

let me explain something to you: the number of people who use photoshop so massively outweigh the number of people who use gcc that the notion of compilation benchmarks applying to the "real world" is almost laughable.

its applicability in distributed computing...

are awesome. you should really look into it if you are, indeed, "serious" about distributed computing. the project is called appleseed... point, click, cluster....

No discussion of its Java compilation speeds,

now, if you'd been paying any attention at all to this board for the last, oh, four weeks, you might have noticed the wwdc banner ad touting mac as the Next Big Java Platform. did you go and check out any of their material on java? you should really give project builder and interface builder a whirl... with those tools i'll beat you to market even if you have a compile time of zero.

I'll stick with Solaris and NT.

i assume from this that you're running solaris on an x86. i don't even need to go there...

beowulf? pah!