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Such "dark energy" acts as a source for gravitational attraction and lensing, but it also exerts an outward pressure similar to the Caisimir effect, which accelerates the expansion.

Other information on this project can be found here, here (Caltech), or here. This link to Princeton University seems to explain the project much better, at least to me.

Berkeley also has their MOSS, which TA's and prof's may have heard of:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html.

I think it probably takes a look at a pseudo-compiled version. That's what I'd do, anyhow.

Andrew.

The group of artists who created all those works were the GALA committee, which was made up primarily of students and faculty from the University of Georgia and CalArts (hence GA=Georgia LA=Los Angeles). Pictures and video clips of the pieces that made it into the show can be found at the GALA committee website, which has most of them:

http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/

Another interesting fact- in order to bring attention to the art while Melrose Place was running, the committee created a fictional Melrose fan named "Eliza" who began to notice strange things happening on the sets. "Eliza" documented these anomolies on her website, and was essentially a mole for GALA in order to arouse speculation among the show's fans.

An archive of the mole's website is at:
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/eliza/

The group of artists who created all those works were the GALA committee, which was made up primarily of students and faculty from the University of Georgia and CalArts (hence GA=Georgia LA=Los Angeles). Pictures and video clips of the pieces that made it into the show can be found at the GALA committee website, which has most of them:

http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/

Another interesting fact- in order to bring attention to the art while Melrose Place was running, the committee created a fictional Melrose fan named "Eliza" who began to notice strange things happening on the sets. "Eliza" documented these anomolies on her website, and was essentially a mole for GALA in order to arouse speculation among the show's fans.

An archive of the mole's website is at:
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/eliza/

I'm sorry, but I seem to have been unintentionally misleading above. The show in which these artistic works were inserted was not Twin Peaks (which I don't believe was a Spelling Production) but Melrose Place. The works were presented as part of a larger exhibition entitled "Uncommon Sense" that focused on art as part of the public process, and the specific section was titled "In the Name of the Place". The creators of the work have a nice web site at http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/projects/mpart/. All in all, it was one of the most interesting exhibits I've ever been to.

We ran a Counter-Strike tournament at UCSB yesterday. We had just over 20 machines on a 10Mbit Cisco switch, using ~30% utilization... I think you would be just fine with 64 machines on a 10Mbit FD switch.

As gets mentioned here from time to time, Digital Fountain addresses (or endeavors to address) the "recipients in sync" problem.

I'd be surprised if multicasting ever comes into very wide use; since the situations that it's useful under are limited...

Where I work, many of us kids like to listen to streaming radio broadcasts. We've been criticized for the strain we put on our Internet connection, and it's a valid point. Often several of us are listening to the same shoutcast stream (or whatever) at the same time, and it seems kinda silly that we consume N * 50-100kbps of bandwidth to receive the same content. But, hey, this is just a personal way in which multicast could help my life.

When most people think of multicast they think of 1-to-many transmission. There are also lots of applications involving many-to-many transmission. Chat is an obvious one; chat becomes particularly well suited for multicast when you're dealing with voice chat rather than text. A more interest application is in networked virtual environments (less grandiloquently, games). A couple other fellows and I wrote the networking part of an NVE that used many-to-many multicast: the world was partitioned into octrees, and each octree was assigned a multicast group. Octree nodes split and merged based on traffic, and there were different levels of groups for messages of different levels of detail (e.g., toe movements vs. explosions). (Well, this was the plan; we didn't finish all of it, but it was a cool demo). Peer-to-peer NVEs have many advantages over client-server systems, including reduced (and hopefully optimally minimal) latency and natural scalability. This book provides an overview of the subject, but there are many papers out there that are more in-depth and informative.

Finally, check out Kevin Almeroth's research in multicast applications. He has several good survey papers that address your synchronized play out gripe and explore the gamut of potential multicast applications.

For full disclosure, I am a physics graduate student working in the astronomy department at Berkeley. Although I am not a cosmologist, I heard the latest on the supernova searches from one of the key investigators yesterday at an informal brown bag lunch. As a regular /. reader, I thought I would put in my own two cents worth of corrections and additional info.

First, the existence of a cosmological constant is NOT at all news. Prior observations by both the LBL group doing observations of supernovae type Ia (group page) and the BOOMERANG group doing observations of the cosmic microwave background (group page) verified the existence of a cosmological constant several years ago.

Second, as a previous poster has stated, the geometry of the universe is NOT necessarily open.
See especially this informative figure which shows the allowed region of parameter space based on both the SNIa and the BOOMERANG results. As you can easily see, the combined results are consistent with a flat universe with a cosmological constant, but the flat universe is a critical case, and one cannot exclude either an open or closed universe.

Third, what IS new is the detection of an extremely distant SN at redshift z = 1.6. The discovery, made largely by Adam Riess, who is now at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute, was largely serendipitous; it was detected in the Hubble Deep Field, and a number of prior observations allowed Riess to piece together a light curve from which he could infer the intrinsic luminosity. The NEW results are remarkable for two main reasons :

1) Critics have argued that a thin smattering of grey dust in intergalactic space could mimic the effect of a cosmological constant (ie, for a fixed redshift, objects seen are dimmer not due to an acceleration of the expansion of the universe, but instead due to obscuring dust along the line of sight, where the dust must absorb equally well at all frequencies). However, at very high redshift, the relative contribution of matter is higher, and so objects seen are BRIGHTER than what one expects in a freely coasting universe. This is not the trend predicted by the simplest dust model. So the recent evidence is one further advance for the non-zero cosmological constant model.

2) At such high redshifts, clocks appear to be moving faster because of the relative expansion of the universe since then (a photon wavelength is stretched out, but c remains constant, hence the photon frequency is also slowing in time in the universe, as are all clocks). The high redshift SNIa light curve exhibits this general relativistic time effect, and one cannot make sense of the curve without correcting for it.

For full disclosure, I am a physics graduate student working in the astronomy department at Berkeley. Although I am not a cosmologist, I heard the latest on the supernova searches from one of the key investigators yesterday at an informal brown bag lunch. As a regular /. reader, I thought I would put in my own two cents worth of corrections and additional info.

First, the existence of a cosmological constant is NOT at all news. Prior observations by both the LBL group doing observations of supernovae type Ia (group page) and the BOOMERANG group doing observations of the cosmic microwave background (group page) verified the existence of a cosmological constant several years ago.

Second, as a previous poster has stated, the geometry of the universe is NOT necessarily open.
See especially this informative figure which shows the allowed region of parameter space based on both the SNIa and the BOOMERANG results. As you can easily see, the combined results are consistent with a flat universe with a cosmological constant, but the flat universe is a critical case, and one cannot exclude either an open or closed universe.

Third, what IS new is the detection of an extremely distant SN at redshift z = 1.6. The discovery, made largely by Adam Riess, who is now at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute, was largely serendipitous; it was detected in the Hubble Deep Field, and a number of prior observations allowed Riess to piece together a light curve from which he could infer the intrinsic luminosity. The NEW results are remarkable for two main reasons :

1) Critics have argued that a thin smattering of grey dust in intergalactic space could mimic the effect of a cosmological constant (ie, for a fixed redshift, objects seen are dimmer not due to an acceleration of the expansion of the universe, but instead due to obscuring dust along the line of sight, where the dust must absorb equally well at all frequencies). However, at very high redshift, the relative contribution of matter is higher, and so objects seen are BRIGHTER than what one expects in a freely coasting universe. This is not the trend predicted by the simplest dust model. So the recent evidence is one further advance for the non-zero cosmological constant model.

2) At such high redshifts, clocks appear to be moving faster because of the relative expansion of the universe since then (a photon wavelength is stretched out, but c remains constant, hence the photon frequency is also slowing in time in the universe, as are all clocks). The high redshift SNIa light curve exhibits this general relativistic time effect, and one cannot make sense of the curve without correcting for it.

The FT article that was linked to in the post says that an optical fiber is used for reading. This reminded me of Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NFSOM) which is a technique used by a research group where I was a graduate student. To read more about it look under techniques at the Awschalom Group web page. For this NFSOM technique an optical fiber is tapered and coated with a metal to produce a tip with an aperature of ~100 nm. With a spot size of 100nm square it would be possible to fit about 1 Tera bit in the space of a credit card. Of course, this does not sound like a completely solid state device. The optical tip must scan over the recording material.

I also found another article which seems to have been written by a more clueful journalist. They report that the data is stored on layers within the substrate. With the areal density that might be accessible using NFSOM and 16 recording layers within the material it might be possible to reach the densities they are claiming.

It certainly seems that technology like this could take a long time to be developed into a product, but the university announcement does say that they have already received some patents on the technology and they sound optimistic about how much more work is needed. That stance is probably geared to attract venture capital more than anything, but who knows? -Dan

• piecework computations, where a large chunk of work can be split into smaller chunks, and
• branch-and-bound computations, like the travelling salesman problem

It's highly fault tolerant (uses eager scheduling) and load balanced (uses work stealing).

SLab is an excellent multitrack recorder/mixer. It is not up to snuff with ProTools yet (though no program is on any platform).

Other Linux audio related links include (sorry if some links are bad, I haven't updated this list in awhile):

Multitrack audio recording/mixing:
Ardour
Slab
Snd

Midi Sequencing:
Jazz++
Rosegarden
Brahms (I THINK this is a sequencer)

Sound editing / effects processing:
MixViews
ecasound

Audio creation (synth emulators):
Ultramaster RS-101 and Juno6 CSound
Cecilia (requires Csound)

Notation:
Lilypond
Rosegarden
Mup

Awesome pages with links to everything you wanted to know about Linux audio:
Applications for Open Sound System
Sound and MIDI software for Linux

Now, imagine a space station crashing through the atmosphere, heating up to insane temperatures, and falling into the middle of the ocean, where the water temperature stays mostly constant. If you don't think that is going to have a measurable effect on a large chunk of water, you haven't taken any thermo or bio classes...

Oh, please! Let's imagine that when Mir hits, it is at the same temperature as the surface of the sun (5700 K), while the ocean where it lands has a temperature of 280K. Let's say that Mir is made of steel with a total mass of 100,000 kg.

Heat capacity of steel = 447 J/(kg*K) , heat capacity of water = 4169 J/(kg*K).

So the heat energy supplied by the station is (447)*(100000)*(5700 - 280) = 2.42*10^11 J. Dividing by the heat capacity of water, we get a result of 5.8*10^7 kg*K.

In order to calculate a temperature rise, we need to decide how much of the ocean's volume to consider. For the first calculation, consider a cube of water 100m on each side. I hope you will all agree that this is an absolutely tiny fraction of the entire Pacific ocean.

The volume of water in this 100m cube is (100^3) =10^6 m^3, and the density of water is 1000 kg/m^3. Therefore, the mass of water in this cube is 10^9 kg.

So, (deltaT)*(10^9 kg) = 5.8*10^7 kg*K

deltaT = 0.058 K (or 0.10 degF for Americans).

Now take a look at http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/geos/1112.html , a page studying the El Nino phenomenon. Look at the satellite photos on that page, and figure out for yourself how much impact a 0.058 degree temperature rise in a 100m section of the Pacific ocean is going to have. Also note the section in the text which says "On warm sunny days, the surface waters can heat up by as much as 1-2 degrees C during the daytime hours".

Granted, any fish which happens to be at "ground zero" is going to get cooked, but the ecosystem is going to be completely indifferent to the event (at least from a thermodynamic perspective).

p.s. The environmental damage caused by industrial cooling-water is real. However, there you have a continuous source of heat energy rather than a one-time addition of a heated space station.

For a good survey of the the past, present, and future of interdomain multicast routing, try this paper.

As others have mentioned, yes, flow control is a problem, and, yes, reliability is a problem. There are many solutions to both problems that have been researched (largely in academia), but flow control can't really be solved if you're trying to distribute RedHat over multicast to half a million people who are on disparate links. Someone a few posts up mentioned the Digital Fountain idea, but neglected to provide a link. Digital Fountain aims to solve the problems that are being discussed here for exactly the kinds of applications that are being discussed here. The paradigm is that random bytes are constantly flowing from the fountain (the multicaster) and the recipients fill up their buckets with the random bytes until a file is formed. Read their papers for a more mathematically rigorous explanation...

From what I understand, most UC schools get their resnet internet access either at discount with help from the state, or for free. I serious do not think this is a valid use of my (and "our" for those of you living in California) tax dollars. Why should I be paying for someone else to napster the network to death? Sheesh.

I would really be interested in your counter opinions or support... That's right... Press that reply button. :)

Hawking and Berkenstein came up with this concept in the 70s. Since Hawking radiation implies that black holes have a temperature it follows that they have an entropy as well, and the relationship is S=A/4h, where A is the surface area in appropriate units.

This theory has recently been proved using string theory. Since entropy has its basis in the number of available quantum states of a system, Strominger and Vafa showed this relationship to be true by counting the degeneracy of configurations for strings and D-branes corresponding to black holes in string theory. This is a real result for string theory, since up till then the theory only had a semiclassical derivation.

For more information, see here for more information on the superstring proof or here for the semiclassical derivation.

This wavelength is around the peak of the first Atmospheric window. It's also cheap because it's the wavelength used by CD readers.

----

Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.

This is standard canard. The main component (70%) is measurements over the sea surface. Further, most warming has occurred since 1980-- long after the effect you cite should have appeared. Be careful; the petrochemical industry spends a lot of money spreading such "commonsense" nonsense.

Or what about the ozone hole? [...] And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk.

Our lack of understanding is my point, but... this from the 1998 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: "The large ozone losses in the Southern Hemisphere polar region during spring continued unabated with approximately the same magnitude and areal extent as in the early 1990s. [...] These ozone changes are consistent overall with our understanding of chemistry and dynamics."

All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry.

Pure invention. Here are global CO2 levels as measured at the Muana Loa observatory. No discontinuity due to Pinatubo's 1992 eruption. (You're probably thinking of SO2, but you're still overstating.)

Human-caused CO2 increases are certain. Global warming is certain. The first should cause the second. But conceivably we're missing something, the CO2 increases are not causing global warming, and coincidentally some unknown, natural force is the real cause. It's possible. But odds of even, say, 1 in 10 that we're hosing the planet should perhaps give one pause.

I advocate forcing every new programmer to learn INTERCAL. Behold its gloriously simple and useful operators:

The interleave operator takes two 16-bit values and produces a 32-bit result by alternating the bits of the operands. Thus, #65535c/#0 has the 32-bit binary form 101010....10 or 2863311530 decimal, while #0c/#65535 = 0101....01 binary = 1431655765 decimal, and #255c/#255 is equivalent to #65535.

Windows95 used to include the Sun PC-NFS client that might do what you're asking, but I'm not sure (as the last time I used Windows95 was several months ago and I don't have a test system to mess with).

If you're just trying to get Windows (NT) to log into an NIS domain, you can have a look at NISGINA. There's a neat article at LinuxWorld here. I poked around with this before I discovered Samba, but never really tested is. NISGINA's hopme page is here. NISGINA (and it's subsidiary utilities) come with source, too (which is nice).

Sun (I think..) also makes an NIS/NFS client for Win32 -- there's a technical run-through here. It's called the Solstice NFS Client for Windows and it probably doesn't come cheap.

Now, if anywone knows where I can get a cheap/free Macintosh NIS/NFS client... (and yes, I know about Netatalk, but I'd like to try anyways)

The Image Processing Workbench (IPW) of UCSB has been open source and freely available for years, and recent ports include Linux. Very powerful collection of command line Unix utilities written in C that can be pipelined together. It's specifically designed to work with remote sensing data although it does not incorporate image projection (mapping) and navigation functions. There is still a need for freely available OS tools for mapping and navigation.

I have been following physics for quite some time and have seen the difficulty in trying to formulate a Quantum Theory of gravity. I think that we will find--very soon--the bridge that crosses the gap between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

One of the more promising theories, as of late, is called M-Theory. It is able to unify all five "types" of super strings. This view of sub-nuclear physics also attempts to answer a lot of questions about cosmology. This would include the actual number of dimensions in space-time and the actual structure of universe, itself.

The problem with the original Super String Theory was that it lacked "testable" predictions. The energies required to probe to that level were in the range of around 10^16 TeV. However, there has been some recent speculation that some of the extra dimensions could be larger than the Planck length (10^-34 m). Physicists were hoping to catch a glimpse at these higher dimensions by observing the effects of gravity at close range.

Some believe that gravity may propagate through more than three spacial dimensions, since it is so hard to unify with all the other fundemental forces. If this is the case, then gravity will fall off at a rate greater than the square of the distance. This would also mean that super-unification would probably happen at a lower energy scale (in the TeV range), as opposed to the dreaded 10^16 TeV range.

go here to get a basic idea of gravitons. They are excepted by most physists. the Einstien model of the unvierse leads to quanta which leads to strings which leads to graviton. Einstien did not like quantum, but acknowledge it probably existed. He called the quantum effects "Spooky".
If you want to find out more about the graviton visit your local library, or college physist, or MIT, or cal tech.
heres a question...If the moon was to disappear, how long would the effects take to reach earth?and why?

Actually, the ucsb admin was doing some sluething, so the odds are if the hacker was sloppy, he's better moving on.

SB Newspress: http://news.newspress.com/toplocal/computer.htm

And of course the unposted, slashdot brings ucsb network to it's knees
"The unusual activity from the campus computer was noticed by UCSB's network programmer, Kevin Schmidt, around midnight Tuesday after he conducted a routine check of the system from his home. He spent the night running a check to see if there had been an intrusion, and found that a campus computer was involved in what is called a "distributed denial of service" attack.

"We were a victim," Schmidt said. "And our computer network system was abused."
After detecting the problem, Schmidt contacted CNN and then the FBI.
Whoever broke into the system attempted to cover his tracks by rotating the origination addresses, but was "sloppy" and left some information intact. Still, computer experts said Friday that finding the culprit or culprits will be difficult because numerous layers of connections may be involved."

And of course the worthless press release:
HACKERS BREAK INTO UC SANTA BARBARA COMPUTERS; HIT CNN

Ah, but your initial argument was the chance that an "exploiter" would exploit the "big, happy, family", not that two groups would attempt to exploit each other. That is a different case altogether. And besides, even within a group that wouldn't be considered diverse, people will still find ways to divide themselves into subgroups based on, for example, religious beliefs, political viewpoints, etc. Even Nazi Germany's concept of "Volk" only excluded people based on their heritage (yet they still purged German Communists).

Besides, I don't believe in dividing exploitation along "group" boundaries. Exploitation is exploitation regardless of the color of skin, religious beliefs, etc. of the person responsible for it.

Since more people, per capita were taken out by the Trotsky/Lennin/Stalin purges than were taken out of the nations participating in WW II, it is certainly reasonable to declare the Soviet Empire more destructive than Nazi Germany.

If the Nazi party were in power as long as the Soviets, I can guarantee you they would have purged more people per capita (ie. if they had stuck to ethnic cleansing instead of invading their neighbors, thus drawing the attention of the world).

You seem fairly preoccupied with how destructive the Soviet government was, but have you ever investigated the destruction the U.S government/multinational corporations are responsible for? To use examples from South America (an area of the world that doesn't seem to fall under the radar scope of the American media):

The involvement of the American government in the overthrow of democratically elected Brazilian president Salvador Allende, whose government was in turn replaced by the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A list of Pinochet's crimes can be found here. Documentation of the connection between the CIA and DINA (the Chilean secret police -- responsible for carrying out Pinochet's brutality) can be found here. There are literally hundreds of references on this...

The United States involvement (CIA, AID, MILGP) in the creation of military, police, and paramilitary agencies, which in turn were responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile (as mentioned above), and Bolivia. You can find large lists of MILGP (U.S. Military Group) officers still to this day in these and other countries.

I don't condone destruction of human life caused by anyone, but it is wrong to only selectively look at the sources of it.

http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~boome rang/team.html

MiXViews (mxv) is a free wave editor written in C++ (source). It's fast, powerful, and runs on Linux (and other UNIX-style operating systems).

MiXViews (mxv) is a free wave editor written in C++ (source). It's fast, powerful, and runs on Linux (and other UNIX-style operating systems).

This is the correct link for mxv.

(mxv) is a free .wav sound editor for Linux. There are also a few other ones available, search for them on freshmeat.net.

As someone who has done an undergrad degree in CS and is currently working in the industry for a large company (they don't get much larger), I would say that I strongly endorse Smalltalk as the best language for teaching the fundamentals of OO. If you haven't heard of it, Smalltalk is a language with a very simple english-like syntax; the syntax can be mastered in less than a day. This is very important, because many languages which are touted as great for teaching have such a massively complicated syntax that the only time the entire rules were bound together in one volume, it underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole (apologies D. Adams). I've seen students get so caught up in the syntax of these languages that they lose sight of the fact that they are supposed to be learning how to PROGRAM, not how to PROGRAM IN (insert language of choice for this year).

Many of the "new" features of a language such as Java were in fact borrowed from Smalltalk, which has boasted them for over 20 years. These features include Virtual Machine/Bytecode technology and Garbage Collection. However, Smalltalk has many other features that make it ideal for teaching. For example, EVERYTHING is an object: no base types, no "magic" classes that aren't really objects, etc.; Java sacrificed these critical features in the name of efficiency.

For a time, the university that I attended taught Smalltalk as the first year language (after I had gone through...). Unfortunately, choosing a good language is only half the journey. I saw, much to my dismay, that rather than getting a solid grounding in Object theory, students were learning useless and irrelevant things like how to put pretty buttons on windows. I realize that SOME visible gratification is necessary, but delving right into widgetry before the basis of programming has been drilled in is useless. Such things are implementation dependent, and much more importantly, language dependent. When Java becomes the thing of the past, there will be 200,000 Swing programmers out there who are screwed because the only thing they know how to do is add a component to a panel. They don't understand the deeper issues at hand, and will find it hard to adapt to new technology because they will have to learn it all over again. Given a solid grounding, any new language is simply a variation on principles that you learned in your first year.

Please don't think that I believe that OO is the solution for everything. I've done my share of C, Assembly, and other non-OO languages. I simply think that OO is a great teaching tool because it mirrors real-life interactions, responsibilities and state of objects. I also know that it is relevant in the workplace, otherwise I wouldn't have a job right now. Even procedural languages can be programmed in an object-oriented manner, although the method of doing so usually overrides the simplicity desired of a teaching language.

I don't want this to sound like an advertisement, but you can get gnu-smalltalk for just about any unix-like system. VisualAge for Smalltalk is available from IBM on www.software.ibm.com/ad. VisualWorks is available from ObjectShare, formerly ParcPlace, at www.objectshare.com. Squeak is available from www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak.

a UCSB group is currently doing research on the effectiveness of the net and soforth. they've got a few papers up and such at http://www.polsci.ucsb.edu/~bimber/res earch/. Worth checking out.

> If you state that such changes are "only a theory", you are lying through the skin of your teeth.

This is an utter falsehood. The entire "theory" of evolution is based on evidentialist findings and cannot be proven solely by deductive or logical methods. It might be actually correct, but until it is proven logically, it is not "fact". At the very best, it is "plausible" or a "strong possibility" that evolution is in fact the means by which creatures have become they way they are. But because Darwin has some good ideas, and there is a fossil record, that does not make evolution a universal truth, and it should not be considered one.

Secondly, citing those few people's highly debated arguments was in poor form. cje admitted that "a few creationists" believe this and that, and then proceeded to pass some sort of judgement on the entirety of creationists. I might as well use the same tactic on those naturalists who have extremely controversial beliefs.

The remark of cje is typical of the naturalist objection to creationism. The typical naturalist will use "science" to say that evolution is the only "proveable" method by which all of use has gotten here today. The truth of the matter is, science (the gathering and analyzation of empirical data) has shown nothing decisive on the matter, but at most "a possibility" or "plausibility". Challenging creationists to state a common theory and saying they haven't done so by showing some differences that a few of them have is just plain silly. There are common beliefs held among all of those who believe in creationism, and because cje has not bothered to do his homework and discover those beliefs, his arguments and challenges appear weak at best.

And, to prove that I'm not just braying and citing unfounded opinion, I now leave a reference to a highly respected creationist philosopher's views on Darwinian naturalism : Darwin, Mind, and Meaning by Alvin Plantina.

Something like this already exists. Look at Javelin and Charlotte

There's lots of cheap Sparc and other equipment out there if you're willing to live with the older models. (An IPX is dirt cheap these days; on the other hand, an SS5 is a lot more expensive for what you get because it's still a `current' model, even though modern PCs blow it away in terms of speed.)

However, if you want to get good deals and know what you're getting, do some research before you buy. For hardware information, the Sun Hardware FAQ is the biggest collection in one place. Another place worth looking is under the `Supported Hardware' link at the NetBSD project ; there's information there on many different systems, including Suns, and links to other sources of information. (This is also the only modern OS that runs on a lot of old equipment.)

Once you've had at least a cursory look through the resources available, spend a week or two reading through misc.forsale.computers.workstation to get an idea of what a decent price for this stuff is. There are a lot of bad (too high) prices posted there, but these usually get pointed out fairly quickly.

The last thing I'd recommend is to start cheap, to see if this is to your taste. If you decide that working with non-PC equipment is just too much of a hassle, or you get too little performance for your dollar, you're only out a couple of hundred dollars if you bought an IPX, rather than a couple of thousand if you bought an SS20.

Personally, I find old hardware quite rewarding. I currently have running at home 3 Sparcstations (two with rather nice 17" colour monitors that were dirt cheap!), a couple of Sun 3/60s (one colour, one mono, both with 19" monitors) and a VAXStation 2000, and my main mail server for cynic.net is an IPX. I've also had various other things kicking around in the past, though I recently cleaned out my collection. It's fun stuff to play with, and actually does useful work quite well in many circumstances.

cjs