Slashdot Mirror

Let me explain the experiment, for those of you who are curious about the state of the art in neuro research. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the location in the brain of areas which are active during certain tasks. The task I was given was a memory / reflex test. I was given a button, and shown a sequence of letters at varying rates. I was supposed to press the button when I saw a letter that was identical to the letter shown two letters earlier. So if I saw E-C-E-C-C, I'd press the button on the second E, and again on the second C, but not the third C. (This is a hard enough test without being a medical experiment!)

First, they wired me up for an EEG. This involved sitting still for about 45 minutes while two people stood over me, put a skullcap with wires on my head, and went over each electrical contact with some grease and a little wooden dowel to move the hair out of the way so the electrodes would have good contact with the skin. (The goop washed out in the shower, but it felt funny driving home.) Then they stuck me in the MRI, with a mirror in front of my face at a 45 degree angle so I could look past my feet without sitting up (impossible in that tiny tube). Then they performed the tests.

I was in the tube for about 90 minutes, most of it not moving any muscles except for my finger to press the button. If you move any muscles, your whole brain lights up with activity, and it throws off the readings. It was also noisy in there, because I was laying in the middle of a huge electromagnet being bombarded with radio waves. After it was over, they showed me a 3D brain scan, and I got to see a 2D plot of my brain waves by color (blue for theta waves, green for alpha, red for gamma, etc etc).

Back to the topic at hand. Unless they suddenly find a way to carry around a $1.5M electromagnet, hide it somewhere where no one can see or hear it, convince people to walk through it somehow (Futurama tubes, anyone?), figure out a way to filter out all the extra brain noise from people walking, talking, and doing all the other things we normally do, and somehow interpret the data in a time-relevant manner, there's no way anyone is going to make "brain scanning" work. OTOH, maybe there is a way after all.

It's possible to play various tricks as a TCP receiver to get a server to send you data as fast as you want. Instead of just prioritizing ACKs, if you split ACKs, send duplicate ACKs, or send ACKs for data you haven't gotten yet, the server will think the connection is great and increase the send window. The details are here.

You can use a radioshack scanner and plug it into a computer running pd with a DTMF decoder patch and get anyone's voicemail password who has a cordless phone. For some cordless phones, you can even use an old TV set that goes up to channel 83!

You can also get long distance calling cards this way too, I'm paranoid and I now dial these on the cord phone, then pick up the cordless. Are user's responsible for using encrypted phones?

AT&T is clearly at fault for accepting the charges. That is the part of the system that is the weak link, not the voicemail passwords. Someone could have hung an answering machine on their phone line. It's a ridiculous hole.

As for SBC, Their system asks you for your password BEFORE your mailbox number, and if it's right for the phone you're using, it doesn't ask for the mailbox. So, if you have the same password as the person whose phone you're using, you hear THEIR messages, and there is no way to listen to your own! It's rare, but it happens. Telcos are lame.

=Rich

BTW, pd is the greatest, coolest, amazingest piece of linux software there is and hardly anyone seems to use it. You can make a DTMF decoder in no time, or generate any tones you need, and so much more! See the examples.....

Thanks for the UCSD link. It's very informative. Looking further up in that article, we see that these "left-handed materials" are much less exotic than might have been supposed from the original article. What we're talking about is ordinary material that has been assembled in an unordinary way.

Many readers are familiar with Fresnel lenses. You might have seen one at the back of some buses where they provide a "wide angle" view of what's behind the bus. At a gross scale, they look flat, but they are in fact etched glass or plastic. I mention them not because they're made out of so-called metamaterials, but because they're another example of small scale engineering having a large scale effect.

The researchers have etched small structures (smaller than the wavelength of interest) into normal materials. The two main differences between this "metamaterial" and a Fresnel lens are

• The structures are small than the wavelength of light being used, and
• They use a unit replication pattern rather than a circular symmetry pattern.

It's a neat piece of engineering, but it hardly changes our understanding of the universe.

Incidentally, on the "light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge" comment, an ordinary Fresnel lense is only one example of a flat structure that will accomplish this. Another example is a perfectly flat glass plate with an index of refraction that decreases and then increases. The other comments I've read have assumed a constant index of refraction.

"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge." Not on my planet, bucko.

I'm not sure what planet you're on, but at least on this one, light passing through a flat lens does indeed diverge.

The UCSD link has more technical information. Especially "illuminating" is the diagram at the bottom of the how it works page which clearly indicates (as does the text) that the material only has the odd effects for a very specific range of microwaves (10.4 to 11 GHz).

Thank you!

Trying to learn the truth behind that awful "news" article's BS, I landed at this site:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/~drs/left_home.htm:

"A Left-handed material is a material whose permeability and permittivity are simultaneously negative. Our present materials (shown in the photographs) are structures composed of copper elements, some in the shape of rings, some ordinary posts or wires, that appear as a continuous material to electromagnetic waves over a certain range of frequencies. These composite materials, or metamaterials, exhibit a simultaneously negative permittivity and permeability, and can thus be thought of as examples of Left-handed materials."

These stories are the most sensationalistic crap I've read in a long while.

Here's a (only slightly dumbed down) better explanation: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~drs/left_home.htm

Anyone that has had a high school physics class or a few semesters of introductory physics in college remembers snell's law and that infernal little quantity called 'n' that describes the characteristics of the material with respect to light. What they don't tell you in those classes is that you aren't even getting half of the picture.
Initially, you see n defined as c/v, where v is the speed of light in the material. Since v is less than c (always) this number is always greater than 1 except for vacuum. This is where the 'wierd science' part comes is, and the fact that you're only getting a fraction of the picture. In reality, n has both real and imaginary parts - the imaginary part decribes the 'folding' or how much the wave magnitude decays in the medium over distance and time. For example, if you took something that measured the intensity of light outside in the sunlight and compared it to the intensity of light behind a window in a house, the intensity *inside* would be less because the glass absorbs a certain amount of energy of the light as it passes through. As you can see, this 'n' thing is a little more complicated than what you learned initially in high school and college - end result, well, they sorta lied to you. In fact, the above is just scraping the barrel because you're still trying to give physical credence to a mathematical model.
The 'bad science' comes from putting too much faith in what the math really means. Guys, math is just a tool to *model* reality. If you put too much credence in it you start to think that stuff like virtual particles and feynman diagrams are real. They aren't. They're a tool used by physicists to get an answer that agrees with experiment. For more info on negative index of refraction stuff look at what these guys did, and also look here for a little more info.
Not that it isn't cool to hope that things go faster than light and that we're just getting part of the picture...

Well, it lacked subsurface scattering, which is pretty important thing when rendering stuff like human skin. Check it here.

7835 Trade St. suite 100

Electronics there is a crapshoot. Your computers might actually be working when you send them there... Ours are totally stripped.

Lots of office stuff though... desks, chairs... The guys that work there are nice enough, but try to get as much as they can for everything. It's good to know a lot about what you are buying. Cash or check only though...

The can be found here.

Since AspectJ is getting some attention I figured i would point out some other AOP resources

• MDSOC - Paper - Is basically IBM's take on AOP. It avoids creating Aspect Space and Object Space (what belongs in an aspect, what in an Object?) but is less mature than AspectJ
• HyperJ - Home - IBM's Java language stuff supporting MDSOC
• JAC - Home - Aspect oriented middleware for Java. I haven;t explored this one much, is on my todo list.
• Aspect Browser - Home- A tool to help identify crosscutting concerns in Java (emacs!)

It's unlikely that Gore won Florida:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a14ee867d3d.ht m

http://weber.ucsd.edu/~mruben/florida.htm

It obviously seems to be a lot of junk traffic, but the only part we can say is bad requests are part 3 and 4 from the chart. Bad spellings must go to the root since there may be such domains!

It would be nice to analyze the 70% repeated or identical queries, probably lots of traffic can be explained for (or else there are a bunch of administrators out there who need a good manual on bind).

It obviously seems to be a lot of junk traffic, but the only part we can say is bad requests are part 3 and 4 from the chart. Bad spellings must go to the root since there may be such domains!

It would be nice to analyze the 70% repeated or identical queries, probably lots of traffic can be explained for (or else there are a bunch of administrators out there who need a good manual on bind).

Oh fuck!

I guess us libertarian geeks will just have to set up our own channels of communications. Unfortunately, my neighborhood association won't let me set up a tower, and we have lots of trees, so my LOS is severely limited.

Big Brother wears mouseears.

Hanzim - Score: Excellent

• a really superb Chinese ideograph tutor (also quite good for learning the Japanese kanji which are mostly identical to Chinese) with bilingual English-Chinese translations based on radicals.

Kanatest - Score: Very Good

• a handy (Japanese) katakana and hiragana tester - the calligraphy is very good too.

If you can grasp the notion that an internet is not the Internet, it means exactly what he said it means.

The bullshit started with the origional Wired article, then Racist Majoraty Leader Trent Lott got it rolling by mockingly saying that he had "taken the intiative in creating the paper clip." "Inventing" was then substituted for "creating" by the cocksucking media, and an urban legend was born.

This article does a nice job debunking the "invented the internet" myth. Go read it. After that go ahead and keep making jokes about Gore and the internet, its all funny haha, but know that you are spreading a baldface lie.

What really pisses me off is that the media had a grand old time eviscerating Gore for a plethora of false statments that he never actually made, while ignoring then Govenor Bush's ATTEMPT TO TAKE CREDIT FOR A BILL HE FUCKING VETOED!!!. During the 2000 debates Bush said "As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through." The shitsack VETOED that bill, and then only let it pass into law without his signature because the Texas legislature passed it again with veto proof margins!

Sorry, I'm not that familiar with internet bureacracy, but what exactly is so suspicious about that whois record? For the record, the address and zip code appear to be valid, as does the area code.

So last month, the American Physical Society, representing some 40,000 physicists, expanded the ethical guidelines for researchers, in their Statements on Profession Conducts document. The new guidelines call for more ethics training in science and urge all research institutions to adopt the same set of misconduct procedures. The guidelines also clarify co-authors' roles and duties, making it clear that when you put your name on a paper, your reputation is on the line.

Biologists faced similar scandals during the Gallo and Imanishi-Kari cases in the 90's. Unlike Robert Gallo and David Baltimore, who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.

The above info was compiled from an article that originally appeared here.

-B

I think some places have laws against advertisments directed at young children. Is somebody going to argue that 'this is where babies come from' is more damaging to a child than 'you're not a good person unless you own X'? (The answer being yes, whoever is selling X is going to argue that like hell). If i had kids (big if), i'd be concerned about them being consumerized as well as being scarred by goatse etc. Clearly, supervised use is the way to go, but .kids is arguably a good stopgap measure for parents unwilling or unable to be involved in their child's computer use and preferring to leave the decision of what's appropriate up to The Man (business or the us government(business)). (And it's somewhat similar to my fascistnet proposal).

4.The Devil not that fat fucking penguin

Gentoo linux takes care of 1-3. Yeah the penguin is a fag.. I agree

Dude, Gentoo even takes care of the fat ugly penguin. Gentoos are the fastest species of penguin and are really kind of sexy. Check it out yourself.

UCSD's Concurrent Systems Architecture Group

www.windowsclusters.org

NCSA NT Cluster Consortium

Real Application Performance

These are just a few links - many more are out there if you search for "Windows HPC"

ScottKin

I am a student working on the HPWREN project responsible for this link, and you can find out much more information about this link and the wireless network in general at our website:
http://hpwren.ucsd.edu
Also note the November 1st news item that deals specifically this with link, and includes photographs of the setup here:
http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/021101.html

I am a student working on the HPWREN project responsible for this link, and you can find out much more information about this link and the wireless network in general at our website:
http://hpwren.ucsd.edu
Also note the November 1st news item that deals specifically this with link, and includes photographs of the setup here:
http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/021101.html

here's a link to more information via HPWREN's web page: hpwren San Clemente

Origin of mag field

Here's a nice summary of the "Gore invented the Internet" bullshit. Note that Gore claimed to have been directly involved in providing NSF funding for ARPANET. This, in fact, he did. More importantly, he NEVER claimed to have invented the technology and engineering behind the Internet. Here's what Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf have to say on the matter. Note that they ARE principal engineers of the original ARPANET. Essentially, they back up Gore and his involvement in providing the necessary funds to keep the ARPANET, and then the Internet alive during tough financial and budgetary times.

You are repeating a political dirty trick the Republican's used to discredit Gore during the 2000 election. That it was completely false and a total misrepresentation of Gore's words and intent didn't matter to Bush and his campaign staff. That people still repeat the slander as though it was God's truth shows how effective negative advertising and media manipulation really is. I note finally that I dod NOT vote for Gore, and was never a Gore supporter. And I won't vote for him in 2004. But that doesn't mean I think it's acceptable to let this untruthful meme perpetuate without refutation.

Cheers,
--Maynard

The only people who would consider this a troll are Americans who are so brainwashed and so closed-minded that they can't see the truth. I am an American, but if I had the ability to leave this cesspool, I would. Here are the problems I see:

1. Americans are overweight (so the poster is correct in saying we're fat) with many of them being dangerously obese. I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds myself.

2. Americans have become locked into an obessive and unhealthy relationship with money and property due to the capitalist system. In America, the only value a person has is the amount of "stuff" that they own. This is immoral.

3. Americans are woefully out of touch with regards to the rest of the world due to the lack of true news reporting and cultural education in general. See this link for a great rundown of American failings.

4. Due to the propaganda that passes for news in this country, Americans (incorrectly) think that the rest of the world is out to get them. It isn't true folks. Wake up and join the rest of the world.

5. Americans are too eager to see an enemy around every corner. Even if it is unwarranted. This is evidence of how scared most of our population is. The very fact that so many fools believe they need to own a gun, further illustrates the point.

In general, Americans need to grow up and become aware of what is really going on in the rest of the world. America is NOT the greatest nation on the planet. The American century is over. Accept it.

While capitalism might be the best thing going right now... that doesn't imply that it will always be the best thing. I believe it's nearing the end of it's usefulness because it only encourages greed, ruthless competition and fear. It's time for a change. Keep in mind, the best way to travel used to be a horse drawn coach at one time, I'd challenge anyone here to say that it still is.

The capitalist system is the root source of most of America's problems in and out of the nation. Why did the "terrorists" hit the Twin Towers? Because WE are interfering with their culture solely to make a profit. Why did the "dot.com" bubble burst? Because a bunch of greedy bastards thought that they deserved six figure salaries for having no business model other than "It's really cool and it'll use the internet". Why do we have such a huge disparity between the rich and the poor? Because the rich have the money to pay people to make them richer. The poor actually have to work.

So, as much as I would love to defend this country, I find myself wanting to walk away, quietly and ashamed, from all the things it currently stands for. Until this country and it's populace decide to pay attention to the real world instead of the one they see through the filter of capitalism, we are doomed to be mocked and attacked. America is being controlled by the wrong people: lawyers and business interests. The only people those two groups benefit are themselves. They just throw the illusion of wealth at people like you and me.

I make $45,000 a year working as a network admin/programmer in the non-profit (major metropolitan public library) sector because I believe in doing something for my fellow man. I could have worked in the private sector and made a lot more money, but who would that be helping? It wouldn't help those who really matter (the children in the inner city, the unemployed and underpriveledged). That is how I can view my country this way. The peopple who have been deluded into thinking that they are wealthy and important because they own stuff, are morally bankrupt.

What!? What!? He said "badly" . What's wrong with that? It's a word. It's a valid word. AND it's synonmous with "poorly", so it's a valid sentence. Go back under your lonely bridge you ugly, worthless troll! And points off to any moderator who mods this fuck up. *I* should be modded up for being insightful.

Huh. And the news media refered to our avatar system as an R2D2-like "dustbin on wheels."

Huh. And the news media refered to our avatar system as an R2D2-like "dustbin on wheels."

I wish I had some appropriate analogy for this this situation. The SF Giants are the only sports team I truly care about and the tools Fox has foisted upon us make me want to pull an Elvis on my TV.

Why not download PD from here and have a play around. Creating a delay between the audio inputs and outputs is very easy...

Using Windows Media Player you can connect to the encoder (either on your local machine or a network machine) and listen to the streamed audio. There will naturally be a delay, which you should be able to tweak by playing with the buffer settings in WME and WMP.

Why not download PD from here and have a play around. Creating a delay between the audio inputs and outputs is very easy...

There has been other cheating on the GRE uncovered this summer. AP had a story on how there were Korean and Chinese GRE cheat databases.

I'm sure that it's pretty common especially given the insane scores of some people on the exams. I've seen a lot of CS grad school applications where the scores do not match the person who shows up. I mean there are some seriously stupid people who have 99% on EVERY section of the GRE. Most often, you'd see someone with a 99% on the English portion of the test who'd show up and have an obviously low command of spoken and written English. Typically this was most obvious in Chinese students -- too bad because this is probably one of those "one bad apple" problems.

Of course I disagree with the whole idea of the CS portion of the exam. I mean I remember some stuff on there was just bizarre. Karnaugh maps and crap like that -- who cares?

Its not that all of the chemicals and mechanisms exist that is amazing about the bombadier beetle, it is the fact that they all appeared together to form a chemical reaction on command.

UCSD's acceptable use policy doesn't reserve the right of the university to remove sites based on content alone. (For copyright, safety, legality, etc., they do--but not to edit content.) See UCSD's web policy.

The letter specifically says that the UCSD policy that has been violated is the prohibition against breaking federal law (i.e. VI.H.i). That makes it a First Amendment issue--they are essentially claiming that this link is illegal. The First Amendment suggests that the link would count as protected speech.

The letter *could* have cited VI.C.ii and said, "We're getting complaints about this site and don't want to deal with it. This is an avoidable incremental cost, so stop it." This would be less directly a First Amendment issue, but it would still directly be a free speech issue. The policy would then be, "You can't say anything objectionable, because someone might object, and we don't want to hear about it."

Besides, since when have private ISPs been required to have fewer restrictions on speech than a public university? Maybe if ISPs were considered "common carriers", but so far they've been decent at dodging that label.

...

Federal law also specifies that providing material support to support terrorists not only includes money and training but also includes communications equipment, personnel, and facilities. In this case, communications equipment is the use of the UCSD computer network resources, personnel are the Che Café members who maintain the server with burn web site, and facilities include the Che facility where the server is housed.

...

I am hereby instructing you to immediately remove the FARC from listing on the burn.ucsd.edu web site or any other web site that is uses the "ucsd.edu" domain name or any computer or other communications equipment or other resources or facilities used by the Che Café that are owned, leased or operated by UCSD. Your are further hereby instructed to immediately disconnect the link on burn.ucsd.edu to the FARC web site.

You're absolutely right. There isn't much to debate here. All colleges and universities I know of have similar acceptable use policies and this is completely within their legal bounds. I am against the Patriot Act as much as the next guy but this simply isn't the "what the f@$#" article that everyone has been waiting for.

Relavent UCSD Policies

UC Business and Finance Bulletin G-29, Procedures for Investigating Misuse of University Resources Appendix C, Whistle Blower Policy

Acceptable Use Policies

When I attended SUNY Geneseo, the dean made me take down my personal web page. It consisted of a classified ad listing for students to buy/sell their textbooks. There was no money in it for me at all but the school used a broad interpretation of their rules to take it down anyway. The real reason was because the school has an agreement with a local book store saying that all book orders will be placed through that store and no where else. I think that is even more controversial than what we are talking about here but they still got a way with it. Small town politics.

Did you read their response to the University administrator - basically, 'bite me?' Those vegan anarchists are feisty, aren't they?

che cafe webpage

I'm one of those people who believes that Linux on the desktop can work (for some of us at least, I'm not going to make my mum use it), and have been using Debian as my desktop for a few years now pretty much exclusively.

I've got an oldish Windows XP box for playing games (Morrowind stole my life!), but it doesn't get booted all that often. It sits on a KVM with the linux box.

However, when I was recently in the market for a laptop, I went straight for an ibook. It's a cool looking, compact, and moderately powerful PC. However, it wouldn't have been an option without OS X.

I'm writing a PhD thesis (in Criminology), and I spend my days in emacs and LaTeX. Emacs 21 rocks on OS X (well, except for the whole one mouse button not working with flyspell), and BibDesk is the best free (as in speech) BibTeX reference manager I have ever seen. LaTeX works beautifully, and with fink I have pretty much the same Unix goodness I love about Debian (and it works almost as well as real Debian apt!).

Of course, I'd like better virtual workspace management (space.app doesn't really do it for me), but on the whole, it's easy to use (for someone who has never used a mac in his life), it looks great, and it is rock solid. Sure, it's not cheep, and it's not free (as in speech), but it's still cool.

Gnutella is not one of the more advanced protocols, but most of it's problems are present at varying levels in other p2p systems. It's not really surprising that P2P software which spends so much time trying to connect to computers, connect to a computer to start a download etc... and search in a geometric spiderring fashion are quite inefficient.

It's not that hard to mount a rail gun on an asteroid. Everything is basically floating, so you just have a drilling head on your mass accelerator (mechanically or magnetically accelerated buckets are less dependent upon asteroid composition than a railgun is).

And what if asteroids are just piles of rubble? If we are going to change its trajectory, aren't we going to have to pour in a huge amount of kinetic energy? Won't each bucketload of debris you fling off with your mass-driver send an asteroid-quake through your rock, or berg? A couple of years of asteroid quakes may shake your asteroid apart, so instead of having a pile of rubble, you have an uncontrollable cloud of rubble. What if it isn't a pile of rubble, what if it is an iron-nickel rock, but it has fault lines? Could enough asteroid-quakes totally fracture the asteroid into several chunks?

Push the nose against the asteroid and start chewing out bits to feed to your mass accelerator. Smaller accelerators on the side for attitude adjustment.

I wonder if you aren't glossing over several problems?

All asteroids that have come close enough for us to take a look at have been spinning. It is hard to imagine that they wouldn't be spinning. Were you planning to kill the asteroid's spin before you tried guiding it anywhwere? And how did you plan to do that?

Earth's escape velocity is 11 kilometre per second. But the escape velocity of an asteroid? Phobos is about the same size as an extinction class asteroid. Its escape velocity is about ten metres a second. This link says that is 26 miles per hour. Asteroid 2002 NT7, which caused a scare six weeks ago, will approach Earth in 2019 is 2 kilometers in diameter. If its density was the same as Phobos, and I have done my math right, its escape velocity would be just 2 meters per second.

IANAP, but it seems to me that nuclear charges would be the best approach. IANAP, but I wonder whether an arrangement of nuclear charges arranged across one hemisphere, and exploded more of less simultaneously, would be a better approach.

We discussed shaped charge anti-tank warheads on slashdot a couple of weeks ago. In the shaped charge warhead the shape of the explosive charge is calculated so it focuses around the non-explosive slug it is meant to accelerate.

I've wondered whether the explosive charges would have to be in contact with the surface of the asteroid to be effective. If that wouldn't be necessary then there could be a considerable saving in rocket fuel, because you wouldn't need to match velocities upon arrival. Our existing ICBMs have their MIRV buses. We would need to lift the MIRV buses to LEO, and assemble boosters, in order to send them to intercept the asteroid. So we wouldn't have to develop new technology, like Orion rockets, ion rockets, mass drivers solar sails, or giant air cushion.

Unfortunately I think it would be necessary for the charge to be in contact with the asteroid.

[see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/glossary/au.html, http://physics.ucsd.edu/students/courses/spring200 2/physics5/notes/lecture2/tsld018.htm]

the Astronomical unit is a standard measure for distance to objects within the solar system, being the mean orbital displacement of the Earth relative to the sun.

makes perfect sense, and is no less arbitrary than assigning the distance 100 million km, which is merely the distance light travels in approximately 333.56 seconds, or the definition of the Parsec [1 Parsec (Parallax arc-sec) is defined as the distance to a star which exhibits a parallax angle of 1 arc-second]

these units make perfect sense to the people who use them.

Jingoism indeed.

Use a Verifiable Cryptographic Time Capsule (VCTC) to send the information into the future. See the paper on Encapsulated Key Escrow at:

http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/papers/escrow.h tml