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This is really a shame. Great projects such as ncutil were built for darwin and are very useful within an OS X environment.

Sun really has the right idea, with an open source operating system. Darwin should stay open source; open source is a great idea.

A partition has been setup for people to beg for the open darwin project to be kept alive. I am signing!

Any one else fell like groveling?

re your question of rivet materials for aluminium:
in the previous, now closed thread:
If you use rivet materials other than the parent material you risk galvanic corrosion. For the combination of steel (rivet) and aluminum (panel), it can be severe,
particularly in moist salt environments (like cars in the snowy states). The aluminium and steel will both rot and crumble away with corrosion. You can see an example of this in an older car that has a aluminium air conditionig condenser (the thing that looks like a radiator in front of the real radiator) which has steel side supports.. you may see signs of corrosion (white powder) where the two touch. You can look up a listing of galvanic compatibility of metals online. Metals far apart on the list tend to attack each other badly. Here is a list:

http://www.ocean.udel.edu/mas/masnotes/corrosion.p df

Another mirror:

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Code%20Monk ey.mp3

Coulton is great; get "Mandelbrot Set" while you're at it:

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Mandelbrot% 20Set.mp3

Another mirror:

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Code%20Monk ey.mp3

Coulton is great; get "Mandelbrot Set" while you're at it:

http://www.cis.udel.edu/~eweaver/stuff/Mandelbrot% 20Set.mp3

Well, I purposely didn't say robots.txt - because really, that is a de facto standard (AFAIK, there is no RFC for it..).. everyone building a spider program knows to check that file.

On the other hand, is http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock1a.html a standard (de facto or otherwise) for access permissions to NTP servers? AFAIK, it is not. If it isn't, then placing the access restrictions on an arbitrary website is about as useful as me requesting people not to spider my site through a usenet posting (ok, the analogy doesn't work exactly - but it's close enough).

>Firstly, just because the NTP server is "advertised in the NTP projects list of Stratum 1 NTP servers" (http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock1a.html ) with a restriction of use does not make what DLink is doing is illegal.

Why not? Is this NOT the place to advertise usage and requirements?

>Just as if I say in a newsgroup posting "do not spider my website" would not prevent Google from doing so (automatically, or by legal necessity).

Great example, wrong info.

That's because Usenet is not the place to post that request.
There is no convention or RFC saying Google should look there.
There IS convention to look to ROBOTS.TXT -- FYI.

If Google hammers you and chooses to ignore your ROBOTS.TXT you would have a case (not a case if they spidered you gently... it's 'public' enough... I mean you'd have a case if they BEAT THE CRAP out of your servers).

but I think this guy is being just a bit unreasonable.

Firstly, just because the NTP server is "advertised in the NTP projects list of Stratum 1 NTP servers" (http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp/clock1a.html ) with a restriction of use does not make what DLink is doing is illegal. Just as if I say in a newsgroup posting "do not spider my website" would not prevent Google from doing so (automatically, or by legal necessity).

Secondly, he says there is "nothing [he] can do to avoid the packets arriving at [his] server", after rejecting the idea of changing the domain name because it would be a "very timeconsuming effort" for the "2000 legitimate users". Yet he asks D-Link to change the firmware on hundreds of thousands (maybe more, maybe less?) of their routers. Now, I don't know how much compensation D-Link has offered him (in good faith, not by any legal obligation).. but it seems to me the most pragmatic solution is to just go ahead and change the name, and as long as D-Link provides adequate compensation to perform this task.. then that is what should be done, and that's the end of it.

I agree. See (upcoming) paper at WWW 2006 which talks about why SCTP is a much better fit for HTTP as compared to TCP:
http://www.cis.udel.edu/~iyengar/publications/2006 .www.natarajan.pdf

Your intuition that solving the load sharing problem would go towards solving the failure detection problem is right on.

I should have said "half-closed" connections. In any case, some FTP implementations apparently rely on half closed connections in an incompatible manner.

See http://www.cis.udel.edu/~amer/PEL/poc/pdf/Bickhart MSthesis.pdf. Note that Bickhart has implemented a kernel space shim, which requires shim rules because it cannot intercept the name resolution process. A purely user space shim has a different set of problems, so perhaps a hybrid approach would be best.

That's why there's another topic of research dealing with shear thickening fluid. I particularly like Norman Wagner's research here. Basically, we could make full body armor, but the number of layers of kevlar required is too many to make it very flexible or breathable. This is helping to solve that while keeping or improving the protection.

The issue is...one turbine generates 10% of the power for an island...and then it gets rusty. He he he....maintenance is a b!tch, then she gets PMS. Imagine loosing 10% of your generation capacity instantly.

That is modded as "Interesting"? To who?!

Most waves only travel along the surface...I wonder what a good, strong underwater (tsunami-type) wave would do to it?

Seriously, absolutely no effect.

It's not "most waves only travel along the surface" - ALL waves travel through their medium. Waves aren't currents, they're transmitted motion. Use this page's Java applet to see the effect in the water for yourself, keeping in mind Tsunami are long period waves (figure 30 minutes), typically under a meter high, and the turbines are 75-200 meters deep.

Apparently someone skipped gradeschool science. Or has never been to a beach, noticed the lack of devastation on the sand as a non-breaking waves passes over...

Now, about your publicly calling other folks "moron"...

'ethical behavior in regards to the use of information technology,'

This would be the part where they teach kids that using technology to build a copyright mechanism that takes over your customer's computer, and creates security holes, such as the recent Sony-BMG scandal, is unethical. Or perhaps this would be teaching kids about the ethics of setting up a cartel wherein labels make a lot of money off record sales, and artists don't.

'the concept, purpose, and significance of a copyright,'

From this page:
"By granting the copyright holder exclusive rights over a work for a limited period of time, the system fosters the long-term dissemination of new intellectual works for society as a whole." (emphasis added). This would encourage children to discuss why the current copyright system in the United States, where the period of copyrighted works is continually extended, is fundamentally broken.

'the implications of illegal peer-to-peer network file sharing.'

And finally, children would learn that the big record labels took about 5 years too long to get into the online music distribution buisness, so that by the time they did, there were illegal free alternatives which produce superior (read: not DRMed, and therefore superior from the consumer viewpoint) products. We could teach kids that file sharing networks allow people to hear artists they wouldn't otherwise hear on pop-dominated radio stations and TV, and promote more diverse and creative music. And, we could teach them that illegal file sharing doesn't seem to have an impact on record sales.

Somehow I don't think this is what Chavez had in mind.

Why, even slashdot readers with low (ie, 4-digit) user ids don't even seem to be able to understand subtle humour, even when a smiley is attached.

It's called Asperger syndrome, and it's like dyslexia for sarcasm.

I hate to burst your bubble, but most crop plants achieve only 1 to 2 percent efficiency, with sugarcane being an exception at 8%.
Source: http://www.life.uiuc.edu/govindjee/whatisit.htm

Scientific-grade solar cells are about 15% to 20% efficient with some going as high as 24%
Source: http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2006/nov/solar110205 .html

Solar Stirling engines achieve nearly 30% efficiency at an installation at Sandia National Laboratories.
Source: http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/20 04/renew-energy-batt/Stirling.html

So I'm sorry to say that plants SUCK at converting sunlight into energy we can use. As the first link states, the initial reaction in photosynthesis is nearly 100% efficient, but as biological processes consume that energy, the total efficiency for the system drops significantly. Work is being done to attempt to make "biological solar cells" which use the initial reaction in photosynthesis as their method of light harvesting, but to date nothing has been produced.

Electricity storage for vehicles is a bit of a problem, unfortunately. I haven't got any links declaring that one solved. ;)

I first heard that water may be a greater contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide from Dr Henrik Kjaergaard, in my first year physical chemistry course.

Here is the atmospheric absorption spectrum, the solar black-body spectrum, and the earth's own emission spectrum (which shows which wavelengths are reabsorbed - "Greenhouse")

Absorption and reemission in the IR wavelength range (700nm to ~1mm) is important, but so too is absorption at shorter wavelengths, which may be reemitted in the infrared.

Dr Kjaergaard's research group conducts computational experiments and employs long path length absorption spectroscopic techniques to investigate the EM absorption of weakly bound complexes of water in the atmosphere, such as the water dimer.

What is observable and testable in said bacteria and insects is not, in fact, evolution, but rather natural selection and intra-species adaptation; the emphasis of "strong" traits in the gene pool as opposed to "weak" traits. [...] While it is certainly irrefutable that a species itself can change over the course of time, as this is observable, it is another thing entirely than to presume that, even given millions of years, one species becomes another entirely different species.

Ah. What is a "strong" trait, and how is this in any way different from mutation? I suggest you read up on some observed instances of speciation. Evolution has been observed creating novel species, whose members can interbreed with themselves, but cannot interbreed with members of the parent species.

One change, but requires various changes to the genetic code to be functional; the actual sac that the blood builds up in, the duct that the blood is projected through, the muscles around the sac that constrict to project the blood, the nerves that enable the muscle to contract, and the instinct to use this ability are all different parts of the genetic code, and without any one of these traits, the ability will not work, and the changes do not give the toad an advantage.

The "irreducible complexity" complaint. Not a very good argument. See also the Reducibly Complex Mousetrap. (If you're really interested in this particular question, yes, some papers on the evolution of defensive blood-squirting have been published, though this seems to be a fairly technical topic for the lay reader.)

Mathematically, it's possible that all of these traits appeared simultaneously, but it's also an extremely minute chance.

Unless they didn't appear simultaneously, in which case the probabilities don't matter. See the articles refuting "irreducible complexity," above.

Additionally, the 'jump' from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms is a bit of a stretch. What kind of a genetic change is required to make the difference between a 'colony' of individual unicellular organisms to become one single multicellular organism?

How do you define the difference between a colony and a multicellular organism? You'd just be drawing a line in the sand. (You might challenge that in a "true" multicellular organism, only some cells handle reproduction, and the rest are designed to die without ever creating a new organism. But the entire advantage of a colony is that some cells are able to die while the colony itself survives! As soon as cells band together, there is evolutionary pressure to program some of them to "commit suicide" by becoming body structures for the benefit of the colony.)

Furthermore, the mitochondria and chloroplats found in various cells are believed to have originited as parasites that eventually began to help their host. But these organelles are now a part of each cells genetic code. We already know that traits acquired through an organisms lifespan do not change their genetic code, and a parasitic organism is hardly a trait either.

You're simply wrong. Mitochondria and chloroplasts are not "part of a cell's genetic code." Mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own genetic codes, indepedent of the host cell's genome. Additionally, mitochondria and chloroplasts are only ever produced by binary division (like bacteria), and cannot be "manufactured" like other cellular structures such as ribosomes. See 'endosymbiosis.'

There are myriad things like these that just don't stand up to the kind of scrutiny that science demands; all theories, scientifically, must be considered to be false until they can be prove

I am shocked (shocked) that people don't get sarcasm.

Geeks don't tend to have a higher incidence of Asperger syndrome, do they?

And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.'

DO NOT believe the evidence! Just because warming trends are happening on two different planets is NO reason to think that there might be a common cause, like the solar energy cycle. DO NOT read up NASA predictions for solar cooling and cooler weather on Earth. DO NOT look at the graph showing the correlation between solar output and the Earth's climate. DO NIT read up on the data showing that most stars like the sun show variability in output. DO NOT read about how the Earth's climate has changed greatly in the past, but always oscillates in a limited range.

Read only government approved scare stories. Believe only government approved computer climate models (even if they do not yet generate outputs that conform to the real data we see). Accept as an article of faith that the "cause" of the "problem" is fossil fuels (even though the majority of warming in the last 200 years occurred before the Industrial Revolution really got underway). Accept only "solutions" to the "problem" like Kyoto (even though Kyoto does not bind the fastest growing nations to any curbs in carbon use, and even though Kyoto would drastically depress standards of living growth in the first world).

When anyone challenges the government story on global warming, accuse them of being in the pay of "Big Oil". DO NOT judge the data and theories on their own merits; preemptorilly disbelieve anything that does not conform to what you've read in Time magazine and heard in Al Gore's political speeches, even if it comes from Mars probes, or experts on solar energy.

My rearch group does work with MPI and other C supercomputing extensions (like OMP). I've never heard of TIBCO, so I cannot really compare the two.

As I remember it, MPI is more explicit (you explictely tell it where to do fork-join operations), whereas OMP is more transparent (you set up fork-joins at loops, for example, and specify private vs shared variables and OMP takes care of the rest). As usual, YMMV.

PDF version of the above paper from the author's site

White people do score higher on IQ tests than black people. Just as men score slightly higher than women on the tests.

The reasons for the difference are the only thing in debate, not the actual difference. Some argue that it's partly or mostly genetic, others argue environment (poor education, cultural differences, etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

A good overview of 30 years worth of data and various journal articles is here: http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/

Studies cited in the data show that differences in intelligence testing are present even before the child undergoes any education (age 3). Jensen's PDF shows that there seems to be at least some validity to the genetic theory of intelligence differences.

IMO it seems strange to think that evolution and the virtual "speciation" (I forget the real term) that occurred over time for the various homo sapiens communities had purely physical effects. We can observe the changes in cranial capacities for the entire Homo line, and rightly observe as the amount of brain mass increases the amount of neurons and "intelligence" increases. Changes in diet and simple things such as being more succesful in an area could influence a population to grow larger brains over time, (the tradeoff between energy and all the calories for activity, or for powering all those brain-watts, which are expensive).

So it seems reasonable to me that various mental characteristics could be influenced by human evolution in recent times... we know about genetic differences in races that cause resistance to Malaria, and Sickle-cell Anemia. White people are more likely to develop skin cancer, black people are more likely to be lactose intolerant.

Why do we assume that the evolution that is responsible for those differences kept us all exactly the same on the inside? Because there is a new PC environment that simply taught us all "You're all the same on the inside"?

Where is the evidence for that view? I certainly am not a racist in any way, but I wonder why we have to so forcefully grasp that idea that we are all the same, when evidence seems to contradict it more and more.

(women are not as strong as men, as good at math, as good with finding their way through a maze, men are not as good at language and socializing, etc.)

So I think an attack on someone who supports the idea that genetics may be partly responsible for the differences in IQ between the races is out of line. As that is what he is arguing, read the wikipedia URL and other link for more on the reasonable interpretation of the available data.

I don't know about you, but when I was doing research at my alma mater's library, I was working not with books, but with computers almost all of the time. Granted, the topics I was searching on (marketing in supermarkets, Colombian conservation law, kidnappings in Latin America) mostly required very recent information. The other thing is... well... books are long and supremely unsearchable. If I was writing a thesis, or any report of any real heft, I'd be more than happy to read through several books. But periodicals served their purpose, and what was great about them is that they were searchable before I printed them to make sure I had all the information I needed.

Even to this day, Google lacks the thoroughness of most search tools found at libraries, simply because this information is not free, and not freely available. Google Scholar's abstracts are a good start, but no match for getting the full article at no cost from a library.

As long as texts are maintained, I have no problem maintaining a mostly electronic database of all this information.

Actually, the Arabs didn't invent the zero. That was the Indians. (The ones with the dot, not the feathers.) Other than that, you're right on.

Indians "with feathers", ie Native American Indians, did have the concept of zero.

• The Classic Maya Calendar and Day Numbering System
• Mechanical Aids to Computation and the Development of Algorithms
• Mesoamerican Archaeoastronomy

Dave Mills, author of the NTP RFC and main implementor of the NTP server software since time immemorial (back in the Fuzzball distro for PDP-11 days) has an extensive collection of information about time and how it relates to networks. Here's a specific page about the leap second:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/leap.html

For more info, see the NTP site:

http://www.ntp.org/

and the site of the Network Time Synchronization Project:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html

Dave Mills, author of the NTP RFC and main implementor of the NTP server software since time immemorial (back in the Fuzzball distro for PDP-11 days) has an extensive collection of information about time and how it relates to networks. Here's a specific page about the leap second:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/leap.html

For more info, see the NTP site:

http://www.ntp.org/

and the site of the Network Time Synchronization Project:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html

I disagree, specifically because constructive criticism usually is given with the intention of improving the product.

How does a listener or reader judge the intent of a speaker or writer, especially when the speaker or writer is likely to have a disability common to computer experts?

Gaming the system = fitting in just enought to fool people into thinking [you're competent].

Pretending to be somebody that one is not is exactly what other people with my disability have trouble with. Besides, employers don't want merely "competent"; they want the best candidate:

Q. What do you call the person who is second best at every job in town?
A. Unemployed.

Long Hair -> cut it; Fat -> Excercise; Grooming Problems -> Scrub

Check, check, check.

Shitty clothing -> JcPenny.

Is Sears OK?

Shy -> Join Toastmasters, Freemasons etc.

It's not shyness as much as the fact that I was born with testicles, fair skin, and a miswired brain.

"Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest. They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space. Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see. It's important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of "improper parenting".

By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context. "

This basically describes more than half of the slashDot crowd I think. Partially describes me and a bunch of my geek friends.

But this research does serve a useful purpose in Autism/asperger syndrome.

Folks with asperger syndrome commonly have an inability to detect sarcasm and read facial, social cues.

>>By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context. Read full definition here

... as someone who has suffered from depression for years, let me hint to you that there are several other things in the IT "lifestyle" ("Life? Don't talk to me about life....") that have something or other to do with depression.

(1) Self-care. The style that we encourage in CS courses, with our image of hackers working for days at a time and living on the four programmer food gorups ("caffeine, grease, salt, and processed sugar"), is not something that people can generally physically deal with even into the middle twenties. Sleep and periodic meals make a big big difference to mood.

PHB's who think that you can actually do more in an 80 hour week than in a 50 hour week just add to this, which leads to ...

(2) Feelings of helplessness. We start out with the frustrations of programming, where we're doing perhaps the most complicated intellectual task invented by humanity, doing it with a body of knowledge that's really only 50 or 60 years old, and dealing periodically with apparently inexplicable problems. Then add the canonical Dilbert moments: PHB's, "flexible" schedules, expected overtime, "offshoring", our own inclination toward being obsessive-compulsive (which we either start with or are trained into by our tools and techniques), and then dealing with a whole lot of people who don't understand the intellectual challenges or share the style of rigorous thought and obsession with detail that go with our field. Depression and burnout are very much related to feelings of helplessness.

(3) programming tends to involve people who are less extroverted and less social. People who are bright, introverted, and unsocial tend to feel isolated and alone. Depressing.

In fact, a lot of us would test pretty highly for Asperger's Syndrome, which is akin to mild autism.

The point is that you don't need some new "information glut" syndrome to explain a prevalence of depression and burnout.

Well actually... http://ag.udel.edu/extension/information/ent/ent-6 3.htm

That is a mere assertion, driven by fear and ignorance of reality. You need to get out, and stop viewing reality with tunnel vision. I notice that you are now posting anonymously now. Perhaps deep down you know that you are wrong, and fear losing your precious /. karma as a result? Very laughable if you ask me.

Here are some things you may wish to read. These things kinda suck for the respective countries, but their loss is the US's gain. And like it or not, the brain drain starts as H1-Bs:

• How To Plug Europe's Brain Drain
• How extensive is the brain drain?
• How to reverse Africa's brain drain

And now the signs that the US's recent paranoia is self destructive

A.S. isn't something that a medical professional can really "test" you for. At least not in any really objective way. Diagnosis is based on identifying which, if any, of a set of particular traits you have. And many of them are quite hard to guage in people you don't know. (Admittedly some are easy to spot; it's a mixed bag).

Because of this, diagnosis of things like "does patient find it difficult to adapt to changes in routine" might well be done with a doctor asking you "so, do you find it difficult to adapt to changes in routine?" **. And some things are, by nature, invisible to other pople, e.g. do you find it natural to make eye contact when talking, or have you learned to fake it?

Since none of the diagnostic criteria are particularly hard to understand, an alternative (or complimentary) approach would be to gather this information yourself. It's hard not to be biased in these things, but you can call on the opinions of family members, friends, trusted work collegues, and the like, and do a pretty good job of assessing yourself that way. You can use the same criteria your doc would (summary here).

I'm not trying to argue against professional diagnosis. But you're likely to end up trading off between the opinion of somebody who probably knows more about the symptoms, vs the opinions of folks who probably know more about you.

Cheers,
Kevin

Hmm. Funny. Seems like perfect timing, in retrospect. I just held a presentation on SSA (and efficiently transforming code into SSA) today.

Get the slides here.

HTH

However, whether it was numerically correct from the start may not be the important part. How about just nailing down the shape of the curve? Isn't that worth something by itself?

On the other hand, does anyone actually have a graph of transistors per chip, or transistor size plotted against time, covering the past 40 years? That is, is anybody checking the numbers?

I guess I can do my own Googling:

Gordon's graph paper that shows cost versus number of transistors per chip

Intel processors, a little behind the curve - doubling every two years.

More Intel processors (same ones), but this time doubling every 18 months.

This one is probably the most useless. It looks good (although too large to display the whole thing) until you notice the disclaimer for the vertical (Transistors) axis: "Note: vertical scale of chart not proportional to actual Transistor count." WTF?

There's a good page discussing life on Europa, and the issues concerning exploration of the moon, here.

What you just wrote there seems a perfectly succinct way of saying what you said - in fact I don't think I could make it any shorter than you did without some effort.

And that would be the problem. The information density is too high; most people have to slow down their reading speed and re-read a couple of times to comprehend it.

How exactly does one go about finding out if they have something like this?

For a formal diagnosis, you'd have to see a trained therapist. However, it's pretty much unnecessary; there's no cure for Asperger's, and treatment mostly involves learning to work around the difficulties it causes. While a good therapist can help, it's not terribly important. This website has a decent overview of the symptoms.

Asperger's overlaps with High-Functioning Autism, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity), Social Anxiety Disorder, and a few other conditions; it's hard to make a correct diagnosis with overlapping symptoms, so Asperger's is frequently misdiagnosed as e.g. ADHD. Some giveaway symptoms are eye gaze avoidance and anxiety at the idea of unfamiliar social situations. Since most of the anxiety comes from the inability to read body language and other social cues, people with Asperger's tend to be much more relaxed online, commonly expressed as "I wish real life had a backspace key".

• Bram Cohen (author of BitTorrent) has Asperger's Syndrome (sometimes called High Functioning Autism)
• Steve Silberman wrote about the increase rate of incidence of Asperger's/Autism in Silicon Valley
• For family needing to deal with a member with Asperger's Syndrome or autism, try OASIS
• If you're curious enough, there are sites, such as this one, that are created by those dealing with autism.

some links explaining black smokers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_smokers
http://www.oceansonline.com/hydrothe.htm
http://www.ocean.udel.edu/kiosk/bsmoker.html

Maybe projects such as this one might solve some taxonomic debates such as the old chestnut about whether Megachiroptera (fruit bats) and Microchiroptera (insectivorous bats) are acutally closely related.

For those of you who don't know the debate is as to whether Megachiroptera are closer related to primates than they are to the Microchiroptera. I personally believe that fruit bats are flying monkeys. Therefore, fruitbats are the only primates native to Australia (besides Homo Sapiens obviously).

QT and WMV movies don't play on Linux? Hello, MPlayer codecs.

I think Stallman is a bit eccentric about his ideas about freedom. I would venture to guess that he's wired a bit funny. His ideologies are are not practical nor are they rooted in reality. My freedom is not in jeopardy because I elected to use MacOS X on an Apple G5 (my wallet was but not not my freedom). Stallman presumes that his intelligence and knowledge give him the right to not respect the boundaries of others. When someone tells him that he can't have his way with their software (or if it isn't written by his own minions or philosophies), he cries foul and plays the freedom card. This isn't an ideology, this is arrogance and extreme anti-social behavior. This sort of behavior is very consistent with a high-functioning autism known as "Asperger's Syndrome."

Draw your own conclusions...

'a pension fund is the property'
Only if you spend it.

Anyhow, you failed the lameness test. are you autistic or suffering from aspergers syndrome?

There's a test here. I got a score of 17...

My advisor (David Mills, first chairman of the Internet Architecture Committee and inventor of NTP) mentioned this once. He said that Al Gore's staff were at every technical meeting related to internet development, and that the funding Gore helped push through Congress was critical to the project. Furthermore, he said after that quote was widely distorted in the media (where Gore rightfully claimed credit for providing the funding), he and several others who *did* invent the internet signed a public affidavit attesting to the veracity of the claim.

And whats the difference between microsofts great new smart card technology and sunray cards ?

If only Brazil could manage to use all this ingenuity and excellence to find a way for their police death squads, and professional hired killers to stop murdering and torturing their street children (aged between 5 to 18 years). Considering that there are estimated between 7 to 17 million children living on their streets, one would think that they would look at the ground occasionally whilst they reach for the stars.

"More than 18% of Brazil's population is illiterate, and 35% of children between ages 7 and 15 are not enrolled in school. In addition, with the exception of Haiti and Guatemala, malnutrition is more prevalent in Brazil than in any other Latin American or Caribbean nation (UNICEF, 1996b). According to official government statistics, 1,000 children die from hunger and malnutrition each day in Brazil. Moreover, Brazil's infant mortality rate in 1993 was 52 per 1,000 live births, one of the highest in Latin America and exceeded only by Peru (88) and Bolivia (98). In the poorest regions of the country and in impoverished areas near industrial centers, 10% of the children are expected to die before they reach 5 years of age (Martins, 1993)." Link here

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for space travel, and I don't agree that the "solve our Earth problems" first applies to first world countries, but surely a third world country like Brazil could at the very least reform their murder state before embarking on a space program.

Why would Bush be afraid of the youth vote? In the 2000 presidential election, the 18-29 year old vote closely matched the general vote.

Personal anecdotes suggest to me that men tend to become more liberal with age. However, a lot depends on the society that they grew up in. A person who grew up in the 1950s will probably have more conservative ideals than somone from the 1960s. So seniors are more conservative than the current youth, but less conservative than themselves when they were young.

A simple string analysis of the trojan reveals some intimidating-looking strings:
GetSystemDirectoryA, xProxyBot v 1.0.0, 1.0.0 , w32.exe,
Windows Service Application, www.earthlabs.biz,
sockproxy/rec.php.
Software\M icrosoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run
Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\RunServices
%s?&p=%d&v=%s
VisitWe bPageThread , Socket4RandomThread, Socket4ServerThread
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Control\SafeBoot\
explorer.exe
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)
InternetCloseHandle, InternetGetLast ResponseInfoA
InternetReadFile , InternetCrackUrlA
InternetOpenUrlA
InternetOpenA , InternetConnectA
FtpPutFileA, FtpGetFileA
HttpSendRequestA, HttpOpenRequestA
InternetGet ConnectedStateEx, InternetGetConnected State

No-one yet has been able to create this enzyme synthetically, which means that these critters have to be harvested for their blood (around $15000 per vial).

For "vial of blood" read "quart of enzyme."

More info is at http://www.ocean.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/Research/l al.html