Slashdot Mirror

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions

Actually, while UF owns what it purchases, it is very much considered property of the state. Note that does not mean owned by the taxpayers... there's not much tax money gets spent on that us taxslaves get to legitimately call ours.

In Florida the "Sunshine Law" dictates an open-access policy for Florida government and extensions thereof. Meetings regarding the planning of UF's policies and future are supposed to be open to the public. The complete payroll of every single UF employee (faculty, staff, OPS, A&P, etc) is a matter of public record. Guess what else that means? E-mail relating to UF business (aka State of Florida business) MUST be archived indefinitely for potential public access. NERDC had a tape library of old e-mails going back to at least the early 80's, last I saw.

The university owns the bandwith, they can block it, scan it, whatever. But invading the student's PC's is an invasion of privacy. This isn't even like watching employees. In a company, the PC belongs to the company, not the employee. These are the student's personal computers. The school has absolutely no right to scan the systems.

Remember, it's only students using the UF Department of Housing network from the dorms, NOT the campus-wide network. Plenty of open computer labs and other places to plug in a network. I'm sure there's WAP's all over now too...

Dorm residents have always been required to sign agreements banning all sorts of activities and even posession of certain items (i.e. pets, electric burners, etc).[1] You want to live on campus, you gotta play by the campus's rules. So yes, UF does have the right to scan student's PCs when the student is living on state property and using the housing network.

Whether that's fair or not is left to the reader.

The student is therefore totally liable for anything illegal found on that PC.

The university should limit its power to scanning internet traffic.

[1] Not that that didn't stop some students from trying to burn down South hall...

They have at least 160+30 megabits/second to the regular net, and a pipe of what looks like 450megabit/sec to Internet2,

Students are already paying considerably more than the market rates for their rooms. If the universities can't cough up decent network services equivalent to what is commercially available, they simply need to outsource and stop crying. This "we just can't afford it" is bullshit.

If students can get ostensibly unlimited use of DSL for $50/month from the local telco, there is no reason the university cannot approximate that service even if that means having the local telco wire the buildings and offload the res.net from their domain and stop bitching about it entirely. Of course, outsourced services fall prey to the constant and overt mark-up rackets and micro-kingdom vanity that universities so irrationally cherish.

If you have 7,500 students signed-up for residential service and $50/month is extracted from each, thats $375,000 per month, far and beyond well enough for a 10G connection that would allow every single student a sustained 1Mb/s link with LOTS of breathing room. Say they only pay for eight months a year, that's still $3,000,000 or $250,000 per month. If they can't get enough bandwidth for less than a quarter million a month, whoever is in charge needs to be fired immediately. Ok, so in Florida's case, they pay for DHNet out of the rents. Fine. A single occupancy room costs $2675 per semester, or, about $643 per month in a city where studio apartments run more like $400/month. I would gander they could find fifty bucks a month in there somewhere or they could just explicitly charge for network services.
http://www.housing.ufl.edu/housing/GenInfo_Stats.h tm

They simply have no excuse to brow beat students to protect their pathetic service levels when cheap commercial alternatives are available that could easily be integrated into university housing and when minimal access fees would pay for obscene amounts of bandwidth. So they dropped their usage by 85% by being draconian. Great, I could cut traffic on Los Angeles freeways by jack-knifing a tractor-trailer on at the I-405/10 interchange. Doesn't mean it solved the problem. It's a racket. Screw 'em.

AUP Policy

On page 3...

Don't most modern operating systems include at least basic firewalling functionality?

As I'm typing this in Linux, I can assure you that it works with alternative OS's. Just a simple firewall rule adjustment, and there's no problem. They even have instructions on setting up duplex and firewall settings on the DHNet webpage

I'd think that colleges don't have that much budget for a legal team.

Yup. No legal team whatsoever.

A J2EE or even a lighter java servlet based solution may not be the best for your needs but it sounds like to me your "big, custom" content management system is at least somewhat bloated.

Unless your system is very highly customizable by your users you should have all sorts of opportunities for caching and optimizations geared towards scaleability.

It's not the same but the webmail for UF scales to 2,000-3,000 concurrent users during peak load with only one gig of ram. Unlike a news site, every user is looking at custom content, their mailbox. Except for the login page, no two users see the same thing which prohibits caching.

Anyway, slashdot is the wrong place to be looking for serious solutions to problems like yours.

SunRays are also very small, which is good for installations where labs are also used for classrooms. Students don't have to avoid kicking minitowers shoved under the desk or "prairie dog" to see over hardware sitting on top of desks. This is a problem where I work now.

Where I was a graduate assistant, SunRays are used for a writing environment -- 30 in each of five classrooms. The desktop interface is basically a Windows 9x clone built with TWM (which was adequate, but I think IceWM or something else would have been better).

cbd.

You're right and the above poster hit it right on the nose. From the AOL history site:

July 1993 - Jan Brandt starts sending AOL disks in the mail

That makes it pretty clear, doesn't it?

The MicroKelvin Lab at the University of Florida does research in the 100uK range. They have the largest ultra-low temperature lab in the world (there's another one like it at Cornell).

I work for UF and we use Cyrus IMAP and have been for a while. Cyrus really is an impressive server. A year ago we were serving 90,000 accounts from one server. Each account has a 25 meg quota so do the math on how much disk it could have been, thankfully we only actually needed about 1/3 of that disk space. It was a BIG server and it did get sluggish during peak usage times but other wise it was solid. We did have problems but most of them were attributable to AIX.

Anyway, we now run Cyrus in a murder cluster configuration which lets us distribute mailboxes across a bunch of backends and move them around as needed. It's proving to be quite a solid setup.

If you need big time scalability then go Cyrus, otherwise I'm sure other servers will do just well.

I have one comment on PHP based webmails and that is they are not very friendly to your mail server. Each and every page view they build and close an IMAP connection which does a lot of redundant work and unneeded load. (The same goes for perl based webmails.) This isn't an issue with most sites but for an organization with lots of webmail users this will be a problem. Recently the last PHP based webmail on UF was taken down. When the primary campus webmail switched to a Java Servlet based webmail that kept persistent connections around between page views our ability to serve more users concurrently increased noticeably. <plug>We've developed GatorMail because there weren't any acceptable solutions at the time. Unfortunately GatorMail is not third party friendly (it's tightly coupled to our setup) so unless you can dedicate a servlet programmer to decoupling it you probably won't be able to install it.</plug> I think a lot of work has been done to JWMA since we started GatorMail so it may be much improved since we last looked at it.

I work for UF and we use Cyrus IMAP and have been for a while. Cyrus really is an impressive server. A year ago we were serving 90,000 accounts from one server. Each account has a 25 meg quota so do the math on how much disk it could have been, thankfully we only actually needed about 1/3 of that disk space. It was a BIG server and it did get sluggish during peak usage times but other wise it was solid. We did have problems but most of them were attributable to AIX.

Anyway, we now run Cyrus in a murder cluster configuration which lets us distribute mailboxes across a bunch of backends and move them around as needed. It's proving to be quite a solid setup.

If you need big time scalability then go Cyrus, otherwise I'm sure other servers will do just well.

I have one comment on PHP based webmails and that is they are not very friendly to your mail server. Each and every page view they build and close an IMAP connection which does a lot of redundant work and unneeded load. (The same goes for perl based webmails.) This isn't an issue with most sites but for an organization with lots of webmail users this will be a problem. Recently the last PHP based webmail on UF was taken down. When the primary campus webmail switched to a Java Servlet based webmail that kept persistent connections around between page views our ability to serve more users concurrently increased noticeably. <plug>We've developed GatorMail because there weren't any acceptable solutions at the time. Unfortunately GatorMail is not third party friendly (it's tightly coupled to our setup) so unless you can dedicate a servlet programmer to decoupling it you probably won't be able to install it.</plug> I think a lot of work has been done to JWMA since we started GatorMail so it may be much improved since we last looked at it.

I work for UF and we use Cyrus IMAP and have been for a while. Cyrus really is an impressive server. A year ago we were serving 90,000 accounts from one server. Each account has a 25 meg quota so do the math on how much disk it could have been, thankfully we only actually needed about 1/3 of that disk space. It was a BIG server and it did get sluggish during peak usage times but other wise it was solid. We did have problems but most of them were attributable to AIX.

Anyway, we now run Cyrus in a murder cluster configuration which lets us distribute mailboxes across a bunch of backends and move them around as needed. It's proving to be quite a solid setup.

If you need big time scalability then go Cyrus, otherwise I'm sure other servers will do just well.

I have one comment on PHP based webmails and that is they are not very friendly to your mail server. Each and every page view they build and close an IMAP connection which does a lot of redundant work and unneeded load. (The same goes for perl based webmails.) This isn't an issue with most sites but for an organization with lots of webmail users this will be a problem. Recently the last PHP based webmail on UF was taken down. When the primary campus webmail switched to a Java Servlet based webmail that kept persistent connections around between page views our ability to serve more users concurrently increased noticeably. <plug>We've developed GatorMail because there weren't any acceptable solutions at the time. Unfortunately GatorMail is not third party friendly (it's tightly coupled to our setup) so unless you can dedicate a servlet programmer to decoupling it you probably won't be able to install it.</plug> I think a lot of work has been done to JWMA since we started GatorMail so it may be much improved since we last looked at it.

Personally, I think "de-snaked" is more impressive

Fried Snake

First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?

Hate... like all relationships... ;)

FYI: the NHMFL is operated by the University of Florida, FSU, and Los Alamos National Labs -- not just FSU. To give all the credit to a clown college like FSU is a disgrace to real research institutions like UF.

Yeah, this AC is biased by being a UF grad. But c'mon... you really can major in clowning there. How much research would they get done if they were left alone?

Some silk reflects light in the UV range which is thought to attract flies. dense read.
Another possible use is to confuse potential predators Silky doodles may confuse spiders' enemies

I think the main benefit of thinness maybe that less resources are used in its manufacture. Just my 2 cents worth.

This is as silly as saying all computer scientists are socially inept geeks who tell everyone who will listen that they are stupid for using any Microsoft products.

Every vegan and vegetarian I've met has considered their diet a personal choice, and not everyone does it for ethical reasons, many do it for health.

Which brings me to my next point: the myth that vegan/vegetarian diets are inherently unhealthy. Fact of the matter is, it's not overly difficult to eat a healthy diet as a vegan, and even easier to do so as a vegetarian. In fact, there are numerous health benefits, like reduced chances of diabetes and coronary disease. Also, you aren't ingesting all the antibiotics and hormones they pump farm animals full of.

Is it possible to eat an unhealthy vegan diet? Of course, just as it's possible to eat an unhealthy omnivore diet(as many north americans do).

Why don't you quit with your FUD, and actually do some research first.

European? No. Ignorant? Yes. CPUs, no matter the heat limitations, require a certain wattage to operate properly.

To see why this is so, consider a modern semiconductor circuit. Information is stored as 1's and 0's, with the 1's meaning a capacitor is storing a charge at some voltage. A 0 means the capacitor stores no electrons and sits at ground potential. To switch a bit from off to on today involves stuffing electrons into a capacitor until it is charged. To go the other way, from 1 to 0, requires grounding the capacitor. "The real dissipation comes from the fact that when you switch you normally throw away the energy that's sitting in the device capacitances. The charge is sitting there, and the energy is stored in there, and you normally throw that away. That's the easiest thing to do with it" ... The amount of energy wasted per capacitor is minuscule, but discharges take place millions of times or more a second all over a chip. What's more, standard programming practice is to clear all registers and set them to a known state before beginning an algorithm. That, too, throws away information.

Argh, dang you, that's my desktop machine hosting the ONLY US mirror... .

Though the main problem isn't the load on my machine, but my boss's expression if she realizes the traffic spike I caused.

They'd be trying to kill us no matter what we did. If we withdrew from the Middle East they'd hate us for our cultural influence. There are always more reasons to hate for people like that - trying to appease them is useless.

And this, my friends is why the BORG are really the enlightened ones. By accepting all peoples into their own society they are slowly, but surely ensuring a galaxy without war or hate.

It's not too late! Learn the ways of the BORG now!

Here is another link to the Microsoft campus

while I'm all in favor of meditation, I agree with a lot of the slashdotters here that the big problem is the 12 hour days. one of my favorite passages in the Tao te Ching (which certainly had an effect on Zen Buddhism) addresses this:

Fill a cup to its brim and it is easily spilled;
Temper a sword to its hardest and it is easily broken;
Amass the greatest treasure and it is easily stolen;
Claim credit and honour and you easily fall;
Retire once your purpose is achieved - this is natural.

That is, (to the best of my understanding) a good Buddhist wouldn't meditate an hour so that he can work 16 hours in a day; he'd work hard for his 10 hours and then go home.

On my desktop I use mozilla for browsing the web, zoom player for videos, winamp for music, irfanview for pictures and flash movies, mozilla (again) for mail, Agent and powergrab for newsgroups, and PGP disk to keep it all together and organized (rather than use "partitions" for organizing data I use encrypted "containers" - also known as "files.")

So... what? If MS comes out next week with WM10 and IE7 it'll mean nothing to me; I still have IE5.0 on this box and the only reason I would upgrade to 5.5 is perhaps to install the IBM ecmascript engine, which requires some networking components from 5.5.

MS can come out with Windows-x-b-allodocious if they like - so what? Won't prevent me from using win2k with zoom player, agent, powergrab, pgpdisk and mozilla. Nor will it prevent these old Vectras stacked in the corner from running win2k, or win98, or even DOS (for which there are still plenty of uses).

Sharecropping? I think not. There is a world of "obsolete" and discarded technology out there, and each of us can command our own little heap of it. To quote Fred G. Sanford: "Never underestimate the power of junk."

You can find a better picture of the antigravity machine here!

Look at you you little birdie tweeting away. Politicizing against Bush because you are a cortexless brain stem barfing out the liberal lies you are spoon fed. Bush: the guy who funded Project Prometheus and INSPI. [You don't know what those are, and I don't give a shit.]

Ok, troll, I'll bite.

1. I'll politicize against whomever I want as it is my 1st Amendment right to do so.
2. I politicize against Al Gore and Bill Clinton, too. I'm an equal-opportunity politicizer. :)
3. Projct Prometheus and INSPI seek to use nuclear power for space propulsion. While they might be useful for a manned mission to Mars, there is a broad range of other applications, including unmanned missions to various parts of the solar system and perhaps beyond. And INSPI was established in 1985 according to their website, so I don't know where you get the idea that funding INSPI was Bush's idea.
4. I'm not a liberal in the sense that you imply. I am, however, a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party, although I'm not strictly party line on every issue.

I care about beating the Chinese. This has nothing to do with Bush and more to do with morons like you who drag politics into science to serve your own twisted purpose. Bastard.

Good for you. Not everyone agrees with you. It's a fact of life. And politics necessarily have to be dragged in when talking about NASA because it's a government program. Just like politcs have to necessarily be dragged in when talking about the military, social security, the IRS, or any number of other government programs.

And to address your negative view on the America space program. Couldn't get a job at NASA if you tried. You aren't even close to the brilliance level to do anything technical there. You are a button monkey troglodyte flapping his lips and doing nothing.

What does my employability at NASA, or lack thereof, have anything to do my negative view of the American space program? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

One of my friends from the University of Florida has written a book about just this sort of thing called "That Gunk on Your Car."
Check it out...
That Gunk on Your Car

Actually, you can learn all about mastering tic-tac-toe from this manual. Or you can test your skills at this Java game.

Actually, you can learn all about mastering tic-tac-toe from this manual. Or you can test your skills at this Java game.

Here's some more mirrors I found:

http://ximian.dulug.duke.edu/pub/ximian/
http://ftp.dc.aleron.net/ximian/
http://ximian.oregonstate.edu/
http://open-systems.ufl.edu/mirrors/rsync.ximian.c om/
http://0-open-systems.ufl.edu.library.csuhayward.e du/mirrors/rsync.ximian.com/

The scariest thing here about this story is that both of these dim bulbs have law degrees. Are they giving degrees away when you get enough box tops!?

No, they're selling them for tons of cash, like they have for a long time. And please, don't tell me about people failing out. That only happens to the 'not fabulously wealthy.'

note: law school links just chosen at pseudorandom. Just making a point, not accusing any one school of being any worse than any other.

and here is an air photo with the locations of the accelerators outlined (they are, of course, under ground)

Um, so that's a Troll is it?

So did the UK not develop Prestel then?

And was it not launched in the 1970's?

And did I not used to work for Prestel?

I'm sorry you seem to have been outsmarted by a search engine.

I belive the phrase that's apt is something about you being replaceble with a very small shell script...

or "When they came for the cartoons I did nothing because I wasn't a cartoon"

Weren't there some government hearings on cartoon violence a few years ago? Didn't the television folks agree to straighten up and fly right? It sounds like that's about the time cartoons started getting lame. Coincidence? I don't think so. I got curious about what happened and did some googling....

STEP 1. OMG! Marvin the Martian just blew up the Earth, and that's supposed to be funny?

from TRUCE - Teachers Resiting Unhealty Children's Entertainment

"Too much of what children see on television is violence as entertainment. It undermines lessons we teach at home and school about how people treat each other, and encourages the use of violence to solve problems and to have fun. We have seen the effects of this glamorized violence in such events as school shootings."

STEP 2. I am shocked and appalled and am going to do something about it.

from lionlamb.org

"The mission of The Lion & Lamb Project is to stop the marketing of violence to children. We do this by helping parents, industry and government officials recognize that violence is not child's play - and by galvanizing concerned adults to take action."

"Lion & Lamb works to reduce the marketing of violent toys, games and entertainment to children in two distinct ways. We work with parents and other concerned adults to reduce the demand for violent "entertainment" products, and with industry and government to reduce the supply of such products."

"We believe that attitudes about violence as "entertainment" can be changed over time. Just as attitudes about drunk driving and smoking have changed, we believe that Lion & Lamb can help forge a national consensus that violence is not child's play. Just as it has become "uncool" to pollute and to litter, we are working to change the tolerance level for violence as a "cool" theme for toys and other entertainment products for children."

STEP 3. Well, if you think about it, we can't do it ourselves, so we need the government to force everyone to do the right thing.

"Too often, both government and the entertainment industry place all responsibility for monitoring the games children play on the shoulders of their parents. Certainly, parents need to be vigilant and provide their kids with guidance. But in a culture where $1 billion a year is spent by industries of all sorts to advertise their products directly to children, parents can't stem the tide of "entertainment" violence on their own." - snippet from an article at LionLamb.org

STEP 4. The Government is only too happy to oblige. Who could vote against protecting children?

"Senator Paul Simon, speaking to a conference organized in Beverly Hills on August 2 by the National Council for Families and Television, told some 650 representatives of the broadcasting business who were present that he was giving them sixty days to come up with a plan to regulate themselves with respect to the portrayal of violence--or else they would face some sort of government regulation." - from newcriterion.com article archived from Sept. 1993

Step 5. Mission Accomplished

"Culminating a protracted campaign against TV violence, both Houses of Congress have passed legislation requiring that new televisions be equipped with the so-called v-chip -- a computerized chip capable of detecting program ratings and blocking adversely rated programs from view." - from an article in the ACLU Archive

ahem

"uses open-source Firebird relational database technology to provide a blah blah blah..."

OR

"uses open-source Firebird web browser technology to provide a blah blah blah..."

Why would you not call it FirebirdSQL anyway!? Firebird alone isn't very original OR descriptive.

Firebird

No, you paid per phone, but they didn't multiply that into your bill.

Read again, more carefully. I wrote about the base rate times the number of phones plus additional costs.

You failed to mention that long distance calls used to be based on how far you were calling, simply because you tied up more circuits the farther you called

Patently false. You have no idea how the system worked. A call followed the fastest route, even if it meant bouncing a call from D.C. to NYC through Atlanta, out to Denver, down to L.A., up to Spokane and back through Chicago; a call from D.C. to London could bounce once to Virginia, hit satellite or cable and be there in the U.K. with less than half the distance.

AT&T's rates were always based on what it cost them to complete the call, they weren't incredibly overpriced.

Again, false. The rates were set for maximised profit (in the economical sense). In 1980, a call from D.C. to France cost (iirc) $3.69 for the first three minutes and $1.12 each additional minute. Once the break-up came about, long distance dropped drastically and it was discovered that all throughout the hearings, AT&T had been lying about LD costs -- it turned out that LD was subsidising local calls, not the other way around. This is why all the Baby Bells drastically increased home phone rates. LD charges continued to drop due to competition and the removal of the local subsidy burden.

Have you heard of Bell Laboratories?

Yup, and that was my biggest concern in the break-up. Despite the problems, there was a lot of both pure and commercial research coming out of them. Still didn't change the fact that the Bell System held everyone hostage.

Cell phones for instance, were invented decades ago at AT&T

See http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/~jshea/eel6509/misc/hi story.html. The government didn't prohibit AT&T from offering the services (it was Bell Mobile who handled mobile phones), it was the FCC and limited technology. AT&T went to ask for more bandwidth. The FCC asked them "how much bandwidth do you need?" AT&T muttered, "Umm... sixhundredsixtysix?"

True cellular (as opposed to standard radio) phones were invented by NTT and Siemens. A couple years later, the FCC relented and gavge them the bandwidth... in the microwave range. The technology was still being invented. Did you ever see the massive IMTS transcievers? The AMPS boxes? The first "handhelds"?

AT&T also had a great service record

The linemen were not out immediately to residential and government customers. They could take three weeks. Business phones were limited to those old, clunky PBX systems, no matter what neat options were possible. You don't have to go to Bell anymore for line service -- the local carrier is responsible for the wire to your primary entry point. You are responsible for your own internal wiring, and with that responsibility comes the freedom to arrange it as you please. Hire a contractor to do it.

I was a phreak in the late '70s and worked for C&P Bell in '83-'84. I was in the libraries and control rooms. I remember them putting down the masking tape in mid-December 1983 to demarcate the coming AT&T and Bell Atlantic sides, which would, within two years, no longer cohabit. I know from whence I speak.

It's easy to remember the good and hard to remember the bad. Bell Labs, but monopoly. Good quality phones, but no choice in which ones. One company billing you, but you paid whatever they said.

One of the best things about the break-up was that it finally put an end to Lily Tomlin doing her operator schtick on every variety show and dying sitcom. It was funny a few times, but at the time, it was oversaturation.

It's about bloody time that the "hotter sun" concept breaks into the mainstream. That's what I have been repeating over and over about the reason why the best computer climatology models fail to reproduce known climating history, and hence prove their uselessness. It's because they are based on a "solar constant" (about 900 W/m2 at equatorial peak if I remember correctly) but the solar output is not a constant.

(Hey, sounds like this old Murphy's law of programming: "Constants aren't".)

Two years ago, the Science magazine carried a paper explaining how researchers examined sediments in Yutacan and proved that solar output increase, with a cycle of about 208 years, forced a drought on the Maya that was probably the last straw and destroyed their empire. Findings are correlated with other data. See "Solar Forcing of Drought Frequency in the Maya Lowlands" by David Hodell et.al. Very important paper for anyone who wants to understand climatology.

-- SysKoll

But I have two sad words to add: Formosan Termites. They are in North America and headed north; the frost line didn't seem to stop them

And don't forget about the Mongolian Concrete Borer either.

Having authentication system (whether backed by Kerberos or Active Directory/LDAP) does not mitigate the need for WEP or some other encryption. Do like my university and set up a VPN.

Having authentication system (whether backed by Kerberos or Active Directory/LDAP) does not mitigate the need for WEP or some other encryption. Do like my university and set up a VPN.

Here at the University of Florida we have just moved to a new system called the UF-ID system. Students had to get recarded. It took almost a year to re-code all of the University's systems (housing, accounting, libraries, etc) but we had a successful launch on January 21st 2003. The system works great and ties in directly with the University's new ActiveDirectory that was established for the entire campus.

Furthermore I think the FERPA (Family Educational Rights Protection Act) makes it illegal to use even partial identification numbers to post grades. You can read more about the University of Florida's system at http://ufid.ufl.edu

See for example Newton Timeline. Note the item for 1697, when Newton was 55. He recieved a problem from Bernoulli that he solved and published the solution to anonymously. Bernoulli was easily able to identify Newton as the author "as the lion is known by its paw"--that is, by the style and depth of insight in the solution.

--Tom

Run a man over with the intent to kill, you'll face life.

errr...no.
Quite often, killing a person with your vehicle, the driver leaves the scene.
And even when he is caught, getting a conviction is tough. No one the wiser as to 'intent'. And so then it gets reduced to manslaughter, or even a misdemeanor.

No charges pending
"Robert Lassiter of Orlando drove into the riders on State Road 21 from behind, killing two and injuring four. Killed were Margaret Raynal, 31, and Doug Hill, 47. Lassiter was never charged or ticketed, something that has fed the perception that authorities do not treat cycling accidents the same as other crashes. "

Dying for Love
"...was 30 years old on November 17th, 2000, when he was hit and killed by an 18-wheel truck driven by Reuben Espinosa, who has a history of violent behavior and who admitted to "playing chicken" with the cyclists."
After much pressure from the San Francisco cycling community, Espinosa, who continued to drive a truck after the incident, was finally charged with manslaughter and assault with a deadly weapon.
On November 9th, Espinosa was found not guilty of manslaughter, in part because of testimony that the truck's brake lights were on at one point during the incident.

When things are ingrained in a society, and "everyone" uses it...it becomes awfully hard to bring your fellow man to task for something that might just as easily have happened to you.

I haven't seen anyone try and connect the "purple streak" picture and the break-up, so i'll post my theory references again and hope it gets considered.

The tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The roughtiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trailacted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused severe damage, enough to cause a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.
My,My, Hey, Hey

I haven't seen anyone try and connect the "purple streak" picture and the break-up, so i'll post my theory references again and hope it gets considered.

The tiles were damaged heavily at launch, scratched deeply as in previous incidents.
The roughtiles heated and shed, leaving a trail of debris plasma.
The plasma trailacted as a conduit for an electrical arc from charged particles in the high upper atmosphere,similar to the Ben Franklin kite legend.
A huge bolt travelled along the plasma trail to the left wing where it caused severe damage, enough to cause a cascading failure over subsequent minutes. Blue jets, elves and sprites are large atmospheric electrical phenomena which occur at the altitude the space shuttle was passing thru and were being studied by Ramon in the MEIDEX dust experiment.

New image evidence shows damage to the composite section of the wing. An increasing reliance on composite materials in aircraft construction creates the potential for additional problems because the composites can allow a connection between lightning and airplane electrical circuits

Here you can find everything (or more) than you ever wanted to know about the genetic foundations of the feline fur color, including the tortoiseshell variation. The text requires a basic understanding of genetics lingo (homzygous, allele, recessive and the like).

HTML version of the same from Google's cache for those who don't like the .doc format.

1. So it's a test balloon. At least they looking to see if there's enough support.

2. While NASA hasn't been building them (they built the XE' in 1969, and ran it for over 48 minutes) they, and other government agencies have continue to research them. Initially, it was secret research as part of SDI, then later SEI picked nuclear as primary means of propulsion and granted research projects for such method. Today, nuclear propulsion is still researched, and lots of money still goes towards it.

For the most part, NASA hasn't needed a nuclear capable rocket. Back in the late 60's, they got into the situation where they built one, but really didn't require it's power. Yes, we could have gone to the moon with it, and a bit faster with more luxury, but the cost would have been higher, and the manufacturing process more intricate.

Now adays though, when you look to go a great distance, the cost is lower. That, and, our manufacturing processes via CAD/CAM and simulation test suites make that aspect of the process much more palpable.

3. Nothing like a fact list with the words "I think" in it. Do us a favor, don't think, google. I'm not going to state here that nuclear so-called "micro-explosions" are _legal_ per the two or three different treaties which (some not ratified) govern. I've seen it argued both ways, and it comes down to one of those legal principles of "original intent" arguments which are really very annoying. The purpose of the test ban treaties were to stop the testing of nuclear weapons. The so-called Outer Space treaty was prevention of nuclear weapons in outer space. Greenies are stretching them because they are worried about shooting 100kg of nuclear fuel into space in the event the craft destructs and scatters the material over the population. Valid concern. I would hate to have anything rained down on my family. But i would also hate for a 747 to crash into my house. Tell me the safety measures taken to prevent it, and what the statistical probability of it happened, as well as worst case scenarios, and let me decide if i live in the danger area. NASA has to do this routinely with launches. Hell, amateur rocketeers have to file such reports when they throw stuff up in the air.

4. So says you. Look back on US history though. Every time some impossible goal is set that piques us, we go into over-achieve mode to compensate. Wars, moon races, reaction to Japanese car manufacturing quality... It's ingrained in us. I would never bet against this country. 8 years to launch a vehicle headed for mars, with a man on it... not impossible.

5. Welcome to the life cycle of economics. It goes up, it goes down. Depression are as necessaries as bubbles. Debt is a good thing for any large company with the assests the size of the US. If you don't leverage yourself, you're _throwing_ away capital.

6. No one i know beleives Saddam mounted 9-11 attacks. "They" have sold us he has weapons of mass destruction. We're still waiting for the proof. But don't for an instant think the liberal media is helping the Bush group sell us Saddam AlQueda links which don't really exist. They shoot any such misconceptions so full of anti-bush holes such rumors couldn't get out of the press room. As for politics, well, they are what they are. I don't know if it could pass, but, this is a way to pump a lot of money into a lot of companies which right now are hurting. I know a lot of engineers that twiddle their thumbs these days. Depending on the districts, and who's the senators that do best by say Pratt Whitney getting a 20billion contract for making a, b and c... you never know who will jump across party lines.

7. See my answer to number 1. Balloons are'nt necessarily a bad thing. I'm glad they are event attemping to float this one. These things aften time follow a chaos like effect. The one administrator who "misspeaks" about something, that 1,000 sci-fi hungry journalist pick up on, and write about... soon the buterfly flapping it's weaks has created a hurricane.

8. ION is still to young. We know we can do it wiht Nuclear, we know how to, we've built and run them before outputing the ISP we need. We've done our homework on Nuclear. ION still needs some more research and tests, and well, power. That said, if we were leaving the solar system, i'd take an ION drive.

9. So, you think bush's plan is to announced major tax cuts, then follow that with a plant o mars, than before he ends his speech, announce a tax hike. As someone who spends way to much in taxs each year, i must admit, i'd rather it go into these types of projects, then some inner city youth out reach program. I'm not cold, I want everyone to have the chance I had, but i don't want inept useless programs sucking money to maintain the status quo. I'd much rather have all my taxes go to some technology project that _never gets off the ground_. Why? Because I just paid for research, technology, new ways of thinking. I just paid someone to fail with a project that was too grandiose, someone's first "second system syndrome". I know they'll bounce back and build something better, or pieces of their research/technology will find it's way into some other project. And think of large projects like these, all the ancillary jobs it creates. I run a company that does consulting. And I often bid and compete for government contract work. It's good, fun work. Building a 20billion dollar vehicle, and need to data mine your project life cycle for something? There's a nice little 150k project for a small consulting firm.

This is how our economy is supposed to work. This how a lot of people make a living. Yes, i would like to see projects managed better, driven to more attainable goals, but above all that, i say, spend the money. I'd rather them spend the money and fail, then not spend the money and fail. Keep those dollars circulating.

-malakai