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it will cause a disastrous accident.

Unlikely. It will almost certainly be less severe than if humans were driving. Humans typically take 1 second to 3.5 seconds to realize something is wrong, and transfer their foot from the accelerator to the brake. During that time, a car going 70mph will travel 100 feet or more ... before it even starts to brake. A self-driving car can begin braking in 10 milliseconds. With humans, the cars will begin braking in sequence, one after another. This can result in a chain reaction pileup, with the most severe accidents happening far back in the pack. SDCs will all brake simultaneously, with those further back having plenty of time to stop.

Believe it or not, the engineers designing these things have actually thought about these issues, and done extensive testing. If 1 meter spacing wasn't safe, they wouldn't be doing it.

I've heard, but never timed it myself, that perl is faster for regexp-type stuff than even the specialized tools, just from the massive amount of optimization it has accrued over the years; here is a completely unbiased source. Use a perl or python script, and consider using Storable (perl) or pickle (python) to serialize the data structure, I guess, but just having the whole list in memory will help.

According to this, perl regexps are (unsurprisingly) a superset of egrep's.

I don't see how introducing SQL could do much to help speed, or anything else, in this application.

Unfortunately your information is very spotty, no doubt as a result of reading popularized accounts of climate history.

For example the idea that it was warmer in the past based on the idea Greenland was green in the past is just nonsense. Read:

http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/envs501/downloads/Jakobsson%20et%20al.%202010.pdf

Miller 2010... Temperature and precipitation history of the Arctic

Alley 2010... History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: paleoclimatic insights

Popularized web accounts published by political organizations are useless.

As far as solar minima, again that's poppycock, see

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

This rings false to me. It seems you're implying that the violence level of "any other religion" is well-defined, as in, every other religion is more or less as violent as each other.

There is no doubt that the GP's statement was false in its overgeneralization. Some religions are overtly non-violent, such as the various offshoots of the Christian Anabaptists (including the Amish). They certainly aren't mainstream Christians but with numbers in the one to two million range, they are a legitimate Christian sect.

I've never seen, for example, militant Buddhists. Well, perhaps a Buddhist (or someone claiming to be one) who is militant about something else, but no-one who spreads Buddhism by force.

Then you should pay attention to some international news. Folks in Sri Lanka would disagree with your claims.

thats odd, because I cannot find any install media newer than 6.10 on any of the download sites. http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/ubuntu-releases/ if its supported, its very poor if they cant even create install disks for the platform.

Take a look at the mirrors - it's up, but the site doesn't yet reflect it.

http://mirror.its.uidaho.edu/pub/ubuntu-releases/9.10/

small amounts of volcanic ash might only irritate your lungs, but if a supervolcanic eruption took place, it would likely throw up tremendous amounts (~1000 cubic miles) of tephra/pyroclast, the finest particles of which could circle the globe and remain suspended in the atmosphere for years. if you're immediately downwind from such an eruption, you'd be breathing in heavy amounts of what is essentially microscopic shards of broken glass for weeks or months.

archaeological evidence has been uncovered showing that the mass deaths of plains animals 12 million years ago during a supervolcanic explosion at Yellowstone were due primarily to lung disease from volcanic ash inhalation. even many animals that survived the initial ashfall were still killed by the ash stirred up by their own movements or wind.

"Oh, really?.. In the 90s... 250 thou... Unless you provide any serious source you're a bigoted moron."

Remember Bosnia? http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/bosnia_genocide.htm

Killing millions of Jews, Native Americans, anybody else is all true, but it doesn't mean that it's OK for Muslims to do the same

I agree. They are all assholes. Its like arguing over who is worse though, Chrales Manson or the Son of Sam. Ultimately I want them both off the streets.

"Does the word 'Buddhism' sound familiar to you?"

Quite familiar. Every hear of the LTTE in Sri Lanka?

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/slrv.htm

Of course various branches of Budhism have sprung. In Japan various zen philosophy and samurai go hand in hand. Many Zen philosophers wrote in fervent support of Japan's wars of aggression.

Many of the martial arts of the east were created by Budhist monks.

There's thousands of cases when Christians killed just because some artist/writer/anybody offended their feelings in the last couple of years, right?

There are fewer examples of Christian violence the Islamic violence, but I would argue that this is because Christians are less influential in the west then Muslims are in the middle east. That said there are plenty examples of extremists killings gays, minorities, medical professionals involved in abortion to pretty much prove the point.

Something like keeping people alive in space for years rather than months is the REAL issue.

You mean like this, this, or perhaps this (to count just a few among literally thousands of projects dedicated to accomplishing exactly that)?

Incidentally, the Russians have a HUGE volume of data on long-duration spaceflight, for periods that could conceivably cover an exploratory trip to Mars.

...and if you induce gravity for the majority of the trip (e.g. w/ centripetal motion), you actually discard the majority of the problems. The rest involves shielding from gamma/cosmic rays, taking along enough supplies (but water in sufficient quantities there would alleviate the majority of the burden - air, fuel, and water would take up the vast majority of the load anyway if you had to bring it all along).

/P

I am not aware of any other group with similiar goals. But yes, I guess it's important to blame everyone equally so nobody's feelings are hurt. How this novel approach will let the British deal with the problem posed by Muslims in the country is anyone's guess.
Indians in the 60's and 70's, asians, Blacks... all were accused of "changing the beloved country" Enoch Powell would have told you about how "they don't share our values". I couldn't care less about whether other's feelings are hurt, I am not a pacifist by a long shot. I believe that there should be no knee jerk reactions to things - treat people as individuals, judge them by their actions, not by their colour or belief. If you don't you WILL create more "enemies" and instead of fixing the problem, it will make it worse
It's the same story everywhere in Europe. Muslims don't have the same attachment to nationalism as most other people do. The Ummah is more important to them.
only some and then no more than some Catholics or Hindus or Buddhists.
There are approximately 2 million muslims in the UK, the trouble mainly coming from the least educated, poorer section, the same as the christian and black "houligans" - of which there are plenty. There were a few muslims that bombed the railways and I suspect there are some more that have similar intentions but the IRA, which last I looked was not muslim, also did similar things so it is not JUST muslims.

Something to ponder:
If a group of football supporters break the law, do you punish all football supporters?

Nah. You can become competent with vi in a few days. Save yourself a lot of hassle. Print out one of these handy-dandy vi cheat sheets. This one's not too bad, but is poorly formatted, IMHO.

We all know that Idaho doesn't exist.

I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject!

I should note that the email is pretty much available through webmail on all systems in some form, to my knowledge, even if the person needs to use their "Classic" version that cuts down on the features to work better with some browsers. People on non-Windows platforms aren't totally locked out, but they are in suboptimal positions, if that makes any sense.

I know that the IT department realizes that Apple computers exist. The Bookstore is an authorized Apple dealer, their VMobile program

As far as I know, all operating systems can check their mail, but only using the web mail client. Desktop clients besides Windows Live Mail Desktop aren't supported, because Windows Live doesn't support POP, although there seem to be some Thunderbird extensions that get around this. However, I suspect they could be liable to break at any time if Microsoft changes the system; people can't rely on them to work. And, some people don't use Thunderbird for their client.

Does this place have an active placement of Macs or PCs

Both: both PCs and Macs are sold in the campus bookstore, which is an authorized Apple dealer. Their VMobile program leases both PC and Mac computers. Some departments, like the Biology department, are very Mac-oriented.

We're trying our utmost hardest to figure that out, believe me. I've been lead to understand that the SCAC was part of this decision process. They are set out in the student association's rules to:

The Student Computing Advisory Committee (SCAC) shall make recommendations to the Vice Provost for Outreach and Technologies on policies and procedures related to student computing technology. These may include any of the following actions: review of operations, budgets, services, and needs for student computing; prioritizing financial expenditures; and assisting in the development of long-term planning.

However, we have gotten a response back from the faculty co-chair of the SCAC saying that they last met in Spring 2006 and were not involved with the implementation, and suggested I contact the student co-chair.

Notice the last: you cannot forward your email. You cannot forward your email.

I should note that this policy is not Microsoft's fault, or at least their lack of it wouldn't have affected the choice anyway, because our email policy made in 2003 decided that too many people were missing important University emails when they forwarded because of spam filters and outages out of the University's control. Therefore, students can't forward their email. I can understand that, but it adds a layer onto our problems, because we can't set up our own email accounts and simply have our mail forwarded. (Although this change does break the policy a little--it also stated that a student's email will not change during their student career, which some people are unhappy with, but I don't think that's a huge issue because all email to their old account will be forwarded to the new one.)

Our switch wasn't cost free--we had an article in our school newspaper about the finances of the deal. We do, however, save quite a penny in the long run as compared to what we have now, which is very understandable in the face of our budget woes. Still, the cost for running a basic service like email don't seem very exhorbiant compared to other things student fees have been spent on, like Palousafest 2006, which the university radio reported cost $20,000.

This is the same school that requires you to register your laptops MAC address to get on the network. Yes. they use MAC filtering as if it actually worked.

One such institution that has conducted such a change is the University of Idaho. The information is available here. The ITS department has further clarified that they aren't even going to support Windows Live Mail Desktop (which is also in beta).

One such institution that has conducted such a change is the University of Idaho. The information is available here. The ITS department has further clarified that they aren't even going to support Windows Live Mail Desktop (which is also in beta).

University of Idaho. https://maila.its.uidaho.edu/

using airburst nukes to try and take out your opponents missiles in the upper atmosphere

Apparently this is already a design criterion. I recently came across this paper, concerning the re-entry characteristics of the Galileo atmospheric probe at Jupiter. Check out Figure 7, where we read, "Galileo stagnation region heating is equivalent to the combined heating of an ICBM warhead flying through a thermonuclear explosion."

I'd always heard that it was Idaho that didn't exist.

Something which may be of interest. Benjamin Shropshire recently posted on the D newsgroup with a parser generator he'd written using D template metaprogramming. The parser generator itself (one source file) can be viewed at http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~shro8822/dparse.d and a complete usage example at http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~shro8822/exp_gramm er.d.

Something which may be of interest. Benjamin Shropshire recently posted on the D newsgroup with a parser generator he'd written using D template metaprogramming. The parser generator itself (one source file) can be viewed at http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~shro8822/dparse.d and a complete usage example at http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~shro8822/exp_gramm er.d.

unless you doubt the existence of Belgium (and let's not get in to that here).

It could also be argued that the administration is picking people who know something about what they're regulating...

Hey, so why don't we hire pedophiles to protect our children?

Oh wait...we do

University of Idaho modeled our V.Mobile (http://www.vmobile.uidaho.edu/) program after the UNC program. However, we do offer iBooks and Powerbooks... and hopefully soon MacBooks :D

The University of Idaho has spent a large amount of resources developing two similar programs that lease laptops to students. The first is a mandatory program through the College of Business and is called IXL (http://www.ixl.uidaho.edu/). All students entering their Junior year of study are required to lease a laptop from the college. The lease term is four semesters and the students have the option to buy the laptop at the end of the term for $1.

The second program is an extension of the IXL program. There was a demand to offer this program and other products to the general campus. V.Mobile (http://www.vmobile.uidaho.edu/ offers a very similar program to IXL, but is optional to the entire campus.

Our program is modeled after several other institutions across the country (Babson College and University of North Carolina). I would strongly suggest that you visit Babson or UNC and check out their program.

The University of Idaho has spent a large amount of resources developing two similar programs that lease laptops to students. The first is a mandatory program through the College of Business and is called IXL (http://www.ixl.uidaho.edu/). All students entering their Junior year of study are required to lease a laptop from the college. The lease term is four semesters and the students have the option to buy the laptop at the end of the term for $1.

The second program is an extension of the IXL program. There was a demand to offer this program and other products to the general campus. V.Mobile (http://www.vmobile.uidaho.edu/ offers a very similar program to IXL, but is optional to the entire campus.

Our program is modeled after several other institutions across the country (Babson College and University of North Carolina). I would strongly suggest that you visit Babson or UNC and check out their program.

Here is a page describing how to form plurals of Latin nouns used in English:
http://www.class.uidaho.edu/luschnig/EWO/1.htm

It is worth noting that "-ii" NEVER replaces "-us". There are circumstances in which "-i" replaces "-us", but "abacii" and "virii" are absolutely wrong, in Latin and in English.

Unfortunately your choice of examples shows that you are not arguing what you claim, innocently or not, to be arguing. Instead of arguing about proof, you're arguing about a corner of epistemology (the philosophical study of how we know things) known as empiricism.

Yes; this has become apparent in retrospect; thanks for your help. The other posters were talking about the syntactical rules of a representational grammar (that is, today's version of math) whereas I'm talking about physical reality.

Have you read Spinoza's Ethics? I'm working on it at the moment, because I'm trying to understand why so many pantheists (which he was and I am) have come to the conclusion that God has no personality. Spinoza states both the ideas he believes and those he disbelieves in the form of a "geometrickal proof" - not because he thought that mathematical proof was canonical proof, but because he wanted to restrict the incidence of misinterpretation of what he was saying by forcing the arguments into a very rigid, well known format. This apparently worked for a century or so but makes the work more difficult to comprehend for most modern readers. It also freaks out mathematicians because he essentially provides "geometrickal proof" of concepts he then states are false. Lots of interesting discussion of this here.

One can indeed offer proof of the non-existence of a thing. What one cannot do is offer evidence of its non-existence. Evidence and proof are not the same. "Proof" is a logical idea and "evidence" is an empirical idea.

If you want to prove something to me, you must provide independently verifiable evidence or describe a means of finding same. This, to me, is the meaning of the english word proof. It's also the number one definition on dictionary.com, incidentally, and you are only the second poster to state that you are using the special mathematical meaning for the words "proof" and "prove" and not the common english meaning. Again, my thanks to both of you.

Standard logic is one system, amongst many, for extending knowledge. We seem to have a large measure of faith in logic because one of its consequences is that no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction. In other words it is a system born of our cultural uneasiness with contradictions.

I'm not sure it's true that "no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction". I know that's the target, but I need to think on that a little more. Are you saying that all paradoxes are the result of erroneous axioms, or that our logic is imperfect because the syntactica of human communication permit paradoxical statements, or some combination of both?

In fact, one way to logically extend our knowledge is to posit (assert) the truth or falsehood of a statement and then show (prove) that the rules of the logical system lead to a contradiction. Since your assumptions lead to a contradiction, logic says that at least one of your assumptions must be false. This is called "proof by contradiction" or, in classical terminology, "reductio ad absurdum."

I understand. But without empiricism, the only thing that method is useful for is creating very abstract methods, and

The moon landings will always be doubted, and doubtable, until we're heading there for vacations and doing real business there which provides materials or situations that move the moon into the common experience.

There was a good parody of this a few years ago, in the form of an "open debate" on the existence of Idaho.

Now, I've been in Idaho, and lived just next to the border in Pullman WA for several years. But that puts me in a tiny minority of the world's population. For most people, the evidence for Idaho isn't really any better than the evidence for the moon landing, the existence of some random god, etc.

Then there was the movie Wag the Dog, about a faked war with an imaginary country. So how do we know that there's really an Iraq? I've never been there, and all the evidence I've seen could have easily been faked in just about any other middle-eastern country.

Deciding which stories to believe can be tricky.

ok, here you go:

Oooo, your smart. The Internet runs on electricity. Oil isn't used to generate electricity. Electrity is produced from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydroelectric. Louisiana's contribution to generating electricity is natural gas, not oil.


The global economy is utterly dependent on a constant supply of oil. everything we do requires tons of oil: transportaion, food production, manufactoring, pesticides, the production of plastics, and computers and other high tech devices. The production of the average desktop computer consumes 10 times its weight in fossil fuels.


And you might note we could get electricity from hydroelectric, nuclear, solar or wind just as easily as coal or natural gas, then we could still have our Internet and not keep dumping CO2, Mercury, Sulfur and other assorted pollutants in to the air.


As you might note, this is also complete absurdity, we can't get our electricity "as easily" from other sources, not even close. Barring a major technological breakthrough, these are currently not viable alternatives to oil. In fact our best chance is producing better technology for mining more out of known oil fields and minding non-standard oil reserves out of new locations.

from http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj09/youngqu1.html:

"Oil is a unique energy source that has no complete replacement in all its varied end uses. The British scientist Sir Crispin Tickell concludes, "...we have done remarkably little to reduce our dependence on a fuel [oil] which is a limited resource, and for which there is no comprehensive substitute in prospect." [Emphasis mine]

Coming to realize that oil is finite, any and all suggestions of means to replace oil are welcomed. Cheerful myths are enthusiastically embraced. These include: that there are two trillion barrels of economically recoverable oil in the Colorado Plateau oil shales; that dams and their reservoirs are a source of indefinitely renewable energy and that they are environmentally benign; that solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro-electric power can supply the electrical needs, from the Arctic to the tropics, of the Earth's nearly six billion people (likely to become at least 10 billion in the next fifty years); that coal, oil from oil sands, and biofuels can replace the 72 million barrels of oil the world now uses daily; and that somehow electricity produced from various alternative energy sources can readily provide the great mobility which oil now gives to the more than 600 million vehicles worldwide. Regrettably, none of these cheerful myths appear to be valid.

better?

I thought it was a well-known fact that Idaho does not exist.

Found a good FAQ on Many Worlds.

'Virii' is actually the correct plural of 'virus'.

Nope. You're making two assumptions, both false. The first is that the "correct" English plural must always be the same as the Latin one, if a word is a loan from Latin. That is often the case, but it isn't a law of nature or of any other kind. Like speakers of other languages, English speakers can and do adapt foreign words. The great majority of English speakers, including well-educated people and scientists who work with viruses, say viruses.

The second false assumption is that the Latin plural of virus is virii. It isn't. That would be true if virus were a second declension masculine noun, but it isn't. It is a neuter noun of the second declension and has no Latin plural. Here is a summary of Latin plural formation that includes this fact about virus. For further discussion of Latin pseudo-plurals in English, I suggest this Language Log post.

Haven't read the book, but am now thinking about it. One thing in your post caught my attention and raises a question: where does he get the idea that the human mind can be either both or correct, not to mention both? Seems a strange notion.

Btw, if you are interested in a truly wonderful book about the interdependencies of mind and matter in the human brain, read Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin

According to Walter Youngquist, shale oil is a net loser i.e. it takes more energy to produce shale oil than is recovered from the shale oil/kerogen. It's not a question of economics. This is also the case with oil sands.

http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/doc/vinge

and then chose the html document.

Humanoid means "shaped like a human".

Wrong, it means "like a human", no reference to shape involved. What you're thinking of is "anthropomorphic".

No, what I'm thinking of is "Human" + the greek suffix "oid" (-oid resembling, like, shaped)

ASIMO is anthropomorphic but doesn't have a truly humanoid gait (yet).

How would you know, the last time you looked at it it either was the old astronaut-sized model, or some other robot (Toyota's walker prototype?) who also had nervous japanese techs around it.

Anyway, it does.

You mean "the first I heard about".

You really, really suck at guessing what I mean. Your reading comprehension skills need some honing.

I might have meant "the first to walk up stairs" though...

"One of the first functioning bipedal robots was developed in the 1970s by Kato (Kato and Tsuiki, 1972)."

No mention of how those legs went about, and I'm pretty damn sure that this thing was a thetered monstrosity, not a humanoid, independant robot like Asimo.

Anyway, just go see the damn movies of the latest Asimo model someone else posted, it's streaming, but you need to stop blasting somthing you haven't even looked at.

Eastern Washington University, Cheney

Eastern Washington University, Spokane at Riverpoint

Gonzaga University

Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS)

Intercollegiate College of Nursing, WSU College of Nursing

North Idaho College

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

Community Colleges of Spokane (Spokane Community College)

Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI)

Spokane Public Schools

University of Idaho

University of Idaho, Research Park, Post Falls

Washington State University, Pullman

Washington State University, Spokane

Whitworth College

Website: http://www.vpnet.org (a little bland at the moment, but still good info).

Eastern Washington University, Cheney

Eastern Washington University, Spokane at Riverpoint

Gonzaga University

Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS)

Intercollegiate College of Nursing, WSU College of Nursing

North Idaho College

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

Community Colleges of Spokane (Spokane Community College)

Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI)

Spokane Public Schools

University of Idaho

University of Idaho, Research Park, Post Falls

Washington State University, Pullman

Washington State University, Spokane

Whitworth College

Website: http://www.vpnet.org (a little bland at the moment, but still good info).

...but if it will make a little girl in Japan happy, it's served its purpose.

Sanrio is really committed to making little girls happy. Just look at this little item.

(Anonymous. Yes, I think so.)

Either go to:
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Sanrio/ and click on the link from there , or get it with wget:

wget http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Sanrio/image s/HK40K.jpg --referer=http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Sa nrio/

Combine two popular franchises, and you get...

Hello Kitty 40K

If you think they got your school wrong... the picture they posted for University of Idaho (where I go to school) definitely isn't a building on campus. I've never seen that building in my life, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.