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scholarworks.umass.edu
www.economist.com
www.nbcnews.com
www.ehs.org.uk
etc, etc.

Claims with no citations? You're either an idiot or an outright troll/liar.

A small sampling of the citations linked in the post in question:
http://www.city-journal.org/20...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.umass.edu/legal/Ben...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publ...
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/abst...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...
http://www.jstor.org/discover/...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles...
https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abst...
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/...
http://www.sentencingproject.o...
http://online.wsj.com/articles...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live...
That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short. That's enough citations that I then have to add in this line because the stupid post filter thinks the average line length is too short.

If you're talking about the army blankets then you heard wrong. It's bullshit made up by Ward Churchill.

If you talking about Ward Churchill. Then yes - its bs.

If you're trying to say no blankets were distributed....
http://www.straightdope.com/co...
https://www.umass.edu/legal/de...

https://www.umass.edu/legal/de...

Distributing blankets infected with smallpox was certainly discussed by officials in 1763, way before Ward Churchill's alleged events.

See here and here.

I'm not sure you can even call this a "defect". The CPU is working as advertised, and it's not like it's insecure by design.

If anybody sues Intel, they'll be suing Intel only for providing an optional feature that makes computations faster.

Had this problem surfaced in the mid-90s, lots of OS researchers (yes, including Andrew Tanenbaum) would have argued that the CPU wasn't at fault, the operating system was.

Here's a linky to the University of Massasuchetts' Climate Systems Research Dep't ongoing study: the most recent pic is from June 1, this year. Note the graph under the heading The value of a photograph, showing the decrease in surface depth of the glacier studied (about 0.8 meters over the period from June 2015 'till March 2017). And here's a pdf linky to the most recent (2014) easily accessible scientific publication about Mt Kilimanjaro's summit ice fields by the same group. Right in the introduction they mention why and how the earlier 2015 prediction was wrong; the summit is now predicted to be ice-free by 2040.

Never happened.

Hard as it is to prove a negative, it is easy to show a positive. Because the distribution smallpox blankets as a means of infection? Actually happened.

Even your own source mentioned it.

Not sure why you limited yourself to the US Army. I could say the Swiss Army never committed a massacre in Nanking, but what would that prove?

Also, would have been pretty amazing if the US Army had come to comprehend and weaponize germ theory decades before it was developed and accepted.

Why? It is known that the practice of biological warfare predates the discovery of the Americas. In fact, the British Army expressly discussed it. So you're saying the US Army would be amazing because they knew what their predecessors knew?

Am I amazing because I could read a book too? Or because my grandmother could teach me how to suck eggs?

Now certainly you wouldn't say their knowledge was complete, but you don't need to understand the mechanisms of salicylic acid in order to drink willowbark tea.

> Horses are bigger than donkeys so I imagine they have larger genitals.

I had to google very softly around this question. I think you are incorrect, based on a couple lines in this vet guide:

https://www.vasci.umass.edu/si...

Remember, the folks writing this would have a lot of knowledge of animals, from top to bottom. Their way of life, and in some cases their lives, depended on that. So regardless of whether larger or smaller, the description was meant to convey an easily understood comparison by any of those who read it, or heard it.

• Facebook: https://research.facebook.com/...
• Google: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.0383...

Check rankings on LFW: http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lf..., most of the best performing systems are using deep learning.

Facebook and Google can easily have millions of labeled face images, and there are now publicly available face databases of 0.5M face images, so training data: not an issue. All systems perform some preprocessing to align faces to a canonical frontal view, so any face image that is not totally a side view is usually well recognized. Strong pose (both tilt and pan), illumination changes and occlusions are still tricky though. Curious about the issue of this lawsuit.

It doesn't help that Greece was forced into an austerity plan in their last bailout. Essentially that kicked off a death spiral. Austerity has already been well discredited (see here, here, and here. Original paper here) yet it keeps being foisted off on citizens everywhere.

I'm not suggesting that Greece should spend money like a drunken sailor on leave, but following a faith based economic theory even after it has been disproven (even to the satisfaction of the writers of the original paper) is not the answer.

TFS says "The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed..." but this is incorrect for wind turbines that have oil in the gearbox assembly.

Wind turbines in cold weather need to be heated so the oil remains fluid. This power has to come from a steady source (not wind) so the turbines can wind up consuming more power than they generate.

Reference

Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.

I don't think you could say that with confidence. Geocarbsulf is already pretty rough by 55 million years ago.
But certainly, no species of primate that is currently existent were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than we're going to be seeing.

Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.

I don't see how speciation could occur without internal variation in a species. There's nothing to differentially select for.

Moreover, within an ecological system, a drop in genetic diversity of a species can result in a drop in species biodiversity of the system, and vice-versa

The experimental results, combined with natural observations, show that in this system, the maintenance of species diversity is dependent on sufficient genetic variation, because without this variation the system would become dominated by B. nigra (if sinigrin levels are uniformly high), or by other species (if sinigrin levels are uniformly low). - Mutual Feedbacks Maintain Both Genetic and Species Diversity in a Plant Community Lankau and Strauss, NATURE, (2007)

has a Ph.D. in 17th century English literature. Admittedly we do work at a college, but you might be surprised at what humanists are doing these days: he got into the computer side of things while building databases of who was sending who letters around then. Digital Humanities is a growing field, and one that has some interesting CS applications- you've got things like Mallet chewing through vast swathes of literature looking for correlations, you have folks building high end digital maps to look into questions of how sight lines affected historical battles, etc.

They're not anywhere near college level.

Having actually taught some high-school AP classes, I think that depends on where you're going to college. Colleges generally calibrate whether they accept AP credit and what score is required based on their curriculum.

For example, MIT's AP criteria states that they won't accept AP credit to pass out of a chemistry or biology class; to do so, you need to take MIT's own placement exam. They don't accept CS AP credit at all. And for calculus and physics, they basically require you to get a 5 on the hardest possible AP versions of those tests to get any credit. But much of MIT's basic undergrad curriculum goes as much as twice as fast as a typical college.

Most colleges, on the other hand, will give you a semester of college credit for almost all those subjects if you get a 4 or 5. (For comparison, here are the requirements for the University of Massachusetts. And this is still a fairly decent school, as state universities go.) Some might even give credit (or partial credit) for a 3.

I completely agree with you that some of the AP curriculum is crap. (For example, the AP E&M physics C test is ridiculously oversimplified compared to what a real college student with calculus should be able to do. On the other hand, the mechanics test for physics C isn't bad -- it's been dumbed down a bit over the past couple decades, but it can still have some reasonable questions.)

But the reality is that the AP credit *IS* roughly equivalent to the curriculum at many colleges. If it wasn't, colleges wouldn't give credit and advanced standing for AP scores.

Keep in mind that their result is on a controlled dataset ("labeled faces in the wild," http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lf...) for which a lot of training data is available and on which previously proposed systems already perform well.

So this 97% number is a bit of an adventurous extrapolation. Think of it as only polling in NYC and stating that you can predict the result of the next presidential election. The paper was clear on that point, only the summary made it look catchy as usual.

Unless and until some unforeseen, miraculous breakthrough happens in language design, GCd languages will always be slower when it comes to memory management. And because memory management is so critical for complex applications, GCd languages will effectively always be slower, period.

This isn't true. Have a look at Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management. The take-away is that GC'd languages are only slower if you are unwilling to pay an extra memory cost; typically 3-4x of your explicitly-managed program. Given that GC gives you safety from null-pointer dereferences for free, I think that's a fair tradeoff for most applications (BTW, you can run the Boehm collector on explicitly-managed code to identify pointer safety issues).

It was a potential exploit on Intel's Ivy Bridge RNGs, and it wouldn't work on Linux, as /dev/random etc mix RDRAND with many other sources of entropy.

Uh, you are grandly understating the issue presented in the paper.

It is a potential exploit on many chips. I say is because the paper itself says the dopant-switch technique compares favorably to the cited existing visual obfuscation patents stretching back at least 15 years.

This specific paper simply presents an actual recipe on how to tamper with a RNG with no visible evidence whatsoever, bypassing the majority of reverse engineering and chip validation efforts of the past decade. It would be more difficult to leverage this sort of flaw into something remotely exploitable, but that is hardly the point. This specific RNG was chosen for the attack because the design is readily available, which is what most security researchers probably desire in their cryptosystems.

The overall problem is that a transparent and strong system can have brittleness introduced in a completely undetectable manner, weakening it in predictable ways. This is right up spook alley.

I suggest you simply pseudocode on paper a mark and sweep algorithm.

OK, so I was going to respond by saying "why are we talking about mark and sweep?", but I checked myself and I'm thinking too much from the viewpoint of the desktop. So let's look at both.

On the desktop, pure mark and sweep isn't very popular, and is mostly used as a component of a more complex GC, like in the final age of a generational collector. The JVM doesn't use it, .Net doesn't use it, PyPy doesn't use it, V8 doesn't use it, Allegro CL doesn't use it, SBCL doesn't use it, Chicken Scheme doesn't use it, Racket doesn't use it, and Glasgow Haskell doesn't use it. The Boehm-Weiser collector for C uses it because it doesn't have a choice. SpiderMonkey uses mark and sweep, but work is underway on other collectors. Perl, (I think) CPython, and Flash use reference counting primarily, with mark-and-sweep to reclaim cycles. Ruby and Lua are the only current systems I could think of that unabashedly use mark-and-sweep. Even counting all of the exceptions, we're still 9 systems with a copying collector vs 7 that use mark-and-sweep. (I would say that dropping Perl/Python/Flash from the count entirely is reasonably fair, which would make it 9-4, and to be 10-3 when SpiderMonkey's generational collector is done.)

So in one sense I want to say that you are off-target when you're talking about mark-and-sweep, because how it behaves as the amount of memory changes is not particularly relevant as the most popular platforms don't use it. What matters is how copying generational collectors (which most of the "don't have it" have some variant of) perform. And for generational collectors, it's absolutely true that they take a lot of memory to perform well. That statement is supported by hard evidence gathered by Matthew Hertz and Emery Berger and published in 2005. If you disagree, I look forward to your study.

(I do see your response here. It's possible that giving too much could lead to further degregation. But 3-5x the memory requirement of a manually-managed version (what people are describing as "what it needs") is supported by the above evidence as well as reasoning about what's going on inside the system.)

On the other hand, that's not the mobile space, which is the primary purpose of the article. For instance, I am not positive about this, but I infer that Davlik uses mark and sweep. (They separate mark bits from the objects because of some memory stuff which I would guess also means they don't move objects.) I can certainly imagine that the GCs in place in mobile apps are less mature and more likely to use mark-and-sweep.

----

However, Hertz and Berger look at mark-and-sweep allocators too, and in overall results mark-and-sweep does worse than the best collector (a 2-generation generational collector with mark-and-sweep old space) and second-best collector (a 2-generation collector with a semispace old space) across the entire range of memory sizes tested. In fact, all collectors tested (5 in total, vs two versions of manual allocation) Get nearly monotically better as you increase available memory; and that result holds even for the individual benchmarks (whereas the relative order of how good the collectors are can vary; in some, mark-and-sweep is the best at low memory overheads).

I'm not going to claim the benchmarks are the best or all-inclusive, but that paper is still by far the best analysis I've seen of performance of manual vs automatic memory management. So when it says that performance gets better as you provide more memory, it'll take rather more than someone asserting on /. to convince me otherwise (no offense).

* memory management is explicit [merriam-webster.com] -- what does this mean?

Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management
Automatic vs. Explicit Memory Management: Settling the debate

* deterministic [merriam-webster.com] -- what does this mean?

I thought it was self evident. Here is a discussion of the matter.

* endemic [merriam-webster.com] use of a garbage collector... -- what does this mean?

Pervasive would be a better word. Languages that make garbage collected allocations for most or all things. For example in Java, aside from primitives, all allocations conceptually occur on the a garbage collected heap.

reference-counted heap objects

Reference counting: counting the number of references to an object.
Heap: an arena of memory maintained by a memory allocator. Also CPUs typically have no knowledge of how software manages heaps. You may be thinking of virtual memory
Objects: object in the generic sense of some amount of memory managed on a heap. These lecture notes show the same usage. The editors of this page also use the word 'object' in exactly the same manner when discussing pointers. It's not that hard to follow.

Putting it together we have objects on a heap for which reference counts are maintained; reference-counted heap objects.

"exchange" heap -- what does this mean?
* "local" heap -- what does this mean?

The link I provide to Patrick Walton's blog would get you there. Also, there is documentation, Sorry if discussing a new programming language involves terms you haven't heard. Computing can be like that sometimes.

(note: there is only one "heap" on most CPU architectures, so now we have added abstraction)

Now you are definitely confusing heaps and virtual memory. There are usually many, possibly thousands of heaps on a system at any given time with many distinct implementations of which the CPU is entirely ignorant. Memory allocators and virtual memory are different things.

* via an "owned" pointer -- what does this mean?

Similar to a C++ auto_ptr or unique_ptr. Again, the link I provided would get you there.

* wild pointers -- what does this mean?

Dangling pointer and wild pointer are synonomous.

Use of the exchange heap is exceptional and explicit yet immediately available when necessary -- what does this mean?

I provided a link directly to a discussion of this.

Memory "management" is reduced to efficient stack pointer manipulation -- uhh, what? the language sits around modifying content at %esp and %ebp along with some offsets? sounds far from efficient)

Incrementing a decrementing stack pointer registers is very efficient. Offsets are computed at compile time and the instructions typically require one CPU cycle and no memory access, given a naive model of a CPU. These techniques are a ancient and ubiquitous. Sorry you weren't familiar with them.

or simple, deterministic destruction -- what does this mean?

Others seem

Nah. Urban legend.

FWIW: If you read WP2 & WP3, I think they are just attempting to read some of the SRAM from inside the GPU for a source of what they call a "PUF" (physically uncloneable function). They hope to sprinkle some error-correction code and some magic crypto dust the uninitialized SRAM pattern to create a number that will be useable for attestation (basically to assure that it is the machine that you think it is).

This idea isn't new. A quick google search shows papers about using SRAMs as both PUFs and Random numbers going back in 2007 (they called them FERNs) http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kevinfu/papers/holcomb-FERNS-RFIDSec07.pdf

The major problems with this stuff is that...

Once you power up your system, something is gonna want to use that SRAM (GPU vendors aren't in the business of leaving big chunks of SRAM that they don't use for researchers to discover and use), so you have to take a snapshot after powerup, but before someone wants to use the GPU. This makes many avenues of attack available (e.g., you have to put that fingerprint somewhere, because the GPUs will shortly trounce all over it).

Secondly is the stability issue. Although some parts of the uninitialized SRAM is going to be statistically stable (power-up to 1 or 0 pretty reliably), some others are going to be pretty random (in fact other researchers are looking for highly unstable bits in SRAM powerup to be able to extract a random number for a nonce). Across temperature, and over time as the parts age, these bits will change (some stable ones will become random and some random ones may exhibit a strong bias one way or another). Without extensive characterization over age and temperature, this would be pretty unstable to use as a definitive ID.

Third, when GPU vendors notice that people are accessing SRAM before initalization, they will start wiping the memory on boot. This is to prevent this third-party ID usage model (because nobody wants to repeat the intel CPUID fiasco) and because now that GPUs are being used for general-purpose computing, any type of SRAM retention issues across power-up is a security risk. On a related note, there are in fact there are other researchers attempting to use SRAM retention to create a reasonably secure clock (google TARDIS: Time and Remanence Decay in SRAM).

If I had to speculate, about the only reasonable model for this (assuming the GPU vendors don't co-opt it or shut them out) is to create some sort of "ticket" system. Distill a timestamp and a challenge value with the PUF (and maybe even the "random" part of the SRAM for salt) down to a ticket using some cryptomagic. That ticket would be valid for a while, and you'd have to create a new ticket before it expired. Over a short enough time and temperature regime, a security system might be convinced that this temporary ticket is an acceptable substitute credential, but it would not really replace an actual authentication technique.

This stuff has also been researched extensively for 5 years or so. I don't know what these folks are really bringing to the table (other than they are looking at GPUs for big blocks of SRAM). Why be so secret? Maybe it's because they want to keep that funding coming. A quick google showed someone in 2009 even wrote an undergrad paper on the subject of SRAM/PUFs... http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-031709-141338/unrestricted/mqp_sram.pdf

Relevant - a related but different approach: AutoMan, a language for programming with people: http://www.automan-lang.org/

AutoMan is a platform for integrating human-based and digital computation. It allows programmers to "program with people", which appear to the programmer to be ordinary function calls. AutoMan automatically handles details like quality control, payment, and task scheduling. It is currently implemented as a domain-specific language embedded in Scala (a language that runs on any machine with a Java Virtual Machine), and uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a backend.

Technical paper at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/AutoMan-UMass-CS-TR-2012-013.pdf, to appear at OOPSLA 2012.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors.)

I'm not referring to searching through the data to make a detection, yes computers are awesome at that. Just making the measurements over an appreciable fraction of the sky with such accuracy would take a long time. It has its applications, for example when observing the space shuttle (you only need to search a small volume around the shuttle) or when tracking ballistic missles for interception (which is the original purpose for this radar system). So to obtain useful update rates (say, once every minute) at such high resolution, you will need an astronomically large number of radars. If you scale back the resolution, though, this is achievable, and has in fact already been implemented. Disclaimer: I was peripherally involved in the CASA project.

Many myths here.

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
http://skepticalscience.com/solar-cycles-global-warming.htm

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels. The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels. These energies are well intentioned, however they are misplaced.

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

People have forgotten their environmental basics and in their zeal have created a self feeding hype machine. Scheduled catastrophes kept turning out to be false alarms. The problem is that this is causing a loss of credibility in scientists and science. People need to be concerned about pollution, for the sake of fighting pollution.

Were spending so much time worrying about whether or not the concrete being poured for a windmill is going to have the proper carbon offset. As a result were forgetting about bigger things like rampant unregulated coal power plants in China and the smelting of old electronics by hand in Africa.

We need to get back to science, back to fighting pollution and away from the hype.

bq. but the pro-science side has data much longer than 100 years

And here it is, pages 4-8,12-16

My students implemented this as a class project: http://plasma.cs.umass.edu/emery/grad-systems-project-1. One month, 100% of the bytecodes.

Holding contrarian views is a great way to feel superior, until someone points to evidence that you are wrong. Variola (smallpox) virus can survive years, even decades under good conditions. The correspondence about the plans to distribute blankets to indians does exist if you care to enlighten yourself.

Obviously this is a problem that has been looked at by hundreds of engineers and scientists, and this is the first group to successfully apply this technique; and all we can muster is a collective circle jerk trying to sound smart.

This is the first group of scientists besides thousands of undergraduate chemists every year who take a physical chemistry class and had to use Spartan calculate bandgap and relaxation times. Sorry, there's nothing cool about the computational work in this paper whatsoever, all the novelty is in what they made.

Get your dad on R for statistical analysis. Even if you love to program (and I do), doing it in C can be a grind. R, like Perl and Ruby, has a HUGE library which is dead simple to use (just about as easy to use as RubyGems), and very high quality. Plots are easy to do and look beautiful (especially if you use Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 library). We use it in our department because when it comes time to do the analysis, we want to be focusing on the math, not whether we have some null pointer dereference hiding somewhere. If you taught yourself Scala and Erlang, then R will be a piece of cake.

Much of the early concern regarding climate change was from the Mann (and later, Briffa and Jones) "hockey stick", which used a single bristlecone pine tree as the basis for temperature reconstructions.

Even the very first of the Hockey Stick papers, Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley & Malcolm K. Hughes, NATURE 1998, used a lot more than a single species of tree.

We use a multiproxy network consisting of widely distributed highquality
annual-resolution proxy climate indicators, individually
collected and formerly analysed by many palaeoclimate researchers
(details and references are available: see Supplementary Information).
The network includes (Fig. 1a) the collection of annualresolution
dendroclimatic, ice core, ice melt, and long historical
records used by Bradley and Jones6 combined with other coral, ice
core, dendroclimatic, and long instrumental records.

(And the portfolio of proxies has been extended considerably in the last 13 years.)

Did that data set consider migratory patterns, or herding of local sheep/cows/yaks/whathaveyou? That alone could skew the results heavily one way or another. This is why you want to release ALL your data, because other scientists might find other causalities or variables in your data/models that you didn't originally anticipate.

On the other hand, if people are going to ignore your paper, and make up patently false reasons why it is questionably, there's little to be gained from giving them more data to ignore.

Rather than demand acceptance of a theory, it's best to provide the data, welcome the skeptics, and use ALL the data to show what you did, why you did it, and what conclusions you reached.

And if the ""skeptics" that you've welcomed misrepresent your work, and claim things such as you have here, do you still welcome them?

I'd be inclined to tell them to sit down and shut up.

Don't forget these:

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know

Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)

NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/

If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

Various Roller Coaster Simulators

Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)

Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Don't forget these:

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know

Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)

NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/

If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

Various Roller Coaster Simulators

Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)

Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

I was just reviewing this stuff a bit, and came across this paper which is just as interesting and relevant (PDF file): CRAMM: Virtual Memory Support for Garbage-Collected Applications (Ting Yang, Emery D. Berger, Scott F. Kaplan, J. Eliot B. Moss).

But hey, Feudalism 2.0 is fun if you're part of the nobility, so I expect it to continue on its way.

And feudalism has never been free market.

Here's a paper from 2007 (two years after the one we're discussing) demonstrating how to mask your skew: Skewmask: Frustrating Clock Skew Fingerprinting Attempts

this was done by under grads from umass 6 yrs ago. I have no Idea if this was the first time it was done, but big deal
http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/sdp/sdp04/goeckel/

I'm pretty sure people who are moving about will not die.

The families of athletes who have suddenly died during training or competition would disagree with you.

I'd say it's closer to the older days than you think. I would argue that plenty of laws are passed just to get people into prisons. It may not be blatant, but consider our prison population per capita and how many non-violet offenders we have incarcerated. However, I hope that is unrelated to our use of prison labor.

And I would say look at how many nonviolent offenders that are incarcerated that are also forced to work. It's almost negligible if you discount the one who volunteer.

While yes, most prison labor is volunteer(as-in, they have a choice), but they are not just completing tasks that the prison or state need done. They are also getting paid. Though the prison gets a cut, and the wages are traditionally VERY low. So it doesn't especially offset the cost of housing the prisoner, but it gives the hiring company an incredible profit compared to hiring minimum wage workers.

No, hte company will pay a premium wage, more like hiring a temp worker instead of a full blown worker. The state picks up or forgives certain taxes and so on because making criminal into good workers is part of a healthy rehabilitation process. Make no mistake, setting up shop in a prison is not the same as moving to some third world country as far as labor savings go.

I have some personal experience in this area too. I hired the local (county) jail facility to do trash cleanup after a benefit I helped organized. (a mother and father of two were killed by a drunk driver and the surviving children would have been separated and placed in foster care if the only known next of kin- a disabled grandmother on a fixed income- couldn't find a means to support them). Anyways, it costs us close to $12.00 an hour per inmate plus the costs of sheriffs and guards at overtime rates to get about 40 inmates out to a 20 acre plot and dump trash cans, pick up litter, and help deconstruct two of the stages. My understanding is that the inmates only received about $3.50 an hour from the sheriff's department. Thankfully, a 3 local law-firms picked up the tab for that and it didn't come out of the collections.

Granted, this is a local experience but my understanding is that it's a standard practice.

Up in washington, they're making US armed forces uniforms[1]. Apparently even Victoria's Secret clothing is being assembled by some prison labor now. And the practice is growing. The United States prison population is potentially an incredible underutilized workforce and can make some serious profits for the companies that take advantage of it.

This may be true, but I don't think it means what you want it to mean. Federal law requires that prison labor (prison industries) operate the prison shops that no single private industry shall be forced to bear an undue burden of competition from the products of the prison workshops, and to reduce to a minimum competition with private industry or free labor. Rules set forth on this require that inmates or goods and services in direct competition with open markets (not goods or services provided to the government) can't be sold unless a prevailing wage is paid to the inmate.

I have heard rumors and stories of ways to get around this though.

However, we really need to be careful of the profit motive in using prison labor. Would it be benificial to society as a whole to lock up more of our population to have a cheaper workforce? Should judges be provided with more kickbacks for longer sentences for viable workers? It is a potential downward spiral.

I don't think that happens. Certainly the federal laws suggest it shouldn't be happening.

As far as judges are concerned, they should be open and disclose all contributions or connections with anyone related to any of these prison industries. If there is a connection, th

I'm saying that 20% overhead for dynamic memory management is typical of even well-designed programs. Very few programs can take good advantage of efficient bulk-deallocating arenas/regions, and research has shown custom memory pooling schemes are generally no better than malloc/free.

Robert Heinlein said it best, albeit indirectly. Grok this and you will understand all human life.

the threats have been demonstrated in the lab by a fella named Kevin Fu

It should also be mentioned that Prof. Kevin Fu was recently named Technology Review's 2009 Innovator of the Year for this work.

He made an excellent topic choice.

On the other hand, it does look he'd be happy as a baker .

We not only support it (somewhat), but we offer our on spin-off on Ubuntu distro!

http://linux.oit.umass.edu/

As an aside, if you really think Gitmo is the only establishment of it's kind operated by the United States, I have a CIA plane loaded full of cocaine and cash I'd like to sell you.

Yes, the American prison system is getting pretty nasty lately.

If I'm not mistaken, the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. In fact, in 1971, Stephen Cook established a direct proof of its NP-completeness, which basically introduced the whole idea of NP-complete problems to theoretical computer science. Well, Sudoku is yet another game that is basically NP-complete as well (PDF link), and as might expected from their both being NP-complete, Sudoku problems are reducible to SAT problems (see here, also a PDF link), and presumably vice-versa. My guess is that perhaps the same people who get kicks out of solving Sudoku puzzles might have almost as much fun with this game as well.

Why do you insist on posting your own fantasies as if they had anything to do with the truth?

I live in "cooler climates". No, growers do not add CO2 to increase temperatures. Greenhouses being closed environments trap all the temp they need through sunlight on its own - if anything you ventilate the extra heat since you don't want to damage the plants.

http://www.umass.edu/umext/floriculture/fact_sheets/greenhouse_management/jb_ventilation.htm

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm

Most people like to engage in debates on forums to learn something new. I'm not really sure why you're here.

http://www.umass.edu/bursar/explanation.html

e.g. "various agencies providing services and activities for students"

When you go to college, you pay fees for a ton of things you probably don't use already. Do you think you will use 200 of those RSOs? Probably not. Adding the (very small) collective licensing fee would probably be used much more often than RSOs #78-126.

Bottom line is, you already pay for a ton of things you don't use. Collective licensing -- everyone who wants music could benefit from.

Indeed, global temperature records taken from ice cores, tree rings, and lake deposits, have shown that the Earth was actually slightly cooler (by 0.03 degrees Celsius) during the 'Medieval Warm Period' than in the early- and mid-20th century.[4]

Though I suppose reading to the second paragraph would be too muck to ask, there's also the facts that the heating (around 1 degree celcius) was localised around Europe, and various sources point to a significant cooling in other parts of the world at the time.