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The difference is this: in the United States, prison labor may only be used to produce goods and services for the state. It is illegal for prison-produced goods to compete on the open market and it is illegal for prisons to profit off anyone but other governmental agencies.

Nope, no longer true. Excerpt:

• Oregon prisoners sew jeans called "Prison Blues." Inmates are paid anywhere from 28 cents to $8.00/hour, but 80 percent of the higher wage is withheld.
• In 1994, a local prison secretly slipped Chicago-area prisoners into a Toys R Us store to stock shelves. Union protests stopped it.
• Southern California youth offenders book flights for TWA.
• Private companies hire prisoners in Ohio, California and other states to do data processing inside prisons.

Actually there is an open viewer for molecules. It's called Rasmol http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/ and many source files can be downloaded from their site.

... between precision and humanity would be feasible.

An analogous study comes to mind. To estimate to what degree sexuality is determined by nature as opposed to nurture, Simon LeVay identified through experiment a segment of the primate brain that influences sexual behaviour (to read about monkeys with intimacy issues and find a rather arbitrary image of Homer Simpson's head, go to http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~kripston/homosexual ity/Biological.html. The page on the genetic study of homosexuality found at the bottom may also be of interest).

Various studies found the size of the anterior hypothalamus in male homosexuals and female heterosexuals to be smaller than that of male heterosexuals'. The conditions of upbringing prove significant as well. If one identical twin is homosexual, there is roughly a 52% chance the other is also gay, a far cry from a 1 to 1 correlation, even after allowing a generous amount of room for error due to other factors.

Did I have a point?
Oh yes, I remember. By analyzing the similarities of boy and girl scientists' gray matter, we might hope to find some common ground that differs from the shared characteristics of boy and girl hairdressers'. If we could then track down a good number of identical twins with respectively unique academic interests and upbringings, we could begin to make assumptions about the effect the latter (nurture) has on the former (aptitude and interest in various topics).

"...Uh... but how does that help? That's the same experiment Rich0 just described, except yours will be far less precise as you are relying on the subjects' subjective descriptions of their childhoods whereas the subjects in the first study are 'prepared' and documented in a laboratory setting,"

This is true! I have quite unabashedly wasted time, both yours and mine, for the modest qualifications I made to the previous comment, but such qualifications ought to reduce the total number of psychopaths and/or lawsuits resulting from the study, and I could think of no more entertaining thing to occupy myself with past 4 AM. We will also be able to walk away knowing a little bit more about biology, assuming we were in fact able to isolate the regions of the brain that are responsible for this development. If not.. well.. we may proceed with the forced breeding. For science!

The same thing is happening in western Massachusetts to connect The Five Colleges (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople

Maybe someday we'll have real turkipedes.

That's simply not true. What you are referring to is called "endianess", which is the way the bytes are arranged in 16 or more bit words. There are two possible ways to store the bytes of a 16 bit word: least significant byte first (called little endian), and most significant byte first (called big endian).
The bits in a byte are always numbered from 0 to 7, with 0 being the least significant and 7 being the most significant bit.
Also, bits on physical lines (like address or data busses) are always numbered sequentially, and it therefore impossible to wire things up backwards because of endianness (it is, however, still possible with pure stupidity).

Endianness can be a problem, however, in computer networks; for example when transmitting a 32 bit word from an Intel machine to a PowerPC. The two machines differ in endianess (the Intel being little endian and the PowerPC being big endian), which means the byteorder is different, which can lead to incorrect values for the word after transmission, if the programmers don't take care to convert every word to network endianess before transmitting and from network to machine endianess after receiving.

For more information: http://www.cs.umass.edu/~verts/cs32/endian.html

• The news media are beholden to sponsors, because sponsors pay the bills.
• Reporting "fact" is a political process.
• Journalists are sometimes incorrect, and sometimes lazy.
• The news media only stay in business as long as people are watching, people watch only when the news is "interesting". Sponsors only pay when people are watching (see #1).

In the end, what we get is a horribly distorted view of the present state of the world. I TA'ed a class about this, and here's an excellent student project that dealt with precisely this issue. These two obviously aced the course.

There's a lot of good reading (and viewing) out there on this subject: Trust Us, We're Experts, The Myth of the Liberal Media, Manufacturing Consent, and of course, the classic (fictional but relevant) 1984.

You need to WORK to stay informed. You need to read and watch a diverse variety of media. If you can read a foreign language, this helps. But even when you do all of these, it's easy to get burned. Look at the issue of WMD's in Iraq. Very few people knew the facts because the facts weren't being reported.

In other words, relatively insignificant - right?

+0.4 kelvin increase in temperature is considered significant evidense of global warming.

Why should +2 watts/m^2 of extra radiation be considered insignificant?

The applet here suggests that a +2 watts/m^2 would raise the temperature +0.11 kelvin. That more than 25% of the +0.4 kelvin increase. That's hardly insignificant.

Consider also that the applet given doesn't take into account a multiplier effect due to the extra heating of water which increases water vapor in the atmosphere (water vapor is by far the biggest green house gas - even more than CO2). The additional heating of the ocean by this extra radiation is going to increase the amount of water vapor in the atmostphere, enhancing the greehouse effect.

Climate models assume that, for each 1 degree increase in warming due to CO2, water vapor creates a 4 degree increase in warming.

So assuming this multiplier, +0.11 becomes an increase of +0.55.

Of course it's much more complicated than this, but +2 watts/m^2 isn't necessarily insignificant.

Amail, Bmail, Cmail, Dmail, Email, Fmail, Gmail, Hmail, Imail, Jmail, Kmail, Lmail, Mmail, Nmail, Omail, Pmail, Qmail, Rmail, Smail, Tmail, Umail, Vmail, Wmail, Xmail, Ymail, and Zmail

Sorry.

UMass Amherst has the following: "Wireless Airspace Policy"

Typical right-wing attitude - people who are too intelligent or informed are a risk, because they might not fall for their lies. I think this says it all, really. It's the coalition of the dumb.

When it comes to influencing the vote with emotions Bush and Cheney take the cake.

A good article on this same subject is Cheney Speaks to the Reptile Brain by Thom Hartmann.

It of course applies to all candidates but is very harmful when even mentioning 9/11. Remember when Mike Tyson took a chunk out of Holyfield's ear? Well, later Tyson said that the head-butting and bad calls made him remember another time that it had happened and he snapped. It's called an "Amygdala Hijacking", a phrase I believe coined by Daniel Goleman.

You develop emotional responses by experience. Now that we've all gone through 9/11 every time it's mentioned we become overwhelmed with the same emotions that we experienced at that time. That is why it was mentioned during the Republican National Convention so much (*).

Good articles on the subject:

How the neuroscience revolution can change your practice.
and...
Emotional Intelligence - Stop Amygdala Hijackings

(*) Notice "Osama" was not mentioned once.

I wrote a paper about this, and problems with custom (special-purpose) memory allocators in general, called Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation (OOPSLA 2002). In it, I also describe a new memory allocation scheme, called reaps . This is a hybrid of regions (pools) and heaps that acts just like pools except you can still free individual objects.

In fact, for a case study, I put reaps into Apache (adding a ap_pfree call), and showed how using reaps made it simple to incorporate a piece of existing C code (namely, bc) into Apache. Without reaps, an invocation consumed 7.4MB of memory (since every free had to be disabled). With reaps, 240KB.

I did send a message to the Apache folks about this a while back, but they balked because the implementation is in C++, rather than C (developed with my Heap Layers infrastructure)...

-- emery

Emery Berger
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

I wrote a paper about this, and problems with custom (special-purpose) memory allocators in general, called Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation (OOPSLA 2002). In it, I also describe a new memory allocation scheme, called reaps . This is a hybrid of regions (pools) and heaps that acts just like pools except you can still free individual objects.

In fact, for a case study, I put reaps into Apache (adding a ap_pfree call), and showed how using reaps made it simple to incorporate a piece of existing C code (namely, bc) into Apache. Without reaps, an invocation consumed 7.4MB of memory (since every free had to be disabled). With reaps, 240KB.

I did send a message to the Apache folks about this a while back, but they balked because the implementation is in C++, rather than C (developed with my Heap Layers infrastructure)...

-- emery

Emery Berger
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

I wrote a paper about this, and problems with custom (special-purpose) memory allocators in general, called Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation (OOPSLA 2002). In it, I also describe a new memory allocation scheme, called reaps . This is a hybrid of regions (pools) and heaps that acts just like pools except you can still free individual objects.

In fact, for a case study, I put reaps into Apache (adding a ap_pfree call), and showed how using reaps made it simple to incorporate a piece of existing C code (namely, bc) into Apache. Without reaps, an invocation consumed 7.4MB of memory (since every free had to be disabled). With reaps, 240KB.

I did send a message to the Apache folks about this a while back, but they balked because the implementation is in C++, rather than C (developed with my Heap Layers infrastructure)...

-- emery

Emery Berger
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dyirbal (an Australian Aboriginal language) has four genders. Masculine, feminine, neuter, and edible non-flesh food.

Cherokee and Arabic has three numbers. Not like 1, 2, 3; but, singular, dual, and plural.

Chinese as a spoken language does not exist. Each "dialect" (not an entirely acurate word depending on its intention) is mutually uninteligible when spoken. Hence, may be considered seperate languages. The term dialect is applied to them because they share a common writing system. A Mandarin speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker, but can read a message from the Cantonese speaker easily.

However, most of our (Canada's) Research has gone into underwater exploration. This only makes sense since over 80% of our border is coastline. This is where to look for examples of canadian robotics.

Other examples of advances from canadians is some of the more advanced Meterology satallites that have been designed and developed here in our humble country.

For some references you can check out..
The ISE Laval University
and a list of others

Here is an alternative explanation of the connection between extraterrestrial life and ammonia.

Google for Tomasulo's algorithm.

My guess is that the rings have a certain falloff? The 1 km thickness may be for objects worth measuring; some are large enought to destroy the craft, there are even "moons" in the rings: bodies small enough not to be broken by the Roche Limit. I would guess that small dust particles would make a noticeable plasma puff at those speeds and that the dust stretches vertically much more than the 1 km "standard" ring size.

This reminds me of Heap Layers and others; they both try to reinvent malloc()/new().

According to your flawed stastics they may be more educated, but according to my flawed stastics they have an average lower IQ

It was probably as easy as typing in "C++ for Java" (since he's looking to learn C++, NOT Java), but taking time to think it through would have taken too much time, wouldn't it?

But, if he had typed in "C++ for Java", as I did, here's a useful link.

It's probably in everyone's interest to give out patches to all, even those that Micro$oft knows are illegal copies, as it probably impacts the spread of viruses such as Sasser more than it does their pocketbook.

You make one horrible suggestion and one great one. The great one is to address allocation performance problems by substituting a better allocator (e.g., Doug Lea's). This is a good idea for lots of reasons. It takes almost no time and involves no source code changes, and leverages heavily-used robust code.

The horrible suggestion is to roll your own memory manager. This approach causes numerous software engineering problems -- consider what happens if you inadvertently call free on one of your custom-allocated objects. Worse, it often yields no performance improvement compared to DLmalloc. See my OOPSLA 2002 paper Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation for a full analysis. One of the morals of the story is that you should use DLmalloc instead of freelists, which yield neither cycle-level nor locality performance advantages.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy ot the University of Massachusetts in Amherst undertook a similar project a few years ago.

What makes their project unique is that the design is NOT a replica of Stonehenge but, rather, a reconceptualization of the calendar wheel based on a modern understanding of astronomy.

Check it out here.

How many times have you heard the phrase "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"?

A major problem is that even though geeky kids are attracted into the "elite" undergraduate universities, most of their professors don't think that it is their responsibility to mentor and encourage their students in a systematic and regular way.

For example, check out this complaint of Stanford University at
http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932 , which reveals that 78% of the professors don't participate in the advising system, professors are giving lackluster lectures, and Stanford is fudging its "successful alumni" lists to give misleading impressions about its quality.

A couple of months ago, I decided to examine the undergraduate alma maters of Stanford's one hundred electrical engineering faculty members, and found only three of them, including a part-time consulting professor, had actually gone to Stanford as an undergraduate. Many of them had gone to public or foreign institutions.

Which seems upside down: Many of the "best and brightest" (despite Stanford's ranking of 5 or 6, or whatever) are attracted to a university where professorial research is emphasized over teaching to the detriment of the students. Professors only have a finite amount of time, so these students who are the most eager to learn, and are paying a premium dollar for tuition, are getting a half-baked education.

Meanwhile, professors devoted to teaching are stuck in the smaller lesser known liberal arts colleges, and scoffed as "those who can't do, teach." These professors end up getting "not-necessarily-the-best-and-brightest", and even quite possibly are stuck with the "dumb and the dumbest".

So what ends up happening is that the best possible high school candidates for research end up getting turned off to the research fields. I know a guy who majored in physics at Stanford and works at a bank, while a Stanford chemical engineering major worked as a chef cooking food for one of the Stanford eating clubs after graduating. I know a chemistry major from Harvard who is working in finance -- and this was a very bright guy who had gone to one of the most prestigious prep schools in the United States.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation has shown that Harvey-Mudd College sends more people per student to graduate school that any of the Ivy League universities. Who would want to go to a college called "mudd", and who has even heard of it? Purdue University has produced almost 20 astronauts, but I'd never heard of it. If these colleges can train the next generation of scientists from a pool of "not-necessarily the best-and-brightest", think of what could happen if they did have "the best-and-brightest", ie students with 1600 SAT scores and National Science Talent Search awards under their belts?

Even Jack Welch the former president of General Electric, admits in his autobiography Straight from the Gut that it's a good thing he went to the lesser-respected University of Massachussetts at Amherst, while a brighter and more capabable schoolmate of his went to MIT. The schoolmate was completely devastated by his experience at MIT and ended up dropping out and never going back to any university. Jack Welch ended up doing pretty well, earning a doctorate and then millions (if not billions) of dollars as the president of General Electric for twenty years. (If you don't believe me, READ HIS BOOK. Note that I didn't say "Buy his book"; get it at the library if you don't want to make him richer!)

The college mismatch between students and professors would be a comedy if it were fiction. But since it's true, it ranks as a tragedy.

"That which ye sow, ye reap."

If a research university is going to do research, than it should do so completely and abandon any pretense to "teaching" its undergraduate student body. "Those who can, do; those w

How many times have you heard the phrase "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach"?

A major problem is that even though geeky kids are attracted into the "elite" undergraduate universities, most of their professors don't think that it is their responsibility to mentor and encourage their students in a systematic and regular way.

For example, check out this complaint of Stanford University at http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932, which reveals that 78% of the professors don't participate in the advising system, professors are giving lackluster lectures, and Stanford is fudging its "successful alumni" lists to give misleading impressions about its quality.

A couple of months ago, I decided to examine the undergraduate alma maters of Stanford's one hundred electrical engineering faculty members, and found only three of them, including a part-time consulting professor, had actually gone to Stanford as an undergraduate. Many of them had gone to public or foreign institutions.

Which seems upside down: Many of the "best and brightest" (despite Stanford's ranking of 5 or 6, or whatever) are attracted to a university where professorial research is emphasized over teaching to the detriment of the students. Professors only have a finite amount of time, so these students who are the most eager to learn, and are paying a premium dollar for tuition, are getting a half-baked education.

Meanwhile, professors devoted to teaching are stuck in the smaller lesser known liberal arts colleges, and scoffed as "those who can't do, teach." These professors end up getting "not-necessarily-the-best-and-brightest", and even quite possibly are stuck with the "dumb and the dumbest".

So what ends up happening is that the best possible high school candidates for research end up getting turned off to the research fields. I know a guy who majored in physics at Stanford and works at a bank, while a Stanford chemical engineering major worked as a chef cooking food for one of the Stanford eating clubs after graduating. I know a chemistry major from Harvard who is working in finance -- and this was a very bright guy who had gone to one of the most prestigious prep schools in the United States.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation has shown that Harvey-Mudd College sends more people per student to graduate school that any of the Ivy League universities. Who would want to go to a college called "mudd", and who has even heard of it? Purdue University has produced almost 20 astronauts, but I've never heard of it. If these colleges can train the next generation of scientists from a pool of "not-necessarily the best-and-brightest", think of what could happen if they did have "the best-and-brightest", ie students with 1600 SAT scores and National Science Talent Search awards under their belts?

Even Jack Welch, the former president of General Electric, admits in his autobiography Straight from the Gut that it's a good thing he went to the lesser-respected University of Massachussetts at Amherst, while a brighter and more capabable schoolmate of his went to MIT. The schoolmate was completely devastated by his experience at MIT and ended up dropping out and never going back to any university. Jack Welch ended up doing pretty well, earning a doctorate and then millions (if not billions) of dollars as the president of General Electric for twenty years. (If you don't believe me, READ HIS BOOK. Note that I didn't say "Buy his book"; get it at the library if you don't want to make him richer!)

The college mismatch between students and professors would be a comedy if it were fiction. But since it's true, it ranks as a tragedy.

"That which ye sow, ye reap."

If a research university is going to do research, than it should do so completely and abandon any pretense to "teaching" its undergraduate stude

Note, however, that communities in New England (where drinking water comes from groundwater) are looking into things like calcium magnesium acetate instead of sodium chloride. (Actually, I believe they're using a 'safer' formulation already in CT, but no idea if it's CMA or what.) Groundwater is actually less of a concern than metal fatigue; nobody likes their car rusting out.

I assume they still use the cheap stuff for the giant stretches of midwestern highway, but I could be wrong.

http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~thoureau/japanese.h tml

Having taken japanese for two years, I can confirm that it is all true.

That's right! Humans who have experienced similar transformations are all living happier lives!

Jump back in your SUV, nothing to see here, move along.

Because the law isn't always the best yardstick of right and wrong. Currently, the laws that govern this kind of behavior are the result of some of the most intense lobbying ever. They're overblown.

I believe in checks and balances in the system. Having a single unilateral entity that answers to nobody is not how the system is supposed to work. Currently the RIAA/MPAA are sidestepping due process with the help of a senator, Fritz Hollings. Do a little research on him. Search Google for his nickname, "The Senator from Disney", so named because of his being bankrolled by the entertainment industry. Here's an example of the kind of nonsense this guy is trying to make into law.

As an example of the way things work now, let's say you share a music file. The RIAA logs on to the network and finds "this IP is sharing this file". They then bully your ISP into divulging their records, and then threaten to sue you for millions, and "allow" you to settle for thousands.

The FBI currently doesn't have that much leeway in pursuing criminals. Think about that. Now consider that they're still lobbying. What's next? They've already asserted that if the music went to your account, you are responsible. Even if it wasn't you. They've busted grandparents who's grandkids downloaded music. What if your machine gets a virus and sets itself up as a file swapping node?

Another problem with the RIAA, is that they fail to meet their established purpose. They are supposed to facilitate music and protect musicians, but instead do the exact opposite. They're essentially an extortion racket, and have been since long before the first MP3 was burned.

If you'd like to know about what a nest of criminals the RIAA are, read this article by Steve Albini. It's a must-read about how the music industry works. They're a protection racket.

And with the exception of Metallica (who, as everyone knows were replaced by pod people replicants late in '97), how many musicians can you name that are in favor of the RIAA's legal thrashings about? If the RIAA is helping people, wouldn't those people stand up and say thank you? The silence is deafening.

Do a little research. Here's a good example, an interview with Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame. It's a good read, especially where music executives fly him to Jamaica, get him higher than a kite and try to get him to sign legal documents.

Make no mistake, the RIAA are scum. And the fact that their lobbying has given them powers that compare well with the NSA should make you worry. It does me - and I don't share music. It gives me the creeps when criminals get that kind of power.

Weaselmancer

I've spent the last 5 years writing code. I've gone back to school to finish my degree. I hate writing code, but I enjoy mathematical logic. I like the rigour of foundational mathematics and theoretical CS.

Unfortunately, CS courses don't transfer well, and I don't feel like paying large ammounts to private school to finish non-major coursework (unfortunately I can't transfer non-major coursework in from another university at my old school).

I hate writing stupid code. I hate paying someone for the privilege of writing trivial classroom code. I'm working without the degree, so a math/physics double major with a minor in CS will work for me. Frankly, no one cares what your major was in IT. CS-based math courses (theory of computation|algorithms|discrete math) tend to lack rigour. My experience is that they often stop sort of proof. How can you study graph theory without proofs? Erdos and Dykstra are rolling over in their graves! CS is the one field you can teach yourself.

Do you want to be in IT or do you like applying computers to scientific problems? Frankly, physics, chemistry, and biology have computational subfields. There are even a few bioinfomatics programs for undergraduates. You might find cognitive science or statistics interesting. Heck, many good physics departments offer a computational physics/scientific computing course(s). It just depends.

The other option might be to suffer through a few CS courses, and get a degree in something else and study CS at the graduate level. Most CS departments take people from other disciplines. Math is the best in that regard. Some MIS programs (like CMUs) allow you to focus on non-programming areas and are pretty good. You might like a program like Boston University's "Cognitive and Neural Systems". CalTech has a similar program at the Koch Lab. I even saw a "computational mathematics" program at JHU that required little programming. In fact, some of the best computer scientists are secretly mathematicians. Knuth, (Martin) Davis, Minsky, Ritchie, and many others have PhDs in math.

The little joke among computer scientists is that the best don't often study it. Logicians and combinatorical mathematicians tend to be better with the theory. Engineers are better with hardware. EEs are usually the ones who write device drivers. Heck, who wouldn't want a Claude Shannon or Lofti Zadeh working on CS problems. Frankly, I don't understand the point of modern-day CS. It's not math and it's not quite engineering. I like CS, but I just hate the boring coursework.

If you're still not convinced take a look at "The Feynman Lectures on Computation" and "Feynman and Computation". One of his hobbies was algorithm analysis. The man wasn't just a brilliant physicist. He did ground-breaking work with computers. I was first introduced to analog computation and quantum computation by Richard Feynman's work. He also worked on some deeper computational problems during the Manhattan Project (see "Surely You're Joking" [his memoirs]).

Type analog computation in a search engine and you'll see that this area of CS is done by other other fields. I've been reading about the applications of analog computation and their relation to limits of computation (see Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit). In fact, the future of computing may lie in some analog world. The computer program is math (see An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications). Church's Thesis may prove to be the most valuable piece of 20th century mathematics. In fact, I've seen a few logicians that use LISP code to do mathematical work (like Gregory Chaitin).

Ultimately, I think you need to figure out what you really enjoy doing and find other people who are doing it.

I've spent the last 5 years writing code. I've gone back to school to finish my degree.I hate writing code. I enjoy mathematical logic. I like the rigour of foundational mathematics/theoretical CS.

Unfortunately, CS courses don't transfer well, and I don't feel like paying large ammounts to finish non-major coursework (unfortunately I can't transfer it in from another university) at my old school.

I hate writing stupid code. I hate paying someone for the privilege of writing trivial classroom code. I'm working without the degree, so a math/physics double major with a minor in CS will work for me. Frankly, no one cares what your major was in IT. CS-based math courses (theory of computation|algorithms|discrete math) tend to lack rigour. My experience is that they often stop sort of proof. How can you study graph theory without proofs? Erdos and Dykstra are rolling over in their graves! This may be differ by school. CS is the one field you can teach yourself.

Do you want to be in IT or do you like applying computers to scientific problems? Frankly, physics, chemistry, and biology have computational subfields. There are even a few bioinfomatics programs for undergraduates. You might find cognitive science or statistics interesting. Heck, many good physics departments offer a computational physics/scientific computing course(s). It just depends.

The other option might be to suffer through a few CS courses, and get a degree in something else and study CS at the graduate level. Most CS departments take people from other disciplines. Math is the best in that regard. Some MIS programs (like CMUs) allow you to focus on non-programming areas and are pretty good. You might like a program like Boston University's "Cognitive and Neural Systems". CalTech has a similar program at the Koch Lab. I even saw a "computational mathematics" program at JHU that required little programming. In fact, some of the best computer scientists are secretly mathematicians. Knuth, (Martin) Davis, Minsky, Ritchie, and many others have PhDs in math.

The little joke among computer scientists is that the best don't often study it. Logicians and combinatorical mathematicians tend to be better with the theory. Engineers are better with hardware. EEs are usually the ones who write device drivers. Heck, who wouldn't want a Claude Shannon or Lofti Zadeh working on CS problems. Frankly, I don't understand the point of modern-day CS. It's not math and it's not quite engineering. I like CS, but I just hate the boring coursework.

If you're still not convinced take a look at "The Feynman Lectures on Computation" and "Feynman and Computation". One of his hobbies was algorithm analysis. The man wasn't just a brilliant physicist. He did groundbreaking work with computers. I was first introduced to analog computation and quantum computation by Richard Feynman's work. He also worked on some deeper computational problems during the Manhattan Project (see "Surely You're Joking" [his memoirs]).

Type analog computation in a search engine and you'll see that this area of CS is done by other other fields. I've been reading about the applications of analog computation and their relation to limits of computation (see Neural Networks and Analog Computation:
Beyond the Turing Limit. In fact, the future of computing may lie in some analog world. The computer program is math (see An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications)

The current crop of "anti-cheating" software mostly tries to analyze when a player is playing "too well." This does not solve the underlying flaws in the system.

There are some CS research papers, which are starting to address cheating from a more fundamental (theoretic) point of view. Here's one that applies cryptography to prevent cheating for distributed game protocols:

Cheat-Proof Playout for Centralized and Distributed Online Games

From the SIGNL lab at UMass, Amherst.

Anyone know of any more?

The current crop of "anti-cheating" software mostly tries to analyze when a player is playing "too well." This does not solve the underlying flaws in the system.

There are some CS research papers, which are starting to address cheating from a more fundamental (theoretic) point of view. Here's one that applies cryptography to prevent cheating for distributed game protocols:

Cheat-Proof Playout for Centralized and Distributed Online Games

From the SIGNL lab at UMass, Amherst.

Anyone know of any more?

Well we all know Peugeots are better than a Hindustan Ambadassador.

Why waste mod points on an AC post? It doesn't help or hurt their karma.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding as to the point of the slashdot moderation system.

When you are thinking of moderation in terms of karma and that moderation's effect on that user's karma, you are, at best, misunderstanding the mod system. At worst, you are abusing the mod system.

As a point of reference, I would like to refer to the the first Slashdot troll post investigation . Specifically, I'd like to call you attention to the following point:

Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions

The reverse is also true, as you have demonstrated by your comment.

*BSD is dying. In Linux its called QOS and fair queuing. Friends don't let friends drive corpses.

The Big Dig fiasco was the result of collusion amongts Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the Republican governor's office and the predominantly Democratic Legislature on Beacon Hill. Both the Governor's office and the Legislature made the project a patronage bonanza. When this corruption resulted in fiascos, they simple payed Bechtel and Parsons Brinkerhoff to clean up the messes.

The main reason we still have tolls, and in fact they have gone up, is to finance the Big Dig. Two board members (one Democrat one Republican) at the Mass Turnpike Authority spoke out on Bechtel/BP corruption at the Big Dig, and in fact threatened to terminate their contracts in 2001. Republican Governor Jane Swift quickly fired them and increase tolls on the Mass Pike. Her predecessor's, predecessor Bill Weld (also Republican) at one point considered selling the whole Mass Pike, but instead used it as collateral on $2.7 billion in loans to pay for, you guessed it, the Big Dig.

Painting the Big Dig as partisan issue is ridiculous. It cuts across every level and wing of Mass politics.

I'm not sure what makes people think Romney is so much better than the last three governors, all of whom were Republican. I happen to know he is a lying sack of crap. He openly claimed my rep, who is a prominant Democratic known for his honesty and independence (one of the few who voted to fund the Clean Elections law we passed by referendum) endorsed him, which was an outright lie.

You do raise a good point about the partisan bickering over what to name the northbound Central Artery tunnel. How our Democrats could oppose naming it after the late beloved Silvio Conte is beyond me. Conte worked closely with the House Democratic leadership under Tip O'Neill and endorsed Democrat John Olver as his successor before he died.

You're welcome.

That's a very humanistic position, which suggests that homo sapiens' mental capabilities separate us from the rest of the planet. You're saying that the whole enterprise of linking human destiny with the ecological structure of Gaia [or whatever name you give the "vast, self regulating system" that we live inside of] is annoying to you, as it diminishes us and is out of touch with the people.

Here's a clue: people saying 'save the planet' are doing several things: 1) referring to the ecosphere as it is, not just a playground for hominids, 2) pointing out that ecology is an interconnected web with unforseen dependencies, 3) pointing out that our survival as a species may depend on us curbing our global practice of extinction, 4) stating that our humanistic rise above our environment's demands is a liability when it comes to understanding all that, so humanism needs adjustment.

Better to die on my feet than live on my knees, as the saying goes, and for those connected to a natural environment, a diminished ecosphere is an oppression. In many senses, saving the planet = saving ourselves.

Glaciers are certainly retreating rapidly, worldwide. There are very few growing glaciers. Sea ice is also retreating in both hemispheres.

Looking at a glacier in rapid retreat is striking evidence at least of local warming. If like me you're too lazy, try this or google for 'glacier retreat'. (Note the mountain summit is over a mile square and the image shows ancient ice, not snow.)

When you keep in mind that this is happening everywhere, you have a global warming at high altitudes at least to account for.

I found this page more enlightening.

A much better site for information on learning Japanese is at U. Mass.

Yea, but elle rulez.

I agree that right now MA taxes are not unreasonable. The worst I encountered was a 12% short term Capital Gains tax, but I think even that has been reduced to around 5% in the past couple of years. The income tax fell from 5.9% to 5.3% in the past 5 years.

Did you notice the "optional" tax rate on the MA tax return form this year? Yes that's right, you had the option to be taxed at a higher rate if you wanted to!

..and me. Download and install on WinXP. Point it at my sizable MP3 collection on one of my servers and .. it locks up. Force quit - try again. It locks up.

Kind of makes me feel like this guy.

The knowledge discovery and datamining cup challenge this year was looking at the arxiv.org papers for this sort of analysis - some very interesting results. The Task 4 winnder looked at the structure of the papers as a sort of relational database and uncovered a lot of statistical patterns and metrics that could be quite useful for scientists.