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AGW is not a proven condition in the real world. Selectively run experiments in isolated labs that claim AGW to be a real thing aren't legitimate for claims of open air,

A study from 2000 to 2010 measured the changing forcing of CO2 using spectrometers from the ground in the open air. Here is the abstract:

The climatic impact of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is usually quantified in terms of radiative forcing, calculated as the difference between estimates of the Earth’s radiation field from pre-industrial and present day concentrations of these gases. Radiative transfer models calculate that the increase in CO2 since 1750 corresponds to a global annual mean radiative forcing at the tropopause of 1.82 +/- 0.19 W/m^2. However, despite widespread scientific discussion and modelling of the climate impacts of well-mixed greenhouse gases, there is little direct observational evidence of the radiative impact of increasing atmospheric CO2. Here we present observationally based evidence of clear-sky CO2 surface radiative forcing that is directly attributable to the increase, between 2000 and 2010, of 22 parts per million atmospheric CO2. The time series of this forcing at the two locations—the Southern Great Plains and the North Slope of Alaska—are derived from Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer spectra together with ancillary measurements and thoroughly corroborated radiative transfer calculations. The time series both show statistically significant trends of 0.2 W/m^2 per decade (with respective uncertainties of +/- 0.06 W/m^2 per decade and +/- 0.07W/m^2 per decade) and have seasonal ranges of 0.1–0.2 W/m^2. This is approximately ten per cent of the trend in downwelling longwave radiation. These results confirm theoretical predictions of the atmospheric greenhouse effect due to anthropogenic emissions, and provide empirical evidence of how rising CO2 levels, mediated by temporal variations due to photosynthesis and respiration, are affecting the surface energy balance.

And here is the PDF of the whole paper for your edification: Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010

The dishonest climate change scam's scientists and sheepish laymen alike have another problem to sort out: "NOAA’s GHCN systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler. The thermometers in a sense marched towards the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs."

There's a temperature record from BEST. Maybe you've heard of them. They use every single temperature record they can get their hands on, that's over 39,000 temperature stations. They don't exclude anything with usable data. And yet their findings are substantially the same as NOAA's GHCN. Even if you did the opposite of what you accuse NOAA of doing you still wouldn't find much difference as long as you picked a statistically valid selection of stations.

Have you actually looked?

Building codes for DC metro area:
Virginia building code
DC building code
MD codes (incl building)

Law for DC metro area:
Virginia law
DC Code / law
MD Laws and statutes

Fighting ignorance and BS on slashdot could easily be a full-time job; theres no shortage of people who will talk out of their rear about things they have no information on.

I do know shit about history. In my extensive readings, I realized that the definition of, "Founding Fathers," as suggested by the plural form, was not comprised solely of Thomas Jefferson.

However, read and weep:

While considering slavery a moral travesty, hideous evil, and clearly at odds with his values of the American Revolution and republican virtue, Jefferson owned several hundred slaves at his home at Monticello and surrounding agricultural farms and businesses. In much of his correspondence to friends and business associates, Jefferson laments the immoral institution of slavery and yet describes how it must continue.

Bold is mine.

No, it says natural language is the best way to measure human intelligence.

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cours... "Computing Machinery and Intelligence":

The question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost any one of the fields of human endeavour that we wish to include. We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.

Turing also mentions the strategy of not behaving like a man, which the recent winner may be interpreted as having adopted:

It might be urged that when playing the "imitation game" the best strategy for the
machine may possibly be something other than imitation of the behaviour of a man. This
may be, but I think it is unlikely that there is any great effect of this kind. In any case
there is no intention to investigate here the theory of the game, and it will be assumed that
the best strategy is to try to provide answers that would naturally be given by a man.

Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.

I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".

My example works fine if I'm in a windows world.

From windef.h

typedef int BOOL;

Have a nice day, sheesh next time I'll put an include in the response. I'm also letting the preprocessor do some work here, so my def comes back to 1 which is an int which is fine. Now get off my lawn before I bring out the K&R book.

I still have one mod point left bitches!

I first used VMS in Computing 122, programming in Fortran 77, at uni in 1984

I was thinking the same thing as you. College programming classes in the 80's (at UMBC) consisted of taking your assignment and writing out your logic by hand, signing up for terminal time, then coding it in Fortran.

Three alternatives to RDF used by Google:

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/index.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/05/12/google-support-rdfa-and-microformats/
http://schema.org/

Microsoft uses OData as well as Schema:

http://www.odata.org/

OWL is a way to write schemas, making the logical alternative

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

Popular schemas include everything in this list. Schemas are not necessarily compatible and tools are usually written for a specific schema.

http://139.91.183.30:9090/RDF/Examples.html

> But then again... how smart can they be if they put it into emails.

As Eliot Spitzer (remember him?) once said "Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail."

> let alone had their emails all made public... :P

That is a superfluous redundancy ;). Email, by definition, involves at least 2 endpoints. It'll be in the recipient's inbox (or recipients' inboxes), and who knows how many other places. Assume that every email you write will end up being splattered on the front page of your local newspaper, regardless of whether or not you're doing anything illegal. Consider the situation of former Enron employees, many of whom knew nothing about the financial shenanigans going on at the top http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/02/05/search-the-enron-email-corpus-online/

If the girl herself wants to do it, there's no "victims".

Oh, that old argument.

Look, there are many good arguments for the legalisation of prostitution per se (even for minors, although the person paying for services would then likely be breaking some statutory rape law).

But it's without foundation to bring up the "lots of women want to do it" argument. And "want to do it", whatever the tedious capitalist he-may-be-interned-in-a-factory-but-at-least-he's-not-dying-in-the-fields armchair philosophers will tell you, must not be confused with "is desperate for money and willing to do it because there is no viable alternative". I have not read any evidence that a majority of prostitutes work because they enjoy being prostitutes. Have you?

Stop being a "prostitution is no initiation of force therefore it should be legal therefore it is OK" libertard and instead ask "Is it moral in general to pay for prostitutes?" Don't use the exception of the $xE6/year professional dominatrix with a fancy web site living in Hollywood and servicing the stars. Consider the average prostitute.

If I were a child and were given the choice between your photo and my photo, I would choose your photo.

To support parent's point, here are some oyster shuckers voluntarily earning more money than on a farm they'd never have seen. Unfortunately the Great Depression put so many adults out of work that children were pushed out of these jobs, which is sort of like "lead[ing] to growth in industries that lead to the cushy office jobs we all enjoy today" except to the extent that it's nothing like it.

Before the great capitalist machine was able to put them back in their place, the communist Roosevelt forced FLSA on hard-working American children, preventing them from living out the capitalist dream. Eventually children all had the space to receive an education and the time to explore knowledge further, and that's why China's taken our jobs away.

I received an expensive education through parental support and private scholarships, so don't worry about me. But what I'm asking of you, dear common reader, is that you go back to shucking rather than living beyond your means. It's for the good of Economy, and if some of your offspring survive then their children's children might even benefit in some way. And please, don't look East - everything's so much worse in Marxist Europe, and you'll only be distracted by sympathy for men who have dug their own unionised, healthy, comfortable graves.

Oh! I see what you did there.

Matt: First off, it's critical to understand that Canonical doesn't make decisions at the cost of usability. Ever. Usability is our cardinal virtue.

The Yahoo! deal is not at the cost of usability. Yahoo! is an excellent and wildly popular search engine with many many millions of users. We are very pleased to have reached an agreement that will pump additional revenue into the community compared to the existing default. For those worried about Microsoft's involvement with Yahoo!, it is trivially easy to switch to Google or other alternatives.

Really? So this means that Canonical is convinced that Yahoo is at least as good as Google, Bing, etc.

I'd be interested in seeing what studies support that conclusion because I couldn't find any. I could find some data suggesting the opposite though:

• Blind Search
• uTest

It doesn't really matter what they use it for, now does it? The fact that they choose to use MySQL at all shows they put an amount of faith into it. You don't store data in a database because you want to lose it, right?

But, to answer your question, a quick Google learns Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia store all of their important data in MySQL databases. I know Google doesn't use MySQL for searches, but they do store other stuff. I'm not sure what Nokia does, but they do seem to like MySQL a lot.

Is that all? Excellent! In that case I think that I can cite an example of prior art.

I worked on a system called "MUCH", short for "Many Users Creating Hypermedia", at the University of Liverpool in England back in 1989-1992. Running on UNIX and built in-house by postgraduate students under the guidance of Professor Roy Rada using C and the Andrew Toolkit", the project itself was inspired by Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu". Mention of the project is also made in Prof. Rada's C.V. at his current employer, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Fairly obviously, given the name, MUCH allowed multiple users to collaboratively create SGML based hypermedia documents via an integrated version control mechanism similar to that employed by Wikipedia. These documents, while mostly textual (it was the early 1990's!) besides having the ability to contain both graphical and audio content, could also contain any number of embedded external applets written using the Andrew Toolkit. Some of the proof of concept applications developed while I was there (work continued after I left) included animated clocks, calendars, calculators and other widgets, many of which were interactive.

1) Millions of people could be using something else.

Such as? I mean, billions of people worldwide don't read a newspaper on a daily basis. They just pass along important news orally. Ergo, you argue that newspapers everywhere are worthless, right?

2) "Following" people on Twitter is necessarily superficial compared to other media, which offer the same benefits without the message size limit.

So what's wrong with a tool that lets your friend know what you're up to and vice versa? It's a great way to keep your relationship with friends and family members up to date. Everyone is superficial in a social setting. You are being superficial here on Slashdot. People are superficial by nature, and always will be. Twitter doesn't magically change an otherwise deep and thoughtful person into, "OMG hav u seen britney l8ly? lol."

3) Instant knowledge of world events is available in many media, with Twitter again being more superficial than the others.

Oh yes. You must be talking about that other medium that you lets an entire cadre of friends know about something important that happened to you or that you heard about within minutes of it happening just by quickly shooting off a short message from a computer or cell phone. The non-superficial one.

4) No, it's a means by which protesters disseminate information. It worked in Iran because it's new and the government didn't know how to block it as well as other services at first. It has no inherent advantage in this area.

But you're missing the point that it worked. Better than instant messaging could have. Better than email could have. Better than blogs alone could have. That is important and while the Iranian people may not have achieved their goal, the event will probably earn at least a well-deserved footnote in history. How quickly governments can block Twitter has no bearing on its overall worth. If they control the country's communications, they can block any media.

5) Your point is preposterous. It allows for a deeper understanding of how people use Twitter, sure, but that's not valuable.

To say that there's nothing to be learned about human communication by studying it via a brand-new electronic communications medium is what I call preposterous. Since your so forthright with your opinions, I'm sure you won't mind contacting these researchers and telling them that their work is worthless.

6) And an inferior one at that.

Inferior to what? Concrete examples please, no weasling out with "everything" or "other media" like you have in this post. I'm really curious to know what exactly does Twitter's job better than Twitter. Without being, you know, superficial.

You forgot one.

Sixth - Make sure all doors which have been deemed emergency exits will not open until up to 30 seconds after you push up against them.

I know it sounds stupid.. hell, I agree that it is stupid to make an emergency exit function in such a manner, but the point of your list seems to be enhancing the simulation to accurately reflect reality, and making emergency doors that open instantly doesn't.

If anyone is wondering where I've encountered such doors, just ask anyone staying in the dorms of UMBC.

The value of Wikipedia is it's independence, and I am certain a blind advertising campaign could put sufficient money in Wikipedia's coffers to keep the servers serving without jeapordizing Wikipedia's independence. Wikipedia could structure advertisements in such a way that they work through a third-party ad service and Wikipedia never deals directly with the advertisers. Subscriptions could enable donors, schools, etc. to avoid advertisements.

As for rewarding contributors to Wikipedia's document base, I'd be against that - the "we all agree this is the best information on a subject" model works very well, and to pay contributors would distract them from contributing to Wikipedia out of interest for a topic, it would, I fear, turn into a money-making scheme, akin to the gold miners in World of Warcraft.

Sure, it's possible, and you don't need to be a "computer scientist" to do so. You can do anything in any language that's Turing-complete.

But that's a bit like saying you can write a webserver in Bash -- aside from just proving it can be done, why would you ever want to write this? What practical reason could you possibly have for using Bash instead of, well, anything else?

I could ask the same questions about Drupal and PHP. Given that Drupal could've been written in any language, and given Dries Buytaert clearly knows other languages (being a computer scientist), what possible reason could he have for using PHP?

for some more background on how much trouble you can harvest from supposedly anonimized data:

http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/08/21/aol-cto-resigns-two-researchers-fired/

(sure, that's aol, and it was publicised and google will never (I hope!) do something this stupid but even anonimized data is not without risks, the fact they have to share this data with viacom does not make me happy, it sets a really bad precedent).

Google claims they use the history to be able to target ads more precisely but I really don't see why a few % extra revenue would be worth the liability.

So, your privacy policy no longer matters one bit because any group suing you to disclose that information does not have such a policy agreement with the customers of the party sued.

Korea to make robot abuse illegalhttp://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/03/07/South-Korea-to-make-robot-abuse-illegal//
**The original charter draft** This page is in Korean. But i am sure you will find a way to the pdf file.
First click on the http://cafe.naver.com/roboethics/
click on the the text 'koreanrobotethicscharter070403.pdf' on the right side in the middle.

Ports aren't really the problem. If you don't forward ports, other people can't initiate connections with you - you can only initiate connections to others. That's just the way NAT and port forwarding work. If you and another guy both have port forwarding disabled, neither of you can connect to the other. If either of you have port forwarding configured, the other one can initiate the connection and sharing can commence. If you only have 10 people in the swarm, cutting out half the people due to a lack of port forwarding will severely impact your download rates. However, cutting out half of the millions of WoW players still leaves over a million other users to connect to, which should be plenty to max out your download. See http://bt.degreez.net/firewalled.html and http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/btclientconfig.html for more info.

This is the real problem. Blizzard's BT client has very poor or no upload control. While downloading a file, a connection occasionally reports its status back to the sender, letting it know to keep sending data (in greatly simplified terms). If you're saturating your upload channel, your download can't report back that it's good for more data - the upload chokes off the download. It's very common with improperly configured BT clients, but can show up anytime you're uploading something (for example, unchecked uploading via FTP).

I can verify the other poster's claim. I watched as the Blizzard patcher saturated my upload and downloaded at <2K. Using an external app, I limited the patcher's upload to about 3K less than what it had been using. With no other changes, the patcher took off and maxed out my download speed.

Solution? Extract the .torrent file from the patcher and download it with your regular BT client. CapnBry's WoW Torrent Extract will easily extract it for you, and I post them as soon as I can at http://gaming.invisibill.net.nyud.net/wow/torrents/.

Why are people still using these? Why haven't they been replaced by forums?

Maybe this was mentioned this already, maybe not.

I think these comparisons of DX10 with DX9 are misleading. DX10 builds on a completely new architecture, so comparing to existing games isn't really fair. Basically, the games that will really demonstrate DX10 don't exist yet. These are all new features that DX9 doesn't even support.

Some examples:

- Geometry processors (for displacement mapping, procedural modeling)

- Render Arrays (to render 6-face shadow maps in one pass)

- Volumetric Textures (for volume rendering apps)

As mentioned, the games to take full advantage of DX10 don't exist yet.

For example:

- Shadows. A typical DX 9 game will implement geometry for "shadow volumes" on the CPU, then perform shadow shading using a fragment shader on the GPU. A DX 10 game could implement the entire process on the GPU much faster (not possible with DX9), leaving the CPU for better AI, etc. However, if you run a DX9 game on DX10 its not going to take advantage of that. i.e. its still going use the old method, just run through a DX10 card. So there will be a slight performance gain because of the new architecture and faster card, but you're not really taking advantage of what DX10 can do with the card.

Games have to be written to take advantage of the new features. This has always been an issue with graphics programming. You write software solutions. You have to re-write it once it gets ported to hardware. Not sure if this will ever change (one can hope).

Bottom line, putting old games through radically new cards is not a fair test. A real comparison would be to completely rewrite the same game in DX10.

For more details look here:
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2006c03/ch02.pdf

PS. I code for both DX and OpenGL. In my experience, both do a pretty go job of keeping up with hardware. DX10 is a little ahead because the game industry has mostly adopted directx (theres some history to that story).

Maybe this was mentioned this already, maybe not.

I think these comparisons of DX10 with DX9 are misleading. DX10 builds on a completely new architecture, so comparing to existing games isn't really fair. Basically, the games that will really demonstrate DX10 don't exist yet. These are all new features that DX9 doesn't even support.

Some examples:
- Geometry processors (for displacement mapping, procedural modeling)
- Render Arrays (to render 6-face shadow maps in one pass)
- Volumetric Textures (for volume rendering apps)

As mentioned, the games to take full advantage of DX10 don't exist yet.
For example:
- Shadows. A typical DX 9 game will implement geometry for "shadow volumes" on the CPU, then perform shadow shading using a fragment shader on the GPU. A DX 10 game could implement the entire process on the GPU much faster (not possible with DX9), leaving the CPU for better AI, etc. However, if you run a DX9 game on DX10 its not going to take advantage of that. i.e. its still going use the old method, just run through a DX10 card. So there will be a slight performance gain because of the new architecture and faster card, but you're not really taking advantage of what DX10 can do with the card.

Games have to be written to take advantage of the new features. This has always been an issue with graphics programming. You write software solutions. You have to re-write it once it gets ported to hardware. Not sure if this will ever change (one can hope).

Bottom line, putting old games through radically new cards is not a fair test. A real comparison would be to completely rewrite the same game in DX10.

For more details look here: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/s2006c03/ch02.pdf

PS. I code for both DX and OpenGL. In my experience, both do a pretty go job of keeping up with hardware. DX10 is a little ahead because the game industry has mostly adopted directx (theres some history to that story).

Sounds simple enough:

They're not making money off of allowing you to access it; they're losing money.

Not sure about other universities, but at UMBC, we are paying for our Wi-Fi through our tuition as a "Technology Fee."

Just because it's free as in beer doesn't mean it's truly free. Most of the time, "free" just means the cost has been somehow obscured as part of something else.

My school ( http://umbc.edu/ )has posted a new login announcement on our shell accounts: We will be terminating our Linux shell services as of the end of the semester and replacing them with servers running both HP-UX and SCO OpenServer. To comply with new federal wiretapping regulations, we will also be terminating "ssh"-based login services and enabling only "telnet" access at that time. lol I sincerely hope this is an April's 1st joke ...

Mozilla XMLTerm was an interesting project, somewhat similar to a Common Lisp CLIM "Listener", though with XML instead of Lisp.

WTF am I talking about? the merger of GUI and CLI. Basically, a shell window where e.g. you type "ls" and the listing has thumbnail icons
that are clickable. Scientists familiar with Mathematica or Texmacs might "get" the idea, too - imagine that sort of UI applied to the whole OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLTerm
http://web.archive.org/web/20050207072807/xmlterm. sourceforge.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLIM
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hefner1/listener.png

Some social networking sites (e.g. livejournal.com and d.hatena.ne.jp) already provide basic data export in FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend) vocabulary. Search engines such as Swoogle and SWSE aggregate some of the content published in RDF. The problem is that crawling large database-driven sites with millions of files takes years when adhering to the Robots Exclusion Protocol. On the other hand, an API can provide on-demand integration, but with every site building their own API, a lot of schema wrapping (e.g. via XSLT's) is needed to aggregate data. Vocabularies such as SIOC could provide a standardised API and data format for all sorts of community sites, which would facilitate the integration of data from multiple places.

``From my limited experience with CompSci degrees (I am a Physics major), Computer Science is basically Applied Mathematics.''

I suppose you could say that, but I prefer to see computer science as a discipline on its own, which happens to involve some mathematics (as so many disciplines do). The overlap between mathematics and computer science is actually very limited: there are lots of things that are considered part of mathematics, and only a few of these are relevant to CS; conversely, there is a lot to CS that is irrelevant to mathematics in general or even other domains one could consider applied mathematics.

``A knowledge of algorithms, proofs, and a good helping of experience to understand the 'programmers mindset' are far more important than learning different languages.''

That is certainly true of one's objective is to get a CS degree, but that's not what this thread is about. The thread is about improving programming skills, and, for that purpose, I would consider learning various languages an absolute necessity, and perhaps even more important than anything you learn in a CS program.

``Nearly any problem can be solved with a Turing Complete language, so it hardly matters which one it is.''

That's simply not true. Turing completeness is a valuable concept in theoretical discussions, but it's practical value is very limited. SK calculus is Turing complete, but writing almost any algorithm in it is a nightmare, not to mention that it doesn't support I/O, which makes it almost completely useless for writing programs.

Even among more realistic languages, different choices have different implications. Programs written in OCaml will almost certainly run faster than programs written in Python. Python programs will almost certainly be shorter than Java programs that do the same thing. Various abstractions that can be expressed in Common Lisp cannot be expressed in C. A program that is accepted by the Eiffel compiler is more likely to do what you want it to do than a program accepted by a Forth compiler. Etc.

``In addition, most programmers will use the popular languages (like Java) in their jobs, so learning less popular languages (like Lisp and SmallTalk) will not be very helpful.''

Not for the purpose of finding a job, but for the purpose of solving problems, it will. Learning different kinds of languages teaches you different ways to look at problems. The languages most asked for in current job ads are very similar: imperative, object-oriented, and pretty verbose. If you learned just these languages, you would almost certainly miss out on functional programming, declarative programming, concurrent programming, metaprogramming, and a whole load of other techniques, because these are not comfortably expressed in these languages. However, knowing these techniques can sometimes help you to find more elegant solutions even in languages that aren't made for these techniques. For example, see how Brandon Corfman wrote better C++ by looking at Common Lisp.

One of the easiest ways to set up a sites with ads that your "paid to read" gang clicks on is to establish a nest of splogs and automatically populate them with plagiarized content from real blogs. We think that companies like Google and Yahoo can benefit from better automatic splog detection (e.g., http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/tag/splog/). It might be possible to test this hypothesis by analyzing the frequency of splogs as a source of clicks for an advertiser. If anyone whould like to share their data we might be able to do such an analysis.

I experienced Amazon.com being down a few weeks ago; so did this guy who posted a screenshot: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2006/08/21/amazon com-down/

The article would have us believe that this is going to expose everyone to massive amounts of privacy invasion. This is not necessarily the case. It is already the case that there are privacy mechanisms to protect information in the SW (e.g. require agents to authenticate to a site to retrieve restricted information). Beyond simple mechanisms, there is a lot of research being conducted on the idea of trust in the semantic web - e.g. how does my agent know to trust a slashdot article as absolute truth and a wikipedia article as outright fabrication (or vice versa).

As for making the content of the internet widely available, some researchers feel this will never happen. As another commenter noted that it is essential that there is agreement in the definition of concepts (ontologies) to enable the SW to work (if my agent believes the symbol "apple" refers to the concept Computer, and your agent believes it refers to "garbage", we may have some interesting but less than useful results). I am researching ontology generation using information extraction / NLP techniques, and it is certainly a difficult problem, and one that isn't likely to have a trivial problem (in some respects, this is goes back to the origins of AI in the 1950's, and we're still hacking at it today).

For some good references on the Semantic Web (beyond Wikipedia), check out some of these links

• Semantic Web Portal
• eBiquity at UMBC
• Swoogle - a search engine for Semantic Web

You know, you should really attribute that quote in your sig to a person, instead of a place. Unless Armonk, NY is particularly talkative.

"Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people."
-Nido Qubein (reference)

Qubein is a motivational speaker, and I expect that if he actually did say that in Armonk, NY on August 8th, it was probably in a presentation to IBM (given that they're practically the only game in that town).

In mid 2005 we here at UMBC moved our AFS servers from a bunch of individual Dell/Linux and Sun/Solaris servers with DAS JBODs to Sun V20zs on a fabric with the Xserve RAIDs LUN'd out for each server. We love this set up and the Xserve RAIDs perform amazingly well for what they do (email, home directories for 15k active users). They're cheap, straight-forward to manage, and so far seem quite reliable.

Details on our setup here.

In mid 2005 we here at UMBC moved our AFS servers from a bunch of individual Dell/Linux and Sun/Solaris servers with DAS JBODs to Sun V20zs on a fabric with the Xserve RAIDs LUN'd out for each server. We love this set up and the Xserve RAIDs perform amazingly well for what they do (email, home directories for 15k active users). They're cheap, straight-forward to manage, and so far seem quite reliable.

Details on our setup here.

> If you don't understand C++, you are only liable to reinvent it. Badly.

Isn't the saying that you will reinvent Lisp, badly? Greenspun's Rule/Law? ;-)

This example is of an accumulator generator snagged from Paul Graham's website: http://www.paulgraham.com/accgen.html. Tailored to a problem that functional languages can solve more easily, but it is still interesting.

I would also recommend: For a Java/C++vs. Lisp comparison.

And for another programmers take on it where he tries the same thing: C++ hackers take

Also see another PG article: Succinctness is Power If you google for succinctness PGs article is the first result amusingly enough.

And here is a pretty famous study done on Erlang: Erlang Study

I hope we can at least agree that not all languages are created equal. I am honestly not interested in cloning or working in a langauge like C++. I am much more interested in languages like Lisp. I also freely admit that my OO experience leans heavily on Java, Lisp, and Ruby coding. And that I have little real C++ experience. I have done *basic* OO in my C++ programs. I used the STL for a couple of REALLY simple things in one of my later C++ programs but that is really about it. I try to use C++ in its more modern and usable context when I use it, but it is quite a time investment and I am really only after performance if I am using C++ so I keep it as lean and mean as possible and end up with C using objects with new and delete and a smattering of STL when it saves me time and I can easily do it without adversely affect the outcome of my program. So I base a lot of these assumptions on: a lot of C programming, a lot of OO programming, and a little C++ programming.

You might be onto something about the semantics of OO programming compared to the syntax of the language. It is relatively unimportant as long as the Syntax does not get in the way.

As for specific types of programs: Web development, simple and relatively complicated desktop applications. Pretty much anything that is not processor bound. I am being vague because I really do believe it in a very general sense. I do a lot of web development.. so in my world I am a little IO bound by network latency. You have to work around big warts like HTTP being stateless and generally you really want to maintain state. I also develop the occasional desktop application (Windows stuff ...Sigh). For Windows programs you really do need to use as little memory as you want, but you can still get away with using .NET which runs in a VM and is GCd. I really do focus on web development and network programming, though. I have written all sorts of programs such as search and data indexing stuff. It is still fast enough with hundreds of megabytes of data and it isn't C++.

So in my IO bound world I use the most productive and powerful languages I can convince my team to use without secretly wanting to murder me. There is a bigger learning curve for C++. And to be honest I am not concerned about average programmers. I only want people working for/with me that can wrap their head around any programming language even assembly. So ideally I only want to work with people that can use C++ and be good at it. Only I don't want to use C++ because I think the learning curve is not needed. That said is there REALLY a reason for every programmer to understand pointers? Is it really required. We are coming to an age where entire generations of programmers are raised on Java and GCd languages. I wasn't, but I know quite a few programmers who were/are. Do you really have to know assembly on up? Is that important for every programmer to know? You can't even talk to modern x86 processors directly these

This is really a another slant/use for mobile agents, http://agents.umbc.edu/ has some good links in the mobile agents category.

However, some of the (intuited) graph theory looks good, they walk, rather than bouncing backwards and forward to make 'star' shapes and consume resources locally rather than continually use network bandwidth. But all the problems of authentication, permission, capability remain. Don't put one of these on your network at home, kids!

I remember this fellow from 15 years ago at my alma mater http://www.umbc.edu/. Here's his bio http://www.umbc.edu/engineering/me/appa.htm.

I remember this fellow from 15 years ago at my alma mater http://www.umbc.edu/. Here's his bio http://www.umbc.edu/engineering/me/appa.htm.

What's a bittorrent file?

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/btclientconfig .html#HowBTWorks

After reading that page, which describes how bittorrent works, you might want to go to the following page, where you can download a bittorrent client and learn more about the system.

http://www.bittorrent.com/

More informational links about DIMES that aren't slashdotted...well, at least not yet:

- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-sl.pdf

- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-abs.pd f

More informational links about DIMES that aren't slashdotted...well, at least not yet:

- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-sl.pdf

- http://dawn.cs.umbc.edu/INFOCOM2005/shavitt-abs.pd f

I'm one of the two people here at UMBC who run the core servers for the campus.

We use AFS here for everyone's home directory, mail spool, web space, and other things. To maintain this, we currently have about 6 servers with direct-attached storage serving everyone's AFS home directory volumes. These servers are a mix of Dell and Sun gear running Linux and Solaris. Both platforms have run well over the years, but each server's direct-attached SCSI storage is limitting and, well, aging.

So we can better use our storage and improve things for everyone in general, I'm in the process of rolling out a fiber channel SAN with new servers and RAID arrays to replace what's currently running. The new server gear we chose? Sun's V20z Opteron server running Solaris 10 . Linux is right out.

Why no more Linux, or rather, why Solaris? A few reasons. Solaris's storage management is TONS easier to deal with and do interesting things with than what is available in Linux. Namely, we've found and have been fustrated by Linux's software RAID. Yeah, it works... but that's about it. Weee look, I can make a mirror! Solaris's SVM (aka DiskSuite) is no VxVM, but it does allow us to do things such as disk sets to share between hosts and monitor our metadevices in detail. Linux's raidutils on the other hand are poorly documented and toublesome (usage options don't match reality, etc)

Another aspect on Linux vs. Solaris in mass storage is (as far as I know) a lack of multi-pathing in Linux. Multi-pathing is a no-brainer especially in the context of Fiber Channel networks and Solaris's MPxIO is in-built and works quite well.

But I'm just poo-pooing Linux here on this specific point. We offer Linux workstations in every one of our computing labs. Linux replaced SGI/IRIX workstations there many moons ago and work well for that purpose. Linux servers also are used for our general shell login servers. But on the backend, where we need reliable features, consistency, and heavy-lifting... we're enthralled with Sun x86 servers and Solaris 10. The V20z Opteron hardware actually is cheaper (for us) than a Dell 2650 and offers a ton more features all-alround.

There is an irony, though. The service processor on the Sun V20zs run Linux. Ah well ;)

Every point of view? No I don't.

You still seem to be confusing the right to free speech with "being correct" or "being tolerant".

No, I don't. I recognize the limits of free speech, in the context of a free and democratic society. I also agree that people have the right to have wrong or outright false opinions, and they should be free to express them subject to reasonable limits. I feel that it is appropriate to draw the line against religious-based attacks on homosexuality. Why? Because it appears to be nothing more than thinly disguised hatred.

The underlying principle that attacking an innate characteristic of a group (i.e. gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation) is not the same as attacking the group itself, nor any particular members of that group does not hold itself up to scrutiny. The argument is easy to dispell via reductio ad absurdum.

There is nothing special about homosexuality that makes it worthy of being singled out, other than that doing so is still considered to be acceptible in some corners of society.

If you were to make a similar argument against a different minority group, the underlying bigotry would be immediately obvious.

Both are sexual sins condemned in the Bible.

They are hardly equivalent. It seems to me that you are trying to equate first degree murder with jaywalking. Sure, both are listed in the criminal code, but one is far more significant than the other.

Both were subject to death by stoning in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.

Irrelevant. Many things that would result in summary execution a few thousand years ago today are not considered crimes today. Neither of your examples (homosexuality or adultry) are criminal (or civil) offenses.

I also often compare homosexual sex to pre-marital sex. Both are considered acceptable by our culture and both are considered sins by Christians.

Does the Bible specifically state that pre-marital sex is a sin? For that matter, does it specifically state that homosexuality is a sin? Many religions codified existing societal conventions and taboos into the religious framework.

It's also a useful comparison because it's easier for heterosexuals to relate to the temptations of premarital sex than it is for them to understand the difficulty Christian homosexuals have in rejecting their sexual desires.

Telling young people to wait until they are married until they have sex is not remotely similar to telling gay people that they can never have sex.

I critique a person's actions or decisions to act on those desires (inborne or otherwise) that are bad.

Fine, but who are you to state that homosexuality is bad? Before you start waving your Bible at me and saying "it's all in here", please take a look at that Bible. There are lots of words in there, approximately 774,000 apparently. How many words are spent talking about homosexuality in any form? Not that many. Condemning homosexuality does not appear to have been a primary concern of the author(s).

It all boils down to interpretation of course. I have not forgotten that you suggested that the Sermon on the Mount was not typical of the teachings of Christ! It is one of the very cornerstones of Christianity, and the act that got him into so much trouble with local religious authorities.

Beyond that, you are trivializing a really important aspect of human sexuality. You have reduced sexual orientation to the level of a perversion or fetish.

I don't know about you, but I have no interest and would not be capable of having sex with a member of my own gender. Gay people feel the same way about having sex with someone of the opposite gender.

It's not like they can be converted to heterosexuality, and it i

I must have been mislead by statements such as:
We never did get any help from Google. -- Tim Finin
and statements like: Please do not write to Google to request permission to "meta-search" Google for a research project, as such requests will not be granted. -- Google.

You may be right, they may have had permission, but all I see is complaints against google for no cooperation--which I would count special permission to use their database as being.

At any rate, if I misunderstood the Tim Finin, then I do apologize--but I do have to say that the way they talk about working around Google's restrictions and their lack of help sure makes it sound like they have never received any such permission.

A few sites I have worked on that are run by MKDoc are listed in their top 500, since MKDoc generates a RDF metadata file for every HTML document, but the biggest and most interesting are missing, I expect that there are perhaps several hundred times more RDF documents out there than they have found...

I just got a D70, and am extremely happy. I already had a nice lens (Nikkor 24-120G VR AF-S Lens) and flash, so it was a no brainer. After selling my old body, it was about $500 to upgrade, and considering how much I spend on film and developing, I saved money.

Some Advantages of Digital for me (I shoot Concerts):
-ISO 1600 is very usable, enabling VERY low light pics like this one.
-Auto White Balance (or simply the ability to change it) alows me to go from outside to inside to inside w/flourescent lights
-I can carry the equivalent of 4 rolls of film on a 1GB CF card, which is more than enough most of the time.

I recall that President Andrew Jackson vetoed a federal highway bill that would have been the first inter-state highway in the United States. He felt that such a highway would favor one State over the others and he also felt that a federal expenditure to construct a highway was unconstitutional.

What the public expects out of our government has expanded considerably since then. We expect our local governments to install, if not maintain, community sewage systems to handle rainwater during floods and to treat wastewater so that we do not pollute the environment. These kinds of systems were built by localities when the public was apprised of the health benefits of decreasing the number of pools of still water (mosquito breeding grounds) around municipalities and preventing outbreaks of disease from raw sewage. They have not always done these things and there seems to be some evidence that many of the waterworks of Roman cities were not necessarily public works.

To make a certain quality of Internet access free to all sets a standard within a community above which other service providers, like Verizon, would have to provide in order to sell their service. A publically-funded WiFi service is the kind of thing that could attract more high-tech industry and could increase the level of education within a municipality. Were voters to decide to pay for the taxes necessary to install and maintain that kind of a service, I'd see it as the kind of expansion of what government does (like trash pickup) that is not necessarily vital to the community but an "added perk" that makes living in that municipality more preferrable than other, surrounding communities.

For Verizon to try to limit what the public may choose to pay their taxes to support is another example of how corporations are attempting to place themselves in charge; to govern by fiat. Voters should consider the bedfellows of those representatives they vote for more than anything else. It was felt by the framers of our Constitution in the US that religion ought to be seperated from politics. Increasingly, our arguments need to be turned toward the Corporate interests. Campaign finance reform was one such argument. I predict, as time goes on, these discussions of corporate interests versus the interests of the common man (as a voting bloc) will become sharper.