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Your comment about him not having "gathered the necessary voter signatures by now rather than waiting until the last sixty days before the deadline" betrays your ignorance of Texas' ridiculous election law.

We may be small, but we have big tools. Our technology allows us to extract and consume billions of tons of oiland coal each year. Is it any real surprise that means we've released almost 300 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the industrial era. You don't need to be an atmospheric scientist to see the trouble we are causing. The atmosphere traps some of the sun's heat and we are effectively putting more insulation into a system where the energy input cannot be readily decreased (a broken thermostat)... There are going to be big effects when you add more energy to a (relatively) closed system. The earth will eventually find a new equilibrium, but I doubt it will be very accomodating to us when it does.

I'm a pessimist, but I also take a very long term view. After all, the first anaerobic bacteria created the atmosphere we breathe - and this would have been a pollution crisis in their world if they could have recognized the evidence and understood the ramifications of it.

So maybe we are creating the next environment for something better than us. Or maybe we'll get some giant dragonflies again:

According to recently developed geochemical models, oxygen levels are believed to have climbed to a maximum of 35 percent and then dropped to a low of 15 percent during a 120-million-year period that ended in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian. Such a jump in oxygen would have had dramatic biological consequences by enhancing diffusion-dependent processes such as respiration, allowing insects such as dragonflies, centipedes, scorpions and spiders to grow to very large sizes. Fossil records indicate, for example, that one species of dragonfly had a wing span of 2 1/2 feet.

My money is on a coming panic at the effects of climate change that leads to an attempt to rectify by seeding the oceans with iron filings to feed the plankton and speed the process of breaking down the CO2. This could lead to another elevation in O2 that starts a planetwide fire and forces life back into the oceans again.

I think the fever metaphor is right on - sometimes fever kills the patient. It is the body's own immune response that creates the real problem. Perhaps life is, on some level, programmed to evolve little monkeys who get good at shooting down the occasional catastrophic meteor impacts (the reason we are so inclined to war, with the star wars missile defense type projects being a sort of holy grail for life's long-term success). Perhaps the earth's 'immune response' is normal in the evolution of a life-bearing planet, and unfortunately in some cases, fatal.

N.B. While I consider myself pagan and have no discomfort with being called a tree-hugging dirt worshipping hippy, at this time I don't necessarily believe in an individual sentience per-se in the earth as Goddess, or even as a single organism. But I am willing to believe that this process happens over and over and over again on many different worlds and that creates the basic protein structures that will tend to evolve in certain ways.

The pathologist Lewis Thomas wrote in response to the Gaia hypothesis that he could not see the earth as a living organism, but he could imagine it as a single cell. And then on our immune systems he said:

In real life, however, even in our worst circums

The University of Michigan rolled out Kerberos some time before 1993. I forget when. There have since been many other projects which tie into it like cosign for example.

The University of Michigan rolled out Kerberos some time before 1993. I forget when. There have since been many other projects which tie into it like cosign for example.

http://iontrap.physics.lsa.umich.edu/publications/ archive/naturephys_2005_stick_GaAs.pdf

So, they still have a ways to go if they haven't achieved a 2-qubit entanglement yet, but it is at least a manfacturing advance.

"...one must wonder what happens when the systems finally fail."

Probably something similar to this

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~hsul/MyWebs/Visits%20to %20Duke/Random/slides/Crazy%20Car%20Accident.jpg

Heh, this is almost fun.

Nope, this is just your usual dictatorship FUD; keep the population poor, afraid and ignorant.

Poor:

An Analysis of the Presidents Who Are Responsible For Excessive Spending
Bush Borrowed More Than All Previous Presidents Combined, Group Says
Surplus? US Debt Pushes $6 Trillion
U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK (this is a very interesting one, in my humble opinion)

(hint: guess whose taxes are going to pay for that)

Afraid:

U.S. Department of Defense News About The War On Terrorism
The War On Terrorism
AMERICA'S WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

Ignorant:

Education Not a Bush Budget Priority, Representative Miller to Testify
Bush Budget Slashes Education, Other Domestic Programs
$2.5 Trillion Budget Plan Cuts Many Programs
Bush administration Cuts Public School Funding to Pay for New Private School Voucher Scheme

And you complain about China? I'm afraid you have the same problems in your country (assuming you're American).

I need to persuade my psychologist friends who've been arguing this stuff to put up a web page somewhere collecting their detailed refutations and counter-arguments in response to Rieger's paper. If you haven't read it already, I recommend you do so - the blatant way in which the analysis is chosen to support the desired conclusions should jump out at you. But the more detailed analysis by those versed in the field is worth reading too.

The closest related link I can find ATM is this one, but it's only tangentally related:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Reviews/ Psychology%20Perverted%20-%20A%20Response.htm

I'd like to see data that backs that claim up. If anything, there is some research that suggests that bisexuality, at least in men, is a misconception. The likelihood is that human sexuality is distributed in a pretty lumpy way, with the vast majority being heterosexual, a robust minority being homosexual, and, questionably, a very tiny segment possibly being "true" bisexuals. There is plenty of research demonstrating the likely genetic basis of homosexuality, but bisexuals have not been found to be "in between." Of course, none of this addresses the higher prevalence of bisexual behavior in women, which raises the issue if women can be "truly" bisexual whereas men cannot--or if culturally sanctioned displays of homoerotic and homosexual behavior in otherwise heterosexual women is actual bisexualiy, or just acting out. Sexuality works very differently in the minds of women than men, so this is quite an open question. Anyway, I think we are too "hard-wired" in this department to start suddenly engaging in rampant bisexuality even if the cultural accepts it in both genders. For men, at least, its just not in their genes.

Also--a heterosexual who is non-sexually attracted to, or objectively appreciatie the sexual attractiveness of someone of their own gender is not being bisexual. That requires genuine sexual desire for both genders. That's tough to confirm, but with modern neuroscience techniques (like fMRI) we may be able to tell the difference.

The article talks quite a bit about fossil evidence, but what about the genetic evidence? If you look at the variability of human genetics, you find that europeans aren't very genetically diverse. Similarly, American Indians aren't very genetically diverse, and Asians aren't either. Africans, on the other hand, are very genetically diverse. What this indicates is that the human race' history in Africa goes back much further than anywhere else. It appears that a subset of Africans left Africa and colonized the rest of the world. Here's a short article that talks about human genetic diversity compared to their location: http://info.med.yale.edu/genetics/kkidd/point.html http://www.umich.edu/news/?Releases/2005/Oct05/r10 1805

They would take the steps necessary to ensure that this thing doesn't pull pages from The Koran Online or other online religious texts. Wouldn't want your TP dispenser to cause an international incident...

Nanochem promises to allow even tinier feature sizes. The atoms in a molecule are about half a nanometer across, but they can form structures with gaps even smaller. Benzene rings have diameters also about 0.5nm, and can be made in regular arrays as nanotubes. More complex structures can twist these feature spaces even closer, and in vast numbers of regular arrangement. Their production through chemical, rather than mechanical, engineering promises more efficiency, lower cost, and larger production yields.

We are now looking at the nanometer from above, pulling our micrometer structures towards the new horizon. Once across it, we will still use nanometer-scale engineering to produce picometer (and smaller) scale results.

Your examples merely demonstrate that nature* can have a large impact on us whatever we do. But you're assuming the converse is true--that therefore we cannot have any impact on nature no matter what we do. That does not logically follow. Nature is incredibly diverse; there is little to no connection between hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and earthquakes in Thailand. You might as well be saying "I can't break this boulder with my hammer, therefore we'll never cause a species to go extinct."

More specifically, if you believe human activity cannot affect seismic activity, I encourage you to read up on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal fluid injection study. In fact, here's a good overview of the various ways in which humans affect seismic activity.

*And don't get be started on this word, which is fraught with interpretative baggage. Remember that scientifically we are part of nature too, so it's not a question of "humanity" affecting "nature," but rather one aspect of nature affecting another.

Universities have been doing enterprise deployment of Macintosh desktops since before MS Windows existed, even since before the term "enterprise deployment" existed. The early days were pretty rough, of course. But now OSX and its Unix core have a full set of enterprise desktop management tools available. Check out MacEnterprise and tools like Radmind. Many Universities are now doing large-scale deployments of Mac desktops. And since those tools are all Unix-based, perhaps many of the same techniques will work for Linux desktops?

While it can't really be argued that global warming is not happening, or that human activity is the cause of it, the question is then: what now? Not everyone believes that global warming is a bad thing, overall. But if you think so, the cure to global warming is really simple, in principle: stop consuming so much. It is industry, after all, that contributes much of the greenhouse gasses. However, how many in this crowd can stop buying and using technology items? And, if you did so, what would happen to the economy? It would likely collapse. Now consider that, as it is often said elsewhere, that poverty is actually the greatest destroyer of environment, and consider the entire worlds population living in that condition. Which is worse? Frankly, I think the evidence is strong that global warming is happening, and that human industrial activity and modern lifestyles contribute to it. But what is the alternative? If the US Government spent a billion dollars to "do something", would it really help? Would it even have dent on global production? Six billion people are bound to have an impact, no matter what you do, and no matter how much taxpayer money you want spend on it. Perhaps we will just have to learn to live with and adapt to it. After all, change is a normal part of the universe and we are part of it.

Many would disagree. All the sources I've seen describe a straw man as misrepresenting your opponents position to one that is easier to refute, and then basing your argument upon that misrepresentation.

So for instance, if I said "We have an ethical duty to house asylum seekers" and you said "Nick wants to let anyone into the country without checks or controls, bit this will lead to them stealing out jobs", then that would be a straw man.

There are plenty of online resources describing the Straw Man fallacy: here's a few of them:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lilyth/strawman.htm l
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
http://www.drury.edu/ess/Logic/Informal/Strawman.h tml

There are many loathsome scum that are Christians.

I'm not so sure of that.

Quick google for "nat is not security" came up with: http://safecomputing.umich.edu/tools/download/nat_ security.pdf

"Conclusion:

The well-known security adage "security through obscurity is no security at all" is certainly applicable to NAT. IPv6, whose biggest initial win is a significant increase of address space, has no concept of NAT since no additional security is gained."

Well, I am going to shout "racist" and "xenophobe", as well as "idiot". How utterly prejudiced to describe all muslims as freeloaders and complainers! You claim that "[t]he Muslims are demanding a political change in Europe from Western-style democracy to Sharia Law". There are certainly some muslims who want that, just as there are some Europeans who vote for Le Pen, but the idea that all do is ridiculous. (Here's the proof: attitudes toward sex, not democracy, divide the West and Islam. Incidentally the same article shows that, although muslims are on the whole less keen on sexual equality, 55% of them still support the idea. So much for your claim that islam promotes the beating and repression of women.)

Islam is not perfect - nor is Christianity, which has historically persecuted those opposed to it and continues to exhibit bigotry towards gays and lesbians. But this sort of over-generalized nonsense should stay where it belongs, on the BNP website. I find it depressing that you received "+5 insightful" for this ignorant crap. Let me display my own prejudices - are you an American, by any chance?

Where did you get that idea that it was for "heroism"?

SEC. 2. Award of the Medal. (a) The Medal may be awarded by the President as provided in this order to any person who has made an especially meritorious contribution to (1) the security or national interests of the United States, or (2) world peace, or (3) cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

2004 Presidential Election Cartogram by County Population.

You must be proud that both people in Idaho voted for your guy. A guy with the lowest approval ratings for any President in 33 years.

More accurate information here.

2004 Presidential Election Cartogram by County Population.

You must be proud that both people in Idaho voted for your guy. A guy with the lowest approval ratings for any President in 33 years.

More accurate information here.

"Scanning" of old books is typically done with a camera photographing a book lying in a cradle (to not split the binding). One image is taken of each page or every two pages (the latter is faster, but has focus problems).

Once photographed, OCR software grinds away. There are errors. Some projects proof-read the errors (this is very expensive), but with Google's volume they cannot. Even when not proof-read, however, the OCR'ed text has high value in search engines.

For examples of the resulting product, see U of Michigan's Making of America or the Library of Congress American Memory.

New, in-print books can be scanned destructively. That is, saw off the binding and feed into a sheet feed scanner. This works with publishers who have extra copies they can expend.

If you can point me to ONE case of this in the animal kingdom except for our species, rather than simply declaring that my logic is circular without demonstrating how, I'll gladly concede and go home with my tail between my legs.

I haven't been part of this debate, and I am not interested in making anyone go home with their tail between their legs. I would like some feedback on Army Ants. I certainly don't know if they try to exterminate species, but they do use sophisticated attack paterns to clear out whole areas for resources and food. They form "ant bridges" to make large distances easier to navigate. I'm interested in your feedback.

Thanks.

This sort of event provides motivation for overlay routing schemes, which can compensate for major outages along various routes of the backbone:

http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi04/tech/full_pape rs/subramanianOver/subramanianOver.pdf
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/pubs/2005-hwj-in focom.pdf

You are shifting the burden of proof and rather distorting the facts: You may only ever have seen exceptionally weak arguments, but that is not because only exceptionally weak arguments have ever been deployed - quite the converse is true*. The problem so far has instead been that no argument with even a semblance of strength for introducing software patents has ever been produced. And however weak you think any argument against the expansion of patentable subject matter is, it automatically wins unless you have a strong argument in favour of that expansion. But the expansion has occurred anyway of course, and in the face of strong arguments and strong opposition from industry and academia. That many companies, academics and individuals had to make such arguments at all illustrates the appalling state of recent policy making in this area (if you can call it policy making). Any credible economist will tell you that patent scope expansion without prior empirical and sound theoretical justification is verboten. Too bad - the damage is done and in the US it seems the fight's effectively over now, but the rest of what I want to say is appropriately Eurocentric anyway.

*
http://researchoninnovation.org/online.htm
http://www.si.umich.edu/~kahin/mip.html
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/mirror/impact/index. en.html
http://philsalin.com/patents.html
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1557
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=stor y_16-8-2005_pg5_12
http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/quotes/index.en.html

"You have to be prepared to deal with issues like why expressing a particular piece of logic in C or Ada doesn't deserve patent protection, while expressing the same logic in Verilog or VHDL, which look identical to a non-programmer should deserve that protection."

That is definitely not an issue. One does not ask whether or not some invention deserves a patent, but whether or not it is patentable subject matter at all and your example is a poor one because if the claims of a patent are directed to the expressions of logic, then they are software patent claims.

"Likewise, why a device that fits the description in a patent claim should not be protected if the implementation happens to be (even in part) carried out with an embedded processor with embedded code, even though it's not at all apparent to the outside world that there's any software involved at all."

The distinction between hardware and software is not useful and is not at all relevant to the question of whether a patent claim is a software patent claim or not. One way to discover how the distinction between software patent and non-software patent is determined (and it is not always easy) is to read the way it is expressed by Judge Peter Prescott QC in his recent CFPH decision, in which he carefully and fully interprets the EPC Article 52 exclusions. Unfortunately, Prescott's interpretation seems to me to leave a lot of room for claiming things such as image enhancement techniques derived from purely mathematical considerations, but at least compression algorithms and data manipulation and data st

• When making a list in your comment, you can use <ul><li>/</li></ul> tags instead of asterisks, you know.
• LnxAddct has one vowel in his name, last time I checked.
• Python eats chick(en)s, few animals eat python. Also it is the chick(en) that gets liquified, not the python
• Python and mathematics? So what?
• Every programmer should worry whether his code is bug-free.
• Python writes as Python does. Crush the bugs, concisely.
• You think that code tags would keep the lameness filter from interfering? Think again. If it didn't, we would still have those ASCII art page-widening-crapflood-fests (although forcing the participants' entries to a monospaced font, which is more aesthetically pleasing IMHO).
• Instructions on how to use something shows your respect for your intended audience. Lack of instructions merely shows respect for your own ego.
• Not everyone has access to hosting services (depends on many things including restrictive corporate firewall settings, content and value of wallet/bank account in case of commercial hosting, etc.). Also, many free hosting sites I know of severely limit or disallow hosting of binary files because of their possible 'k3w1 w4r3z d00d' appeal.

We never actually got to fabricate it, but when my VLSI group finished our chip last semester we put some art in the whitespace. I was too busy with final integration to actually draw it, but the rest of the group agreed it would be cool to put tux on the layout. A groupmate spent 30 minutes or so creating a pixelized version of tux in the Metal 3 layer. We also have names & school logo on the right and a trombone ASCII art on the left (the multiplier was a little long so we had plenty of whitespace). Tux art is blown up in the linked image. Sorry about the poor quality, but I don't want to suck too much bandwidth and anger the sysadmins. Chip Image

Yes, clearly the authors of the study have bought into that idealistic position that emprical evidence allows you to reach conclusions. I guess they must be part of that reality based community. They take the fact that the few hints of a connection cited before the invasion were not substantiated by the thourough investigation that occured afterward, to suggest that the evidence for the connection was somehow lacking. Its almost as if they think one opinion is not as valid as another just because its not supported by the facts.

Bill Gates was at the University of Michigan in the morning. He pushed the XBox360, and grabbed the wrong controller for the demo.

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

• Andersen Shares His Unique Vision of Quantum Universe
• Jan-Henrik Andersen - Industrial Designer
• Perception of the Extreme Unseen
• Subatomic particles: An art form

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/lens.html
Covered on /. last year. This is the one that came to my mind when reading this title.

Also, it seems odd to have the boson part of the chart arranged so that the photon is so visually connected with the quarks.

It's here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~janhande/sizedmatte r/standard_model.htm

Actually, the pdf isn't all correct either, they managed to mess up the URL of Mr. Hande's page, which has a lot more info than the article linked in the blurb.

I refer you to any of a number of histories of c:

http://www.engin.umd.umich.edu/CIS/course.des/cis4 00/c/c.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html

c is clearly an american invention.

This presentation (by Theo de Raadt) gives a good overview of the security features in OpenBSD (beyond what's already outlined on the OpenBSD security page). It covers W^X, random stack displacements, random canaries to detect stack smashing, random library base addresses, random addresses for mmap and malloc operations, guard pages, privilege revocation, and privilege separation. One thing it doesn't cover is systrace.

Funny that this list is mostly conservative states. Kinda ties well into the hypocrasy of Republicans and taxes and the taker-giver state reality.

Interesting diagram detailing population distribution of the US and voting. The Hannity's of the world love to show you a mostly-red map of the US while neglecting to mention the sparser populations in geographically larger red states:

Voting Map

2.5 U of M Digital Copy. Google agrees to provide to U of M a copy of all Digitized Selected Content that has been "Successfully Processed" with thirty (30) days after the Selected Content is Digitized... the U of M Digital Copy will consist of a set of image and OCR files and associated information indicating at a minimum (1) bibliographic information... (2) which image files correspond to that Digitized work, and (3) the logical order of those image files.

So Google is giving the library a digital copy that is not just an index -- it is a full copy of the original, probably PDF or TIFF images of pages plus the OCR. Were Google discarding this copy rather than making a copy for the library, then the "it's only an index" argument might hold. As it stands, it doesn't.

You are misinformed, trolling or both. Most of OpenBSD's efforts in recent years have been directed at proactive security. OpenBSD was the first operating system to add ProPolice to its compiler, the first to implement address space randomisation, the first to add privilege separation to every daemon that needs privilege.

The result of this is that a security hole is either a) not exploitable to begin with, b) incredibly difficult to exploit, or c) not very productive even if it is exploited. All your caps-lock-on ranting misses this entirely.

I doubt that you want to educate yourself rather than ranting, but other people might be interested in Theo's paper on all this.

In addition to good, audited code and these proactive measures, OpenBSD includes systrace, which can enforce mandatory policy on application basis. It doesn't do everything that SELinux does, but it is far, far easier to use.

Wouldn't make a bad starting point for a company logo of some sort.

Sorry for the late reply, but it's been busy here.

Open Directory has provisions via the Workgroup Manager settings from Mac OS X Server to completely manage clients. In conjunction with Apple Remote Desktop and NetBoot it gives you the ability to manage almost anything on a client machine.

There are also third-party packages that can help with this process, such as NetRestore and Radmind.

Some URLs:

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/workgr oupmanagement.html
http://www.bombich.com/
http://eq.rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

--Paul

http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/

It shouldn't be that hard to figure out what a simple program like a browser needs.

re: ACLs

I use OpenBSD myself, those guys are hardcore "traditionalists". No ACLs for me.

> Linux does have a severe lack of fine grained permissions, but
> that's probably for the same reason as the configuration files not
> being in XML.

Damn you, inertia! Damn you!!!

> I'm very surprised no-one has risen to the task yet, it would
> certainly make Linux head and shoulders above the rest when it comes
> to security, and that's uba kudos.

There was a lot of interest in systrace a couple of years ago. It is supposed to provide very fine-grained control. I haven't played with it myself. I dunno if any mainstream distros have picked it up.

But let's say Apache wants to use some of those features. They don't dare use ACLs because that would orpan several *nix flavours, they don't dare use systrace because that would orphan several other flavours.

One of the advantages of *nix is portability. That unfortunately means coding to the lowest common denominator.

Life is complex. Software is hard. Almost every developer/sysadmin decision is an annoying tradeoff.