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See the website for the research group that works on this.

Wow. Compare that to the Version of the Bible Darl uses and I think I'm finally starting to understand this Linux/SC0 thing.

I think it was in Viruses of the Mind that Richard Dawkins proposed that it is the christian meme's way of defending its life and the lives of its offspring. Rational thought and knowledge is to the christian virus as holy water is to the demonically possessed.;-)

Many christians have a lot riding on their beliefs. Facing reality means facing the liklihood that they will cease to exist when they die. Generally, even all memory of their existance will die a few generations after them. It means coming to terms with the fact that they wasted 1/7th+ of their limited days and perhaps 1/10th of their income in church. Although psychology wrongly,imo, exempts religion as something other than insanity, the recovering christian must face that he was effectivly insane for a portion of his life. All the good and all the bad in life was a combination of luck and effects of his actions rather than the intervention of God. It may mean being rejected by one's family and friends. It's a lot of depressing stuff to face in the name of honesty.

You can read Victor Li's paper (PDF). The reinforcing fibers are plastic, which raises a whole host of questions. The work, by the way, has been done at U Mich's Advanced Civil Engineering Material Research Lab.

You can read Victor Li's paper (PDF). The reinforcing fibers are plastic, which raises a whole host of questions. The work, by the way, has been done at U Mich's Advanced Civil Engineering Material Research Lab.

Here's a streaming video!

(And here's the original article from the Univ. of Michigan)

*already starts to feel guilty about the /. effect* :-(

Here's a streaming video!

(And here's the original article from the Univ. of Michigan)

*already starts to feel guilty about the /. effect* :-(

Why not link to the source at the U of M News Service:

U-M researchers make bendable concrete

Technocrat.net had this article earlier today, and without the extra advertising.

interesting stuff!

Apparently, the bag limit is now fifteen signs, limit of three per customer.

"This is not exactly news. (Cf. Kurt Vonnegut's description of the basic story, which he calls ``Man in a Hole'': ``Somebody gets into trouble and gets out of it. People never get tired of this.'')"

K. Vonnegut's "Man in Hole" quasi ideogram well describes storylines as we like them. The idea is older than Aristotle, whose definition of catharsis has propelled everything Hollywood has done and probably all of pulp fiction. Dvorak is just showing his dismal lack of even a basic knowledge of The Western Canon and showing his age.

The University Library will receive and own a high quality digital copy of the materials digitized by Google. With ownership of these materials, the University will be able to provide access to the content in ways that are consistent with its mission as a great public university. For example, U-M may choose to enhance the ability for a patron to use material that is out of copyright, including creating reprints and downloadable text. Some degree of access to the copyrighted material will also be possible, and will be done within the limitations of copyright law. These forms of access will transform the way faculty, as well as students, carry out research.

There may be a double-standard, true - but you're still being interesting to linguists.

(Check out Dr. Alexander Z. Guiora's work on "The Effects of Experimentally Induced Change in Ego States on Pronunciation Ability in a Second Language." (and a few more studies in Language Learning) He and his colleagues, back in the '70s, examined the way impaired subjects (drunk, hypnotized, under the influence of valium...) pronounced foreign languages they knew. Interestingly enough, these subjects had better pronunciation when drunk etc. than sober! So it's all about making yourself interesting to someone and having their grants pay for the fun...)

Systrace is the kind of thing you're looking for. As far as I can tell, it's available for NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux. I'm not surely if it's actively maintained.

Yes, in addition to adding the Northeast, Verizon will soon be covering California, Oregon, and Washington. Here is a map of verizon's naked DSL coverage.

We are, we have been.

About two years ago, we started replacing our central web, email, and distribued filesystem (AFS) infrastructure, and sites computing services hardware to intel. We switched from Solaris to our own linux from scratch and have seen tremendous improvements - mostly due to price and performance benefits.

You may ask, how do we run 300+ linux from scratch machines without running into major software version control issues? radmind.

Our LFS is tightly integrated with radmind, which allows us to control every part of the filesystem that we choose. I can bring up a hotspare with a blank hard drive from CD, and add it to the production pool 10 minutes later, and with the latest software.

There's more information available here, unfortunately, the article is 13 months old, and doesn't show the current depth of services we offer that run on linux.

p.s. Netcraft seems to be showing our networking infrastructure, and not our webservers, or other equipment.

We are, we have been.

About two years ago, we started replacing our central web, email, and distribued filesystem (AFS) infrastructure, and sites computing services hardware to intel. We switched from Solaris to our own linux from scratch and have seen tremendous improvements - mostly due to price and performance benefits.

You may ask, how do we run 300+ linux from scratch machines without running into major software version control issues? radmind.

Our LFS is tightly integrated with radmind, which allows us to control every part of the filesystem that we choose. I can bring up a hotspare with a blank hard drive from CD, and add it to the production pool 10 minutes later, and with the latest software.

There's more information available here, unfortunately, the article is 13 months old, and doesn't show the current depth of services we offer that run on linux.

p.s. Netcraft seems to be showing our networking infrastructure, and not our webservers, or other equipment.

An answer to that question was given years ago by Richard Dawkins.

Follow the link. It's worth it. If you are too lazy a very short (and somewhat distorted) summary is:

* Religions cannot be mainly about truth, as the vast majority of people keep their parents' religion. If it had been about truth, religions would have spread more easily without the help of tradition.

* Religions are ideas that propagate through contact, as viruses. A stronger "virus" in this sense, is one which claims to be the only way to salvation, because it frightens people into not choosing other alternatives.

You know they can do wonders with hormones and vaginoplasty.

"No. You can't decide for yourself what should and shouldn't be a crime, and ignore the ones you think shouldn't be. That's what the law is for. It's a form of unvigilante unjustice that's just as bogus as vigilante justice, and is what seperates civilisation from anarchy."

You ignore one of the chief reasons why the right to a trial by a jury of your peers is important.

You might want to read these links:

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/crime/punis hment.html
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/crime/punis hment.html#death
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/history/crime/verdi cts.html#partialverdicts
http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/ geweb/PUBLICEX.htm
http://www.greenmac.com/eagle/ISSUES/ISSUE23-9/07J uryNullification.html

Just from a quick google session.

If they pass a law making breathing without a permit illegal, are you going to think the same way?

"You can't decide for yourself what should and shouldn't be a crime, and ignore the ones you think shouldn't be."

I do in many way agree with this though. The government should not leave any laws on the books that are not enforced fairly, regularly, and evenly across the board. I say this because people will decide for themselves and I think it tends to reduce their respect for all law and get them in the habit of choosing for themselves in all cases, even for laws which really should be there. (I hope you can get my meaning from that.)

all the best,

drew

I don't think you've looked at Apple Remote Desktop which is quite powerful and can deploy apps.

1. Software Distribution

2. Asset Management

3. Remote Administration

4. Remote Assistance

On the unix\linux side there have been tools like Radmind (also for Mac OSX), synctree, roboinst. You seem quite fond of the Microsoft offerings. In reality our university has many systems. We have different camps and on the Windows camp I've seen major issues regarding security and problems deploying Windows applications using SMS and Active Directory. Last summer it took eleven weeks for one person to repackage 80 MCAD and ECAD applications for the Windows loadset, the same 80 CAD applications took only two weeks to repackage and deploy with a Linux loadset. As for reliability Windows servers and workstations are poor and their down time high compared to the Sun, HP-UX and Linux workstations on campus. The great thing about Windows is that it needs to employ more people than necessary and the inefficiency guarantees job security.

No, it is not self-evident. That point is explained in the article, duh...

The question to ask yourself is "is socialism good for the poor?" Then look at the nations where socialism has been enacted to its largest degrees -- Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, East Germany, Vietnam, India, Maoist China, present-day North Korea -- and ask yourself if those are nations in which the poor would like living.

Indeed, the difference between capitalism and socialism was probably starkest and most-clearly explained by the difference between East and West Germany. On one side of the wall, there was prosperity and wealth and individuality and uniqueness and freedom; on the other, poverty, run-down, same-looking government-owned housing, and totalitarianism. Ever wonder why so many people in East Germany were happy to tear down the wall?

Figure it out doofus. Feel free to join the rest of us someday in realizing that socialism and communism have been proven, repeatedly and everywhere they've been tried, to be failed economic systems. Look around: even the "socialist" nations of Sweden, etc. have significant market (i.e. capitalist) elements to them; those nations simply round off the harder edges of capitalism with large welfare systems.

That said, those nations are facing fiscal distress because even *they* have too much socialist influence... But at least they have been more-prosperous, more stable and more free than more-strongly socialist nations like those I mentioned earlier.

If you need further evidence, talk to Jeffrey Sachs, the economist leading the war on extreme poverty worldwide. He wrote a piece in Time magazine recently (in the last month or so) pointing out that one of the reasons people in Africa and elsewhere have been so poor is because of socialist economies; he called such economies "mistakes."

Today, India and China are growing at torrid rates because of their market liberalizations and large populations of relatively well-educated people willing to work for pay rates that in the U.S. would be peanuts, but in those nations enables them to live as comfortably as the very well-to-do here in the U.S..

Their populations are becoming increasingly-wealthy as a result of globalization, and the same can occur in other nations -- if only economic illiterates who promote failed economic systems and policies would sit down and read an econ. text sometime.

That isn't to say there aren't some rough edges; China's healthcare system has worsened overall since their liberalizations and their environmental regulations haven't yet caught up with the fast-rising amount of pollution they have there, for example. But on the whole, they are improving and developing rapidly, and eventually they will grow their way out of such problems and join the developed world -- just as the U.S. did, just as Europe did, just as Japan did, just as Canada did, etc...

BTW, one last point. Look at Ronald Reagan's policies in the U.S., and compare them to this graph. Notice something? During Carter's years (1976-1980), the poverty rate rose, despite high taxes on the rich. From 1982-1990, it fell, during the "evil capitalist" reign of Ronald Reagan (who cut the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%) and Bush Sr.. It rose to 15% in 1990-1992, due to the recession, but has been dropping ever since then, with only a slight increase in income taxes instituted by Clinton (and cut again by Bush Jr.).

Today, after some 30 years of "creeping capitalism" (as capitalism's opponents might call it), we are at the same level of poverty as we were in the "golden era of American socialism", the 1960s. Capitalism not good for the poor? Don't bet on it.

What is it with you computer programmers?!!!

This guy's still got him beat.

Such position looks as if it would only be possible if "head" is substantially heavyer than "tail" (or else it would tip backwards). However, the doc states that the middle segment is the heavyest. Or does it also have the means of pumping liquid for one end segment to the other to achieve more optimal weight distribution? In any case, if such feature exist, it isn't mentioned anywhere...

How modular the design is. It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section

If you go into the slideshow on the site, there's an image of the robot composed of 7 sections instead of 5.

...but I'm sure we will soon. Everyone should check out this rad 7min video of this thing in action. Very cool. =)

My physics teacher let me borrow a 3x4ft Fresnel lens. It would focus that 12sq.ft. of incoming sunlight down to a about a square inch. It melted pennies into the concrete walkway.

Unfortunately, I did not get to use it twice, as I set a passer-by's shoe on fire, and she complained.

See this website for a similar story.

Same idea but with a big Fresnel lens: Remember?

I'm also a member of the LDS church and appreciate AArnott's comments.

I just want to point out that while I disagree with your political viewpoint, many members of the church do not. There are plenty of democrats, republicans, independants, and who-knows-what-else members. Trust me, if you want to have a heated discussion (haha, yeah) at a family gathering such as a reunion or thanksgiving, just bring up politics.

Calling Utah a "religious dictatorship" is quite ignorant. Sure there is a large number of LDS members there but it really has nothing to do with internal politics. Regarding it's Republican vote last year, consider that ALL the midwest states voted red.

Check out GOMS and KLM modeling. Look at the execution times for the primitive operators. As another poster said, the majority of the delay in a user interface is from thinking activities, such as visual search and method recall. And before you bash this stuff as only theoretical, try actually modeling a task you've already done, and then timing it while a user performs the task. You'll find that the numbers come pretty close.

There's a good reason there haven't been any real changes in user input devices for 50 years... it's because what we have works very well. You don't invent something new just to invent something new... you invent something new to solve a problem. And honestly, the user interface problem is more one of design, not devices. The real problem is that few people are taught techniques like GOMS and KLM, and even fewer use them. Most people's idea of a "user-friendly" interface is the one that looks the prettiest.

The only thing that's going to really improve user interface speeds is a direct neural interface of some sort, and I don't think it'll really speed things up that much for normally abled people, unless it's coupled with a really good predictive AI that can guess where the user is going next, and do it before the user thinks of it, because it's still going to be the mental operators that slow things down.

Yup. (scroll down somewhat.)

I don't know about Windows machines but for maintaining *nix ones you can use projects like radmind or Cfengine. Someone else in this discussion mentioned sblim but it doesn't look that project is ready to be used in production environments. Hopefully someone else will point to some other decent software.

Actually there are a couple of commercial ones. I can't remember the names but go through the radmind mailing list archives and they're probably mentioned a bunch of times. Speaking of radmind, are you aware of the fact that several university administrators are using it to manage networks consisting of hundreds of Mac OS X machines? radmind can work on UNIX, BSD and Linux machines as well.

Fugu is a decent BSD-style licensed GUI for SFTP, SCP and SSH tunnels

ReVirt:

The ability to replay the execution of a virtual machine is useful in many ways besides intrusion analysis. For example, it enables one to replay and debug any portion of a prior execution. We have built an extension to gdb that uses virtual-machine replay to provide the illusion of time travel. In particular, we provide the ability to do reverse debugging, though commands such as reverse watchpoint and reverse breakpoint. graph. See our paper in USENIX 2005 for details.

I've discussed this at length with my sister, a magna cum laude engineering graduate of this school. She's commented that many of her other similarly gifted female friends just can't picture being a windshield-wiper engineer for 30+ years. They're more likely to find fulfillment in (for example) managing a bunch of geeks. (Again, I said most. A handful of her peers are happily employed as geeks or pseudo-geeks.)

Aside: Your law and medicine examples are interesting. I don't know many lawyers, but I have pegged many physician roles as ones more suitable to women. Those include primary care positions and surgical fields (e.g. ophthalmology) that involve "small" surgery.

Another aside: Is science harder than medicine or law? I'd say that depends on your approach (and the particular "science" field). To be successful in medicine or law you have to be (above all else) an informaniac that can assimilate lots of (often boring) information in a short time. The analytical part, when it appears, is child's play. In engineering, you may not be overwhelmed with information, but the concepts are more difficult to grasp. So, yes and no. Who is more likely to be an informaniac? A number cruncher? We may never know for sure, but I'll bet the distribution won't be 50:50 for either.

One more aside, on the subject of hard-wired gender differences: Here's a single example; extrapolate at your own risk. A friend of mine has two young sons (4 and 2). She's consciously strived to make their environment gender-neutral and has done some interesting experiments. Not long ago she got them a dollhouse and some customary accessories for it. They pulled out the furniture and rugs and parked their trucks in it. :)

You mean like ESM or TMesh?

The legal principle of common carriage is used to insure that "no customer seeking service upon reasonable demand, willing and able to pay the established price, however set, would be denied lawful use of the service or would otherwise be discriminated against."

Cite: Common Carrier Regulation - A discussion memo for IPPS 744: Information Networks Policy (University of Michigan)

So in other words, flying is a right as long as you don't make unreasonable demands. So is not showing ID a reasonable demand? I think so, but I guess the courts will have to decide.

Educational doesn't have to mean that it be visually spectacular. My first exposure to computers was in a computer lab in South Africa in the 80's, where they were teaching elementary school students how to move the turtle around in Logo.

I'd suggest having some simple programming languages, like Logo or BASIC, and some games that run under those languages. Text games that require simple arithmetic or planning ahead to win are great. If the students manage to figure out how to use the languages to start modifying the games, or making their own, then that's a bonus.

Actually, sometimes these puns can be successfully translated across languages, in one of two ways.

One, you substitute a word pair that still gives the same relationship, though a different object. Go to your bible's apocrypha, and read the story of Daniel and Susannah . The proper translation uses "oak" and "mastic" trees, but gives no sense of the pun. So some translations substitute "yew/hew" and "clove/cleave", while noting the original words in the notes. Which translation is more faithful? Arguably the one that maintains the pun, but especially if the original form is noted.

There is another way, as well. Often our puns are based upon words that really do have a relationship to each other, and those relationships are then carried across national boundaries. Further, the languages tend to be interrelated due to commerce and common origin. As a result, you can sometimes directly translate a pun by carefully picking the right word. A skillful translator will pick this up, and therefore make a better translation than a less skillful translator.

Hmm. What about dua with CoSign?

Hmm. What about dua with CoSign?

Faith in human kind is restored.

Now, we should double our efforts to inform everybody Why software patents are a bad idea, and Who is really backing the proposals for it. Particularly, EU should be wary of software patents. With the minefield of US software patents, EU should really rethink being a follower anymore.

Isn't that usually how elections work?

Seriously, I should go back to bed. The section corresponding to the comment should be Appendix D, as is noted in the comment topic.

For all you crossword-puzzlers and wordgames enthusiasts, Chapter 13 is a great tool to have, and an interesting study in and of itself.

The University of Michigan calls student ID cards Mcard. They both store information. . . how long until a lawsuit?

Going back a few decades in history... In 1945, Vanaver Bush wrote about his vision of Memex

"Bush saw the ability to navigate the enormous data store as a more important development than the futuristic hardware. Here he describes building a path to connect information of interest:

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined [...]

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. "

Maybe a program that uses SFTP, but with a nice GUI, but again, I'm not writing my own programs here.

What? like Fugu?

Publicly traded corporations have legal obligations towards transparency and disclosure. Since non-profits don't have investors, they have the right to keep their records private just like any individual does. Private corporations may voluntarily offer some level of openness to combat potential PR problems, but non-profits are generally beholden to their ideological base and are judged by their effectiveness in advocating for their causes. You often hear right-wingers disingenuously calling for transparency from organizations that they have no intention of supporting in the first place, which is really kind of pointless, because the average environmentalist places other things above immediate bang for his buck anyway. That's practically the definition of environmentalism.

...running an ethical business is somehow a new invention of the anti-corporate camp, which they've strong-armed onto an unwilling business sector.

That's not necessarily an insane view point. Publicly owned corporations are legally obliged to maximize revenue for their stockholders. If its cheaper to screw your customers and stop them from finding out about it by controlling the media or by preventing them from seeking legal remedies, then why would a purely profit driven entity not try to do those things? The fear of exposure and threatening their bottom line is the only thing they understand.

In a highly competitive economy, corporations are under tremendous pressure to survive and there is plenty of legitimate concern that they will end up cutting a few ethical corners here and there. After all, the alternative is to go out of business! So ethical guidelines are rolled back just a bit, just enough to get us through this tight spot in the market. As time passes, it becomes the norm and when it comes time to tighten the belt again, another ethical lapse takes place, nothing big, you wouldn't even notice it, but it too becomes the norm. Bureaucratic organizations have a tendency to diffuse responsibility over many departments and individuals. There's no one person who suddenly decides that they are going to screw the consumer, they are just trying to get by, trying to not lose their job, but the result of those collective actions can be very different from any individual's good intentions and hard-working diligence. There's no need to demonize the employees or even the management, because "evil" corporations are the collection of a million seemingly insignificant actions made over time. The leadership may lose focus and be unable to see the forest for the trees, with sometimes damaging results. Its like that poem that starts, "For want of a nail, a shoe was lost..."

The intuition obvious and appealing, but the theory has been studied and rejected.

Prof Slemrod @ U Mich studied this and found that it was not the case.

His book is here.

Slemrod found no evidence that the Reagan cuts in '86 nor the Bush increases in '92 affected the labor supply curve.