Slashdot Mirror

For FTPing (and SFTP, as well as SCP), I would reccomend Fugu (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/). Free and free, it offers lot of nice features, such as being able to think that you are editing files by remote (not actually the case, but well done anyway).

Okay... I'm at a loss. I see an awful lot of passages saying, in effect "there was infrastructure available which could be turned into production and/or weaponization labs".

I see nothing indicating that was being done and, to the contrary, several indicating quite explicitly that it was NOT being done.

More importantly, in the rare cases where it's indicated that there might be something worth looking into, the case is almost always that the activity ended in the mid-90s, long before Bush and his friends were saying they knew where these things were.

I invite you to read the Deulfer report, preferably without taking things way out of context and slapping your own preconceived notions into the tiny crevices where they clearly don't fit.

Here's a link to help you.

In fact, everything I've found in the "Key Findings" section so far is a damning indictment of just how wrong the pre-war statements were. Lots of places where it says "could've done this but didn't". Nothing really to support the assertions of the Bush administration.

Actually, I'd much prefer that systrace be configured for my media player than running a complete instance of UML.

Systrace

1. Nasa.gov says "According to the big bang, the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter and in all directions.".
2. Some guys at U Mich (GeoSci students?) say "About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe."
3. Cambridge Cosmology says "About ten billion years ago, the Universe began in a gigantic explosion"

That's the first three results. How about Dictionary.com? "big bang [n.] The cosmic explosion that marked the origin of the universe according to the big bang theory."

So if I'm wrong in referring to it, in general and metaphorical terms (like the name "big bang" itself), as an "explosion", at least I stand in good company. So now that I've spent all this time defending my use of a single word, I can actually get to the relevant parts of your post (I don't mean anything personal by that, I promise ;)

I already admitted the error of attempting to tie an accelerating universe to problems with the Big Bang, I don't know why you wrote so much more about it, but thanks anyway, interesting stuff. I do find the accelerating universe a fascinating tangential subject. (If your response contains something along the lines of "the fact you think acceleration and the big bang are tangential to each other shows your complete ignorance, etc etc" I will stop reading)

'The mathematics of the Big Bang model are easier to work with when the vacuum energy density is zero: the equations are simpler, and various things are easier to calculate . . .and physicists will always consider the simplest case first.'

Yes, and I believe that eliminating the "ZPE" components because they complicated the equations has done enormous harm to our understanding of physics. (Similar to what happened to Maxwell's original equations when Heaviside butchered them)

I can tell you are a strong adherent to good experimental data (as am I)... a book I cannot recommend strongly enough to you is "The Field" by Lynne McTaggart. (Think I mentioned this in an ancestor post) It is chock full of recent experimental results concerning quantum physics and consciousness, from good solid double-blind placebo controlled studies. I am not given to superlatives, but this book will blow your

A friend in high school had an HP-45 and his dad had an HP-65 programmable calculator. This got me interested in computers. I bought an HP-25 at the end of sophomore year, learned to program (49 steps of assembly language memory!) and then moved upward.

Our high school also had a "math lab" with a paper teletype with 110 baud dial-up time-share access to the local university's computers (a Dec 10 and a CDC 6600/6400). A bunch of us proto-geeks spent before-school and after-school time mucking about on this. Using the TTY and a bit of help from another friend, I learned BASIC. When I outgrew BASIC, I latched on to APL which was a seriously cool language. Some of my friends had computers (if a 6502 with 16k of RAM, dual cassette tape drives, can be considered a computer).

I think "learning computers" means something very very different these days. In the early days, everything was programming and nobody used canned applications. If you wanted a computer to anything, you wrote the program yourself. Moreover, the operating systems of that day (especially for hobbyist systems) were extremely simple. One could understand what everything did both in software and in hardware.

These days, "learning computers" means more learning to use 3rd-party applications and learning to manage the OS. I'd wager that, /.ers excepted, most people don't ever learn to program these days. In the olden days programming was all you could do.

If you think birth control and education is the answer, where the track record of success?

He had a little bitchy slap-fight with the student body of the University of Michigan a while ago that resulted in this pretty good guide though his profound love of the word "buggery". Seriously, he writes articles where he'll use it like 16 times in a single paragraph.

It's not an issue of power.... It's an issue of propellant.

Damping torsional vibrations is relatively easy; you've got a magnetic field you can torque against, and passive coils will damp out rotation just fine (they're used to de-spin some passively-stabilized LEO satellites). East-west vibrations can be damped using current through the tether (additional plasma contactors will be required to allow the current to vary in different segments). Not sure how you'd handle north-south vibrations, but I have neither given it thought nor done research.

If you need to provide make-up thrust of 1 N through the segment between 120 km and 400 km, which is moving at an average forward velocity of ~1400 m/sec (figuring 10 m/sec/km), that is 1400 watts plus losses. Compared to the tens or hundreds of KW you'll need to reboost in compensation for net upward traffic, drag comp is nothing.

Even the relatively tiny tethers we've tried in space have had big problems with severing, accumulating currents, the works.

1e-5 tesla field times 1400 m/sec is 14 millivolts per meter; over the 280 km segment that dips below 400 km, that's only about 4 kV. I doubt that this is going to be a big headache, especially if the tether is segmented and charge pumps used to keep each segment at close to the ambient voltage level (each charge pump would be in an insulated segment). For each difficulty there are probably several ways to address it; we should be flying a few so that we can get engineering experience.

Well, in my experience geeks like Chinese food, so I suggest The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters by the late James McCawley, a linguist and connaisseur of Chinese food. It teaches you to read Chinese menus. Long out of print, it was reprinted last year. You can get it from the publisher (link above) or Barnes and Noble.

First is was a notedly exaggerated aside

at least by anyone that has any grasp of the English language

and secondly, I mentioned it in regards to the fact businesses generally let folks 'borrow' software for home use. I made no mention nor implication of why folks buy PCs

Secondly, calling someones entire argument a 'strawman' simply because you don't understand what they were trying to say IS criticism. I don't know how you cannot see this. Call someones argument wrong and you are criticizing them. Do you see how this works?

And again, I don't think you know what a strawman is.

I have a funny feeling you hung out in a coffee house while listening to a debate team use big words and you picked up on it thinking you understood the term and can use it to impress friends and family. I can only hope that in the late 80s your family wasn't as terrorized with you running around screaming Its My Prerogative having loved your cassette of that dreamy Bobby Brown that you had posters with crudely scrawly hearts with BB + RW forever etched into it.

".. a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity"

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi on S.Wolfram, A new kind of science

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/cellula r-automata.html

They have been predicting the demise of programmers since the invention of COBOL in the 60s. It was supposed to turn ordinary business users into programmers thanks to its easy, English-like syntax. We're still waiting. Now this writer is talking about running out of programmers capable of maintaining code that was presumably easy to write and maintain?

I think you mistake COBOL for ALGOL. The latter was indeed advertised for it's "ease of use" and it started a long line of (supposedly) user friendly languages, through it direct descendant - Basic - to contemporary Visual Basic and AppleScript. Cobol was rather advertised as being "business friendly" because it allowed ease separation of data and code and that - allegedly - suited it better for business/office data processing than its main competitor, Fortran. Noone could seriously predict "demise of programmers" in early 1960's. There were no personal computers in present meaning - even the so called minis of the PDP family, still required a separate room, had a price of a small airplane and were operated by dedicated staff wearing lab suits.

The uncorrected OCR is very useful for indexing (by Google or others), as the 5% or fewer typos are not enough to interfere with indexing keywords. Uncorrected OCR can also be corrected later.

The page images are tied with the uncorrected OCR so you can see exactly what's there.

For an example, see books at University of Michigan's Making of America (MoA) Exhibit, which has thousands of 19th century books and periodicals available.

Then there is the whole issue of electronic pre-print copies http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-02/bennett.html mentions it.

Kristen Nygaard and Ole Johan Dahl - inventors of object-oriented programming.

A recent research paper from University of Michigan, Backtracking Intrusions, presents a tool for identifying and visualizing the cause of suspicious behaviors (e.g., "where did the file /tmp/rootkit come from?"). A very nice paper and a significant contribution to intrusion forensics.

1980 to 1984: The work crew of the MIC unit was halved from 12 to six workers, the maintenance crew from six to two workers. On December 26, 1981 a plant operator was killed by a phosgene gas leak. Another phosgene leak in January 1982 severely injured 28 workers and in October the same year MIC escaped from a broken valve and four workers were exposed to the chemical. The senior officials of the Union Carbide, privy to a "business confidential" safety audit in May 1982, were well aware of 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC units. Remedial measures were then taken at Union Carbide's identical MIC plant in West Virginia, USA, but not in Bhopal.

December 2-3, 1984: Poisonous gas leak from Union Carbides pesticides factory. In three days around 8,000 people die. On the night of the disaster, water (that was being used for washing the lines) entered the tank containing MIC through leaking valves. The refrigeration unit, which should have kept the MIC close to zero degrees centigrade, had been shut off by the company officials to save on electricity bills. The entrance of water in the tank, full of MIC at ambient temperature triggered off an exothermic runaway reaction an consequently the release of the lethal gas mixture. The safety systems, which in any case were not designed for such a runaway situation, were non-functioning and under repair. Lest the neighbourhood community be "unduly alarmed", the siren in the factory had been switched off. Poison clouds from the Union Carbide factory enveloped an arc of over 20 square kilometres before the residents could run away from its deadly hold.

Bhopal timeline

A William Stavropoulos 'Wanted' poster

My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...

1980 to 1984: The work crew of the MIC unit was halved from 12 to six workers, the maintenance crew from six to two workers. On December 26, 1981 a plant operator was killed by a phosgene gas leak. Another phosgene leak in January 1982 severely injured 28 workers and in October the same year MIC escaped from a broken valve and four workers were exposed to the chemical. The senior officials of the Union Carbide, privy to a "business confidential" safety audit in May 1982, were well aware of 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous phosgene/MIC units. Remedial measures were then taken at Union Carbide's identical MIC plant in West Virginia, USA, but not in Bhopal.

December 2-3, 1984: Poisonous gas leak from Union Carbides pesticides factory. In three days around 8,000 people die. On the night of the disaster, water (that was being used for washing the lines) entered the tank containing MIC through leaking valves. The refrigeration unit, which should have kept the MIC close to zero degrees centigrade, had been shut off by the company officials to save on electricity bills. The entrance of water in the tank, full of MIC at ambient temperature triggered off an exothermic runaway reaction an consequently the release of the lethal gas mixture. The safety systems, which in any case were not designed for such a runaway situation, were non-functioning and under repair. Lest the neighbourhood community be "unduly alarmed", the siren in the factory had been switched off. Poison clouds from the Union Carbide factory enveloped an arc of over 20 square kilometres before the residents could run away from its deadly hold.

Bhopal timeline

A William Stavropoulos 'Wanted' poster

My Bhopal site has over 200 links if you want more info. Link is in the sig...

Basically, if you can't write a complex FFT with a user-defined complex number type and have it work about as efficiently...

Of course, I couldn't help myself and had to go experiment a bit. My conclusion is that you're halfway correct. A naive FFT implementation using the standard Complex module delivers very poor performance. A few minutes with the profiler demonstrates that the biggest problem is the immutability of the standard Complex datatype. You end up doing lots of needless allocations and garbage collections--mark_slice alone accounts for 40% of the computation.

But if you're willing to compromise a bit, you can use a mutable data structure and get rid of most allocations. The tradeoff is that the code has lots of assignments--not very functional in nature.

C++ and OCaml code is here. On my (slow) machine, I get the following representative times:

$ time ./fft_cpp

real 0m3.143s
user 0m2.881s
sys 0m0.128s

$ time ./fft_ml

real 0m3.785s
user 0m3.465s
sys 0m0.123s

I consider that pretty good. Note that the C++ STL isn't terribly fast here; you can save about 25% on the C++ code by dumping that in favor of something simpler. But still, OCaml is in the ballpark as long as you're willing to write imperative-looking code.

Dude its Koran

This article has been on /. before but this guy gives much more detail.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrniell/cyc2.html

pfft, this guy built a cyclotron IN HIGH SCHOOL by himself and used it to demonstrate "particle mass resonace" he won the ISEF (used to be westinghouse) with it. Oh and he also was a consultant on accelerator technology for the show "stephen hawkings universe" shown on bbc and pbs. Not cool enough for you. Well he also built a breeder reactor to win a scavenger hunt.

pfft, this guy built a cyclotron IN HIGH SCHOOL by himself and used it to demonstrate "particle mass resonace" he won the ISEF (used to be westinghouse) with it. Oh and he also was a consultant on accelerator technology for the show "stephen hawkings universe" shown on bbc and pbs. Not cool enough for you. Well he also built a breeder reactor to win a scavenger hunt.

Yeah, this guy made one during High School.

Not that I ever fook forward to loosing my lower legs, but if I do I can think of a few possible alternatives to traditional prostetics... Why try to restore natural function when you can have something better?

=Smidge=

This has already been done for journals by the Making of America Project. So wouldn't the
process be similar for for newspapers. But, newspapers are printed on lower quality paper and
possibly lower quality printing technology.

Making of America (MOA)
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/ (Cornell U)

http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ (U Michigan)

what a great game!
yeah, it's not too bad
needs a more robust server, though

Precisely... this nation isn't so red after all. Remember - land doesn't vote, people do. Notice that the blue areas are generally centered around the bigger cities? Not the farm-land, where people learn about politics in the churches, instead of from the news...

The giant fresnel lens of doom

I've stopped thinking along a single axis with regards to political thought. Here's a paper http://www.umich.edu/~umisl/articles/parties.htm that mentions the two axis system I feel is more desriptive. I like to think about social policy on one axis and economic policy on the other. free social policy (legalizing drugs, abortion, guns etc) and free economic policy (low tax, less laws restricting trade) would describe libertarian. restrictive social policy + free economic policy would describe some conservatives. Free social policy and restrictive economic policy might describe democrats. Someone like old Ross Perot might be restrictive socially and economically. Yes its veering from the topic. But what a dead horse. :)

Browsing metadata is the next frontier in the evolution of the web. Some of the other RDF browsers popping up include Gnowsis, MIT Haystack, and Fenfire.

With the growth of the Internet, the value of data itself is dropping, while the value of metadata (i.e. "data about data") increases, introducing a need for tools that can manipulate metadata. That is what RDF is all about - standardizing a way to represent metadata. It is not a standard for the metadata itself...those standards will be determined the same way everything else is on the Internet: with the best solutions rising to the top.

The most common objections to this scenario?
a) "Nobody will bother entering metadata". Wrong...it's already happening. Users are voluntarily generating metadata all the time. Just check out sites like flickr (photo blogging) and del.icio.us (collaborative bookmarks), not to mention Amazon reviews and Ebay ratings.
b) "RDF tags will just be abused with spam, trolls, and other useless info". A variety of techniques are emerging that are designed to protect the integrity of user-contributed data, including trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.

The slashdot crowd thinks that it lacks information and poorly represents U.S. political views as a function of geographic location. The slashdot crowd thinks that scientists know better than journalists. Gee, all your 51% victories become pretty obvious now, don't they?

see http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/cu rrent/lectures/kling/carbon_cycle/carbon_cycle_new .html

"If you add Fe you stimulate growth and the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere by algae. In a careful biogeochemical analysis, however, this idea proved to be untenable because the algae would eventual run out of other limiting nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. The Geritol Fix could at most reduce our atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 10%."

I was about to make this map (a cartogram in shades of purple, but fortunately someone saved me the work.

Let's hope they have a way to communicate to non-combatants. Maybe ATT's speech synthesis?

Example:Fear not.

First of all every government security agency in the world believed that Saddam had WMDs. You cannot call someone a liar if they act on what they believe to be truthful information.

The US is the possibly the most globally orient country in the world. Just look at the financial relations that exist between the US and everyone else. We have an extremely open market with possibly (though not proven) the lowest tarrif rates of any other country in the world. If we were so anti-global we would create tarrifs on imports that duplicate the tarrifs our good face when exported to other countries. Almost every country in the world has much more severe barriers to foreign competition and foreign ownership or acquisition of companies than the US.

The US government sends more aid to other countries than any other country in the world. They probably (unsubstantiated) send more aid to other countries than the entire EU combined. The American people also donate more to charities foreign and domestic than any other country in the world (and that includes as percent of GDP and GNP)

The length to which nerds will go to prove they have a girlfriend to slashdotters

The server actually belongs to the EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) department at the University of Michigan. You would definitely think they'd be geeky enough to have a decent server. I'm actually a student there and rely on that server for school. I actually ended up on Slashdot when I couldn't get the spec on a project because the server was down.

Yep, Slashdot is destroying productivity as never before.

I don't know why Apple didn't include something like fish:// -- it's sheer brilliance (much like Exposé is brilliant). I briefly considered writing a protocol translator for her laptop so Finder would think it was accessing SMB shares when it was really using ssh. Instead, I've decided to just go with Fugu. It does the job -- I just really miss the integration. :(

Factually FALSE. The the report concluded there were no existing programs of any signifigance. The most the administration was able to squeeze out of the report was an allegation that Saddam may have desired to develop such weapons after the sanctions eventually got lifted.

Congratulations. You've just parrotted news misrepresentations that are directly contrary to the contents of the report. Since the report is public record, there's no excuse for this except personal political bias.

See pages 12 and 13.

Jolly good! Come on, cowboy! Bang, bang!
The world is not so simple. Think again about the outcome of such large scale murder and why after such action there would be actually more insurgents than before.

Jolly good! Come on, cowboy! Bang, bang!
The world is not so simple. Think again about the outcome of such large scale murder and why after such action there would be actually more insurgents than before.

You might also want to take a look at radmind:

"At its core, radmind operates as a tripwire. It is able to detect changes to any managed filesystem object, e.g. files, directories, links, etc. However, radmind goes further than just integrity checking: once a change is detected, radmind can optionally reverse the change."

I have been thinking that the American system of healthcare is a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath but after some cursory study, I find the oath to be wanting as it is translated into English.

The United States allows abortion and I personally think that is a good thing (allowing it) because of a study finished some years ago by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities that showed women find their value in society increases in direct correlation to their access to contraception.

It is my opinion that, if society is going to make a mistake in its laws, those mistakes ought to be the kind of mistakes that increase the worth of the citizenry of that society, not decrease their worth. Thus I feel that abortion should remain legal as a "last resource" method of contreception and in cases of rape or incest in a society that claims to value women.

The hippocratic oath specifically prohibits that:
"I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. ..."

So I don't know what doctors are swearing to.

I think that the healthcare system in the United States uses two methods of triage: financial and injury or disease. The idea behind the hippocratic oath is that doctors will work to save lives and to serve and educate people, regardless of their standing, without prejudice and with honor. This is certainly at odds with the American system of healthcare delivery.

Lawsuits are not necessarily to blame just as the level of medical education and the quality of the medical schools aren't either. I will agree that there is disfunction but one cannot point to one sole cause for the price of healthcare in the US.

Perhaps it's the "what the market will bear" attitude we have here that we apply to everything, including the public welfare. That, combined with a "survival of the fittest" ethic coming from our government these days, has created a system that is not fixable from within the system. The solution must come from outside of the system and it would appear that the global market might do that.

We cannot buy drugs from nations that control the prices of dtugs because "those drugs may be unsafe" (according to politicans and the drug companies). Never mind that these drugs are perfectly safe for the citizenry of the non-US country and are made by the same manufacturers. Drug companies tell us they're doing research when they're really researching how they can take over other drug companies and laboratories to get their patents as well as how they can use the US court system to extend their existing patents to maximize their profit cycle. They have stopped educating doctors and started using advertising to "educate" their potential customers, all the while passing the cost of national television and magazine advertising campaigns on to the customers.

Doctors have to request additional tests to protect themselves from litigation which results in more waiting for treatment that works, and adds about 1 to 2% to the costs of healthcare.

And the poor don't see a doctor in a timely way, winding up in an emergency room with an acute illness because they cannot afford either health insurance or the cost of a doctor.

In the meantime, we have lobbyists writing our laws and taxpayers footing the bill for a system that works for most but is very costly.

If there is a doctor in the house, I would specifically request a copy of or a link to the actual hippocratic oath now sworn to. And, perhaps, we need patients to swear another oath, to see a doctor regularly and to treat him as a good samaratin.

The strictness imposed by Pascal and its decendents really forces you to think carefully about what it is you're trying to code

True, but if you really want to know what a strick language is, try ADA.

I said, "Ya, I've got a very good memory. That's why I make more money than your store manager by programming computers for a living."

"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Isaac Newton

Jer.32
[26] Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying,
[27] Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?

John.14
[1] Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
[2] In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
[3] And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

Rom.8
[38] For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
[39] Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Rev.22
[12] And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.
[13] I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
[14] Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
-- KJV Bible at umich.edu

As for people dying and heading off to 'the nothingness of oblivion where all living things must go to someday....' that is, per science and the Bible, NOT the case.

First up, a 'scientific explanation':

Jer.32
[26] Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying,
[27] Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?

John.14
[1] Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
[2] In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
[3] And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

Rom.8
[38] For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
[39] Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Rev.22
[12] And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.
[13] I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
[14] Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
-- KJV Bible at umich.edu

As for people dying and heading off to 'the nothingness of oblivion where all living things must go to someday....' that is, per science and the Bible, NOT the case.

First up, a 'scientific explanation':

Problem is, every so often, the carbon dioxide gets out. And lots of people die. Now, there are degassing projects which release the gas from the lakes into the atmosphere in a gradual controlled process.

Degassing