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No, they even exist on Slashdot. And not as anonymous cowards either.

Speaking as one from inside the scientific community, a lot of researchers have their own "pet" ideas on cures for the disease du jour, and these ideas don't always have the strongest link to reality. When these ideas have made their way into human subject studies, people have died, even though it the concept worked PERFECTLY in mouse and rat models. And that should underline how little we actually understand the big picture of human physiology.

I believe that the goal of medicine should be to preserve human life. This is why I study to be a doctor, this is why my goal is to be a physician scientist. However I do not see how this goal may be adhered to by killing lives in their beginning, or worse, creating lives only to destroy them.

The Nuremberg Code (available here) states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is "absolutely essential". The disregard some scientists have for this, purely in the name of science, disturbs me greatly.

2Pet.3
[3] Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
[4] And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
[5] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
[6] Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[8] But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
[9] The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[10] But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
-- KJV Bible at hti.umich.edu

2Pet.3
[3] Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
[4] And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
[5] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
[6] Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[8] But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
[9] The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[10] But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
-- KJV Bible at hti.umich.edu

2Pet.3
[3] Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
[4] And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
[5] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
[6] Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[8] But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
[9] The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[10] But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
-- KJV Bible at hti.umich.edu

2Pet.3
[3] Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
[4] And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
[5] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
[6] Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[8] But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
[9] The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[10] But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
-- KJV Bible at hti.umich.edu

2Pet.3
[3] Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
[4] And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
[5] For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:
[6] Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished:
[7] But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[8] But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
[9] The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[10] But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
-- KJV Bible at hti.umich.edu

is not going away any time soon. A good example is the University of Michigan which has run a large on-campus phone system for many years. http://www.itcom.itcs.umich.edu/telephone/about.ht ml They do have some VoIP service.

It is interesting to note that most students on campus (Ann Arbor) are going to 7 digit dialing (565 exchange) and that service at U Hospital is going over to SBC.

I'm not totally up on it, but I know that there's a professor here (University of Illinois at UC) who studies the statistics of earthquakes and models them as an avalanche process.

There's a theory called 'self-organized criticality' which models systems in which you have the natural evolution of an unstable state, which can then be set off by relatively small perturbations, so large events which would be statistically unlikely in an uncorrelated system (exponentially unlikely as a function of magnitude) become far more likely (power law distribution).

Here's a random search result that explains it: Self-Organized Criticality and Earthquakes

Hoewever, it is technologically and physically impossible to build a cyclotron in your back yard.

No it's not.

Hoewever, it is technologically and physically impossible to build a cyclotron in your back yard.

No it's not.

And what happens when people start misusing the metadata like the current meta tags?

The Semantic Web just provides a method for expressing metadata. Maintaining the integrity of those expressions involves a different set of problems. Some of the solutions include trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.

I couldn't agree more. My cyclotron days were filled with searches (pre-internet) for equipment, surplus, parts, machining supplies, etc. I had to develop lots of stuff on my own. So, I'm writing a book about it. I'm a only 150 pages in, and have lots more to go. Basically, I'm aiming for something about like a "Building Scientific Apparatus" for homebrew particle physics machines. There's a lot of info out there that's buried in 1920s-1960s books on building such machines in the lab that has been more or less fogotten/lost. A list like the above would have helped out tremendously.

Hi, its a great question you are asking... I think its a big art to teach stuff to children, because one must really understand it to do so in order to know that a simplification is not too simple. Do you know the great books of David Macaulay (like "the way things work")? He has a great approach, explaining everything using mammouths :-) What I would do is: - Ask them, if they have used computers before - Try to explain that a computer is something simple (maybe use an abacus as abstraction) - Show them some nice program to give them somthing to try themselves (Logo or even better Squeak) I think generally its important to be enthusiastic and humourous about the topic! Cheers, Dani

As for security, NFS is built on top of RPC, secure RPC and you have secured NFS. Sun's latest implementation of RPC does include a collection of security features.

And note that recent 2.6 kernels have experimental rpcsec_gss support that allows you to authenticate rpc requests using Kerberos. This interoperates with Sun's and other implementations (and was funded in part by Sun).

More information here.

--Bruce Fields

There are also a number of people who create a fictitious being and place where they will live out eternity in bliss (religion).

Since it is illegal to test people's intelligence in the U.S. for a job

[24] No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
-- Matthew 6:24 of the KJV Bible at umich.edu

The new, new, new design is now a semicircular length of rubber-treaded fibreglass, which means they have spring to them. In fact when one leg finally snaps they have to replace all six as the robot depends on them to be balanced in stiffness.

Using these legs they get some great dynamic stability as shown in 'turbo mode' and other showoff moves plus pronking, etc.

The coolest are the round legs with the adjustable radius - stand up, sit down, roll, jump...

Also note worthy is that researchers at MIT have found a way to produce similar results using animal flesh. The most drastic results, reaching the unheard of 99% efficiency level, are in the Equus Caballus species. A resurgence in the use of the term "horse power" is expected.

Woops, that's the working WINDOWS torrent.

The working torrent is here.

Trickle-down economics may or may not be effective. Consider, though, tax revenue which seems to suggest that Reagan's tax cuts increased tax revenues by 50% over his terms in office.

Re:Occam's Razor (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 12, @02:47AM (#10225852)

...It [Occam's Razor] is, however, used to discredit the belief that there is a supreme being. I (and a lot of other people) do reject the belief that there is a surpreme being.

[3] For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.
-- Romans 12:3 KJV Bible at umich.edu

[6] But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
-- Hebrews 11:6 KJV Bible at umich.edu

"I don't believe it if I don't see it!"

An atheist once said in a debate that he could never believe in anything that he could not see, taste, hear, smell, or touch. His opponent asked him how he knew he had a brain, if he had never seen, tasted, heard, smelled, or touched it.

The atheist replied that even though he had never seen, tasted, heard, smelled, or touched his brain, the fact that brain experts had always found a brain in everyone they examined meant that the probability was high that he too had a brain. But he admitted that on this line of reasoning it was possible he may or may not have a brain, just as there may or may not be a God.

--Why can't atheists find God? (And how you can help them to find Him.)

Re:Occam's Razor (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 12, @02:47AM (#10225852)

...It [Occam's Razor] is, however, used to discredit the belief that there is a supreme being. I (and a lot of other people) do reject the belief that there is a surpreme being.

[3] For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.
-- Romans 12:3 KJV Bible at umich.edu

[6] But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
-- Hebrews 11:6 KJV Bible at umich.edu

"I don't believe it if I don't see it!"

An atheist once said in a debate that he could never believe in anything that he could not see, taste, hear, smell, or touch. His opponent asked him how he knew he had a brain, if he had never seen, tasted, heard, smelled, or touched it.

The atheist replied that even though he had never seen, tasted, heard, smelled, or touched his brain, the fact that brain experts had always found a brain in everyone they examined meant that the probability was high that he too had a brain. But he admitted that on this line of reasoning it was possible he may or may not have a brain, just as there may or may not be a God.

--Why can't atheists find God? (And how you can help them to find Him.)

So is this system used because of memory requirements or what? Sounds like If they asked to use the GRAPE-6 they would get another magnitude of resolution or more timesteps.

So is this system used because of memory requirements or what? Sounds like If they asked to use the GRAPE-6 they would get another magnitude of resolution or more timesteps.

Lots of research has been done in the area of multitasking. One of the more insightful results is that much of what passes as "multitasking" is in fact task-switching. Each switch exacts a cost as we reorient ourselves to the new/old task. If you are really interested heres enough info to write your own thesis on the topic.

Lots of research has been done in the area of multitasking. One of the more insightful results is that much of what passes as "multitasking" is in fact task-switching. Each switch exacts a cost as we reorient ourselves to the new/old task. If you are really interested heres enough info to write your own thesis on the topic.

Again, the definition does not fit. I addressed that. Burrying waste is not a technological advance. The only advance that could come from that would be improved long-term storage containers, or maybe a faster fork lift to move them. I'm all for advances in power generation methods in nuclear reactors, use of fuel more efficiently, etc. But I am against sticking radioactive waste, that will be around for quite a while, in an area that shows geologic signs of a past water table which was higher than the yucca mountain site. That's not luddism, that's rationality. Nuclear power will be needed as a bridge to future technologies, no doubt about that...but climates change. Green belts shift. What happens if the greenbelt shifts south from oregon, idaho, and wyoming down towards nevada? It's happened before, and with the half life of waste to be stored in yucca mountain, it's fairly probable that it will happen again.

Here's a lesson in Soil Physics for you, to help you understand my skepticism:
Soil is a highly complex medium, with a net negative charge. Positive ions adhere to soil, negative ions break up soil (called flocculation, why sodic and saline soils suck for agriculture - the negative ions in the salt complexes destroy soil structure). Clay, part of a soil, tends to be quite negative - generally -90 to -20 mmol/kg. It has a pH dependent charge, gernally getting less negative as pH decreases, with a few clay types actually becoming positive as pH dips below 6. This is pretty rare. Right now engineers in yucca mountain are counting on the clay (Primarily smectite and clinoptilolite) to stop any potential nucleide leak. However, according to my chemistry text book, Plutonium-239 is one of the main waste isotopes from nuclear fission. The movement of nucleides through clay is still fairly unknown. Will it sorp? Will it floculate the clay? It only takes one hole in a clay layer to facilitate the free movement of water through it.

Lucky for us this this a pretty damn pressing question, and there are scientist working on it. Personally, I DO hope yucca mountain is a viable site, but I haven't found enough evidence to convince me of that yet.

As far as solar being prohibitively expensive - if it had as many government subsidies as nuclear power does, it most likely wouldn't. The cost per killowatt hour for nuclear fuel that i found is around 5 cents. The cost cited on the same site for solar power was 12 cents. I have to wonder if this cost is the actual or the subsidized cost. What subsidies, you ask? these . Googling for "Nuclear Subsidies" brought that up. I googled for Solar Subsidies and only found a page citing californian subsidies for home owners.

Maybe something like these and this would help in your lab. Although a BT mouse is a bitch to use once it's been secured this way. =)

How is this any different from "Dating Sims" like this one or this one? Am I missing something, or is the innovation here just that it is on a mobile phone? -F

We have wireless tasers that use a laser to ionise the air then an electric current jumps towards the victim from a battery.

I guess this is one of those in action.

But I'm not jumping in joy until we have portable tesla coils. Mwahaha! :-)

Just imagine all the uses...

I suspect sshd with priv separation works like that. I haven't nitpicked either M$'s patent nor SSH's process but they look terribly similar. Can someone with better knowlege of the details reply? Does it constitute prior art? And most importantly: is M$ targeting UNIX's most important networked administration application considering how they attacked VNC by the EULA prohibition?

Verbing is a perfectly acceptable linguistic practice in English. here's this page on the matter I found via a quick Googling.

The only problem is that the newly verbed word may often sound awkward or pretentious, and it's not at all Formal English. But Slashdot editors aren't exactly known for their linguistic fortitude.

I don't see solar powered cars becoming the norm since night time would basically put them out of commission, but I could see some type of hybrid. It would be nice to see a solar/electric/gas powered hybrid at some point. In other news, the University of Michigan has a superb solar car team that competes in international competitions every year. They have won the national championship three years and finished 3rd in the world twice. Hopefully the trajedy that happened at UToronto doesn't happen again.

It's not the case, unless we are in a Star Trek episode where the DNA of an ancient race was spread through the galaxy in the primordial oceans of life friendly worlds. Scientists can go back the evolution chain and they know that humans evolved from primates and primates from small mammals and so on. It's extremely unlikely that we are colonizers. And even if we were the colonizers, where are our cousins?

Some interesting links: 3.75 millon year colonization theory And a much more conservative estimation of 50 million years

[10] For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.

Kerberos is generally the standard among Higher Education. PKI Certificate authentication is also explored quite a bit, but it suffers from being an architecture written almost entirely in Powerpoint.

We also use RSA Secure ID tokens, but only as a second form of auth and only required for highly sensitive operations.

We are also rolling out a web single sign on system which build off of Kerberos called Cosign.

Some of the more clueless departments (or those who simply do not know how to run anything else) are clamoring for a Windows Active Directory Domain, which we are going to provide, only it is going to be an authentication slave to our MIT Kerberos realm (There is no way in hell our access id and passwords will live on MS software)

Finkployd

Yes, because keeping everything proprietary and under tight restrictions is guaranteed to make you rich and powerful.

(I'm going to use success rather than power from now on, since I imagine that is the goal for more people)

Success, alas, is the exception to anything. If any one strategy guaranteed success everyone would do it and nobody would be having this discussion.

Since success is a crap shoot anyway, I would rather become successful (which is a relative term anyway) doing something I believed in and enjoy doing. If I were working for a dilbertesque software company that tried to lock everyone into their proprietary solutions, litigate away competition, and produced crappy software I might be more successful. I might even be driving a Mercedes instead of a Civic and live in a huge house instead of renting a duplex. But you know what, I wouldn't be believing in what I do every day and I would likely be miserable. I might not even be that successful since I don't know where I would find motivation.

No thanks, I'll just keep my non-competitive University job where I love what I do, I get to play with cool open source technology, and I get to keep my lofty ideals. I'm happier this way. And, dare I say, more successful :)

Finkployd

I'd suggest doing some reading before calling my claims outrageous.

What needs to be put aside for good is the belief that any so-called "momentum" behind ABM and similar schemes comes in some way from an altruistic "industry" intent to free email users from spam when in fact it is one of several attempts to get a "piece of the action" from the most sucessful uses of the Internet based (until when?) on open protocols. Such "altruistic" industry/government moves are usually accompanied by fallacious hand-waving about some impending "tragedy of the commons".

Spam reduction is just one of the baits here; another one is the promise of sharing bits of the money with several players including the end-users, those ultimately affected by the inevitable (but pseudo-authoritavely FAQ-downplayed) security disasters waiting to happen with ABM.

In fact, what this is about is yet another partial privatization of the commons; as your FAQ gently puts it, with this new Internet toll,

"Escrow agencies, ISPs and underwriters will each be able to take a cut off the top of any claimed bonds as services fees, and escrow agencies will be able to make additional money on depositor float. The exact distribution and size of these fees are not known at this time, but we expect them to settle to values that reflect the market for such services and its competitive structure. A fee of as much as 10% in total does not seem unreasonable."

In fact, what the ABM toll builders hope for is not a quasi-extinction of spam. Survival of at least some spam is part of the business model, with spammers playing by ABM rules being rewarded with the ABM newspeak label of "legitimate marketers".

"Many Fortune 1000 companies, legitimate small businesses and others have shied away from email marketing for fear of being viewed as a "spammer" - something that could compromise the integrity of their brands and their hard-earned reputations. Attention Bonds let these legitimate marketers back into the medium at a lower cost than the alternatives."

Another business opportunity for the toll-masters, helping the targetting of spam (sorry, I meant "legitimate marketing"), is suggested by

"Those who have retreated from email marketing for fear of tainting their brand and products can re-enter legitimately and smartly. Those skilled in database marketing may have an added advantage in that they can better refine their target lists. And because it is an economic system that allows the recipients to "signal" and provide information in terms of value and interest back to marketers (the senders), ultimately it makes the marketers smarter and more efficient about how to successfully reach the right targets."

Indeed, one would expect "those skilled in database marketing" to be strong supporters of the ABM strategy.

Even your argument on effects on competition is revealing:

The use of sender bonds will also allow mid-sized ISPs to continue to compete with major ISPs. The biggest players (AOL, Microsoft-MSN/Hotmail, Earthlink, etc.) are very focused on spam because of the added infrastructure costs to carry the traffic of billions of messages each day. Spam now constitutes more than 60% of email. These trafficking costs are huge. But, as hard as it is for the large scale ISPs, it is even harder for the mid-size ISPs, which have fewer resources. Unless the spam problem is addressed in a cost-effective way, small and mid-sized ISPs will keep dropping out, creating less competition and ultimately less choice and value for the consumer, since only the larger ISPs can support and suffer the added costs over time.

Here and elsewhere you seem to presume that all SMTP traffic happens between ISP-owned machines, conveniently forgetting private email servers and even small email providers which are not ISPs, suggesting, on the email services side, that this would be just some

The FUSSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers will pay money to send you mail.

needs to be put aside for good.

The post office reports that in 2002, $46 billion was spent on direct mail campaigns. Each item of real junk mail that you receive in your US Mail box costs money to send (typically greater than $0.35 each). There are companies out there that will happily pay for your attention - it's just that right now, you never see any of the payment since it all goes to the post office or the printers. See section 7.4 of the Q and A for the full details.

Strong identities are an important part of any realistic spam solution, but not necessarily tying the digital id to the person's real-world id (aka authentication). However, strong authentication alone is insufficient to solve spam because of the problem of first-contact.

Well, deciding to pay everyone you mail once up to some amount is one way of reducing the cost of decicion.

If email addresses get longer because of including information about ABM amount as you suggest, then that is another cost. The one page description talks of a challenge and then longer addresses are not needed.

When the system is new there will definitely be people who get the annoying challenge as most will not have decided to use it yet.

I would add to this that ,in general, good guys would not require keeping a very high balance in their escrow account. If a typical bond cost $0.10 as suggested, you would not need to risk more than one or two dollars in your escrow account unless you habitually send e-mail to unscrupulous recipients who claim your bond without justification.

Yes, a successful virus writer could get rich by stealing one dollar from each of a million targets, but would you not want to take part in a system that could hugely improve that quality and value of communications you receive, merely by risking a dollar or two in escrow?

Also, if your escrow account gets raided, it would not mean that you can't send email anymore. All of your friends would presumably have whitelisted you and would allow your messages through without invoking the bond mechanism.

Well, as per TFA (or at least this part), this system does not necessarily eliminate all anonymity.

There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account.

So what you are saying is that it is OK to make law outlawing something as long as it only adversely affects a minority of people.
QED

Revalations 13:16-17
[16] And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
[17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Revalations 13:16-17
[16] And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
[17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

It's been done... there were a lot of the players around for a while, and the hardware was a little bit more durable than a modern PC. The data's been rescued, and these people have made good progress on software emulation of the original hardware. The big problem is the plethora of potential copyright owners making the disk not legally copyable or distributable...

It's been done... there were a lot of the players around for a while, and the hardware was a little bit more durable than a modern PC. The data's been rescued, and these people have made good progress on software emulation of the original hardware. The big problem is the plethora of potential copyright owners making the disk not legally copyable or distributable...