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Open source beer!

I will remove it if asked, so grab it if ya want it.

Mark

I think this is a reference to Jack Handy:
http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/htmldoc s/deepthoughts.html

Google is your friend...

That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.

That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.

Satellite temperature records don't reflect the measurements on the ground. Nobody knows why yet, but what are you going to put more stock in: records from physical thermometers (a very well-understood measurement system) on the ground where people, crops and wildlife exist, or satellite radiometers which give discrepant readings from the physical thermometers for unknown reasons and may be giving some kind of systematic error that is not yet understood? My money's on the mercury, not the infrared.

And Slashdot, please stop mimicking the liberal media mindset that the earth is undeniably warming, and furthermore that "everyone" agrees with that statement. They don't. Climate science is still a region of massive debate and we can't just say with certainty what the climate will be like in 100 years.

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second-rate technology, who led them into it in the first place."

Things haven't changed much at all.

All things considered, I'd rather have Douglas Adams.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

If a Gecko was to grow a pouch, we would call it a Marsupial

No. A gecko is of the Class Reptilia. Reptilians can not be marsupials because marsupials are, by definition, mammals.

Here is a link for more information.

Dancin Santa

I was thinking about the same subject from the other direction recently. For my research I am trying to simulate the growth of silicon germanium crystals. The usual way of approaching a physics problem like this is to make simplified approximations of what actually happens. For example, hard-to-model processes like diffusion are measured by experiment or found from standard relations. But these simplifications can yield a model which is subtly wrong and fails to predict unexpected behavior.

What I really want to do is model the entire crystal growth from the most fundamental physics (quantum mechanics or something like string theory). That way the simulation is not just an approximation of reality but is indistinguishable from reality! How fast of a computer do I need for this full-detail simulation?

Well, that depends on the size of the system I'm trying to simulate. How big of a computer do I need to model a 1g chunk of matter? Logically, it seems that at least 1g of computer would be required to model 1g of arbitrary material in real time. (Otherwise, I could simply model a 1g computer with a 0.5g one, which in turn is actually simulated on a 0.25g computer and so on.) So, perfectly simulating a 10g crystal would take 10g of "ultimate laptop" processing. But if, like the article mentions, the laptop uses ordinary matter rather than plasma then the computation rate is 10^40 ops/second rather than 10^51 ops/second. This implies that my 1kg super laptop would need 31.7 years to simulate 1 second of growth for a 10g crytal! How much computation would be required to mimic The Matrix? To perfectly simulate life on Earth would require a computer at least as large as the Earth itself!

So, although 2 GHz processors sound fast and the ultimate laptop in this article seems unfathomable, we have many applications today that can take all the computation speed available. A near future application for ultracomputing is the modelling of protein folding for drug design. There, the amount of matter being simulated is small fractions of a gram and the leveraging of computer weight and time is worthwhile.

AlpineR

Well, yes, they can probably put whatever they want in it. I've seen EULA's that literally say they get your first born. That's not the interesting question. The question is-- what will actually hold up?

EULA's have severe limits. In Vault v. Quaid, it was held that an EULA can't infringe on federally protected consumer rights, such as noninfringing use, reverse engineering, and so on.

I found a rather interesting article dealing with copyright law vs. shrinkwrap licenses here. It's worth reading, since IP and EULA's seem to come up here quite often. It doesn't have an immediate interpretation of the current situation. However, it is evident that typically courts agree with the notion that EULA's cannot be used to artificially block legitimate competition, since that runs entirely counter to the purpose of the copyright laws they're predicated on.

nobody

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

Seriously, he's mildly amusing, but as whack jobs go, Chiu is strictly third-rate. I'm sure he wouldn't get any play if he wasn't basically offering free stuff to people who put banners on their site. Until something more interesting comes along, I'll stick with the classics, like McElwaine and Ludwig Plutonium.

For the large majority of Freedom Plan customers, this allowance will not impact on their current usage patterns and will provide them with improved network performance. This is because around five percent of users take up 35 percent of total bandwidth at any one time.

I'd say that if their network does not have optimal performance today, it is because they designed it that way (knowing the current usage patterns, including the 5%/35% ratio and all). And just because they are going to force some high volume users to pay more for their traffic, or to change their usage pattern, or leave, does not mean that the utilization of their net will be lower. It could mean that they will be able to push their network investment schedule back a couple of months, and let the performance level crawl back to what it is currently. Considering the boom in the number of broadband users, and in the band used/user, this would not take long.

Another aspect, too, that should be considered, is: who cares about 3 Gb being downloaded/uploaded in off-peak time ? Why restrict it ? What impact does it have on costs, or on the network performance for the average user ? The answer is none -- no impact. Maybe we could one day evolve towards more economically sophisticated ways of charging for traffic ...

I definitely need one of These. Don't even have to make any big mods! Probably could be used to heat the house as well...

You certainly could do with some understanding of language. Why not read something about language that wasn't written for 8th grade students before you go shooting your mouth off?

Check out some more good 'uns on this page. oh, and no of course i don't then go ahead and install AOL. duh, i use them for coasters like everyone else...

Stratospheric Processes And their Role in Climate
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
Space Physics and Astronomy Research Collaboratory
South Pembrokeshire Action with Rural Communities
Social Planning And Research Council of British Columbia
Student Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation
Statewide Pennsylvania Rights Coalition
Scalable Processor ARChitechture

Tim posted the story, but the review was written by clampe, who's pretty bright himself.

One of the most active groups involved in the development of scientific collaboratories is CREW (the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work) at the University of Michigan. It's an interdisciplinary team that has worked on a number of successful Projects including Collaboratories for Space Physics, AIDS Research, and Breast Oncology.

One of the most active groups involved in the development of scientific collaboratories is CREW (the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work) at the University of Michigan. It's an interdisciplinary team that has worked on a number of successful Projects including Collaboratories for Space Physics, AIDS Research, and Breast Oncology.

If you think I'm joking take a peek at the following.

geek

new

UMich

And my favorite, check out his Darpa funding: Quinn

Article XIV: On-Call Pay

Quoting:

Each employee specifically designated as in an "on-call" status shall be paid twenty percent (20%) of the job rate for his/her classification for hours spent in that status. Employees, when designated for on-call status, are required to restrict their whereabouts to the extent that they are required to leave word at their home or with their supervisor where they can be reached and be in a position to return to work immediately when called. Upon return to work, such employees are not eligible for call back or reporting pay, as provided in Articles XII and XIII, nor for on-call pay while at work, but shall be paid their regular hourly rate, plus shift premium or special schedule premium, if applicable, or the overtime premium as set forth in Section A. of Article X, if applicable, for actual work performed. Time spent in an on-call status shall not be counted in calculating time worked for deter-mining when an overtime premium shall be paid.

No, his experience shows a society which exists with a pack-mentality, in which the weak or the individual gets eaten by the Group - we have to realise that though we know that "You don't have to fuck people over to survive", that doesn't mean we don't fuck the little people over anyways.

This phenomena isn't unique to the Educational System, nor is it unique to the present age or to the US.

What do we do to stop this trend in schools? What do we do to stop this trend in society? What do we do to stop this trend in humanity?

-f

The fair, brotherly cops and respectable politicians are the source of enough institutional racism that the UN is getting involved. Your government has investigated the cops and found them guilty of pervasive racial bias. Heck, your own officers don't even believe that their fellow cops are fair or brotherly.

BTW, the rate of church attendance is more like 44% in the US and 27% in the UK. The University of Michigan has one of the most respected social sciences/statistics departments in the world, so please don't come back here claiming otherwise.

And as far as New Labour and the "Third Way" being responsive to the people... well, it's about as believable as hearing the same thing from Clinton. It is true that the British government isn't bought and sold as brazenly as ours is, but it is just as responsive as any other government when dollars (or pounds, as the case may be) are at issue. When those businesses want to start invading your privacy more brazenly, you can be sure that MI5 will be there to help out.

In conclusion- either you are a damn good troll or you are pretty deluded about the society you live in. Hope it is the latter... it is never too late to learn.

~luge

In Giving it away, you suggested that we could all easily make ketchup in our kitchen sinks. I tried and succeeded only in making a mess. Can you give us that recipe?

But you have to rush if you want anyone to read what you write on slashdot ;-)

Heeheehee... my favorite line of this message comes right at the end:

Hey, this is a funny thing. Did you know that the name of Bill Gate's wife is Melinda? Isn't that the name of your virtual sweetheart?

(giggle)

It wasn't too frightening for
Doctress Neutopia. For a short while, RMS was a shoo-in for the post of Gaia Messiah. It didn't work out, she complained about the disgustingly filthy state of his keyboard and started comparing him to Bill Gates.

Gun violence has been a problem throughout history. Violence among young people, and school violence in particular, is not really on the rise. The severity of school violence may be (as in, some of the shootings in the past several years have been real masscres, something that was more rare in the past) but the frequency of the incidents is not. It's just been picked up by the media and become a flash point for heated discussion.

The National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (where I work) has data collected by the U.S. government and by private researchers. It's free and available to the public, and you can look at it and see (if you do the statistical analysis yourself) that this is the case. This includes the CDC data that the statistics in the article above come from. I'm not denying that this is a major problem, and one that should be addressed immediately and with a great deal of energy. I am getting tired, however, of reading about this is a new phenomenon. Every time that people say that this is a new phenomenon, they link it to other new phenomena like the Net and video games and too much cheese in one's diet.

Don't just swallow the sound bytes whole-- look into the sources and decide for yourself.

The class was quite a bit of work, but was very rewarding. The final research project was very cool, as Prof. Edwards was very flexible about methods of submission (paper, video, web site, etc.) and topics ranged from women in computing to digital music to a brief history of Soviet computing (and yes, you can write a 3500-4500 word paper about the history of Soviet computing).

We learned about more than just the history of computers, however. This class forced me to think about how technology affects society, long before such musings became as popular as they are today. We learned about the role that census machines played in the Holocaust, about how a military boondoggle supplied some of the key components to today's computing technology, how women who played such a key role in the early years of computing were pushed aside, and finally the role of technology in other countries.

Of course, this class holds a special place in my heart since I met my finac&eacute while researching my paper, so I might be a little biased :)

The class was quite a bit of work, but was very rewarding. The final research project was very cool, as Prof. Edwards was very flexible about methods of submission (paper, video, web site, etc.) and topics ranged from women in computing to digital music to a brief history of Soviet computing (and yes, you can write a 3500-4500 word paper about the history of Soviet computing).

We learned about more than just the history of computers, however. This class forced me to think about how technology affects society, long before such musings became as popular as they are today. We learned about the role that census machines played in the Holocaust, about how a military boondoggle supplied some of the key components to today's computing technology, how women who played such a key role in the early years of computing were pushed aside, and finally the role of technology in other countries.

Of course, this class holds a special place in my heart since I met my finac&eacute while researching my paper, so I might be a little biased :)

The class was quite a bit of work, but was very rewarding. The final research project was very cool, as Prof. Edwards was very flexible about methods of submission (paper, video, web site, etc.) and topics ranged from women in computing to digital music to a brief history of Soviet computing (and yes, you can write a 3500-4500 word paper about the history of Soviet computing).

We learned about more than just the history of computers, however. This class forced me to think about how technology affects society, long before such musings became as popular as they are today. We learned about the role that census machines played in the Holocaust, about how a military boondoggle supplied some of the key components to today's computing technology, how women who played such a key role in the early years of computing were pushed aside, and finally the role of technology in other countries.

Of course, this class holds a special place in my heart since I met my finac&eacute while researching my paper, so I might be a little biased :)

The class was quite a bit of work, but was very rewarding. The final research project was very cool, as Prof. Edwards was very flexible about methods of submission (paper, video, web site, etc.) and topics ranged from women in computing to digital music to a brief history of Soviet computing (and yes, you can write a 3500-4500 word paper about the history of Soviet computing).

We learned about more than just the history of computers, however. This class forced me to think about how technology affects society, long before such musings became as popular as they are today. We learned about the role that census machines played in the Holocaust, about how a military boondoggle supplied some of the key components to today's computing technology, how women who played such a key role in the early years of computing were pushed aside, and finally the role of technology in other countries.

Of course, this class holds a special place in my heart since I met my finac&eacute while researching my paper, so I might be a little biased :)

The class was quite a bit of work, but was very rewarding. The final research project was very cool, as Prof. Edwards was very flexible about methods of submission (paper, video, web site, etc.) and topics ranged from women in computing to digital music to a brief history of Soviet computing (and yes, you can write a 3500-4500 word paper about the history of Soviet computing).

We learned about more than just the history of computers, however. This class forced me to think about how technology affects society, long before such musings became as popular as they are today. We learned about the role that census machines played in the Holocaust, about how a military boondoggle supplied some of the key components to today's computing technology, how women who played such a key role in the early years of computing were pushed aside, and finally the role of technology in other countries.

Of course, this class holds a special place in my heart since I met my finac&eacute while researching my paper, so I might be a little biased :)

My school made it's own Linux distribution. It's little more than a slightly altered Redhat 6.1. But, for a Linux newbie such as myself, it was great to be able to install a distro with working AFS/Kerberos that was designed to be interoperable with UofM's other systems.

Lots of customized distros are good. Lots of generalized distros are good too.

OK, for the hell of it...

If you want httpd for a PDA, look here.

Frankly, I don't think the Palm community get enough credit for the *heaps* of quality, free, and often open-source software that is produced. All of the add-on apps for my pdQphone are free-beer and most are open-source. I can use an open-source palm telnet or SSH client to access client routers from a moving vehicle (and I think that is both pretty cool and pretty handy, and no not while I'm driving :^).

There's some work on secure RPC and NFS for Linux and OpenBSD. Take a look at Dug Song's project list and the UMich NFSv4 project. Not sure how far these have progressed, the NFSv4 page at least seems somewhat out of date, but interested parties might still find them useful.

The upcoming NFSv4 standard will support strong authentication, encryption, and server-side access control. A group at CITI is working on a Linux implementation of NFSv4.

I would imagine, however, that not all schools are the same. The differences between CS and CE are most likely potentially drastic between two schools. You should look at descriptions of the courses, etc. from the schools you are interested in to see which major you think is best suited for you.

CEvsCS

And if you're going to U of M, and you can handle a foreign language, I suggest CS.

Myth - "Those with more interest in the hardware or architecture design aspects of computers should be CE majors." This is a common misconception, since both CE and CS degrees require a balance of software and hardware courses. In fact, CE is for those wishing an engineering degree, and CS is for those preferring a more science-oriented degree, or those preferring a computing degree within the context of a liberal education. from here.

Myth - "Those with more interest in the hardware or architecture design aspects of computers should be CE majors." This is a common misconception, since both CE and CS degrees require a balance of software and hardware courses. In fact, CE is for those wishing an engineering degree, and CS is for those preferring a more science-oriented degree, or those preferring a computing degree within the context of a liberal education. from here.

However, that is completely wrong.

You see, if a university wants to give someone a degree with the word "Engineering" on it, the program has to be accredited by ABET. The accreditation makes sure that students are learning enough programming and, yes, that they know at least something about circuits, computer architectures, and signals and systems (about one class each is enough). Therefore, only departments that have been accredited by ABET can give "computer engineering" degrees.

If a University wants to give "Computer science" degrees then it can get accredited by CSAB. Their accreditation requirements are more "lenient" than ABET's since they require fewer "hardware" courses (if any).

Usually, the only difference is that a computer engineer has to take about three more classes (circuits, computer architecture, signals and systems) than a computer scientist in order to fulfill the degree requirements, but it depends on the school.

Note also that CSAB and ABET are integrating their CS and CE accreditation so in the future there probably will not be any difference.

The U. Michigan has a good FAQ on the subject.

I know this because almost every singly student I advise asks me about it.

it is merely a feedback controlled motor system.

Absolutely. But I think it's no less a robot for that.

What is a robot ? Are there any existing devices that you'd class as a robot ? I think this is an interesting question, because there are very, very few current machines that meet your criteria.

No, a machine has to be able to make decisions in order to qualify as a robot.

What's a "decision" ? Does a robot that "makes a choice" that will improve its access to food/fuel/power count as a decision maker ? Must it have an internal world model that knows, "I want food, Food is over there, I will go over there" ? Or is it sufficient to simply turn towards the light ? It may not have an understanding of "food", "light" and their relationship, merely that generations of its parent [algorithms] underwent a proces of natural selection that rewarded those who favoured light by improving their food access.

Are you familiar with subsumption architectures ? These are a highly successful series of robot designs, based on tiny robot-components executing according to their inbuilt rules, but producing a resultant behaviour of the system (or "creature") that is apparently far more complex. Nowhere in these architectures is there any notion of a Big Architecture "World View" or any "Reasoning"

One of the dogmatic statements of the subsumptionists (on Brooks' model) is that, "The world is its own best model". This means that robots shouldn't try to model the world, they should use it itself as the model. For a photovore, the best food sources are found in the places that are brightest (this is a world modelling task, as it's not trivially obvious to a robot). A Big Architecture robot would need to "know" that light==food, and that it should then seek out food by seeking out light. A photovore doesn't do this; it just goes to the brightest places, with all the intelligence of a thermostat. It doesn't even realise it's seeking "food" by this process, it only knows that it's seeking light. It doesn't even know why it seeks light (as it doesn't know that light is food), it just does it. More complex ones may have built this behaviour up randomly, by either a reward or selection process; perhaps the sound and humidity seekers starved earlier.

Here's a description from the University of Michigan.

______________

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• http://www.robotbooks.com/lawn-mower-robot.htm"> U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

• Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Technologies
• "Where am I? Systems and Methods for Mobile Robot Positioning" (more recent than above)
• http://www.robotbooks.com/lawn-mower-robot.htm"> U of Florida's LawnNibbler
• Robotics Companies list
• "Can't Anyone Make a Decent Robot?"

On the very slim chance this isn't a troll, I offer the following:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (replace robots with artificially-created humans)

Personally, I worry that the ones who would most want to clone themselves are probably the ones we'd least want cloned. Also, I think in small quantities it probably wouldn't doom the world (twins, triplets, quads)

... but imagine the process becomes incredibly inexpensive, almost trivial. Throw in artificial wombs. I think when you get to dozens or hundreds of clones, that might get screwy. Some people resent being one of several middle kids in a large family, what if you were one of a hundred identical twins? How would you name them? (if you're not George Foreman)

I wonder how many clones of himself Bill Gates could afford to create ...