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I have the facts to back it up.

1) The Duelfer Report, clearly stating that there was no connection between the Baathist movement and al Qaeda, and just the dysfunctional remainings of a weapons program.
2) An interview with the Number Two of al Qaeda, al Zawahiri.
3) The history of the Baath Party as a secular, socialist and nationalist Arab movement.
4) The biography of the Number Two of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, who is no muslim at all, but a Chaldean Catholic. So whatever Iraq was, it was surely not ruled by islamistic jihadists.
5) All the alleged evidence brought before the war being debunked, from the Yellow Cake Story to the British dossier on Iraq's WMD program being just a rip of of Ibrahim al-Marashi's doctoral thesis.
6) The fact that Donald Rumsfeld even created his own intelligence unit because the CIA was still unable to uncover anything supporting, what the administration was believing to be true.
7) The fact that Colin Powell's address at the U.N. didn't convince neither Hans Blix, head of the U.N.'s inspectors of Iraq's WMD program nor the "old Europeans", with Germany's Minister for Foreign Affairs, J.Fischer, publicly stating his doubts.

I think the definition is very simple. If the universe is entirely predictable, then there cannot be free will. If truly random events can occur, then "free will" is possible, though not necessary.

OK, now define "truly random". :-)

Here's my definition of free will: behaviour that cannot be predicted far in advance by anyone (including the actor), but that can be recognised as the outcome of a decision-making process (which allows the actor to learn). The first clause excludes non-chaotic deterministic processes; the second clause excludes non-cognitive chaotic processes such as the Brownian motion in a nice hot cup of tea.

I like this definition because it doesn't rely on "true randomness" (which as far as I can tell is just a way of saying "effects that originate outside the current level of description") or a "central executive" that gives orders to the rest of the brain; it allows the brain to be what it clearly is - a decentralised, modular, subsumptive system with chaotic (i.e. deterministic but unpredictable) dynamics.

For instance, Lobachevsky, at least according to Tom Lehrer. (For those of you sound-deprived, enjoy the lyrics).

Read the paper. http://www.cse.umich.edu/~imarkov/pubs/conf/date08-epic.pdf.

The chip generate a unique Private Key when first powering up. The matching Public Key is sent to the IP holder for activation. Supposedly there is no way to force a chip to generate a known private key without modifying the masks.

Modifying the mask (blueprint) using a "microscope" (or other techniques), is much more difficult that just putting the original mask in the machine and churning out a few thousands of chips.

I know this is /. but I took the time to find the actual paper, they cover the typical attacks on the security mechanism quite thoroughly. Apparently its very difficult to scan a mask, especially at the small scales the industry deals in today - they suggest it would be cheaper to simply design the chip yourself.

(Off-topic: the anti-spam mechanism atm gives an interesting result for my email address..."'poo' in gap" oO)

The research paper describing EPIC http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~imarkov/pubs/conf/date08-epic.pdf will be presented next week in Munich http://date-conference.com/

Lots and lots of kids get run over crossing the street in the dark on Halloween. They really do.

Compared to the approximately 3,000 annual pedestrian fatalities in darkness, the increase in Halloween deaths is relatively small, amounting to about three additional deaths per year.

I came to browse Slashdot while waiting for some ray tracing of my own. I do atomistic modeling of nanomechanics and I'm rendering movies of how atoms wiggle and move during deformation. Here is a test shot of a 4 nm tall aluminum cylinder rendered at 150 femtoseconds per second of animation:

Aluminum nanocolumn vibration (Quicktime, 14 MB)

It's amazing how nice ray tracing can look compared to other visualization methods. It took three hours to generate this 1000 frame movie. But as processors add cores or ray tracing gets hardware acceleration this can speed up dramatically.

Doing ray tracing on small screens makes a lot of sense since you're restricted to low resolution anyway. A Nintendo DS or Apple iPhone has a fraction of the resolution of a desktop, but the ratio of processor speed to screen pixels might be better (or become better in the near future).

I work as a scientist, and I have released a couple of classes as open source: a C++ implementation of a certain random number generator and a simple but flexible configuration file reader.

I needed these bits of code for my research and couldn't find any existing code that met my needs. Two of those needs were simplicity and portability. The programs I write must run on various architectures and without the installation of other packages. So I wrote them myself, borrowing and adapting bits from other open code. So far the cost to me was the same whether I kept the source closed or open.

Then I released the code for the extra cost of cleaning up the comments and making a simple Web page. In return, users of my code gave me bug fixes, better portability, and speed improvements. They also taught me some better programming habits. All of that makes my scientific code, which I don't give away, better and helps me compete in the field of science.

I suspect that the producers of those open source libraries receive similar benefits. They needed software to perform a certain task, but that task isn't the end goal of their own work. By sharing their libraries they make the rest of their work better.

I work as a scientist, and I have released a couple of classes as open source: a C++ implementation of a certain random number generator and a simple but flexible configuration file reader.

I needed these bits of code for my research and couldn't find any existing code that met my needs. Two of those needs were simplicity and portability. The programs I write must run on various architectures and without the installation of other packages. So I wrote them myself, borrowing and adapting bits from other open code. So far the cost to me was the same whether I kept the source closed or open.

Then I released the code for the extra cost of cleaning up the comments and making a simple Web page. In return, users of my code gave me bug fixes, better portability, and speed improvements. They also taught me some better programming habits. All of that makes my scientific code, which I don't give away, better and helps me compete in the field of science.

I suspect that the producers of those open source libraries receive similar benefits. They needed software to perform a certain task, but that task isn't the end goal of their own work. By sharing their libraries they make the rest of their work better.

...economic prosperity and theism are inversely related...

This is false. The United States is one of the most religious countries, yet it seems to be doing pretty well for itself economically.

Worse still would be the increase in downloads if he did another My Life as a Bosom...

Course the physicist demographic would plummet sharply.

This might help: http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/ndss08_dns.pdf
Corrupted DNS Resolution Paths: The Rise of a Malicious Resolution Authority

No. At best your going to have an average of different locations at certain temperatures but that has no real reflection of the situation.climate zones depend on climate falling within a given statistical range or anything, or that changing that range would be a change to a completely different zone. What was I thinking?

First, A feedback can have a forcing effect.

Look, you can argue against definitions all you want. Feedback is, by definition, not forcing.

That is to say that a feedback can raise temperatures which under the Co2 model would generally be a forcing.

No! That is feedback. It occurs in response to a long-lasting stimulus, and only in response to that stimulus. Feedback can be positive or negative. What you described is known as "positive feedback".

Water vapor is a feedback and a forcing though, I though I made that clear.

You made it clear that you're wrong.

But under the Co2 models, they aren't prepared to account for water vapor as a variable which is why you see explanations using it as a constant.

In *NO* model is water vapor a constant.

And no, water doesn't average 10 days in the atmosphere because the saturation points differ.

Wow, do we need to go all the way back to the definition of the word average?

I suggest you quite getting your information from loaded sites designed to convince you regardless of the truth. Real science and at least one of the scientist contributing to it is one of them.

I suggest you get your data from somewhere other than your a**^H^H^Himagination.

There have been 150-200mV microcontrollers (pdf) at the University of Michigan for some time now: http://wimserc.org/research_highlights/Submiminal_Processor_Research_Highlight.pdf Conference paper 3: http://vlsida.eecs.umich.edu/resource.php?grp=1 what is new is TI and MIT are involved in a commercial low voltage product. But thats still 5 years out. MIT is good at getting press.

And Vint Cerf agrees with him.

Right there at the top of google.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/k/kjv/browse.html

http://www.ibs.org/niv/booklist.php

Moving an asteroid is MUCH easier than solving poverty, crime or homelessness. If you have enough lead time it takes a relatively small rocket attached to the asteroid to steer it clear of the earth. A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force! Another simple proposal.

On the other hand, there is already enough food for everyone on the whole planet, but human greed, for both wealth and power, prevents a huge number of people from enjoying peace and prosperity. And no amount of technical or political knowledge is going to help.

In short, it is a very low chance event with very bad results that we CAN do something about.

The Amazon river puts out 219,000 cubic metres of fresh water per second. That's 0.219 cubic kilometres per second, or 6.9 million cubic kilometres per annum. My guess was out by orders of magnitude - in fact we use about one thousandth of an Amazon.

..by cellular automata expert Shalizi,

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

An interesting review: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

Wyrd - "Because you're tired of waiting for your bloated calendar program to start up." http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pelzlpj/wyrd/ Enjoy!

Credit where it is due.

    http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

You may want to rethink that strategy. This study (pdf) found that people who vented their anger on a punching bag were more angry and acted more aggressively afterward than those who didn't. In fact, the best results (less anger and less aggression) were for those who did nothing.

then I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Ranum's points. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there working on Real Security. Let's see, there's OpenBSD's work to integrate cryptography as a system service, there's Neils Provos' work on systrace, there's GCC's ProPolice stack-smashing protection, there's OpenBSD's write XOR execute protection (which, BTW, Windows now has to some small extent), there are phishing mitigation features in Firefox, there are Free implementations of good authentication systems (e.g., MIT Kerberos, Heimdal), lots of programs now ship with sane defaults (ala Postfix and qmail), there are safe-string libraries of all license stripes, and on and on and on! The fact that Microsoft apparently does not use their own safe-string implementation is indicative of the problem here. Microsoft writes crap. If you want systems where security is a real concern, it's easy to find it. That's not to say that those systems are "secure"-- security is always a work in progress-- but to say that "our responses to those problems also remain the same" is disingenuous. Projects like OpenBSD (among many others mentioned above) have attempted to identify entire classes of problems, and solve them on the big-picture level instead of doing the patch-a-week thing.

Lets see, violent crime in the UK is pretty steady at 650-900 homicides a year for a country of 55 million. The recent trend has been sharply down despite 52 homicide victims of 7/7. Of those the vast majority are domestics, killing sprees are pretty much a once a decade affair.

I don't think that you could honestly attribute more than 50 or so homicides a year to the effects of computer games in the UK if you took the most liberal interpretation imaginable.

Smoking causes about 110,000 deaths a year according to the leading anti-smoking campaign.

Allowing for the fact that ASH might well overstate the case somewhat the fact is that we don't have a single UK case where computer games are confirmed as a major factor. So I would be pretty confident in stating that smoking is at least a thousand times more dangerous than video games and the evidence points to the difference being more like a hundred thousand.

So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?

You can tell that its a fit up job in the first sentence "After reviewing more than 50 years of research on the impact of violence in the media,". In other words this is not an objective study, its a fishing expedition through existing research. Lets take a look at his bibliography. Does not exactly look like the guy is a disinterested party here.

Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.

I found a few more details in the press release.

As others have pointed out, the causation may be that those with some predisposition to violence are more attracted to violent TV programs and games. Some evidence for that is actually in the press release itself:

When the children in the Columbia County study were eight years old, the most violent shows on television were "Gunsmoke" and "77 Sunset Strip." Even so, the study found large effects of heavy viewing of violence ten years later.

Since those programs are not very violent by more recent standards it shows that the absolute level of violence in the viewed programs is not the crucial factor. Instead the relative level of violence is. Someone who only watched "Gunsmoke" today would not turn out to be very violent, while someone who watched it back when it was the most violent thing available would. That means that the content of Gunsmoke is not a cause of anything.

The explanation that fits these facts the most is that watching violence on TV is an indicator, not a cause.

Doesn't Genesis say that God decided no one should live longer than... was it 100 years? No, 120.

So life extension is against God. Personally, I'd expect that if an omnipotent god said nobody is going to live longer than 120 years it really wouldn't matter what anybody did, but apparently God needs the help of us poor peons to make sure his edicts are enforced. And that Noah... he's the worst of all. He lived WAY more than 120 years, even AFTER the decree!

You stated we are not capable of mega engineering. This is false. We are capable of scaling our energy collection out as far as we need with technology that is over 30 years old, and with that capacity, we can pursue whatever mega engineering projects we want.

The problem is that we can't feasibly remove the CO2 and other greenhouse gases, GHGs, we have already released no matter how much the energy capacity is expanded. We could try to scrub the atmosphere but how much energy would it require to reduce GHGs?

Our biggest threats are population control and wasteful use of our non-renewable resources.

A way to reduce, er control, the population is to increase education, equality, and economic opportunities. As education and gender equality improve people's economic opportunities improve as well and the more people earn the less they reproduce, ie the birth rate declines. In the "Western World" or First World if it wasn't for immigration the population would be declining.

Whereabouts is a project at the University of Michigan to build a location sensing network using widely available off-the-shelf components, such as RFID sensors and 802.11 stations.

Our goal is to build a network of sensors that will allow users and computers to detect and share their location information, and provide an interface to query and monitor that information. This network and query interface will serve as infrastructure for research in areas such as ubiquitous computing, privacy, large and rapidly changing databases, and whatever else we come up with.

Note that this project will in no way involve the tracking of anybody who does not wish to be tracked. Anybody who prefers not to participate can simply not wear a tag. We further plan on providing privacy options which will allow users who do decide to wear tags to control what information is disclosed.

Currently, we have created a building-wide location infrastructure in our CSE building, location middleware to allow location data to be handled in a uniform and privacy-sensitive way, and a tour guide application to demonstrate the system and acquaint new visitors with our building. We also have a variety of student projects which have built on the location system.

This work has resulted in several publications, and in some software available from our Web site. We are in the process of making more of our software available.

Many people are involved in and have participated in this project.

Quite a bit of other information is available on the Whereabouts project Wiki.

This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant EIA-0303587 as "An Infrastructure for Wide Area Pervasive Computing" and by a grant from Intel.

Unfortunately, those most directly affected by the patent system are also often the least knowledgeable about it and often the most infected by its peculiarly virulent myths and fallacies. Asking some of the right questions, as you have done, is a good start but the patent system - esp. w.r.t. software patents - has been a hot topic in economics and elsewhere for some time now and you might be interested in some of the more recent stuff than that found at the LPF site:

http://researchoninnovation.org/

http://www.si.umich.edu/~kahin/kahinpubs.html

There are stats about how much time children has spent with their parents (and/or family) and how maladjusted they are. I will not point you to the stats, you may have to leave your computer (and YOUR television) and go to you local institution for cultural studies to get them.

Now that's a horrible thought. Are you saying that there's oodles of data supporting the traditional American nuclear family, and there are no conservative groups trumpeting it on the web?

But generally they point to that the more time spent with different adults, the less maladjusted the children gets.

Except that it appears that: Children spend more time with parents:

Despite a sharp increase in the number of dual-career families, children spend more time with their parents than children did two decades ago, according to a U-M study.

The study, forthcoming in Demography, finds that children ages 3-12 in two parent families spent about 31 hours a week with their mothers in 1997, compared to about 25 hours in 1981. The amount of time spent with fathers increased from about 19 hours to 23 hours a week.

I completely agree. FreeBSD started offering official binary security updates. Maybe one day OpenBSD will do the same. Until then give Radmind a shot. It works beautifully for any BSD OS.

Actually, while I wouldn't put salt in an open exterior wound, I've found it does help with in-the-mouth canker sores. Whenever a nwe allergy season kicks in it takes my body awhile to adjust, and if I'm not careful what I eat then I end up with sore white craters in my inner lip or sometimes cheek. I've found that wetting a Q-tip, putting salt on it, and then rubbing it into the wound causes an initial sting, then blood rises to the surface and they become less bothersome for awhile. They tend tend to heal faster when I do this too.

For those that aren't too keen on the idea of packing salt into the open cut, you can also gargle salt-water for a similar cleansing effect, though I find it's not quite as effective as applying it directly.

Googling for it, many sites do recommend salt-water to cleanse wounds:

Wilderness survival, Intellihealth, and Pediatric advisor (for skin infection)

Other common substances I've heard that can be good for cleaning wounds include garlic and honey.

I've never really understood the expression "salt in an open wound" myself. Having used it in various situations the sting rarely lasts long and afterwards it usually hurts less than before the cleansing.

I wonder how well a mixed solution of natural anesthetic, capsaicin, and salt and maybe garlic extract would work? Might be a good thing to keep around in a naturist's first-aid kit, or perhaps just concentrated solutions of the above and a good water purifier (purify water on-site and mix). I've been meaning to grow myself some hot peppers anyhow, so perhaps I'll buy a plant or two and see if they survive my rather less-than-green thumb.

This has been posted elsewhere in the discussion, but you might like to read what academics think of Wolfram's magnum opus: here. It seems that people who do understand it think that it is not particularly original, repeating many known results from previous work (without citations), and also saying things that are actually wrong.

The ideas about the Universe as a giant cellular automaton are particularly bizarre, I think, but then I have always had trouble with seeing myself as being equivalent to a computer program. It's all reminiscent of the Hitch-hiker's Guide, actually, since Wolfram is effectively saying that you can extrapolate all possible states of the Universe from a piece of fairy cake, then build an artificial Universe that is equivalent to the real one. Then, presumably, you can do any scientific research from the comfort of your office, and still be able to go to parties in the evening. Sounds great, if unlikely.

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity should give you an idea why many people despise Wolfram and look for opportunities to deflate the hype bubble that surrounds him and everything he touches.

Wolfram never actually proved Rule 110. The actual work for that was done by Matthew Cook - who presented the paper at a conference while he was working in Wolfram's employ - and eventually got himself and the conference sued. Apparently, working for Wolfram means you sign over any and all papers, ideas, and patents over to him, without receiving any real credit for them.

Another little-known fact is that Wolfram was just one of several people who initially coded Mathematica. He decided one day to take all the code, form a company on his own, and engage in expensive lawsuits with all of his former collaborators to gain ownership of the code.

As far as I'm concerned, the man at this point is wasted intelligence. He may come out with another non-trivial result or two over the course of the rest of his life, but his best contributions to the science may yet come from his wallet - like sponsoring prizes like this one.

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

The above link is worthwhile, entertaining, and should help bring back anyone who drank the Wolfram Kool-Aid.

(go blue)

I'm talking about the fact that Roundup-ready corn, which is the genetically modified organism in this instance, will be pushed out by native species if we stop applying Roundup.

So invasive species don't exist? People would argue with you that native species will push out non native species, just ask some people about the Kudzu invasion between eastern Texas to the mid Atlantic states. Kudzu isn't native to the US, it was imported from Japan. Fact is is invasive species are a big deal in some places and there is concern GMO corn will pose a threat to native corn in Mexico as an invasive species. Here's an article on how "Biofuel Crops Could Become Superweeds".

You cannot feed 6 billion people through organic, non-GMO farming.

BS, the biggest reasons people starve is because of conflicts, politics, and subsidies. Farmers don't want to grow crops on fields where a battle is fought. Nor do they want what they grow to be taken from them, then they need distribute the food. Politicians, like President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe can take a country that's a breadbasket and produces more than enough food for it's population, food was Zimbabwe's main export and generated enough income to pay for any imports needed, before Mugabe came to power into a nation that needs aid. Once Mugabe came to power he forced most if not all of the white farmers off their land then gave the farms to his cronies. Now once fertile land is not able to produce enough, those the land was given to didn't know how to farm. Now Zimbabwe depends on foreign aid to feed the country. The third problem are the hugh subsidies the EU, Japan, and the US give to it's farmers. The billions of dollars in farm subsidies the US gives to US agribusinesses, Japan who gives about as much, and the EU who gives even more drive poor farmers off their farms in the Third World. How can a Mexican corn farmer compete with Cargill who receives billions and can grow then export to Mexico and sell corn there cheaper than a Mexican farmer can grow it? With few exceptions all those starving starve because of money and politics.

As for whether or not organic farming can feed the world, there are studies that conclude organic farming can indeed fee the world. Some studies conclude organics produce more in the same amount of place while other show it produces a little less. From University of Michigan, Organic farming can feed the world, U-M study shows". From the BBC: "Organic farming can 'feed the world'".

Fact is is Genetic Engineering and GMOs aren't needed to feed the world.

http://positrons.physics.lsa.umich.edu/nanopos/Publications/Reprints/Annual%20Rev%20Materials%20Research%20PAS%202006.pdf Used mostly for characterizing porus materials. Fun read if you find materials or nuclear science interesting, however perhaps too boring to put forth as informations in TFA.

I needed a fair amount of work to get back to my normal grip strength. For that, I was given therapy putty in lower grade (yellow) followed by a higher one (green). It's basically silly putty formulated in a specific way to provide different levels of resistance.

Once I was back to a normal grip strength, I started using a Powerball (you should be able to get them cheaper than that, mind you). I was told by the therapist that exercise with any decent set of free weights should provide the necessary workout and resistance, but the Powerball is a lot smaller and easier to travel with and can be used at the office (the noise is annoying, but not more so than some peoples' desk fans).

I really do recommend the physical therapy as well, though, because that included massage and heat treatment that made a huge difference at the beginning, and especially because you can make sure you're doing the exercises properly under professional supervision. Once I was back to having functional hands without pain, the therapy was done and I've continued on my own, doing the stretches and using the Powerball, for two years now without any relapses.

Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.

Soar.

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/soar/home

Read Allen Newell's "Unified Theories of Cognition".

I have no desire to defend Islam.... My interest is only in defending Muslims.

... saying "Islam tries to get you killed for disagreeing" muddies the actual situation, and creates resentment among moderate Muslims.

There is nothing Islamic about beating women.

[4.34] Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.

Now, imagine your most dumbest, most back-water Virginia or Georgia redneck, time-wrap him back a hundred years, reduce his level of education and income by an order of magnitude, and you have the sort of dumb Bengali villager that is willing to whip a women because some mufti told him to. Do you honestly believe you even need to bring Islam into the discussion to explain the behavior?

Easy. I've already indirectly referred to it, but you can read more yourself. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/White/astrono my/retreat.html

In 1664 Alexander VII prefixed to the Index containing the condemnations of the works of Copernicus and Galileo and ``all books which affirm the motion of the earth'' a papal bull signed by himself, binding the contents of the Index upon the consciences of the faithful. This bull confirmed and approved in express terms, finally, decisively, and infallibly, the condemnation of ``all books teaching the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun.''

The doctrine of papal inerrancy certainly was understood to apply to such statements, despite attempts later on to wiggle out of it, when it was proven beyond all doubt that both the bible and the popes were wrong.

First, the Slashdot story only references a press release on Physorg.org, an organization that apparently exercises little oversight over the articles it runs.

That statement seems misleading (quoting) The study, "Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky" appears in the August edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CID/ It is my understanding that CID is a well-respected peer-reviewed journal.

Physorg.org just copied a UofM press release. If you are offended by the standards at Physorg.org, you're welcome to read the original press release here: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php? id=5990

Second, read this article by the same author, which says exactly the opposite of the present article: Antibacterial Cleaning Products and Drug Resistance.

Your logic appears to be flawed. But other posters have already commented on that.

NO development of drug resistance or Triclosan resistance has been shown as a result of use of Triclosan, apparently, although people have been speculating about that for at least two decades. There are some chemical pathways that bacteria cannot abandon.

You're appear to be setting up a straw man argument here. The article is just saying that soaps with Triclosan (quoting) are no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms, as well as reducing bacteria on the hands. The conclusion of the paper is that (quoting) government regulators should evaluate antibacterial product claims and advertising, and further studies are encouraged. So, they're saying that it might be possible that manufacturers are claiming that the soaps do something they don't necessarily do, and that someone should probably check on that.

The sloppiness and over-valuation of the work suggests either: 1) The University of Michigan does not deserve our confidence, or possibly 2) Allison Aiello is allowed to be sloppy because she is attractive.

Oh puleeze.

I'm guessing your link to her profile page on our web server is the only reason your comment was moderated as "interesting".

Yes, Triclosan may not prevent bacterial or virus infection. But no one said it did. The purpose of Triclosan is to prevent or reduce skin fungal infections, and it does that very well, in my experience.

And what, pray tell, type of experience is that? Have you recently published in any peer-reviewed journals about these experiences of yours?

[disclaimer: I work for the University of Michigan School of Public Health, but I don't recall if have ever met Dr. Aiello in person]

"(the negative effects of antibacterial everything in the household)"

Tricosan is bacteriostatic, but so is soap. One of the points of washing is to get rid of bacteria. Every time you do anything against bacteria, you encourage bacterial evolution to find a new pathway.

1. First, the Slashdot story only references a press release on Physorg.org, an organization that apparently exercises little oversight over the articles it runs.

2. Second, read this article by the same author, which says exactly the opposite of the present article: Antibacterial Cleaning Products and Drug Resistance.

   Quote: "... we did not observe a significant impact on antimicrobial drug resistance during the 1-year period..."

3. NO development of drug resistance or Triclosan resistance has been shown as a result of use of Triclosan, apparently, although people have been speculating about that for at least two decades. There are some chemical pathways that bacteria cannot abandon.

   The story is not new, but is apparently chosen only because it easily excites the popular imagination.

4. The sloppiness and over-valuation of the work suggests either: 1) The University of Michigan does not deserve our confidence, or possibly 2) Allison Aiello is allowed to be sloppy because she is attractive.

5. This quote from the U. of M. press release is pure, wild speculation, not supported by theory or experiment, apparently: "Because of the way triclosan kills the bacteria, mutations CAN happen at the targeted site. Aiello says a mutation COULD mean that the triclosan can no longer get to the target site to kill the bacteria because the bacteria and the pathway have changed form." [my emphasis]

6. Yes, Triclosan may not prevent bacterial or virus infection. But no one said it did. The purpose of Triclosan is to prevent or reduce skin fungal infections, and it does that very well, in my experience.

Freeman Dyson said this in 2005. If Slashdot is going to post a daily piece of anti-global warming propaganda each day, couldn't they at least pick a current piece?

We used to write FEM problems that'd take weeks to solve, so I did some random scribbles, given the rapid climb of n^n and that the 'per-second' part can integrate out 3.5 digits in an hour, or 6 digits per week...

A 40 point problem becomes 10^64 photons (10^19 seconds coming from the sun).
A 35 point problem becomes 10^34 photons (10^-9 seconds from the sun)

An eyeful of sunlight has 10^15 per second, according to: http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0405/Mar07_05/02.sht ml
Oddly, a 1mW laser generates roughly the same (according to a quick democalc found at http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserioi.htm#ioilpm4)

Since we're playing strictly gedanken-games, I say we make a 10-meter parabolic concentrator (pi * 5m^2 * 10kcm^2 /6cm^2-per-eyeful = 10^5, and run the test for a week. That's gonna give 10^11 x as many photons. 10^26 photons per week.

Heh, you're right... still not gonna scale worth beans, even assuming I didn't hose the above googling of physics vals or the math...

I've heard of a couple potential SSH clients that would work on the iPhone.

WebShell is a project that is geared specifically as an SSH client for the iPhone. The problem is that it requires installation on any server that you want SSH access to.

GotoSSH.com appears to provide web SSH access that would probably also work on the iPhone. It seems unique because it doesn't require any software installation on the SSH servers. I've found it handy since I can connect to some of my servers that are outside of my work firewall (which blocks SSH traffic of course).

I'm not sure how useful it would really be to try and use a text terminal on an iPhone, but I suppose it would be handy to be able to restart a daemon process or other quick maintenance commands.