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Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Here's the original post from robots.net...

A recent National Science Foundation press release includes photos and video clips of the latest Scout emergency response robots. Scout is a small (100mm x 35mm) two wheeled, tube-shaped robot containing a video camera, IR range sensors, light sensors, pyroelectric sensors, and two-way radio links that support frequency hopping and encryption. MegaScout is a larger version that will eventually carry manipulator arms, grappling hooks, and may act as a mothership for the smaller scouts. The robots are designed to survive a six story fall or being thrown up to 100 feet into a disaster area. The Scouts are built entirely from off-the-shelf parts. The robots are being deveoped by Nikos Papanikolopoulos
and other researchers from the University of Minnesota Distributed Robotics Lab, the University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab, and the Caltech Robotics Group. More video of the robots performing amazing feats is available on the UMN website.

Yes, zebra mussels do CLEAR the water, but they do not CLEAN it. What they do is they remove all the sediment that other creatures oftem feed on, thus making it unavailable. However, they pass most pollutants right on (except for some heavy metals and such which they bioaccumulate like crazy, poisoning any creatures which then eat them.)

And the clearing of the water actually causes problems in and of itself. There is still a super high nutrient load in the water, and the extra light allowed in causes several noxious weeds to grow out of control, choking out most normal vegetation, destroying habitat several animals use (especially for egg laying) and choke waterways from human navigation.

While their unchecked growth in the wild does cause problens, zebra mussels could make an interesting part of a constructed bioremediation system (at least in waterways which are already infected by the zebras anyways.)

A couple of links on zebra mussels:
Wisconsin DNR
Minnesota Sea Grant
Missouri Department of Conservation
Iowa DNR

And slightly more technical link outlinking some ofthe risks of overfiltration

As far as the Vatican goes, the Pope never really had much direct influence in Egypt. That was the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

According to this page, the burning of the library was a team effort involving Julius Caesar in 47 BC, fanatical Christians in 391 AD, and Omar the Caliph of Baghdad in 641 AD.

Concur.

They gave it their best shot, but they got it wrong.

But then again, so did many others. Clippy notwithstanding, a day will come when personalized interaction with computers will not only exceed what now obtains between humans and pets, but also what now obtains what now obtains between humans and other humans. When this finally happens, there's gonna be some seriously weird shit going down along the lines of the ancient curse about living in interesting times.

There is an old iron ore mine shaft about an hour away from my house and from what I understand, they too are trying to find dark matter. The University of Minnesota I think is the major funder to the MINOS project. I'm no physics major so I'll let you figure out whats happening. I found a link describing what they are doing.

I've been there also, and it's a fascinating place. It was a lot of fun to be able to talk to a couple of the scientists there - briefly :(

This page has some more info and a contact number. It's well worth a visit if you are in the area.

If you have time, don't forget the fishing pole, either - there is some fantastic fishing, canoeing and hiking in the area. Just go before the bug season starts, or you'll come back short a few pounds of flesh :)

SB

Unless you spelt it ridiculously, such as "My'lil asia", a filter for "My" shouldn't pick it up.

Then again, a Google search for "Buttered cat" gave me this picture of old guys, so who knows.....

Folks at the University of Minnesota had a slightly different concept: They used gigantic red, yellow, and blue inflatable game pieces using Minneapolis streets as a game board. It was the Big Urban Game played in September 2003. In case you are wondering, blue won.

The home page of the B.U.G.

Well, except that you wouldn't, for the most part. I see the case you're trying to make here, that we're granting the government powers that we don't extend to private citizens, but the problems is, for the most part, that's not true. You won't, as a general rule, get a restraining order in such a case, because simply following you around with clipboard in hand doesn't meet the legal definition of stalking, especially if you don't know that I'm doing it. Mash here for a general overview of stalking laws, but in a nutshell, it's not stalking unless I either explicitly or implicitly threaten your personal safety, or I follow you with the intent of harrassing, annoying, or alarming you - just following you and taking notes isn't stalking, particularly if I do it surreptitiously, as I said. It's not stalking when a private citizen does what we're talking about here, and I see no reason to think that it's akin to stalking when the state does it either - it's not a helpful analogy, in the end.

And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public.

You don't have to wear a name tag, but there's nothing forbidding me from snapping your picture as you're in the food court, and then using that picture to find out more about you. That's perfectly legal for me to do, and more to the point, perfectly legal for the police to do - they do it all the time. To say that "people can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them" is not entirely accurate - more accurately, people can look at you, but they won't know you unless they choose to find out more about you. And there's a big difference between them not knowing you because you choose to be anonymous, and them not knowing you because they don't care enough about you to find out more.

Hypothetical: the police set up surveillance of a junkyard suspected of dealing in stolen auto parts, and while they do, you show up and buy parts. Even though they don't yet know who you are, they snap your picture in order to find out who you are, as part of an investigation into whether or not you're an active participant in this criminal activity.

Now, as an innocent person, you may find this alarming, but I don't see why this should be an illegitimate exercise for the police. They don't operate via crystal ball - if they could automatically and unerringly home in on only the guilty, we wouldn't be having this discussion. The very nature of police work means that you're going to encounter citizens who haven't actually done anything wrong, if for no other reason than because criminals don't live and work in criminal zones, where the only people they ever interact with are other criminals.

You've never really had "the right not to be known against [your] will" or "the right to be anonymous except when [you] choose to identify [yourself]" - those are simply not blanket "rights" that any society has ever recognized. You don't have the right to be anonymous in all circumstances unless you choose otherwise - that's why you have a license plate on the back of your car in the first place, because that right simply doesn't exist.

The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.

You can still do that now - there are plenty of hotels that will give you a room for cash, no questions asked. You may not care for the neighborhoods they're in, though ;)

Until OO is 100% comptible with MSOffice, it will not be likely a small business would switch to it.

But there's the problem -- because MS Office file formats are proprietary and can change at any time, OpenOffice (and other third-party apps for that matter) will probably never be "100% compatible" with MS Office. This is why we need open standards.

See here for the outline of a talk that one of my college professors gave a couple years back regarding this.

Not only that, but a while back an ethanol-hydrogen reactor was developed by the University of Minnesota

It seems lately ethanol is not only a common thing around the house, but it's becoming a common research item as well. Soon ethanol may become an energy solution, because it comes from all sorts of waste products (restraunt/cooking waste, farm waste, etc). Most likely not, but it will at least relieve the load on some landfills.

GopherVR

You just can't take *BSD seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You BSD groupies need to find some sexy girls like her ! I mean just look at this girl ! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox . As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx . I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass ?!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Lt. Gay Ellis you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of Linux if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight deamon or a gay looking goat ! Don't you wish you could get one of these ? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty !

Join the campaign for more cute open source purple-haired moonbabes today!
--

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus isn't even listed, even though they have most of the buildings covered by wireless. Other people seem surprised their institution is even listed, given that they have very limited wireless access.

Given major omissions like this, I take the survey with a very LARGE grain of salt. For some reason they base the survey on number of students, number of computers, and computer/student ratio. Sorry, but when I think of being "unwired", I think "what's the likelyhood that I can get a wireless connection in any given building? The number of people around me has little to do with that, and the number of computers in the university has almost nothing to do with that. Those might be important numbers to use in other surveys of techno-ability, but they're meaningless in a ranking of wireless access.

I suppose this group will become the first to claim land for itself on Mars. They can't claim it as an appropriation by claim of sovereignty for Russia, but if it's a private mission they should be able to claim it for themselves, or Fox-Media-Rocket-Corp or whoever.

The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space says nothing about non-state missions, unfortunately. I'm not even sure the rules apply to entities not parties to the treaty.

Is there a doctor of law in the building?

I didn't post this as AC, so I must not be trolling.

Purple-haired moonbabes run LINUX! And that's good enough for me.
props to the Ceren/BSD troll.

You just can't take *BSD seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You BSD groupies need to find some sexy girls like her ! I mean just look at this girl ! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox . As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx . I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass ?!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Lt. Gay Ellis you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of Linux if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight deamon or a gay looking goat ! Don't you wish you could get one of these ? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty !

Join the campaign for more cute open source purple-haired moonbabes today!

You just can't take *BSD seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You BSD groupies need to find some sexy girls like her ! I mean just look at this girl ! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox . As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx . I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass ?!

With sexy chicks like the lovely Lt. Gay Ellis you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of Linux if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight deamon or a gay looking goat ! Don't you wish you could get one of these ? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty !

Join the campaign for more cute open source purple-haired moonbabes today!

It's a lot more economical than air travel, can be just as fast (with aiport wait times and all), and is just as if not safer than flying.

Unfortunately, it's not necessarily more economical.

Believe me, I much, much prefer rail to air. It's far more comfy, safer, and the view is better. But a study (done in 1996 by David Levinson) of the proposed California High Speed Rail system for the Los Angeles to San Francisco corridor found that the costs per trip, compared to air travel, will be about double. That includes externalized costs, such as fuel emissions and noise. The proposed HSR system would even be more expensive than driving.

The good news is, a much, much higher ratio of the costs are internalized in those figures. That means that passengers would be bearing almost the full costs of their journey, unlike highway and air journeys where more costs are externalized.

The numbers go like this:
..........Internal...External...Total
Highway...135........21.........156
Air.......77.5.......4.5........82
HSR.......157.65.....1.35.......159

That's in dollars per passenger. (I tried to make it legible. I'm afraid it's in /.'s hands now.)

Now, Levinson is very hung up on the enormous capital cost of building the system, so he is possibly incorporating debt maintenance into those cost figures. However, the location I'm citing (which is a PDF of a class lecture presentation) references "fuel costs," so that may be the only consideration. (That seems unlikely, though, since it costs a lot less than $135 to fill your tank twice for the drive up to the Bay Area.)

None of the steroids ... would be planets

I don't think the parent was ever suggesting we define such molecules as cholesterol or testosterone as planets...

p

What's happening to slashdotters? Have we all turned into scared whiners a la "nothing can be done, let's all weep in unison"? That idea above isn't mine (or this guy's either, I've heard it before), but it's not so bad.

This "simple yet elegant" layer would require far more work than the underlying SMTP servers do.

Exagerration. It is much work and it's not going to be here this year, but I think it will be here.

How exactly -- no handwaving, no fluff -- do you propose to implement this?

One email is defined as "incoming SMTP session". Attache some unique ID to it - say, "SMTP-server-IP.date.time.message-digest". Or anything else. There are lots of possibilities here.

You need to either tie bank account details to email account information, or maintain a separate "online only" bank.

Cavalry's incoming: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/trade-charter.ht ml

You need to find some unforagable, unbreakable, untappable method of identifying individual emails to make your one penny claim.

Digital certificates + public cryptography guys have already done most of hard work here.

Say, you sign your claim (with your private key, so that it can be verified using your public key).

You need to retrofit all existing mail clients to keep track of this new header (because Message-IDs can be forged).

1. It can be done at server level, transparent to users (why should they be bothered with such stuff). Regarding problem "no more 'free to receive' mailing lists and email": make webpage on their smtp server for users where they indicate 'if they send me email with 1 cent and it gets verified positive as belonging to this mailing list/company newsletter/whatever give it back'. Users by signing up send this 1 cent to populate 'sending budget'. By unsubscribing they get this 1 cent back (obviously this requires trusted third party, but you need it anyway -- online bank -- for handling those cents). Or wait - they can even give this 1 cent into "custody", lasting as long as they are subscribed to the list.

2. It actually could be used to enhance email capabilities - say, for increasing email priority or for "consulting via email".

3. Finally, once this infrastructure is in place, there will be a way to unambigously identify emails, parties and servers - so some, like coworkers or business partners could set policy like "make exchanges fulfilling requirements of this ruleset free of charge in both directions if other parties agree to the same conditions". Again, there's a lot of exciting opportunities here.

This scheme is gigantic and unworkable. Prove me wrong, with details.

Quit whining. ;-)

On more serious note: the pieces to implement this are evolving independently anyway - OITP, financial XML, PKIs, online banks. At some point they just HAVE to become mature enough to use them in this way - and then it will be just a matter of working out software to glue it all together. I'm sure things like avamisd_new will include interfaces to it - it already has interfaces to spam scanners and antivirus scanners, why not this?

About unfeasibility of micropayments: yes, this guy has good arguments; but the issue is complex and the "metered services" are not simply going to die and be replaced by flat rate. Real world example are SMS messages - they're paid "per message" and still immensely popular (at least here in Europe).
One could even think of connecting this sort of service to flat rate somehow - say, an online bank that includes this sort of verification service as gratis in its monthly fee for online account, i.e. it exchanges "variable risk" from email-dealing for "fixed income". The model is already working in mortgages for real-estate, so I guess it

Many states already have Matrix like programs under the local paramilitaries and courts. Minnesota has one that put all police data in private control. Minnesota CriMNet It has whistleblower hackers, politicians, guns and bad management all wrapped in a huge wad of fear.

Slashdot had a discussion about Programming Gone Wrong in the past.

It mentioned, among others, the Ariane 5 Failure, the infamous Therac-25 accidents, loss of Mars Orbiter, Hi-tech toilet swallowing woman, AT&T Switch failure, a bunch of things literally crashing, etc. And here is yet another article on miserable Patriot failure.

For professional assessment of risks, there is a Usenet group for RISKS Digest (Google groups) that describes all kinds of situations where technology has gone wrong.

And 64 bit integers converted to 16 bit integers kill, if not people, at least big budgets.

Sadly, this is nothing new.

Every software developer needs to read Peter Neuman's book Computer-Related Risks , and keep up with the Risks digest (comp.risks).

Learning from other's mistakes is much less painful.

First-Year Calculus Notes
Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus
Lectures on Calculus
Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals
The Calculus Bible

MJNO, Minnesota's own TIA program was shut down as it had no controls on who could access the data, included private data and was in the hands of a private paramilitary. Article and AP news references

"That's right: Who on earth has a cable modem but not a computer?" I don't see anyone paying $600 for a video phone when they could drop $100 on a webcam and use the free video-chat features of AIM or MSN Messenger which they most likely already use. Thats what the earth scientists are doing!

Look HERE for a more informative article directly from the University.

The U of M's IT magazine Inventing Tomorrow interviewed Kakalios for its Spring 2002 issue. My favorite quote from the lengthy article:

One of Kakalios' favorite stories acknowledges this leap of faith. "There's a panel in which The Atom and another character have shrunk to submolecular size, and they're sitting on an electron," he recalls with a grin. "The Atom's companion says, 'We're smaller than an oxygen molecule. How are we breathing?' The Atom replies, 'I've never really figured that out.'"

The U of M's IT magazine Inventing Tomorrow interviewed Kakalios for its Spring 2002 issue. My favorite quote from the lengthy article:

One of Kakalios' favorite stories acknowledges this leap of faith. "There's a panel in which The Atom and another character have shrunk to submolecular size, and they're sitting on an electron," he recalls with a grin. "The Atom's companion says, 'We're smaller than an oxygen molecule. How are we breathing?' The Atom replies, 'I've never really figured that out.'"

Here's an article (pdf) that Kakalios wrote for the Star Tribune. It discusses the simple physics behind a 1973 Spider-Man issue.

Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height. "Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."



From the University of Minnesota:

Professor to describe 'uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'

Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height.

Kakalios will describe a freshman seminar class he teaches, "Physics of Comic Books," at 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 15, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle. His talk is part of the symposium "Pop Physics: The Interface Between Hard Science and Popular Culture," one of two symposia in the Science, Entertainment and the Media category.

"Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."

Take, for example, the strength of Superman. To leap a 30-story building in a single bound, Superman's leg muscles must produce nearly 6,000 pounds of force while jumping, Kakalios calculates. The Man of Steel was that strong because he was designed to resist Krypton's powerful gravity. But for a planet with an Earth-like surface to have so much stronger gravity, it would need neutron star material in its core--a highly unstable situation. No wonder the planet exploded. Other topics considered in Kakalios' class include:

# Is it possible to read minds as Prof. X of the X-Men does?
# If Spider-Man's webbing is as strong as real spider silk, could it support his weight as he swings between buildings?
# Can the mutant master of magnetism Magneto levitate people using the iron in their blood?
# If you could run as fast as the Flash, could you run up the side of a building or across the ocean, and how often would you need to eat?

"Once the physical concepts such as forces and motion, conservation of energy, electricity and magnetisms, and elementary quantum mechanics are introduced to answer these and other questions, their real-world applications to automobile airbags, cell phones, nanotechnology and black hole formation are explained," said Kakalios. "The students in this class ranged from engineering to history majors, and while not all were comic book fans, they all found it an engaging and entertaining way to learn critical thinking and basic physics concepts."

Chalk up another one for the most disasterous software bugs in history. This one should give the Ariane 5 explosion a go for no 1.

For a more detailed look at these issues check out Andrew Odlyzko's work, particularly "The economics of the Internet: Utility, utilization, pricing, and Quality of Service" and "Paris Metro Pricing: The minimalist differentiated services solution".

Earth scientists have used squidcam to communicate between windows and mac for some time now, although it isn't based on an existing instant messaging service. Squidcam also allows for multiple connections at once, something iChatAV/AIM cannot. Read this review on web-cams.

• Red = Warmer
• White = Colder
• Green = No Change
• Blinking = Precipitation coming

A history of the Weatherball

I haven't been by that area for years, so I don't know if the Weatherballs are still there or not. Bueller?

• One in six elderly citizens in the USA is either hungry or has an inadequate diet.
  
  
• One in four children comes to school undernourished in the United States.
  

Being a bit more extreme, water vapor is "noisier" than solid ice, with liquid water somewhere in the middle.

Yeah. That's why we do our radial distribution functions with respect to the idea ideal gas. If the system is vapor the radial distibution function will look like a line at 1. If it has some order to it there will be peaks and valleys.

have you experience with bioinformatic code?

Nope. We do molecular simulation. Our webpage. Ah, heck, now look what I've done. Now you will know who I am. I guess the value of communication overcame my value for privacy. ;) See, we are on topic. :)

I also live in Minneapolis and have DISH service for my TV. I installed and aimed the dish, and was very careful about it. The aiming bars on the Dish receivers (which may or may not be in dBi - I don't remember) register 96 and 102 for the 110 and 119 satellites, respectively.

I installed my dish three years ago and have only had two service drops in the entire three years, both in the first six months when I was still using the free pair of lnbs. Since I installed my quad lnb I've never once lost my signal.

In Minneapolis we get an average of 55 inches of snow per year, with annual precipitation around 28 inches (according to the U of MN). So with almost 5 feet of snow annually and over two feet of annual precipitation, we have a lot of potential obstacles.

Qtopia has wasted years rewriting the low-level graphics stuff but doing no better than Palm or PPC on apps.

And not just no better, but quite a bit worse. Heck, I have found better and more available Linux/Unix adaptations for WinCE than for the Zaurus. It is easier to simply recompile a Linux app for the Zaurus, but a lot of those apps aren't usable on a PDA.

The right thing to do would be to develop an updated Newton-like environment (dynamic language, persistent database, XML data interchange, etc.) and not waste time with reinventing the low-level infrastructure

Huh! Are you my secret double or something?

That is the kind of solution I have favored, and the one I have been working on. The dynamic language is Squeak Smalltalk. THe persistent database is Magma, and object database system for Squeak. Some XML interchange- through XML-RPC and SOAP- but it isn't used as the storage format.

The system I am working on it is called Dynapad. You can see some new screenshots here. The wiki hasn't been touched in a long time, and it was rolled back (think their server had an issue, had to restore from a backup) and I have not had the time to redo it all. Mind you, work continues and I have done a lot since I have made a release. I will be putting out a new release within a week, it is long overdue.

Linux and X11 are fine for modern handhelds--they need decent, modern apps.

Indeed. I generally advocate for using a Linux kernel as what is underneath; Squeak itself can run as an OS, but with so many drivers and other perks of using an establish kernel, I can't see why not to use it. Dynapad can run on Linux under X11, DirectFB, /dev/fb, SDL, and Qtopia, though if I were creating a standalone system I would just use the framebuffer display mode for Squeak and Dynapad. It works quite well, and for one window, X11 is overkill.

And that's a real opportunity, because both Microsoft and Palm are sitting on their hands.

Again, you hit the nail on the head. Someting I have been saying for years. PDAs are a chance for us to start over again, and this time do it right. On Windows CE, the API is pretty compatible with regular Win32, but even so, it doesn't run regular Windows apps, so backwards compatibility isn't as compelling in that sense. PalmOS doesn't have the problem of backwards compatibility. They both had the chance to do it right, but they didn't. They didn't do it horribly, but still.

With the Linux/Qtopia situation, it is even worse. The community, as well companies like TrollTech and Sharp have done so little in this area. Even more so than MS and Palm, they had the chance to take that potential, the potential of creating a truly great, innovative (in the truest sense of the word) and forward look system. But they didn't. They took the easy way out. As a result, the situation is pretty crappy, and light-years from exceptional.

How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a "revealed willingness to pay," a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good. ...
[emphasis mine]

Unfortunately for these [mass media] companies, content is not the key. Content certainly has all the glamor. What content does not have is money. This might seem absurd. After all, the media trumpet the hundred million dollar opening weekends of blockbuster movies, and leading actors such as Julia Roberts or Jim Carrey earn $20 million (plus a share of the gross) per film. That is true, and it is definitely possible to become rich and famous in Hollywood. Yet the revenues and profits from movies pale next to those for providing the much denigrated "pipes." The annual movie theater ticket sales in the U.S. are well under $10 billion. The telephone industry collects that much money every two weeks! Those "commodity pipelines" attract much more spending than the glamorous "content."
[emphasis mine]

Not the first time it's happened, either

But I've seen cathedral windows that weren't just a different thickness at the bottom, they were sagging open at the top!

On the other hand, as one of the links points out, you can disprove the theory by simple mathematics.

Cathedral window age = 500 years
Cathedral window sag = 1 cm
Theoretical sag rate = 500 years/cm

Egyptian/Greek/Whatever glass vessel age = 3000 years
Theoretical sag rate = 500 years/cm
Expected sag of 300 year old glass = 6 cm

As the link notes, if glass flowed over time, all the old glassware in museums would show definite signs of puddling -- even taking into account differences in formulae. At the very least, the broken edges would have smoothed themselves like ripped-apart Silly Putty.

I wasn't convinced until I read the link. I had completely bought into the sagging glass idea!

Here's an alternate theory for the cathedral glass. When the window was made, using old-school techniques, they ended up with some imperfect pieces. Do you put those at the bottom, where the bishop will see them... or put them at the top, and let God decide if He cares?

"Although there is no documentation of the transmission of prions to humans..."

I'd have to go check to see if there's any body of research that deals with other animals, because prions aren't species specific, which is why we have BSE ('Mad Cow'), Scrapie (in sheep) and Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. It's notoriously suspicious to start using 'in humans' as a caveat.

"This is why we don't take blood donations from people who spent time in England."

Stronger wording than the actuality;

"Because of the theoretical risk of vCJD transmission, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises blood services not to receive blood from people who might have been exposed to the disease. This includes, among other groups, those who lived in the UK for 3 months or more between 1980 and 1996, people who received a blood transfusion in the UK anytime since 1980, and people who lived in Europe for 5 years or longer starting anytime since 1980."
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/hot/bse/n ews/dec1903blood.html

As an addendum, here's something from the UK Government - http://www.doh.gov.uk/cmo/vcjdstatement.pdf

"I also heard on NPR yesterday that Mad Cow is often mistaken for Alzheimer's so Mad Cow deaths may be higher then we suspected."

That wouldn't surprise me, although pathology would immediately show the difference. One of the reasons why suspected cases in the UK are always sent through the pathologist.

The thing is that BSE crept up on us in the UK. We had cattle infected with BSE for the best part of fifteen years, which let to the pyres of curiously nice-smelling carcasses all over the place. 143 confirmed cases in that time, and bear in mind that the UK is actively looking is not a huge amount. However, the 'incubation' period can be a few years.