Slashdot Mirror

I have been playing with Mapserver and it really rocks for online stuff. It only recently went sort-of-production with 3.5, but with support for PostGIS and PHP, it is great. Having tried both, IMHO, it's far more accessible than ESRI's ArcIMS.

Xix.

If you want an automated movie rating system, I suggest Movielens. Most of the time it does a pretty good job for me (although no matter what I do I can't seem to convince it I'm not a die hard sci-fi/fantasy fan).

Sort of like a movielens for restaurants? Sounds like a winner.

i've always been into computers, but had never really thought about it as a career. when i started university i was in biology with the intention of continuing into veterinary medicine. after a year of bio i was hating it and getting better grades in my non-bio classes, so after contemplating math, chemistry, and physics (or some combination), i went into the physics program. throughout my physics degree i took a bunch of math and computer science courses and got a minor in chemistry. by the time i'd finished that degree i knew that i wanted to use chemistry/physics in my career, but knew i didnt want to be an experimental physicist, so i spent a year taking more computer science and math courses to prepare myself for a more theory/computational direction. i then got into the scientific computation program at the university of minnesota. (semi outdated webpage here). great program with lots of different options from many different departments, so i was able to pick and choose exactly the courses that most interested me. i've loved the time i've spent here and strongly recommend this program to anyone with broad interests, but still geared towards science and computers. i'll be graduating at the end of the semester and look forward to putting what i've been doing to work.

Russ

So get off your high horse, it makes *perfect* sense to talk about this being "very unique".

You are simply wrong and here's the evidence to prove it:

Common Errors in English Usage
Some Common Grammar and Usage Mistakes in Undergraduate Philosophy Papers
Bowdoin College -- A Style Guide
The Dirty Dozen
Additional Writing Hints (first entry)
Unique and Other Absolute Modifiers
See Curmudgeon's Corner...our soapbox where we vent our spleen regarding abuses of the English language.

I am a published writer and experienced editor, so you can stop making a fool of yourself and let this drop. Or you can amuse me further by trying to come up with some explanation of why you believe that you are right.

Although I believe that the New Scientist is very often sensationalistic, why not contact the named scientist at the U of MN?

Here is her contact information.

-AP

Very interesting opinion. I can definitely see where given recent media events this opinion could be formed.

Question: Can you point to one source that indicates the research is a direct result of pro-lifers?

Just because a lot of the attention has been on controversial research as of late. This in no way indicates that concurrent research was the direct result of this attention or moral disagreements.

Note: After further review I have found one supporter who specifically supports ethical research here

But in an article, located here, it is stated, "Even though Verfaillie is a leading research in adult stem cells, she steadfastly believes the government should also fund research on embryonic research". So even though a few supporters may have altruistic goals, this does not necessarily mean the research is founded on the same principles.

This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)

The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.

Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, who did the work) research.

The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.

May as well post the comments I wrote back in December.. I never put them up anywhere -- I figured others would have much better comments than me. I'm sure there are, but the style I wrote mine in is different from what I've seen other post. Maybe some folks will get some new ideas..

Anyway, here it is

Here's a nicely formatted list of mirrors for you lazy bastards ;)
Let's make the slashdot effect on xfree86.org a little more bearable :)
ftp://ftp.calderasystems.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86
ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/XFree86
ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.infomagic.com/pub/mirrors/XFree86
ftp://mirror.sftw.com/pub/XFree86
ftp://phyppro1.phy.bnl.gov/pub/XFree86
ftp://ftp.rge.com/pub/X/XFree86
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/xfree86

Summary

I'm really glad to see that gopher is alive and kicking. Not only that, but you can still search gopherspace using Veronica!

Personally, I think it's much better than the web.

Why can't the auto manufactures develop a decent HUD. Imagine something that could project the centerline of the road on the window when it is snowing or raining hard. Or perhaps, it could incorporate itself with the collision avoidence systems and show when obstacles are in the way.

Here is an opportunity to apply the Prisoner's Dilemma part of Game Theory.

explanation. Or read Beautiful Mind by Silvia Nasar.

.forsight

You are partially correct about the effect of such as system on the "groupthink problem". Users who always modded down (or +foe'ed) everyone whose ideas they disagreed with would surely get a slashdot consisting of only comments that they agreed with, but users who modded comments according to how well they contributed to the discussion would be richly rewarded: their slashdot woudl be a place of informative discussions and insightful comments.

If you are curious about CF, check out movielens (link above).

These report is pure drivel. There is a very interesting report / Rebuttal from Odlyzko of University of Minnesota about the growth of the Internet itself. It seems that the numbers banted around is between 400% year and Zero. Second the makers of these reports can't do basic math.

These report is pure drivel. There is a very interesting report / Rebuttal from Odlyzko of University of Minnesota about the growth of the Internet itself. It seems that the numbers banted around is between 400% year and Zero. Second the makers of these reports can't do basic math.

The nature nurture debate has raged for centuries in respect to intelligence. Ever since Darwin's cousin Francis Galton proposed his theories of hereditary intelligence.

At first glance, it seems neat that these guys did a study on twins. You might think, "wow, what a great approach." You'd be right, then you'd hopefully realize that other people had these ideas in the past, and they did the right studies and came to the right conclusions.

When Thomas Bouchard was in charge of the Minnesota Twin Studies, he and his colleagues compared twins raised together and apart.

Bouchard and colleagues tested 56 pairs of monozygotic (identical) twins who had been raised apart and compared them to hundreds of identical twins who had been reared together. The twins were tested on dozens of capacities. This approach allowed them to examine spatial ability, verbal ability, mathematical ability, personality, etc. Rather than the antiquated "g" or general intelligence factor.

So, here's a study with many more subjects, much better comparisons, and more detailed data. Here's the cool part: if you correlate the scores of twins on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) (the standard IQ test in the US) and Ravens Progressive Matrices (An allegedly culturally unbiased test of reasoning skills), you see a 65% (WAIS) or 50% (Raven's) agreement among scores of twins raised together, and among twins raised apart, the WAIS scores are about 35% in agreement with nearly the same 50% agreement on Raven's scores.

What does this mean? Well, it means that even in the best cases, IQ scores are about 50% hereditary. In addition, the big drop off between WAIS scores indicates that environment has an important role in intelligence. Given that most of the twins were raised in similar middle class families (who adopt kids), the estimates of the role of environment are probably inflated.

That being said, the study mentioned in the story focuses primarily on brain structures. This pisses me off. One of the lamest things about current cognitive neuroscience is the common misunderstanding of the difference between structure and process. Given the little we know about how the brain works (yeah, we're getting good info about the molecular level, and we know in general what larger regions like Broca's area are responsible for, but we have woefully little info about how these structures actually work), idiot PR people take brain findings and blow them out of proportion.

The fact is, if you want to talk about intelligence, you have to talk about behavioral measurements. Looking at structures can, at best, tell you if something is wrong. So, yeah big deal, major structures are heritable, given the fact that environment has been shown in better studies to play a key role in intelligence, we shouldn't rely too much on these findings.

Bottom line: Yes of course nature plays an important role in intelligence. You'd have to be an idiot not to realize that. This study is not groundbreaking. Moreover, the headline of the article is sensationalistic and only a half-truth. Environment does play a role in intelligence. My god, meet a person who ate lead paint as a kid and you'll realize that.

..it seems like your email adress is root@rzbx.org, whereas the email adress of the guy who posted your parent post is geigertube@yahoo.com, and his parent post's poster's email adress is jkoepp@atlas.socsci.umn.edu.

Just something to think about.

Actually, the neutrino detectors weren't built to study the "Solar Neutrino Problem" either, although that has been a pleasant side effect.

To all who discuss about the good and bad of music exchange over the internet, I refer to this, mirrored here for an economist's perspective on why napster/gnutella/morpheus etc... are good things.

Read this , mirrored here for an economist's perspective on why napster is good.

In every state I have lived in, you are required to have (at the age of 18), either a VALID and CURRENT driver's license, or a CURRENT state ID.

You must not have lived in California. We have a statute on the books which requires production of "valid" ID on demand by a LEO, but it was struck down because "valid" was "vague" by the Supreme Court in the Kolender v. Lawson case.

There's a doctrine called "freedom of movement" with which "you papers please" requests interfere. Read this for some info/background.

Closing society to those who don't want to give up all their rights is not acceptable simply because you've given them a choice. Comdex is not a great example, but how about not being able to fly without being cavity searched? You suffer if you refuse to participate in such a system 'cause you think that's going too far.

I found that design uncannyingly similar to a da Vinci drawing. Does anyone else notice the similarities?

The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG

More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.

As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.

Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.

The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:

Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.

Write to your Congress-Critters today!

"I fear for the Republic"

Tom Porter

The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG

More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.

As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.

Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.

The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:

Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.

Write to your Congress-Critters today!

"I fear for the Republic"

Tom Porter

• October 4: Dan Burk , U of M law professors and an expert on intellectual property law (This Thursday!) More info
  
• October 17: John Logie of the University of Minnesota's Department of Rhetoric
  
• November 8: Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security, author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
  

• October 4: Dan Burk , U of M law professors and an expert on intellectual property law (This Thursday!) More info
  
• October 17: John Logie of the University of Minnesota's Department of Rhetoric
  
• November 8: Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security, author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
  

The companies that are making money will always need programmers. Here in Chicago its the financial sector. Have her try the exchanges and financial companies like Hull Traders, CBOT, CBOTCC, CME and CBOE. There is a lot of work to be done there and they are mostly unaffected by the economy. Remember there are more tech jobs in Chicago than anywhere else right now. Tech job study

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

I can just hear Jack Nichelson's voice: "Where does he get all of those toys?"

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html%20
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

I can just hear Jack Nichelson's voice: "Where does he get all of those toys?"

http://ai.about.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2001/02/13/0213robot.html%20
http://www1.cnn.com/TECH/9612/11/interactive.robot s/
http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1999/12/07/news/new 2/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1 112000/1112411.stm
http://internet.cybermesa.com/~haddrill/robots.htm l
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/97lega cy/robot.html
http://www.it.umn.edu/inventing/98fall/cover/
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/1934206.shtm l
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.03/robots.htm l
http://ai.miningco.com/library/weekly/aa072099.htm

In my experience helping CS 1 students, command line tools are easier to learn.

With a command line tool you simple create a text file and you use gcc to compile it.

With the borland or vc++ you have to go through a long process outlined here. The sad part about it is that people will have problems manipulating the compiler throughout the entire CS 1 course. They'll do something like include header files as source files or they'll try to reopen they're source by clicking on a source file instead of a project file...

In this LinuxWorld interview look what Stroustrup is hoping to someday have in the C++ standard for libraries. It's a joke, almost all of those features are already in Java. As Stroustrup says, a standard GUI framework is not "politically feasible".

Now go listen to what Linux Torvalds is saying about what he finds to be the most exciting thing to happen to Linux the past year. Hint, it's not the completion of the kernel 2.4.x, it's KDE. The foundation of KDE's success is the triumph of Qt as the de facto standard that a large community has embraced to build an entire reimplementation of end user applications.

To fill the void of a standard GUI framework for C++, Microsoft has dictated a set of de facto standards for Windows, and Trolltech has successfully pushed Qt as the de facto standard for Linux.

I claim that as a whole the programming community doesn't care whether a standard is de jure or de facto, but they do care that SOME standard exists. When it comes to talking people into making the investment of time and money to learn a platform on which to base their careers, a multitude of incompatible choices is NOT the way to market.

I find talking about LISP as one language compared to Java to be a complete joke. Whose LISP? Scheme? Whose version of Scheme, GNU's Guile? Is the Elisp in Emacs the most widely distributed implementation of LISP? Can Emacs be rewritten using Guile? What is the GUI framework for all of LISP? Anyone come up with a set of LISP APIs that are the equivalent of J2EE or Jini?

I find it extremely disheartening that the same people who can grasp the argument that the value of networks lies in the communication people can do are incapable of applying the same reasoning to programming languages. Is it that hard to read Odlyzko and not see that people just want to do the same thing with programming languages--talk among themselves. The modern paradigm for software where the money is being made is getting things to work with each other. Dinosaur languages that wait around for decades while slow bureaucratic committees create nonsolutions are going to get stomped by faster moving mammals such as Java pushed by single-decision vendors. And so are fragmented languages with a multitude of incompatible and incomplete implementations such as LISP.

Maybe it's time to visit Rio?

Don't assume that better policy in one area necessarily translates into better policies in all other areas.

Rio's murder rate is 61 per 100,000. That's ten times as high as the United States in general, and more than twice as high as Flint, Michigan, which is widely regarded as one of those places that normal human beings just don't voluntarily enter.

Well, it's good to see that a university is actually doing some pilot programs before jumping into a technology. Unfortunately, I can't say the say the same for my school. The University of Minnesota Duluth College of Science and Engineering will be requiring all incoming freshman to purchase from the university Compaq H3650's. This will be extended to include all students the following year.

This decision had very little input from the current students at the university, and I have yet to hear of any established applications for this technology. For those too lazy to follow the link, here's the purpose as stated by the department:

The purpose of the iPAQ requirement is both to enhance the technological environment of the engineering and computer science classroom and to better prepare UMD graduates to be competitive in the work world. The hand-held or "pocket" pc is truly cutting edge technology. It has very recently and very rapidly become an important tool of practicing professionals in engineering, industry, business, and information technology. It is the expectation of UMD and the College of Science and Engineering that our graduates be among the most prepared and most competitive in this rapidly changing world.

This is an extremely technocratic statement, and does not address any of the actual uses for the technology.

Thank goodness I'm graduating this year...
RbdPngn

Well I have a PHP script that I've made, but I don't know if it works (I don't have any IIS boxes to test on).

If you want to test it, find an IIS box. Shut off the default route, so nobody can hit you while you're doing this. Copy cmd.exe to root.exe in the scripts folder. Open a browser on the IIS box, and point it at default.ida?XXXXX an Apache system running PHP and the script. If it works, it'll pop up a window on the IIS system.

When you're done, remove root.exe, restore your default route.

Well, the point of that story was that, from that conversion, I thought similar cases, perhaps comforming to ATX, did exist, but were simply below the standard of Apple's version. I never did have any problems with cables pinching in that case, anyway. :)

An Internet driven by business, for business, would hardly have the appeal of the net as it exists today. It would be nothing but banners, keywords, affiliate programs, and all the other garbage that already makes the web so annoying.

I agree with your sentiment. In 1994, did people flock to the web (remember that old IBM commercial that had the nun saying she was dying to "surf the web"?) because of advertising and slick corporate marketing materials? Hell NO! The web took off because it was full of crap, truth, lies, gibberish and FAQs that other regular folks put together. CEOs and other pointy-haired morons often forget this reality. The web succeeded because, not in spite of, it's hostility towards business.

This is more than just an opinion by some crank. An AT&T researcher named Andrew Odlyzko has written about this many times. His Content is not king article is the most accessible. Odlyzko has looked at the history of pricing of communications channels, too. More recently, the "Internet Enabled" cell phones have failed, while SMS text messaging phones have taken off, probably because the "Internet Enabled" phone depended on people wanting to view slick corporate marketing collateral, while SMS text messaging is popular because everyone can use it for their own purposes.

For more info see:

PowerWall link

http://www.physics.umn.edu/~duvernoi/barney.txt

That would totally screw up the stats

Not really a bother, I highly doubt they're calculating speed from two samples alone. They'll definitely be running the samples through some sort of filter (1 2 3 etc) to smooth the noise and eliminate 'outliers'. Moreover, they'll probably be also looking at average distance travelled over some time, e.g. it would be very easy to see that you drove, say, 5 miles on some particular stretch of highway in 4 minutes and 22 seconds, which means you drove on average 68 MPH for that stretch. Hardly rocket science.

An interesting excerpt:

1. Intellectual property created solely for the purpose of satisfying a course requirement is owned by the creator and not the university.

of course there are a bunch of other clauses there that can trip you up.. So best thing to do is ask your university legal department to clarify their policy before you turn in that homework...

Java, in my humble opinion, is not a good core learning language for computer science. Lisp (or Scheme, as used at my school) is a good choice. As a language to teach object oriented programming, it's not bad. Neither is C++, or several other languages.

I never took the AP computer science course (my high school didn't have AP classes). If the goal is to teach computer science, then I think Java is a bad choice. I would argue that you could design a high school introductory computer science course that could be done entirely with paper and pencil.

The problem is the computer science/programming confusion. Teachers, parents, and kids think that they want to learn programming. They demand that the courses use current programming languages so that they're not "wasting their time" with something like BASIC. They don't understand (and, perhaps, don't care) that they're not learning computer science, just a single programming language.

I implement Autodesk Mapguide for a living, and Mapserver is very close in features and performs comparably to Mapguide with the LiteView extension.

I looked at the GRASS package for a bit, and it is very complicated, even for someone who does GIS professionally.
If you want to do basic GIS manipulation, get a copy of ArcView, MapInfo or Autocad Map.

FME from Safe Software is a fantastic converter for most data formats, and has an 15 day trial.
It rocks.

Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
Make doooooobieees?

Sylpheed has been able to do GPG for a while, though I only got it going yesterday. I put some [S]RPMs up here
--

http://www.geom.umn.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/

Where I go to school, there are a bunch of iMac kiosks around campus. They are obviously not running OS X, because they seem to be very unstable machines. Most of the time when I try to use one, I find that the machine's open because it's unusable. Still, I imagine they could just hook up some sort of USB watchdog timer, causing the system to reboot when it dies..

India has more religions than you can ever imagine. Surely, you're not going to base any arguments on this religious book are you ?

Maybe you should think a little before bringing such a weak argument to the table.

read this if you want to know more...