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Perhaps the issue is that what happened violates the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties Man: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/oasinstr/zoas2dec.htm

"Every person has the right to the protection of the law against abusive attacks upon his honor, his reputation, and his private and family life."

And the American Convention on Human Rights: http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/oasinstr/zoas3con.htm

"Every person has the right to be compensated in accordance with the law in the event he has been sentenced by a final judgment through a miscarriage of justice."

And thus might come under the jursidiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Yes, the navel gazing is getting seriously out of hand--people place inordinate importance in internal processes. That extends though to worrying about it. The articles are the only really important thing and that has some important implications.
1) By nearly all measures most articles are improving. 2) The content is under a free license

As long as #1 is happening, to an extent who cares about the rest? Well, detractors do, since they have something to whine and complain about. I'm not talking about you ta bu, I'm talking about the people that don't contribute or try poorly and then say, see it doesn't work. But #2 is the real key. Once articles aren't improving some other process can take over the content and improve it. Hopefully a sane stable version system will get implemented soon and that will be the process that keeps the material improving and reduce the impact of vandalism. In any case free content is still working and that's what makes the fact that the trolls come out of the woodwork and get modded up on slashdot so funny.

The other point is that the decrease in new accounts and editing may not mean that good contributions are reducing. For a long time a high proportion of new accounts have been made simply to vandalize. There are several orders of magnitude more accounts than actual contributing accounts. The rest are for garbage and they get blocked and move on to a new account. So 30% less new accounts is meaningless. Also as recent studies (pdf file) have pointed out the anti vandalism bots have significantly impacted vandalism. Perhaps that has deterred a bit of the editing we don't want, which would show up as less editing anyway, making that statistic less important as well.

I haven't found a way to do without DHCPv6. See rfc 4704

There was a draft rfc, draft-jeong-ipv6-ra-dns-autoconf-00.txt but it was later rejected because of scale issues; required management of authorization information for individual hosts.

There is a long thread about ipv6 & dynamic updates located here

There is a draft rfc for adding a router message to the autoconfiguration of ipv6 addresses to include sending dns addresses. The draft is available here. Of course after the draft is finalized kernel(linux, *bds, windows, etc) support will need to be added.

The ipv6 autoconfig is nice but lacks the useful things(ntp, dns, etc) that DHCP provides.

Did the moderators bother reading the case? I hope not, as it would indicate that they're not just lazy but simply can't read. From the case:

Prosecution for carrying concealed weapon. The Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, overruled pretrial motion to suppress and rendered judgment, and defendant appealed. The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Judicial District, 5 Ohio App.2d 122, 214 N.E.2d 114, affirmed, the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed an appeal on ground that no substantial constitutional question was involved, and certiorari was granted. The Supreme Court, Mr. Chief Justice Warren, held that police officer who observed conduct by defendant and another consistent with hypothesis that they were contemplating daylight robbery, and who approached, identified himself as officer, and asked their names, acted reasonably, when nothing appeared to dispel his reasonable belief of their intent, in seizing defendant in order to search him for weapons, and did not exceed reasonable scope of search in patting down outer clothing of defendants without placing his hands in their pockets or under outer surface of garments until he had felt weapons, and then merely reached for and removed guns.

The same is true of stores (lots of ppl passing by) and office will be the worse. But in the office, most can actually telicommute.

In Minnesota the registration is not time stamped, registration is still done with pre printed books so there is no timestamp to compare to the voting.

Descriptions of public voting tests for both Diebold and ES&S MN ballot scanners in Hennepin and Ramsey Counties (largest two counties): http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hause011/

I'm afraid Content is not King.

It found that most people who drive into Manhattan below 60th Street do so because of the comfort and convenience of their cars, ignoring easily available public transportation... [And] that a large share of people driving into Manhattan are bound for somewhere else and therefore contribute little to the city's economy beyond bridge or tunnel tolls. It said 61 percent of those crossing East River bridges were making through trips and that more than 30 percent of those using Hudson River tunnels were bound for destinations outside Manhattan's main business district.

the university I attend

I'm not going there now but I wanted to go to UMN for the Inter-College Program B.S. in the Three Area Cross-College Program. I had wanted to do CE or EE as the main area of study with the other two areas being in international business, finance, and or economics.

the university I attend

I'm not going there now but I wanted to go to UMN for the Inter-College Program B.S. in the Three Area Cross-College Program. I had wanted to do CE or EE as the main area of study with the other two areas being in international business, finance, and or economics.

Some of the differentials are enormous at the university I attend (pdf link):

• Resident tuition, Graduate School: $4,870/semester
• Software engineering, first year (resident or non-resident): $6,510/semester
• Management of Technology master's (resident or non-resident): $14,000/semester
• Executive M.B.A. (resident or non-resident): $20,625/semester

Thankfully, I have no aspirations to become management, and I just take classes in the CS department (I'm a doctoral student in music)...

I believe this submitter is talking about catastrophic project failure, as in "the project failed miserably". QA in my experience is not usually the cause of projects failing, unless you consider the classic Lorane 5 Rocket disaster. or the iPhone Launch and AT&T melting down on activations.

I am assuming this project has good DBAs and good programmers. Most shops have these, but these poor folks find themselves drowning in nebulous requirements and SCOPE CREEP.

Personally, I operate on the "It compiles, therefore I should slam it into production and go home, because I am that good."

I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.

This fall total tuition and fees for most majors at Iowa State is $3080.66 / semester:
http://www.iastate.edu/~registrar/fees/tuition0708 .html

Minnesota: $4705 / semester
http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/costsaid/tuition.html

Wisconsin: $3365 / semester
http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php

Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).

Oh and we have universitys here in the states too, its just a different classification of schools. Colleges are smaller, uiversitys are larger.

In the US universities are usually collections of colleges. A university can have a College of Engineering and Science, College of Business, College of Liberal Arts, and so on. Take the university where I live, University Of Minneasota. It has a College of Biological Sciences, Institute of Technology, and College of Liberal Arts amoung others.

Oh and we have universitys here in the states too, its just a different classification of schools. Colleges are smaller, uiversitys are larger.

In the US universities are usually collections of colleges. A university can have a College of Engineering and Science, College of Business, College of Liberal Arts, and so on. Take the university where I live, University Of Minneasota. It has a College of Biological Sciences, Institute of Technology, and College of Liberal Arts amoung others.

Oh and we have universitys here in the states too, its just a different classification of schools. Colleges are smaller, uiversitys are larger.

In the US universities are usually collections of colleges. A university can have a College of Engineering and Science, College of Business, College of Liberal Arts, and so on. Take the university where I live, University Of Minneasota. It has a College of Biological Sciences, Institute of Technology, and College of Liberal Arts amoung others.

Oh and we have universitys here in the states too, its just a different classification of schools. Colleges are smaller, uiversitys are larger.

In the US universities are usually collections of colleges. A university can have a College of Engineering and Science, College of Business, College of Liberal Arts, and so on. Take the university where I live, University Of Minneasota. It has a College of Biological Sciences, Institute of Technology, and College of Liberal Arts amoung others.

Many of the issues of our society are only worsened by certain people's sense of morality. It just so happens that those morals are both extreme and somewhat out of step with the feelings of the average American. Morality is not a strong basis upon which to found a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously diverse society.

What you should demand is more ethical governance. At present, that is not the direction we're going-- in order to protect the "good" in our society, those in power are increasingly less concerned with the ethical principles upon which our nation was founded. One thing that I think is often incorrectly discounted in criticisms of the NeoCons actions is their intent to do "good". I'm reasonably sure that, from their perspective, they are doing just that.

I used R's chisq.test() function.

"One statistical analysis of the new and previous Utah studies showed cell phone users were 5.36 times more likely to get in an accident than undistracted drivers. Other studies have shown the risk is about the same as for drivers with a 0.08 blood-alcohol level."

I Was A Botanist.

My guess is that any botanist worth their salt is going to look at this and shrug. Truth is it really isn't news. It was known 25 years ago that you could inject a plant with a substance and it would show up in its neighbors in time, even if they were different species.

Botany Lessson:

I willl try to keep this short. If you take a seed and plant it in perfectly sterile soil, say after autoclaving it, and take another of the same seed and plant it in the same unautoclaved soil the plant in the autoclaved soil does worse. As far as the common perception goes that makes no sense, same seed, same nutrients, same conditions - but different growth. So what gives? The difference is this - Mycorrhiza In short, most plant roots aren't that great at pulling minerals out so they have a symbiotic fungus do it for them, then hand back complex sugars and other stuff to the fungus. Some plants are so adapted that by themselves they *cant* live without the symbiote. It it said that up to 95% of ALL plants have this relationship.

So?

Well, if you are the fungus you are indiscriminate with who you work with (last I knew there weren't that many species of mycorrhiza fungi - but it has been a long time since I worked in Dr Charvat's lab) so bonding with all your neighbors wouldnt be a bad idea. So now there is a pathway, we understand what it is, all we have to do is figure out the signal process. That I have no clue about - but if I had to guess - I would say that as a symbiote the fungus knows not to try to take too much from the plant, and if they are siblings it may not be able to discriminate between them there by giving less and taking less, and consequently helping less. From the outside it would look like less growth (because they weren't getting what they need). While the other situation might just be normal growth, though in comparison it would look aggressive. Or if it *is* more growth compared to a lone plant, it might be that the bigger fungi is able to provide more nutrients to both hosts, making them grow more then they would alone.

Meh - my two cents

Sera

Not even the opposition charges that he isn't legitimate.

Complaining about it would only make them look like whiners. Is this the best you can do?

He is widely popular from polls, as well as the many elections he's won.

What the FUCK are you talking about? What drugs are you on, and where can I get some? Bush's job approval ratings are in the toilet and actually reducing the number of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans.

Now, when you come back to reality and join the big parade, perhaps you could explain who told you that shit, and why you believed them.

BTW those were the top three hits on "bush approval rating". Perhaps you should learn how to use google.

MovieLens is perhaps kind of similar-but-different. You go there and rate movies. Based on similarities to how other people rated movies, it then suggests movies for you and your likely rating of them. It's pretty neat actually -- my wife and I both have accounts there, and you can cross-reference with other people. So now when we go to the video store, instead of each of us picking one movie we like and potentially forcing the other person to suffer through it, we can find a movie that (in theory) we will both like. Seems fairly accurate so far.

The University of Minnesota already does this with their student ID cards. Not quite the same, but I still don't like it, as it makes the ID itself less useful. Policies then restrict what can be done with the card, and you end up having special cards for other functions (like, say, checking out a music practice room key card) because no one is allowed to keep the student ID because it's an ATM card. So, it really doesn't even result in fewer cards.

I was interested in learning more about (like Calculus) on Wikipedia and found that I couldn't even understand the description of the subject!

https://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/assets/71190.pdf

Notice how they talk about people as if they are "consumers"? Rather nauseating. However, given that this professor is in a marketing department, perhaps she is required to produce consumer-related research.

Maybe then he will finally clue into the fact that fewer and fewer Americans support his flawed Iraq policy with each passing week...

http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm

Here is why "Americans" hate mass transit and public transport, it is social engineering at its worst. Transit social engineering by overlords

Not everyone learns the same way.

Your kids learn through repetition, so they're in a great program. Good for them.

Some people get bored, though. And some people don't like doing busywork. When I was in 7th grade, I did Algebra I and II in one year. That would not have been possible if I did so many practice problems. In fact, at that age, I would not have done the homework at all if I didn't see the point.

Kumon sounds like it would have been a great program to make me both despise and never understand mathematics at all.

It's important to get kids into programs that teach how they learn most effectively.

(BTW, since when did the First Amendment - which explicitly states in its very first word that it applies only to Congress - restrict state governments?)

Ok. Yes. It was inevitable...
(So mod me an AC Troll, if you like.)

They're still good solutions for this perniscious problem.

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www.mandriva.com/
http://www.debian.org/

or any other flavour of choice:
http://distrowatch.com/

You can even try CD-based versions to see how you really like it before touching a thing on your current system:
http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu/6.06/
http://www.knoppix.com/

__________

Booting your machine from a CD or DVD ISO to try it out - free.
Selecting your Open Source OS of choice, installing it, and using it however you like - free.
Discovering that, for most things*, it just 'works', will never blue-screen again, and that you've escaped the Microsoft lock-in treadmill - priceless.

* seriously folks, if you want esoterica, it's there too, and yes -- as with all things -- 'your mileage will vary'. But for sane and reasonable interpretations of 'most' this is still true, and not an exaggeration.

http://www.ima.umn.edu/2005-2006/W4.3-7.06/activit ies/Desbrun-Mathieu/desbrun.ram

In fact Linux supports more devices that any other operating system ever... and thats one of the advantages of open-source kernel drivers... they are maintained with the Kernel, so they remain usable through kernel architecture changes with zero effort from the original contributer of the device-driver.

Hehe, new innovation. Yea. Luckily that whole 'tattoos on humans to track them' is just crazy sensationalism.
It could never happen in reality.

Sorry you got annoyed. We'll try not to let it happen again.

(Tagging your ass with an RFID is the government's wet dream. Anybody that thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.)

I read this a short while ago somewhere on the internet and now can't find it so can't provide proof, but someone was complaining that a x64 bit ISO for a distro didn't come with the source whereas the x86 did.

Not sure if some distros are having issues like that. According to this (what I think is a legitimate mirror) download Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop x86 is actually bigger than x64 (by a few MB):
http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu/edgy/

I don't know why anyone would complain, the spec is only 6,000 pages long.

And the best part is, these are the pages it uses... (I mean, why else do those specs cost so much?)

Actually, the 5.56x45, as well as its 5.45x39 Soviet counterpart, is designed to wound more than it is to kill.
Wounds remove more people from battle than do kills.

I just got home from practicing for six and a half hours for a doctoral degree recital I am performing tomorrow. I could have just put together a video instead. I'm sure I would get an A from the committee if I did!

(I'd like to send a special shout out to Karlheinz Stockhausen for writing pieces that have to be performed from memory but are next to impossible to memorize, such as In Freundschaft. Thanks so much!)

Oh, and if any of you folks are in Minneapolis tomorrow (Wednesday, December 13), be at Ultan Hall on the University of Minnesota campus (in the Ferguson Hall building) at 3:45 p.m. to witness the carnage. Thanks!

That's just plainly not true. The sad thing is that the number of tickets purchased is not wildly responsive to the expected value of that play. It's responsive, but not as much as it should be in a strictly rational sense. Who wants to wait?

It's utter nonsense to say that "MORE people would play," to cover your bases on this one. Yes, more people will play, but that is merely a pressure on the game. It is not a forced constraint. In John Corbett and Charlie Geyer's writeup based on expected play of Powerball here, they came to an expected monetary value of $0.9651 with a $300MM jackpot and 80MM expected plays, accounting for the probability of other jackpot winners (all other prizes are non-shared).

Powerball has gone to $365MM. Even giving completely conservative numbers a run (cash payout of $171MM, even though a $314MM jackpot had a cash payout of $170MM, 100MM plays on that jackpot), we come to an expected monetary value of $1.07 on a $1 play. Don't say that something doesn't happen in reality when that very thing has happened in reality already. With the record payout, there might have even been a positive expected value after taxes. I hate doing my own taxes, though, so why would I bother running the numbers on someone else's?

Your sort of vague argument could be made against counting cards in blackjack, that the game must be constructed with a negative expected value at all times, but that is not the case. The game is constructed with a negative expected value (for the suckers/players) over the span of all plays.

Yes, I've done my homework on game theory, and I understand that it is very rare that one can consider coming out ahead with the lottery. Still, the suggestion that it isn't functionally possible to have a positive expected value for the game in the real world is just false.

IOW, you want a literary version of MovieLens. You know what? So do I!

using a grenade launcher.

The coolest thing I'm building now? The robot builders of tomorrow.

Dean

Actually, I find the whole scenario you are worried about so remote that I fail to see why people worry about it. Random burglars will run when they are spotted, regardless of whether you have a gun or not. Only real enemies will stay to mutilate you and your family. Most people know whether they have real enemies who are likely to do that. (And besides, if someone plans to mutilate you and your family, a gun probably isn't going to stop them)

1. Divine intervention - lots more cracking of ribs, I guess
2. Eve was a bit of a go-er
3. Women just weren't mentioned much (although I'd have thought that the birth of anyone when there are less than 5 people on the entire planet would be newsworthy in any tome)
4. Either Cain or Seth had, err, unique anatomical features

Attorney John Lear's new offices in the Major George Downey Mansion will be the testing ground for the system. Lear, who specializes in gas and oil law, stumbled upon the idea last year while investigating alternatives to traditional heating and cooling systems.

The project includes each utility installing a new boiler, fuel handling system and auxiliary equipment to tie into existing turbine generators. The project will use biomass from a tree farm in Aitkin, as well as right of way clearings.

Biomass is organic matter (such as wood) that can be processed into energy for heat, liquid fuels or power generation. Biomass can be combusted directly to produce steam for electricity or it can be converted into a gas to power a turbine.

The boilers will produce 20 megawatts of biomass electricity in Hibbing and 15 megawatts in Virginia.

The two utilities, working jointly as the Laurentian Energy Authority, hold a contract to sell 35 megawatts of biomass power to Xcel Energy.

Some basic tasks like file io or token processing and such minor things might be reused. But even then porting something so simple like a string tokenizer written for a full fledged virtual memory OS like Unix/WinXP to a fixed memory handheld device is highly non trivial, especially if you want to handle multi-byte i18n char streams

If the author sells what he was smoking while coming up with the article, he stands to make tons of money.

We sue for-profit companies who produce products which are known to be harmful to us, even after being told for three decades that what they produce is harmful, yet still continued to buy and use the product, and win.

And for how many of those decades were we told that nicotine is as physically addictive as heroin?

Tobacco companies have known since the fifties of this addictive nature, but I don't recall seeing it mentioned on the packaging of any tobacco product, ever.

Even when told how dangerous it is, virtually no smoker has the ability to quit once they've started, regardless of their desire to do so. Of all the smokers you've known, how many would have started if they'd known it was that addictive? A lot of people willingly submit to brief danger (like unintentionally inhaling gasoline fumes) but would think differently if they knew one moment of contact would force them into a lifelong spiral of increasing exposure to the same danger.

You will never find a human that will, after a few minutes of persuasion, reliably betray its principles, never tell anyone, never come back to blackmail you, and even completely forget the whole incident even happened should you care to ask him to, let alone thousands of identical humans who will do so in lockstep without giving the slightest indication that anything is amiss.

Actually, engineers care about this a lot. Inexperienced people take a formula and assume it works under all conditions. However, when you take a [good] numerical analysis course, you'll do more than just learn how to use a formula. You'll spend time doing a lot of real analysis that you don't necessarily enjoy doing (I didn't) but the point is clear. A lot of times we really, really, care about existence of solutions. At times, we even care about the uniqueness of such solutions. Or, how about convergence of the series we're approximating a function with? Or maybe, does this Fourier series really work on this set of data that has a bunch of discontinuities in it?

Here is what happens when such problems aren't approached with proper rigor. In short, we read (regarding an offshore oil drilling platform):

The post accident investigation traced the error to inaccurate finite element approximation of the linear elastic model of the tricell (using the popular finite element program NASTRAN). The shear stresses were underestimated by 47%, leading to insufficient design. In particular, certain concrete walls were not thick enough. More careful finite element analysis, made after the accident, predicted that failure would occur with this design at a depth of 62m, which matches well with the actual occurrence at 65m.

So, yes, engineers VERY MUCH care about these things.

that's just not true poncho - skype can traverse nat and re-route packets, defeating most consumer firewalls. adios now.