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Well, if UMR Rulez so much, get off yer AC ass and be proud of UMR. And yes, Rapid Prototyping's been around a while, just this is a different approach being taken with some different results and uses. It even has the chance to be cheaper/smaller/faster/blah blah blah. That's what makes this so interesting.

Here's the official link, while I'm karma whoring. Nothing new in there.. just different presentation.

Sigh.. if only I were in a different department, I could claim this..

Acutally, I've seen some of the BASIC stuff for this, it's quite cool. But, I must protest, the article has it wrong, the work was NOT done in the mechanical engineering building. And actually, no, the ink isn't completely reusable.. just mostly- evaporation, contamination, and other things have to be taken into account.

Here is the official link from UMR. Nothing too detailed in there, I'll warn you. Basically what you read at Discover.

Sigh again. If I were in a different department, I'd know enough to provide quite a bit insight.
(PS- UMR's other claims to fame is the National Champion Solar Car, and a huge arse St. Pat's festival that can only be described as... Animal House.)

Discover ran this story about a similar technology that "prints" ice sculptures, the idea being to provide real, temporary prototypes of a CAD design. Probably much cheaper that other technologies, and probably much closer to real world use. Discover also provides thie link which provided more detail on the process.

Of course, they also state in their acceptable use policy that they can search any attached machine without any due process or notification being required.

Instead of writing new operating systems that virtually nobody is going to install, it would be far simpler and more cost-effective to simply develop a Distributed Processing API Library and/or supporting system services for existing operating systems that are capable of handling it. Like that MOSIX project.

Obviously most Unices fall into the boat, as would Java-based environments, but you could probably even do it on NT if you were really desperate.

Of course, your really big-ass gov/mil/edu houses may not be too concerned about the cost :-)

Seems like the Java platform would be the best way to get this kind of thing to the masses, nearly everyone has some kind of Java Runtime Environment installed, and not many non-techies are going to want to mess around with their kernel.

Go on, you know you want to:
CLICK HERE TO ENSLAVE YOUR COMPUTER IN THE BORG COLLECTIVE

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No, SAS stands for something like Statistical AnalySis, or something.

I used it in school to do some pretty neat math stuff. It's not Free, it's not pretty, but it can really crunch some numbers.
Mike

• First, here are lecture notes from a college course on operating system design.
• Second, some more meterial from another university (it's not clear to me that this is from a course).
• Third, a terse document detailing broad set of features common to operating systems of different periods (also part of an operating sytems course).
• Fourth, another page, which seems to be part of college course, with a section on the history of operating systems.
• Fifth, a web-slideshow on the topic.
• And Finally, a smattering of other links to the same topic by even more authors: another lecture from a college course, chapter 3, section 1 from the book Introductory Information Protection by Fred Cohen & Associates, Operating Systems - Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Evolution of Operating Systems User Interface Design

I have some pages on Gnutella and it's clones as well, with a PHP search engine, relatively recent list of working hosts and so forth myself.

A linux console client that works fairly well can be downloaded here:

http://www.umr.edu/~jjp/

The speed of light through any medium is less than the speed of light in a vacuum. Sometimes light can be made to travel through a medium faster than it's natural rate. This results in a nifty "light shockwave" which I believe is called cherenkov radiation.

Yep. You can see some cool pics of this effect at http://www.nuc.umr.edu/Reactor/Reactor.ht ml, along with a pretty good explanation of how. It's pretty neat the way it actually happens..

Furthermore, the light in a fiber actually zig-zags down the fiber channel and does not travel straight down it. This also reduces the signal's speed from c.

Actually it increases the distance of travel which gives an appearent speed difference from c, which is just as good as slowing it down. :-)



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The Earth is not heated by nuclear fission. It is heated by the natural radioactive decay of various radioisotopes that are part of the mantle (and maybe the core) material. The main elements are U, Th, and K.

Nifty bit of trivia: It's worth noting that there is evidence of an ancient, natural fission reactor that fired up spontaneously in the Oklo area of west Africa. This happened some 3 billion year ago, thanks to a rich bed of Uranium ore and the right combination of ground soil and water. In fact there are some 14 known reactor sites. Here's a link about the last one being mined:
http://www.apnet.com/inscight/05131997/graphb.htm
General info about Oklo: http://www.nuc.umr.edu/~ans/oklo.html
The natural reactors depleted the amount of U235 present in the ore and left behind long lived fission products.

Interestingly, neither the fission products nor the plutonium bred from the ore's U238 had migrated from the original reactor sites, despite having had billions of years in which to travel, plus plenty of ground water during a good part of that time.

Anyway, while the Oklo area would have been slightly hotter locally, it could not have put out enough power to alter the global heat balance to any great extent.

There's a famous cryptogrophy code out there, I forget the name of it, but the story is this: someone discovered it (it came in three pieces), and supposedly cracked the second piece, which explained the first and third pieces of the code would tell him where some rich treasure was. The second piece of the code was coded by using numerical values standing for the number of letters into a document, in this case the document (he claimed he discovered) was the US Constitution (so, the 10th letter in "We the people of the United States..." would be 'l').

I'm not a physicist, but for no particular reason I have been on a tour of a reactor, and still seem to remember some related elementary foo...

How much do you remember about nuclear fission (which, presumably is what happened in this incident, since the conditions would seem completely inadequate for fusion)?

The splitting of an atom can free neutrons, sending them in various directions. Depending upon various conditions (such as the amount of fissionable material, the presence or absence of materials that either absorb or reflect the neutrons, and so forth), these neutrons may or may not collide with other atoms. These collisions can induce more splitting, leading to the possibility of a self-sustaining chain-reaction.

Incidentally, the NY Times/Associated Press article mentions that the workers thought they saw a blue glow. Dunno about you folks, but this reminded me of Cerenkov radiation. For more info on that, see this page.

"HELP! Am Being Slashdotted!"

At least, that's what the picture currently shows..

Ah heck, I'll take a screen shot..

Screen Shot

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They use the seized equipment not just as evidence, but as leverage against the suspect ("we have your stuff, cooperate and you can have it back").

Same technique used in The Hacker Crackdown