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Oh come on now. That's just because they couldn't dump them in the colonies anymore, they were still doing that in Upper and Lower Canada and the colonial state of Newfoundland. Despite what the wikipedia article says, the crown was still shipping them to north america until the very late 1700's(round about 1795ish), but only into lands "just far enough" to not make it an issue for the newly founded US. See there was even a trick to it, they would declare the prisoners being sent to an "unknown location" and then basically dump them in the territory or colonial state. Who'd then be responsible for well...everything, from feeding to housing, and so on while it "was in dispute with the crown." And that could take years, and in the mean time the prisoners would/could be forced onto a plantation while arguing with the crown over it.

Lot's of bits of history like that which really doesn't get fully covered. Here's an example from 1789, also covers some other stuff but worth the reading.

That number won't pass Luhn checking - try 4000 1000 4000 1000 instead.

Yes, it does pass. It's a valid test number. I've used it during development for years.
http://www.ee.unb.ca/cgi-bin/t...

Decades ago the US GPS gave wrong coordinates to civilians, a few 10 meters off. That is what I call distortion.

Deliberate distortion, aka "selective availability" was turned off.
There are multiple other sources of distortion.

The ionosphere does not distort or hinder GPS signals, why should it? The signals are in the wrong wavelength for that, and: they come from the outside. Again: easy to google.

Yeah, you should really give this google thing a try:

GPS and Ionosphere
The influence of the ionosphere on GPS Operations (contains a nice "Summary of GPS Errors")
Ionospheric Effects on GPS
There even are pretty pictures.

It sounds as if you are working for the same corporation as I do. Software developers do not have to (and normally may) think here, because marketing and upper management have it all figured out for us. All what's remains is just to sit through 2-4-6 hours of meetings a day. And press buttons on the keyboard. Easy peasy.

The chess puzzles are probably the only use my brains have the whole day. Link 1. Link 2.

There is no such thing as due process in Canada. There never was. Authorities can decide on a whim what they will do to you.
There is also no recourse, no accountability, no freedom from intrusion. The 'reasonable grounds' dictate for search and seizure are based on some drones best imaginings of you at the time.

The Canadian government also collects information about the population on a regular basis ans stores it away in
CPIC and among various vestigial databases.

There are no real controls over how CPIC data are used. Any disgruntled police officer can diddle the database with impunity.
Any non-active or ex police member can still gain access to private records at any time.

Many police officers use the public databases for personal searches, outside the bounds of actual casework. They then pass this
information on to private individuals, family and friends. Some do it for money.

The Canadian databases have serious data quality problems. Any complaint is placed in public databases and may later be used as evidence or
'leverage'.

Since complaints are logged and remain in databases for years. People use the complaint process as a way to harass others.

There is no logging of WHO entered data into Canada's public databases. This means that if there is an error or illegal manipulation of the database, no employees can be fired.

There is also no logging of WHO VIEWS Canada's public databases. This means that there are no employees fired for misusing Canadian databases.

As you can see I am not a big believer in Canada's privacy and human/civil rights performance when it comes to it's citizens.

I believe applicable the term is G.I.G.O. (wikipedia)

**
The Canadian Charter of Rights contains no reference to " due process of law" it substitutes for the Phrase " fundamental justice". The court interpreted "fundamental Justice as the substantive concept" . Main Problem: vague concept.

source: http://www.unb.ca/democracy/English/Ideas/DueProcess/DueProcess.html

**

Remaining puzzle: I don't know of any 120km-diameter impact crater "off the WA coast" of about the same age (i.e. ~Late Eocene). The Earth Impact Database certainly doesn't show one, and the list of impact craters >100km is very short. In fact, it is unlikely for such a crater to exist off the coast of Washington because the continent quickly changes to deep ocean crust due to the subduction zone parallel to the coast, I'm not sure the crust there is even Eocene in age (it's pretty young due to the adjacent Juan de Fuca ridge), and hardly any impact craters are known from ocean crust anyway (the only ones known are quite small, and didn't really form an "impact crater" because of the deep ocean water). It's possible that this "crater off Washington" was confused with the large (85km) Late Eocene impact structure that exists off the East Coast of the USA in Chesapeake Bay and is not far from Washington, D.C..

Coincidentally both the Popigai impact and Chesapeake Bay impacts are mentioned in the abstract of the paper, so it's very likely a mix-up about the two Washingtons that explains the third one. We can't really blame the submitter for the mix-up. They just quoted the errors in the other article.

I suspect the author actually meant the Woodleigh crater off Western Australia (WA).

  http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/images/woodleigh.htm

Remaining puzzle: I don't know of any 120km-diameter impact crater "off the WA coast" of about the same age (i.e. ~Late Eocene). The Earth Impact Database certainly doesn't show one, and the list of impact craters >100km is very short. In fact, it is unlikely for such a crater to exist off the coast of Washington because the continent quickly changes to deep ocean crust due to the subduction zone parallel to the coast, I'm not sure the crust there is even Eocene in age (it's pretty young due to the adjacent Juan de Fuca ridge), and hardly any impact craters are known from ocean crust anyway (the only ones known are quite small, and didn't really form an "impact crater" because of the deep ocean water). It's possible that this "crater off Washington" was confused with the large (85km) Late Eocene impact structure that exists off the East Coast of the USA in Chesapeake Bay and is not far from Washington, D.C..

Coincidentally both the Popigai impact and Chesapeake Bay impacts are mentioned in the abstract of the paper, so it's very likely a mix-up about the two Washingtons that explains the third one. We can't really blame the submitter for the mix-up. They just quoted the errors in the other article.

I suspect the author actually meant the Woodleigh crater off Western Australia (WA).

  http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/images/woodleigh.htm

Remaining puzzle: I don't know of any 120km-diameter impact crater "off the WA coast" of about the same age (i.e. ~Late Eocene). The Earth Impact Database certainly doesn't show one, and the list of impact craters >100km is very short. In fact, it is unlikely for such a crater to exist off the coast of Washington because the continent quickly changes to deep ocean crust due to the subduction zone parallel to the coast, I'm not sure the crust there is even Eocene in age (it's pretty young due to the adjacent Juan de Fuca ridge), and hardly any impact craters are known from ocean crust anyway (the only ones known are quite small, and didn't really form an "impact crater" because of the deep ocean water). It's possible that this "crater off Washington" was confused with the large (85km) Late Eocene impact structure that exists off the East Coast of the USA in Chesapeake Bay and is not far from Washington, D.C..

Coincidentally both the Popigai impact and Chesapeake Bay impacts are mentioned in the abstract of the paper, so it's very likely a mix-up about the two Washingtons that explains the third one. We can't really blame the submitter for the mix-up. They just quoted the errors in the other article.

I suspect the author actually meant the Woodleigh crater off Western Australia (WA).

  http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/images/woodleigh.htm

Okay, let's clear this up to the extent that is possible.

Correctly represented: the structure identified in the Timor Sea (the Mt. Ashmore dome) is 50km across, but it represents only the eroded central uplift of a complex crater, so the original crater diameter could have been 100km. The impactor for such a crater is roughly 10x as small (the 5 to 10km mentioned).

Incorrectly represented: the structure being referred to in Siberia is probably the Popigai crater, which is about 100km in diameter. This is incorrectly identified as the size of the impactor in both the summary and the article it cites.

Remaining puzzle: I don't know of any 120km-diameter impact crater "off the WA coast" of about the same age (i.e. ~Late Eocene). The Earth Impact Database certainly doesn't show one, and the list of impact craters >100km is very short. In fact, it is unlikely for such a crater to exist off the coast of Washington because the continent quickly changes to deep ocean crust due to the subduction zone parallel to the coast, I'm not sure the crust there is even Eocene in age (it's pretty young due to the adjacent Juan de Fuca ridge), and hardly any impact craters are known from ocean crust anyway (the only ones known are quite small, and didn't really form an "impact crater" because of the deep ocean water). It's possible that this "crater off Washington" was confused with the large (85km) Late Eocene impact structure that exists off the East Coast of the USA in Chesapeake Bay and is not far from Washington, D.C..

Coincidentally both the Popigai impact and Chesapeake Bay impacts are mentioned in the abstract of the paper, so it's very likely a mix-up about the two Washingtons that explains the third one. We can't really blame the submitter for the mix-up. They just quoted the errors in the other article.

Okay, let's clear this up to the extent that is possible.

Correctly represented: the structure identified in the Timor Sea (the Mt. Ashmore dome) is 50km across, but it represents only the eroded central uplift of a complex crater, so the original crater diameter could have been 100km. The impactor for such a crater is roughly 10x as small (the 5 to 10km mentioned).

Incorrectly represented: the structure being referred to in Siberia is probably the Popigai crater, which is about 100km in diameter. This is incorrectly identified as the size of the impactor in both the summary and the article it cites.

Remaining puzzle: I don't know of any 120km-diameter impact crater "off the WA coast" of about the same age (i.e. ~Late Eocene). The Earth Impact Database certainly doesn't show one, and the list of impact craters >100km is very short. In fact, it is unlikely for such a crater to exist off the coast of Washington because the continent quickly changes to deep ocean crust due to the subduction zone parallel to the coast, I'm not sure the crust there is even Eocene in age (it's pretty young due to the adjacent Juan de Fuca ridge), and hardly any impact craters are known from ocean crust anyway (the only ones known are quite small, and didn't really form an "impact crater" because of the deep ocean water). It's possible that this "crater off Washington" was confused with the large (85km) Late Eocene impact structure that exists off the East Coast of the USA in Chesapeake Bay and is not far from Washington, D.C..

Coincidentally both the Popigai impact and Chesapeake Bay impacts are mentioned in the abstract of the paper, so it's very likely a mix-up about the two Washingtons that explains the third one. We can't really blame the submitter for the mix-up. They just quoted the errors in the other article.

Which their warehouse has property taxes, the employees pay income tax on, also the fed-ex and ups charges include fuel costs and taxes.

The fuel costs and taxes are insufficient to cover the cost of the damage done by shipping. On average a semi-tractor with a reefer unit will get about 6-7 mpg, which is a third to a quarter (say) of the mileage of an auto, yet it does more than three or four times the damage that the car would do; The relative damaging effect of an axle is considered to be approximately proportional to the fourth power of the load. In other words, a 40 ton truck can easily cause as much damage to a typical road as 60,000 one-ton cars. Yet they pay only a few times as much in fuel taxes (since that is tied to fuel consumption) and only a few times as much in registration fees. There are several orders of magnitude unaccounted for here. Where do you propose the difference should come from? The pockets of those who live in the same tax region?

However, Hezbollah is devoted to destroying Israel. Here [nybooks.com] are [standwithus.com] some [un.org] links [www.unb.ca], in case [psepc.gc.ca] you didn't bother to find them.

You copied those links from the Wikipedia article didn't you?

The first one:

Adam Shatz (April 29, 2004). "In Search of Hezbollah". The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17060. Retrieved 2006-08-14.

Hezbollah's announced long-term objectives-- [...] the elimination of the State of Israel

Unsupported allegation, which continues

but it interprets its founding principles with considerable suppleness, as when Nasrallah says he will not sabotage an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement

Next up: http://www.standwithus.com/pdfs/flyers/hezbollah_program.pdf

The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel[*]
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. [...] Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, [...], and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.

Oh, what does that little [*] there mean?

The Jerusalem Quarterly, number Forty-Eight, Fall 1988
This is a slightly abridged translation of "Nass al-Risala al-Maftuha allati wajahaha Hizballah ila-l-Mustad'afin fi Lubnan wa-l-Alam", published February 16, 1985 in al-Safir (Beirut), [...]

[*] This paragraph did not appear in the original translation published by the Jerusalem Quarterly.

Ah, "this paragraph did not appear in the original translation. Why?

It is possible [possible?] that this omision is due to the fact that the source (al-Safir) for the translation did not include this text, which appears in the original Hizballah Program.

Appears in the original, sez who? Wikipedia says:

Some translations of Hezbollah's 1985 Arabic-language manifesto state that "our struggle will end only when this entity [Israel] is obliterated".[10] However neither the original publication of the manifesto, nor those found on Hezbollah's website, include the statement.[10]

God, this is boring, anyway, struggling on we have http://domino.un.org/unispal.NSF/fd807e46661e3689852570d00069e918/50862df07adbd884852569ad0054a527!OpenDocument

Error 404
HTTP Web Server: Lotus Notes Exception - Entry not found in index

Well, got 'em bang to rights there.

Moving on you cite http://www.unb.ca/web/bruns/9900/issue14/intnews/israel.html

Sorry, the page you're looking for can't be found.

The Brunswickan Student Newspaper is no longer hosted at the University of New Brunswick.

Please update your bookmarks to http://www.thebruns.ca/

A broken link to a student newspaper?

And last, and least of all http://www.psepc.gc.ca/prg/ns/le/cle-en.asp#h20 - "Public safety Canada" whoever the fuck they are say that that Hizballah is a "listed entity". Sounds bad. They seen to have read the dodgy PDF above.

You know, [citation needed] doesn't mean [stick in an unsuppo

Why did you stop reading the article there? Sure, Hezbollah does some positive things, and has a broader scope than just the destruction of Israel.

However, Hezbollah is devoted to destroying Israel. Here are some links, in case you didn't bother to find them.

Allegedly "The relative damaging effect of an axle is considered to be approximately proportional to the fourth power of the load":

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JFE/bin/get6.cgi?directory=July99/&filename=martin.html

By that reckoning if the Cherokee weighs twice what the Civic does (ish) it should be paying 16 times as much tax.

You're wrong. Road damage is correllated to the fourth power of the total axle weight.
This is a very well studied area, both theoretically and empirically, so guessing isn't necessary.
Here's one reference, googling will quickly find others. Binging might too.

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/JFE/bin/get6.cgi?directory=July99/&filename=martin.html

In theory a SCSI disk should not be much better than ATA but the reality is the best made, more reliable parts go to the high end more profitable products.

There are, typically, huge differences between your average SCSI and ATA disk beyond just manufacturing quality. USENIX paper here. Differences range from disk interface command richness, to reliability under wider operating conditions, to materials and assembly. They do the same thing, but they aren't even close to being the same thing.

Invented by Dean Kaman is a bit of an exaggeration. The arm is the result of a DARPA project overseen by Deka, and involving a laundry list of partners including the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the University of New Brunswick. See here for the UNB page about the project.

Sorry, Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. Assuming you are a human and not a dog, you can not hear frequencies above 22khz. As for 16 bit, nobody uses all that dynamic range anyway. So 16bit/44.1khz is entirely good enough for listening.

Now 24/96 has its uses if you're mastering something, so that any errors introduced in the mixing process are below the quantization error in the final 16/44.1 product.

The first discovery of this cyclicity in the appearence/ disappearence of fossil species or genera was published in approximately 1982 by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (a project that pre-dates the Alvarezs' KT impact hypothesis). They see a 26 million year cyclicity. (Note - that link is to a proponent of the "Nemesis" hypothesis ; don't take this as endorsement of that theory. But the man provides an accessible summary of Raup & Sepkoski).
A few years later people looked at essentially the same data set through different statistical goggles. They came up with a 24 Ma cycle. Others have come up with figures around 30 million years, from the same data. Now someone is extracting figures of around 64 million years. Whoopy-dee!
As a geologist, I'm perfectly open to this sort of hypothesis. Space effects on life-on-Earth? Hey, I've been to Nordlingen - tick the box that says "space can affect life on Earth". But being open to this sort of idea does not mean accepting any presentation that's made. It's entirely possible that the observed variations in historical biodiversity levels are as much a product of variable preservation as of variable historical biodiversity.
My guess - there's a lot of statistical effort applied to "damp down" the effects of the big spike in extinctions at 63~65 million years ago courtesy of (amongst others) the Chixulub impactor ; but the studies all show a spike in extinction frequencies at half, one, or twice the period of the biggest spike in the data set. That sounds to me like over-correction or under correction of the data, not helped by the data set being one-sided (we don't know biodiversity rates for the next 100 million years).

Why is it dangerous? Do you have anything to support that? Or is it just because of the Hindenburg?

I would guess the refueling infrastructure wouldn't require that much of a change; you'd just have to have pressurized tanks, pumps, etc. The important part is that the vehicles wouldn't all have to be replaced with a totally different technology, as you advocate with your batteries. Hydrogen burns just fine in a slightly modified gasoline engine. Hundreds of millions of cars wouldn't need to be suddenly replaced, and people with older cars could easily modify them to burn the new fuel.

What's wrong with batteries? That's pretty easy.
1) Can't store enough energy (the same thing you say about hydrogen). Has anyone built an all-electric car that can go 400-500 miles without a recharge? If not, then the technology simply isn't ready to use. The best I've heard of was GM's EV-1, which could only go 30-40 miles or so.
2) They take forever to recharge. If I'm taking a weekend road trip, I'm not about to stop every 100 miles and wait 4 hours to recharge my batteries. If it can't be recharged in 5 minutes, it's not ready to use.
3) They're heavy. All-electric cars are very heavy because of the batteries, and that only gives them a pathetic range. Adding more batteries for a better range increases the weight too much.
4) They're expensive. Lead-acid batteries aren't too cheap, but they don't store enough energy. Upgrading to something like Li-ion means an enormous cost.
5) They're not improving fast enough. Sure, I can get 2500 mAh AA batteries for my digital camera now, when I could only get 1800 mAh batteries 4-5 years ago. That's not much improvement when, as I pointed out before, electric cars are WAY behind everything else for range. And you still haven't addressed the recharge time issue: even if you could get 300 miles out of a charge, that's no good if it takes 8 hours to recharge. Very few people are willing to own separate cars for long trips and for commuting.

Lastly, no one wants to move to a new technology just because of some promise of "potential breakthroughs". Sorry, I'm not going to put up with a major pain-in-the-ass technology for 30 years waiting for someone to develop this "super nanocapacitor" so we can finally have the performance with electric that we've had with fossil fuels for almost a century. Develop the new technology first, and then we'll consider it.

As for hydrogen, here's some nice links I found in 10 seconds with Google:

Hydrogen storage in nanotubes - 1998

Hydrogen stored in nano-scale metal-organic frameworks - 2005

Hydrogen stored as solid

Apparently, a lot of real (and expensive) research is being conducted into making hydrogen a realistic replacement for gasoline. That's a lot more than I can say about batteries. From what I see, the idea of an all-electric car has basically been abandoned (though hybrids are certainly becoming very popular).

The glow of a wood fire is from incandescent soot, so the hydrogen flame would be really unsatisfying.

More of what they're doing at the research group's site.

An example of a confirmed impact crater which is elliptical is the Sudbury Crater in Ontario, Canada. There are plenty of others. It would just mean that the impactor arrived at a steeper angle than those at circular craters.

The Chicxulub event, while large, is not the only large impact suffered in Earth's history. There are quite a number of large craters in the geologic history, and probably more that we have not stumbled upon yet. The Earth Impact Database lists two craters larger than Chicxulub:

http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/CIDiameterS ort2.htm

Wikipedia blurbs on the two largest (as usual, do more research to verify if interested:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

There are also questions about a possible crater in Antarctica, but it's too new an announcement to know if the features observed are actually impact related: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm

My question is, why would the Chicxulub event have been so uniquely deadly?

I suppose one possible scenario is a double (or more) sucker punch of large impact followed by volcanic activity and/or other factors that happened to hit while the Earth was still recovering from the impact. Of course, that's a bit complex for a spectacular headline.

I hope work continues on this - it's a fascinating insight into our environment and might be useful in knowing how to safeguard ourselves against changes in the future.

My guess: some stupid americans had never seen a twoney.

Sounds to me like the old "information overload" phenomenon. The solution-pattern to this situation is never going to be found via incremental improvements in information processing, as the growth is exponential. Nor will an "add-on" approach solve the problem; while hyperlinks, search engines, and other qualitatively-impressive tools are awesome in their own right (and do help!), they only add a layer or two to an information-growth process that adds layers supralinearly ... they're another "stop-gap measure", though they're also the best we've come up with, so far.

So how to solve an unsolvable problem? Rephrase it! IMO, the problem isn't "too much information", as that's already been solved by the "biocomputer" we all watch the Simpsons with: our senses/brains already process "too much information" handily, but with lots of errors. No, the problem is that we're using the wrong approach to what we call "information" in the first place! We're rather fond of numbers (numeric forms of representation), as they've been around for around eight thousand years, and words (linear forms of representation) go back even farther. Pictures, music, etcetera store far more information (qualitative, structural forms of representation), but usually get mapped back to bitmaps, byte counts, and Shannon's information theory when this discussion starts. And that's the heart of it right there: everyone assumes that reducing (or mapping) everything to numbers is the only way to maintain objectivity, or measure (functional) quality.

Here's a challenge: is there a natural way to measure the "information-organizing capability" of a system? Meaning some approach/algorithm/technique simple enough for a kid or grandparent to understand, that most human beings will agree on, and that puts humans above machines for such things as recognizing pictures of cats (without having to have "trained" the machine on a bajillion pictures first). [Grammars are a reasonable start, but you have to explain where the grammars come from in the first place, and what metric you want to use to optimize them.]

A constant insistence/reliance on numeric measurements of accomplishment just ends up dehumanizing us, and doesn't spur the development of tools to deal with the root problem: the lack of automatic and natural organization of the "too much information" ocean we're sinking in. If we're not a little bit careful, we'll end up making things that are "good enough" -- perhaps an AI, perhaps brain augmentation, [insert Singularity thing here] -- as this is par for the course in evolutionary terms. But it's not the most efficient approach; we already have brains, let's use 'em to solve "unsolvable" problems by questioning our deep assumptions on occasion! :-)

Disclaimer: the research group I work with (when not on "programming for profit" breaks, heh) is investigating one possible avenue in this general direction, a mathematical, structural language called ETS, which we hope will stimulate the growth of interest in alternative forms of information representation.

I'm surprised by the stupid comments found on the page concerning China's Tokamak device. I'm eager for the day when scientists finally manage to create a working fusion reactor. Here's what asimov had to say back in 1975.

http://www.unb.ca/
http://www.utoronto.ca/

Because Canada is more fun.

Or you can ask... most people are honest about their gender

Or give them at least the option NOT to answer that question. What does it matter if I read a page like this one if I am a man or a women? Even more when I have to enter an apply for hotmail.

I am so much emancipated that these things should NOT matter. Do they ask you for your skincolour? No, because that is racism, yet asking what your sex is is allowed and normal.

This means that although there is a statistically significant difference between the means, that difference is so small that it makes little, if any, difference in the grand scheme of things

But it becomes a big difference when you look at the tails of the distribution, which is relevant to this story. If the average math ability of males is half a standard deviation higher than females, that's going to translate into a very large imbalance in PhD students who have to be several standard deviations above the mean.

Say the population of females has a mean "math aptitude" of 100 with a standard deviation of 10, and males have a mean of 105 with the same standard deviation. The difference in means is small enough so that there will be many women who are better at math than most men. But say you need a 130 to get a PhD. From this table, 6.2 out of every 1000 males will qualify, but only 1.4 out of every 1000 females.

One of the Fredericton engineers had a beef with another one about the best placement for the steering wheel on their gravity car (learn more here One of them was short and wanted it closer to the seat, the other was tall and wanted it farther away. In the end they placed it according to data about the armlength of the average person. But they were still angry. Hench- Mechanical Engineering Fight Club!

I hate to bring up that unpleasant "science thing", but can he cite any empirical evidence of a lifeform that has survived by colonizing multiple planets?

His position that human lives are threatened by cosmic impacts is supported by a considerable body of evidence--see for instance the Impact Database. Given the extreme brevity of the interview, I don't think labeling him a "nut job" is reasonable. He may have a good point if allowed to expand on it. The interview was so short it was hardly worth a mention on Slashdot.

My university also has a full-blown co-op program. It operates by contacting businesses across Canada and asking if they would like to have some of their students apply for jobs. Then us students go through a process much like applying for a job in the "real" world. I think this is much better than having some scruffy third year student (like me) call them up and ask if they want to hire him (or her) for a security position.

Also, there is a precedent for security companies hiring Co-op students. If I am not mistaken, The Canadian Security Company (I can't remember their proper name, CSE or something like that) hires some students from my university every study term. The students have to go through a security clearance process that has several requirements such as: you must be a canadian citizen and, criminal record checks and such.

if you want to see our website, go to www.cs.unb.ca

So yeah, the point of all that is to tell you to definitely get in touch with your advisor. I'm sure you have a course advisor (if you don't, get one!). He or she should be able to point you in the right direction.

I was at a conference for Privacy, Security, and Trust a few weeks ago here at the university where I work, and there were two very interesting papers presented by people who had given this idea serious thought. Both papers, in PDF format, are available here and here.

I was at a conference for Privacy, Security, and Trust a few weeks ago here at the university where I work, and there were two very interesting papers presented by people who had given this idea serious thought. Both papers, in PDF format, are available here and here.

I was at a conference for Privacy, Security, and Trust a few weeks ago here at the university where I work, and there were two very interesting papers presented by people who had given this idea serious thought. Both papers, in PDF format, are available here and here.

The Province of New Brunswick Provincial Archives have been like this for quite some time now, with birth, death, marriage certs and census records. I have been able to search for information about my family history online using their handy dandy search tool, as well as visiting the Archives themselves at University of New Brunswick. It never occurred to me that others might be trying catching up, but I guess that this type of service isn't something that most governments deem necessary for the public.

I guess Civil Rights Action Panel was on the list of rejected titles?

Believe it or not, a merger of Canada's Reform Party and Alliance Party became the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party. Yes, all too briefly, the big right wing party here in Canada was known as CCRAP. Go here for a few lines from Canadian politicians after seeing the unfortunate acronym. Canadian politics are just more fun! (Mainly because we can't do anything that would lead to severe global consequences.)

Hmm, scrap the last sentence about International Standard. This is more precise. Sorry for the confusion.

You know, there hasn't just been one great extinction in history. The dino-killer happened 65MYA. This article is talking about a much earlier event that happened 250MYA.

The comment in the article about the Chix . . . Chick . . . Mexican event refers to the idea that impact catastrophies may not have been the isolated event many assumed. Considering the large number of impact structures of up to several hundred kilometers in diameter around the world, it seems pretty obvious to me that it would have had a large effect on the development of life.

Most of these structures are so weathered that they aren't recognizable from the ground. For instance, the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast of the United States is a 90 km impact structure. Here are a couple of links about terrestrial impact structures. The second one is the best.

And interestingly enough, RMS is missing from the list :) (am not complaining, though).

I'm sure there are a lot of people who read RMS as Root-Mean-Squared, right? I know RMS is a person, and I've seen his name probably about 100 times, and he's all ubergood and everything, but I still can not remember any part of his damn name.

Much of the downtown is already being covered. Next year even they're covering the major malls and other areas.

When asked, the local ISPs rightly said it probably won't cut into their revenues, because with the amount of people on the free network you'll never get high downstream / upstream speeds, but it'll be great for surfing the web or checking your email on the go from your PDA, nearly anywhere in the city.

http://www.unb.ca/bruns/0304/12/news/wireless.html

While this does seem like a very practical, important, and just plain cool use of GPS, I do see the one big, ominous problem of the US jamming/degrading the GPS system in the event of another war. As well they should, but this could be leathal for this technology.

From gge.unb.ca:

The GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) uses the C/A-code component of the GPS L1 signal which is transmitted on 1575.42 MHz. The C/A-code, which stands for coarse/acquisition-code, is a pseudorandom noise code which the GPS receiver uses to determine the distance to a satellite. The distance is determined by aligning the received code with a replica of the code generated in the receiver. By measuring at least four such distances to different satellites simultaneously and knowing where the satellites are from the navigation messages they transmit, the receiver can figure out where it is. The C/A-code is a relatively short code which repeats every millisecond and a GPS receiver can easily lock onto or acquire it.

The military's GPS capability is known as the Precise Positioning Service (PPS). It relies on a much longer code called the P-code (for precise or precision) which is transmitted on both the L1 frequency and the L2 frequency at 1227.60 MHz. The P-code is encrypted (and it's then called the Y-code) so that it cannot be accessed by unauthorized users. Encryption also prevents a military GPS receiver from being fooled or spoofed by a fake GPS signal transmitted by an enemy. The encryption process is known as Anti-Spoofing. Military GPS receivers have decryption capabilities which permit them to recover the P-code.

Each satellite's unique P-code segment is one week long. In order to determine the distance to a satellite using the P-code, the receiver must align a replica of the code it generates with the arriving code.

Prior to 2 May 2000, the accuracy afforded users of the GPS Standard Positioning Service (SPS) was purposefully degraded through a policy and technique known as Selective Availability (SA). The use of SA gave military users of GPS a position accuracy advantage - one it did not wish to share with potential adversaries. SA was effected by manipulating or dithering the output of each GPS satellite's active atomic clock. This clock controls the generation of all of the satellite's signals and hence the measurements made by a GPS receiver. SA was imposed at a level which would yield a stated SPS horizontal (latitude and longitude) accuracy of 100 metres or better 95 percent of the time for any point in the world during a measurement interval of one day. On 2 May 2000, by presidential decree, the level of SA was set to zero. SPS users immediately saw a quantum jump in positioning accuracy with factors of 5 to 10 improvements. Even a simple handheld receiver can now often yield horizontal position accuracies of 5 metres.

Now remember, we've more or less been fighting 3rd world countries as far as their military capabilities go, so their use of GPS against us was highly unlikely. But say we go to war with a real military anytime soon. A country like China could sustain a global conflict for a while, and has the technology to make effective use of GPS against us. It wouldn't suprise me then if the (useful) SPS signal soon after the start of a conflict of that scope became non-exist.

So, back to the point of this, unless the US gives the Indian government military grade GPS gear, there could be a disaster waiting to happen. Granted, the chances are low, but still something to think about. But even given this, I personally think this should be a good model for other advanced railway systems to look at.

Depends. Some craters are huge. Look at the Barrington Meteor Crater in Arizona. While that one is fairly recent (about 49,000 years), there's lot of other identifed that are significantly older.

Reading this reminds me of my cognitive neuroscience/AI prof Lev Goldfarb. He began our course by telling us that very, very little has been accomplished in the fields of Cog Sci and AI, and that he is possibly the only one who has brought a real contribution to the table: a formal language ("real science") for working in this field. His "Evolving Transformation System" or ETS provides methods for measuring symbols and the differences between them, and lays the groundwork for modelling cognitive processes.

Compare this to any of the fake sciences, which can easily be itentified because they have the word "science" in them. Social Science, Cognitive Science, and so on, which talk about phenomenon but fail to create formalisms to describe them (like physics does for physical phenomena, for example.)

He's eccentric, but is he right? I don't know. You can read a summary of his work here. I never dived into this field enough to learn whether he was a revolutionary or just a big talker. I'd be interested to hear what other slashdotters have to say.

Any UNB students past or present out there that have explored the steam tunnels?

These darlings connect all the residences to every building on campus. Since the campus is built on a hill, there are a lot of steps.

Once went as far as the hospital! (that's a long walk above ground let alone going through the tunnels.)

Every so often there are vents that you can peek out of (locked of course) so you can try to figure out where you are.

Perhaps you are wondering what an NP-complete problem is or what this P vs. NP stuff is all about. You might want to check out the comp.theory FAQ and scroll down to 7. P vs NP. It gives a bit of history and a decent description.

Or check out The P versus NP Problem at Clay for a really good description (unfortunately too long to quote here). And lastly, you might want to check out Tutorial: Does P = NP? at VB Helper for a little more info.

Ok, but what is it good for? The Compendium of NP Optimization Problems is a great place to look for real world examples of NP problems. Including everything from flower shop scheduling [nada.kth.se] to multiprocessor scheduling.

Hopefully that helps. I was very clueless when it came to P vs. NP stuff that always seems to be mentioned on Slashdot. So I took the time to look it up. Now I'm clueless but I have links to share. :)

IVS, a Canadian company has been selling a visualization package, Fledermaus, for over 10 years that includes a flying mouse called a bat. This package is aimed at hydrography and ocean exploration.

IVS, a Canadian company has been selling a visualization package, Fledermaus, for over 10 years that includes a flying mouse called a bat. This package is aimed at hydrography and ocean exploration.