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Google leads you straight to the horse:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Carl+Ericson's+'Race'
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~eriksonc/Game/Race.html

No idea if that is the full version or whatever.

Oh, but they're both oh so very...1996! That's the problem! Yeah! They need more AJAX Web 2.0 Javascripted-to-death bullshit, or nobody will respect them. Haven't they ever heard of Ruby? On Rails? Sheesh. Why don't they just get with the program already? Why aren't there Flash games built into the advertisements, for fuck's sake? Everyone knows you need a Flash game built into your banner ads before the crowds will come.

(This post is extremely tongue-in-cheek, since the first useful web page I ever found about Linux was http://sunsite.unc.edu/~mdw. This was the page of Matt Welsh, then dictator of the Linux Documentation Project. Before that, everything I learned came from actually reading Usenet, and digging around with FTP. Aside from Matt's book, Running Linux, that is. After I found Matt's page, replete with well-written and complete HOWTOs along with news, I didn't need any more help. And then Slashdot and Freshmeat happened, and I stopped caring about Matt's efforts. And then, sadly, both of the latter were bought out and it's been downhill since.)

Miles per acre? What's that in rods per hogsheads?

Miles per acre ca't be converted into rods per hogshead. However, you may find the following conversions useful:
1 mile per acre is exactly 80 rods per rood.
1 mile per gallon (US) is exactly 63 furlongs per firkin (US)
Anything else you need can be computed from information at http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html

Some citations for those interested:
http://www.ccc.unc.edu/news/news.021809.php
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Commentary/2000/1100.htm
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/ls564.htm

All are very clear that the CRA had little to nothing to do with the subprime mortgage foreclosures.

Such capability is very useful to network folks to predict application behavior and best management approaches in various environments. We used FreeBSD for that purpose, but the effect was the same. We injected 350ms latency in each direction, and presto - satellite communication. That is enough to cripple TCP connectivity through a sizable pipe (latency will preclude the flow from taking entire pipe). By testing various acceleration methodologies, you can see first hand which one will allow you to fully utilize the bandwidth you are paying for, all in the comfort of your lab.

Even better, with dummynet on FreeBSD, you can add loss to the equation (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jeffay/dirt/FAQ/comp249-001-F99/dummynet.html) to simulate a dirty satellite link (such as one in need of a re-peak). Good times...

I'm using "value" in economic terms, not monetary terms. When economists talk about value, reward and gain, they aren't just talking about cash in your pocket. You can produce value in society and *not* get money.

You can be rewarded for your work without getting money. People who do volunteer do it because they are getting a different kind of reward... they feel good about themselves. The technical term for this is "psychic income". Your artists and philosophers wouldn't do what they did unless they enjoyed it--that enjoyment is enough of a reward for them that they continue.

I'm trying to think of some examples of artists with great ideas who fail to implement them. I think there are probably scientists with great ideas that never produce value because they never implement their idea.

I'll give this a shot: If I was an artist, I think it would be a great idea to fly a airplane over the city and draw shapes using colored smoke. I have this great idea of doing something with the water too--like turn it into colored jello or something. Great idea... but I'll never implement it.

Or in favor... because for sure, there are no scientific studies regarding the issue (at least of my knowledge).

A few years ago, I was required to read such a study for a Telecommunications Economics course at my university. The main conclusions of that study were thus (all are direct quotes from the study):

1. "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero."
2. "Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale."
3. "The business model of major labels relies heavily on a limited number of superstar albums. For these albums, we find that the impact of file sharing on sales is likely to be positive."
4. "Our estimates indicate that less popular artists who sell few albums are most likely to be negatively affected by file sharing."

The study was done by Felix Oberholzer from Harvard Business School and Koleman Stumpf from UNC Chapel Hill. It was written in 2004 and I believe the actual study was done in 2002. I can't share the PDF myself because I don't think I have any server capable of withstanding a slashdotting, but a quick Google search turns up this link which appears to be the same: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

Like most slashdotters suppose, their basic conclusion is that the majority of file downloaders would not have become paying customers. I think anybody being reasonable would agree that that is true; even if you may have bought a handful of the albums of songs you downloaded, you're very highly unlikely to have bought even a majority of albums from which you download songs.

I'll leave it up to others to determine the study's validity, but there it is and those are its conclusions.

Hi. I'm one of the authors.

Wow, clearly you are not bothered about linking your real and Slashdot personas.

I'm certain most /.ers guard their /. persona, given the blunt nature of the comments found here.

OT, has there been any research into looking up a person's sex/ethnicity by analysing his or her /. comments? It is already known that the species problem is hard.

The idea that the CRA caused this mess has been debunked repeatedly by every study done on the subject. If you want some real sources on this, I'd suggest studies put out by a university, the Federal Reserve, or the US Treasury Department.

Oh, yeah! _Those_ are impartial sources.

First off, your source is not appropriate for a serious argument. It's an op/ed by a columnist with accusations of plagiarism to his name, not a news article.

The loans that caused the vast majority of the current mess were issued by mortgage brokers (firms like Countrywide Financial, Ameriquest Mortgage, and Ditech), not banks. Brokers are not held to the CRA standards. The idea that the CRA caused this mess has been debunked repeatedly by every study done on the subject. If you want some real sources on this, I'd suggest studies put out by a university, the Federal Reserve, or the US Treasury Department.

Some real reasons behind the arguments about the CRA:
1. Banks have hated the CRA for a long time. They were trying to dodge it or get rid of it back in the 1990's as well.
2. Conservatives oppose most government regulation on principle.
3. By blaming the CRA, it absolved the bankers of any role in creating the problem.
4. It creates an image of a foreclosed subprime homes is owned by a black person in a bad urban neighborhood. In reality, the areas with the most subprime loans are in suburbs near LA, San Diego, Denver, and Miami. In short, racism.

The bar for criminal copyright violation is quite low, for better or worse.

Um, did you bother to read that cite?

Yes.

It proves that you were wrong about "like 99%" and "very high volumes."

I would suggest admitting it and apologizing when things like this happen. It will make you look the better person.

It also does not indicate what you claim (more below on that).

Did you follow through to 506?

Yes.

Ironically, you just disproved your own point and even what I said about 'mostly'.

Criminal penalties only apply for copyright if, and I quote, it is 'a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording'.

You are wrong again.

There are multiple sections governing criminal penalties. There are specific penalties for violations relating to 'a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording' - that's 2319 (d), here. They are not the only ones. The penalties for written works are simply different. For instance, examine the foregoing sections (b) and (c) of 2319. I gather that you do not know how to read the law, so I will also provide an analysis: here:

"Increased penalties of up to five years imprisonment and $250,000 in fines were available only if the infringement involved reproduction or distribution of motion pictures, audiovisual works and sound recordings. Repeat offenders were subject to the maximum fines regardless of the number of copies or types of works involved. All other offenses continued to be misdemeanors with maximum fines of $25,000 and one year imprisonment."

I'm increasingly surprised by your desire to assert obviously incorrect facts about the law. It's a peculiar thing to do. The law is there in black and white, along with famous cases, commentary, etc.

Even if you can't understand the materials you are reading, doesn't common sense come into play at some point? Do you really believe there have been no criminal charges relating to copyright violations regarding written works? These laws date back to an era before television and radio.

You obviously have some interest in and passion about the law. Why not read more deeply, or even consider studying it? By emotionally insisting on your guesses about what you don't understand, you make yourself look ridiculous. At this point I am really becoming embarrassed for you.

As pretty much everyone who's worked with computers at all knows, this is simply factually wrong. Passwords are not stored in computers. A hash of the password is stored.

You are wrong again, in two ways. First, the minor way: although hashing passwords is good practice, it is not universally done.

The standard methodology in Unix-variants for many years was to encrypt the password using DES; the stated goal was a one-way process. Passwords can indeed be extracted, however, much to everyone's chagrin, hence the use of shadow files and so forth. Microsoft windows has, over the years, used reversible encryption.

Second: Say that all of the hardware in question only stored hashes of the passwords in question. This also isn't relevant to the "password records" example that I gave, describing common industry practice, in which passwords are recorded as working notes.

I notice you didn't respond to this.

If you can't turn it back into music, it does not count as a 'copy'.

On this point, you are correct.

...he clearly didn't make a copy, and hence cannot be in violation of copyright.

Perhaps you didn't read to the end of my last email. You're response is a non-sequitir.

I think it's cause dogs aren't allowed to have xbox live accounts.

But, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information that UNC is working on a Moodle implementation--when I asked UNC's ITS in a Student Technology Advisory Board meeting they replied that they're currently doing a Sakai trial but are not looking into Moodle.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information that UNC is working on a Moodle implementation--when I asked UNC's ITS in a Student Technology Advisory Board meeting they replied that they're currently doing a Sakai trial but are not looking into Moodle.

Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Ross Anderson, professor at Cambridge University.

It replaces and expands upon Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and Practical Cryptography by Ferguson & Schneier to make a more holistic approach to security encompassing the entire system, not just using the latest (coolest) encryption techniques. Most real-life systems are broken by going around or ignoring the encrpytion.

Another classic is

TCP/IP Illustrated by the late Richard Stevens
Most people need/read only Volume I: The Protocols, but there is also Volume II: The Implementation which is wonderful albeit with a smaller following, though Volume III which is considered a big disappointment to many (I've never read the vol 3) isn't worry buying unless you're specifically interested in its contents.

The only serious alternative to TCP/IP Illustrated is Douglas Comer's series Internetworking with TCP/IP which is the series I learnt about TCP/IP programming with. Still highly recommended.

For Software development, The Mythical Man-Month by computing pioneer Frederick Brooks should be required reading, and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister should be handed to every new IT/IM or software manager with their promotion or hiring (if they haven't read it already). Computing would suck so much less if we all held ourselves accounting to the basic ideas in these two books.

For historic, 3 books + bonus item that would have to be included are:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs by Niklaus Wirth

Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948 by Norbert Wiener

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, by Alan Turing and published in 1950 in Mind

Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson in 1974, is most often pointed to as the "birth" of hypermedia.

The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured the Altair 8800 on its cover.

Wouldn't you think that some RESEARCH and TESTING had taken place before enacting this law?

There has been plenty of research and testing that has shown that hands-free systems don't decrease the risk from cell-phone mediated distracted driving. The issue is that people who write laws are not the people who are familiar with such research, you only hope that they can task some staffers to look into it. In this particular instance that communication simply got dropped. My dad does a lot of work on distracted driving, and a friend of mine was working in the office of a state senator back a few years ago when the law was being worked on. I tried to connect him with my dad so that the useful information could make its way into the bill, but my friend got re-tasked to another project and that conduit was lost. Given the law that got passed, it's clear that no other source of useful information made it's way into the legislature in its place.

Sausage and laws and all that...

-Ted

I think you do need to focus on that, because the two examples you just gave and the entire gamut of evolution denialist "problems" with evolution are demonstrably false. Unless you know of some new ones, but as far as I've seen the evolution denial movement hasn't come up with anything new for a long time.

i'm not denying macro-evolution, rather i see some questions that it fails to answer in a reasonable way.

1. why do no transitional entities exist today? there are millions of species, yet i'm supposed to believe that there is a 100% extinction rate across all species? that sounds absurd. just because one evolved iteration of an entity is more adapted doesn't mean the less developed entity is unsuited for survival. yet, not a single transitional entity out of millions... hmmmmmm...

2. how did eyes develop before teeth that don't rot?

3. how did the whale's aquatic ear develop? it is believed the whale evolved from a terrestrial animal with a terrestrial ear... but a hybrid aquatic ear is a disadvantage on both land and sea... and no example has ever been found.

4. one of the most highly trumpeted transitional entities is the Archaeopteryx.

the problem is that it very likely isn't transitionary at all... or so says an evolutionist bird expert...

http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html

if you read these questions and have a hostile reaction... you are treating evolution as a religion and not with a scientific approach.

Raw data sets are NOT copyrightable. This was settled by various yellow pages companies. http://www.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/law/357c/001/projects/dougf/node5.html

If we hadn't had things like CRA and community activist groups painting banks that didn't paint lots of bad loans into 'underserved' areas as racists, then we might not have had quite so many bad loans.

The myth that the CRA and other goverment housing initiatives were largely responsible for the current economic debacle has been so thoroughly discredited it's tiresome to see it trotted out again.

This article makes the case that Fannie Mae started accepting risky mortgages in response to market and investor pressures. The originators of mortgages were making it clear they had alternatives to Fannie, and large investors in Fannie were pressuring it to take greater risks in order to earn a higher return. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were owned by private shareholders who invested in those corporations to make money.

The study discussed in this article makes the case that it's not the type of borrower that determines the default rate, but the type of loan. As one of the authors of the study says "These results show clearly that mortgages made using traditional affordable housing guidelines are holding up much better than subprime mortgages." A significant portion of subprime borrowers could have qualified for much lower cost traditional mortgages. Lewis Ranieri, considered by some to be the founder of mortgage backed securities, is quoted in this transcript as estimating that 50% of subprime borrowers could have qualified for Alt-A or prime mortgages. Government housing initiatives like the CRA did not push these people into subprime mortgages.

Though there hasn't been a HUGE change from what the drug czar was able to do, there are signs that a czar such as the drug czar, and in this case a copyright czar can help. Our copyright and IP legal needs to be reorganized and focus on the right direction and this is one way that can really focus to fight against piracy and enforce intellectual property. However, I don't think the damages provision in this bill does anything but give money to those who have little and give it to those who already have billions. Check this: http://jolt.unc.edu/blog/2008/10/01/prioritizing-resources-and-organization-intellectual-property-act-2008

....you look at this guess and then ask "what else would we expect to see if the guess is correct?"...

The problem is that when the evolutionists guesses do NOT accord with observations TODAY, they resort to telling everybody that evolutionary processes are very SLOW and take so much TIME, so of course we don't see them taking place today.

Everybody, not just highly educated scientists, observes and has observed for centuries that living things do NOT evolve the way evolution preaches. Dogs forever produce ONLY more dogs, cats make more cats, birds lay eggs which only hatch into more birds of a certain kind. Woodpeckers don't produce sparrows or ostriches. This holds true in more "primitive" life forms also. One celled algae produce only more algae. Your mother would have been very upset and unbelieving if the doctors or nurses had brought a chimpanzee to her instead of you and told her that she just had experienced evolution happening backwards. After all, evolutionists preach that evolution can happen the other way also and might be called devolution.

The Creator simply tells us in the Bible that is what He did. He made each kind reproduce after their own kind. Birch trees don't make Pine or Fir seedlings, only more Birch trees. This is ALL we observe. Creationists don't HAVE to make guesses about the past, because they are TOLD what happened by the one that made it happen. We all see it STILL happening every day of our lives as corroborating evidence that what God has said about this subject is true.

When evolutionists are confronted with this undeniable FACT of nature, they dismiss all that everyday fact with: "It takes millions of years for that sort of evolution" and so we can't expect to see this in our life time".

I say that is BS and a cop out into the magic land of time. If it can't be seen or duplicated TODAY, it didn't happen. You can go visit the pyramids and if someone really wanted to build one today, they could, even though they were made thousands of years ago. All history, including natural history cannot be scientifically tested, but must be believed by whatever records we have. There is no way to experimentally or observationally determine that Julius Caesar ever lived. You have to BELIEVE the written records of historians.

We find fossils all over, but WHO has ever made a fossil? Make me a fossil and explain how you did it. Take an e-coli bacteria and evolve it into a streptococcus or spirochete or the other way round and explain how you did that in an experimental report. You'd win a Nobel prize for sure. Experiments and observations is what REAL science is all about, not speculations and conjectures of what might have taken place millions of years ago, but cannot be duplicated or observed today.

(..what else would we expect to see..)

The current interpretation of the observed red-shift of distant starlight is the doppler effect. Another interpretation of it is that it is caused by the slowing of the speed of light. Not the "tired light" interpretation, but the changing nature of space itself. This change must also change the energies of the atomic orbits. Since atomic phenomena are quantized, the red shift should also be quantized. This is indeed what scientists have observed. The red-shift is not smooth, but occurs in tiny jumps. If you are interested look here:

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/redshift.html

This is credible evidence that allows calculation of exactly how much the speed of light has changed. It also gives us a basis for correcting radiometric time bases into the past, because Planck's "constant" is inversely related to c. Planck's constant has been _measured_ to be increasing still today.

Evolution is NOT science, but a philosophy dependent on the magic of time. If any scientists who believes in evolution could ever make it happen now, in the lab or observe it in nature, there would be screaming headlines everywhere.

....You're correct that light going through free space is simply a wave propagating through a dialectric medium, but virtual particles aren't part of the issue...

You seem to overlook the fact that light can be represented as waves or as particles, namely photons. Either way you look at it, the dielectric nature of space has changed dramatically if you want to look at it from the wave perspective or there are many more virtual particles now for the photons to interact with than there were at the beginning of the universe.

(...How, exactly, does this work? Where are the calculations?...)

This is not based on abstract calculations, but the actual measurements. Planck's Constant is a measure of the zero point energy. Planck's constant has been measured as increasing right up until 1970 or so, when some decrease in the measurements was noted. It is also interesting, that no change in the product h*c has been observed.

But the changing ZPE resulted in other changes, too. Remember Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2? 'E' is energy and 'c' is the speed of light. The small 'm' is atomic mass. It is pretty widely known that this equation indicates that energy and mass are interchangeable. Mass converts into a lot of energy.

However,not all mass explodes into energy! Instead, what we see at the atomic level with Einstein's equation, is that the energy itself is what is constant. But we have measured the mass of the electron as changing. If energy is constant and the mass is changing, that can only mean the speed of light is also changing.

One of the other observations of the universe that comes into this, is what is known as the red shift. In 1929 Edwin Hubble observed that the light spectrum of the elements from distant stars it is shift towards the red. We still observe this today. Hubble INTERPRETED this red shift to be caused by the well-known Doppler effect.

There is evidence that indicates that this interpretation is incorrect, even though it has been and still is commonly held. If interested, you can look here:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/redshift.html
Because the data clearly show that the red shift is quantized, it must be caused by something related to quantum mechanics.

The red shift appears to be related to atomic behavior which is in turn affected by the steadily increasing ZPE. How times do not respond smoothly to the steadily increasing ZPE, but in quantized jumps.

This quantized red shift therefore, is another indication that atomic processes, such as radioactivity have not been absolutely constant as is commonly assumed, but have changed dramatically.

(..civilizations like the Romans were already doing lots of record keeping and taking census data..)

Yes they were, but that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about preventing people from carrying on commerce and trade, unless they are fitted with a numeric identifier. As long as there is an accepted medium of exchange affording anonymity, such as cash or other generic objects, the lack of a numeric identifier would not prevent trade between people. Right now, talk about a cashless society is still theoretical. However, only through computer technology is it actually be possible to impose a cashless trading system on everybody. That is something that no human being, even living only 100 years ago could have imagined or foretold.

Oh...you voted for the guy that supports the teachers unions. I won't knock teachers, but teachers unions exist to get teachers the highest salaries possible while doing the least amount of work. And at that they are tremendously successful.

A system such as Hawkeye CANNOT BE MORE ACCURATE than humans. From the link in the article, the Hawkeye system uses 5 cameras to compute the 3D position of the ball. That's an overdetermined system of equations, which cannot have a unique solution due to observation errors in the camera views.

Luckily there's a 100+ year old discipline called statistics, and 60+ years of literature on tracking to help you out in these cases.

So Hawkeye has to complement the equations with an ARBITRARY rule, eg least squares and this arbitrariness makes the Hawkeye estimate neither more accurate nor less accurate than humans, just different. FYI, there are plenty of other arbitrary rules that work, eg least absolute errors, maximum entropy, etc.

While I can't speak for the designers of the Hawkeye, in tracking there are very good reasons to choose one form of error minimization versus another. It only seems arbitrary because you are not informed on the subject, but there's plenty of free papers out there to read and discover.

To explain current methods, please start out with this paper, in particular Figure 2, you'll see that the sort of errors you get from a camera are indeed well fit by a Gaussian. While a camera's perspective transformation is not purely linear (and various forms of distortion make it also non-linear), a good camera with a decent lens estimating the ball location within a limited area is well approximated by a linear model (and you can characterize just how much the error is). Now, a bunch of cameras with a Gaussian error distribution in the image plane with a linear projection out into the world is still a Gaussian (with a transformed covariance matrix). You can then multiply the independent measurements from multiple cameras to get a better estimate. Add a time series to that and apply this recursively and you get a Kalman filter, something invented for aerial tracking and still in widespread use today. If something is good enough for missiles to intercept other missiles, it ought to be good enough for a tennis match.

If the linear approximation not good enough for you, you can use a Rao-Blackwellized Kalman filter. If that's still not good enough because you want to use another error distribution or non-linearizable dynamics, set up a particle filter with a whole lot of particles and enough CPU to simulate it. The point is that what you call arbitrary is a well studied field which is many decades old. You'd be best served by learning about it first before you cast away all that work. I'm not a "tracking" person, just a user of there work. When a field of science has done its job well enough that it has become common engineering, and you can go look up whatever you need in books, with all the derivations, caveats and tradeoffs laid out there for you to see, I would say that that field has done a pretty good job.

The whole media story around this paper is ridiculous. It's a paper from a social sciences department about how the public does not understand the fallibility of these machines due to noise. That's all this paper is about: Hawkeye has error. I hate to break it to the uninformed, but all measurement systems have error. From Galileo to Gravity Probe B, your results can only be as accurate as your measurements, calculations, and statistical models will allow. You can decrease error with various methods, but you can never completely eliminate it. People should not be able to get out of high school without understanding accuracy on measurements, and some rudimentary statistics, but unfortunately our education system hasn't been able to reach that goal. As a result, the public doesn't understand error, and might come to believ

Most of your complaints seem aimed at C and not C++. Let's see:

* No standardized pragmas

They standardized the extension mechanism. That sounds good for a start, but I don't see how you could go farther.

I've never used them though.

For double:
#include <limits>

const double inf = std::numeric_limits<double>::infinity ();
const double minf = -std::numeric_limits<double>::infinity ();
const double nan = -std::numeric_limits<double>::signaling_NaN();

See more here for example.

There are has_infinity() and related functions to check for a type's capabilities (say, in a template)

I have an irobot vacuum cleaner and a dog. The vacuum does the job fairly well, not perfectly. If I insisted on perfection, I'd still be vacuuming 2-3 times a week cleaning up dog hair instead of once a month. The algorithm the vacuum uses is "1) When you bump into something or at a random time select from a list of behaviors (turn right/turn left/go straight/follow a wall/draw a spiral). 2) Execute the behavior until the first rule kicks in." Not very clever, but good enough.

The thing is it's intelligence way beyond what was available years ago. Not brilliant, just good enough.

We keep raising expectations when the early goals get met. When Blue Gene beat Kasparov, it wasn't executing terrifically clever algorithms - it was just amazingly fast at executing the ones it knew. When Checkers turned out to be a deterministic game, it was a computer that figured it out. When Douglas Hofstadter heard David Cope's computer-composed mazurka, he was shaken and even stirred. So now winning at Chess and Checkers or writing music is no longer considered AI.

As we begin to understand ourselves better, it may turn out that we're not much different than my vacuum cleaner - at a random time, pick from a list of behaviors (work/watch tv/ post on slashdot/ have sex/eat).

Gee. I just posted on slashdot...

Well:

From this graph, the price of corn in 2004 peaked at approximately $3.35/bushel. The latest price of corn on there was approximately $4.30/bushel.

From this site, the approximate weight of one bushel of corn is 56 lbs. According to Google that's 25'401 grams.

If you cut all of the kernels off of the cob, boil them, and eat them without salt or any other seasonings, according to this chart, it will contain 66 calories per 82 grams.

This means one bushel contains approximately 20'445 calories.

According to this list, a 190 lb person running at 10mph (6 minute mile) will burn 1380 calories.

So, you'll get 14.8 miles worth of calories out of one bushel of corn.

So, in 2004 you'd be paying $0.226 per mile. Today you'd be paying $0.291 per mile. That's an increase of about 22.3%.

An increase from $75 (GURPS 4e, 2004) to $105 (D&D 4e, 2008) is 28.6%.

So given the questionable sources, estimations, etc I've used, I'd say that those numbers are close enough to conclude that the cost of the books has approximately followed the market.

ND

Ruby
rails
Ruby on rails
Soap
Ajax
Ajax soap
Python
Perl
Java

Is it any wonder normal people think we're strange? (Ignore the rest of this comment, as it presently has too few characters per line (currently 8.5) but thankfully I can paste slashdot's retarded "error" message in the comment to correct this travesty)

Possibly, however no one in their right minds would process a matrix of that size without blocking. There are several 'Block SVD' algorithms, there are also some projects done by students on doing SVD on GPUs.

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~geom/Numeric/svd/
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=block+SVD&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Agreed that the matrices that it is processing are large but what is the size of the blocks that it is processing - IIRC the 8600 that the guys in my lab are working on can have 32 threads running in parallel however each thread will be working on a very small (I've been told it's upto 32x32 double precision floating point and that's stretching it)

Thus -blocking- as I had said comes into play, look I'm not downplaying the usefulness of the GPU or anything, nor am I downplaying their research, it's just that it's to be expected and the usefulness to general applications is limited.

Short and sweet:

Criminal misdemeanors have been part of american copyright law since 1897.
The reach of the criminal law was extended and harsher penalties made available as early as 1909.
In 1982 first-time offenders could be convicted on a felony charge.

As for the NET act of 1997:

The ease of infringement on the Internet was the primary reason for criminalizing noncommercial infringement as well as recognition of other motivations a nonprofit defendant might have such as anti-copyright or anti-corporate sentiment, trying to make a name in the Internet world and wanting to be a cyber renegade. Criminal Copyright Infringement

From the Copyright Corner:

Criminal misdemeanor penalties have been a part of the copyright law since 1897.

In the 1909 Copyright Act, criminal copyright infringement was expanded to cover all types of works and all types of activities. It continued to be a misdemeanor offense with both willfulness and a financial motive required; the penalties included imprisonment.

The 1976 Act revamped the criminal provisions by changing the "for profit" requirement to infringement conducted "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." This lowered the standard from requiring that the defendant profit from the infringement merely to an intent to profit or gain from the activity. The Act retained the one-year in federal prison term but increased the fine from $1,000 in fines to up to $10,000 generally, and to $50,000 if the work infringed was a sound recording or motion picture.

In 1982 the criminal infringement provisions were amended to make certain types of first-time infringement punishable as felonies.

The most recent amendment to criminal copyright infringement was the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 (NetAct) which made it a felony to reproduce or distribute copies of copyrighted works electronically regardless of whether the defendant had a profit motive. Thus, it changed the 100-year standard regarding profit motive but retained the element of willfulness. The ease of infringement on the Internet was the primary reason for criminalizing noncommercial infringement as well as recognition of other motivations a nonprofit defendant might have such as anti-copyright or anti-corporate sentiment, trying to make a name in the Internet world and wanting to be a cyber renegade. So, the infringement must be either: (1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain or (2) involve the reproduction or distribution of one or more copies of a work or works within a 180-day period with a total retail value of $1,000. Commercial infringers are subject to higher penalties.

CRIMINAL COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT [2004}

Connecticut Man Sentenced To 30 Months in Prison For Criminal Copyright Infringement - Forty Defendants Convicted In Operation Copycat To Date {April 29, 2008]

The problem with high-end animation is that you need to load in many different textures and geometry models before being able to render the final image and write out a single frame. Most of the supercomputer work seems to have everything in CPU node memory at the same time, and just run one iteration instantly (a 2048^3 3D grid of CFD cells for simulating supernova).

Previous research in parallel processing tried allocating processing nodes to different locations in the scene or different geometric models, or just using a whoever-is-available-at-the-time algorithm. Pixel-planes tried allocating one processor per pixel.

A relevant article at Outlook Business

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog
http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog.

One level deep ray-tracing is no different from triangle rasterisation, even with supersampling. The problem is when you try and do reflections with an entire scene. A single character will consist of over 10,000 triangles, and the scene itself might consist of 1 million triangles. Then you would have to find the space to store all these coordinates, textures and tangent space information (Octrees?)
There were experimental systems (PixelPlanes and PixelFlow) which investigated this problem.

Not the OP, however: I understand the incredulity, but here's one study I was given in a telecommunications economics class. (The link from my school's website appears to be gone, but based on filename this is the same PDF I saw):

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

A quick excerpt from the abstract:

Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.

The basic conclusion, if I remember correctly, was: The top 1% of artists in terms of popularity lose sales due to pirated songs, and the rest actually see their sales increase with piracy. Obviously you can fact-check this yourself to see if my recollection is correct.

Pthreads is a more useful parallel API for any task outside scientific computing. But if you want the high-level overview, David Patterson's (yes, the David Patterson of The Book on computer architecture) multicore talk is quite good. (I think I found the right slide deck...)

Right, the state "armies" are considered militias. They're state-sponsored and regulated by (though distinct from) the National Guard, under command of the state governor. This doesn't mean they're not an army, just not the federal US Army, many militias call themselves by the word "Army".

I didn't say that the states could enter into treaties, I said that some have to deal with foreign relations. Foreign relations and treaties are separate, you can have foreign relations without treaties. There isn't a whole lot of talk about it, but I did find the following essay interesting: State Governments and Foreign Policy.

Science has an uncanny similarity to a lottery game, in many ways.

If this was actually done ("all" the evidence), then no one would have the slightest doubt about evolution, anymore than someone looking at the Earth from space would still question a flat earth. The problem is that most people don't want to look at the all the facts, because reality would conflict with their world view. Therefore, they ignore the facts.

The way some people freak out about this, you'd think evolution was a religion.

People "freak out" because it's the forces of ignorance attacking the forces of truth.

The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory, to the point that most of us just go ahead and refer to it as a fact.

b/c you haven't defined what you mean by "evolution," i don't know if your statement is accurate or not. i assume you mean micro- and macro-evolution, in which case you are wrong, imho.

micro-evolution is an observed fact, as far as i'm concerned. it has been tested, it can be replicated, it is rational and there is an abundance of direct evidence to support it. everything is great so far.

macro-evolution, on the other hand, has many gaping holes so big you could drive a slashdot car analogy through them. i know some people will argue they are the same thing, but they do so b/c they *know* they can't support macro-evolution in its *own* merits, so they try to take something that is true and tack on an unsupported leap of faith and hope nobody will notice. faith doesn't belong in science.

perhaps the single biggest hole in macro-evolutionary theory, which i've never heard discussed in public, is that, if true, it strongly suggests a 100% extinction rate of 100% of all transitional entities that led to the species that we observe today - and we see a LOT of unique species that exist today. the theory states that the one variant of a larger group spontaneously develops an advantage and, therefore, has an increased "survivability index." this seems plausible enough.

where we enter the land of the totally unexpected is when the lower survivability index group, which is much larger, goes into extinction 100% of the time for the 100s of thousands of currently living species. all the evidence, should one actually care about such, indicates that species with different survivability indexes coexist all the time. For example, a dog and cat have different survivability indexes for a given environment, yet whatever transitional entity that equaled 95% of dog's survivability index goes extinct? actually, this must be true for every single species that has ever existed, 100% of the time. it is as though the larger population magically just goes "poof" when this newfangled version appears on the scene.

does it make sense that the hypothetical evolutionary advancement of a third eye would cause all two eyed people to go extinct? is the first act of this new and improved species to kill off all prior species? sound absurd? it needs to be addressed.

after all, nobody can point, with any degree of reasonable certainty, to any currently living transitional entity. the evidence indicates none exist.

the truth is, the life around is very discreet in nature, when the theory of macro-evolution would point toward a continuum of life where some transitional forms passed away and others survived. does this prove macro-evolution is wrong? of course not, but it indicates the theory has a big hole that needs to be rationally addressed and folks who think gaping holes in theories lead to calling them "fact" need to rethink what a fact means.

arguing over the death of historical transitional forms is to entirely miss the *aamzing* and *stunning* and *unexpected* fact that not a single transitional life form can be identified today. given that macro-evolution posits 99.9+% of all life forms that have existed to day are transitional, it is extremely unexpected to not find a single one still living!

if that isn't bad enough, there isn't a single transitionary form that can be identified as such beyond a reasonable doubt.

this is a macro-evolutionist throwing the hot coals of reason on one of the typical macro-evolutionist's poster children for transitional entities:

http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html

in addition, macro-evolutionists postulate that land animals morphed into whales. the problem here is that a hybrid land / water ear is a disadvantage in *both* environments, so it contradicts one of the basic

"With two sticks, you'd need a base."

This is exactly correct. I'm a bit of a flight game nut (I hesitate to use the word "sim" because while I do enjoy highly realistic games like Falcon 4, I still play a great deal of Ace Combat). While I've owned a number of sticks over the years, my current favourite is the Hori Flightstick II that shipped with the special editions of AC5. Before this I used a Microsoft Force Feedback 2, which had an extremely heavy base. You would use your weak hand for the throttle control at the base of the stick and your dominant hand for the stick itself. The weight of the base was sufficient.
 
The Hori sticks are quite light, and therefore come with suction cups on the bottom. This actually works quite well, provided whatever surface to which you intend to affix them is smooth. My coffee table and desk (both fairly standard Ikea fare) are "textured" slightly, and the sticks will not stay in place. The worst is the left hand throttle control. I prefer to adjust my throttle to have a lot of friction (there's an adjustment on the bottom of the unit), but this means that throttling up often results in me just shoving the whole stick forward instead.
 
My current solution is that I have both of them mounted on a pane of glass that used to be a door for an entertainment unit that I no longer use. I've stuck some rubber feet on it to protect the surface of the table or desk, and to keep it sliding around. This works perfectly while playing, but just as the parent post suggested, this hack of a base for my sticks is big, and not very mobile. They sit, always stuck to the glass, rather conspicuously beside my entertainment unit. It's an okay solution, but quite annoying.
 
I seriously doubt that anyone other than flight game addicts like myself would be willing to put up with it.

See the concept of 'fails gracefully' - where if your software assumes one set of conditions, and has problems, it drops down to the earlier, more commonly used conditions.

It is precisely this type of behavior that, when done in the past by Microsoft, was later exploited by malicious attackers.

Case in point.

I'm no fan of them having ipv6 turned on by default when we're still years away from wide-spread adoption, but I don't think having it handle the ipv6/ipv4 issue automatically is a good idea.

First, it's Muhammand Yunus, not Yukos. He was never AFAICT connected with a defunct Russian oil producer. ;)

The concept of "sustainable enterprise" is starting to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas, if only because the alternatives are rather unappealing. The sound-bite version of this idea is that, if the poorer 5/6-ths of the world's population became entrepreneurial, and found better, cheaper ways to use our limited supply of natural resources, those of us at the top of the pyramid would also benefit. In this respect, capitalism (as we know it at least) would seek to do good and do well at the same time. (Another famous proponent of this approach is Professor C. K. Prahalad.)

Pure free-market theorists despise this idea, as most believe that only self-interest should govern economic decisions in order to maximize the greater good. This view, however, fails in practice, since it cannot account for information asymetry (where all "players" don't have equal access to all information about the "game"), let alone the wildly unequal access to capital among the world's populations.

Shamless karma-burning plug time: Check out this site for more info. (Yes, I'm a Kenan-Flagler alum. Go Heels.)