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Turns out it's easy to find links to speed cubing pages, but for people like me who just want an easy-to-understand (as opposed to super-fast) solution you have to dig a bit. The best explanation I found was Denny's 3x3 cubing page, which uses a layer-by-layer approach that's pretty intuitive. The only drawback was that it doesn't cover what to do about logos, which need to be oriented in a specific way (as opposed to just being on the right face); for that one, try Matt Monroe's page.

Turns out it's easy to find links to speed cubing pages, but for people like me who just want an easy-to-understand (as opposed to super-fast) solution you have to dig a bit. The best explanation I found was Denny's 3x3 cubing page, which uses a layer-by-layer approach that's pretty intuitive. The only drawback was that it doesn't cover what to do about logos, which need to be oriented in a specific way (as opposed to just being on the right face); for that one, try Matt Monroe's page.

indeed you are right... The original story by Herbert Wells (Orson's father) is here ...

Of course it should be animated, but PNG doesn't support animations.

...but here's an animated .gif of Eric's glider that should do the trick. (GIFs are legal now, right?)

I agree that without the glasses you would be impaired. I think it relates to the famous levels of processing theory. This basically says the more work you do to process information - the better you will remember it.

The main problem with adult material and the Internet is how can you tell if a person is an adult without having them prove their identity? The current least worst solution is to require a credit card number, which somehow proves you're old (or clever) enough.

Instead, perhaps you could ask questions that only adults would know the answers to, say questions about engineering, calculus or physics. Of course you'd then be allowing child progodies to access pornography (which may not be a such bad thing) and you'd obviously be locking out the 'not the full six-pack crowd'.

A seconday problem with adult material is that there are powerful lobbying groups that are trying to ban it completely. They make use of various arguments, which basically all boil down to a personal moral choice that is being made by them and not by you. This flies in the face of the freedoms supposedly allowed by western democracies. Particularly irritating is when this is done by country A which causes effects ripple effects in country B.

I made a version of this page that colors all the numbers from green (good) through white (mean) to red (bad) instead of just the outlyers. If you're interested, check out my version of the bonnie results.

I would be surprised if there were any common law country where the identify of users of an IP address were NOT subject to subpoena in a civil suit.

In most civilised countries in Europe a judge actually has to decide wheter the company can give out the identity of a user.
DCMA gives an assistant/clerk(?) the authority to allow identification based on a subpoena.

I meant to include this link to the article on subpoenas.

What is the proper name for "imperial" anyway?

In the US, they are more commonly referred to as English units .

Work it out yourself.

Segway / DEKA Research is a New Hampshire company.

Mount Washington is the highest point in New Hampshire (or New England for that matter, but not -- as is commonly believed around here -- the highest point on the US east coast: that title goes to North Carolina's Mount Mitchell).

As a popular landmark & attraction, Mount Washington has great appeal in New England. The "This car climbed Mt. Washington!" bumper stickers are ubiquitous, and driving up the mountain's wind-swept road in the family minivan or station wagon has been a rite of passage for generations of New Englanders.

That is why they had to drive Segways up the mountain. This is a New England transportation invention, but that just wouldn't be complete without the obligatory drive up Mount Washington.

The real question is whether or not the Segways they took up the mountain have any space for the bumper sticker :-)

This is an excerpt from Understanding Computers, an old Time-Life book, that covers how the CG inTRON and The Last Starfighter were done that you may find of interest for your lecture.

If you're just in it for the money, the lottery may be a better option. A detailed analysis is here.

Seriously, get a Ph.D only if you love it. I love being a graduate student, I'd do it for the rest of my life if I could (different fields of course). If you don't think you'd go to school just for the hell of it, I wouldn't pursue a Ph.D.

Either FERPA will need to be amended, or those tapes will require very careful handling to avoid existing protection in FERPA. This has probably already been addressed in case law, but a brief search revealed nothing.

Text of FERPA : http://regweb.oit.unc.edu/resources/ferpa_text.php

Basically it restricts who has access to "educational records."

Excerpts follow for the trusting and lazy. Reading the actual text of FERPA is certainly preferable to these tidbits. I'm also putting them in a different order so they will be less dull to read. Be sure to read up on the (long) list of ways in which records can be released without prior consent! This post is becoming too long, otherwise I would have included those as well.

Reg. 99.7
What must an educational agency or institution include in its annual notification?

(a)(1) Each educational agency or institution shall annually notify parents of students currently in attendance, or eligible students currently in attendance, of their rights under the Act and this part.

(2) The notice must inform parents or eligible students that they have the right to -- ...

(iii) Consent to disclosures of personally identifiable information contained in the student's education records, except to the extent that the Act and 99.31 authorize disclosure without consent; and

Reg. 99.1
To which educational agencies or institutions do these regulations apply?

(a) Except as otherwise noted in 99.10, this part applies to an educational agency or institution to which funds have been made available under any program administered by the Secretary of Education if --

(1) The educational institution provides educational services or instruction, or both, to students; or

(2) The educational agency provides administrative control or direction of, or performs service functions for, public elementary or secondary schools or postsecondary institutions. ...

Directory Information" means information contained in an education record of a student which would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed. It includes, but is not limited to the student's name, address, telephone listing, date and place of birth, major field of study, participation in officially recognized activities and sports, weight and height of members of athletic teams, dates of attendance, degrees and awards received, and the most recent previous educational agency or institution attended.

(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g(a)(5)(A))

"Disciplinary action or proceeding" means the investigation, adjudication, or imposition of sanctions by an educational agency or institution with respect to an infraction or violation of the internal rules of conduct applicable to students of the agency or institution.

"Disclosure" means to permit access to or the release, transfer, or other communication of personally identifiable information contained in education records to any party, by any means, including oral, written, or electronic means.

(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g(b)(1))

"Educational agency or institution" means any public or private agency or institution to which this part applies under 99.1(a).

(Authority: 20 U.S.C. 1232g(a)(3))

"Education records"

(a) The term means those records that are:

(1) Directly related to a student; and

(2) Maintained by an educational agency or institution or by a party acting for the agency or institution.

(b) The term does not include:

(1) Records of instructional, supervisory, and administrative personnel and educational personnel ancillary to those persons that are kept in the sole possession of the maker of the record, and are not accessible or revealed to any other person except a temporary substitute for the maker of the record;

(2) Records of the law enforcement unit of an education

Based on this research, the red shift of light can't be based on velocity (as that would result in a smooth distribution of values, not discreet units). Therefore any assumptions about "dark" matter are based on an invalid assumption.

I have my own theories about this quantisation, but I haven't gotten around to writing a physics paper yet.

Sorry, I didn't have my slide rule to hand to work my way through the copy right maze.

Regarding fonts not having copy rights, can you cite references for this? It seems strange that they don't attract copy rights as images or even trade mark protection (yes, I know that's a separate issue). Does Paramount really not have any rights to the symbols making up the Klingon fonts, for example?

Not UNC-Chapel Hill though Unix is an established server OS. UNC has a deal with Microsoft ensuring that all of the intro computer classes (officially) teach on Microsoft products. Linux is very much an underground thing there. I was able to convince the TA to let me turn in my work from a Linux development environment (which would compile with blackdown, but not with MS's JDE). He was pretty nice about it for an emacs user. :-)

[This is my own story. In case kuro5hin is 404, for convenience I am reposting it in reply to your reference.]

Exposing the Happy Birthday story:
An editorial by J. Byron, May 2003, rev. June 2003

In this article, I attempt to answer three questions: 1 - What is that song Good Morning to All, and how does it relate to Happy Birthday to You? 2 - Is the melody to Happy Birthday to You public domain? 3 - Are the lyrics to Happy Birthday to You also public domain? There are many references to Happy Birthday on the Web. Most warn you of the copyright claim on it, and that the current owners rabidly defend it. Many of these "editorials" do not tell you about the song Good Morning to All - and the few that do, don't tell you about its undeniable legal status. Is this deliberate, or just ignorance of the facts? I don't know. Two such examples are an article at Attaché Magazine and the commonly cited article at snopes.com. In addition, some articles may unintentionally present inaccurate information. An article posted at lawyers.com incorrectly states that Good Morning to All was written in 1895 but unpublished. That assertion is untrue, and makes an important legal difference.

There is a 1935 copyright registration for Happy Birthday, but the melody Good Morning to All was formally published in 1893 as part of a collection, registered in October 1893, and is public domain by U. S. statute. (you just can't use the "Happy Birthday" lyrics in public without paying) However, one site listed in this editorial claims possession of some early publications that nullify the copyright to even the lyrics.

Good Morning to All [a.k.a. the birthday melody] included in:
Song Stories for the Kindergarten, pub. 1893
Song Stories for the Kindergarten, revised ed., pub. 1896
[and apparently other pre-1923 editions]
Words: Patty Hill (-1946) Music: Mildred Hill (-1916)

Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning, dear children,
Good morning to all.

The song Good Morning to All - from which Happy Birthday was allegedly derived - is free to use (words and music) by U. S. federal statute. (Published before 1923, and furthermore published before 1909) Take a look at Lolly Gasaway's PD chart, or Cornell University's expanded chart. That version of the birthday melody may suffice for some people - instrumentalists in particular. Also note that titles cannot be protected by copyright, and no unique or proper names are involved. Naming an instrumental CD track Good Morning to All a.k.a. Happy Birthday to You should be legal. (The law of other countries might affect the song's status outside the U. S.)

Allegedly, after the publication of Good Morning to All in the Hill's songbook Song Stories for the Kindergarten, Robert Coleman, and others, published the "birthday" lyrics with the Good Morning to All melody. In the 1930's, the "Happy Birthday" lyrics combined with the Hill's published melody showed up on stage and in singing telegrams. The Hill family allegedly won a 1934 lawsuit for infringement. In 1935 the Hill family registered the "Happy Birthday" copyright mentioned endlessly on the Web. (Which does not affect today's public domain status of Good Morning to All.) Two sources for Good Morning to All sheet music are PD Info (a small studio, that also sells sheet music reprints) and

so many links are good !

.. I would *strongly* recommend that the Slashdot Community who's been all over this 'Linux on the XBOX' bs start doing something interesting with it, and I mean fast. It would look plenty embarrasing for MS if they went after them for releasing the exploit and then people started making good (and legitimate) use of it. If everybody just wants to play MAME on it with questionably legal ROMs, that won't help Free-X.

Might I suggest a DivX based media server that can rip DVDs?

I'd suggest a cluster, as big, powerful and cheap as possible. It would be tough finding a cluster node with more power/buck than the X-box. Especially if the onboard NVidia GPU is used as a vector processor as opposed to just a graphics engine.

We have about 350 employees and we are standardizing on Mozilla. Outlook and Internet Explorer are considered VERBOTEN here due to their inherent (and, in our opinion, insurmountable) security risks. You can read our statement regarding the issue on our website:

Why Not IE?

Thanks to our no IE/no Outlook policy we have avoided EVERY major MS email worm outbreak. That means no downtime from the outbreaks, which translates in hours or days of work time not lost. (Compare to MS itself, which seems to lose its email system due to a new worm for at least a couple of days yearly.)

So machines are more efficient, but we'd prefer to have real humans in space? How do we resolve this conflict?
Easy, we combine them: Uploads!

Uh, last time I checked, copyrights lasted longer than that. How is this wholly the DMCA's fault?

It may come as something of a shock to you all, but the USA is officially metric.

Here are two key phrases for those who can't be bothered to click on the links:

"In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards. Currently, the foot is legally defined to be exactly 0.3048 meter and the pound is legally defined to equal exactly 453.59237 grams."

and

"What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen: construction, real estate transactions, retail trade, and education."

Well duh! Officially metric, but the traditional units are used in education. Small wonder things aren't changing. :)

Nalfy

As the poster below me said, you are quite wrong.

The point is the US has had 200 years and they haven't even started the process. There's nothing saying you can't run in parallel - the UK has been doing so for years. It's absurd to say you have to rip out all the imperial pipes and replace them - you just have to keep 2 sets of tools around until those old pipes get replaced naturally.

No, you really don't get it at all. As it happens, most people who have tools ALREADY have the two sets of tools. What makes switching difficult is having two sets of PARTS. It's all well and good to say "from now on all parts/raw materials will be measured using the metric system", but what does one do about, say, electrical conduit fittings? There is an UNGODLY amount of installed bass there which is already in inches and adding on to it would require a complicated system of adapters and a complete recalculation of wire capacity. Name any other construction trade and you run into the same thing. How do you add on to an inches-and-feet house with metric lumber? What size metric ducting do I buy to add to a 12-inch heating plenum? Not saying that it can't be done, but there's a lot more to it than "keep[ing] 2 sets of tools".

In fact it's older than your country.

Are you a troll or just an idiot?

Hint: You're wrong.

c is a constant, of course. In fact, it's used to define the meter as how far light travels in a vacuum in 1/(299,792,458) of a second. Second is defined as the time for a certain number of vibrations of a Cesium atom to occur. As per your question of relating mass to Joules, note that high-energy physicists do this all the time. They usually refer to masses of particles as MeV/c^2. And they usually work in units where c=hbar=1, thereby making distance, time, and energy all essentially the same units (easier to do calculatins that way).

One thought that jumps to mind for a standard energy interval is the lyman alpha energy width (the jump of the electron in a hydrogen atom from n=2 to n=1 where n is the energy quantum number). Or, for mass, use a standard mass of a well-defined particle such as an electron. In fact, I'm surprised that NIST doesn't do this. It might be that isolating electrons for mass measurements are too difficult (gravity is weak), but electron mass does show up in many other calculations (specific heat of degenerate electron gases, for instance). Or isolating ultra-pure hydrogen gas and spectroscopically measuring Lyman alpha is more difficult than it seems. I guess NIST wants [relatively] easy methods for measuring these quantities.

Okay, I just found this site which answers the question. They quote

This one physical standard is still used because scientists can weigh objects very accurately. Weight standards in other countries can be adjusted to the Paris standard kilogram with an accuracy of one part per hundred million. So far, no one has figured out how to define the kilogram in any other way that can be reproduced with better accuracy than this. The 21st General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in October 1999, passed a resolution calling on national standards laboratories to press forward with research to "link the fundamental unit of mass to fundamental or atomic constants with a view to a future redefinition of the kilogram." The next General Conference, in 2003, will surely return to this issue.

It all boils down to ability to measure the standard units to the highest precision possible. I'm actually stunned that the mass of that bar can be weighed to that precision.

As a side note, if you can come up with a better way of measuring fundamental constants, you might win a Nobel Prize. The guys that discovered the integer quantum hall effect initially published their results as a better way to measure some of the fundamental constants.

Yup... this can all be done easily with a Kalman Filter.

First off I'd like to give you a tip to look at GPGPU which is a site which has references to a lot of papers using graphics hardware for general purpose calculations. (I found it in another part of this topic.)

And yes, it's true that the vector processors in a PS2 are more flexible than what is found in an XBox or on a standard graphics card for a PC. And of those two the XBox has the benefit of UMA.

Still, it's an interesting way of modern hacking on a similar level as using the C64 floppy drive as an additional processor.

A lot of the GDC and SIGGRAPH 2003 papers focus not on graphics directly, but on scientific computations using the CPU. It's very cool, and if nVidia and ATI the like ever want to expand into a new market, they should build cards with multiple GPUs each, and sell them to the scientific community, or to non-realtime CG places like Pixar to accelerate their offline rendering.

This page has a good summary of the current research going on to make GPUs do stuff other than graphics. http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/gpgpu/index.shtml

While optimized for graphics, GPUs can indeed be used as general-purpose processors. GPUs are effectively stream processors, a class of devices whose architecture and programming model make then particularly efficient for scientific calculation.

> It might take a real long time, but it is a general purpose processor and so can process anything

The same holds true for GPUs. Like CPUs, they are turing complete.

Interesting. I was actually thinking more along the lines of automatic compensation, but I hadn't even thought about gyroscopes vs. impulse jets. I poked around a little on the hubble site for the instrumentation and flight computer and I found the handbooks for the instruments at this site. Appearently, the gyroscopes are used for coarse motion detection and the FGS uses constellational guidance. The manuals actually make a pretty interesting read.

On a side note, a constellational guidance is related to how head mount displays like UNC's HiBall work.

It's also a fine example to set for other businesses whose livelihood does not depend on milking revenue from the last 2 percent of works created up to 120 years before. If more publishers will take this step to restore the original intent and implementation of the Founding Fathers then this can be used as an argument against extending copyright to Life+100 which looks to be the next milestone on the 'Privatize the Public Domain' moebius strip.

If it was published before 1923 it is in the public domain. Otherwise here is a link to a table that has all the other cases. Until Congress extends it again

This brings into play one other serious problem: keeping the color and luminance profiles of the projectors in sync, including smoothing out the seams where projectorss overlap. It turns out that this is harder than you might expect. Also, the possibility of immersive teleconferencing on such a display is really cool, but requires unreal amounts of bandwidth (gigabit speeds, generally).

I think that a system like this will probably be deployed eventually, as the costs of digital projectors continue to drop, but at the moment there are still some serious problems to be solved.

This is a really interesting paper on the history and future of programming languages. (Check out the history chart in the middle....)

No doubt. The morale of the Iraqi army can't be all that high, though. They lost the last one big time, and Arab armies in general haven't been too effective in this century.

My best guess is that big chunks of the army will cave fast. Rooting Saddam himself out will be a much more difficult problem. Finding him will be tough, with all the doubles and places he might be. And then busting into wherever he's holed up will be much tougher, as the Republican Guard is better-trained, better-equipped, and has a higher morale than the rest of the army.

The simple fact that the outcome of this assault is a foregone conclusion is ample evidence that Saddam Hussien doesn't pose a critical threat to the U.S.

He has been a big obstruction to our oil policy in the area, though...

Heh, reading through an archive of some old flamewar that included Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds (see this compressed text file), I came across this piece of text from a message from Tanenbaum, dated 30 Jan 92. Linux complained about how Linux is freely available whereas Minux is not and Andrew thought it was an interesting concept to make software freely available, but only to those who can afford first class hardware (talking about the 386 here).

"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."

Interesting, that. :)

(P.s. Sorry-- meant to hit the Preview button. I screwed up the first time)

Heh, reading through an archive of some old flamewar that included Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds (see this compressed text file), I came across this piece of text from a message from Tanenbaum, dated 30 Jan 92. Linux complained about how Linux is freely available whereas Minux is not and Andrew thought it was an interesting concept to make software freely available, but only to those who can afford first class hardware (talking about the 386 here).

"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."

"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."

Interesting, that. :)

• robot navigation
• remote presence
• (i'm a sports fan:) automatic referee
• human-machine interface (gestures / VR)
• ...

"Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency."

He's also a bit of a fuckwit

And you may want to improve your web surfing skills. Because, in 10 seconds from the first (home) page I found that they still have Java for Linux/PPC.

Ok, maybe that was a bad reference as a primary reference. Still, I was only pointing out that there are lots of lengths you can choose from when you're using a cubit. The standard English cubit is 18 inches, but there are lots of references to other lengths as well, not only by aol members. 1 2 3 4.

there is Froot. Definitely a must for Zaurus gamers who like Snood.

Judging from the AP exam statistic -- who takes the test -- fewer than 13% are female. Not even the studies that have shown disporportionate ability among boys would support this difference. These girls are being discouraged, and discouraged early -- despite showing greater math aptitude before about age 12. Women gravitate, but they are also guided.

He was also instrumental in supporting the academic internet during his years in Congress when all other people in Congress didn't have a clue about these things.

I know first hand about this because I was in IT at the time -- yes, I'm old -- and worked in a community college where we were debating whether or not we should halt the rollout of our TCP/IP network and switch to OSI because we were a two-year college and more tilted to serving business and not research and maybe the upcoming information super highway thing would be better than hooking to the then non-commerical Internet.

Now, as it turns out, the separate networks never materialized, OSI fizzled, and the non-commerical Internet became the Internet we know today and serious research institutions are going off on their own with Internet 2.

So, he's a tithead, but he *was* the leader in congress in understand the benefits of an internet (of some sort) and that commercialization of the internet is what was a large factor for the economic boom of the 90s.

Remember, no one outside of academia heard of the Internet before like 1992. The first mass media cartoon regarding the internet was in the new yorker in 1993 (the "no one knows your a dog on the net" one) which we all, at the time, were amazed (and scared) that mass media noticed the Internet.

p.s. I find it interesting, however, that conservatives are so quick to jump on someone's bad choice of words when their own people who can't choose good words in speeches are somehow to be given understanding, ala Bush and former VP Dan Quayle (and visa-versa of course).

Some more on this at snopes.com

In 1967, scientists agreed to define the second as that period of time which makes the frequency of a certain radiation emitted by atoms of cesium-133 equal to 9 192 631 770 hertz (cycles per second). In other words, if we really want to measure a second, we count 9 192 631 770 cycles of this radiation.

Check out this site, it should do what you want.

As far as installing Redhat dual boot I'm pretty sure you will have to reformat your drive. However there are tools that can shrink your partitions without destroying all the data. Partition Magic by powertech comes to mind, but there may be freeware utilites avaiable as well. Check out This HOWTO for a little more information. I would also encorage you to look around metalab and read as many of the docs avaiable for your paticular choice of linux/BSD before you attempt to install. Good luck if you decide to do it.

Justin