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Try here. For the supplementary material go here.

Can't get the excerpt page but the main part is there, including their methodology. Which is flawed.
It's based on this study.
Which uses the number of unique /24 subnets and geolocation as a measurement of internet penetration in a country.
No problem in that. Referenced study shows that there are pretty high correlations on both national and subnational level.

The problem with the original study (one this slashdot story is about) is where it claims to "show that politically excluded groups suffer from significantly lower Internet penetration rates compared with those in power, an effect that cannot be explained by economic or geographic factors.
Except their study uses ONLY geographic factors (i.e. geolocation) to determine the "internet penetration" within the "excluded groups".

I.e. They are counting subnets in geographically remote places (away from the countries' main networks which tend to be in urban areas) and simply calling such groups of subnets "excluded".
Implying "ethnic favoritism" and political motivation for "exclusion" but never presenting any.
They never demonstrate the connection from subnets to actual people - "excluded" or not.
They never demonstrate "ethnic favoritism" or "political exclusion".
They never even demonstrate "exclusion".
For this study it is a presupposed "fact" that people (i.e. subnets) are somehow "excluded" by the mere fact that there are few of them in one place and a lot of them elsewhere.
It is borderline conspiracy theory nuttery, where being rural automagically means that "the man" is keeping you offline.

When they DO try to present SOME kind of evidence for "exclusion", they do so in the supplementary material (page 21), based on the Ethnic Power Relations Dataset.
Where "exclusion effect" is presented across the entire country.
And where USA is situated between Zimbabwe and Nigeria, right next to UK and Canada which are standing shoulder to shoulder between Gabon and India.
While their error bars are universally so wide that South Africa (one of the countries in their study) has an "exclusion effect" just over zero and error bars ranging from -2.5 to 2.5.
The entire graph shows values from -5 to 5.
While Saudi Arabia, Butan, Congo and Egypt are near the bottom of the "exclusion" scale - the lands of internet freedom and political inclusion.

Only thing they actually DO determine is that, when controlled for local GDP indicators, "excluded" groups DO have negative regression coefficient (-0.481, standard error of 0.094) - which are about twice lower than "distance to capital" (-0.942, s.e. 0.133).
I.e. Negative influence of being geographically distant from nation's capital is TWICE that from being "excluded".
Even when controlled for the influence of having no electricity (nighttime lights per capita) instead of for GDP, being away from the capital is still a greater negative factor (-0.703, s.e. 0.130) than "being excluded" (-0.539, s.e. 0.090).

Meanwhile, higher GDP per capita (0.749, s.e. 0.155), road density (4.068, s.e. 0.833) and urbanization (2.782, s.e. 0.748) all show positive regression coefficients for "internet penetration".
I.e. Closer you are to roads, cities and more money - the greater the number of subnets.
Whodathunkit!

In other words, their "conclusion" is not only cherry picking - it is pure confirmation bias in the face of their own results showing the exact opposite of their claims.

Reductio ad absurdum I must not live in Europe. In my country, college is neither free nor you have to accumulate debt nor you have to earn spots (There are some exceptions but not the general rule). You just pay your tuition (For example, 835€ a year for UE student but 374 € for low income and in some cases 0€, you may even receive money and a place to live).

Europe educational and social system is far from being uniform. You cannot say "There's a dirty little secret regarding the European 'free college' program": there are no such thing as an European College Program. There are a multitude of programs in Europe with various systems. And there are a lot of countries were just a secondary school (high school, I think for US) diploma is required, for example, in Germany.

Whatever, you just seem to have in mind "(nearly) free tuition" is impossible/wrong/... for idontknow wich reason and any lie seems good to support your preconception.

1.5 million people have died as a result of our attack on Iraq. White ones, brown ones, Americans, Iraqis, mostly civilians and many of them not from bombs but from starvation after the infrastructure needed for their water, food, and medical care was destroyed.

You will be relieved to know that those figures are almost certainly not true.

ORB's "million Iraqi deaths" survey seriously flawed, new study shows. More here.

Leftist billionaire George Soros underwrote the widely quoted Lancet study written by an anti-war professor. As time goes by it keeps looking worse, and worse.

The Wikileaks contents tend to undermine them as well:

The logs showed there were more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009.

They included 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy", 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 coalition troops.

Iraqi news site in english.

As has been pointed out by others the Romans were not atheists. In fact throughout the Roman empires lifetime there was an abundance of religions to chose from. Atheism is a fairly new phenomenon. The first individuals to self-identify as "atheist" appeared in the 18th century.

As to why the Romans prosecuted Christians in particular one of these German scholars may have an explanation:

Professor Gerhard Baudy of the University of Konstanz in Germany has spent 15 years studying ancient apocalyptic prophecies. He has learned that in the poor districts of Rome, Christians were circulating vengeful texts predicting that a raging inferno would reduce the city to ashes. "In all of these oracles, the destruction of Rome by fire is prophesied," Baudy explains. "That is the constant theme: Rome must burn. This was the long-desired objective of all the people who felt subjugated by Rome." (Source: PBS

Christians may not have burnt down Rome but they sure set themselves up as the perfect fall guys.

If you're trying to suggest BSODs are a thing of the past, I have just two things to say:

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
IRQ_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL

Those are due to driver bugs. Page fault in non paged area means a bad pointer - you touched a page that was marked as not present, but since the area is unpaged the OS can't do anything to fix it.

IRQL not less than or equal is more interesting. NT has a concept of IRQL. It's an abstraction, and it means which interrupts are enabled. The lowest level in kernel mode is PASSIVE_LEVEL which means the scheduler is enabled. The next highest level is DISPATCH_LEVEL where it is not. Above that are the hardware interrupt levels. Now consider a spinlock, an OS synchronisation primitive. These are to protect shared resources. Drivers call KeAcquireSpinLock() to get them, do some stuff and then KeReleaseSpinLock() to release them. On a SMP system, KeAcquireSpinLock needs to raise IRQL and then acquire the lock. On a single processor system it just raises the IRQL.

http://ext2fsd.sourceforge.net/documents/irql.htm

So IRQL in Windows NT is very important thing. If the system is running at a raised IRQL, someone is holding a spinlock, or an interrupt is in progress.

Lots of kernel routines are documented in the DDK as being only callable at a certain maximum IRQL. Typically, IRQL_NOT_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL is caused by touching paged data at a raised IRQL which can't work as the pager risks a deadlock when it tries to acquire spinlocks to page it in, or less likely by calling a function which is documented as not being callable at that IRQL.

If you look at the stackframe, you can see which driver is to blame and either disable or update it. If the system has always been unstable, check the RAM.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft are experimenting with static code analysis and automated test cases to catch driver errors like this

http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/soft/teaching/ws05/ seminar/scpresentation.pdf

Umm - not exactly. What you are describing is commonly known as a TEC, or "Thermoelectric Cooler" (and also known as a Peltier cooler). They are not composed of a single Peltier junction, but rather a large multitude of such junctions in what is basically a semiconductor package. A TEC is basically a semiconductor-based heat pump, which uses electricity to move heat from one side of the TEC to the other. In the process, the TEC also generates a fair amount of heat (no such thing as a "free lunch") from the hot side, while also consuming a fair amount of energy (which most of it is converted to heat, the rest moving heat from the cold side to the hot side). Finally, remember that you can't generate cold - coldness is the absence of heat.

Now, as I have noted, TECs work via the use of multiple Peltier junctions. Peltier junctions are fairly simple devices, consisting of a junction made between two dissimilar conductors. TECs are made in this manner, but in the same way as ICs are made (more or less). On a larger scale, though, a Peltier junction is easy to make - get a piece of alluminum wire, and a piece of copper wire, and twist them together: congratulations, you have just made a simple (though very inefficient) Peltier junction (however, this is not what can cause house fires in older homes with alluminum wiring - this problem is caused by a combination of alluminum and copper wire junctions heating up because of the resistance of the junction, thus starting a fire).

Peltier junctions work by using something known as the Peltier Effect, which was observed in 1834 by Jean Peltier 13 years after the Seebeck effect was first discovered. The Seeback effect is basically the inverse of the Peltier effect - in that two disimilar conductors, in the presence of a heat source, generate an electrical current. This effect has been used in industry to detect and measure extremely high temperatures, such as what is generated in various industrial furnaces. It has also been experimented with as a method to use the sun to generate electricity (ie, use a solar furnace to focus the sun on a bundle of the junctions) - there is actually an old Popular Mechanics article from the 1950's or 1960's showing how to build such a device.

As to whether you can use a TEC to exploit the Seebeck effect in a practical manner - probably not, as they aren't designed to work in this manner, and you might destroy the device. However, these devices are cheap enough, and if you supplied an appropriate cooling system for the device you might get a bit of electricity out of it - just don't expect much. It would make an interesting science fair project for the kids, though (grab a TEC, a fresnel lens, and a very large heat sink with a fan, bolt it all together and hook it up to a cheap voltmeter, then set it in the sun).

BTW - where did all the real geeks on this site go to, anyhow?

Is it right for a discredited man to have his pHD removed? Is it right that popular opinion can determine how qualified someone is to make a statement in their field?

The university he got his degree from was the University of Konstanz in Germany. Here's a German article (babelfished) on the whole thing. The educational laws of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg state that a PhD title can be removed if "through his behavior at a later point in in his career, the owner has proven unworthy of the title."

From Bell Labs' summary, we can find more about what he was charged with:

• Substitution of data (substitution of whole figures, single curves and partial curves in different or the same paper to represent different materials, devices or conditions)
• Unrealistic precision of data (precision beyond that expected in a real experiment or requiring unreasonable statistical probability)
• Results that contradict known physics (behavior inconsistent with stated device parameters and prevailing physical understanding, so as to suggest possible misrepresentation of data)

[...]

The Committee's main findings and conclusions can be summarized as follows.

By all accounts, Hendrik Schön is a hard working and productive scientist. If valid, the work he and his coauthors report would represent a remarkable number of major breakthroughs in condensed-matter physics and solid-state devices.

Except for the provision of starting materials by others, all device fabrication, physical measurement and data processing in the work in question were carried out (with minor exceptions) by Hendrik Schön alone, with no participation by any coauthor or other colleague. None of the most significant physical results was witnessed by any coauthor or other colleague.

Proper laboratory records were not systematically maintained by Hendrik Schön in the course of the work in question. In addition, virtually all primary (raw) electronic data files were deleted by Hendrik Schön, reportedly because the old computer available to him lacked sufficient memory. No working devices with which one might confirm claimed results are presently available, having been damaged in measurement, damaged in transit or simply discarded. Finally, key processing equipment no longer produces the unparalleled results that enabled many of the key experiments. Hence, it is not possible to confirm or refute directly the validity of the claims in the work in question.

The most serious allegations regarding the work in question relate to possible manipulation and misrepresentation of data. These allegations speak directly to the question of scientific misconduct. The Committee carefully investigated each of these allegations and came to a specific conclusion in each case.

The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling. In its mildest form, whole data sets were substituted to represent different materials or devices. Hendrik Schön acknowledges that the data are incorrect in many of these instances. He states that these substitutions could have occurred by honest mistake. The recurrent nature of such mistakes suggests a deeper problem. At a minimum, Hendrik Schön showed reckless disregard for the sanctity of data in the value system of science. His failure to retain primary data files compounds the problem.

More troublesome are the substitutions of single curves or even parts of single curves, in multiple figures representing different materials or devices, and the use of mathematical functions to represen

I have a Garmin Vista (about US$300), RS-232 Cable and Cigarette Lighter plug (about US$30), and Ram-Mount (about US$20).

What a fantastic combination for driving. Tha maps (US and Europe (about US$175 each) rule.

I usually use NiMH batteries when walking. They last a few hours without charging. I recently used a pair of alkaline AAs for a two week trip through Europe and only had to change them once! Granted I didn't use it constantly, but I did use it quite a bit.

I use gpspoint on Linux for saving, uploading, and downloading routes, waypoints, and tracks.