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Meteorite impact sites are in fact the locations that we mine lots of valuable minerals:

http://www.univie.ac.at/geoche...

The heavy, denser metals largely sank deep into the Earth when it was still forming. This is thought not to be true for many asteroids, although we don't know for sure. Estimates of mineral value range from billions to trillions (at current prices) for even small metallic asteroids.

Necron69

I would say the shoe is on the other foot. Show me a single intelligent, adult human without a body and I'll happily remove the "definitely" :-). As far as science has been able to show so far, both brains and bodies are necessary. I think it's certainly possible that a body is only strictly necessary for the developmental phase but that's an empirical question to test. The key problem here is what we call "intelligence". If the definition of intelligence contains only logic processing, then obviously pretty much any modern computer is intelligent. I'm happy with accepting that but would argue that human behaviour (the real kind that we see in the wild, not thought experiments in scholars' heads) is not very well described with this model and needs something else. I'm yet to see any hard evidence that the computational model can describe human behaviour very satisfactorily. Perform chess computations, sure, spend a day taking care of the kids, going to work, playing tennis after work then preparing a romantic dinner, not so sure. At least not so sure it would be done like a human would.

To be honest, I actually subscribe to radical constructivist views of knowledge but will certainly accept that any decent model we use should enable us to predict/explain lots of actually observed phenomena ("hard evidence" you might call it). But let's not forget that for centuries almost all scholars attributed the causes of many phenomena to supernatural deities - it's not because (almost) everyone believes something that it's "the Truth". But I'll grant that maybe I should temper my claim to "it is definitely worth taking the idea that embodiment is necessary far more seriously" :-).

Tell her to transfer to Austria if money is that big an issue.

Also on the PSLV-C20 launch are the Canadian military satellite SAPPHIRE, and the twin spacecraft BRITE-Austria and UniBRITE, developed in Canada for TU Graz and University of Vienna respectively. ISRO put out a pretty good brochure describing the launch.

You can find some good photos of the stacking and launch vehicle integration here, here, and here. You can watch the launch live on Monday morning here.

Needless to say, we're all pretty stoked around here ^__^

You are right that Popigai impact diamonds have been known for many years (paper from 1997 for example [PDF]). I don't understand what is new about this news article. There's nothing new there at all, and the Popigai diamonds are industrial diamonds, not the big, single crystals for jewelry. But what you say doesn't make any sense either, because graphite subjected to impact pressures and temperatures does not produce radioactivity.

> Yeah, what a failure the 360 has been for Microsoft.

You seem to conveniently forget ... :-)

1) the 2 billion investment MS has made into the XBox platform
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025537/php/ABWLs/FK-Marketing/store1/Case_XBOXlive.pdf

2) and the $1 billion expense from the RROD
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/13/1-billion-dollar-pain/

I am neither a XBox nor PS3 fanboy (I have both consoles), just pointing out some basic facts you left out.

Just as an example, my father is partially deaf. No hearing in one ear, and less than a quarter of human baseline in the other. But with a hearing aid (which still doesn't get him to full functionality), he gets 95% accuracy or better in regular conversation, and it gets better as the conversation progresses.

There have been a lot of papers written about the fact that English has a TON of redundancy built-in so that you can miss a lot of the conversation and yet still obtain the general meaning. In fact, English has been deemed to be one of the more fault-tolerant languages in existence. Here's an article by Claude Shannon (the same Shannon famous for the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem) on the topic.

The trick is to build algorithms which can properly analyze and utilize this redundancy in order to understand what is being said. Right now it's one of those tasks that the human mind easily handles but which we still haven't discovered how to do it via computers.

You still have not presented a falsifiable idea. You claim the statistics I cite are wrong, but you don't provide any reasoning behind it. Moving on...

when the original argument was about what types of weapons may be used

The GP said "You are allowed to use any weapons available on any target available with very few exceptions." (emphasis mine) I can see making a mistake and killing 15 people is SOP for the military. Firing on the van without confirming there are valid targets inside is clearly way out of line. Later in your post you say that I imply that the US military covered it up. Here's what they said at the time:

Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh had gone to the area after hearing of a military raid on a building around dawn that day, and were with a group of men at the time. It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture.

The U.S. military said the helicopter attack, in which nine other people were killed, occurred after security forces came under fire.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL05399965?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r1:c0.564356:b31590548:z0

which is based on your own little fantasies rather than on how information is actually gathered in combat

I'm not the one who mentioned James Bond. The troops had no confirmation that these were the people the convoy was talking about. They did not wait to see them target their weapons at any US forces.

you again misrepresented your own source by claiming that the casualties were in the "hundreds of thousands"

The stats end in 2008. The lowest possible number is the Iraq Body Count number, which only includes documented deaths from reliable media sources. If you think that every death in war is documented, then you haven't read a page of history.

Moreover you completely ignored the fact that these surveys list estimated cases of "civilian deaths from violent causes", which encompasses civilians executed by militants, civilians blown up by suicide bombers and VBIED's, and civilians killed in sectarian fighting.

And it's your assumption that this civil war would have occurred if we hadn't removed Saddam and disbanded the Iraqi Army and destroyed their power grid and sewer system and water infrastructure and let them loot every government building while we guarded the Ministry of Oil?

Let me quote you some Bush I:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.

And you tried to derail the discussion by bringing up completely irrel

Not really. It's been possible to get them throughout this time, up until about mid last month. See:

• [pca] No more free patches, Martin Paul, 12 Feb 2010
• PCA web site news item - 2010/02/24

I'm just waiting for someone to 'CSI enhance' this so that we can see Neil's bootprints.

On it. :oP

Sure. Either look in the http://dev.jakeapp.com/documents/3">introduction for new developers or on the mirror site
mirror site.
We don't have a git daemon just yet.

I set up a file download mirror if you can't reach the main site:

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0625457/jake/

Do you have any information on this, other than all-caps words?

Because I read a multitude of articles and papers of people, doing exactly what you claim to be impossible.

I'm even going to find an article on it for you: http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/physik_astronomie/bericht-32526.html
They "beamed" particles 600m far. Which is exactly a collapse of the entanglement with transfer of information without any delay. And this is from 2004!
And here's the guy who did it: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/franz.embacher/Quantentheorie/
Go on, and tell him that he did not do what he claims, and that you know more about quantum theory than he does. Please. Go on.
Because I'd love to see the answer you will get.

Wild forests aren't the "natural habitat", savannas are. The human species spent most of the time in savannas

It's even documented in a study on Evolutionary Aesthetics

From Stephen Pinkers book "How The Mind Works":

In experiments on human habitat preference, American children and adults are shown slides of landscapes and asked how much they would like to visit or live in them. The children prefer savannas, even though they have never been to one. The adults like the savannas, too, but they like the deciduous and coniferous forests â" -which resemble much of the habitable United States â" just as much. No one likes the deserts and the rainforests. One interpretation is that the children are revealing our speciesâ(TM) default habitat preference, and the adults supplement it with the land with which they have grown familiar.

Disclaimer: I'm not an anthropologist, I just read the book a while ago

Sorry for the broken Unicode. It's /.s fault.

Or use them together: Use RExcel and RCommander.

you can boot into dos from a usb drive formatted fat 32, all it requires is bios support. download the HP USB disk storage format tool http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-order,4-page,1-c,peripherals/description.html have a dos boot floppy handy for the necessary dos files. run the format tool, and then tell it where your dos files are. then install whatever dos tools you want from http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0503736/php/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.Links it should run on any computer that can boot from usb.

You can mount NTFS/ext2 in DOS using Paragon IFSDRV. There are probably drivers for other filesystems available if one looks around. A quick google reveals a long list of DOS software at www.unet.univie.ac.at.

His requirements do seem to fit with my experience of living in Vienna, Austria though :)
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/metro/english/network_maps.html

Looks like Jesusland might get a bit smaller...

Given the sheer amount of petty editing wars and defacing that constantly plague Wikipedia, you would likely be better off just reading an Encyclopedia when you want some knowledge and an internet connection isn't available.

Seriously, I know wikipedia is the darling of open source, but the more I learn about it, the more I realize it's pure garbage.

Why? Educate yourself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/oct/24/c omment.newmedia
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/24/wikipedia_ letters/
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/horst.prillinger/blog /archives/2004/06/000623.html
http://www.kapitalism.net/thoughts/wikipedia.htm

And there's more, but you get the idea. Collusion to ruin people's lives when they run afoul of admins, corrupt editors doing and getting favors from the head honcho himself, pet pages that end up with incorrect information, speculation, or specious reasoning, and a general air of arrogance and groupthink reinforcing an internal idea that they can do no wrong.

Why bother, seriously?

According to the latest polls, 72% of us are convinced. The remaining 28% probably live in Jesusland and I'm not going down there to try and change their minds...

TFA mixed up both the author's name and the journal this work was published in. The author's real name is Rupert Ursin (not Robert), and the article was published in Nature Physics Online, not Nature Physics (those are separate journals). The article itself is available here as a pdf.

They aren't convincing impact-related shatter cones. They look like ordinary concoidal fractures in a fine-grained and very brittle rock (e.g., like chert).

Also, shatter-cone-like structures (e.g., cone-in-cone limestone) can form by other processes that aren't impact related.

Refer to this paper [PDF file] if you are interested in some other examples and discussion.

It is sort of the same issue with the so-called shocked quartz. Yeah, they are fractures in quartz (maybe), but they don't look particularly like shock lamellae, and you need to view them in a higher magnification microscope using transmitted light (contrary to the article, while a scanning electron microscope would help, an optical transmitted light microscope would be fine, provided it was a petrographic one). It isn't entirely convincing the grains they are identifying are quartz. They might be looking at twinning lamellae in plagioclase feldspar instead, in some kind of volcanic rock. The pictures aren't great, and he acknowledges that.

While the surrounding hills are somewhat circular, the ridge running in from the north (Black Rock Range) is a bit inconsistent. An uplift in the center is fine for a hypothetical crater this big, but there should be a ring-shaped trough around it, and the ridge crosses towards the center without much sign of that.

On the whole, I don't find the evidence convincing, but it is an interesting hypothesis to consider, and it is great to see someone trying to figure out the local geology.

I tend to think the authors of the article are refering to the problems of a "useable form" for the structures and easy access of many of these databases. The first problem is mearly a problem of converting between the various structural file formats out there, something a good programmer (or grad student) can solve is a few weeks or less. The second is a bureaucrat issue and not a scientific one.

(From Wikipedia and archived MySQL manuals)

You mean, "poisoning a British citizen so he cooks from the inside-out" is the more civilized alternative usual pattern of Russian soldiers murdering , raping and torturing Chechen civilians, and running "filtration" camps where they rape 13 year old girls ?

(and the occasional retaliation?)

Well you certainly can measure position! What about a single slit experiment? The electron going through the slit has a quite well-defined position, but a less well defined momentum and that is the crux of quantum mechanics. Indeed, as you imply, it is not possible to say the position of the particle is exactly such-and-such because that would violate the uncertainty principle. I would prefer not to mention infinite spreads of position/momenta because this is not helpful; given you mention information propagation, do you not think that this notion might have issues with an infinite wavefunction? The wavefunction in any phase space must be normalizable and this is surely the most important concept. I'll except tunneling as there even the smallest of tails causes the finite barrier to "leak"... eventually.

An illustration - it is well known that C60 can be made to diffract. What do you mean then that position is meaningless? Do you mean to say that the atoms within the fullerene have no spatial relation to each other? How then do we know the symmetry of the molecule (from the number of absorption lines)? Of course postion is meaningful! Whether it is well defined is quite another matter.

I would also question your belief that the operators have any more meaning than the objects that the theory puports to describe! And I would certainly not advise trusting the math (although I'm a theoretician) - surely one must actually trust experiment!

I happen to be a physicist (but I don't particularly think that's relevant). I'm quite sure you grasp QM (the famous quote from Bohr aside), but I'm not sure I agree with the way you have chosen to explain it :-)

It is very common to say that "position, etc. are meaningless" but that simply isn't a correct statement at all, as I hope I've shown. Sorry for dragging this off topic (and for the profusion of exclamation marks)

"Physically seeing the atoms can help verify or improve the simulations."

And how would these simulations need improving? Here is the code I was using. Sure, it's only approximating reality, but the degree to which it is an approximation can be increased or decreased.

I think most PostgreSQL users checked out MySQL in the late 90's, and read the MySQL docs, to see if referential integrity was supported (i know i did).

Not only did they say it was not supported, but that it would be stupid to implement it in the database, and that application developers should write their own code to do constraints.

Well, the message was pretty clear to me - never give MySQL another consideration. Unless you want to do repetitive coding the rest of your life.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=104 831&cid=8925689
http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/textbooks/mysql/manual .html#Broken_Foreign_KEY

i find the results of Mozart's Musical Dice Game way more pleasant to the ear. It's limited to piano, but really sounds very nice.

You're thinking of Mozart:

Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel

Mozart wrote such a scheme - but without the Vic-20. http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/

Would you care to elaborate?

In SQL NULL represents the the absence of a value. In MySQL an explicit NULL may also represent the next value of a pseudo-sequence and an implicit NULL may represent an implicit default value (a zero or empty string) determined by MySQL. See here and this Wikipedia article for more info.

Why do think that this is better? In one case you call the function and then use the value, and in the other case you insert the row and then ask what the new PK is. I'm not sure how one is better than the other. Could you explain?

If you're wanting to know your next ID number before inserting data, you're screwed in MySQL. MySQL uses "auto_increment" fields that just add one to the previous row's value, while PostgreSQL uses what are called sequences which are guaranteed to always return a unique value, and you use those for your ID fields. In MySQL, there's no way of finding out the next value in an auto_increment sequence until you've committed a row to the database, while PostgreSQL lets you peek at the next value in the sequence.

Details please? I'm not trying to pick on you here. I'm just trying to figure out what your complaint is. The MySQL manual is huge, so you can't expect everyone to know what you're talking about.

Here you go. The old manual criticized foreign key constraints and transactions using bizarre reasoning.

For what it's worth, MySQL has some features that we really love, like the binary logs. We have yet to lose a single row because of database corruption.

The issue with MySQL isn't database corruption, it's data integrity. A lot of things in MySQL will happen and not give you any warnings, whereas other databases are very strict about giving you a warning or even refusing the statement with an error so you can respond to it in your code. There are an alarming number of conditions where MySQL inserts things like zeros into fields without telling a single thing. You can't fully trust MySQL.

No, Anonymous illiterate Coward, it's English. The Greek word, as you yourself quote, was "mimma". The French word was "même", meaning "same". Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist at Oxford (where they also publish a dictionary), introduced the term as an info parallel to "gene", in his landmark _The Selfish Gene_. But then, your rudimentary grammar is consistent with a mind that doesn't even absorb the other, more accurate, etymologies on the page where you found your inadequate one, because it's not at the top of the page.

Now that I've schooled you, take another lesson: don't reproduce. You're in over your head, and drowned in the meme pool, Anonymous unfit Coward.

Looks like Mozart beat you to it. His method is more restricted, but the music you get actually sounds pretty musical.

OK guys, it seems as if a lot of people are interested in the pictures, so I put them online.

not so very difficult, as Mozart himself created a piece which was intended to be generated using dice rolls prior to playing it.

>...ARM-like procs at 400MHz each with something like 400MBs or more available memory bandwidth per proc.

This could have been done already with ordinary procs; it hasn't because once you hit an area that's serialized, your app winds up effectively running at 400MHz on a single proc. (More of a problem for desktop applications rather than server applications.)

>Of course the extreme limit would be to have millions of 1 bit processors, but I don't think that anyone is proposing that just yet.

How about 64k worth in the form of the Thinking Machine's Connection Machine CM-1?

You are missing something. This has got nothing to do with faster than light communication, instead it's on how they were able to successfully entangle 5 photons, which is the minimum number needed to implement a universal error correction system in quantum computation.

Teleportation was achieved a long time ago by a bunch of folks at Innsbruck, led by Prof Anton Zeilinger.

You are missing something. This has got nothing to do with faster than light communication, instead it's on how they were able to successfully entangle 5 photons, which is the minimum number needed to implement a universal error correction system in quantum computation.

Teleportation was achieved a long time ago by a bunch of folks at Innsbruck, led by Prof Anton Zeilinger.

It's actually fairly simple. In QC, you can perform any quantum operations on the qubits, but you cannot look at the bits without losing some information. Therefore, what you do is use error correcting codes, by superimposing the quantum states onto a set of photons whose states you observe, but do not use. What they have done here is basically taken the unknown quantum state of a photon onto a superposition set of three photons, and you can find the state of any one photon by observing the other two photons.

This was predicted a while ago by Alexei Kitaev, and Anton Zeilinger had a preliminary demonstration of a basic q.t. system a while ago. I would imagine that this is just an extension of their works.

Regarding your "crappy tactic" comment: See item #23

Lob

You can roll dice to compose a minuet, however.

Tune: "This Land Was Made For You And Me"
Tune (c) 1940, Woodie Guthrie
As of 2004, the rights to Guthrie's tune are administered by The Richmond Organization, located in New York, NY.

The following is a parody of the dispute between The Richmond Organization and Evan and Gregg Spiridellis of Jibjab.com surrounding JibJab's 2004 hit "This Land," which parodies the US Presidential Race between Republican candidate George W. Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry and which uses Guthrie's tune "This Land Is Made For You and Me."

"This Song We Sing For You and Me"
Lyrics by David W. Richardson

Chorus:
This song is your song, this song is my song,
From A. P. Carter, to his "Little Darling,"
From the Babtist Hymnal, to the "Lovin' Brother,"
This song we sing for you and me.

A man named Guthrie, he had a vision.
He wrote a folk song, and shared it with us.
He sang a tune that was familiar, thinking
"This song I sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

Two men named Evan and Gregg Spiridellis
Sat down to write a song about Bush and Kerry.
They borrowed music, from Woodie thinking
"This song, he sang for you and me."
(Chorus)

"Stop!" said the Richmond Organization.
They own the rights to Guthrie's music.
Evan and Gregg, they called it humor, saying
"This song, we sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

The two famous brothers, they filed a lawsuit
To preserve our rights to use Guthrie's work.
The judge will say that it is okay, saying
"This song, you sing for you and me."
(Chorus)

But it may happen that they lose and then their song will die....
Since this can happen, I put pen to paper
And write these lyrics, daring them to sue me, for
"This song, I write for you and me."
(Chorus)

These lyrics are copyright (c) 2004 David Richardson (davidwr.geo -at- yahoo.com), posted to Slashdot.org under the Creative Common License Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0, as found on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/.
P ublication date: July 31, 2004, on Slashdot.org
Slashdot.org is not responsible for the content of this post.

Sources:
John Dowdell's commentary on this issue
Woodie Guthrie Lyrics

One of the best thing about Stargate is that haven't had to resort to over sexual themes to achieve this success!

Whaddya mean, "sexual themes"? It's not like any other science fiction franchise has had to resort to coed back rubs, nubile aliens in skintight uniforms, lesbian kisses, sex with androids or women dressed in tinfoil to keep an audience....

Oh.. wait. Never mind...

Wrong!

This is the most popular FreeBSD-Laptop site. gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/

This is a great resource if your laptop is old. www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html

Here you can read an article about FreeBSD on laptops. www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/lapto p/article.html

If you need more FreeBSD resources, then visit www.n0dez.com/freebsd/

If you've got a 32-bit PCMCIA card on your laptop, use FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. The 5.x branch supports 32-bit PCMCIA cards. In fact, I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE on an old laptop without a hitch.

Too bad there are no sites like Linux-Laptop for BSD

You mean like this?

As to your other question, I use a Netgear fa410tx.

Just to give perspective, I am a physicist who thinks that the Many Worlds interpretation (along with other things like the anthropic principle) is not only incorrect but is bad science.

It fills in a small interpretational gap but creates much larger (unanswered) questions and confusion.

If you think universe splitting occurs whenever a measurement is made, then I believe that you have a very poor understanding of what measurement is. First of all collapse is not some special/magical process and secondly you can't arbitrarily seperate the universe into observed and observer. If you are going to have splitting, it's got to happen always/everywhere and with every state basis. I would say that a preferred splitting is far more egocentric than only wanting to have 1 universe.

And assuming there is no unsplitting/suicide (and maybe even if there is) then there will universes with no measurable physics, or even worse - measurements that give a false physics. And there is no reason for us to not be in one of those universes, other than probability. Of course this could (improbable) happen here, but the point is that according to MWI it does happen somewhere. Infact, Everett proved that the crazy universes will have zero norm on the Hilbert space only if infinite measurements are taken.

But enough of my rambling, just go here for some information against MWI

"MySQL uses table locking (instead of row locking or column locking) on all table types, except BDB tables, to achieve a very high lock speed. For large tables, table locking is MUCH better than row locking for most applications"

Some of the fish died, others heavily mutated. Here's a picture of the mutated fish.