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So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff?

Sure, why wouldn't it be? It may well be different. The problem is that plankton is in trouble. Algae is facing the same challenge.

Proof and sources:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/02/liar-liar-pants-on-fire/317/

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/newecn/Classes/Art/INT1/Mac/1930s/1930sAA.html

http://www.economonitor.com/danalperts2cents/2009/01/23/unhappy-days-are-near-again/

Or just look at https://www.google.com/search?q=unemployment+1930s+graph&client=firefox-a&hs=9cz&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=fflb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=riwDUqS_CqOdyQHG24DYDw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1536&bih=694
  where you can see dozens of nice little graphs that show unemployment dropping throughout FDRs term.

Once again- no knowledge of history.

I visited Cuba a couple of times during the "special period," and saw poverty, closed factories, etc. The main adaptions I noted were -- regular power blackouts and tons of brand new Chinese bicycles.

If you are a fan of dystopian sci fi, check out EM Forster's "The machine stops."

Dramatization video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvrGUnIFuRs
Text: http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf

I recall fooling with a Plato terminal back in the 60/70s when I was at the System Development Corporation. They had a program for time-shared interactive education in the research directorate, but I was not working on it -- had a nice orange plasma display while we were working with vector CRT displays and TTYs.

Mid nineties? Hah, according to this page, the anti-trust settlement did not happen until 2002. That settlement included banning exclusive deals.

However, that settlement only covered the US. Do you really expect people to believe that Microsoft would not attempt (and perhaps achieve) the same type of agreements for non-US vendors selling to non-US countries? As for showing it in writing, do your really think that Microsoft would publish (or allow to be published) such an agreement?

The problem for Microsoft is that, as a convicted anti-trust violator, it does not deserve the benefit of any doubt when other possible anti-trust violations are discussed.

I think he's talking about cavitation. Here:

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Scientific_topics/Wound_ballistics/How_a_high-speed.html

It's basically a matter of damage from the shockwave exceeding that of the damage from the bullet.

Ever wonder how many fewer women and children would be sold into slavery if prostitution were less tolerated? You think if brothels were legal and well regulated that the sex slaves would be a thing of the past? In Amsterdam on the fringes, many of the women are slaves. Sure, in the legal brothels, the women do it willingly, but if you think the only prostitutes in Amsterdam are in the legal brothels you are naive or stupid. Any place where prostitution is legal or tolerated, there are more sex slaves.

This article, written in the 60s by Douglas Hofstadter sums it up perfectly. It's called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". It's as relevant now as it was during the Cold War. This must be the best political essay I've ever read. http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

Good thing I plan to relay this post to your faculty members and students. Get the fuck out of America and stop sapping our education system you fucking supremacist traitor.

Pankaj L Ahire
http://www.cs.uri.edu/~pahire
pahire@cs.uri.edu

Post AC, as I've already moderated.

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/india.htm

There are more than 100,000 women in prostitution in Bombay, Asia's largest sex industry center.

A large portion of those women are in the slums. And before telling me that it's just part of the libertarian heaven where women are free to capitalize on their bodies without unwanted government interference, read the link in its entirety about preteens being infected with AIDS. Is that something you'd want for your daughters or nieces? Does that count as murder?

If you think that 133 murders is an accurate count, you're painfully naive.

Some of what the article says is true as are some of your points - you don't have to look at slums to know that cities offer high density benefits, particularly if they have a well thought out and used public transit system. While it's true that having people literally starving who prefer to eat garbage than die will decrease the amount of wasted food, I don't think that's an example of what's going to "save" the planet.

The National Forensic Association is an intercollegiate debating organization. I doubt they have anything particularly important to say about the JFK assassination. There was a report by the National Academy of Sciences based on acoustical analysis of crime scene recordings, but it concluded that the multiple-shooter theory was not supported by the available acoustic evidence.

Perhaps you are thinking of a report by a Texas A&M professor of statistics and a retired FBI forensic scientist from 2007 who "conducted a chemical and forensic analysis of bullets reportedly derived from the same batch as those used by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald." Their conclusion was that the bullet fragments aren't particularly rare and that the matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets, and that previous analysis based on bullet fragments "used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed."

The important thing to note here, conspiracy buffs, is that those two reports don't contradict one another. There could be a second shooter that wasn't captured by the acoustic evidence -- but likewise, matching fragments could have come from three or more separate bullets is not an equivalent statement to "matching fragments did come from three or more separate bullets."

It's also worth noting that, in fact, the report was not done by a "national association," it never made the sweeping claim that "the official story was impossible," and the report has been criticized for naive use of statistics and generally poor writing. According to critic John Fiorentino, the paper as finally presented in 2008 was revised to address his rebuttal linked above, and "by making the revisions, the authors have effectively negated their findings just as stated in [Fiorentino's] rebuttal."

There are many criticisms to be made of the Warren Commission's handling of the investigation, and I suspect that because of that there will be people arguing about this two hundred years from now. The problem is the same here as with nearly all Grand Government Conspiracy Stories, though: even if the official story (about whatever event we're talking about) is incomplete and imperfect, that doesn't ipso facto make the official story wrong in either overall scope or final conclusion. It's worthy to question authority and to be skeptical of any official story--but there is a point where skepticism becomes gullibility: someone who automatically dismisses anything The Government says is thinking no more critically than someone who automatically accepts anything The Government says, and is ultimately just as easy to manipulate.

The colleges with the closest names to "College of Rhode Island" are:

• Rhode Island College
• the Community College of Rhode Island
• the Univeristy of Rhode Island

I've heard that many residential electric meters have ERT enabled meters, which use a custom wireless protocol, so that the guys don't have to get out of the truck to read your meter. So, you'll need some sort of radio, and then hack the protocol (maybe sombody already has?).

I'm not discussing what plant is better at making oxygen.

I'm discussing where most of our current oxygen comes from. Phytoplankton may or may not be less efficient than other plants at producing Oxygen. That fact is irrelevant, since the sheer volume of phytoplankton provides MORE than half (my bad, not "about half" like I said earlier) of the Oxygen that is produced on Earth.

References?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton
Nasa's take on the stuff
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Phytoplankton/
This one claims two-thirds of the photosynthesis on the planet occurs within them
http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu/factsheets/phytoplankton.html

As a side note...
What started as a desire to create an Algae that would be the perfect fish tank decoration (one that fish would not eat, one that would flourish in a wide variety of waters and conditions, one that would proliferate easily) has turned into one of the world's greatest threats. One that could extinguish us.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/519228.html
In a nutshell, we made the stuff in Germany, it was studied at the Jacque Cousteau Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, and it got out... as it was first discovered in the Mediterranean under this very building. It is extraordinarily hard to kill, and it drives off all other sea life in any area where it grows. It drive off and suffocates other sea plant life, which drives off the little fish that eat that stuff, which drives off the larger fish that eat the small fish.
Go ahead. Search for Killer Algae. See what it has taken to eradicate the outbreak in a lagoon in Australia... and the outbreak in Southern California (I hear it is threatening the Florida coast in some spots). If we destroy the ocean's ecology, we are soon to follow. And apparently our desire for the perfect fish tank may be our downfall.

Also, it is possible to desalinate salt water, making it into fresh water. So sorry, I'm not with you that protecting our fresh water is more important. We've got to get on the ball and protect that which sustains our oxygen production, and ocean life. Else we die with lots of fresh water.

... beginning college students typically don't know what constitutes "good research". And they tend to be very trusting, not just of Wikipedia, but of anything on the Internet.

A few years ago I had a student turn in a paper arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. One of the claims the paper raised was that drinking ages are lower in many European countries, and that they have healthier drinking cultures. That's probably true, but the source that the student cited to back up the point was totally inadequate. It was a two paragraph account of German drinking habits. The account was based on an interview with an unnamed exchange student. It was written down by an anonymous high school student. And it was put up on the web as a really badly designed web page. Let's see - anonymous author, anonymous interview subject, obviously done as part of a high school assignment, very short, no details, and badly presented. Not exactly the world's most credible source. I made the student go find a more thorough account of European drinking habits written by an identifiable human being and vetted by some kind of editor.

That's a fairly typical example. However, I don't think it's anything worth getting upset about. Students have long been overly credulous. Heck, people in general are overly credulous. It's always been possible to go out, find crappy information, and blindly accept it. Wikipedia (and more broadly the Internet) just make that easier. Yes, there's a lot of GOOD info out there on the web, too, but finding it can be very difficult.

That being the case, I try to integrate assignments about how you do research, and what constitutes a good source, what Internet sources are good for, and when you might want to hit the library and dig a little deeper. It's really a necessity. The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them. Many schools are beginning to recognize this -- over the last ten years or so the number of positions at academic libraries for "instructional librarians" has skyrocketed. They visit other teachers' classes and teach lessons on search techniques, evaluation of sources, give tours of the specialized databases the university subscribes to, and so on. Some schools are even beginning to offer complete courses on information literacy. I think we'll probably see a good bit more of this over the next few years.

As far as "Republicans want to protect the environment," the ones who say they do want to do so by removing the few remaining restrictions on corporate drilling, logging, etc--i.e. their definition of "protecting" means the very opposite of what it means to everyone else. They just changed their language.

As far as "democrats want to increase government spending even more," I'd have to ask, "even more than whom?" Which alternative? The last Democratic President balanced the budget, and reduced the size of the federal government. The Republicans always talk about how bad government is, but they have no problems with indefinite imprisonment without trial, waterboarding, warrantless wiretapping, and the largest deficit in national history. Republicans supported Bush in all of these, right down the line. So when your party actually has some prominent members who believe in small government, maybe you can wave the small-government flag again. As it was, Ron Paul got about 10% of the Republican polling numbers in his best showing. That's about the extent of the Republican committment to small government.

The reasonable Republicans don't speak up, so they don't get heard. O'Reilley and Coulter are the voices of your party--if you don't like that, stop buying their books and watching their shows. These people (and the rest like them) are the ones that polarized the political environment to make the population believe that only the far right is "really" Republican, while self-described "moderates" are Republicans In Name Only -- RINOs, as Rush named them. If you want to know why your party looks ridiculous, extremist, and sometimes outright stupid, look within. Even thinking that this perception is a conspiracy by the "liberal media" to make Republicans look bad is signature conservative thinking--the classic persecution fantasy combined with a pseudo-populist conspiracy theory. Don't think I just made this up--read Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, written in 1964.

It's pretty clear now that the rate of progress has leveled off and fallen well short of the flying cars, space colonization, nanotech assemblers and friendly AI fantasy-future. Physicist Jonathan Huebner has gathered empirical evidence (PDF) showing that we're pretty much fucked for new, practical technological ideas already, and that includes AI. I'd respect Kurzweil more if he'd stop making an ass of himself with his sci-fi stuff, go back to his lab and work on something useful.

Why don't they just chain the children up? That is much simpler and far more effective. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_06/uk/droits.htm http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/yearoftheslave.html http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/children_in_chains.pdf

Please take a look at Rhode Island U's IP Policy manual. Section 10.40.18 states: "The Board of Governors shall own and have all rights to any inventions, trademarks, trade secrets, and copyrights discovered, created, or developed by University personnel using University time, resources, facilities, or equipment, except as otherwise provided in this policy." This is to say that any IP -- once it is codified -- is owned by the university. The researcher can opt to not seek protection in the first place (simplest way is to publicly disclose the information) and thereby does not have to abide by these rules. Now, whether or not RIU is applying pressure for its researchers to seek IP protection is another debate.

If products aren't 'worth' what people pay for them, then the whole field of economics is complete nonsense(I will allow that plenty of it is nonsense, but plenty of makes sense too); the value of a product is whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Sure, that number often has little to do with the actual cost of making said product, but that's why trade is so nifty, someone with a lot of potatoes and no salt is willing to trade quite a few potatoes for some salt, and someone with a lot of salt and no potatoes is willing to trade quite a bit of salt for some potatoes, and they both walk away thinking about what a deal they got, especially when potato guy is good and growing potatoes and salt guy is good at mining salt. Your 'require' is simply a euphemism for placing a very high value on the product(i.e., if you require it, you are made so much better off by it that it is, in fact, 'worth' acquiring, even at seemingly obscene prices).

As far as my wandering opinion, as far as I can tell, you are being obtuse, either by purpose or accident. I would in fact, at a given price, prefer secure, cheap, renewable and efficient energy production, but the difference in price that I am willing to pay for those things is very low; my price preference outweighs my feel good about it preference. So I guess I should have said that I care very little where it comes from, but I was going for emphasis or accuracy.

I fail google though, searching for "Netherlands switchgrass" doesn't yield much; there is this article:

http://www.eeci.net/archive/biobase/B10189.html

Which says that it grows ok there and will be neat. There is this pdf:

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/17/16274/kuiper.pdf

which is about bio energy in Europe; it mentions a project, but not anything like a plant. This article:

http://biopact.com/2007/03/disappointing-yields-da mpens.html

talks about costs being higher than previously estimated. Adding 'ethanol' to that search yields this article:

http://cels.uri.edu/news/nSwitchgrass.html

which talks about 'developing enzymes' and ethanol costing $2.70 a gallon(which competes with gasoline sourced at $3.15, that's pretax), but doesn't talk about somebody shipping anything just yet. This article:

http://www.newfarm.org/news/2005/0805/082305/swtic hgrass.shtml

has cellulosic on the verge of the mainstream(yes, it's two years old, but I am somewhat past a 'quick' google at this point). And on and on.

I wish you luck, but I will remain skeptical until somebody stands up and announces that they are producing ethanol that is cheaper than gas, without the benefits of any subsidies whatsoever, because that's what it is going to take for biofuels to work.

The number of crimes has decreased - but jails are fuller than ever. Over 2,000,000 people are in jail right now. Fifteen percent of black males will end up in jail. So I'm not exactly sure that the actual number of criminals has decreased. My main point though was the amount of explicity violent material has grown and it isn't the Lone Ranger anymore LOL.

Prostitutes are rarely the "avant gard" self-employed we imagine. It's pure exploitation in most cases. Usually young women are forced into work to support habits, feed themselves or their family, or other desperate measures. I don't know if you have children - but would you advocate that your daughter or son work as a prostitute? Honestly? Most of them risk their lifes with AIDS and violent, drunk customers on an hourly basis. Some/many of them were sexually abused as children.

More food for thought: "92% of women engaged in prostitution said they wanted to leave prostitution, but couldn't because they lack basic human services such as a home, job training, health care, counseling and treatment for drug or alcohol addiction."

I am not the big moralist you imagine me to be. It's just common sense, a good knowledge of history, and personal experience that tells me that a society doesn't survive on empty rhetoric. It was a long held thesis that moral decay led to the death of a culture - perhaps there is merit there?

I'm not against religious, athiests, nor moral relativists. I'm against the immoral, pure animals that have no reason or education. Most people don't understand that these activities and lifestyles put you at greater risks than normal.

In the end it's a statistical numbers game, play all you like. Just know than if your the looser - it'll be more than a game.

Here's some more FUD for your pipe. True story...

Oh great - so now let's cherry-pick some isolated incidents to bolster our claims. We can do this all night and I bet you run out before I do.
In the meantime, "The heads of America's 500 biggest companies received an aggregate 54% pay raise last year". How much was your pay raise? While at the same time, real average wages have been declining since the early 70s - roughly in unison with the decline of union influence.
So the question becomes: who will help you look out for your own self-interest? The CEO whose priority is to pump the stock price for the Board of Directors? Or a democratically-elected union representative?
Why is it that smart people can be so dense?

"That's hardly significant. Statistically, you can't really call that a correlation."

Ok, Statty Mc Statenstein, do the math for us. I've included a handy link to test for significance, all you have to do is plug in the numbers and give us your answers.

http://www.coolth.com/siginsig.htm
http://www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu/2000/techbrief/t echbrief5.htm
http://www.visualstatistics.net/Visual%20Statistic s%20Multimedia/z_square_ratio.htm

Since we all like to have facts that support our arguments, all you have to do is present your math so we can verify that the is "hardly significant".

so my above post will have more backing: http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/usa.htm (scroll down a small bit and read from the heading titled "Prostitution:" to see exactly what I'm referring to) a lot of the girls are girls who ran away from home, just to abused more. You CANNOT in anyway look at this as a simple "sex for money" issue, there is a huge difference. By saying that you are saying that statuoratory rape, and child abuse and abuse in general is appropriate. You all keep saying "sex between two consenting adults"... who said they were adults? Great, i understand ok yeah whatever nice hypothetical philosphies and views. Now lets take a look at REALITY.

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/conspiracy_theory/the _paranoid_mentality/The_paranoid_style.html

We tried that at my alma mater. A number of bikes were soon found at the bottom of the duck pond. :(

So he is giving a tiny percentage of the money he made using the most slimy and despicable methods known to mankind

For some reason I have this feeling that you haven't seen much of what "mankind" is capable of when it comes to slimy, despicable methods of making money (Example ?)

Thomas-

Like this.

I think it's probably just fair to say that the number of Linux-scriptkiddie wannabies is as nonzero as the number of Windows-scriptkiddie wannabies,

I think you're misusing the term nonzero in this context. As far as I understand a Von Neumann stated that zerosum game theory indicates an "I win, you lose!" mentality.

That would be (since I don't know squat about sports): let's say that football "team a" plays football "team b". Team A wins the game. All of the members of "team a" were playing to a common goal...winning the game! Therefore, all of the members of "team a" were playing a "nonzero sum game" whose goal was to "win". So were "team b", but "team b" as a whole lost the zerosum game.

First, check out the Myers-Briggs personality typing. I found it to be incredibly insightful into how I look at the world. If you're a 'big picture' type, this can easily account for why your grades are sub-par - you may find details such as homework and attendance tedious. These are things that don't make a difference to the final goal, yet could be key elements of how you are graded.

If you haven't picked a school yet, I'd recommend the URI International Engineering Program. It's a 5 year dual-degree program that gets you a BS Engineering and a BA in Foreign Language/Culture. You pick the Engineering Department and Language. I needed something more than just engineering and found that this scratched my itch. I matched Comp Eng and German and am now 5 years into an awesome international career.

Frankly, I want to hear about the other projects that won the URI Outstanding Intellectual Property award this year:

"Single Switch Automated Page Turner"
and
"Novel Bisubstrate Antifungal Derivatives"
link

I'd say that as long as the rest of the world is laughing at us, we're doing just fine.

As far as I can tell (since I've never been), there is only one reason to go to Cambodia, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with checking your email while you're spending time in Svay Pak...

Linux

Bash ...should both be compatible.

Cool spook toys -- all very sexy.

But what about the assassination devices -- shellfish toxins, flechette umbrellas, that sort of thing?

What about MK-ULTRA -- the covert testing of hallucinogens on unsuspecting civilians?

What about CIA/Mafia alliances?

What about Operation Phoenix?

-kgj

Linux laundry detergent

you've only got one week left to get a dashboard cradle and hands-free kit fitted - don't get caught out.

That's rather silly. It's a feel-good partial-solution... something which doesn't threaten cellphone business interests in any way (and only helps them sell more kits)

Studies show that the greatest danger of telephoning and driving is not from having one hand distracted with a machine (because many folks safely handle CDs and eat food while driving), but the mental load of being engaged in a conversation with somebody not in the vehicle.

But, I suppose that until we've got a few more years of fatality records as proof, the public won't believe this enough to influence law. (And even if they do believe it, prehaps talking and driving will be so important to them that safety will be voluntarily surrendered)

"Is Linus Trovalds actually a pseudo-name for a drug-running FBI-sponsored company?"

Of course not. It is a Russian Laundry Detergent. Everyone knows that.

photo here

using Linux detergent box for Boxen

Another boxen photo

Trademark S/N 75735641

Status page for MS-Linux trademark, [hint, someone pick it up quick!]

Here's the paper so you can read all about it yourself.

> No thanks. I'll stick with Windows, which allows
> me more time to make out with my girlfriend.

Hmmm.

Windows: BSOD + trashed disk for the second time in six months. I'm sorry hun, I can't go out with you now, I have to reinstall my Windows box AND all the applications, AND all the configurations.

GNU/Linux: Redhat XX has been out for awhile now. Hmm, girlfriend is going away this weekend. I suppose I'll upgrade. /usr/local? Oh, that's a separate partition. No need to worry about those programs. RPMS? They're all in one directory. rpm -U *.rpm Configuration? Maybe 1/2 hour of copying files from the old backed up /etc to the new one, and all user files are saved on /home, which is a separate partition. No fuss, no muss, no bother.

Which saves me more time? I like GNU/Linux because computer maintenance and projects fit MY schedule, not me slaved to the schedule of an OS that is little more than the equivalent of a petulant child.

Oh, and my girlfriend runs GNU/Linux too. All of our computers work all the time, 24/7/365, no matter what we do with them.


The Beetle is one of them, by the way.

Right, of course it's conceivable that the word 'Windows' is used to describe something other than Microsoft's Windows, like let's say, windows. Whereas for Linux, you just pretty much get linux... oh, and this thing (and I doubt it generates a lot of the hits)

Perhaps someone could make a laundry detergent named Windows and Microsoft would be forced to get a sense of humor.

This is not an uncommon practice. Here at URI we have a Packeteer box installed between the Residence Hall network and the edge routers. It limits bandwidth to P2P applications to 10MB/s (burstable to 20MB/s). This is on a network with 60MB/s to I1 and 65MB/s to I2.

This is a difficult question to answer, but the answer is full of totally unrelated semi-googlewhacks and curious links.

great post, really informative!

I was interested in the wobble aspect... the way I had heard it was that the outlawed bullets were marginally stable in air (perhaps aided by the spin), but weren't stable in tissue. I'm not an expert, and don't know to what extent the aerodynamics are affected by the density/density consistency of the medium.

I found this reference on high-speed bullet damage. Even without tumbling in the body, high speed bullets generate a temporary cavity of up to 30x the bullet diameter (existing for 5-10msec, generating 100-200atm pressure!). There's a cool picture of this cavity in a gelatin block.

I'm a teacher and LK has things right. Here in Rhode Island, we have a program called Teachers and Technology and, even though this program provided each teacher who participated with a laptop and two weeks of training, most teachers shun any thought of technology. I work in a middle school running a network of imacs and powermacs. The network has no log in, no security, no nothing. Turn on the machine and, if you like, reformat the hard drive! Easy. Getting people at school to think about anything new (let alone new technology) is near impossible. Of the listserv of 3000+ RITTI participants, only one member will talk about Linux with me. It's frightening that I'm a member of this group and that these are the people responsible for helping our children grow. Ugh. Just nutty.

You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.

Hmmm...something interesting about those graphs...once Napster was banned, incoming traffic got cut by roughly 60%, but outgoing traffic went to zero! (No, of course, it only went near zero, indistinguishable from 0 on that scale.) So can't universities just set some sort of per-capita per-diem upload cap, and free up all of that outgoing bandwidth? Or just go asyncronous (i wish I could spell) somehow? It wouldn't cut down on downloading, or recieving any illegal material, but it would sure go a long way to solving that bandwidth problem...

--Josh Rosenberg (Colbey)

Take a look at http://www.uri.edu/mrtg/jvnc.html

You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.

That's funny... My girlfriend lives on the uri campus. I just talked to her on ICQ and she's using Napster right now with no problems... Maybe they're limiting the bandwidth it uses for now, but they don't seem to have completely cut access.