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Make sure you equip your next satellite with a Termination Tether. It won't work in geosynchronous orbit, but you'll be moving your bird out of the slot with the last of its fuel anyway.

I did some work with similar technology doing postgraduate work at USU. Here's how it works.
When the brain is active, it gives out tiny amounts of charged particles known as bosuns. The harder a part of the brain is working, the more concentrated the bosuns. So what you do is you take a nice, non-conductive material like a plastic helmet and the you coat it with silicone (watch out, that stuff is carcinogenic) Then you dope the silicone with an acidic mixture of carbonated water, concentrated orange juice, citric acid, apartame, potassium benzoate, citrus pectin, potassium citrate, caffeine, gum arabic, natural flavors, brominated vegetable oil, yellow number 5 and erythorbic acid. Then you place a zinc and a copper electrode in each of the doped patches. IBM did a lot of the heavy lifting on this and they call it a silicone on insulator, plastic grid array. When a bosun interacts with a part this network, it generates a small electrical charge that can be measured. If you use a fine enough network and a little uzbekistanium (to reduce signal leak) you can determine the location and intensity of brainwave activity. This has a lot of potential.
--Shoeboy

It is quite obvious that Jon Katz has gotten his history lessons from listening to the Internet Town Hall rather than by actually looking up his facts in <*GASP*> a book!

The first time they approached the people who run the network. They wanted us to use their modifed browser on all computers at the university. This included all privatly owned computers in the dorms as well as faculty computers in offices, and even dial-in users. Additionally the university would be required to provide network access to C.P. so that they could sell their "service" to private appartment complexes in the area. No guarntee that those appartments would not have USU students. We are not allowed by law to provide network access to people not associated with the university. And one other little thing...they wanted a 5-year exclusive contract with no commitment on C.P.'s part that they would upgrade any part of their system to keep up with the times. We were to trust that they would.

So, we were supposed to force everyone associated with the university to use a specific browser. We were also supposed to provide Internet access to anyone that happend to live in an appartment where they resold our bandwidth. We got a 10% kickback on the net proffits and we would be stuck with it for five years. We said no.

The second time they approached the university administration directly. The story they told them was "hey look, FREE MONEY!" Since administrators tend to be whores, they were for it. I mean what problem could there be with free money? FREE MONEY! Additionally they "gave" transmiters, radios, etc., to the university to get a high speed connection to the president's home. This was a gift "free from obligation." It took an act of war on us mere techies to convince the administration that this was not a good idea. After it was clear that we were not going to bite C.P. took back the "gift" of the free radio link equipment.

There are lotst of details that are too messy to get into, but we figured that this would be a tar baby, and we would be sorry if we had taken the offer.

-g

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations

When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course, you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

As a practical matter, a mere failure to speak out upon occassions where no statement is asked or expect from you, and when the utterance of an uncalled for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of your father's, offering you a place at his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if you any of young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations, and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

John J. Chapman Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

If you'd like to drop them a line, here's their email addresses and here are their fax and phone numbers.

Tell them the hardcopy edition of the cluetrain is well worth buying.

It will be helpful for their 21st Century Project:

Beaver City has chosen a 21st Centruy Project which centers around the "Electronic Highway" with a goal of becoming an electronic "Smart Communities" as an emphasis. Some of the action steps Beaver City will accomplish in this effort are:

• Organizing a "Smart Communities" Committee
• Completing a Beaver City Home Page
• Continue to develop links to information and resources related to the Beaver City area.

AOLserver is an excellent web server... totally multithreaded, persistent database connections, database abstraction layer, extremely fast.

ACS is an excellent toolkit. Anyone with a technical mind that has gone through its data model will notice how well thought and implemented it is. Really slick. The port for PostgreSQL has its first beta out, and a new beta due in the next couple of weeks. USU Free Software and GNU/Linux Club website runs with ACS/pg and it is great... totally free source software. http://linux.usu.edu. Download ACS/pg at http://acspg.benadida.com and build a serious, reliable, and scalable web site.

Philip Greenspun does a great job when it comes to the web and database backed websites. He supports Free Software (his toolkit and tools are all free) and gives away US$ 10,000 every year in a prize for someone who creates a good, free, web service. He and his company have trained hundreds of people on web services for free, and ArsDigita pays and treats its programmers REALLY well.

As for Oracle, I don't know why you folks cry so much about it. It is the best RDBMS around, period. It's not for everyone though. If you have really important data, you probably have the money to pay for it. Someday PostgreSQL will get there too. It has improved VASTLY. MySQL is not even trying to solve the problems that RDBMSs were designed to solve. Sorry, but it is the truth.

If you are used to Apache and PHP, fine. Go with it, it's your tool of choice. But don't let your religion get in front of your technical mind to the point where you simply can't distinguish what's true and what's not. Let the technical details speak for themselves.

http://sls.mcs.usu.edu/~kurto/lynx/faq.html

Other notable Amiga-derived features include:

• palette of 4096 colors (16 per line, I think, using Amiga "Copper"-like tricks.)
• Blitter w/ logical ops and scaling features (more powerful than Amiga)
• Previously mentioned sprite hardware (much more powerful than Amiga)
• Sound specs suspiciously similar to Amiga

The next step was moving away from integer ops and sprites, into true 3D. Hence the 3D0 (the next RJ Mical, Dave Needle (and David Morse(?)) collaboration).

Just to get things out in the air up front, let me say that I am one of the consultants in the labs that the previous poster mentioned. It's a perfectly legit policy. If you have a reason to be looking at objectionable material (ie. human sexuality, art, poly-sci) you are expected to be discreet. There are obviously machines in corners and against walls where you can turn a monitor if you must view that stuff. The lab policy doesn't directly address such material. It's actually covered under the student code.

Viewing porn just for the hell of it? Well you are certainly allowed to do so in Utah, I can attest to that. The state, church, etc. will not stop you from doing so. What they will do is not pay for you to do it, no more than they would pay for a WW II revisionist to put up their propaganda. Or pay for Klan members to march through campus. You have the right to say what you want, but you don't have the right to expect me to provide you the pulpit or to sit and listen.

At my current position, I work for a geotechnical company - so all the servers are named after rocks... Granite is the primary server, basalt, felspar, dolomite, etc... Using names that are known in our industry helps... The users don't need to know what server is doing email, web, database, etc... I prefer transparent networks, so the users don't get in a knot on where to find things... I name printers after trees simply because they are spitting out dead cousins..... Workstations are named after their primary user, use or location.... I even go as far having logical drive mappings - U:\ for users, T:\ transfer, P:\ applications, etc. It's all the same in the different offices... Since some employees work in multiple offices, they don't have to learn a new network topology...

If you're interested, I wrote a few years back a Netware Directory Service Suggested Naming Standards for NDS objects.... NDS Naming Guidelines

Maybe worthwhile, YMMV...

.mark

I am a student at Utah State University and my English 1010 class is taught online. The teacher is actually a teacher at Salt Lake Community College which is about 100 mi. from Logan, Ut. They have online chats in our groups we were split up into. There are message boards that we post on a certian discussion at least MWF for attendance. Then we get weekly homework that we save in RTF and upload to the server. I quite like it, if I get my homework done early I just have to participate in the discussions.

USU offers a few other online courses but I don't remember what they are.

I am a student at Utah State University and my English 1010 class is taught online. The teacher is actually a teacher at Salt Lake Community College which is about 100 mi. from Logan, Ut. They have online chats in our groups we were split up into. There are message boards that we post on a certian discussion at least MWF for attendance. Then we get weekly homework that we save in RTF and upload to the server. I quite like it, if I get my homework done early I just have to participate in the discussions.

USU offers a few other online courses but I don't remember what they are.

Last week I watched a video presentation of a seminar discussion -- the subject being "music" and "learning". The speaker, Dr. Michael Ballam at Utah State University, related that part of what solved Einstein's early learning difficulties was that his mother purchased a violin for him, and as he began to learn to play, his learning abilities improved as well. Dr. Ballam also mentioned (quoting from biographers) that later in life Einstein thought of physics in nearly "musical terms."

Big laugh, right? Not really. According to neuroscientists, the parietal lobes of the brain seem to be the "interpreters" for sensory signals from other places in the brain: (vision, HEARING, motor, sensory and memory). [Thick quote alert... highlighting, mine] (from American neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire):

• "Whatever the skill employed in thought - that of logic, mathematics, language, spatial or musical symbols - we must not forget that it is driven by the Jamesian processes, undergoes flights and perchings, is susceptible to great variations in attention, and in general is fueled by metaphorical and metonymic processes. It is only when the results of many parallel, fluctuating, temporal processes of perception, concept formation, memory, and attentional states are "stored" in a symbolic object - a sequence of logical propositions, a book, a work of art, a musical work - that we have the impression that thought is pure."

(Small bio note here: I am ADD (attention deficit disorder), but survived and even did well in school, so long as I was also involved in music because my spatial awareness went way up.)

Interesting stuff, eh?

P.S. I'm trying to see if the text of Dr. Ballams' seminar is available online, and will post a link if I find it.)