Slashdot Mirror

I don't see any point in continuing this. You are clearly utterly ignorant of Libertarianism and you don't care to learn, otherwise you would have read the Wikipedia article which would have answered your questions.

I expect you will respond that I've failed to make my point and therefore I am not responding to your points. I assert here that I have responded to your points by providing a pointer to a detailed 3rd party article and I now find myself in the position of "trying to teach a pig to sing".

You might also benefit from reading the articles about Cecil Rhodes, Rhodesia, and Zimbabwe. More on Cecil Rhodes is here, here, here, here, and here. Unfortunately, none of those sites support your assertion that the British government couldn't stop him (or that it even wanted to) but then life's not always the way we want it to be.

That's what it was in the 90's, right now it's worth about 0.704932 USD per 1 AUD.

In the 90's, it was worth more, and in the 80's it was worth even more.

( http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/fasts/2000/DollarClock.p df , remove the space)

Why is a kilobyte 1024 bytes?

With a wonderfully ugly color scheme too.

I believe Dave Barry has prior art on this, Year in Review.

JUNE:
17 -- True Item: A consumer in Seattle reports finding a hypodermic syringe in a can of Diet Pepsi.

JULY:
1 -- A consumer in Detroit reports finding a switchblade knife in a can of Diet Pepsi.

AUGUST
3 -- A consumer in Baton Rouge reports finding a machete in a can of Diet Pepsi.

SEPTEMBER
1 -- A consumer in Boston reports finding an AK-47 assault rifle in a can of Diet Pepsi.
5 -- In a move strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association, the California State Legislature passes a law requiring a five-day "cooling-off" period on purchases of Diet Pepsi.

OCTOBER
1 -- A consumer in Phoenix reports finding a nuclear submarine in a can of Diet Pepsi.

NOVEMBER
1 -- A consumer in Detroit reports finding a full combat division of the Iraqi army in a can of Diet Pepsi.

DECEMBER
1 -- A consumer in Orlando reports finding the Ark of the Covenant in a can of Diet Pepsi.

When I was a student at Sydney University in the early 80's I belonged to a caving club (SUSS) that used to abseil down the face of the Unis Library during Student Orientation Week. This building was about 9 stories high and clad with copper - very nicely tarnished to an elegant hue. One day, when I was just getting out of my abseling gear at the bottom a guy from 'BUGAUP' (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, very active in the 80's in Australia, they used to write 'BUGGA UP' over walls) approached me with an interesting idea. This guy asked if I could abseil down and use Brasso to graffiti the copper cladding! Geez man, I did want to get a degree. Still it was tempting :-)

Here is the research paper published by Manos on the topic.

There are some interesting PDFs of papers co-written by Steven Manos available including these two:

• Novel fibre Bragg grating design using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms
• Optical Fibre Design with Evolutionary Strategies: Computational implementation and results

I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what's going on, but the first of those two is worth looking at if you have even a passing interest. The second looks to be a little more towards the "deep end".

There are some interesting PDFs of papers co-written by Steven Manos available including these two:

• Novel fibre Bragg grating design using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms
• Optical Fibre Design with Evolutionary Strategies: Computational implementation and results

I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what's going on, but the first of those two is worth looking at if you have even a passing interest. The second looks to be a little more towards the "deep end".

It is specifically referring to the fabrication of fibre itself.

Optical Fibre Technology Centre:
http://www.oftc.usyd.edu.au/?section=fibre

I know it's not directly relevant to the question, but FWIW the rather excellent Freedom Force uses Python as its scripting language.

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice. -- ChristopherAlexander

Or is there a service pack or a patch I missed?

Yeah. One came out. Please follow this one simple step.

Report back on how well it worked.

No, the main problem is that unless you are generating your power using only renewable resources, you are likely causing a disproportionately high amount of pollution.

Wind power, solar thermal power, geothermal power... these are promising and may eventually be lower impact than non-renewable sources.

I would definitely choose solar thermal power as the most likely replacement for non-renewable source power.

Check out lout. I found it easier to work with than LaTeX. YMMV.

If you can wait, you may also consider using Jeff's followup to lout, Nonpareil. The specs are done, but he's still working on a compiler.

Well, it is damned important to us, seeing as it made us into what we are. It made our brains grow! And our teeth are suited to both meat and vegetables.

Meat is perfectly natural and good for you, as long as you have a balanced diet. That goes for anything. Too much of something is bad for you. The problem today is more that people eat too much meat than that we eat meat at all.

Meat eaters - be proud. You are continuing our predecessors' great tradition of eating meat to be more clever.

Meat eaters taste better.

Graphics on the Sorcerer sound impressive, with a resolution of 512 x 240, when most machines of the era supported a maximum of 320 x 200.
...
The Sorcerer instead chose another method entirely, which was to not really to have graphics at all. Instead they allowed the user to re-define the character set (the shapes of the letters on screen) and used these in lieu of pixel-addressable graphics.

A more surprising limitation, given the machine's genesis, is the lack of sound output. Enterprising developers then standardized on attaching a speaker to two pins of the parallel port

For old machine cool case mods, surely you'd have to go the OTHER way.

I mean get an old PDP-11, gut it and put boards and extensions everywhere, imagine rebuilding the PSU as a set of USB access points, or as a beowulf cluster of Mini-ITX systems :-)

Or put an old IBM Mainframe in the basement, wire up the lights and away you go.

Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows 95 on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows 95 CD. To my surprise he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned on the oven. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:

12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE10 E510CC98D444AA08E1324

'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said.

'No but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'

One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

ref

Well if you must know look here..

Size and density of particles, mist or aerosol - determines site of deposition. Maximum alveolar deposition at 1-5 micron size. Airway deposition 5-10 micron; nose 20 micron; fume 0.2 micron - not deposited (e.g. metal fume fever)[1]

The first is that large particles tend to settle out of the air more rapidly than do small ones. The settling rate for sub-micron particles is so slow as to be inconsequential. These particles stay suspended in air and drift with ambient air currents. A 0.01 microns particle will sink through air at a rate of about 140 days to settle1 meter in air. A 0.1 microns particle will settle about 10 times as fast, and will require about 14 days to settle 1 meter. A 1 micron particle will require about one hour to settle 1 meter. The point is that these small particles remain in the air long enough to be inhaled, and they will remain in the air long enough to be swept around by ambient air currents.[2]

> Really that easy?
> Why do I get the sneaking suspicion you won't be convinced that easily.

I'm not convinced because I asked for (see emphasis):...

Here's an easy way to blow my point out of the water completely !! -- just find a tree with more than 5500 tree-rings in its trunk. Not radio-carbon dating mind you, nor some fancy extrapolation scheme across different trunks -- just a tree with 5500+ rings in one trunk... Like this one: a still-living 4700 ring bristlecone pine [sonic.net], or this one: a 4844-ring pine [sonic.net] cut down (!) just a few decades ago.

But you gave me this: (see emphasis)

Dr. Charles Ferguson of the University of Arizona has, by matching up overlapping tree rings of living and dead bristlecone pines, carefully built a tree ring sequence ...

I asked you for 5,500+ rings in the same trunk since there are many problems with ring-matching across different trees. From this article:

Recent research on seasonal effects on tree rings in other trees in the same genus, the plantation pine Pinus radiata, has revealed that up to five rings per year can be produced and extra rings are often indistinguishable, even under the microscope, from annual rings. ...

The extended tree ring chronologies are far from absolute, in spite of the popular hype. To illustrate this we only have to consider the publication and subsequent withdrawal of two European tree-ring chronologies. According to David Rohl,3 the Sweet Track chronology from Southwest England was 're-measured' when it did not agree with the published dendrochronology from Northern Ireland (Belfast). Also, the construction of a detailed sequence from southern Germany was abandoned ...

The author of this article should know... he's a tree physiologist. I think multiple rings in a year for some trees and not others, would throw a spanner into ring matching, no?

So, due to the fact multiple rings *can* occur in one year (but it's rare) I asked for 5,500+ rings rather than 5,000. But hey... 5,500+ rings, even with multiple rings, in a single trunk shouldn't be a probem, eh? I mean there really isn't a "reason" for a 5,000 year limit is there? For one thing, the last ice-age supposedly ended 10,000 years ago. For another, we're already upto at 4,700 rings ... no 4,800! ... almost there... just 700 rings left to go.


> > ...consider visiting the Answers in Genesis site.
> Do you really think those crackpots have any idea what they're talking about?

Actually, they do. For the article quoted above, you could always take this up with the people who awarded the author his Ph.D.

that bug was fixed.

Locking it up in the glass of a CRT is a pretty damned good way to keep discarded lead out of the water table. In fact, I can't think of a better one. Can you?

Yes.

My argument is that 99.9% of environmental scientists are neither chemical nor physical engineers.

Unfortunately, the reverse is true. 99.9% of chemical and physical engineers are not environmental scientists.

Environmental science is hardcore - it requires chemistry, biology, earth science AND a specialised series of courses. I picked the university of sydney at random (high google page rank,) but the requirements are similar here at Columbia.

The environmental scientists know their chemistry - the chemical engineers don't know their biology, meteorology or geology, which is where the problem lies (I don't want to badmouth everyone in that discipline; I'm a molecular biologist but I make an effort to keep abreast of the broader context of my work. I know some chemical engineers who are quite savvy on what happens outside of a synthesis facility.)

Ah good, someone got in before me :) It is definatly a good idea to separate out the GUI part when dealing with cross-platform applications, since a lot of portability problems reside there.

In all honesty, I don't recommand Qt or wxWindows - they are great toolkits, but you lose out heavily on productivity compared to visual development environments with GUI builders. While both of these have associated builder tools, I don't consider them very mature of capable compared to VB or Delphi/C Builder. There is also a write-once-debug-and-tweak-everywhere concern (just getting wxWindows looking good on Windows and Solaris takes some effort).

Java is a great choice as it is supported on many platforms, has powerful GUI classes, a couple of builder products, and has several means for client/server support, including CORBA. But for UI applications it isn't hugely productive (strangely enough).

Some of your other options include ParaGUI and SDL, gTk, GraphApp, V, Mozilla's XPToolkit and XUL, and WideStudio.

I have grappled with exactly this question (legacy C/C++ needing to go cross platform with GUIs), and the best answer I've come up with so far is to keep your main code in C/C++ (since you have the legacy code AND the skills), define a clear UI abstraction layer, and create the UI in a scripting language such as Tcl or Python. Use SWIG to tie the script to native C functions.

I have more experience with Tcl/Tk, and believe it is more widely portable (especially the GUI consistency), but it is slower and arguably more difficult to program than Python. Still, this depends on what skills you can acquire, and what your UI requirements are.

Prechelt has an empirical comparison of some languages, including C/C++, Python, Tcl and Perl, and most importantly he has productivity figures! Keith Waclena has a Language Crisis page of comparisons, and Doug Bagley hosts the Great Computer Language Shootout. There are all invaluable resources for determining a balance between portability, functionality and productivity.

As a side note. The article mentioned that a "computer scientist at Sydney University helped Analyise the images to work out what the componenets were."

I had the pleasure of being a student on Alan's for some time. He was intensly interested in this sort of thing. He was involved in studying Babbage's work, and in the re-creation of Babbage's Difference Engine. I remember standing with him in front of a display case containing gears from one of these projects as he explained how they had been manufactured.

Alan Bromely died on August 16 this year after a long battle with cancer. I remember in 1998 I was studing a subject taught by Alan. Twice during one semester he was unable to give lectures due to his chemo therapy, but he continued to teach, and always had time to explain something to anyone who wanted to listen.

The Babbage project
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald
A university publication

You mean something like this?

Magnetic RAM died a long time ago, friend, to a much more economical solution dubbed the "semiconductor."

And the ocean has more than algae. Plankton consists of many creatures, many of which build shells. Carbonate shells. The same stuff as the white cliffs of Dover. That stuff sinks. Some of it also dissolves at a certain depth.

What happens to fish skeletons? And fish waste? Sinks.

:P

This morning on my way to work I bought copy of Linux Format to read on the train (LXF28 June 2002). On page 8 (Linux Webwatch) was a section on creating music on Linux which included a few interesting links.

Ardour - record 24 or more channels of 32-bit audio at 48kHz

TK-707 - a soft drum machine based on Roland's precursor to the legendary 808

Slab - another audio recording tool that consists of a virtual tape deck, a mixer, a wave editor and some audio mixing tools.

Open Music This project provides a spectrum of Licenses for musicians to realease their music under (influensed by the GPL).

Imagine how easy it would be to write code using this?

The civil engineering faculty at Sydney University has another (quite informative) analysis here:

http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/wtc.htm

This is quite a nice page on why the WTC collapsed.
Im surprised how quick the response is to write these articles.

http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/wtc.htm

The University of Sydney has a short description of the WTC's structure and offer an explanation for why the towers completely collapsed after being struck. The link: www.civil.usyd.edu.au/wtc.htm

You must have missed Ook, a language designed for orangutangs.

Another natural language language is Chef. Programs are written like cooking recipies. The above link has examples of a Hello World and a Fibonacci sequence generator. I wouldn't want to eat either of them, though. The ingredients are the variable names, so some of the concoctions sound downright nasty. Although, the Fibonacci generator only requires 100g flour, 250 g butter, and one egg, and it's accompanying Caramel Sauce (the recursive function) requires a cup of white sigar, a cup of brown sugar, and a single vanilla bean.

Well, actually, the space station has mainly lables in Russian on the Russian made components (and they are always augmented by English lables). Also, the main language for this space station is English, but US astronauts are taught Russian during their training time in Russia.

At a seminar by one of the US astronauts who was my lecturer when I was at uni, which I attended a few months ago, he (Greg Chamitoff) mentioned the interaction between cultures on the ISS. He said that during training, they (American astronauts) spend time in Star City, Russia training with the Russian cosmonauts and equipment, and practicing Russian as well.

The good thing is, the astronauts know it is still a station in development (appropriate name, alpha :-), and they also know that there will be a lot of interaction problems with other nationalities on this, but they see it as a learning exercise, and a challenge not an obstacle.

The reason for this "pomp and circumstance" is because NASA is portrayed (by the media) and so perceived by the public as a money spender rather than a scientific organisation.

I recently attended a seminar by Greg Chamitoff a former lecturer at my university who is now a NASA astronaut. The main audience of the seminar was intended to be aeronautical engineers. Greg went into the whole process of becoming an astonaut as well as the design and construction of the ISS. The failures, and the steep learning curves involved especially when working with multiple nationalities is astounding, but will bear good fruit. Information about such obstacles is not usually advertised because politicians will pounce on them out of ignorance of the whole process. The media like short soundbites, and so the whole procedure, except mishaps, gets cutout, and people are left with the impression that NASA (and other space agencies) are useless.

People in the know, know better than to trust the media about anything, let alone science

The reason for this "pomp and circumstance" is because NASA is portrayed (by the media) and so perceived by the public as a money spender rather than a scientific organisation.

I recently attended a seminar by Greg Chamitoff a former lecturer at my university who is now a NASA astronaut. The main audience of the seminar was intended to be aeronautical engineers. Greg went into the whole process of becoming an astonaut as well as the design and construction of the ISS. The failures, and the steep learning curves involved especially when working with multiple nationalities is astounding, but will bear good fruit. Information about such obstacles is not usually advertised because politicians will pounce on them out of ignorance of the whole process. The media like short soundbites, and so the whole procedure, except mishaps, gets cutout, and people are left with the impression that NASA (and other space agencies) are useless.

People in the know, know better than to trust the media about anything, let alone science

I don't know where you got that story from, but according to this guy the art director for The Doors painted petroglyphs in oil-based paint on a blank cave wall...

Interferometry is very neat - I always thought the VLA was bigger than that though - ATNF is 6km long (in the east west dirn - the north south thack is new and not used yet - awaiting reciever upgrades)
Problem is, you do actually lose information - all those gaps in baselines, say if there is no basline between 2 scopes with distance x metres, then you are missing a peice of infomation in the fourrier plane - and you have to deconvolve to fix this up - which no one knows whether really works - and under what circumstances it breaks down. It also introduces quite bad side effects for some images - I am dealing with a source now that beams in with a difference flux once imaged, compared to before the fourrier transform - not good.
Incedentally, on Contact, that alien sound sounds awfully like our helium cryogen pumps :)

The reason we don't have these large arrays of optical telescopes has to do with the nature of light. Radio waves have such a large wavelength that aligning several telescopes along the exact parabolic curve of a simulated large reflector is not difficult (radio waves can be anywhere from several inches to several hundred feet long).

The scopes arem't arranged in a parabola - a delay is introduced by a very fast and large computer :), to offset the geometric delay. Here at Usyd, we have a 1 km array in optical which sort of works (not very sensetive yet though - awaiting new detectors and people)

An optical telescope array presents a much more difficult problem. Light in the visible spectrum has very small wavelengths (less than an inch). Thus, aligning even two telescopes along the proper parabolic curve for interferometry is extraordinarily difficult on earth.

An inch?!! Less than micrometer! And a micrometer is fairly easy to adjust for - just the sensetivity is very low - you need to collects photons in real time and try to correct for the atmosphere. We dont have the luxury of 22 metre dishes - our siderealstats are only 20 cm wide each.

The first one is the NGST, or Next Generation Space Telescope. This will have a large solar shield (basically, a large sheet of mylar to reflect heat away from the mirrors). It will have several octagonal mirror surfaces, and will unfold to be about 8 meters across (Hubble is less than 3). It will also have various infrared and microwave cameras built in, so dangerous "upgrade" missions won't be required nearly as much.

It's going to L2, which means it will never be serviceable - have to get it right the first time. But if it does work, it is in a stable point, so it will last forever (for small values of "ever").

All in all, though, there is so much left to learn from deep space, it almost makes you cry. I find the whole endeavor rather exciting.

Hell yeah! I personally am watching out for the Square Km Array , and somewhat hoping it ends up out here in .au, 'cause it will be coming online just about the right time for me to do science on it :).

I presented a little paper at a small gathering in '98.

see the pdf

Anyway, I can't remember thinking this was novel enough to patent. Obviously I'm never going to be rich.

You do not need much processing power to run UAV -- Progress spacecraft is a pretty advanced UAV -- can dock automatically for instance, and it's computer probably has just a few megs of core memory.

"Applications for this system are potentially frightening," said an intelligence source. "One expert I spoke with estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV -- a pilotless aircraft."

Hey, cool! I never expected to see a Julius Sumner Miller reference on slashdot. The old prof. spent much time here in Australia, and was much loved by the public - due to his appearance in a long-running series of Cadbury's chocolate commericials, nearly everyone in my generation can ask "Why is it so?" in a Millerian accent :)

But he wasn't British (or even Australian): he was American. There seems to be some confusion on this point (even the web page for the Julius Sumner Miller Fellowship at the University of Sydney refers to his "unmistakeable Canadian accent" but in the prologue to his second book of Millergrams, Miller himself refers to his "native New England". Unless he meant the AUSTRALIAN New England ...

A spacecraft could suck ionized material in the front end, accelerate it down the middle and then expell it out the rear.

it's called a Bussard Ramjet

Amorphis

Thanks for the comments on Python! I'm sitting here, Python book by my side, currently trying to learn it. Was getting disheartened but reading posts like yours fill me with confidence again.

Glad to hear it!

I personally learnt Python from Programming Python, from ORA, which is a fairly good book, but I soon learnt that the Online Documentation was invaluable. Especially the Library Reference.

For those who are interested, I have a small python cgi here . Just to pretend this is on-topic... "I'd hate to write even that in VB". :)

-Spiv.

Personally I feel that MRAM is a beautifully ioronic idea.

Anyone have a good place to send the kids to show them what CORE really was?

You might want to point people at http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/pdp-11/ core.html which has a nice, brief summary of the technology.

Other sites worth looking at are:

http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/core.html
http://www.computer-mus eum.org/collections/ferrite_mem.html
http://www.science.uva.n l/faculteit/museum/CoreMemory.html
http://www.fortunecity.com/ marina/reach/435/coremem.htm

The last of these is particularly interesting (if somewhat self contradictory, as it describes Univacs miniaturised planes which are only 4.5" square, and cost $6000 each for 1 kilobits of storage.

Mark..........

• The one book I've read on this, Rachel Nordlinger's Ph.D. dissertation, Constructive Case: Evidence from Australian Languages, is available in Amazon, and luckily in a friendly university library. Also, her M.A. thesis is a description of the language Wambaya.
• Ken Hale has done *tons* of research in Australian languages, especially in Warlpiri.
• Jane Simpson is also an important scholar in these languages.

Off the top of my head, I can't get you any more references, but these should be enough for you to find the relevant literature.

Of course, this is all academic linguistics work, so if you haven't done linguistics at all, you may simply not understand a thing...

Anyway, the main idea is that languages can identify grammatical relations (subject, object) in two main ways: configurationally, or by the arrangement of words and phrases, or nonconfigurationally, by using inflective morphemes. Nearly all european languages rely heavily on configuration to this effect, though they may use morphology a bit. A large number of Australian languages, however, rely mostly on morphology. This requires them to have a more complicated morphology, since the syntax is no help in deciding what word modifies what, or what is the subject, and such.

For example, in languages like this, a noun and its modifier do not have to be adjacent. A sentence like "The rabid dog has bitten the children" could be said something like "Rabid-1 has bitten children-2 dog-1", where 1 and 2 are different case morphemes; by the case you know that "rabid" goes with "dog". In that sentence, as long as "has" is the second word, any word order is ok.

<plug> I'm sort of working on the msvideo stuff. I need more hours in the day though :) See http://www.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~bbaetz/win e/ for very very early patches with known bugs. (ie it doesn't display anything useful at all.)</plug>

Hopefully I'll have more time to work on it in the (short) uni holidays in a few weeks. Theres also a cosource.com request for this, but I haven't applied for it because I don't have the time.

My take is that Internet and similar communications technologies offer a lifeline to developing countries. Why? Technology is no substitute for political consciousness - but the brilliance of the net is it's ability to build that consciousness through interaction and communication that breaks down entrenched geographic, social and other barriers.

Opportunity : to leap-frog years of expensive development and install lowest cost equipment available to the vast majority of the population. Think - satellite TV access in India - lowest costs in the world, available to great majority of population.

Dangers : Another Channel to sell western products to developing worlds - another channel to enrol cheap labour while avoiding responsibilty.

Dominance of English. The dominance of english is definately slowing the uptake of the net in developing countries, and restricting it to the wealthy. Free Software (localisations of Linux) is fighting that (See Bytes for all (link below)

There are some very interesting organisations that readers may be interested in.

PanAsiaA group that has assisted in the development of the first ISPs in some 6 asian developing countries - they mainly work with civil society and people's organisations. They are now developing e-commerce applications.

Bytes For ALlSpeaks for itself. Links to training courses for poor in developed countries to jump start Internet - with a radical mindset.

Free software and development(Paper calling for involvement from Free Software movement in development issues - previously posted on /.)

Other ICT in Development LinksPersonal page of links and analysis.

James Howison http://jhowison.tripod.com

I'm involved with attempts to get development NGOs to take a stronger interest in information and communication technologies. Some web pages that might be of interest:

• Development and Free Software
• networking Dili

Danny.