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Please explain how knowing how much money each hospital, doctor, or clinic is going to charge you is a BAD thing?
The "fucked up" pricing practices in the US have their biggest help in that NO ONE knows (not even the doctors) what things cost.

Time magazine did an article (no paywall) a while back during which they exposed that the same doctor, preforming the same procedure, could charge wildly different costs without even being aware of it. Requiring doctors and hospitals to publicize the prices is the first, and most important step, step towards fixing

Climatology would be much further along if the data and models were vetted through real Econometricians and Statisticians first, at least they will consider if the Drunk and the Puppy are Cointegrated.

Well we already have the ability to turn various things into oil and oil like substances, some of which already are much closer to refined oil based fuels. The some of the more notable processes are:
Fischer–Tropsch process
Thermal Depolymerization
Pyrolysis
CO2 to liquid
In almost all of these cases all that is being done is something absorbs CO2 and then that thing is turned into an liquid. Which means that oil is basically a battery much like the vaunted hydrogen fuel cells but in an easier to handle an use form. Some of these methods have even been done industrially and some I believe are close to being cost effective at the moment.

yes, indeed, will let you get more capacity only when you fit the probe in the same space. For the time being, an STM is about this big.

I'd dearly love to know how they plan on locating any particular atom, let alone redirect the read/write head to it and only it.

Even if the atoms are arranged in an array, flat, how does an atom-scale read head know where it is pointing with sufficiently minuscule granularity? Do they intend to put markers on the surface nearby--oh no wait atoms. Well, they can probably have wires leading--oh no wait atoms. Well, maybe if they color--oh.

Well I guess they'll just have to have one atom surrounded by its own read-write logic, flash-style, and completely negate the whole point of having the actual storage on the atomic size. Oh no wait, that's not even what this research is about.

Seriously, I don't think this has much potential for engineering, as much as it may be clever science.

And while single-atom memory is an interesting feat, memory density isn't everything. It lets you get more capacity into less space, which can be nice.

yes, indeed, will let you get more capacity only when you fit the probe in the same space. For the time being, an STM is about this big.
As a research technique, is amazing. As an applicative discovery... a long way yet until the real-life consumer grade direct application will emerge (if ever)

But if size was everything

Hit the nail in the head here: latency and power consumption spring into my mind as well.

... has everyone forgotten the dreaded Seagate 'stiction' problems? And those fun fixes? I was told they were due to contamination, but found out later, not so. But I banged my share of them around just to get them running long enough to copy off the data. Ah, Ghost.

Or the Miniscribe brick scandal, which not a quality control problem, illustrates how your favorite drive manufacturer can become a casualty of even bad accounting?

Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.

The rate of alcohol consumption per capita in the UK is double that of the 50s.

Oh FFS !
Not that old chestnut....
People _never_ got drunk in the past. Oh no, never.
They would never take addictive drugs to the ruin of families.Oh no, never.

(sorry, was reading that the other day but I didn't bookmark it, some UK paper)
The Daily Heil by any chance?

starting salaries by major, 2003

If you are calling me ignorant, you are mistaken. I certainly covered binary number representation in college. But it hasn't been useful since then. I work on much higher level stuff. I imagine this is true for most people. There isn't a lot of demand for people who write new operating systems... that's just the industry moving forward while you're stuck in the past.

However, price controls are effective and have been able to only raise the price up slightly but predictably. Even the revenues would be more agreeable for those having an actual hand in running the stadium.

On Google
The study itself

Stealth (i.e. undetectable) debuggers seem possible in principle. The only one I know about is
Cobra. Unfortunately it looks proprietary and closed source.

If anyone knows of free-software stealth debuggers I'd like to hear about them.

So I can graduate!

Otherwise I won't be able to get my unversity's M$ discount.

Don Witt, then a physics professor at Sul Ross University in Alpine, coordinated a monumental effort to locate the lights' source. Using the Sul Ross Society of Physics Students, the Big Bend Outdoor Club comprised of community members, and local pilots, short-wave radio amateurs, and a few outside professionals, Witt's group was positively unable to form any sort of solid conclusion. They did say, however, that sometimes the lights that people claimed were "Marfa Lights," were really artificial lights from area ranches or automobile headlights merely passing behind unseen obstructions along distant Highway 67, which winds through the Chinati Mountains between Marfa and Presidio.

Thank you for your generous reply.

Would you mind if I shared this, and your previous post, with the ACM chapter at my university (http://acm.uta.edu/)?

After Kernel Trap did their interview with Hans Reiser, we have been looking for good advice from experienced programmers. While we were originally looking at forming a base of questions to use in interviews, I think this sort of exchange is just as helpful.

Again, thanks for your input.

Exactly.

I never thought I'd say this about an operating system, but, I feel at peace using FreeBSD. There was always something agitating about the Linux culture, like I wasn't sure if I was missing something. I think your comment about the "constant upgrade" is a facet of what I felt; like I was always driven to be ready for the next upgrade or whatnot.

Part of my move came after taking several CSE classes at http://cse.uta.edu/UTA and BSD seeming like it's actually engineered and purposed to be the way it is, instead of someone going about following the wind (but, that's pure conjecture... the wind part).

I have FreeBSD every where I need it:

• At home: on the desktop and on a pre-production server
• On a 300MHz PII laptop (does very well with Fluxbox and KDE apps) it's what I mainly use because BSD makes it quick enough
• On my web-server
• (thankfully) on my workstation (at work)

Another thing I can say about FreeBSD is that it seemed to run faster out of the box than my compiled Linux 2.6 Linux kernels did. This could just be an issue of the rest of my hardware (desktop at home). It's still nice to have that perception regardless.

Lastly, the documentation is excellent and thorough.

Please, what ever you do, don't just do it. All that leads to is opportunities to get your thought/logicp processes wrong, time and time again.

As a Computer Engineering student at UT Arlington, the best way I could have prepared myself for learning how to program was to learn logic, specifically: Discreet Structures. This will not only help you with high level language structures, like loops, but it is essential to understanding binary logic: the foundation of computer operations, it is also helpful in understanding and doing calculus, which you will have to take if you pursue an engineering degree.

For example, if you do not understand that the opposite of the color black is not the color white, then you will have trouble with binary logic and the structures and sets built there on.

It's ok to acustom yourself to programming languages. But, my point is that you understand the logic behind any computer language you learn.

If you want to use a book to learn a language, a good and challenging series can be found under the Dietel & Dietel authors.

If you want to tackle object oriented programming, go for learning Ruby; it's free, simple, powerful, and open source (not that the later is too critical unless you want to change the back end of it: requires much programming understanding).

Hope this helps.

P.S. The binary opposite of the color 'black' is 'not black'. The binary opposite of 'white' is 'not white'. The binary opposite of 'on' is 'not on', which is often defined as 'off'. Perhaps by the time you get into college, either the one you choose already teaches logic early on in the program or they will have when you get there.

The guy at the payment window didn't find their use of Windows 95 as amusing as I did.

Oh, they tried. Most high-end home theater equipment from a few years ago included a FireWire port. It's possible to daisy-chain everything together using only a single cable between devices. But, unfortunately, it has largely died out due to the lack of DRM.

Another benefit of FireWire is that it is possible to connect a cable box to your Mac and save digital versions of shows. That's probably another reason why it died.

Still another benefit is that you can connect a MiniDV camcorder directly to a compatible TV over FireWire.

It's kinda sad that this elegant technology wasn't embraced due to the lack of DRM.

Check out this pic of a home theater system. I found it a few years ago when I was in school. On the left is a regular home theater; on the right is a FireWire home theater.

There's been sort of an underground movement here at UTA where I work. The chalkings are quite good with lots of detail. From what I've heard the university hasn't been getting too annoyed 'cause there's no permanent damage.

Check these out:

Mario and Bubble Bobble

There's been sort of an underground movement here at UTA where I work. The chalkings are quite good with lots of detail. From what I've heard the university hasn't been getting too annoyed 'cause there's no permanent damage.

Check these out:

Mario and Bubble Bobble

There's been sort of an underground movement here at UTA where I work. The chalkings are quite good with lots of detail. From what I've heard the university hasn't been getting too annoyed 'cause there's no permanent damage.

Check these out:

Mario and Bubble Bobble

Keep in mind that SH-130 will add about 20 extra miles to the trip (say from downtown SA to Waco or DFW.) Further, even under uncongested conditions, SH-130 traffic will be limited to 55 mph (that's the design speed of the facility and it cannot be changed without costly vertical and horizontal realignments), whereas once past Austin, I-35 will be 65/70 mph all the way to Selma/Schertz.

So even if it takes you 30 minutes to negotiate the 5 miles through downtown Austin, you will still not save much (if any) time on SH-130. Would you pay $10-$15 to save, say, 10 minutes of travel time? How about 20 minutes of savings? Or how about no time savings at all?

Yes, the toll rate will be somewhere between $10-$15 (about $1.25 for every 10 miles). According to survey data, only about 5% of drivers are willing to pay even $5 for 20 minutes of time savings. (See this page. It is a toll pricing application under development for TxDOT. Scroll down to the table for "% SOV Users willing to pay Toll Price for Time Savings on Managed Lanes:". The default numbers in the table are from a survey conducted in the spring of 2004 of 800+ DFW drivers.)

Similar numbers are seen from all over Texas. Granted that these are for urban driving conditions, but in general, Texans don't like the idea of paying toll. Just recall what happened when toll was proposed for some parts of Mopac.

I work at a university and our traffic seems to have remained about the same. The students tell me that most everything is blocked in the dorms, tho, so I'm not sure if we had much of a problem here anyway. But, yeah, here are some numbers. :)

At my university, the math courses are often big fans of making students use Maple and Matlab alternately... With this in mind they are pretty good at providing us with a large number of computer labs equipped with both those two as well as Mathematica (though I haven't played with that one yet).

Maple and Mathlab are both crazy powerful, sometimes nearly too much so when all you want is a short and simple operation...
Due to that, in conjunction with those programs, (or in their absence) and with my Ti-89, I have sometimes used:
http://zen.uta.edu/
or more specifically:
http://zen.uta.edu/math/
Which is good for a few sets of patterns of operations from differential equation solving to laplace transforms...

At my university, the math courses are often big fans of making students use Maple and Matlab alternately... With this in mind they are pretty good at providing us with a large number of computer labs equipped with both those two as well as Mathematica (though I haven't played with that one yet).

Maple and Mathlab are both crazy powerful, sometimes nearly too much so when all you want is a short and simple operation...
Due to that, in conjunction with those programs, (or in their absence) and with my Ti-89, I have sometimes used:
http://zen.uta.edu/
or more specifically:
http://zen.uta.edu/math/
Which is good for a few sets of patterns of operations from differential equation solving to laplace transforms...

The media is most certainly in the habit of making isolated observations of reality, and then placing them on a podium for all to see. Problem is, that's all that we all see. The subsequent conclusion by the uneducated and inundated public is that the rare is real, and common.

Jean Baudrillard wrote of such a phenomenon in his book, Simulacrum and Simulation. (Interesting side note, Simulacrum was featured in the original Matrix movie: it is the book that Neo uses to hide his pirated software in the opening scenes). Here's a link:

http://www.uta.edu/english/hawk/semiotics/baud.htm

Kris Kerwin

kkerwin@insi__REMOVE_ME__ghtbb.com

Bad engineering is painful and all ...

But what about all of the people at UTA that have to stumble over "Kalpana Chawla Hall" every time they want to talk about a damn dormitory.

There's the real tragedy, my friend.

Not quite! I'm a big fan of PDAs and portable computing. I've owned many PDAs, including Newton Messagepad 110 (which Apple gave me when I was working at Adobe), but before that I had a Tandy 100 and an HP 100 both of which pre-dated the Newton by quite a bit.

http://auvsi-seafarer.org/seafarers/default.htm
Many schools where in attendence, including my school, Univ Texas-Arlington. Unfortunately, I do not have a listing of the other schools in the competition, and the AUVSI website is a bit lacking.
If youa are interested in one of the other schools in the compeition, here is the link to our UAV. Unfortunately, we had a little "accident" keeping us from flying on the day of the competition, though we still placed 3rd. http://www3.uta.edu/faculty/reyes/AVL/

my source is here

please send me naked lady

Here ya go.

[This is evidently the "Hampster Dance" version.]

One of the astronauts, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, was an alum of my school. Chawla Hall is a $20 million dorm on campus that is nearing completion. I remember a story in the school newspaper that her husband was not happy with the dedication service when construction began. Everyone tried to make it out to be a deep, spiritual event and that is not how she would have wanted it. She was not a religious person at all, and her husband felt that the religious subversion was completely inappropriate. He even said she would have walked away from the service had she been there.

One of the astronauts, Dr. Kalpana Chawla, was an alum of my school. Chawla Hall is a $20 million dorm on campus that is nearing completion. I remember a story in the school newspaper that her husband was not happy with the dedication service when construction began. Everyone tried to make it out to be a deep, spiritual event and that is not how she would have wanted it. She was not a religious person at all, and her husband felt that the religious subversion was completely inappropriate. He even said she would have walked away from the service had she been there.

We've already started a collection for the kids over at the Quakecon Forums. After just a few hours I've had $20 sent in and on December 5th I'm going to collect up everything donated and buy a shitload of stuff from the wishlist and send it off to Gabe and Tycho. The specific thread has more details and if you'd also like to be a part of our massive money collection then feel free to donate over at the official donation site. Not only will you get your name on the big donation but you can get a nice warm feeling during Thanksgiving!

There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

Clearly you've never eaten a klein pancake, which has only one side. Don't ask about the syrup.

according to this, the avg heigh of a human, in 1996, was 70.1 inches.

google tells me that 1 inches = 0.0254 meters.

population of new york city is 8,008,278 people (in 2000).

so we have 8,008,278 people * 70.1 inches * 0.0254 = 14,259,059.31012 metres ...

so, sadly, thats 14,259.059 km, which is a lot more than the wifi run.

cheers.

Are you sure you aren't basing your beliefs on a Simulacra?

'Apparently' in a final nihilistic existential-phenomenological act the French have surrender reality.

I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.

I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernist philosopher who disavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."

In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.

Just a thought.

I don't mean to be thick-headed about such matters, nor to impugn your programming abilities, but I'm wondering if the impossibility of applying all that theory is perhaps a limitation of the real. I suppose I might explain that a bit more.

I think you're right that much theory cannot be practically applied, but as Jean Baudrillard (postmodernist philosopher who disavows postmodernism altogether [all links about Baudrillard]) writes in The Ecstasy of Communication, "The status of theory could not be anything but to challenge the real."

In other words, theory is meant to challenge what exists, even if what is proposed can't be achieved. So, it makes sense that the challenge of programming theory cannot be taken up by the real of programmnig practice.

Just a thought.

I felt that I needed to reply to this. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I guess maybe it's because I'm involved in the arts I see this differently, but for me not only is there no question that this is wrong, it is the type of thing that I would fight and die for.

Anyone who thinks this is alright needs to read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and this essay. Not all films are made purely for entertainment. Many films are made by large groups of people who care deeply about them, have spent their life perfecting their craft, and have come together to make something they feel is important. They have spent anywhere from six months to several years of their lives. When it is all over, regardless of how great the result is, people involved in such a work often think of it like a child. What these people do is the equivolent of saying "Sure, I'll watch your kid for the afternoon - I'm just going to need to chop off his hand first."

I know to some of the less culturally sophisticated, movies might just mean an afternoon at a Suburban multiplex watching some trashy action flick with millions of dollars in special effects, but to others, art has been instrumental in shaping the world we live in. It can be a powerful force, which is the reason artists are so often oppressed and their work destroyed. Before you so wantonly advocate the destruction of other's work, remember that right now their are people fighting for these rights you wish to discard. Many of these works deal with political, sociological, or philosophical issues and contribute to the way people view the world. Maintaining the right of people to express themselves freely without interlocution is the single most essential building block of a free society.

I heard a local actor/playwright talk about performing in Prague before the fall, and how everyone had met at a spot in the woods, and how he realized as he looked around at the nervous spectators that they had risked their lives to come see him perform. Now mind you, it wasn't that these people couldn't see theatre - they actually had some great theatre there - it was just all 'cleaned up' for them by an authoratarian government.

As Ray Bradbury says, you have a choice to view my work or not to view it. If I make a movie about something that offends you, don't watch it. If you can't find enough movies you really like, make your own. But for the sake of everything good in this world, don't destroy someone elses blood sweat and passion because you have a queasy stomache.

I am a Software Engineering major.

My school offers 3 degrees in the Computer Science Engineering department: CSE, CS, and SE. There's a comparison of each degree here. I think these programs are well-balanced, and a good separation of the fields that you are talking about. I chose the SE path because I enjoy the design process of thinking, planning, and adjusting based on project requirements much more than I enjoy cranking out code (although I've lost much sleep and a couple of girlfriends due to late night coding frenzies). I'm still young, and in school, but I would love to be able to work on a large software project in a team environment with capable peers. In fact, I'd love to be able to work on a project with gods, so I can soak up as much as possible. I love this stuff!

I am a Software Engineering major.

My school offers 3 degrees in the Computer Science Engineering department: CSE, CS, and SE. There's a comparison of each degree here. I think these programs are well-balanced, and a good separation of the fields that you are talking about. I chose the SE path because I enjoy the design process of thinking, planning, and adjusting based on project requirements much more than I enjoy cranking out code (although I've lost much sleep and a couple of girlfriends due to late night coding frenzies). I'm still young, and in school, but I would love to be able to work on a large software project in a team environment with capable peers. In fact, I'd love to be able to work on a project with gods, so I can soak up as much as possible. I love this stuff!

• Anyone from the UK here? You guys are saps for government intrusion. You don't even live in a democracy, but you think you do

I'll bite. I (the poster you're responding to) am a UK citizen. Now, let's see. We can be sued for contributory copyright infringement for bypassing DRM, but we didn't make it criminal offence. We don't already habitually hand over book purchase records to law enforcement. We don't have banned book lists. We have exactly the same fucked up first-past-the post electoral system as the US, but we have five parties that regularly win seats in parliament, and we don't return 90% of incumbents, nor did we choose to re-invent the idea of a near-absolute head of state appointed not by democratic process, but by a council of picked power brokers (if you know your history, the 2000 Presidential election was fascinatingly similar to the Anglo Saxon selection of a monarch by the witan, a council of aethelings and eoldermen appointed, influenced by and loyal to various factions in contention for the throne).

There never has been a country, state or city run as a democracy. Athens came close - if you were a free man of property (the premise that both US and UK systems were also based on) - but they got sick of governing themselves and executing advocates of free speech and more or less acquiesed in their own transformation to a dictatorship. The US system is heavily influenced by Athens, and even more so by Rome and it's wacky dagger-in-the-back machinations. Hurrah!

Given your .sig, I'll infer that your primary argument is that in the US, you're allowed to own guns. I'm using that wording advisedly. You are allowed to own guns. As long as you haven't been convicted of a crime, and you don't want a concealed weapon, or a fully automatic weapon, or a handgun with a clip in excess of ten rounds, or live in New York and aren't (de facto) employed in government or the legal system, or in any way want arms (not guns specifically) that could actually be used for the explicitely intended purpose, which is "A well regulated Militia". You've already lost the gun argument, they're just being taken away (from honest men and women) one shell at a time by men and women with heavily armed bodyguards, until only criminals will have guns.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that the UK is much better than the US. The UK is a nasty, mean little country, but in practical terms, i.e. in practicing what we preach - we are still a little better, although I freely concede that we get worse every day under the auspices of Mr President-Elect Tony Blair.

New Zealand knocks us both into a cocked hat, of course. But let's not go there, it's always embarrasing when you think you're on the high ground only to find someone dropping moral rocks on your swollen head.

Liquid Metal Jetting is very cool tech. I took a tour of UT Austin's Automation & Robotics Research Institute and saw them do this in Aluminum and Copper. I know the guy in charge of the project mentioned harder materials, but I can't remember which. Ever wonder how they keep the barrels on tanks from wiggling all over when they move and abruptly stop the turret? That's ARRI too. They do all sorts of cool stuff over there. If you can arrange a tour, I highly recommend it.

Geez you take one semester off and ULM disables your accounts. How do they expect me to get my /. password.

Or better yet, try Computer Science and Engineering - I wish I had the link someone gave me a few years ago listing all the doubly accredited schools that had full-fledged CSE programs, but I know there's a handful of schools that do it. Try and find a school that does just CSE or that's their primary focus and it's not just some add-on degree plan for their CS or EE degree. Basically, CSE is a mix of CS, CE, EE and general engineering. It's VERY difficult, but you get the skills to do just about anything and everything in the computer world and learn a lot about engineering prinicples. I'm in the CSE program at UTA - I'm in the middle of my 2nd year and I've already had CSE classes, EE classes, IE classes, physics classes, insane amounts of math classes...pretty much the same grounding in engineering that AE's, ME's and EE's have to get. It's difficult, but here it the Metroplex not only do CSE's tend to get great jobs, the starting pay is good too since your engineering skills make you an asset because you can move further up the ladder into software engineering and technical team leadership.

C++ style comments (// blah) are a proposed part of the new ANSI C standard (C99).

The big problem with chess is that the tree is VERY large- how big isn't known but estimates vary over a large range (see netchess and wolfram mathworld). There are certainly more chess positions than there are atoms in the universe, but the lines that lead to them are mostly worthless, so they don't matter and can be pruned away. Let's pick a tree size of 10^60-10^70 for arguments sake.

This is way beyond the scope of even distributed computing like SETI. It's usually reckoned that chess is unsolvable by brute force.

Normal computer techniques can handle about trees with about 10^20 positions or so, depending on how much hardware you can throw at it, and how long you wait.

However there are a couple of approaches that can reduce the exponent by a factor of 2 each in chess:

• Quantum computing
• Alpha-Beta pruning

As another poster noted, the current state of the art is 7 bits. You would need probably need 100s of thousands of bits to do chess. And the cycle time for current computers are measured in seconds rather than nanoseconds, but then again no optimisation for speed has been done AFAIK.

Finally it depends on the actual size of the chess tree. It may very well be there is a forced checkmate at say, move 40, in which case we would find it. But if there are only draws by repetition, under perfect play, the tree probably becomes impossibly large even with quantum computers.

Still, a search that said that there were no forced wins in say, the first 40 moves would be suggestive of a draw.

Do you think that people would allow their lives to be ruled by AIs speaking to them through their PDAs? Is it inevitable? Is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, or does it matter?

---
Geoffrey Wossum
Project AKO