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I wouldn't worry about it. Back in WWII, the military considered outsourcing the job of missile guidance to stoner pigeons. However, they abandoned the effort for no particular reason. I'm assuming it was because the missile pilots' union protested. So, all you have to do is protest...or make yourself a more desireable employee by accepting hemp seeds as payment.

I'd suggest downloading some C or C++ libraries for string parsing. Rolling your own is a pain, but there's regular expression libraries that will give you all the strength of perl's. In fact, its a little known secret but glibc has C regular expression functions built in. Here's some documentation.

Really, unless a language brings in a completely new way of programming (functional vs procedural, for example), the time spent learning a new language is usually a waste. Odds are 90%+ that you can either buy or download a library in a language you already know, and learning an API is a lot quicker than learning a new language. The new languages really don't increase the ease of programming, especially not compared to using a language you're already comfortable in. Programming would be a much more advanced art if people stopped pretending the new language will be a silver bullet and instead worked on producing good libraries and APIs for existing languages.

I would recommend taking a look into using a VNC package. Basically it will let you see and control what's going on with your computer (the one controlling the baby monitor/webcam) from your iPaq, laptop, and even a Treo phone!

Basically all you would be doing is opening up a webcam viewer on the computer through VNC and just watch the screen... You won't be getting super fast resolution (depending on speed of connection and machine running the client you'll be looking at around 5 FPS I think) but you will be able to see what's going on. Good luck, and congrats...

...a maximum a couple of hours ...

... symptoms usually disappear in a day or two, and a symptom-free, latent period follows, varying in length depending upon the size of the radiation dose. A period of overt illness follows, and can be characterized by infection, electrolyte imbalance, diarrhea, bleeding, cardiovascular collapse, and sometimes short periods of unconsciousness. Death or a period of recovery follows the period of overt illness.

and

The latent phase - lasts a few days to as long as 2 to 3 weeks at the lower dose levels. The patient is asymptomatic but CBCs will show characteristic changes in the blood elements, with lymphocyte depression and gradual decrease in neutrophil and platelet counts.

It's that "few days" in the 320 rem and up exposure (320 rad or 3.2 seivert is considered the LD-50 according to this table) where you could lose the war.

Don't learn about radiation from Hollywood.

Try googling harmonic series limit or just look at formula three on this page

This page gives an explanation why, and links to a strategy for a proof.

Wolfram has a fuller explanation

Try googling harmonic series limit or just look at formula three on this page

This page gives an explanation why, and links to a strategy for a proof.

Wolfram has a fuller explanation

While we are on the topic of speech recognition hardware, here is a shameless plug for the Perception Processor that people might find interesting. The Perception Processor OR The Perception Processor

I had beginning undergraduate chemistry from Joel Miller at the University of Utah. He's working on plastic magnets as well, but he doesn't have them working at room temperature yet AFAIK. He was quite possibly the worst teacher I've ever had, though he's apparently a fabulous chemist. When talking about the noble gasses, he would always pronounce it 'Nobel', and he even corrected his spelling on the chalkboard from 'noble' to 'nobel'. Our TA's said that he has his eyes on the prize.

In addressing my second point you 1) betray your political leanings (before your ad hominem closing statements confirms it), 2) prove my point. Look at what you're saying: at every step you postulate that somehow this question cannot apply to blacks because they are too different, too complex... but somehow you fail to recognize that we are all complicated and we all have our pet issues. I would submit that I've merely taken the question to places where you are uncomfortable with it going.

Let me suggest this then as an approach to the study. First the article (which I have now read... and then some) asserts that amygdala is more active in processing political images in Democrats vs. Republicans. Seems to me that this can be measured without any special consideration being given to specific social circumstances, unless it also follows that amygdala function is primarily determined by the immediate social circumstances of the study subject. So the first question I would try to answer experimentally is: Is there a correlation of increased amygdala activity amongst Democrat blacks vs. Republican blacks (if you insist, of the same socio-economic group). From this dataset, we can test for socio-economic differences by testing a different group of Republican and Democrat blacks from different socio-economic groups; if amygdala activity is still a statistically relevant determinant, I can have some reason to believe that biological factors are significant enough to predict political disposition. The third test is to take a group of blacks from differing political affiliations and socio-economic backgrounds, submit them to the visuals and the MRI, and then based on the results of amygdala activity, predict their political affiliations (or more appropriately, political leanings). Notice to this point that in all my tests I've not consider one white person or person of another race than black. I should (if the authors of the study are correct) be able to show a biological connection to political leanings amongst blacks and avoiding the 'comparative' factors you cite as not being able to prove the connection in blacks. Now, assuming I establish the biological predisposition, I can start to compare amygdala activity amongst races (since that seems to be where you wanted me to go in the first place) as a predictor for political leanings DESPITE other socio-economic factors. So I disagree, if a mere non-scientist such as myself can envision ways to test the hypothesis without resorting to simple racial comparisons I well imagine that those wiser than I could construct quite good studies to determine if a biological predictor that coincides with race happens to exist.

A stronger point to refute my race question would have been to cite the growing concern on the left that the traditionally solid black base is showing signs that it is eroding. Be it black Democrat leaders starting to complain that the Democrat party has only delivered promises rather than results or an increasingly large black middle class that is waking up to the fact that self-reliance, not government sponsored dependency, is the true path to success: the black base is increasingly not the single-minded block it once was. Don't get me wrong... I'm not exactly holding my breath for a huge Republican victory in the black vote anytime soon, but all things with time. ;-)

Personally, while there may be subtle differences in reactions to political messages due to biology, However, I suspect that we all come to our decisions based on our specific circumstances, logic, and clung to axioms. Which brings me to my original point: that the UCLA study was really a useless exercise. I think your wiser path would have been simply to agree, the study is silly.

More amusingly, my ad hominem closer, you know, the one about engineering liberal support? Well, turns out I was so far from the mark: Another article about this study.

Cheers!
SCB

...is a built in flesh tone detector.
*shudder at thought*

Probably better off with a "people-noone-wants-to-see-naked" detector though.

Libraries in most colleges and universities are also funded by a chunk of every grant. This can be a sizeable chunk depending on the institution and the granting agency ( this page shows 50%). Of course not all of this goes to the library, but the library gets some of it. Finally, some journals assess the authors a fee for publishing the paper (usually on a per page basis).

Amazing how many people manage to post on the internet but still haven't heard about Google.com. Here's one of the better hits for you, but you'll have to read a lot of PDFs from there. What it comes down to is that eating causes slightly more accidents each year than cellphone, but the percentage of drivers that eat is much higher than those who phone.

Actually, the FARs summary is a good one for comparing the danger of alcohol and cellphones, but I can't find a place to download it. Various newspapers have reported it's conclusions, though.

I've seen these studies, and I doubt they are unbiased studies by people in a neutral position on the issue.

Go ahead and point out the "bias" here.

Yeah, it is a very Republican state, but not as bad as many think:

Jim Matheson - Congressman

Bill Orton - Former Congressman (3rd Dist, no less!)

Scott Matheson - Former Govenor

But, it's not like Bush or even Cheney think they need to swing through the state to lock it in... Hatch on the other hand, may just get the boot if he keeps being a bone head!

Yeah, it is a very Republican state, but not as bad as many think:

Jim Matheson - Congressman

Bill Orton - Former Congressman (3rd Dist, no less!)

Scott Matheson - Former Govenor

But, it's not like Bush or even Cheney think they need to swing through the state to lock it in... Hatch on the other hand, may just get the boot if he keeps being a bone head!

Pity I have to stick with sed, awk and shell scripts on our old HPUX servers though...

Why? I guess if you're using HPUX 8 or something you're out of luck, but gcc, apache, etc. - i.e. everything you need to make PHP go - is all available for any remotely recent HPUX version... see http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ if you haven't before.

Available:

...

• Cougar

No, that one's already been used.

I'm not singling you out in particular, but it seems like nobody has actually read the lawsuit[temporary mirror]. The defendant claims that NAC has been bullying him into selling them his web hosting business, and has been unilaterally messing with his contract, copying his services, using his customer list to advertise the copied services, and engaging in a laundry list of other misdeeds.

So he found a new facility, but appears to be having difficulty migrating between IP addresses while still providing "uninterrupted service" for his customers. He claims--of course I have no way of verifying this--that the costs to NAC of allowing him to use the old IPs at the new location will amount to $500/month, and he's eager to reimburse them for that.

I don't think it's time to panic yet. If the plaintiff's claims are correct, then the technical issues of migrating 3000 customers to a new IP space are greater than we think, and the technical issues of rerouting this block of address space are lower than we think. So long as this doesn't lead to an actual judgment claiming that IP addresses need to be portable, I don't think it would have a major impact.

Still, I wish the guy had just sued for a truckload of damages and more time to make the migration a reality. But like the rest of us, I'm not familiar enough with the case to know what's going on.

If you want to experiment with developing your own OS without the Minix framework, check out the Flux OSkit. It provides a lot of low-level stuff to build on (threads, memory management, filesystem) and interfaces gluing to Linux/FreeBSD components.

I officially put my own genetic code under the terms of the LGPL. You can redistribute me and my clones as you like...

Funny post, but it brings up an interesting point. Biotech companies are patenting gene sequences all the time. What's to *stop* you, or me, or CowboyNeal from filing a patent for "A unique sequence of genetic material such that will produce a particular individual, to wit, me?"

Do the biotech companies know the exact sequence of GTCA's in the genes they patent? If not, then I don't see any reason a human individual couldn't patent his/her/hir own 46 chromosomes (+/-).

The plan you speak of was to send out explosive-laden suicide pigeons to crash into searchlights and outposts. Undoubtedly more bizarre (though more off-topic) was B.F. Skinner's Pigeon -based Guidance system.

I know you're joking to make a point, but you do realize that 1 isn't prime, right? That's not just a matter of arbitrary definitions; a lot of theorems that apply to primes don't apply to 1.

Nice.. Interesting to notice how little has changed since 1881: digital disaster!

What you're probably really looking for is an X Server (X clients are the applications that use X to display graphics).

A google search for "X Server PocketPC" gives me this site, which lists a WinCE port of a XFree86.

Alternatively, you could use a VNC, which would be more useful for OS X if you were wanting access to Aqua applications, too.

(No clue how well either of these work; I'm a PalmOS guy.)

Free textbooks online? The ability to continually update and correct errors and misinformation? Sign me up.

We have taken this approach with possibly the earliest (to my knowledge) online textbook available. This site is an online textbook of retinal biology and anatomy compiled by a number of folks. Please forgive the old-school design (early 90's web look, feel and code but that was when it went online) as I am redesigning it in my not so spare time and hope to start wrapping in genetics, molecular biology etc... in the near future.

Other cool facts: Despite the admittedly narrow focus of retinal cell biology, this site does garner upwards of 45,000 hits/day and is running on an old G3 iMac. (one of the best $600 I ever spent).

They still have ocelot, puma, lion, leopard, asian leopard, mountain lion, white tiger, etc.

Not really. Puma has already been used.

fs

they're only good for games

Guess again. Medical volume visualization.

Now, if you're point is that for MOST consumers, they're only good for games, you may have a point. But the other way to look at it is that, since consumers have demanded such amazing video technology, the price to deliver advanced medical visualizations to doctors has dropped dramatically.

What you used to need a $40,000 SGI O2 for, now you can do with a $1000 computer from Best Buy. That computer might actually save your life some day. Pretty amazing, if you think about it.

Although I am quite skilled myself in repairing/restoring older cars, I am more than happy to pay the higher costs after taking a look under the hood of a modern car. My Studebaker is fast and fun, but it has none of the electronics of the new cars and one can almost tear the entire thing down and rebuild it without having to consult a technical manual.

The downside of course is that it is an older car and has none of the safety gear that modern cars have. I once lost a wheel racing (and winning) a 930 turbo (when I was younger and more impetuous) as there were no safety devices that would retain it when the axle broke. You can imagine the fear that sets in at 110MPH or so when you suddenly find yourself running along with a presumably four wheel car that now happens to have only three.

As an aside, you might be surprised at how much an "automotive technician" who knows their stuff can make. The folks down at the Mercedes Benz dealer can truly clean up with six figure salaries. And judging from the last routine service bill on my mom's S-class, there may be more than one tech making that kind of salary there.

the movie dreamcatcher sucks!
EW!!!

First search for the word Vagina

Returned This!

GUH-ROH-DEE

I love you kewsh

Seelet is the biggest queen in #dlf

My cats name is brownshoo

From the article: Pelling agrees, and says that he and Gimzewski are doing tests to rule out the possibility that other molecules in the fluid bathing the cells, or even the tip of the microscope itself, are generating vibrations that their probe picks up.

Even if this is the case, because of a cells small molecular fingerprint or components tend to dictate what role a cell plays or what the status of a cell is on a more discrete time basis that say gene expression, one would wonder if this is not also an identifier of status or identity as well. For more detail on cytosomics or metabolomics, see this site.

EW!!!

First search for the word Vagina

Returned This!

GUH-ROH-DEE

I love you kewsh

Seelet is the biggest queen in #dlf

My cats name is brownshoo

EW!!!

First search for the word Vagina

Returned This!

GUH-ROH-DEE

I love you kewsh

Seelet is the biggest queen in #dlf

My cats name is brownshoo

EW!!!

First search for the word Vagina

Returned This!

GUH-ROH-DEE

I love you kewsh

Seelet is the biggest queen in #dlf

My cats name is brownshoo

EW!!!

First search for the word Vagina

Returned This!

GUH-ROH-DEE

I love you kewsh

Seelet is the biggest queen in #dlf

My cats name is brownshoo

methinks someone's playing with tesla coils. what happens when the earth voltage goes sky high?? stuff catches fire presumably...

(at least thats what happened at tunguska...)

I'm currently a CS undergrad. When we first learned assembly it was in MIPS using spim. In our Systems class we had to learn x86 for decompiling and reverse engineering, but you could always run objdump on any x86 machine and read the file where ever. Of course in compilers we used sparc assembly. I never have had the oppurtunity to use PowerPC assmebly in classes, but luckily it is a RISC lang so not to difficult to parse.

What's my point.... Anyway we don't have and x86 bias here.

"[He's] another dead drug addict."
- Rush Limbaugh on Jerry Garcia, 8/11/95

"We have alcoholics and drug addicts in our society, don't we? And what do we say about them? Well, they can't help it. Why, it's genetic. Why, they have a disease. Why, put one thimbleful of scotch in front of them and they can die.' We totally exempt them from any control over their lives, do we not? Some athlete will spend two years snorting lines of coke. He can't help it.' You know, it's--it's just--it's not--it's--it's genetic. These people--they're predisposed to having this addictive syndrome. They--they can't help--yeah, like that line of cocaine just happened to march into the hotel, go up to the athlete's room and put itself right there in front of him on his blotter."
-- Rush Limbaugh how, December 16, 1994

5)I look at it this way: in order to be human you need to have 46 chromosomes, this is unique to the animal kingdom).

Now people with Down Syndrome, Klinefelter Syndrome, and Turner Syndrome aren't human. Great going, Dr. Mengele.

Do you support killing humans?

No. I was against the war in Iraq.

Bush has nothing to do with sending jobs overseas. Businesses do, however... but in your little world, you believe they are one of the same.

When Republicans pass legislation that gives tax incentives to send jobs overseas, then, yes, they are responsible for the job losses.

Everyone makes mistakes. Bill Clinton did it too, but that's OK. That's "youthful discretion" as Mr. Clinton claimed.

So now that Clinton's out of office, you are willing to accept "youthful indiscretion" as an explanation, but when he was in office, you right-wingers wanted to hang him by his balls for those same indiscretions.

We did not "belittle" our allies, we had disagreements with them.

Donald Rumsfeld said "Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem," but you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."

That sounds like belittling them to my ears.

The difference is that in the US you have the opprotunity to get a job which provides health insurance.

Bulls***! There are people out there who lack the skills, advanced education, and intelligence to get a job at a firm that will provide health insurance. About 62% of uninsured people live in a household in which the head of the family works full-time for the full year, but is either not offered health insurance or cannot afford to pay the premiums to participate. Uninsured workers tend to be self-employed or work for smaller businesses. About 12% of the self-employed are uninsured, 36% of workers at businesses with less than 25 people are uninsured, and 13.7% of workers at businesses with 25 to 100 employees are uninsured.

No one has proposed censoring the internet, they have proposed stopping people from stealing from others.

Ever heard of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), a federal law that requires public libraries that rely on federal funds for Internet use to install filtering software on library computers? That was Republican legislation.

Creationism, on the other hand, should be taught in school right next to evolution. They are both theories, neither of which is proven, and one should not be chosen above the other, but both should be taught.

The word "theory," as used in science, does not imply uncertainty. It means "a coherent group of genera

"[He's] another dead drug addict."
- Rush Limbaugh on Jerry Garcia, 8/11/95

"We have alcoholics and drug addicts in our society, don't we? And what do we say about them? Well, they can't help it. Why, it's genetic. Why, they have a disease. Why, put one thimbleful of scotch in front of them and they can die.' We totally exempt them from any control over their lives, do we not? Some athlete will spend two years snorting lines of coke. He can't help it.' You know, it's--it's just--it's not--it's--it's genetic. These people--they're predisposed to having this addictive syndrome. They--they can't help--yeah, like that line of cocaine just happened to march into the hotel, go up to the athlete's room and put itself right there in front of him on his blotter."
-- Rush Limbaugh how, December 16, 1994

5)I look at it this way: in order to be human you need to have 46 chromosomes, this is unique to the animal kingdom).

Now people with Down Syndrome, Klinefelter Syndrome, and Turner Syndrome aren't human. Great going, Dr. Mengele.

Do you support killing humans?

No. I was against the war in Iraq.

Bush has nothing to do with sending jobs overseas. Businesses do, however... but in your little world, you believe they are one of the same.

When Republicans pass legislation that gives tax incentives to send jobs overseas, then, yes, they are responsible for the job losses.

Everyone makes mistakes. Bill Clinton did it too, but that's OK. That's "youthful discretion" as Mr. Clinton claimed.

So now that Clinton's out of office, you are willing to accept "youthful indiscretion" as an explanation, but when he was in office, you right-wingers wanted to hang him by his balls for those same indiscretions.

We did not "belittle" our allies, we had disagreements with them.

Donald Rumsfeld said "Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem," but you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."

That sounds like belittling them to my ears.

The difference is that in the US you have the opprotunity to get a job which provides health insurance.

Bulls***! There are people out there who lack the skills, advanced education, and intelligence to get a job at a firm that will provide health insurance. About 62% of uninsured people live in a household in which the head of the family works full-time for the full year, but is either not offered health insurance or cannot afford to pay the premiums to participate. Uninsured workers tend to be self-employed or work for smaller businesses. About 12% of the self-employed are uninsured, 36% of workers at businesses with less than 25 people are uninsured, and 13.7% of workers at businesses with 25 to 100 employees are uninsured.

No one has proposed censoring the internet, they have proposed stopping people from stealing from others.

Ever heard of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), a federal law that requires public libraries that rely on federal funds for Internet use to install filtering software on library computers? That was Republican legislation.

Creationism, on the other hand, should be taught in school right next to evolution. They are both theories, neither of which is proven, and one should not be chosen above the other, but both should be taught.

The word "theory," as used in science, does not imply uncertainty. It means "a coherent group of genera

"[He's] another dead drug addict."
- Rush Limbaugh on Jerry Garcia, 8/11/95

"We have alcoholics and drug addicts in our society, don't we? And what do we say about them? Well, they can't help it. Why, it's genetic. Why, they have a disease. Why, put one thimbleful of scotch in front of them and they can die.' We totally exempt them from any control over their lives, do we not? Some athlete will spend two years snorting lines of coke. He can't help it.' You know, it's--it's just--it's not--it's--it's genetic. These people--they're predisposed to having this addictive syndrome. They--they can't help--yeah, like that line of cocaine just happened to march into the hotel, go up to the athlete's room and put itself right there in front of him on his blotter."
-- Rush Limbaugh how, December 16, 1994

5)I look at it this way: in order to be human you need to have 46 chromosomes, this is unique to the animal kingdom).

Now people with Down Syndrome, Klinefelter Syndrome, and Turner Syndrome aren't human. Great going, Dr. Mengele.

Do you support killing humans?

No. I was against the war in Iraq.

Bush has nothing to do with sending jobs overseas. Businesses do, however... but in your little world, you believe they are one of the same.

When Republicans pass legislation that gives tax incentives to send jobs overseas, then, yes, they are responsible for the job losses.

Everyone makes mistakes. Bill Clinton did it too, but that's OK. That's "youthful discretion" as Mr. Clinton claimed.

So now that Clinton's out of office, you are willing to accept "youthful indiscretion" as an explanation, but when he was in office, you right-wingers wanted to hang him by his balls for those same indiscretions.

We did not "belittle" our allies, we had disagreements with them.

Donald Rumsfeld said "Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem," but you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They're not with France and Germany on this, they're with the United States."

That sounds like belittling them to my ears.

The difference is that in the US you have the opprotunity to get a job which provides health insurance.

Bulls***! There are people out there who lack the skills, advanced education, and intelligence to get a job at a firm that will provide health insurance. About 62% of uninsured people live in a household in which the head of the family works full-time for the full year, but is either not offered health insurance or cannot afford to pay the premiums to participate. Uninsured workers tend to be self-employed or work for smaller businesses. About 12% of the self-employed are uninsured, 36% of workers at businesses with less than 25 people are uninsured, and 13.7% of workers at businesses with 25 to 100 employees are uninsured.

No one has proposed censoring the internet, they have proposed stopping people from stealing from others.

Ever heard of the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), a federal law that requires public libraries that rely on federal funds for Internet use to install filtering software on library computers? That was Republican legislation.

Creationism, on the other hand, should be taught in school right next to evolution. They are both theories, neither of which is proven, and one should not be chosen above the other, but both should be taught.

The word "theory," as used in science, does not imply uncertainty. It means "a coherent group of genera

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

hrmm, What kind of critters are in Uranus?

There has been ongoing sesmic monitoring of Yellowstone from 1972-1981 and 1983-present (see this page. If any magma is moving around, this network should pick it up. I don't know why one would want continuous monitoring of the magnetic field in Yellowstone. Molten magma cannot be detected magnetically (look up "Curie point"). And while they may not be continously monitoring the lake bottom, there is continuous GPS monitoring in Yellowstone and the surrounding region (see this page). And of course every scientist wishes for better equipment and more money for research. No surprise there. I wouldn't be worried by these comments.

There has been ongoing sesmic monitoring of Yellowstone from 1972-1981 and 1983-present (see this page. If any magma is moving around, this network should pick it up. I don't know why one would want continuous monitoring of the magnetic field in Yellowstone. Molten magma cannot be detected magnetically (look up "Curie point"). And while they may not be continously monitoring the lake bottom, there is continuous GPS monitoring in Yellowstone and the surrounding region (see this page). And of course every scientist wishes for better equipment and more money for research. No surprise there. I wouldn't be worried by these comments.

Quite right. http://www.science.utah.edu/ehleringer2.html and http://www.chelt.ac.uk/gdn/origins/life/carbon.htm say that the mass difference "12C is more weakly bonded and reacts more readily than 13C, because of its lighter mass" and that "[t]he plants have an enzyme that discriminates against rare carbon-13 isotopes".
So the change in relative mass of the nucleus versus the electrons changes the energy levels, since the heavier nucleus will be less effected by the electrons?

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

You are ofcourse assuming that the NSA uses Linux. I seriously doubt, anything you find on the net is in operation at NSA guarding real secrets.

Anyway, the NSA has two tasks SIGINT (signal intelligence) or code breaking, and the other is Information Assurance as it relates to US National Security interests.

Both are broad tasks, the most exciting and romantic is ofcourse is the SIGINT code breaking, spying, espionage, being clever, etc.

The janitorial work is the Information Assurance, and that is the protecting of information.

Any contribution the NSA makes to Linux is most likely so people can see how ACL security is done right as it relates to FLASK. If the NSA was going to "sneak" backdoors in anywhere they wouldn't do it in broad daylight using the front door so that another intelligence agency could discover it, and exploit it. They took a published security technique and implemented a very vanilla implementation of it for the most widely used open source OS out there.

Finally, (and this goes for all of you tin foil hats too) if the NSA wants your information, they'll get it, Linux or SElinux, be damned. Nothing opens doors, passwords, and safes quicker than a man with a gun who moves with a purpose. Failing that, they'll just take what they need and put their in-house geeks on it.

photo 1

photo 2

More on the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp ecology can be found here:

Link 1

Link 2

Soil Crust Analogs on Earth???
Likewise a USA Today article Imprint shows Mars craft landed in 'weird stuff' describes "The soil was stripped up and folded in an interesting way," said Jim Bell, who designed the panoramic camera that Spirit used to photograph the "mud-like" patch. "It has quite alien textures."

Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park (Moab, Utah)?

Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:

intermediate details

advanced details

The energy that went into making that oil was expended millions of years ago, and it all started as solar energy that was converted into plant and animal matter by the appropriate biological processes. [...] It's just that those hundreds of millions of years produced a large reserve of oil, so that the energy expended in finding it, drilling it, refining it, and transporting it is less than the amount of energy we get out of it -- but the total amount of energy that's gone into getting the oil into a usable form *is* still greater than the amount that's produced when it burns.

According to one fairly rough, recent estimate, each gallon of gas in your car required ninety-eight tons of prehistoric plants over millions of years to create. Talk about redefining "fuel efficiency," this is something that will eventually come into play should global oil reserves hit the downward slope of output that will inevitably come, unless we figure out a way to rush-fossilize a few hundred billion tons of plants per year into new fossil fuel reserves. Considering the total amount of plant biomass on Earth, suddenly that inefficient ethanol car or unreliable wind generator may be ultimately worth the drastic lifestyle change. Hell, it may be eventually necessary to maintain any kind of lifestyle involving advanced technology at all.

Put it this way--barring a freak discovery of nearly unlimited, accessible hydrocarbon reserves and a way to use them without causing more damage to the global environment, the end of the fossil-fuel civilization is an eventual certainty. What comes after it depends on what we do, or fail to do, to prepare for it. This is not fearmongering, it is realism of the most critical sort. After all, we still have to live here for the next few hundred years at least.

Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

The Story of Mel

You should look at the OSKit, which has the low-level bootstrap to get you started. You can replace parts as your OS progresses.

See http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/

My solution for friends and family that ask for technical support is simply that I will help them out if they have a Macintosh. Otherwise, there is no way I have the time to troubleshoot and support Windows, Linux or other Unix operating systems. Macs don't have the virus or worm issues that Windows has, Macs work when you plug peripheral hardware into them with fewer complications than Windows or other OS's, they are more plug and play than Linux or other *nix, and they cost less to support both in terms of time and dollars.

I used to perform more support (even as a graduate student) of other operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Solaris and IRIX) and their associated hardware for my parent business and other family and friends, but damn folks, I have a job that is not computer IT.