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As a hard agnostic, I also disagree. Because if there is something in people's heads, it's a form of existence in itself. Like Santa Claus.

You might be interessed in Popper's theory of reality. Popper says there are interacting 3 worlds:
World 1: physical objects
World 2: mental objects/states
World 3: products of the mind

Here is a good introduction by Popper himself:
Three Worlds by Karl Popper - The Tanner Lecture on Human Values

Friends that are newcomers to Linux, complain to me all the time about their wireless cards not working, right out of the box. Then I share my first experiences with Linux to put things into perspective.

A friend had bought a copy of Slackware 3.4 from Walnut Creek CDROM (cdrom.com). We also had to buy a box of 100 floppy disks from the local office-supply Big Box store. You see, there wasn't a lot of manufacturers with BIOS support for booting CDROM disks. In those days you couldn't just hop onto an OEM's website and download the latest BIOS flash image direct from the manufacturer, to get support for CDROM booting.

Even if you could have downloaded BIOS images from the manufacturer, I don't recall any OS installers to bootstrap directly from CDROM, that was still a fairly new idea at the time. Both Windows 95, and Linux distribution installers had to have a floppy bootstrap first, then load an ATAPI driver to read the rest of the installation files from CD.

In those days, if you hadn't bought the CD from Walnut Creek you had to stay up late, downloading floppy images and checksumming the downloaded images on your 14.4 modem. Even if you had bought the CD, you would have to take the time to image that big box of floppy disks. Then you would have to check the disks for consistency (so you wouldn't get interrupted by a bad floppy half-way through the install). So we would trudge on through the night, making floppy sets. The floppy sets break down like this:

• A set (base) - 9 floppies
• AP set (applications) - 6 floppies
• D set (development/compilers) - 13 floppies
• E set (emacs) - 8 floppies
• F set (FAQs/documentation) - 3 floppies
• K set (Kernel source) - 6 floppies
• N set (networking support/applications) - 6 floppies
• T set (TeX formatting) - 9 floppies
• Tcl set (Tcl/Tk) - 2 floppies
• X set (X Windows base) - 26 floppies
• XAP set (X Windows Applications) - 5 floppies
• XD set (X Windows Development headers/libraries) - 3 floppies
• XV set (X View) - 3 floppies
• Y set (BSD Games) - 2 floppies

So a full install would require you to image 99 floppy disks, not even counting boot and root install disks. So to get a Linux system capable of compiling the Kernel source, and networking with other machines, that would take at least 45 floppy disks individually imaged.

If you want a GUI and some windowed applications, that would be 37 additional floppies. That is 82 floppy disks in all. The first time I installed Linux, I didn't know what to do with it. It was comparable to DOS, or even the OS on my old Commodore. It was just a basic shell, blinking cursor, and the DOS commands I knew, besides "DIR" did not work. It was a proud moment to get the damned thing, installed and booted up. Even if you didn't know what the hell to do with it, once you got to that point.

A year, or two, later at University I could network install RedHat from a local NFS mirror in less than a few hours. Modern day, you can do a full network install in a few minutes. DVD images can be downloaded through bittorrent in less than an hour, and installed. You can even install Linux from a bootable USB flash drive that fits in your pocket.

Most everything works out of the box, from desktop to enterprise-grade server hardware. Most of the wireless cards will work, with a little bit of tweaking and hunting down external firmware. Those new to Linux may not realize, or may simply forget, how far the technology has come in just a few years. Anyone that complains about how "hard" it is to install and use Linux, should try installing from floppy sets to get a little perspective.

What an odd statement your post is.

We (man) progress all the time and know more and more about our planet, environment and life forms than ever. We know the cause of the influenza symtoms (spot the influenza virus ), isn't that amazing?

The point I'm trying to make is, man progress because we have an itch to scratch. We know, from experience, that there is often a reason why our senses (mind and body) react to unknown things. We want to find out how the world works and that leads us to progress in a vast amount of different areas.

I would like more, not less, energy to be spent on various topics including these "paranormal" phenomena. Simply because that is an itch that needs to be scratched. The unknown needs to be explored. That's how we progress, that's how we find solutions to our problems. If someone want to do research in a unknown area, if only to disprove something, more power to them!

P.S. Once it's disproved that the house is not haunted by a ghost the true origin can perhaps finally be found (don't blame me if the real origin is actually a demon from the deepest pits of hell).

> You can be punished whether or not you distribute copies of a copyrighted work for financial gain.

Even worse, my understanding is that you are liable even if you had no knowledge that you were infringing. This is based on something posted by another Slashdotter, who pointed out that copyright infringement is a special kind of tort (I think it was a statutory tort), and that means that there is no defense based on not having the intention to infringe.

This puts your average citizen in the situation where countless things he does every day might end up costing him up to $150K in court (or paying O($1K) to settle out of court). Considering that copyright law is obtuse ("Patry on Copyright" runs 5,500 pages and sells for over $1K), it's clear that something is wrong. See the paper (PDF) "Infringement Nation" by John Tehranian.

[Citation Needed]. Seriously, where is the research you speak about?

Here's some, from the link above: http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcognition/publications.html

The data show that your risk of an accident increases while 4x when you're on the phone.

http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcognition/

This has nothing to do with "misuse." It's a human limitation.

This has nothingt o do with human limitation. It has to do with a lack of training. Pilots must use their radio to stay in contact with air traffic control. They're taught to do it. They're taught how to prioritise operation of the vehicle ahead of this communication. Show me the figures when we have such training for drivers. You can't legislate away every single possible distraction. Drivers need to be taught to deal with them.

Talking on a cell phone while driving increases your risk of an accident by 400%.

http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcognition/

This isn't about some individual reckless drivers talking on the cell phone. It's a limitation of our brains.

The data show that your risk of an accident increases while 4x when you're on the phone.

http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcognition/

This has nothing to do with "misuse." It's a human limitation.

Heroin is a horrific drug, and much worse than beer - instantly and basically permanently addictive and usually destroys the lives of users (much like Meth).

I don't know where you get your facts from, but I get my facts from medical journals.

The Lancet, Adverse health effects of non-medical cannabis use, Wayne Hall and Louisa Diegenhardt, 17 October 2009, said that the dependence risk of different drugs was 9% cannabis, 32% nicotine, 23% heroin, 17% cocaine, 15% alcohol.

So nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and only 23% of heroin users go on to become addicted. This has been well known for decades. Heroin is also safer than tobacco (400,000 deaths a year).

Heroin is not worse than beer (100,000 alcohol deaths a year). If you drink 100 grams of alcohol a day, you have (recalling from memory now, so I could be off) a 16% chance of developing cirrhosis of the liver in 10 years, which leads to fatal liver failure and liver cancer.

Heroin in contrast has almost none of the toxic effects of alcohol and tobacco. If people use clean needles, and get unadulterated heroin, it's pretty safe. In the days before it was illegal, many people, including doctors, were addicted and didn't suffer adverse effects.

I'm not recommending heroin, because in the U.S. its illegality results in a danger of infection and adulteration. And sitting on the couch nodding out is not my idea of a great way to spend a day. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/addiction/drugs/mouse.html There are a percentage of heroin addicts that become dysfunctional, but no worse than alcohol.

I know 3 ex heroin addicts (I lived in a house with two - 4 of the 6 people in that house had rehabbed together, but for different things), and saw one (a singer in a band I was in) kicking the habit, which is literal kicking when a heroin addict is going through withdrawal.

So they stopped heroin. How many of them stopped smoking cigarettes?

The PR from University of Utah http://www.unews.utah.edu/p/?r=092010-1 lots more details than any of the NEWS sites have published also check out http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100922121943.htm

My university's computer science dept.along with film and media arts dept. has an interdisciplinary degree that teaches game development to arts students. You should check it out and see what they teach in entry-level course for arts students in this discipline. You can reach them here: http://www.eae.utah.edu/

Canon does makes some great glass and I shoot exclusively with Canon glass. However, Nikon, Zeiss and Leica among others also produce some pretty sweet lenses. Eventually, everybody is going to have to deal with issues related to the optics being able to actually resolve the imaging sites. At some point (and we are close), the glass will not be able to resolve anything more than the sensor can read out and you'd have wasted pixels. Kinda like the issue with Apple's Retina Display on the iPhone 4 that I wrote about here. Any more pixels would be wasted given the resolving power of the human eye.

Canon had better come up with some sharper lenses with a sensor like this. I shoot shoot with APS-H sensors on the Canon 1D and many of the lenses that Canon, Nikon and Sigma among others make are not nearly sharp enough to deal with many more pixels than are on say... the Canon 1Ds. Zeiss makes some sharp glass, but with the pixel density Canon is talking about with this new sensor, I'd worry about noise in low light conditions like those on my last embed on the USS Toledo (world's first embed in a strategic nuclear submarine). Any sort of low light, high ISO images will be truly challenging environments for such small pixel imaging sites.

It might be a great technology demonstrator or even a specific use CMOS chip for longer exposures, but I doubt it will have any applications in consumer or professional cameras unless some additional technology (or physics) comes into play.

Also, one would have to come up with some new strategies for moving all of that data around. As it is, on the latest Canon 1D Mk IV, they are pushing 16.1 MP around at about 10 fps. With this new sensor, just the readout would prevent this sensor from being used in any but the most specialized of applications.

Canon had better come up with some sharper lenses with a sensor like this. I shoot shoot with APS-H sensors on the Canon 1D and many of the lenses that Canon, Nikon and Sigma among others make are not nearly sharp enough to deal with many more pixels than are on say... the Canon 1Ds. Zeiss makes some sharp glass, but with the pixel density Canon is talking about with this new sensor, I'd worry about noise in low light conditions like those on my last embed on the USS Toledo (world's first embed in a strategic nuclear submarine). Any sort of low light, high ISO images will be truly challenging environments for such small pixel imaging sites.

It might be a great technology demonstrator or even a specific use CMOS chip for longer exposures, but I doubt it will have any applications in consumer or professional cameras unless some additional technology (or physics) comes into play.

Also, one would have to come up with some new strategies for moving all of that data around. As it is, on the latest Canon 1D Mk IV, they are pushing 16.1 MP around at about 10 fps. With this new sensor, just the readout would prevent this sensor from being used in any but the most specialized of applications.

I talked about some of the reasons behind the push for a desire to fly in commercial airspace after my visit to Creech AFB a couple of years ago. Also some discussion on why there might be a higher accident rate in the drones (pilots want haptic feedback, and they do not have it with current platforms).

I would go for Euler's equation, but using Tau instead of Pi.

e^(i*tau) = 1

At this point, the expositor usually makes some grandiose statement about how Euler’s identity relates 0, 1, e, i, and Pi —sometimes called the “five most important numbers in mathematics”. Alert readers might then complain that, because it’s missing 0, Euler’s identity with Tau relates only four of those five. We can address this objection by noting that, since sin(Tau) = 0, we were already there:

e^(i*tau) = 1 + 0

This formula, without rearrangement, actually does relate the five most important numbers in mathematics: 0, 1, e, i, and Tau.

As mathematician Bob Palais notes in his delightful article “Pi Is Wrong!”, Pi is wrong. It’s time to set things right. (More info).

Most common question in response to this argument:

Are you serious?
Of course. I mean, I’m having fun with this, and the tone is occasionally lighthearted, but there is a serious purpose. Setting the circle constant equal to the circumference over the diameter is an awkward and confusing convention. Although I would love to see mathematicians change their ways, I’m not particularly worried about them; they can take care of themselves. It is the neophytes I am most worried about, for they take the brunt of the damage: as noted in Section 2.1,Pi is a pedagogical disaster. Try explaining to a twelve-year-old (or to a thirty-year-old) why the angle measure for an eighth of a circle—one slice of pizza—is Pi/8. Wait, I meant Pi/4. See what I mean? It’s madness—sheer, unadulterated madness.

Making many assumptions, the human eye has about 500 to 600 megapixels of resolution.

But determining visual acuity is nontrivial. Lots of physics, physiology, and neuroscience enter into it.

Visual acuity depends on a number of physical limitations set by the optics of the lens of the eye as well as the sampling on the retina.

For example, the point spread function of the lens roughly matches the sampling of the retinal mosaic (well, within a factor of 3 or so). A nicely evolved system!

Our eyes' acuity are influenced by

    - Refractive error (out of focus lens, often correctable by glasses or contacts)

    - Size of the pupil (physical optics tells us that a wide open iris will reduce diffraction)

    - Illumination (brighter scenes give more photons, and our neuroprocessing can do more

    - Time of exposure to the field

    - Area of the retina exposed

    - State of adaption of the eye (night [scotopic] vs day [photopic] vision.

    - Eye motion & object motion in scene

See http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html

For a good review of visual acuity, see:
http://webvision.med.utah.edu/KallSpatial.html

The people above and I have included numerous links. I do not think ignoring news of death and destruction has anything to do with common sense. Include some links to statistics that indicate an "order of magnitude". Oh never mind, here it is car accident statistics. Looks like there are lots and lots of cell phone drivers causing problems. Here are facts on hands free vs hand held, there's no significant difference. Here's a study on drunk driving vs cell phone driving. A study from the University of Utah showing cell phones are as bad as drunk driving. There is lots of evidence if you're willing to do a little research.

My personal experience is that I have more trouble with cell phone drivers because there are so many out there. About an hour ago someone with a cell phone swerved into my lane. The road was perfectly straight.

Yes, the distraction is the problem, not the phone in your hand. Hands-free phones impare you just as much as being (legally) drunk. Here's a link

If that is so, then why do the actual measurements (as calibrated) agree with the observed ozone concentration?

If what is so, specifically? It almost sounds like you're asking me to justify the statement "If you're implying that scientists detected the possible increase in stratospheric ozone without realizing it would have a warming effect on the stratosphere, that's not true."

But that would be silly. Atmospheric physicists have long known that ozone warms the stratosphere by absorbing UV from the sun. As a side effect, we get protected from severe sunburns. That's why governments banned CFCs to protect the ozone layer. And that's probably why we're seeing ozone recovery today.

So maybe you meant: "the stratosphere has an extremely low heat capacity compared to the lower atmosphere (let alone the ocean)."

The heat capacity of the ocean can be approximated by neglecting deep water because heat rises, and ocean mixing is too slow to matter on a human timescale. The heat capacity of the upper 1 m of the ocean turns out (p 126) to be ~1.5E21 J/K.

Now compare that to the stratosphere. To start with, assume it's an ideal gas and integrate the density from the tropopause to the mesopause. Then compare the heat capacities of the stratosphere and ocean. They're crude approximations, of course, but look at the differences in the exponents. Then consider that global warming is a boundary value problem concerning a decades-long energy imbalance. That's why Dr. Pielke advocates using ocean heat content rather than air temperatures.

... why do the actual measurements (as calibrated) agree with the observed ozone concentration? ... but apparently it is not so difficult to pull fairly consistent data out regardless of those forcings.

What sentence in the paper gives you this impression? Every relevant sentence I can find is loaded with qualifiers like "may relate", "may provide evidence", "may suggest", etc. That's not an accident; scientific language is used like a scalpel.

I agree with the authors; their research is good reason to suggest that stratospheric temperatures are increasing because of ozone recovery. It's interesting research. I just don't see any other point to be drawn from it.

I don't think those other forcings are affecting this data as much as you would have us believe. I am not saying they don't exist...

Scientists have known about sudden stratospheric warmings since 1971: Matsuno,T., 1971 : A dynamical model of stratospheric warmings. J. Atmos. Sci., 28, 1479-1494.

They've been studied for almost 40 years, but still aren't well understood because of the complexity of the stratosphere, multitude of forcings, and difficulty/sparseness of measurements.

Again, I find it interesting how you pick at what you perceive to be statistical uncertainties in the "counter" evidence, when you don't seem to have such problems accepting extremely questionable data from a paltry few ancient tree rings ...

Again, what are you talking about? I just haven't seen any papers that fit this (obviously fraudulent/ridiculous) description. I'd like to at least see these extremely questionable papers that you've repeatedly accused me of accepting.

And while you have stated before that the temperature

based on this neat interactive flash demonstration comparing the sizes of coffee beans, bacterium, viruses and atoms: http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

I think you're suffering from a lack of sense of scale. Here's something to help. Zoom down to the ribosome level to get a sense of "30 atoms thick".

Of course it can be quite a distraction for many drivers to try and hold a phone to their ear or type out a text while driving, What about hands free, e.g., bluetooth headsets? A quick poke of a button on your ear to answer a call shouldn't be any different than pushing a button to change the channel on your radio. If the phone is set to auto answer, it's not much different than having a conversation with a passenger in the vehicle.

There is a (maybe not so) subtle difference between a cell phone conversation and one with a person in the car. Passengers in a car tend to have at least partial awareness of what is happening in traffic and can adjust accordingly or even warn the driver (maybe that is worse, in some cases) Fiddling with a cell phone certainly can't help one's driving, but I think it's the conversation (with a non-present party) that is the real problem. Link below is a study... http://www.psych.utah.edu/lab/appliedcognition/publications/passenger.pdf

If the data-set has been completely de-identified (with the actual dates of all events truncated/obfuscated), or otherwise meets the criteria defined under the HIPAA Safe Harbor de-identification method, then it is not considered to be a HIPAA violation.

Fun fact - Wolfram Alpha can serve as your 'self-checkout line' for things like this.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cubic+micrometer

Here's a bit of scale - a cubic micrometer is about the same size as a calibration bead for microscopy. A red blood cell is about 8 micrometers across. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ Or, there's this video showing the "powers of ten" (also its title...): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

Also, chemists work at these dimensions, too! (So do biologists. And others.) :*P Don't snub the other disciplines!!! Or I'll weep. And not gently, nor to a guitar.

In a modern distro, it would be impossible for an individual to vet the entire code base, it would not be impossible for an organized, determined group of a few thousand experts to do so. I believe that the NSA does just this with selinux, or at least thats the claim.

http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/index.shtml
http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/fluke/html/flask.html

Indeed, SELinux is based on the FLASK kernel architecture which is formally verified. This means that flask has a mathematical model (specification) which researchers use to test for bugs and check for correctness. They CANNOT guarantee that the whole architecture is free of bugs, however they totally guarantee that for all the tests and validations performed the architecture is 100% free of bugs.
If the software (in this case a kernel) is developed exactly following the formal specification, then we can guarantee that the software will behave like the tested specification (mathematical model).

I'm not from formal methods but I believe it is something like that.

That was a fabulous presentation, and one that I'll likely hold onto a copy of, since it describes the issue of SMP memory ordering with a great example. I'll have to write "presenter notes" for those slides, since I can't get the video to come up, but that's OK. I understand what's going on there.

One thing I thought was notably absent was any discussion of data prefetch. With all of the emphasis on how performance is dominated by cache misses, you'd think he'd give at least a nod to both automatic hardware and compiler directed software prefetch. After all, he mentions CMT, which is a more exotic way to hide memory latency, IMHO.

On a different note: In the example on slides 23 - 30, he shows an example where speculation allowed two cache misses to pipeline, bringing the cost-per-miss down to about half. Dunno if he highlighted the synergy here in the talk, because it wasn't highlighted in the presentation. It is useful to note, though, how overlapping cache misses reduces their cost. There can be even more synergy here than is otherwise obvious: In HPCA-14, there was a fascinating paper (slides) about how incorrect speculation can still speed up programs due to misses on the incorrectly-speculated path still bringing in relevant cache lines.

That was a fabulous presentation, and one that I'll likely hold onto a copy of, since it describes the issue of SMP memory ordering with a great example. I'll have to write "presenter notes" for those slides, since I can't get the video to come up, but that's OK. I understand what's going on there.

One thing I thought was notably absent was any discussion of data prefetch. With all of the emphasis on how performance is dominated by cache misses, you'd think he'd give at least a nod to both automatic hardware and compiler directed software prefetch. After all, he mentions CMT, which is a more exotic way to hide memory latency, IMHO.

On a different note: In the example on slides 23 - 30, he shows an example where speculation allowed two cache misses to pipeline, bringing the cost-per-miss down to about half. Dunno if he highlighted the synergy here in the talk, because it wasn't highlighted in the presentation. It is useful to note, though, how overlapping cache misses reduces their cost. There can be even more synergy here than is otherwise obvious: In HPCA-14, there was a fascinating paper (slides) about how incorrect speculation can still speed up programs due to misses on the incorrectly-speculated path still bringing in relevant cache lines.

There's an interesting and sort of thought provoking discussion of the physical characteristics of Silver Foxes bred only for tolerance to humans here:

http://www.hum.utah.edu/~bbenham/2510 Spring 09/Behavior Genetics/Farm-Fox Experiment.pdf

The curious thing is that in addition to becoming human friendly, these domesticated foxes developed a propensity toward dog like physical characteristics like curly tails, overbites, and piebald coats ... curious.

In this cell/microbe zoom, it looks like bacteria are generally smaller than human cells, but not 1%. Viruses are much smaller, though. But they're not "cells".

Actually, the explanation for Craters of the Moon basalt flows is a bit different, although it is related to the Yellowstone hotspot.

Hotspots are relatively fixed in the mantle (though there is evidence to suggest that they do actually move) and the crust shifts over them (continental drift) - leaving tracks behind where the hotspot was. Check out this image from the TFA study showing the extent of the plume, and how it drifted through time.

The Yellowstone hotspot was once underneath Idaho. That was millions of years ago, of course, and your date of the craters of the moon flows (within the past 14,000 years) is correct. While the hotspot didn't cause those eruptions (though it is responsible for most of the Snake River Plain), what it did was heat and weaken the crust, which later thinned and rifted (extension in the Basin and Range). The Craters of the Moon flows are eruptions from the rift, which, though it was helped by it, does not require input from the Yellowstone hotspot to remain hot and rifting.

I looked through the paper and don't see any evidence to support a present-day connection with Craters of the Moon.

The original paper is here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf , Linked from here http://www.met.utah.edu/tgarrett/Publications/index.html

The original paper is here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf Linked from here http://www.met.utah.edu/tgarrett/Publications/index.html

http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/ I just found this, and lo and behold! I used to dig my OLVWM desktop - and it ran like the dickens - just a matter of mucking about here and there but it worked wonders! Ran Slack 3.2 through to 3.6 on a 486 machine for quite some time JUST CUZ - and I don't like to throw out hardware if it's working! This has got me into the groove of setting up a VM with Slack again...nice thing to do for a Sunday!

How can we have a flame war about the definition of a Real Programmer© without a link to the story of Mel, the original Real Programmer©?

Check out their demonstration videos at http://span.ece.utah.edu/radio-tomographic-imaging.

I was fortunate enough to see the demo at Mobicom last year. It's a really neat application, even if the math is nothing new.

The original press release doesn't describe it as a "breakthrough". My guess is, that someone at treehugger.com determined that ad-revenue was their single greatest point of failure. So my guess is that this is a breakthrough but only for people with a very specific business model.

You mean twitter failed to mount a scratch monkey?

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/scrtch.monkey

It's not about the conversation - which, unless you're unable to talk to somebody in your car and drive at the same time, in which case I would advise you to avoid chewing gum if you plan on walking - it's about holding the phone uncomfortably.

You're wrong. Anyone but a completely inexperienced driver can keep the car on the road without hitting anything even while chatting on the phone - if nothing unexpected happens. I've never had a problem myself, still I avoid using my phone while driving nowadays. At rare occasions you'll need all the attention you can muster, if for instance a kid or another bad driver does something you didn't expect. Talking on a cell phone takes away a bit of that attention, and I've read studies like this one where the conclusion is that talking on your cellphone makes you as accident-prone as a drunk driver.
Google yields plenty more, here's an abstract from another one.

Summary: This research assessed the effects of cell phone conversations on driving.
Our first study found that subjects engaged in cell phone conversations using either
a hand-held or hands-free device, were more than twice as likely to miss simulated
traffic signals than when they were not distracted by the cell phone conversation. By
contrast, performance was not disrupted by listening to radio broadcasts or listening
to a book on tape. Our second study, using a high-fidelity driving simulator, found
that subjects conversing on a hands-free cell phone were more likely to get into
traffic accidents. Analysis of driving profiles revealed that cell phone users exhibited
a sluggish response to changing traffic patterns and attempted to compensate by
increasing their following distance. We suggest that active participation in a cell
phone conversation disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging
cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.

You shouldn't ignore the facts on this one, if nothing else to err on the side of caution. How many drivers do you know that will admit they're less than averagely skilled? Still, half of all drivers must be, and I don't want them to rear-end me while planning their dinner.

There is no difference between having a cell phone conversation while driving and having a conversation with the guy/gal in the seat next to you, unless you somehow drop the handset...

Bullshit. Since you obviously lack the common sense to figure this out from experience, here is was 30 seconds with Google will tell you. http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/xap144-drews.pdf http://www.ergoweb.com/news/detail.cfm?id=2293 http://www.psych.utah.edu/AppliedCognitionLab/HFES2004-000597-1.pdf

My first computer experience was a 300 baud dialup to a Honeywell mainframe. That was followed by TRS80, Apple][ and C64.Others I knew used Amiga, Atari (400 and 800), TI99, etc. etc.). Except for the Honeywell, those were all natural evolutions from the Altair. So was the IBM PC.

IBM helped bring desktop computing forward into business with the PC. The release of the IBM PC was going to happen, if not with DOS, then with CP/M. Honestly, what they really brought to the table was their name and software packaged in a nearly bulletproof hard case.

If not IBM, then something else would have come along. There were plenty of "home computers" with growing capabilities around. Forward thinking small businesses were already exploring the many other choices in a business environment including Apple, C64 (yes, C64) and various CP/M machines. Don't forget that VisiCalc was an Apple ][ app first. Wordstar ran on a number of platforms as did Bank Street Writer. Later, we had WordPerfect (for DOS, Windows, Apple IIe, Mac, Linux, Amiga, etc). You may see a pattern there. Before MS horned in, most apps were multi-platform. It was simply expected. Either way, business apps were being developed and were running on many different platforms.

Had MS not been there, Lotus would have continued as well. Their conspicuous success would have drawn competition into the ring one way or another (just like it drew MS in).

Certainly, with or without the IBM and Microsoft, the Mac would have still happened. Had the PC been a CP/M machine, IBM would still have been driven to create OS/2. Without MS, OS/2 would likely have been a more significant product.

Linus would still have wanted a Unix platform and would still not have been able to afford one unless he wrote it himself.

Keep in mind that back in the Windows 3.1 days if you wanted to dial the Internet, you used Trumpet Winsock because Bill Gates declared the Internet to be a passing fad. He was all about Netbeui and Windows shares in the workgroup. Linux was the OS that came packaged with terminal, ppp and slip connectivity out of the box. My first non-shell Internet connection was through Linux and slirp running on my ISP shell account.

As a result, MS came to the internet late. They finally went there because they saw themselves becoming irrelevant if they didn't. If you wanted to see that www thing, you used Mosaic and later, Netscape. You could do so under Windows 3.11 or Linux with X (I was using SLS Linux at the time). Had there been no Windows, I expect Mosaic and Netscape would have been DOS and/or CP/M applications. Otherwise you used gopher and ftp. There was no Outlook, but there were plenty of nice email packages out there both free and shareware. Recall that AOL ran on Netscape. I wonder how many metric tons of hair wouldn't have been ripped out if IE had never existed.

Be might have been more significant.

You may recall that in the bad old days we called it Plug'N'Pray (and your Prayers wouldn't likely be answered) and the ability to disable it and set the resources with jumpers was considered an essential feature even when you were using DOS/Windows.

Microchannel was IBM's move towards automated resource allocation. The rest of the industry responded with EISA then PCI. It's not as if only MS saw the whole set jumpers then see if it worked dance to be a bad thing that could be eliminated.

I would argue that MS's cutthroat monopolistic practices have actually held IT back by 5 to 10 years (and counting). Bill Gates certainly capitalized on the home PC, but he certainly did NOT make it possible. The one and only thing he brought to the party was a cutthroat business model, a marketing department that lied bigger, and a spirit of selfishness. More than one innovative company ended up dead with a dagger in it's back after making a deal with Microsoft. Everything else would have happened anyway with more competition and probably BETTER.

The world would be better off today if MS had never been.

z = primex * primey;
suppose z = 377, how do you find the factors: 13 and 29?
Now, for encryption, z is thousands of digits instead of 3.

As all pries are known, or at least only known primes can be used, why not make a table with the answers? e.g. for the one digit ones
2 x 2 = 4
2 x 3 = 6
2 x 5 = 10
2 x 7 = 14
3 x 3 = 9
3 x 5 = 15
3 x 7 = 21
5 x 5 = 25
5 x 7 = 35
7 x 7 = 49

So suppose z = 35, you look it up in the table and see directly that it is 5x7.
Sure it will take some time to make that list, but once you have it, getting back should be very fast compared to figure it out in a mathematical way.

Here are the first 15.000.000 primes, so there are only 15.000.000^2 solutions to look at or 2.25e+14
I could imagine that by looking at the length of the result you can reduce the place where you are going to look. e.g. if the result is only one digit, you could only look in the one digit solutions, making stuff a lot faster.

Obviously these go to only 9 digits, so a bit more will exist till you get to m39 (or 2^(13.466.917)-1

Anybody willing to make such a database? :-D

For certain types of searches, Google is a monopoly. If they decide that your favourite feature is "not in sufficient demand" and break it, you have no alternatives.

If you or the parent took a moment to learn HOW Google does things, the 2 of you you wouldn't look so foolish. cache of http://cai.au.edu/Training/Content/Google/Google.pdf

It IS also possible to look for articles on e.g. M$'s proprietary language.
You just have to realize that the hash sign already has a function in a URL (and that anything after it will be truncated in a Google search).
The trick is to SUBSTITUTE for that non-alpha symbol.
cache of http://www.physics.utah.edu/~wiencke/elab/ascii/ascii.html e.g. http://google.com/search?q=C%23

For certain types of searches, Google is a monopoly. If they decide that your favourite feature is "not in sufficient demand" and break it, you have no alternatives.

Take for example Usenet search. Google bought dejanews so I am not aware of any alternative to Google Groups. Yet, searching by several authors (which used to work) is now broken.

Consider the following example: Search for 'author:mikea' -- Results 1 - 100 of about 313 for author:mikea. Search for 'author:mikeb' -- Results 1 - 100 of about 345 for author:mikeb. Search for 'author:mikea | author:mikeb' -- Results 1 - 100 of about 281 for author:mikea | author:mikeb.

And Presto! New math: 313 + 345 = 281

...or you could notice that Google deprecates the pipe symbol and you could bother to learn how Google does a Boolean OR search using only *alpha* characters (also covered in the PDF of Google's handbook).

...though you do have a point about the new math; I've found that including something from the header **AND** something from the message body brings up MUCH more in Google Groups searches. Google is interested in Google's interests and apparently that includes saving bandwith by restricting what appears to be redundant results. (It *used* to be more liberal.)

gewg_

MS fanboys use C#: everyone else uses Java

And Real Programmers use FORTRAN.

tftfy

I haven't read all of the 39 pages of this report but from what I gather, I don't see why this should be any different than scientific blogging (or, in pre-internet terms, armchair science).

Example: I read Bryan William Jones' blog. It sometimes has scientific topics although rarely anything new. Let's say Dr. Jones makes some important discovery in a field he is not an expert in ... like bird behavior. And it's a significant contribution to that field. Maybe he realizes what he's discovered and maybe he doesn't know the intricacies of bird behavior so he blogs about it.

Is this a peer reviewed published piece of research? No. Is it important to the field? It might be. Should he get credit? Yes. Should bird behaviorists be required to read every blog on the internet looking for a breakthrough? No. Could it go unnoticed? Yes. Will this happen often? Highly unlikely. Will Dr. Jones rare footage of the endangered African Upside-down tufted titmouse's in flight mating dance be a hit to the general public who like little birdies? Probably.

I see lawyering in a similar light. You expect the laywers and judges involved in a case to be completely on top of everything and knowledgable about everything (try to suppress laughter, please). But of course someone like Groklaw's PJ could bust out a piece of work putting more of the puzzle together than any of the inept dinosaurs running the show. Similar questions and answers may follow this scenario as in the case of the blogging scientist. Most importantly, that this position may be popular with the public but it's not a part of the case unless someone involved takes note and makes it so and puts it into the spotlight (or Bird Behavioral Journal in the former example).

That said, there is one serious flaw in this analogy. Science is usually correct or wrong. And usually easily decided (upon reflection, perhaps I should have used something more hotly contested like quantum theory instead of a bird dance). Law, as we all know here, is not only many shades of gray but also something that many people on the internet get emotional about (which is a good thing) and think they are experts in (which is a bad thing). I have not read the legal minutiae of my state or even country. I know the popular things and I extrapolate on them--almost always erroneously.

In short, I would opine that it would be a violation of free speech to outlaw it and dangerous if not stupid to make it legally important. There is a reason for the BAR exam. If you have not passed that, you probably just want to be a citizen on a soapbox instead of a legal target.

Blogging is by and large a disposable medium that can be morphed into important things by the appropriate people. It is satisfying to express one's ideas like I am doing right now. Leave it that way.

Some of the mirrors have it:
Here's Utah's

Posting anon because I moderated in here.

Anyway, are there real-world kernels that don't use C ?

Yes.

The irony in all this is that Pi is Wrong!

For a variety of reasons, the number 2pi (6.2832...) works out much better as a fundamental constant than Pi, and it simplifies many mathematical formulas. The linked article suggests that 2pi be labeled a 'turn'; so in that sense, 90 degrees is a quarter-turn; etc. Surprisingly insightful.

So while the rest of you jump the gun, I'll be celebrating on June 28th. :)

Migration to UAVs is an obligate journey. My last visit to Creech AFB showed just how inevitable this is, yet I wonder if the move towards autonomous vehicles will really expand beyond a limited niche. Autonomous vehicles have a definite role, but one that is limited to very specialized circumstances akin to interplanetary probes. Platforms that gather data on say climate change or sea conditions are appropriate. However, in the absence of a complete revolution in the way data is gathered through sensors, large event surveillance, crowd and traffic control and hostage situations or crimes (or military applications) will almost always have to have at least a semi-autonomous component to them. I will say that efforts are already underway in certain combat situations to provide for single pilot control over multiple UAV platforms through semi-automated solutions, but those solutions still have an operator actively monitoring the platform.

It is actually surprising how much is involved in transporting the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town there was a considerable presence that travelled around with him and Air Force One is only a small part of that traveling circus. While the current VC-25 are starting to show their age, one does wonder just what sort of requirements creep are involved. It used to be that simpleton transport would be acceptable and in actuality, the 737 makes for a wonderful government transport in the C-40 and in fact the current 747 design (though modified since) has been in place since just 1990. In some ways the 747-8 does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as possessing more efficient engines, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need a 747-8 or an A380? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

It is surprising how involved is the POTUS. Last time the POTUS was in town [utah.edu] there was a presence that travelled around with him and the One is a part of that traveling circus. While the current POTUS is starting to show his age, one does wonder just what sort of creep is involved. It used to be that simple would be acceptable and in actuality, it makes for a wonderful government. In fact the current design (though modified since) has been in place since 1990. In some ways it does simplify some systems, making maintenance easier and cheaper as well as more efficient, but just playing an opposing advocate, do we really need POTUS? My bias would be yes for a number of reasons, but I also think it is reasonable to ask some harder questions about what is actually required.

ws