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I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays."

That's funny as I was wondering the same thing when Apple's press announcement appeared in my inbox. Of course the issue of other movies like those you mentioned should not even be an issue as it is content that the user has loaded on their own iPods (and you should not be looking at your neighbors content anyhow). As to porn and other questionable content, this really comes down to etiquette and if there are those on the flight that will display such content where others may see it (like kids), they are likely pissing people off for other reasons. All told, this is a great idea and I'd rather have to deal with other people's movies than having to listen to them talk on their cell phones (Please! FAA, Nnnoooooooo!) or worse. Flying anywhere is becoming more and more onerous these days and at the very least, having airlines support ways to charge laptops or iPods during long flights would be a huge benefit as Empower outlets are pretty hard to find on many flights in coach and sometimes even in first or business class.

I've had to deal with enough problems flying anyhow again and again and again and anything that will keep people quiet and minding their own business is a good thing.

I wonder how the airlines are going to keep inappropriate video (i.e. porn or even just movies like "Snakes on a Plane" or "Alive") from appearing on the seat-back displays."

That's funny as I was wondering the same thing when Apple's press announcement appeared in my inbox. Of course the issue of other movies like those you mentioned should not even be an issue as it is content that the user has loaded on their own iPods (and you should not be looking at your neighbors content anyhow). As to porn and other questionable content, this really comes down to etiquette and if there are those on the flight that will display such content where others may see it (like kids), they are likely pissing people off for other reasons. All told, this is a great idea and I'd rather have to deal with other people's movies than having to listen to them talk on their cell phones (Please! FAA, Nnnoooooooo!) or worse. Flying anywhere is becoming more and more onerous these days and at the very least, having airlines support ways to charge laptops or iPods during long flights would be a huge benefit as Empower outlets are pretty hard to find on many flights in coach and sometimes even in first or business class.

I've had to deal with enough problems flying anyhow again and again and again and anything that will keep people quiet and minding their own business is a good thing.

Well, its quite simple to figure out why a handheld laser weapon would not fly: A shout from a military handgun from 100 yards away has a kinetic energy of roughly 324 ft-lbs (from http://medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GUNS/G UNBLST.html ). Converted, this means 440 Ws. So if you have a 4W Laser, you would need to point it on your target for 110s to even deliver the same ammount of energy (not considering your target moves, energy is lost due to reflection, cooling, etc.) But now your gun does not deliver that energy in 110s, but in lets say 0,1s (guessing). So you need about 1000 times more energy. (so you need to point only 0,1s). This means you need 440000 Ws. A Li-Ion battery has a energy density of 160 Wh/kg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery So this means you'd have to lug around 1kg of Li-Ion battery only for a single shot. This is all not taking various other points into account where you loose energy. So, you see where the problem lies.

I can't agree with this article more. Since moving from film to digital SLRs my photography has really grown because shooting digital blows away all of the risk and gives you much more creative freedom when it comes to experimental exposures such as low light photography, action photography and more. I find myself taking far more pictures and experimenting more with digital and then simply throwing away the bad experiments than I did with film because of the costs associated with film. The other thing about Digital SLRs is that in addition to the higher quality optics, the actual imaging sensors on the CCD are physically larger leading to much higher quality images than are possible with point and shoots that may possess higher megapixel counts, but have smaller physical sensor sizes.

If you are going to make the move to a digital SLR, I also highly recommend the Canon 20d/30d cameras as a good system to begin exploring a variety of different photographic styles from outdoors to action to macro and still life. You really cannot go wrong with some of the other manufacturers like Nikon with their D70/D80 and Sony, but Canon, like Apple tends to build the entire widget from the glass to the camera to the imaging chips. Additionally, I tend to like the color representation from the Canon Digic imaging chips. If you are planning on shooting less outdoor work or in less rigorous environments, I'd suggest introducing yourself to digital SLRs with the lower end Rebel (or Nikon D50) series which is still pretty nice hardware, just not as ruggedly built. (I've also heard rumors that Nikon is going to introduce a new lower cost D40).

For a sample of some of the images possible with the Canon 20d/30d, almost all of the images on my blog that were taken by me have been captured with the Canon 20d and associated hardware. I also have a Canon hardware list at the top of my FAQ here that may be helpful for those that are interested in some of the lens options.

The negatives that the author of the linked article writes about are also true. Hauling around all of your camera gear to various spots on the globe does get a bit harder with more (and heavier) gear. I just got back from a trip to Argentina at the foot of the Andes (pics to be posted tomorrow morning) and it does take a bit more effort to pack everything you need to take with you. The gear addiction and associated costs do not stop at the camera body and lenses either. You will find yourself buying tripods, monopods, backpacks, filters, flashes, books, more books etc...etc...etc....

I can't agree with this article more. Since moving from film to digital SLRs my photography has really grown because shooting digital blows away all of the risk and gives you much more creative freedom when it comes to experimental exposures such as low light photography, action photography and more. I find myself taking far more pictures and experimenting more with digital and then simply throwing away the bad experiments than I did with film because of the costs associated with film. The other thing about Digital SLRs is that in addition to the higher quality optics, the actual imaging sensors on the CCD are physically larger leading to much higher quality images than are possible with point and shoots that may possess higher megapixel counts, but have smaller physical sensor sizes.

If you are going to make the move to a digital SLR, I also highly recommend the Canon 20d/30d cameras as a good system to begin exploring a variety of different photographic styles from outdoors to action to macro and still life. You really cannot go wrong with some of the other manufacturers like Nikon with their D70/D80 and Sony, but Canon, like Apple tends to build the entire widget from the glass to the camera to the imaging chips. Additionally, I tend to like the color representation from the Canon Digic imaging chips. If you are planning on shooting less outdoor work or in less rigorous environments, I'd suggest introducing yourself to digital SLRs with the lower end Rebel (or Nikon D50) series which is still pretty nice hardware, just not as ruggedly built. (I've also heard rumors that Nikon is going to introduce a new lower cost D40).

For a sample of some of the images possible with the Canon 20d/30d, almost all of the images on my blog that were taken by me have been captured with the Canon 20d and associated hardware. I also have a Canon hardware list at the top of my FAQ here that may be helpful for those that are interested in some of the lens options.

The negatives that the author of the linked article writes about are also true. Hauling around all of your camera gear to various spots on the globe does get a bit harder with more (and heavier) gear. I just got back from a trip to Argentina at the foot of the Andes (pics to be posted tomorrow morning) and it does take a bit more effort to pack everything you need to take with you. The gear addiction and associated costs do not stop at the camera body and lenses either. You will find yourself buying tripods, monopods, backpacks, filters, flashes, books, more books etc...etc...etc....

I am actually a Texan that moved to Utah.

Oh, that's even better. And you look like a freakin' genius yourself. crapping your pants much?

By the way, thanks for the 2800 page views.

Perhaps you could take it at face value that your parent has a Ph.D. (see his publications on his linked page on his /. profile): http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/pubx_pubx_ bwj.html

However, it is germane to mention that his focus is not on calorie burning and related stuff but rather the eye (and some sleep studies)...and so his ideas should be taken with a grain of salt nonetheless.

It's quite simple, actually. It's like celery. It takes more energy for you to consume it and your body to subsequently break the food down than is actually contained within the food.

You obviously missed my post here explaining this fallacy.

And yes, though their methodology wasn't mentioned in this article, .....blah blah blah.... It specifically says that it burns a few extra calories if you drink xyz amount per day.

Do you believe *all* press releases?

P.S. I call shenanigans on your Ph.D. Either that, or you just didn't read the article. Either way.

Feel free to check out my formal CV any time you would like and you should know earning it obtained reading a not insignificantly greater amount of material than a few press releases.

The fact that she is physically attractive - which one of the pictures on that page is she?

fact that she is physically attractive

*Snort!* Ha ha ha ha ha ha....... heeeee ha ha ha ha ha! *sniff*.......

In all seriousness though, there is nothing new here as this certainly plays off any number of sci-fi subjects going back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. People have been obsessed with this sort of thing for years and in fact, was the basis of racial profiling, discrimination, murder and genocide by the Nazis in the 1930s through eugenics.

The funny thing though is that even though many folks are obsessed with image and "beauty", people will choose mates for a variety of different reasons, that sometimes boggle the mind in their complexity or pathology and as long as you have people that are..... less than attractive with large amounts of financial reserves, you will always have confounds in the system. Other confounds are simply human relationships. For instance, my wife and I decided to date and then marry only after we had been good friends for some period of time. The fact that she is physically attractive was only incidental which brings up a whole other category of people who meet and then fall in love over the Internet without ever having met in person.

Oh, and speaking of confounds, the increasing use of plastic surgery among those that 1) have real reason to use it (true disfigurement) and 2) are just vain enough to want it (lips, cheeks, chins, breasts) will have an effect on this as well, leading to a whole new aspect of relationships. What is false advertising when it comes to body modification? Breasts are pretty easy to detect, but what about that nose which might have been bobbed? Straightened? What about those cheekbones? Teeth? All of these mods and others will confound any selection pressure and likely will increase in their statistical impact the more important "beauty" becomes to societies.

But hey, you know..... The Clone Wars will take care of all of this sort of nonsense..... or will it be Skynet? :-)

Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.

I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.

I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.

It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.

Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?

So, we've known for some time about the potential for atmospheric mixing in the Jovian atmosphere. In a way, I guess this would have been expected. For an animation of the Great Red Spot and its turbulence, click here and scroll down.

I am well aware of how science works as I am a scientist who has spent some time working in the metabolic space. What I am objecting to is the fact that this was brought to the press before they really understood what was going on, bringing back memories of cold fusion and all that. Furthermore, it sounds like other scientists who have reviewed the paper are asking similar questions, so...... no, I don't think I am being too quick to criticize the study. Before making claims such as these, there simply needs to be more work done, and one should not do this kind of science in the popular press. That is what I was objecting to.

So, this is pretty interesting, but this smells like (LOL, H2S.... get it?) incomplete science in that they appear to have gone to the press without first, doing the real experiments that would tell them more about what is going on here. Simply looking at core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure will not tell you the status of organ function, nor will it tell you anything about potential organ system damage. Dr. Chris Pomfrett's letter is right on where he questions: "My big question about this work is: is it reducing brain metabolism or simply having a toxic effect on the brain stem?", but he only gets part of it right in his suggestion to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well.

Additional tests can not simply be EEG combined with standard histology as you need to know something about how the tissues are responding in metabolic space, especially as how they are introducing a new small molecular species to the mix. EEG is only going to tell you the global overall status of the tissues, but it too will be altered in ways that may or may not be informative. I would suggest looking at early immediate gene expression profiles for apoptotic pathways and performing experiments designed to actually look at and document the metabolic profiles of these cells/tissues.

I am thinking specifically of some of the techniques we have developed (pictures of some tissues using these techniques can be seen here), but there are many, many other traditional biochemical and metabolic assays that could have been performed for these studies like HPLC, MassSPEC etc...etc....etc....

I don't think it's worth it, from a save-the-world perspective. It seems that putting $9000 into some professionally managed wind power program would end up doing a lot more to reduce emissions.

$9000 -> personal windmill : 100,000kWH
$9000 -> Blue Sky ($1.75/100kWH) : 514,300kWH
$9000 -> windpower.utah.edu : 3,000,000kWH (I'm still not sure how they're managing this)

Then there's the fact that windmills aren't ideal for every house, but anyone with money can support the latter projects.

I also think adopting early in the hopes of driving down the price for later adopters might be a risky strategy. You have to assume that there are already places where $.09/kWH makes perfect economic sense (off-grid uses, especially). It seems to make more sense to let those drive early demand.

But your own personal wind farm has an advantage that a professional system doesn't: personal energy independence. There is something compelling about knowing that even if society fails and the grid goes dark, your generator will be spinning away, making it possible for you to reheat your frozen burritos.

Another advantage is that it can act as a conversation starter in a way that a check to some company won't. Of course the conversation might be, "When will you be taking down that ugly-ass windmill?" Personally, I find them attractive, but there's no accounting for taste.

Methinks that Skystream is being a bit less than upfront about the cost/benefit.

According to the Skystream data-sheet, the unit can produce 400kWh/month assuming 12 mph average wind speed and needs a minimum average wind-speed of 10mph (emphasis mine). According to the national average wind-speed archives there are very few places in the country that meet the required 10mph minimum average and fewer still that meet the recommended minimum of 12mph. And many of the places that can meet these requirements only do so for part of the year.

They say the unit can pay for itself "in as quickly as 5 years". WOW! That must be some set of optimal circumstances. Without even including the time value of money and assuming the lowest end of the $9,000-12,000 installed cost and no maintenance costs you would have to generate $1800 worth of electricity every year.

If your electricity costs $.20/kWh (well over the highest regional residential average rate) you still need to generate 9,000kWh/year or 750kWh/month. According to the specsheet this will require an average wind-speed of approximately 20mph (the full rated speed of the windmill). And the noise produced will be in the 50-60dB range or about the equivalent of my 2kW Honda eu2000i generator.

So perhaps if you are located in Mt. Washington, NH (the only place on the chart with average wind-speed > 20) and the unit isn't destroyed by the January average wind-speeds exceeding 46mph or by the occasional wind-speeds exceeding the 140mph "survival speed" or, of-course, by the ice-storms then you might see a 5-year payback. Otherwise, forget-it.

I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods.

Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). Of all the traffic that hit my blog from the recent Boing Boing posting, it appears that of those that clicked through, over 23% of the clicks were from Macintosh systems and from the traffic I get from Slashdot, about 15% is from Macintosh systems. This limited sampling shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.

Traffic from another site I manage, Webvision (I know, I know, ....really old design from the early 90's, but it's been low on my priority list for the last four years) was likely the first online textbook receiving much more international traffic (about 1000 unique visitors/day from all over the world) and I have seen the international Macintosh marketshare increase from about 4% to 6.5% of total traffic over the past year.

Both of these statistics mirror the trends I have seen reported for the platforms marketshare on much wider scales. These are direct measures that I am reporting as opposed to a fee based service like HitsLink whose measures are not as direct. Too bad Google's Zeitgeist no longer reports on platform statistics which were a good measure of overall platform usage from a much wider used resource.

I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods.

Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). Of all the traffic that hit my blog from the recent Boing Boing posting, it appears that of those that clicked through, over 23% of the clicks were from Macintosh systems and from the traffic I get from Slashdot, about 15% is from Macintosh systems. This limited sampling shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.

Traffic from another site I manage, Webvision (I know, I know, ....really old design from the early 90's, but it's been low on my priority list for the last four years) was likely the first online textbook receiving much more international traffic (about 1000 unique visitors/day from all over the world) and I have seen the international Macintosh marketshare increase from about 4% to 6.5% of total traffic over the past year.

Both of these statistics mirror the trends I have seen reported for the platforms marketshare on much wider scales. These are direct measures that I am reporting as opposed to a fee based service like HitsLink whose measures are not as direct. Too bad Google's Zeitgeist no longer reports on platform statistics which were a good measure of overall platform usage from a much wider used resource.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/research/areas/robotics/rob oticstrack.shtml

I think his name was Mel.

my god. i just love it when a truly eloquent genius takes out the beat down stick and ever so gently taps a tool on the head. AC whoever you are, you are hereby presented with one of those sticky little gold stars.

oh, and in case anybody is interested and went to Jones blog and thought it was a tad "fruity patooty" (case in point muscular guy wearing swimming goggles who looks a little bit more occupied with the image than the perf. factor http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/C127634910 8/E20060808133352/Media/Runner.jpg ) you have reason too, or so we all think at the lab.

and as a disclosure, I know this "tool". and afa "Retinal neurophysiology scientist. My work involves disorders of retinal degeneration and how those diseases affect the intrinsic retinal circuitry including the implications for rescue of vision via gene therapy, and retinal bionic or biological implants. Other research efforts involve exploring metabolomics for application in understanding physiology and medicine and for drug development." dude? ever wonder why we don't ask you to come with us for lunch?

Because almost all of my crashes are caused by driver or hardware problems, its helpful knowing just what that problem is so I can fix the driver or replace the hardware

Fix the driver? Replace the hardware? Not on a Mac. And besides, OS X does output diagnostics for people like you. It just doesn't show it to the enduser on screen, which is fine. This was the first website I found on kernel panic debugging on OS X if you are interested.

he trick might be to turn off the expression of the gene temporarily to rejuvenate aging organs, then switch it back in again to suppress cancer. That way, maybe Yossarian can have is cake and eat it too...

Wishful thinking. As much as people would love to blame the cause of aging on one particular gene or process, the truth of the matter is that aging is a complex and multi-factorial phenomenon that can't be addressed that easily.

Sure, stopping this particular gene might allow for more somatic cell repair but what does that do for the damaged mDNA due to free radicals in the mitohondria? And what about the telomeres protecting the ends of your chromosomes which would decrease with every replication? And what about damaged cells whose replication could cause the very cancer this gene was probably "designed" to prevent?

Not to be discouraging of this kind of research, but really it is just pie-in-the-sky type of stuff and should be regarded as such; the science just isn't there yet. And the irony of it all is that immortality most certainly won't be obtained in our lifetimes. Joseph Heller has to be smiling somewhere about that one.

-Grym

It might make more sense to develop a purpose specific card to push raytracing graphics, rather than an Intel chip. I've seen a university project to build one and they demonstrated an architecture that pretty much scaled up performance as they added more silicon. Which is to be somewhat expected; give each chip a region of view to render and they can cast their rays independently. The critical aspect of this system is memory, and memory contention. The good news is that rendering doesn't need to modify the shared geometry, and they should be rendering to different parts of the frame buffer, so it won't be a process synchronization hell (there will still be some problems when you need to modify that geometry when the frame is done, and figuring out how to ). Critics will tell you that this is going to destroy the cache, but the news is, what little cache coherency on raster cards that's left will continue to die out as textures increase in size, and as we introduce multiple texturing (bump mapping, textures, dirt maps, alpha maps, etc) per polygon. iD's new Quake wars is using some ridiculus texture size to reduce terrain fractals, and no matter how it's done it's gotta put the GPU memory at strain. GPUs have been pushing memory technology for a while now; GDDR3, common in cards for the last three or four years, is DDR2 improved to reduce heat production (and thus up the clock).

Compared to traditional raster based solutions, ray tracing hardware is underresearched. There's a whole host of possibilities with gaming in mind. You can do iterative improvement of the frame. You can dedicate more rays to the middle of the frame (presumably the object of interest). And that's just shit some dude who hasn't spent years of his life pondering this came up with. I'll be much more interested to see what's presented this September at IEEE's RT raytracing conference..

SGI had a ray tracing demo at Siggraph 2002. On the show floor, a 128-processor SGI box ran demos at around 20hz at about 512x512 pixels.
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/2002/sum_star-ray. html
They make some good points about geometric complexity increasing much faster than displayed pixels, so there are fewer graphics primitives per pixel, so scan-line-based algorithms will make less sense.
So in 2002 it took 128 processors to run at 20Hz at 512x512 pixels. And now we think quad-cores will be enough to render today's complex environments? That math doesn't add up to me. I think scan-line algorithms are the mainstream answer for a long time coming...

Yeah, this was their plan to do it incrementally. I got some great shots of the JCB team doing their thing during Speed Week here. The Dieselmax team was having some problems setting up the car for the salt and were gradually working their way up and had planned all along to really go for the record the week or so after Speed Week.

Tufte is absolutely one of the world experts on presentation of design. We have absolutely strived to adopt his principles of data design and presentation in almost all of our work and its paid off in terms of data interpretability. My dissertation work was presented for two years in a row at our big vision meeting getting no attention until I used some of Tufte's principles in presentation of data and the third year I had several hundred of the worlds scientists in vision research gasping, oooohing and aaaahing. It was awesome. Of course Keynote and a cool animation of a degenerating retina helped, but still......

His books are required reading in our lab and I encourage everyone who is involved in presentation of data of any kind to spend some time with his books.

An excerpt from a bit longer essay I wrote:

In August 1980, Byte magazine published its issue on the Forth programming language

At that time, I was working with Control Data Corporation's PLATO project, pursuing a mass market version of that system using the Intelligent Student Terminal (IST). The IST's were Z80 processor terminals sporting 512*512 bit mapped displays with touch sensitive screens and 1200bps modems that went for about $1500. We were shooting for, and actually successfully tested, a system that could support almost 8,000 simultaneous users on 7600-derived Cybers (the last machine designed by Seymour Cray to be marketed by CDC --with 60 bits per word, 6 bits per character, no virtual memory, but very big and very fast) with under 1/4 second response time (all keys and touch inputs went straight to the central processor) for $40/month flat rate including terminal rental. Ray Ozzie had been working at the University of Illinois on offloading the PLATO central system to the Z80 terminal through downloaded assembly language programming, doing exotic things like "local key echo" and such functions.

I was interested in extending Ray's work to offload the mass-market version of the PLATO central system. In particular I was looking at a UCSD Pascal-based approach to download p-code versions of terminal functions -- and even more in particular the advanced scalable vector graphics commands of TUTOR (the "relative/rotatable" commands like rdraw, rat, rcircle, rcircleb, etc.) if not entire programs, to be executed offline. Pascal was an attractive choice for us at the time because CDC's new series of computers, the Cyber 180 (aka Cyber 800) was to have virtual memory, 64 bit words, 8 bit characters and be programmed in a version of the University of Minnesota Pascal called CYBIL (which stood for Cyber Implementation Language). Although this was a radically different architecture than that upon which PLATO was then running, I thought it worthwhile to investigate an architecture in which a reasonable language (you should have seen what we were used to!) could be made to operate on both the server and the terminal so that load could be dynamically redistributed. This idea of dynamic load balancing would, later, contribute to the genesis of Postscript.

Over one weekend a group of us junior programmers managed to implement a good portion of TUTOR's (PLATO's authoring language) advanced graphics commands in CYBIL. Our little hunting pack at CDC 's Arden Hills Operations was in a race against the impending visit of Dave Anderson of the University of Illinois' PLATO project who was promoting what he called "MicroTUTOR". Anderson was going to take the TUTOR programming language and implement a modified version of it for execution in the terminal -- possibly in a stand-alone mode. Many of us didn't like TUTOR, itself, much. Indeed, I had to pull teeth to get the authorization to put local variables into TUTOR -- and we were determined to select a better board from our quiver with which to surf Moore's Shockwave into the Network Revolution. CDC management wasn't convinced that such a radical departure from TUTOR would be wise, and we hoped to demonstrate that a p-code Pascal approach could accomplish what microTUTOR purported to -- and more. We quickly ported a TUTOR central sy

I've had a couple of incidents as well with police and now city run facilities where people want to restrict photography. It's getting really discouraging for folks that enjoy photography and all anyone has to do is invoke the spectre of "National Security".

I've had a couple of incidents as well with police and now city run facilities where people want to restrict photography. It's getting really discouraging for folks that enjoy photography and all anyone has to do is invoke the spectre of "National Security".

Mel??? Is that you?

I would actually say a lot of the R&D a lot of companies did back in the day did not help them as much as it should have. They would invent great things, but some other company would usually profit off of it. R&D is expensive and needs to be well-justified.

Your memory is not as long as mine then. HP became huge by investing in R&D. Apple and Adobe arguably became who they are because of investments in fonts and laser printers (not to mention software and industrial design). Yahoo and Google are who they are almost exclusively because of R&D. Before that we can certainly look back to GE, Siemens, Boeing, Corning etc...etc...etc.... All of these companies profited quite handsomely because of R&D, but I suspect you are thinking of companies who at some point in their management cycle started to focus on the short term rather than the long term and it cost 'em.

Today, computer science has plenty of R&D in industry, but mechanical engineering has to turn to defense simply because of the huge cost in making anything interesting.

Oh, please. I can think of a ton of things that do not cost a tremendous amount of money to engineer, yet are big money makers in their individual markets. Think glass and composites for a variety of things from buildings to aircraft to bicycles to skateboards. Think ceramics for many of the same structural applications and more (acoustics and many others). Think automobiles or hell, even bicycles. The last downhill mountain bike race (linked here) I attended had Honda downhill mountain bikes with automatic transmissions. Think applications in home construction. Think about ...... I could go on and on and on.

The technology that goes into modern warfare will trickle down into society in several years, similar to the way NASA worked 30 years ago. o. It's not an entirely terrible system, because no one but defense is really willing to spend the amount of money and defense is pretty universally agreed on as neccesary.

I have no doubt about that, but after working with some folks in defense, I can tell you it is an inefficient system littered with middle managers and other parasites that each need the hard work of others to justify an existence. Furthermore, completely idiosyncratic and political decisions go into many defense related projects that end up on the cutting room floor for reasons completely unrelated to the performance of the defense project. Read about the XM-8 rifle system to understand what I mean. The dollars that go into black projects invest in technologies that are tied up for years, sometimes decades before ever being made available to the general public and often result in environmental and economic consequences that would be better managed in open, competitive environments. All told, I would much rather see those dollars go into education, basic science and open competition for even defense related projects.

Pardon me if I missed seeing a reference to the PLOT10 library in this discussion. Used to be THE lib for TEKTRONIX terminals (line perinter then color CRT) for graphics anything. Wrote some stuff for plots in C and fortran for data surfaces way back (Z80 CP/M, and later IBM PC), as it was ported as a general purpose lib, to graph on a flat bed pen plotter and CRT (Hercules monochrome graphics adapter). Also, I seem to recall a few geeks simulation Rubik's Cube and Enterprise (Dammit Jim, the Original Series!) on a Tektronix Color CRT when I was a wee lad in college (pre IBM PC). You should be able to google for the source or for a compatible port.

http://www.gaeinc.com/plot10.htm
http://www.cvrti.utah.edu/~macleod/docs/pscont.htm l
http://www.ill.fr/Computing/pgplotSS.html

and then there's http://plplot.sourceforge.net/ as well. (includs the classic "Lena" demo pic)
I've got some code here somwhere's....hmm.....now what did I do with those 8 inch floppies and drive.....
--
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'" -Isaac Asimov

Click on the guys LINK. You are lecturing a neuroscientist with a PhD and I suspect he might know just a bit more than you about the brain [and retina in his case it appears] and how it works.

Click on the guys LINK. You are lecturing a neuroscientist with a PhD and I suspect he might know just a bit more than you about the brain [and retina in his case it appears] and how it works.

You can see a CT image of Terri's brain taken in 1996 here. Scroll to the bottom.

You are right in that Terri's case was substantially different.

His name Mel?

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

Java is already fragmented. The result of open sourcing Java will actually be consolidation, i.e. killing of competing VMs. And a huge open source test suite will greatly benefit all surviving JVMs, which is a good thing.

How can you not see this?

Javas problem is not that it might get fragmented, the problem is that it IS fragmented. Do something about it! Let Java free!

I have a good researcher to follow for you, then. His work compares hands-free use, handset use, passive listening to radio and books on tape, and talking with passengers. He also compared younger & older drivers and the cellphones vs. alcohol. Check out David Strayer's work from the University of Utah.

The first paper linked there, Driven to distraction: Dual-task studies of simulated driving and conversing on a cellular phone, covers handset use vs. hands-free use vs. listening to the radio vs. listening to books on tape. It also includes a test to weed out whether holding a phone had a seperate effect from not holding one (for purposes of attention). The results were that talking on a cell phone itself caused attention problems and reduced reaction time due to "dual-task interference." Remeber that term -- it's very important to why cell phones are distracting.

Now to go down the list of studies linked from that page:
2 - Finds change blindness when having a conversation
3 - People using CPs are twice as likely to miss traffic signals right in front of them as people listening to radio or without distractions.
5 - Showed people on CPs have worse braking time, miss info on billboards, and track less objects with their eyes while driving.
7 - Shows that old and young people are affected in equal proportion by CP usage and that young people become equivalent to old people in reaction times.
8 - Shows CP drivers are more impaired than legally drunk drivers but that drunk drivers are more aggressive while CP drivers give themselves more space to react than normal.
9 - Shows CP drivers don't strongly form memories about things they see while driving due to paying less attention.
10 - Compares CP use and talking to passengers. Both impair drivers compared to having no distractions, but CP users were more impaired. Passengers tended to talk more about traffic and yield conversation more often than CP conversants.

I wrote a couple of articles about where I thought the PDA might be going back in 2002 and 2005. Specifically, I'd suppose (hope) that it might see a resurgence through the iPod phenomenon.

We really have not seen a whole lot of innovation in the PDA market aside from color screens and somewhat faster CPUs since Palm and then Microsoft entered the market. The first device that truly works as an assistant that is affordable will, like Palm did in the 90's take over the market again. Phone use will be required, but could easily function with a Bluetooth earpiece. It will have to have a big enough screen in portrait or landscape mode to surf the web (surfing the web on my Tungsten T3 sucks), will have to be able to plug into a projector and deliver Keynote (or Powerpoint) presentations, read and annotate pdf's, have an honest 4-5hr battery life (ideally more, but this will depend upon new battery technology or fuel cells), be rugged, have a decent way to enter information through a keyboard (real or virtual) and be reasonably affordable.

The Newton was the original UMPC and did many things very well (including handwriting recognition in the 110 and up), but were waaaay too expensive for their time. I had a 110 and a 120 that I used for years before they simply could not keep up, but that form factor is still ideal. Put a color screen in it, run OS X on a flash drive along with global band cell phone connectivity, 802.11 and Bluetooth and if you can sell it for $700-800 or so, you have the ideal PDA. That may be cutting the margins thin, but if Apple could sell it along with .Mac subscription/connectivity to enable syncing with your desktop/laptop and provide a cell phone service implemented like iChat, I suspect it could be highly profitable.

I wrote a couple of articles about where I thought the PDA might be going back in 2002 and 2005. Specifically, I'd suppose (hope) that it might see a resurgence through the iPod phenomenon.

We really have not seen a whole lot of innovation in the PDA market aside from color screens and somewhat faster CPUs since Palm and then Microsoft entered the market. The first device that truly works as an assistant that is affordable will, like Palm did in the 90's take over the market again. Phone use will be required, but could easily function with a Bluetooth earpiece. It will have to have a big enough screen in portrait or landscape mode to surf the web (surfing the web on my Tungsten T3 sucks), will have to be able to plug into a projector and deliver Keynote (or Powerpoint) presentations, read and annotate pdf's, have an honest 4-5hr battery life (ideally more, but this will depend upon new battery technology or fuel cells), be rugged, have a decent way to enter information through a keyboard (real or virtual) and be reasonably affordable.

The Newton was the original UMPC and did many things very well (including handwriting recognition in the 110 and up), but were waaaay too expensive for their time. I had a 110 and a 120 that I used for years before they simply could not keep up, but that form factor is still ideal. Put a color screen in it, run OS X on a flash drive along with global band cell phone connectivity, 802.11 and Bluetooth and if you can sell it for $700-800 or so, you have the ideal PDA. That may be cutting the margins thin, but if Apple could sell it along with .Mac subscription/connectivity to enable syncing with your desktop/laptop and provide a cell phone service implemented like iChat, I suspect it could be highly profitable.

many of the numbers appear here... http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/largeprime.html It could be one of the other mersenne primes.

then again, i'm not taking any chances and have my tinfoil hat at hand...

Theres a whole bunch of numbers just waiting to be looked up that says a whole lot more innocent Americans get shot than in similar countries that have much tighter firearm laws. Start here http://www-medlib.med.utah.edu/WebPath/TUTORIAL/GU NS/GUNSTAT.html I meanwhile will continue enjoying the tight firearm legislation around here. /me kisses kama goodbye

In fact, there is a great deal of good things that have come out of Utah, many of which the slashdot crowd uses on a daily basis. http://www.cs.utah.edu/school/history.shtml

Other potential applications of this technology include the ability to help people with retinal degenerative diseases prolong their useful vision by dynamically mapping projections of images to other areas of the retina that are not affected by degeneration. Of course this will do nothing for the degenerative process, but it could buy some folks a bit more time until we can perfect retinal interventions (biological and/or bionic) to rescue vision loss.

As an aside, this technology to measure the optics of the eye is currently used in many procedure to correct vision such as in LASIK. You can read a little bit about LASIK and see a movie of the procedure here.

Or look at Clinton. Or FDR. Or Reagan. It doesn't matter which president you pick, they've all stretched the law.

If the courts find Bush violated the law, then yep, he should be punished. But until the courts so find, some folks seem to have forgotten you have to presume he's innoncent.