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Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

Silly robot, there is life beyond the web.

Now, all of those encyclopedias of science fiction are stored in the library at the University of Texas. You very likely live nowhere near Texas. The point is that there are about a zillion encyclopedias of science fiction around, and you can find them easily. Check YOUR local library. Even if you haven't got a university library, I'll bet your local library has atleast one of these, unless, possibly, you live in a town with a very very small library. In which case you can get it through inter-library loan, or buy it cheap from a used bookseller.

Now, I'm no luddite; if somebody wants to build a gigantic science fiction wiki, terrific, have fun. I'm just annoyed that so many people now think of the Internet as the One True Source of Information, which contains All Wisdom and Knowledge. Good grief.

The research group of Mark Raizen of the University of Texas at Austin has been working on similar techniques of 'tweezing' and 'laser culling'. Theoretically, in quantum tweezing, Gaussian lasers would sweep over a Bose-Einstein Condensate of ultracold atoms. The velocity of the sweep can be tuned in such a way that Landau-Zener tunnelling criterion is only satisfied for one atom in the reservoir and it tunnels into the sweeping beam.

http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/i7/e070401

  In addition, 'laser culling' is a process by which a doppler-cooled set of atoms, kept in a MOT trap, can have the nuber of atoms whittled down by lowering the trap height. This can be done until a sub-poissionian regime is achieved and a definite number state is in the trap.

http://www.utexas.edu/opa/news/2006/01/physics04.h tml

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.htm l

I agree. Why should we give any weight to the sayings of some random guy. What the hell would he know know about computer science?

The quote is rubbish and contains no usefull information whatsoever. On the contrary: the conclusion it draws in abolutely false.

It seems to me that you are good example of the type of person that the OP was complaining about (ie. not knowing much about computer science). If you read about the history of computer science you would see that it started as a pure mathematical discipline that just happened to use computing devices because the algorithms were too complex to be solved quickly by hand. The early computer was just a tool that made things easier for mathematicians, much like a telescope for astronomers. Of course, modern computer science focuses much more on algorithms specifically related to computer functions like disk caching, task scheduling, etc. So Dijkstra's comment may not be as relevant today but at the time he said it was pretty accurate.

I'm in the middle of getting my Masters in Computational Engineering and Science ( http://ices.utexas.edu/ )...

My main reason for going back after my undergraduate was for the money. With the job I have higher education is a must... most of the people that work there have PhD's.... and they pay for it too... When I get back I will get a hefty (think 5 digits) raise just for getting my Masters... and if I end up getting a PhD it will go up by about the same amount again... (Not too mention they pay me while I'm at school and pay for my school and send me to whatever college I want to go to... yeah it's a pretty good deal!)

Some people claim that there's no money in a Masters or PhD... but it all depends on what you're doing. If you're going to work in IT then there probably isn't much point in a graduate degree... in fact everything that I've heard from my buddies seems to suggest that just getting a graduate degree will make it more difficult to get an IT job (people don't want to pay for someone with a masters when they probably didn't need it for the job anyway). But on the other hand if you're working on the forefront of technology or any other industry then it pays to get a graduate degree and learn how to do research.

Learning how to read academic papers and turn them into useful products (be that code, financial reports, model airplanes... whatever) is a valuable asset, and something that you really get to hone in graduate school. I also think that the experience of working on a research team is invaluable. You get thrown in with a bunch of people with different reasons for being there, different backgrounds, different work styles and different attitudes... and you have to make it work... which is a very applicable skill to the "real world".

Of course, the other reason to get graduate degrees is to stay in academia. Academia isn't for me (I like to actually make end products that have direct impacts), but I am surrounded by people who make it their entire lives. It can be rewarding if you work hard at it (and man they do!), but like I say... it's just not for everyone.

So weigh the benefits and the detractors (you mean I have to _back_ to school!?!? like sit in classes again!??!?!! bah! ;-) and decide for yourself if it's a good idea for _your_ future.

Friedmud

Even one of the pre-USA English kings claimed tobacco was unhealthy.

'A Counterblaste To Tobacco' by King James I of England:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblast_to_Tob acco

A 'modernized' version of the text of it can be read here:

http://64.176.112.65/kjcounte.htm

The original Elizibethan version can be read here:

http://www.la.utexas.edu/research/poltheory/james/ blaste/

Enjoy! :)

Shouldn't that be "you get for what you pay"?

2) an autodrive car would obey speed limits and stop at red lights.

This is the point I think people are missing. It's not just the technical details that are killing CORBA, its the fundamental assumption that transparent distributed objects are a good idea. I wrote an academic paper on this.. the conclusions will be no surprise to experts... but I'm trying to explain and quantify the issues: Web Services versus Distributed Objects: A Case Study of Performance and Interface Design William R. Cook, Janel Barfield To appear, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services ( ICWS) 2006. September 18-22, Chicago, USA

Well, anyway, it's wonderful to be having this White House Conference on Small Business again after almost 6 years. Things certainly have changed in the meantime. Back then, government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. [Laughter] Well, with your help, I think we've turned all that around. We cut taxes. We squashed inflation. We brought interest rates down, threw out needless regulations, setting the economy on a growth path that has created somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 million new jobs in under 4 years. Now, most people know that history. What isn't widely enough recognized, however, is the leading role of entrepreneurs and small businesses in our ongoing expansion.

Makes me wonder if we are near the edge of what humans can know.

But as Dijkstra notes, that might not necessarily halt progress "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science":

<cut'n paste>

For instance, the vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged its tacit assumption that doing mathematics will remain very much the same type of mental activity it has always been: new topics will come, flourish, and go as they have done in the past, but, the human brain being what it is, our ways of teaching, learning, and understanding mathematics, of problem solving, and of mathematical discovery will remain pretty much the same. Herbert Robbins clearly states why he rules out a quantum leap in mathematical ability:

"Nobody is going to run 100 meters in five seconds, no matter how much is invested in training and machines. The same can be said about using the brain. The human mind is no different now from what it was five thousand years ago. And when it comes to mathematics, you must realize that this is the human mind at an extreme limit of its capacity."

My comment in the margin was "so reduce the use of the brain and calculate!". Using Robbins's own analogy, one could remark that, for going from A to B fast, there could now exist alternatives to running that are orders of magnitude more effective. Robbins flatly refuses to honour any alternative to time-honoured brain usage with the name of "doing mathematics", thus exorcizing the danger of radical novelty by the simple device of adjusting his definitions to his needs: simply by definition, mathematics will continue to be what it used to be. So much for the mathematicians.

</cut'n paste>

I'm just hoping that it will end up like this: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~jrubarth/gslis/lis385t.1 6/Napoleon/

Back in the days when Macs had viruses (yes they do exist or existed), I was using a program called Gatekeeper. Instead of knowing about certain virus it monitored system activity and alerted you when virus type activity was happening. You the user would either deny or grant the action.

So given my experience with GateKeeper, the ideas of this malware detection seem obvious. Why did it take this long to apply these ideas to windows malware? Is the problem commerical anti-virus software? They prefer you to keep paying for updates, instead to shut down potential malware until they software knows about it?

You're right in saying that hardware and the like will never be as high as they were a few years ago, when the tech market just soared. New things always observe a substantial increase in output and remarkable marginal rate of production and then levels out (becomes constant) until the next flex in the market. That's how it is.

But you can't say for certain that your prediction is how it's going to be. It's only what you observed from previous history and what you know to be true, now. Go ahead and be my guest. Invest in something secure and what you know will work. Invest in something stable like a mutual fund. Don't ever think that things will change. Nevermind that computer/tech markets are also fueld by the demand of the government. Forget that science changes dynamically every dayas well. Let's continue to make IEDs out of PVC pipes and ignore the exponential technological growth, yearly.

Nobody wants music that fits in their pocket. Nobody wants to know whether there's water on Uranus or not. You're right. Let's just stick to what we know and observe to be true. We all know that the market is very predictable.

Technically, hardware is a manufactured good, not a commodity or even to be availible in the commodities market because it is a manufactured good, not a raw material or primary good. But I get what you're saying such that hardware will be a widespread, cheaply available good. (One day...)

1. New artists benefit from their work being shared freely. Their primary goal is to get their name out.
2. Established artists have fan bases that are loyal to them.

In category 1, micropatronage seems like a good strategy. People are happy to make voluntary donations to an up and coming artist they like, esp. the kind of people who listen to new and indepedent music. In category 2, donations may also work, but artists have another option known as the Street Performer Protocol. They can choose to release their next work only when a certain amount of donations has been reached.

Finally, it is important to note that music artists only receive a very small amount per CD sale ($1 or less seems like a frequently circulated figure for typical CDs). This is the amount that needs to be matched in any new model, not more, if you want to support a claim that the new model hurts artists. Of course the labels do significant marketing and production work, but arguably, new media can take over many if not all of these responsibilities.

Of course, this is what labels really have to fear: that artists become completely independent of them. The main reason this evolution hasn't happened more naturally already is the dominance of television as the culture-defining medium of the masses. TV is a centralized medium where large corporations have access and define the content. This, of course, excludes those who do not sign with major labels quite effectively. As we transition to Internet culture, where you have decentralized mass phenomena, this is beginning to change, and I anticipate that either way, the development outlined above is what we're going to see in the long run.

Decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing would therefore merely accelerate a natural development that is the consequence of technological change. Unfortunately, many people have accepted that labels and publishers represent "culture", which has given these companies nearly unrestricted access to politicians to prolong their own existence.

I think that the argument is much stronger in the case of movies. Of course you can make nice movies on a small budget, but a LOTR trilogy you can't. And it's not like the whole world knew who Peter Jackson was when he started the project -- it was a high risk investment, given that he could have f'd it up completely (cf. Gigli). Right now the movie industry is still well-protected by the very experience of watching a film in a cinema, but that may not last forever.

If the movie industry gets into trouble, I can potentially see independent filmmakers slowly rising through the ranks of low budget stuff with the help of micro- and macropatronage, but to see this as a given would be naive indeed. The best protection for high quality immersive content is probably interactivity. If you stream content directly to a client, and you make the content they see dependent on their actions, copying that content will not be useful to anyone else. For instance, how do you copy World of Warcraft or Second Life? These are immersive, interactive communities, with more and more logic on the server side. Making data streams user-specific may work even for passive video using techniques like foveated video in combination with direct retinal projection. Anything which you can burn on a DVD, however, is doomed to be burned onto DVDs.

I don't see how this gets around the fact that, like the CIA, the NSA is NOT supposed to be gathering intelligence within the borders of the United States (see the executive order that created the NSA)- that is the FBI's responsibility. President Bush used an executive order to allow for the NSA to investigate within the USA after 9/11.

I believe that any monitoring that originates and terminates in the United States prior to Bush's executive order is illegal (it's also illegal after Bush's order, IMO) unless Clinton also gave an executive order to permit it.

From wikipedia: ...the NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...US persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the Attorney General of the United States"

In math, you only express a relationship between things in numerical terms.

Lets do some karma whoring.

"Why limit yourself to only consulting your own past solutions when there are decades of well-documented research into innovative, ingenius, and non-intuitive solutions that smarter people (Kernigan, Ritchie, Knuth, Torvalds, Tanenbaum, etc.) have already figured out and written out for you to learn?"

You forgot Dijkstra, start there:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/welcome.html

The idea that he had a system for all his notes is amazing to me, he has been in a position where this made a lot of sense, but how nice that we can access it now in such a convenient way.

So go ahead read it, and don't live in a bubble.

Yes it does.

It is called urpmi.

For Debian users:

urpmi is apt
rpm is dkpg
rpmdrake is synaptic

Urpmi comes both in command-line and GUI front-end. Urpmi also comes with a "WindowsUpdate-like" tool called MandrivaUpdate.

There is even an online urpmi configurator tool, where you can even select the program sources "forbidden" in the USA, as they contain pre-packaged programs and modules that will allow you to watch DVDs, have 3D acceleration with ATI and nVidia cards, and a whole bunch of programs that its legality is doubtful in USA, as well as non-free programs.

Peace!

This caught my attention:

"...using an automated code-scanning tool..."

In fact, I just heard a talk last Friday about some of our University's faculty's efforts to make code-verifying programs. You give the program what the code is supposed to do, run the program on your code, and the program tells you whether or not the code does what it's supposed to do. The group hopes to run their program on a 1 million line, production ready program in the near future.

If anyone's interested, a similar presentation is available at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/misra/HCSS.pdf.

1. He's from Wyoming, not Texas, otherwise Texas couldn't vote for the Bush/Cheney ticket.
2. He owed the IRS money, to the tune of over $500,000
3. Even if he donated every cent he made in 2005 (around $2 million), you'd still be increasing educational spending in Texas by 0.00015%.

While I can't speak to the truth of that particular story, I did find this on his website

Many people believe that Earth and all its resources exist solely for human benefit and consumption, this is anthropocentrism. We should allow the millions of other denizens of this Earth some space to live -- they evolved here just as we did and have a right to this planet, too. I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.

Regardless of what he calls it, that sounds pretty evil to me.

https://utdirect.utexas.edu/loreg/sems.WBX?year_se mester=99999

The interconnect barrier means that while chip size keeps decreasing, the interconnects between sections of chips, and even between individual chips themselves aren't able to be made much smaller

It's not that the interconnects can't be made much smaller. They can.

The real problem has to do with what happens to delay as feature sizes shrink. For transistors, this delay continues shrink with smaller transistor size. However, the delay through interconnect is actually *increasing* with smaller feature size, and it's doing so at a rate faster than the decrease in transistor delay. The net effect means that it's going to be harder and harder to continue to make chips run faster (the increases we've been used to). (see for example slide 15 of the slides located here

Optical interconnect would supposedly solve the problem (no more interconnect delay problem) but we'll have to see what happens.

Maybe if you were using kick-ass parallel grids like the ones I am for my simulations:

http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/lon estar/
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/cha mpion/

you might change your mind. Plus, multithreading using OpenMP (http://www.openmp.org/ is relatively easy. Message Passing (MPI) is trickier, but much more powerful.

I'm just running a proggie on the champion grid (above) that's using just about all 96 cpus off-and-on for 3 days straight (Floquet time evolution of a 2-boson interacting system). On a single cpu system it would've taken months to make just one run.

Maybe if you were using kick-ass parallel grids like the ones I am for my simulations:

http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/lon estar/
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/userguides/cha mpion/

you might change your mind. Plus, multithreading using OpenMP (http://www.openmp.org/ is relatively easy. Message Passing (MPI) is trickier, but much more powerful.

I'm just running a proggie on the champion grid (above) that's using just about all 96 cpus off-and-on for 3 days straight (Floquet time evolution of a 2-boson interacting system). On a single cpu system it would've taken months to make just one run.

Since the article posted on Slashdot doesn't really explain why scientists think there might be ice on the Moon, I think your questions deserve a decent answer. Some recent unmanned missions like the Lunar Prospector have made spectroscopic measurements that suggest there are higher than normal concentrations of hydrogen near the Moon's poles. This could indicate the presence of water ice, or hydrogen tied up in the molecules of the rocks on the Moon. They did try crashing the Lunar Prospector into the Moon at the end of its mission, but the experiment didn't work out as planned. The reason why they are looking in deep craters, is that parts of the deepest craters near the Moon's poles may be permanently in shadow. Sunlight never reaches the bottoms of these craters, so that water ice might be able to exist there in a sort of permafrost layer. There is some evidence for water ice in deep craters near the poles of the planet Mercury as well. If I understand the new NASA mission correctly, they are basically going to do a more sophisticated version of the Lunar Prospector experiment. Even if this new mission finds evidence for water, it doesn't mean the water is necessarily in a form that could easily be used by astronauts - it could be bound up chemically in the rocks, making it difficult to extract.

From the scientist in question.

I have seen no evidence of him advocating killing off people, only saying that if the earths ecosystem is to survive there must be a massive reduction in the population. And that ebola would be the most efficient method for this to happen.

Personally, I think the world would be better off if there were a disease that induced sterility in a large percent of the population instead of causing death. Much nicer that way. Of course that would have to be created instead of naturally occuring, and I do not support that.

You are deliberately misquoting Dr. Pianka, which is LYING. You take his words out of context and invent meanings to say he's a monster. You're a LIAR, and I really hate you. Yes, I hate you. I don't think I've written that about anybody on Slashdot before, even the guy that I've annoyed repeatedly here for about two years.

Why don't read what he says on his own damned web site:

"I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us."

"What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know"

What more do you need than that? It's right there for you in black and white and you can choose to pretend that what he's not advocating is genocide, but he just told you that EXACTLY that is what he advocates. He lays out the problem of excess humanity just as much as Hitler laid out the problem of too many Jews, or, if you buy into the left wing argument, Bush lays out the problem that there are too many Islamic radicals.

This so called Dr. IS a monster. He's no different from Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin and you are just a stupid sap that falls for it, because instead of Christian Culture or traditional Khmer culture, or the Soviet Worker, its the environment that must be slaughtered for. He and others of his ilk are laying the groundwork for the worst and most unimaginable genocide ever conceived, killing people solely for the sake of saving other species on the planet.

Furthermore, there are witnesses to what this so called salamander loving quack said at this speech:

Speech

And, if his speech was so innocent, as you claim, then, why did this Nazi of yours demand that video cameras be TURNED OFF.

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

And here's the doctor's thesis watered down, ala Mein Kampf.

Your doctor, and other "humanity is the problem" advocates such as yourself, are no different than the Germans running around saying, "geez, there is this jewish problem, what should we do?". And you can talk as much as you want about sustainability and coexistence and changes in standards in living, but I know and you know that in your heart of hearts, you and the good doctor secretly cheer every earthquake, hurricane, and yes, are actually praying that the bird flu mutates into a pathogen. Well, except for your doctor, because he doesn't think it is good enough that ONLY 100 million people might be killed from it.

This is you:

Someone walks into a crowded room. He says that there are too many of X, that X is terrible. It just so happens, that everyone in the room is studying to learn how to make things that get rid of X. They stand up and cheer and say "Yes, we must get rid of X".

Upon reading about this, you agree, that yes, there are too many X, and that yes, someone should do something about too many X. But, you call yourself ok because you, as the professor writes:

I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.

In this case, X happens to be humans and his audience happened to be biologists. But, if someone said, X = black, or X = jew, the world would be in an uproar.

That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC, but typical for US media. It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located. Here's a good example of a double-whammy courtesy of CNN:

"CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) --" (Cancún is in the state of Quintana Roo)

"Mexico's Vicente Fox, a conservative in the final months of his presidency, is host to Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Yucatan resort."

They didn't do their homework here. Yucatán is the state NW of Quintana Roo. The Yucatán Peninsula contains these two states plus Campeche:

but it doesn't necessarily make it 100% OK with your "corporation" or "union." For example, certain state agencies regulate this sort of activity. I'm certain a numbert of corporations have similar rules.

I suspect a relatively weak governor (compared to the President) isn't all that uncommon.

According to a nifty pop up at that Texas politics site (click on "trying to lead" under the features area) the President is somewhere in the middle of power in comparison to his governors.

You have to go deeper into it.

The Lieutenant Governor is the President of the Senate which is enormously powerful.

While the Texas Lieutenant Governor is powerful, the Governor has had many of the traditional roles sent to other executive offices.

It's like the Governor is the chairman of the board, but the Lt. Gov is actually the top shareholder.

According to the accessibility czar here, JAWS is largely a chunk of Visual BASIC which wedges itself into Windows' screen display routines, about as elegant as Sidekick using TSR keyboard interrupts to coexist with DOS. Its authors are praying Microsoft will buy them out and rewrite the code into the OS for them. If Windows was open enough as an architecture to make writing a general purpose screen reader easy, JAWS would handle non-Microsoft apps just as well as MS apps, and it pretty clearly doesn't.

You want FOSS accessibility for browsers? FireVOX extension.
https://webspace.utexas.edu/chencl1/clc-4-tts/

I've run it successfully on Windows XP, OS X Tiger, and Debian Sarge. Under Windows you can even choose which speech engine to use; the one bundled with FireVOX or the one already installed on your PC.

You laugh, but have you ever seen a sampede of news? Nothing funny about that!

We have been using our own software, Ganymede, to handle our DNS for the last 7 years. Ganymede is a programmable directory mastering application.. you give it a schema with objects for real-world items such as systems, interfaces, networks, etc., and Ganymede provides an object database and concurrent client/server GUI for making changes. Whenever an administrator hits 'commit' in their client, Ganymede turns around and updates the DNS (and in our case, our NIS, our Active Directory, our DHCP, and more) on a background thread.

The schema we use for managing DNS at ARL:UT is not the most flexible, in that we have only a single DNS domain that we are managing, and may well not fit your environment, however there is a consulting company in Germany, http://www.fg-networking.de/, which has built a complete DNS and DHCP management solution around Ganymede. They are using it to manage the DNS and DHCP for a University of 14,000 hosts, and they might be able to help you out with your environment.

If you do decide you might like to know more about Ganymede, let me know.. I've been working on it for the last couple of years for internal use and for clients, without posting any new releases on our website. The software has tons of improvements that have been made in the meantime.

From their list:
18) By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40,253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.

But as I understand it, the Egyptian Eratosthenes had discovered this same thing 11 centuries earlier:
http://outreach.as.utexas.edu/marykay/assignments/ eratos1.html

Galileo was responsible for many great discoveries, but I've never seen anyone claim that he discovered the Earth was round. Many argue that a round world was common knowledge in Europe, despite what their maps might make us believe.

Dijkstra was Dutch

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/CSobit.html

"The NSA is made up of very smart and capable folks. Give them a budget and incentives, and they can probably do a pretty good job of sticking their noses into the public's affairs.

The NSA's motivations are political.

Bright they may be, but the NSA is primarily a politically motivated org that answers to the president. It would be more appropriately know as the NSC (Non-Suborned by the Constitution).

Full faith and credit should also be given the NSA for their integral role in the creation of al Qaeda.

Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, should get his notice as the originator of the plan to trick the Soviet into their own Vietnam, and to use the radical Arab fundamentalists as a blade to bleed them. Reagan's NSA should get their proper attribution for expanding upon this sanguineous plan.

"Under President Reagan, the NSC staff assumed a role beyond that of an advisory or coordinating body: It at times became operational, taking on primary responsibility for the execution of the Iran and contra covert operations."

Walsh, Iran/Contra Report,
Chapter 1: United States v. Robert C. McFarlane

And who can forget the words of the ole gimper himself:

"These Islamic fighters in a faraway land have given new meaning to the words 'courage,' 'determination,' and 'strength.' They have set the standard for those who value freedom and independence everywhere in the world."

Ronald Reagan
Statement on the Fourth Anniversary of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

On a more contemporary note, GW Bush's NSA has been alleged to have pulled an end-around the CIA station chief in Rome, violating the logical protocols which were in place at the time, accepting the dubious Niger Yellowcake to Iraq story from the Italian Intelligence Agency, SISMI, first hand, and then sourcing it into the prewar claims.
(The Italian paper "La Repubblica", ran a good 3-part expose. There is a good English translation available: 1 - 2 - 3 - (decent mirror starts here.)

The NSA was left unscathed by the Silberman/Robb Commission, that one hit wonder recognized for their top 40 silver bullet, "Blaming it all on the CIA".

When actors, orgs and/or segments of the US government, in the dispatch of their official duties, act covertly and extra-Constitutionally, they are rogue, and a criminal enterprise. They should be identified as such, their intelligence, and their stated altruistic rationalizations notwithstanding.

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new.
That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel,
these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down.
The gang serves lies,
the passionate Man plays his part;
the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

Robinson Jeffers, "Be Angry At The Sun"

IAU Circular 8674, which states in part

[a spectrum] obtained with Gemini-South telescope (+ GMOS) on Feb. 21.024 UT, shows that underlying a power-law continuum are features consistent with a broad-lined type-Ib/c supernova (designated 2006aj) near maximum light, confirming the findings of Masetti et al. (GCN 4803).

There is a good deal of news in the GRBLog:

http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php

Just search for "GRB 060218".

It appears to be a Type Ib/c supernova -- meaning a massive star, which has lost most of its hydrogen envelope, running out of fuel in its core and exploding -- in a relatively nearby galaxy. By "nearby", I mean "at a redshift of z=0.033", which is still much farther away than the Virgo or Coma clusters of galaxies.

It is currently around magnitude 18, and may brighten by a magnitude or so, but will still require a pretty big telescope and sensitive camera to detect.

IAU Circular 8674, which states in part

[a spectrum] obtained with Gemini-South telescope (+ GMOS) on Feb. 21.024 UT, shows that underlying a power-law continuum are features consistent with a broad-lined type-Ib/c supernova (designated 2006aj) near maximum light, confirming the findings of Masetti et al. (GCN 4803).

There is a good deal of news in the GRBLog:

http://grad40.as.utexas.edu/grblog.php

Just search for "GRB 060218".

It appears to be a Type Ib/c supernova -- meaning a massive star, which has lost most of its hydrogen envelope, running out of fuel in its core and exploding -- in a relatively nearby galaxy. By "nearby", I mean "at a redshift of z=0.033", which is still much farther away than the Virgo or Coma clusters of galaxies.

It is currently around magnitude 18, and may brighten by a magnitude or so, but will still require a pretty big telescope and sensitive camera to detect.

Sorry to dissapoint you, but I'm a grad student in theoretical physics. Here is some third party material to verify that the above is correct:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_field _tensor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-vector

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_Equations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformatio n

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node10.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node23.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node24.html

Sorry to dissapoint you, but I'm a grad student in theoretical physics. Here is some third party material to verify that the above is correct:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_field _tensor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-vector

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_Equations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformatio n

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node10.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node23.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node24.html

Sorry to dissapoint you, but I'm a grad student in theoretical physics. Here is some third party material to verify that the above is correct:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_field _tensor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-vector

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_Equations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformatio n

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node10.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node23.html

http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/jk1/lectures /node24.html