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Check TopoZone.com and University of Texas at Austin online library for USGS and topos. I just found those two links earlier today while looking for quality maps.
You can buy that great water-proof, tear-resistant material that National Geographic prints their "Trails Illustrated" topos on for use in ink-jet printers as well. A quick googling shows at least one link for that stuff.

Unfortunately, they don't have any money for development, although they still contract out bug-fixes once in a while. Now that 64-bit x86 is available and the rest of the processor industry is surely going in the gutter (but what do I know?), it's entirely possible they'll make a VM for PCs if they get funding.

BTW, they also now offer the latest version of Macsyma for Windows (and Genera, I presume, but not for Unices - they lost(?) the the Linux version, and the ability to cut keys for the rest of the Unices) for $500.

* - Here's a link with the latest contact info I've been able to find.

> I live in a Mississippi "dry county," but beer & wine coolers may be sold inside the city limits after 7 AM & no later than 10 PM, Sundays excluded. Quantities less than 32 oz may not be purchased. Since there's not a liquor store, everyone buys their "distilled spirits" by the case or pickup truckload anyway.

Impact, Texas was founded as a 'wet' jurisdiction just north of Abilene, Texas, to serve the students at that dreary[*] city's three (IIRC) fundamentalist religious colleges.[*] Old-timers tell of sitting for hours in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Friday nights, just to be able to pull their obligatory student weekend benders.

[*] I've heard Abilene described as everything from "The New Jerusalem" to "The Armpit of the Universe". My short stay there inclined me toward the latter description.

Here's the website for UT's TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) program:
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/

The site also features pics!
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/lonestar_gallery.php

Here's the website for UT's TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) program:
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/

The site also features pics!
http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/lonestar_gallery.php

Have you worked in a post-graduate computational research environment? I worked for a subgroup at TICAM (now ICES) at UT back when I was a student and most of the grad students, post-docs, researchers, etc. in the places where I've worked speak very little english and have no eye for presentation. Most of them WOULD use FrontPage, because they just want to slap something up there. They often also had a hard time doing even the most basic stuff in Powerpoint. I find most of the people that are real into theoretical computing/mathematics stuff don't give a rat's ass for spending time on presentation. Good for me, though, as that was my job to clean up their stuff :) So, maybe it says something about their project that they didn't have enough money (or weren't marketing savvy/vain enough) to hire their own graphic designer.

who has one of these. I used one in the CIT lab here at UT, but I think most Kinko's or drafting places will do it for you. I've done several large art prints with these, and they can't be beat. Building your own is a neat idea and all, but unless making your own large format printer is part of the piece, I'd stick with the professionals. No need to reinvent the wheel, man.

The parity calculations are computed as if there was one parity disk and then they are distributed across all the disks. The parity blocks are the same size as the data blocks and as long as only one disks dies the other disks will contain all but one of the data blocks plus the the parity block (on average, any particular file may be missing a data or parity block). There is also another newer form of RAID that some vendors called RAID-6 which writes two disk failures per array but at the price of losing two disks worth of capacity to parity data, in real world experience I would say that is overkill because most situations that would lead to more than one HDD per array dying will kill most/all of them. This page's illustration might make it a bit more clear for you.

We all know C++ is the language of choice for discriminating hackers.

It is simple. Most of the people responsible for the behind-the-scenes horsepower work are completely different people than those who maintain web presence. A certain university department I work for is rife with Unix admins who swear by Mozilla, while the departmental web presence is designed and implemented with a very Internet Explorer-biased slant. For the longest time, our departmental website used Macromedia items like Flash. Shudder for us *NIX browsers. :/

Wow, that came out like I am a whiny bitch. I should take some time to express my appreciation to our web design crew for scrapping that deprecated layout in favor of a new, rejuvenated presence, WHICH RENDERS WELL IN MOZILLA/GALEON/KONQUEROR. :)

It is simple. Most of the people responsible for the behind-the-scenes horsepower work are completely different people than those who maintain web presence. A certain university department I work for is rife with Unix admins who swear by Mozilla, while the departmental web presence is designed and implemented with a very Internet Explorer-biased slant. For the longest time, our departmental website used Macromedia items like Flash. Shudder for us *NIX browsers. :/

Wow, that came out like I am a whiny bitch. I should take some time to express my appreciation to our web design crew for scrapping that deprecated layout in favor of a new, rejuvenated presence, WHICH RENDERS WELL IN MOZILLA/GALEON/KONQUEROR. :)

No, both he and his wife are from very, very wealthy families. They just happen to live in Austin, which is the UT conection. It's no accident the Dell Jewish Center is in Austin.

That's right. There's also SARS patients, grizzly bears, incompetent politicians, no jobs, horrible traffic, we're right next to the Pacific Ocean (which routinely produces typhoons that kill thousands of people), nuclear power plants, deadly blizzards... we even have a place called Death Valley.

Hmmm... maybe I should reconsider. Here in Texas, we have West Nile Virus, alligators (though they leave people alone), incompetent politicians (wish they would), jobs that go away when oil prices dip, horrible traffic, we're in Tornado Alley (with a direct hit on downtown Ft. Worth), cement plants, 120-degree weather, and we have a 32,000 square mile region (larger than all of New England) called the Llano Estacado that is so flat, it slopes just 10 feet per mile, and barely gets 12 inches of rain a year.

Screw it all, I'm moving to Barbados!

I went to UT and had the privelege of taking computer architecture with Doug Burger about 4 years ago, one of the co P.I.s of the project. He used to give us rock hard exams ( but buy us pizza to ensure nobody felt bummed out because of them ). Also used to give tons of homework. However, he never came across as evil, just as someone who genuinely wanted us to learn. He's incredibly smart, knows what he is going and is good natured to boot. Check out some of the fun quotes in his plan I went to many lectures of his about his grid architecture project. At that time he had many graduate students working on it - some working on a simulator for the processor, some working on a compiler and some working on studies of what applications are going to take advantage of the new architecture. I'm sure this project is going to turn out to be really cool.

I went to UT and had the privelege of taking computer architecture with Doug Burger about 4 years ago, one of the co P.I.s of the project. He used to give us rock hard exams ( but buy us pizza to ensure nobody felt bummed out because of them ). Also used to give tons of homework. However, he never came across as evil, just as someone who genuinely wanted us to learn. He's incredibly smart, knows what he is going and is good natured to boot. Check out some of the fun quotes in his plan I went to many lectures of his about his grid architecture project. At that time he had many graduate students working on it - some working on a simulator for the processor, some working on a compiler and some working on studies of what applications are going to take advantage of the new architecture. I'm sure this project is going to turn out to be really cool.

They have some papers available there...

Funnily enough, I came away with the impression that C++ had an advantage this year, since the removal of the requirement that the judges run the program themselves meant, in theory, that a brute-force approach combined with a supercomputer could have beaten the most delicately honed algorithm imaginable. That the winner was not an example of this surprised me.

Right there on the page
but for the lazy: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ahudson/submit-huds on.tgz

Congratulations! I've usually steered clear of checking out programming "challenges" because they usually seem to be focused on producing the most unreadable or obscure code to confuse the judges.

While you can learn things from obfuscated code, I think these practical challenges are a lot better for the programming community as a whole.

Finding optimal paths around race tracks and obstacles presents a number of challenges which when solved in multiple totally different ways, helps give us new theories and data which we can use to develop new algorithms and theories for use in the real world.

Can anyone recommend any other programming challenges which focus on developing new algorithms which may be useful in other disciplines?

The only example I can think of is the many "robot" fighting challenges, where you write a program for a robot, and it has to destroy the other robots within the battlefield using its own "wits" and no human input. You might remember PC-ROBOTS from the early 90's if you're a real geek ^v^

Antarctic ? no
Moon ? Mars ?

If you're making a plutonium compression bomb (like Fat Man or all modern US weapons), yes, the shape and detonation needs to be precise on the 10^-6 scale. However, a fully working uranium bomb (like Little Boy) could be assembled by a Jr High metal shop class, given the correct pieces of enriched U235.

While we at BASH are yet unable to cure niggerism (or any other such God-inflicted curse of skin pigmentation), we have had record success turning limp-wristed, "Queer Eye" watching nancy-boys and bull-dyke lesbians back in to straight, God-fearing, Republican-voting human beings!

All we need is your pious financial support, plenty of imprecatory prayer and a good-sized, Leviticus-charged stone or two, and soon the GNAA will be a thing of the past!

To join, go here and read all about how you can start saving gay Negroes from Satan's clutches!

This post was brought to you by a Landover Baptist Church Member.

To obtain a copy of this source, and spread the loving, gay nigger-hating word of Jesus, go to BASH's source page and download it for yourself. Post it wherever you see the GNAA rearing its ugly, demonic head! GLORY!

If you or anyone you know exhibits these signs they may be a homosexual and at risk of joining Satan's Army, or the GNAA.

Defeat the GNAA! Join Landover Baptist Church's very own B.A.S.H. (Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals) Ministry!

While we at BASH are yet unable to cure niggerism (or any other such God-inflicted curse of skin pigmentation), we have had record success turning limp-wristed, "Queer Eye" watching nancy-boys and bull-dyke lesbians back in to straight, God-fearing, Republican-voting human beings!

All we need is your pious financial support, plenty of imprecatory prayer and a good-sized, Leviticus-charged stone or two, and soon the GNAA will be a thing of the past!

To join, go here and read all about how you can start saving gay Negroes from Satan's clutches!

This post was brought to you by a Landover Baptist Church Member.

To obtain a copy of this source, and spread the loving, gay nigger-hating word of Jesus, go to BASH's source page and download it for yourself. Post it wherever you see the GNAA rearing its ugly, demonic head! GLORY!

If you or anyone you know exhibits these signs they may be a homosexual and at risk of joining Satan's Army, or the GNAA.

Defeat the GNAA! Join Landover Baptist Church's very own B.A.S.H. (Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals) Ministry!

While we at BASH are yet unable to cure niggerism (or any other such God-inflicted curse of skin pigmentation), we have had record success turning limp-wristed, "Queer Eye" watching nancy-boys and bull-dyke lesbians back in to straight, God-fearing, Republican-voting human beings!

All we need is your pious financial support, plenty of imprecatory prayer and a good-sized, Leviticus-charged stone or two, and soon the GNAA will be a thing of the past!

To join, go here and read all about how you can start saving gay Negroes from Satan's clutches!

This post was brought to you by a Landover Baptist Church Member.

To obtain a copy of this source, and spread the loving, gay nigger-hating word of Jesus, go to BASH's source page and download it for yourself. Post it wherever you see the GNAA rearing its ugly, demonic head! GLORY!

If you or anyone you know exhibits these signs they may be a homosexual and at risk of joining Satan's Army, or the GNAA.

In defense of the original poster, click the Dijkstra Archives link and take a look at what Dijkstra had to say. So far, I've found this one, Computer Science: Achievements and Challenges (beware, PDF).

The major differences between European and American CS are that American CS is more machine-oriented, less mathematical, more closely linked to application areas, more quantitative and more willing to absorb products in its curriculum.

No, the two programs can't be compared in a general sense of which one is better or whatnot, but general tendencies in academia can, and sometimes do follow certain trends defined by geographic area. It only makes sense because physically close institutions are more readily accessible to one another and therefore influence each other more than say, two institutions divided by an entire ocean.

In the case of CS, it's almost exactly as Dijkstra puts it and as the original story implies--that there's more going on in mathematical and functional circles on the European side of things. Imo, it's not for no reason that ocaml arose out of France; there's simply more research groups over there doing this kind of stuff.

While we at BASH are yet unable to cure niggerism (or any other such God-inflicted curse of skin pigmentation), we have had record success turning limp-wristed, "Queer Eye" watching nancy-boys and bull-dyke lesbians back in to straight, God-fearing, Republican-voting human beings!

All we need is your pious financial support, plenty of imprecatory prayer and a good-sized, Leviticus-charged stone or two, and soon the GNAA will be a thing of the past!

To join, go here and read all about how you can start saving gay Negroes from Satan's clutches!

This post was brought to you by a Landover Baptist Church Member.

To obtain a copy of this source, and spread the loving, gay nigger-hating word of Jesus, go to BASH's source page and download it for yourself. Post it wherever you see the GNAA rearing its ugly, demonic head! GLORY!

If you or anyone you know exhibits these signs they may be a homosexual and at risk of joining Satan's Army, or the GNAA.

While we at BASH are yet unable to cure niggerism (or any other such God-inflicted curse of skin pigmentation), we have had record success turning limp-wristed, "Queer Eye" watching nancy-boys and bull-dyke lesbians back in to straight, God-fearing, Republican-voting human beings!

All we need is your pious financial support, plenty of imprecatory prayer and a good-sized, Leviticus-charged stone or two, and soon the GNAA will be a thing of the past!

To join, go here and read all about how you can start saving gay Negroes from Satan's clutches!

This post was brought to you by a Landover Baptist Church Member.

To obtain a copy of this source, and spread the loving, gay nigger-hating word of Jesus, go to BASH's source page and download it for yourself. Post it wherever you see the GNAA rearing its ugly, demonic head! GLORY!

If you or anyone you know exhibits these signs they may be a homosexual and at risk of joining Satan's Army, or the GNAA.

Here is your grade inflation research straight from the university of texas.
http://www.utexas.edu/student/research/reports/Inf lation/Inflation.html

"America has not yet seen what an intelligent, methodical sharpshooter can cause, even though I know dozens of people like myself."

"After a series of shooting terrorized the capital area for weeks ... authorities have linked them to 19 shootings, including 13 deaths"

On Aug. 1, 1966, the tower was like a lofty deer blind for Whitman, enabling him to mow down pedestrians blocks away and lay siege to the campus area for 90 minutes before he was slain in a shootout on the deck by Austin police. Unnoticed, in an era of lax security when mass murder was still a rarity, he had managed to take a foot locker full of armaments onto the deck, including three rifles and 700 rounds of ammunition.

Ok, once again, there are many theories of evolution. It is impossible to prove a theory correct, only to prove it incorrect. Evolution itself is not a theory, it is an observation, a fact. Evolution has been observed many many times in the laboratory and is roundly accepted by the scientific community as an established process of nature.

You want examples? Ok, do a google search on:

-Housefly experiments by Meffert and Bryant.
-Rhagoletis pomonella (Apple Maggot Fly) experiments by Feder and Bush
-Tribolium castaneum (Flour Beetles) experiments by Halliburton and Gall

Hell, just ask any farmer who watches populations of various insects adapt to the use of pesticides...

Evolution is a fact, you're just going to have to get used to it. Here's a place to start...

TexBooks

An alternate site is UT Life. I like UT Life's organization of class histories and professor reviews, like Pick a Prof, but they don't charge for access. Check their book swap section.

The people behind UT Life even emailed me when I was mentioned in The Daily Texan when they made the cover. Nice.

I'm not sure if it's free or not, but the University of Texas has a book exchange. I've never used it personally, but I know people who have and they've always been satisfied with it.

By the way, here's another link: News. This is from the general public friendly news thing on the UT home page...

Here

A somewhat more informative link for more info. Would it really kill submitters to put a link to the actual project in their submission...

UT Austin does this. I will admit, it's nice getting software for really cheap. So far, our CS curriculum hasn't been influenced by the partnership -- there are no MS specific courses offered by the CS department, and I've yet to have a class that mandated that I use an MS product. (Most assignment must actually compile/run under Linux) However, I don't know about the Business school though -- I would suspect they play along and don't ask questions.

Interestingly enough, I was just reading some of Dijkstra's writings, where he comments on this very issue at UT.

UT Austin does this. I will admit, it's nice getting software for really cheap. So far, our CS curriculum hasn't been influenced by the partnership -- there are no MS specific courses offered by the CS department, and I've yet to have a class that mandated that I use an MS product. (Most assignment must actually compile/run under Linux) However, I don't know about the Business school though -- I would suspect they play along and don't ask questions.

Interestingly enough, I was just reading some of Dijkstra's writings, where he comments on this very issue at UT.

UT Austin does this. I will admit, it's nice getting software for really cheap. So far, our CS curriculum hasn't been influenced by the partnership -- there are no MS specific courses offered by the CS department, and I've yet to have a class that mandated that I use an MS product. (Most assignment must actually compile/run under Linux) However, I don't know about the Business school though -- I would suspect they play along and don't ask questions.

Interestingly enough, I was just reading some of Dijkstra's writings, where he comments on this very issue at UT.

India and Pakistan are not located in the Middle East, just look at these maps at UTexas. I didn't write any of the messages above, but what you're saying is just false so there you go.

And by the way, comparing a loose bunch of suicide bombers with one of the strongest armies in the world is just plain ridiculous. I think hatred has to stop coming from both sides though ( of course ), but the way you Americans seem to accept Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine has always surprised me.

Texas also has the Permanent University Fund which is an endowment of over a million acres of land set aside starting in 1839. This endowment funds the UT and the A&M system. Most of the community colleges are funded by the county, (which would mean property taxes) but IIRC can also receive some money from the PUF. There are also several excellent private universities in Texas that do quite well.

In 1989, a vandal used a strong poison and nearly killed the Treaty Oak, a 500-year-old Live Oak said to be the place where Stephen F. Austin signed a treaty with the local Native American tribes. Heroic efforts (funded by H. Ross Perot) went into saving the tree, but nobody knew if they would be successful.

To preserve the tree's legacy, it was "cloned" -- several still-living branches were rooted just as the parent poster described. One of these trees is now growing next to the original. It's clearly an exact genetic duplicate, and if that's not a clone, I don't now what is.

I agree with the parent poster -- what's the big deal? Why can't they just cut off a branch of the Methuselah tree and root it?

By the way, the story of the Treaty Oak has a happy ending. Despite fears that it would only be good for commemorative pen sets, the tree made a comeback, and started bearing acorns again in 1997 -- 8 years after the attack. Seedlings are now available, for "just" $125 bucks.

The poisoner, on the other hand, likely had a bit rougher time -- 9 years in a Texas state prison. No word on the fate of his acorns...

Besides, if you really were an American (instead of just prentending to be a stereotypical "stupid, foul-mouthed American") you'd know that the word "casualties" includes not only the dead (three) but also the wounded (scores).

Dude, you're full of crap. Kerberos is the easiest part. LDAP is actually the hardest part so far. We just got support for GSS-SPNEGO (Window's preferred SASL authentication mechanism) this week (thanks to some awesome work by Volker). Then there's a bunch of AD-only controls and syntaxes that we're just begining to understand. True is, we can currently support an AD domain controller but it's buggy as all hell (mostly due to LDAP problems). That's not even getting into connectionless LDAP (see my latest presentation at last week's CIFS conference). - Anthony Liguori

I don't think you actually received an answer for why 'natural' elements 'stop' at 92.

I'm not a chemist (or any form of scientist, really) but I believe it refers to how many elements have 'naturally' been found on Earth. Wikipedia sums it up nicely at Transuranic Elements: "All of the elements with higher atomic numbers, however, have had to be produced artificially. They are all radioactive, with a half-life much shorter than the age of the Earth, so any atoms of these elements, if they ever were present at the earth's formation, have long since vanished."

I found a "historical perspective" on chemistry from Google: http://www.cm.utexas.edu/academic/courses/Fall2002 /CH610A/Krische/handouts/Ch.1_Part_1.pdf.

Just to clear up the parasite question...
From the Biotech Life Sciences dictionary:
parasitism (parasite)
A type of symbiosis where two (or more) organisms from different species live in close proximity to one another, in which one member depends on another for its nutrients, protection, and/or other life functions. The dependent member (the parasite) benefits from the relationship while the other one (the host) is harmed by it.

From Webster's Third New International Dictionary of The English Language, unabridged:
Parasitism - biology:
a relationship in which an organism of one kind lives in, on, or in intimate association with an organism of another kind at the expense of which it obtains food and usually other benefits

I think the technical definition of parasite makes it clear that different species are involved. The nature of the fetus/mother relationship has many characteristics that are distinctly different from the biological definition of parastism.

You are right that however the fetus is classified is largely irrelevant to the question.

The convention, which assembled in Austin on January 28, 1861, was dominated by secessionists. On February 1 the delegates adopted an ordinance of secession by a vote of 166 to 8. This ordinance was approved by the voters of the state, 46,153 to 14,747, on February 23. The convention reassembled in early March, declared Texas out of the Union, and adopted a measure uniting the state with other Southern states in the newly formed Confederate States of America. Governor Houston, who refused to recognize the authority of the convention to take this action, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new government, whereupon the convention declared the office of governor vacant and elevated Lieutenant Governor Edward Clark to the position. President Lincoln offered to send troops to assist Houston if he would resist the convention, but Houston rejected the offer rather than bring on civil conflict within the state. He retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died on July 26, 1863.

Yeah, next thing you know English teachers will be assigning kids an essay about eating Irish babies! What a horrible world we live in, where people can use satire to prove a point...

However, the reason groceries prices are as low as they are is the low cost of labor when harvesting. If ag employers they had to pay minimum wage and pay taxes on that, produce may cost 2-3x what it does now.

No, the reason prices are so HIGH is because the government subsidizes crops in the US. They pay farmers NOT to produce anything or to flush what they do produce down the toilet. The reason for this is because if they didn't, nobody would make any money on produce. The US has the capacity to make many times over the amount of food needed to sustain itself... if all this over-abundance of food were actually produced, food prices would fall through the floor and destabilize the economy. Such things have the potential to ripple into third world countries... cheap, abundant food in the poor parts of africa would mean people have the luxury of worrying about something else... governments would fall, fire and brimstone from the heavens and all that.

The world's economy depends on crop prices being stable. They are being kept artificailly high. Raising labor costs wouldn't make things cheaper... but they won't make them more expensive either. Expensive labor alone won't raise prices considering the developed world spends $310 billion per year in subsidies to protect its farmers and their price structure.

Commodities operate on a very thin margin. Fraction of a cent per bushel type of margins. The market won't bear any price deviation, it will crush anyone who overcharges, no one will buy from them. Anyone who undercharges is dumb.... they get bought out, and their product is flipped for profit. The market rate is set and the market rate will persist wether immigrants are paid under the table or they make minimum wage and pay taxes. Labor does not really affect the equation, things like weather and insects... now those can have a big impact. Having a farm of just 6 square miles is a multi-million dollar operation. Granted, it takes significant help to run a farm... but labor costs are almost insignificant in these scales of operation. (actually, they are very significant... labor is like a third of a farms budget, but on a national level it's very minor) Immigrant labor is a red herring in politics not a real issue in farming. Do some googling on it, you'll see i'm right. If labor costs (either from availability or from law mandate) were increased, farmers would find ways to cut costs. They would have to... they CAN NOT charge more than their competition... the market won't bear it. Instead, they will move to using more mechanization and relying on fewer, higher paid workers. See here. The same paper also says that halving the labor pool would result in a $10 annual increase to the consumer. In reality, pretty minor on an individual, but huge on a national level. But that's only if the whole increased cost were actually passed on to the consumer BUT because of this mechanization concept and because of market forces, probably NONE of the costs will be passed to the consumer.

The whole system is kind of shameful. To think that we could produce about three times the food with half (or even less) of the labor... all while there are people starving in the world and exploiting poor immigrant laborers. well, it's sickening. But that's how it is.

1. the inability to cleanly uninstall software that has been installed with the usual configure/make/make install incantation

It's easy to uninstall software installed with configure/make/make install, if you use a depot-style symlink farm manager, like Opt_Depot, or any of the many other symlink depot packages that we have linked off of that page.

You just do configure --prefix=/opt/depot/packagename, and almost all autoconf-derived packages will install all their files under the specified base. Use opt_depot or whatever to create symlinks to your bin, man, lib, include directories, and you're set. Want to uninstall? Just rm -rf the package, run another script to clean up the dangling symlinks, done.

Now, that's not useful for your average Linux-using-grandmother, but if you're already talking about doing your own configure/make/make install, it's not that much extra work, and it makes it tons easier to uninstall.