Slashdot Mirror

Is there a Wireless Network? (No)

Well if our "nomad" network is not wireless, I don't know what is. And it's been around for about 7 years, starting out as a pre-802.11 network and then upgraded to 802.11b, and just this year upgraded to 802.11g.

Does the school provide web pages? (No)

Every student (rather, every person who has a valid NetID) can sign up for a free page and unix access. You just fill out a simple form and they send you the account info.

Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? (No)

We have a distance education program that streams audio out from a shitton of courses, including one of the classes I'm taking right now. I know this because it's annoying when something screws up and my professor has to take care of that rather than teaching me. And my freshman year they were streaming video online of my engineering fundamentals course, and storing it so we could review lectures later.

Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school? (No)

Then what is this?

Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? (No)

Well, according to this, we've had usenet access since at least 1995, but I would venture a guess that we had it earlier, since our first network access was a government partnership with Oak Ridge National Labs.

Does the school provide multimedia equipment? (No)

Well, what about this? Or if they're thinking of in classrooms, almost every classroom has a projector and Smartboard (thing you can write on), and many have sound systems. In classrooms.

Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies? (No)

What the hell. You know, I think that that Internet2 Link we have, and all the related CS courses, including a project for a new file system structure for network storage is just for fun.

Does the school stream its campus radio or TV stations? (No)
Uhmmmm.... Try here. Damn these people either suck or we suck at reporting.

And I know for a fact we have more than 1000 computers that are provided by the university for students to use. We have almost that many in the library *alone*.

Is there a Wireless Network? (No)

Well if our "nomad" network is not wireless, I don't know what is. And it's been around for about 7 years, starting out as a pre-802.11 network and then upgraded to 802.11b, and just this year upgraded to 802.11g.

Does the school provide web pages? (No)

Every student (rather, every person who has a valid NetID) can sign up for a free page and unix access. You just fill out a simple form and they send you the account info.

Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? (No)

We have a distance education program that streams audio out from a shitton of courses, including one of the classes I'm taking right now. I know this because it's annoying when something screws up and my professor has to take care of that rather than teaching me. And my freshman year they were streaming video online of my engineering fundamentals course, and storing it so we could review lectures later.

Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school? (No)

Then what is this?

Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? (No)

Well, according to this, we've had usenet access since at least 1995, but I would venture a guess that we had it earlier, since our first network access was a government partnership with Oak Ridge National Labs.

Does the school provide multimedia equipment? (No)

Well, what about this? Or if they're thinking of in classrooms, almost every classroom has a projector and Smartboard (thing you can write on), and many have sound systems. In classrooms.

Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies? (No)

What the hell. You know, I think that that Internet2 Link we have, and all the related CS courses, including a project for a new file system structure for network storage is just for fun.

Does the school stream its campus radio or TV stations? (No)
Uhmmmm.... Try here. Damn these people either suck or we suck at reporting.

And I know for a fact we have more than 1000 computers that are provided by the university for students to use. We have almost that many in the library *alone*.

Is there a Wireless Network? (No)

Well if our "nomad" network is not wireless, I don't know what is. And it's been around for about 7 years, starting out as a pre-802.11 network and then upgraded to 802.11b, and just this year upgraded to 802.11g.

Does the school provide web pages? (No)

Every student (rather, every person who has a valid NetID) can sign up for a free page and unix access. You just fill out a simple form and they send you the account info.

Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? (No)

We have a distance education program that streams audio out from a shitton of courses, including one of the classes I'm taking right now. I know this because it's annoying when something screws up and my professor has to take care of that rather than teaching me. And my freshman year they were streaming video online of my engineering fundamentals course, and storing it so we could review lectures later.

Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school? (No)

Then what is this?

Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? (No)

Well, according to this, we've had usenet access since at least 1995, but I would venture a guess that we had it earlier, since our first network access was a government partnership with Oak Ridge National Labs.

Does the school provide multimedia equipment? (No)

Well, what about this? Or if they're thinking of in classrooms, almost every classroom has a projector and Smartboard (thing you can write on), and many have sound systems. In classrooms.

Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies? (No)

What the hell. You know, I think that that Internet2 Link we have, and all the related CS courses, including a project for a new file system structure for network storage is just for fun.

Does the school stream its campus radio or TV stations? (No)
Uhmmmm.... Try here. Damn these people either suck or we suck at reporting.

And I know for a fact we have more than 1000 computers that are provided by the university for students to use. We have almost that many in the library *alone*.

IBM has already proved that American technology is, at least, as good as Japanese technology despite all the moans and groans about how we have fallen behind Japan upon the introduction of the Earth Simulator.

Just in case anybody interested hasn't heard of it, the ATLAS library is a C / Fortran 77 library for linear algebra (which is a significant part of scientific programming). It tunes itself at compile-time, to your particular processor and number of CPUs (and whatever else might be affecting your FP performance) by doing tests.

The author also has some quick n' dirty notes for floating-point issues.

But it is mostly the possibility of failure. From this report

According to Dun & Bradstreet reports, "Businesses with fewer than 20 employees have only a 37% chance of surviving four years (of business) and only a 9% chance of surviving 10 years." Restaurants only have a 20% chance of surviving 2 years. Of these failed business, only 10% of them close involuntarily due to bankruptcy and the remaining 90% close because the business was not successful, did not provide the level of income desired or was too much work for their efforts

The old adage, "People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan" certainly holds true when it comes to small business success. The failure rate for new businesses seems to be around 70% to 80% in the first year and only about half of those who survive the first year will remain in business the next five years 3 .

I am running MacOS X 10.3.5 behind a Belkin DSL router. I followed the instructions here. I then tried 'ping6 www.kame.net', to which I get 'ping6: UDP connect: No route to host'. I then follow the instructions here, and then trying ping6 again I get:

[localhost:~] userx% ping6 www.ipv6.digital.com
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2002:0:0:1::1 --> 3ffe:1200:2001:1:8000::2
ping6: sendmsg: Network is down
ping6: wrote www.ipv6.digital.com 16 chars, ret=-1

If I play around too much I get a kernel panic. Anyone have any ideas?

This is old news. Studies published in 2000 based on data from the early 90s have talked of the tetrachromat phenomenon. See this article. There is even a mention of it in wikipedia. Some people even think that all humans are blocked tetrachromats.

Awesome post, man.
My scoop:
The articles above consider 'survival' and the drive to it as top priority, which leads to those conclusions, self interest being top above all and everything. Revenge and other darwinistically explained social behaviors that exist, do so because the other behaviours simply died out, over time. But why is survival, or passing on of genes so important? Yes, we were born with these drives to operate selfishly, maximizing the individual "profit" even if it's irrational from a society's perspective, from the group perspective. But that doesn't mean we can't go against these drives - for instance, have these people study suicide - it's definitely not a good long term strategy for species. Basically, we're free beings, as the existentialists say it, in all of our actions we're doomed to freedom, everything we do comes down to a choice. They talk about the selfish gene, and biological beings simply being vehicles for the genes to create more copies, and all the complexity of life roots from these genes trying to make copies. Yes, after a certain time, only those tendencies will survive that aim to survive, but that doesn't mean at any point in time, a tendency like this is an absolute goal. If anyone chooses not to follow it, will simply die off, or his surivors will, sooner or later - so what? Who cares? Genes don't hold the answer to ethics, the way to live life, the bible doesn't hold the answer, and in this sense, we're left out in the open, to explore, without guidance. As far as stimulating that pleasure center, there are many ways to do it more intensly. We can love, if we want to. We can hate if we want to. We can admire nature, help others, we can sacrifice ourselves for something we believe in - treehuggers will sit in trees and starve themselves in order to protect trees. You may say this is just a compassion-malfunction, that humans developed towards each other, redirected to trees, but I don't think it's that simple. Most things happen random, without purpose, gene mutations happen without purpose. Time is the great judge, and makes random things into rules, purposes, drives, motives. But that doesn't mean these drives are absolute, something to take as a dogma. For instance, peacocks went down this dead end street of huge male tailfeathers, and they can't break from it. Nothing says they couldn't, if they really really wanted to - there could be a new epidemic, or fashion craze among peackocks, for whatever reason, where males with large feathers aren't preferred. Well ok, maybe not for peacock's, unless they get hit with a funny virus or something, but yes for humans - this illustrates how much freer we are simply because we can think more abstractly, instead of being just automatons. (Note: I don't think animals are complete automatons, and I detect feelings of love, and needs for, how ya say it, "self actualization", and other such human traits, even if very little.) Yes we retain the animal functions, the peacock-tailfeather nonsense things, we still get horny, hungry, sleepy, and all that, simply to exist and function, but once we step up on the hierarchy of needs,, these physiological things fall out of perspective, and the psychological needs become more the focus. As far as explaining the psychology through darwinism, through survival of the species, I don't completely go for it - I think nature is on an exploration, on a journey, with us, without clear direction. We can admire the world, admire mountains, cats, for no reason, and pretty much live freely. I'd like to think that our minds are not 100% slaves to our instincts, and we can rise above our instincts, and if we clearly see that a certain behavior, as a group, if made into a widely accepted status quo, collectively benefits us, then we can go for it, even if all the game theories and nash equilibriums predict it's a bad strategy. So what, what's so important about winning? Sometimes you just play a game, such as chess, for the sake of playing, you enjoy the be

Short of a posting here on the official sudo site by Todd or Chris (both of whom I bet could care less) I'm gonna keep saying "Sue-Doh" out of homage to Homer Simpson. Perhaps MSFT's patent is based on the pronunciation?

Here is the benchmark set that the guy was referring to. I think it has a cluster or two on the results page along with some Crays.

It's almost enough to make me wish I was a mutant mother of a color blind son.

You're confused as to the definition of shallow and deep water. The water is "shallow" for the purposes of wavespeed calculation when it's less than 1/20 of the wavelength. In a tsunami the wavelength can be around 200km, therefore the water is considered shallow even in open ocean.

To quote this page:

A tsunami can have a wavelength in excess of 100 km and period on the order of one hour. Because it has such a long wavelength, a tsunami is a shallow-water wave. Shallow-water waves move with a speed equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity and the water depth.


In any case, discussing tsunamis isn't really relevant to the idea of surfing on a rogue wave. You haven't commented on my figures- 50m high wave, 100m wavelength, 45kph speed- what kind of wave can you ride at this speed? Note that if the slope was 45 degrees, you would actually have to travel down the face at 45*sqrt(2) = 65kph in order to move forwards at 45kph. The steeper the wave the faster this would need be.

Can't be done.

Cheers.

I'm tempted to answer your points directly, however, I think it would be better to spend my time pointing you towards the following documents, which, firstly, describe the Internet architecture, and why it was designed the way it is, and secondly, describe how NAT / overlapping address spaces break the architecture. I don't think a debate on NAT can take place until both the design of the Internet and how NAT breaks that design are understood.

• RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - Section 2.3 "It is also generally felt that end-to-end functions can best be realised by end-to-end protocols." is the property that NAT breaks.
• RFC 1631 - The IP Network Address Translator (NAT) - even the original NAT RFC suggests limitations - from section 4. "Conclusions" - "NAT may be a good short term solution to the address depletion and scaling problems. This is because it requires very few changes and can be installed incrementally. NAT has several negative characteristics that make it inappropriate as a long term solution, and may make it inappropriate even as a short term solution. Only implementation and experimentation will determine its appropriateness."
• RFC 3022 - Traditional IP Network Address Translator (Traditional NAT) - the update to RFC1631 lists a number of limitations as well.
• RFC 2993 - Architectural Implications of NAT - a very good document, well worth reading.
• RFC 1627 - Network 10 Considered Harmful (Some Practices Shouldn't be Codified)
• Deprecating Site Local Addresses - an IPv6 oriented document, discussing "site local" addresses, and the problems they cause. They are the equivalent of IPv4 RFC1918 addresses eg. Network 10. The same problems it discusses also occur with RFC1918 addresses.
• Things that NATs break - listed just for completeness.
• The Middleware Dilemma - NAT is a form of middleware, as it does more than just forward IP packets - it maintains state within the network (see RFC1958 for why maintaining state in the network is a problem).
• The Digital Imprimatur : How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle. - The Firewalled Consumer section discusses what NAT is doing to the Internet at a higher level.

Once you've read through these documents, at least to the point of having a basic understanding of them, go through the comment I'm responding to, and look for ways as to how some of your solutions can be better and much more simply achieved via public addressing and the removal of NAT.

Even my home network could be described as peer to peer as I have no server for 4 client machines.

Its interesting you say that. Client / Server is really only defined at the transport layer or layer 4, and here is why :

• Ethernet is a peer-to-peer protocol - a device sending or receiving an ethernet frame is no different from any other, which makes it a peer
• IP is (or was designed to be) a peer-to-peer protocol - a device sending or receiving an IP packet is no different from any other, which makes it a peer.

What makes a particular device a "client" or a "server" ? Only the applications running on it, and where it matters in the context of TCP/IP is either the UDP or TCP ports the applications are using.

However, even that doesn't really work. What if you are configuring a "web server". To test it out, you fire up a web browser on the same box. Now the box is running both the web server and web client, so is it stil a "server", or is a "client", or is it both a client and a server ?

A point about why I clarified IP as being designed, but not necessarily a peer to peer protocol - NAT. NAT breaks the "equally a sender or receiver" property of IP. This property is one of the ones that have made the Internet what it is today - if you had an IP connection, and an IP address, you used to be able run up a web server, irrespective of any up stream devices. In other words, you were in complete control of the decision to make available a service to the network.

With deployment of NAT, you don't have as much, and depending on your environment, a lot less flexibility in making that "service providing" decision. Groups like RIAA and MPAA are quite happy with this, as they want a "broadcast" only style network, where home users can't deploy their own, possibly competing, services. NAT is the technology that will facilitate that.

There are a lot of other technology limitations that NAT causes, which are fundamentally side effects of violating the "equally a sender or a receiver" property of IP. Here is Keith Moore's list - Things that NATs break

I don't see the sonic boom is that much of a problem... But, aerodynamically, I don't know why 2.5khm/hr muzzle velocity is sufficient.

Here is my reasoning:
(from the PDF document)
conventional gun system: muzzle velocity 1.5 km/hr, range 50 miles
first generation of railgun: muzzle velcocity 2.5 km/hr, range 250 miles, Mach 5.0 (1.6 km/hr) at impact.

I assume the old shell decelerate to 0 km/hr at impact. In other words, speed drops by 1.5km/hr in 50 miles. For the rail gun round, the speed drops by mererly 0.9km/hr in 250 miles. It does not sound right to me. My mechanical engineering 101 knowlege suggested that the drag is proportional to the square of the velocity.
(the drag) R=0.5*D*rho*A*v^2, where D is the shape paramter, rho is the air density, A is the cross section area and v is the velocity.

At start, the drag of railgun round will be (2.5/1.5)^2, about 3 times of that of a shell... Of course, they will try to make the railgun rounds aerodynamically smooth, so did the conventionaly shells. Unless the railgun round spend most of the time at extremely high altitude, I don't see why it works.

Anyone know whether drag'n'drop is possible with wxWindows?

If it is then I see a bright future for slashManager.

Once slashdotted, the visitorville logs will be quite familiar to all of us!

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~zhang/movies/big/independen ceday.jpg

Screw that, I want to see our braindead U.S. Patent and Trademark Office abolished instead. The FCC at least is doing some constructive work - well, prior to Chairman Powell allowing even greater consolidation of the already dangerously consolidated radio broadcast networks.

So abolish the USPTO and bring back the old FCC. Oh yeah, and while I'm on a roll, I also want ElectraWoman and DynaGirl back on the air! With more spandex, dammit!

Also little knows is, I believe, that it originially read the persuit of wealth, but they changed that to happiness.

I'm not sure who would think that right gave endowes a citizen with the right to "do whatever they want" in pursuit of their happiness.

In my eyes, there's no difference, if any, between the two.

If I have a right to experience happiness, then I have a right to find it.
To find it, I have the right to do different things such as be a farmer, be a programmer, be a dentist, or be a lawyer.
I would say that finding those things in life that bring you personal satisfaction and happiness must be found.
Here's an interesting article you might enjoy. It's here

Here's a great quote: Those who would supplant the pursuit of such a democracy for a "free market" philosophy of greed, which, like a cancer, would kill the host body that gives it life, have "no business here at all."

In other words, I agree with what your saying, but I don't agree with going the to the other extreme.

Freedom of choice and the ability to earn a fair wage (determined by competition in the marketplace) in any field of profession I choose (which I need to put thought into, eh? There may be too many lawyers to earn a living...) is extremely important to me, and I believe all people deserve the same.
To pay for a home, to worship where and how I please, a decent education for myself and my family, to provide a bright future for my children, and to; in general; realize the harmonious balance whose end result is hapiness is, ultimately, what Jefferson meant.
I do not, however, think it meant to step on the backs of the downtrodden in order to gain wealth that'd make Soloman blush. If great wealth can be earned by providing a good product or service; and can be created and sold with ethics and morals; more power to that person.

Great point, though.

Because only "nuttily suspicious" "freak" would be upset to find out there was voting fraud!!!

Here in the U.S. today is Memorial Day, the day we remember all the "nutty freaks" who fought and died for our country -- very many of whom fought to protect our freedoms. Some, in fact, even died to ensure the right to vote for those that had been denied.

There's a kind of haughty cynicism among those who write opinions like that in the NYT op-ed.

There is a massive storm on Jupiter that's been going for about 400 years.

But Mars and Earth are about as different as astronaut ice cream and Ben & Jerry's. Mars has no water in its meteorological system, whereas Earth's is heavy with water. Mars is also flatter than the Earth, meaning winds can get up to higher speeds, lifting the very, very tiny dust particles into the upper atmosphere.

Does anyone else think that the cutting edge of physics is starting to resemble Ptolemy's system of astronomy? With all this 'dark' energy, and 'dark' matter, it's beginning to look like a lot of hand-waving.

Increasingly complex adjustments (e.g. epicycles) were made to Ptolemy's system to explain the observed motions of the heavenly bodies. Then along comes Copernicus and tells us that we've been looking at it inside out all along, things are simple after all, we just have to adjust our viewpoint.

I think physics is overdue another Copernicus.

I thought it was decided that the universe's expansion was expanding at the speed of light.

No. The expansion of the universe refers to the fact that distant galaxies are moving away from us, and that the farther they are, the faster they are moving. This is expressed by the Hubble constant, which has a value of about 50 km/s/Mpc.

The acceleration of the expansion is reflected as this "constant" increasing with increasing distance.

The acceleration is caused by Dark Energy, not Dark Matter.

Dark Matter is either normal matter or subnuclear matter that makes its presence felt as increased gravity, but is not directly observable.

Dark Energy is not well understood at all.

Bzzt, try again.

Sqrt(2) is the silver mean for all the reasons outlined in the article.

But note that the diagonal of an A* page is sqrt(5) in proportion to the base, and phi is (sqrt(5) +/- 1)/2, so you can use silver-mean paper for nice modular origami with golden-ratio-related shapes such as the dodecahedron and icosahedron.

You're right, the poster you quoted was mistaking reflected and absorbed light. However, since there has already been a good deal of confusion in this series of posts, I should point out that using the phrase, "most energetic" will probably confuse many people.

The peak of the intensity (numbers of photons per unit area) versus wavelength curve is at the green wavelengths (around 500nm), but the energy per photon is h*(speed of light/wavelength).

The graph of intensity vs. wavelength here is useful. (Graph is halfway down the page. Divide by 10 to change from Angstroms to nanometers. Visible light is ~400 to 700 nm, with very blue at 400nm and very red at 700nm.) However, intensity is number of photons, not total energy, so the power vs. wavelength peak (energy contribution) is shifted to the left because shorter-wavelength photons have more energy (blue photons are more energetic than red).

Further info on photosynthesis is here.
Note that there is a blue absorption peak and a red absorption peak. For some reason, green is not absorbed, but looking at the energy versus wavelength graph instead of the intensity versus wavelength peak shows this isn't as bad as it sounds.

Previous posters have said this is a sign of a suboptimal solution, but ignores the fact that there are other factors involved in the optimization of plant leaf design besides light-gathering efficiency.

No I'm not kidding. I spent five years getting my masters' degree in physical chemistry. And so, I'd like to belive I know something about matter-radiation interactions, given that that's mostly what physical chemistry is about.

Heat is the term we apply to the average kinetic energy in the molecules in a given collection of matter.


Correct.

That collection might be in any phase; "heat" still applies to the kinetic energy of molecules or, in especially high-energy states, individual atoms, or even more elementary particles.

Wrong. The concept of 'heat' and temperature loses significance on level of the individual particle. As you pointed out, temperature is a statistical thing, you can't apply statistics to individual objects.

Or, in the words of my atomic physics professor: "Temperature is something which you measure with a thermometer"

Heat and photons are not related.
Yes they are, this has been known for 120 years or so. Please bother to learn about some physics 101 laws like Wiens radiation law, Stefan-Boltzmanns law and the Planck radiation law before spouting off stupid things like that.

However, a barrage of photons of different wavelengths can change the temperature (i.e., the total heat, expressed in relative terms) of a given collection of matter.

Yes. That's called absorption. Photons get absorbed. They don't continue to exist after that. Unless of course they're re-emitted. All matter is continuously emitting and absorbing heat radiation. (Hi, my name is Max Planck)

It get's worse than that, though:
Quantum electrodynamics (Hi, my name is Richard Feynman), tells us that you cannot differentiate between kinetic heat and radiative heat are different things. In the classical picture, heat is transferred in collisions, but in the QED picture, as exchanges of virtual photons.

There is a place for precisely this thing -- though based on different technology. I can download various linux distros at 60 megabits per second. It's a bit hard to set up, but once you figure it out, it's mad fast. There's other applications as well, check it out:
LOCI

There is a place for precisely this thing. I can download various linux distros at 60 megabits per second. It's a bit hard to set up, but once you figure it out, it's mad fast. It's not quite P2P, but more like bittorrent where you download from multiple main sources, but you never need to upload. There's other applications as well such as an Internet2 'vcr', check it out: LOCI

Such as on my blog, and at the University of Tennessee's SunSITE page. The SunSITE pages also links to other sites that have posted information.

This is bullshit. UTK has 130 buildings covered and is converting to full 802.11(bag) coverage in the summer, with a outdoor network to come real soon now. 1310 access points with over 8500 unique users. Hell, even the friggin Creamery on the Ag Campus has 4 APs. Bossy is fraggin' as I type. I imagine that all of the schools listed have bought some Intel product to qualify. We don't use their stuff so....

I'm gonna buy one just to show up some dude at my company

That's the spirit!

Reminds me of this guy, where he writes: "I bought a PowerBook G4 in late 2002, mainly because I liked the packaging and I wasn't willing to give any money to Microsoft". What astounding logic. And then in the very next sentence he says: "I now regret that decision". What a surprise.

I wish I could buy stuff for reasons like these...

Google it.

Here

Here

Here (scroll down to find a movie)

Par archives is just a scam popularized by cluless usnet abusers. Think about it, if those files really could reconstruct a corrupt rar archive, why not post only the smaller par files ... Get youself double copies and you'll be far better off

Ignore this post. It's either a troll or an idiot.

PAR files substitute for missing pieces. They don't regenerate the whole file by themselves. Go look up how RAID 5 parity works. They're not called PAR files for nothing.

Just because you don't understand how something works has no bearing on the fact that it does work. Except in certain performance-sensitive cases, doubling up is the least intelligent way of adding redundancy.

---
Dum de dum.

... but if they did it then there must have been something going on.

Riiiiiiight, 'cause the FBI has always got the best interests of the american people on their minds ... they would NEVER do anything of questionable ethics.

The length of a telescope needed to peer into the mouth of the blazar would have to be gigantic, about a million kilometers wide.

Didn't they get the ESR memo that Java isn't popular in open source projects?

Well, they were handing out flyers titled "Escape the Java trap". They are promoting the free/open alternatives (SableVM, GNU Classpath, , Kaffe, et cetera).

If you had just looked at some links in your Google search you would have found this:

To be precise, what we usually call the "speed of light" is really the speed of light in a vacuum (the absence of matter). In reality, the speed of light depends on the material that light moves through. Thus, for example, light moves slower in glass than in air, and in both cases the speed is less than in a vacuum. Link

This raises the possiblities of halophiles living on Mars. On Earth, halophiles can live in up to 35% salt solutions. Pure water would kill these creatures --causing them to aborb water until they burst.

Its no wonder that Viking found no clear evidence of life on Mars, the low-salt water in Viking's nutirent broth probably killed any halophiles.

I don't know about you, but I find the phrase "the black hole is feeding" somewhat unsettling.

Color blindness - example images and details
Tetrachromates

I read through the majority of the 310 comments on this story (310 as of this moment) and I can't believe no one has touched on an important aspect of the scientific community's backlash against Wolfram's book: he end-ran them.

He may be egotistical (I read most of ANKOS and I did not find his constant self-laudation very charming), but so are many people in science and math. In what other fields can one prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the significance of one's contributions? The Huxleys and Jungs of history could never have felt quite the same tinge of accomplishment as Einstein must have, because literature and psychology have no such measure of the value of an idea. So there is more to scientific self-puffery than just ego, it is a very human thing for humans to fall into this trap when they have managed to make a real, recognizable contribution. (Earlier in this thread, in fact, I saw someone taken to task for Newton's ever-misunderstood "on the shoulders of giants" as a symbol of his humility...which it was not, though arguably so.)

So I think we can all agree, if on nothing else, that Wolfram's ego is definitely not the only ego involved here. Instead of publishing his ideas in the framework of the mathematical and scientific research communities, he chose to publish his findings to the world-at-large. This, in and of itself, can be seen as an immensely egotistical act (one I'm glad of, though, as I'll explain). By doing this, he is essentially saying that his ideas are so great they are likely to be misunderstood (the plaintive cry of many a genius) by his peers and relegated to the back shelf until the community catches up with him. He's confident he's hit on some seed of truth, and he wants to spur the world to cultivate it so he can live to see its fruits...probably so he can hear his praises sung while still living. Not very selfless.

His feeling that his genius is too great to be contained by the research community is felt by every other member of that community, but they lack the means to do anything about it. ANKOS (the book, not the science) is quite enough of an affront to these people for them to bring the full weight of their intellectual wrecking ball to bear on Wolfram's tome. Certainly this is not true across the board, but just as certainly there is at least some venom reserved for him out of animus.

The problem with all this demogoguery that inevitably follows great men around is that the focus very quickly falls upon the men involved instead of the ideas. (One thing we all must admit: Wolfram is a great man. Keep in mind that I'm using "great" in the sense of the gravitas of his ideas. In this same sense Hitler was one of history's terrible greats, as the grand sum of his ideas had enough weight to sweep an entire nation to madness. In fact, in this sense I supposed Hitler was a much greater man than Wolfram; if Hitler's ideas swept a community to madness, Wolfram's ideas only achieved anger. :-) ) So to Wolfram's serious detractors, I hear you with a suspicious ear, while fairness requires that I simply ignore Wolfram's own self-congratulations. If only all such commentary were passionate only toward ideas and dispassionate towards men, it would not take history so long to sift through the idea pile.

We ought to judge people for the most part based on their actions and the results of those actions, not their motivations. Wolfram may have end-run his community out of ego, but I believe the effect in this particular case to be positive. Look at it this way: he has taken the time to introduce these ideas to an entire generation of laypeople. This may present the work in a form that is undesirable to academic researchers, but it certainly does not preclude them from judging those ideas. The upshot is, it's an inclusive strategy that makes the work accessible to everyone. What's bad about t

Overfootprinting gives better coverage and redundacy. In a building the same size as the one he describes on our system we will put 8-12 aps. You have to take into account many factors. One of these factors is what the fucking building is made out of. If you are dealing with a stick built/gypsum board building, you get better floor-to-floor/room-to-room coverage. If it is steel and concrete, you have to take that into account. You've got 11 channels. Use them. Otherwise when one AP goes in the shitter, you get calls out the ass.

I believe the parent is referring to what I did on occasion at UT, but the school then required copies of all course books to be in the library. There was a flurry of "class packs" that students had to get at Kinko's too.

Amazing how academia would try to circumvent the system to profiteer off of students. BTW, the folks who were screaming the loudest about private industry doing things like this seemed to be the professors who profited the most from it.

Then this, Randall, will certainly give you fits at night.

I don't think this author understands the Internet architecture, nor IPv6's design goals. Perhaps he should before he critiques it.

Here are the essential URLs :

RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet The end-to-end argument demands that all communicating devices each have a unique network layer address.

RFC 1752 - The Recommendation for the IP Next Generation Protocol The design goals of IPv6, including a critque of the proposals for it, including TUBA - TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses.

He may also be interested in learning why NAT is not so "perfect" or even "good enough" solution :

RFC 2993 - Architectural Implications of NAT

Things that NATs break

Some people say there is nothing wrong with NAT. To them, I'd propose the following analogy.

Imagine you had only ever seen the world through empty toilet rolls - ie. without your peripheral vision. If that is all you knew, that is as good as you'd think the world was. IPv6, restoring full and unique device addressing, restores the Internet's "peripheral vision" - it removes the Internet's empty toilet rolls.

We may have already missed out on the next "killer app" after the WWW, as it required unique, end-to-end addressing, and the prevalance of NAT prevented it from being deployed.

Several of the comments seem to result from what I think of as "dubious" assumptions about IPv6. I got tired of listing these every time the IPv6 migration discussion came up, so now I maintain that list in a web page: Dubious Assumptions About IPv6

Has anyone seen Yogi and Scooby Doo? harhar. I wonder what's the naming convention this time?

I don't know about Morticians, but there's a team of Forensic Anthropologists in Knoxville, Tennessee, who run a 'body farm' with about 20 decomposing donated cadavers left out for around 4 years each to measure the processes of decomposition.

The centre has data on about 200 cadavers over the last 30 years - if anyone has evidence of this trend, they might be the ones.

Oh, that's ok then, as long as we get to see tits being squashed together in crappy lycra suits!


You're right - if they're going to go the boobs & lycra route, they should find a better show to bring back...