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USA 4 World Wide

The LoRS tools give you read/write access to the unused storage space on the L-Bone. The L-Bone is a collection of IBP depots spread across the globe. The distribution of Linux using this infrastructure is to us an experiment, and to you, the chance to get your ISO in about 5-10 minutes. Our intention is to upload multiple copies of the ISOs into the L-Bone using the lors_upload tool. These copies will be geographically dispersed and broken in to smaller pieces. Once the copies are uploaded, the tool generates the exNode pseudo-file. These exNodes will be available from this page for download with names like [distribution_name].iso.xnd.
...
After installing these tools, you can upload your own files to the L-Bone and then send the exNode to others who would be interested in having a copy of the file. During the upload process you can determine how long your uploads reside in the L-Bone and even which depots to use based on locality/proximity (like ZIP codes). The depots themselves also determine how long an allocation is allowed to exist. After the allocation time (user or depot determined) expires, the data is erased from the L-Bone.

"Well . . . It's new! It's cool! It solves a big need! It's free (for now)! And it has a good instruction manual. Woo-hoo! I'll take Joe's opinion that you don't even have to be "a minor league geek" to play around with this new stuff with the proverbial grain of salt, but I'll bet quite a few of you will be "LoRSing around" with it soon."
-- Terry Calhoun is director of communications and publications for the Society for College and University Planning (www.scup.org)

The LoRS tools give you read/write access to the unused storage space on the L-Bone. The L-Bone is a collection of IBP depots spread across the globe. The distribution of Linux using this infrastructure is to us an experiment, and to you, the chance to get your ISO in about 5-10 minutes. Our intention is to upload multiple copies of the ISOs into the L-Bone using the lors_upload tool. These copies will be geographically dispersed and broken in to smaller pieces. Once the copies are uploaded, the tool generates the exNode pseudo-file. These exNodes will be available from this page for download with names like [distribution_name].iso.xnd.
...
After installing these tools, you can upload your own files to the L-Bone and then send the exNode to others who would be interested in having a copy of the file. During the upload process you can determine how long your uploads reside in the L-Bone and even which depots to use based on locality/proximity (like ZIP codes). The depots themselves also determine how long an allocation is allowed to exist. After the allocation time (user or depot determined) expires, the data is erased from the L-Bone.

"Well . . . It's new! It's cool! It solves a big need! It's free (for now)! And it has a good instruction manual. Woo-hoo! I'll take Joe's opinion that you don't even have to be "a minor league geek" to play around with this new stuff with the proverbial grain of salt, but I'll bet quite a few of you will be "LoRSing around" with it soon."
-- Terry Calhoun is director of communications and publications for the Society for College and University Planning (www.scup.org)

First of all, irradiating the atmosphere with microwaves is far more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.

Nice asssertion about microwaves vs. nuclear power. Do you have any evidence? My personal unsupported belief is that damage caused by microwaves would be temporary, while nuclear accidents tend to have more long lasting deleterious effects.

Secondly, The Earth is a moving target relative to the Earth. How exactly do these people intend to beam this light to Earth? The Moon is not in a geostationary orbit. It also rotates and thus any given point is not facing the Earth 15 out of 30 days a month.

The moon does not rotate with respect to the earth. It is tidally locked in place. See this page for more info. However, the moon does rotate with respect to the sun. Therefore, those collectors, while still pointing at the earth, will be sitting in the dark half of the time.

That said, I think you're right in that more fundamental research would need to be done, and that the risks/rewards need to be spelled out before embarking on such an expensive project.

I could have sworn I really did explain why I want multiple real IPs. But apparently you've already decided to ignore me. Obviously NAT "works", but it sucks. There's plenty of other comments in this discussion on the topic of NAT sucking if you don't want to believe me. Here's a nice list of things that NAT breaks which I took from the frizz's comment.

What do you care if I want my toaster to have a routable IP? The ONLY reason that's a bad idea is that IPv4 has created a scarcity of IPs. You just don't want to have your life inconvenienced by the transition to IPv6. Your argument is completely circular and pointless. And so we get stupid articles like this one by people like you who claim that we're not out of IP addresses and IPv4 isn't broken. The fact of the matter is that IPv4 is adequate to do a bunch of stuff and it's inadequate for a lot of other stuff. A lot of that other stuff is totally valid and your repeated presumption that it's all illegal or otherwise against my residential use contract isn't going to make it go away. Is it essential? Probably not - but how essential it is that everyone have cheap IPs is not in any way a function of the laziness of the network engineer who has to implement the protocol to support it. So let's not pretend that migrating to IPv6 is "pointless" because we won't "need" it for 20 years. Let's migrate as soon as we practically can and stop coming up with stupid excuses not to.

My pet peeve is not being able to use NetMeeting without a server in the middle when both ends are behind a NAT. This happens all the time from one work place to another work place. Doesn't the same problem affect all p2p applications?

Have you ever heard of this thing called "the Civil War"? You know, where the federal government won?

Enjoy.

While the authors try to use existing protocols to simulate temporary storage in the Internet, we are working on a scalable, shared storage resource that is open to the community.

We currently have over 20 TB of storage around the world available in the public Logistical Networking Testbed and other groups have another 10-20 TB provisioned in private use testbeds.

In additon to storage, we are also working on providing simple computational services at the storage nodes (work on the data in place while it is stored rather than moving it to computation centers).

For more info, visit the LoCI Lab at http://loci.cs.utk.edu.

Internet2 users, download the trailer at ultr-high speed from the National Logistical Networking Testbed. See http://www.cs.utk.edu/~atchley/lotr/ for details.

Just look at how slavery led to the civil war.

The Confederate States were strong advocates of states' rights, the principle that all rights not explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitiution were bestowed to the individual governing states. Congressional action and rhetoric violated their principles, so they felt that they didn't need to be part of the United States.

It's actually a fascinating study to see how the Civil War history classes vary from region to region and over time. I went to high school in Vicksburg, Mississippi and studied US history under a national Teacher of the Year award winner (you may have seen Mr. Wong on a stay-in-school commerical). Given our location, we spent a long time talking about the Civil War. He took his job very seriously and didn't cut corners, telling a fairly unadulterated view of our (the United States of America's, not the South's) history.

I don't want to brow-beat your comment, but that's just one of those statements that I feel necessitates clarification. Call it a pet peeve from a Southerner living in Indiana.

Go ahead and mod me off-topic. :)

Mandelbrot invented the term and took credit for that observation.

Meanwhile I'll just put the horrible orange colored volume containing the original teletype generated printout of the Brooks-Matelski set back on the shelf.

Actually I'm pretty excited about finding this. It seems I'm not the only one who thinks that Mandelbrot is little more than a self-publicist. People should see him give a presentation. It's like a sales pitch for himself.

I wonder if there are any web pages about that other IBM-paid self-publicist - Chaitin.

Metaphors use "like or as".

You're busted, too pal.

By the grammar and usage police

Nope, those are similes.

0wn3d!

According to this article there's lots of good stuff worth looking into:

(pasted from the link above)

The Lunar rocks may also be examined according to the chemicals that they contain. Such analysis indicates:

They are rich in refractory elements, which are elements such as calcium (Ca), Aluminum (Al), and Titanium (Ti) that form compounds having high melting points.

They are poor in the light elements such as hydrogen (H).

There is high abundance of elements like Silicon (Si) and Oxygen (O).

The high concentration of rare metals like Titanium, and the availability of abundant amounts of Silicon and Oxygen has led to serious proposals about mining and manufacturing operations in the future for the Moon.

I believe you can get a VT for well under $1000, and I've even heard that some of them now support advanced "sixel" graphics.

And they scroll MUCH more smoothly than OS X.

Making money out of open source software is so simple:

1. Pick a project
2. Claim that it contains your intellectual property
3. Give a PPT presentation in Greek
4. ???
5. Profit!

I bet I know who....

Since it is something of an open issue, what is the current understanding of the nature of dark matter in our universe? What kinds of questions are still being investigated? What kinds of hypotheses do we have now, and what do they imply?

At the last Global Grid Forum, you'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how many keynote speakers (Folks from IBM, Microsoft and HP were the big names) had "Stop the Hype" in their presentations. Of course, the hype machine himself, Ian Foster, didn't even show up.

Here's a one sentence description of Globus: It let's you execute programs on systems in different (virtual) organizations. The interaction between virtual organizations is where globus becomes useful. If you are only staying within your organization (or group) then Globus isn't really worth the effort.

For your type of group, you may be better off playing with Condor. Less hype, and a lot more useful if you are only going to be working on computers that are under your control.

You may also want to check out IBP if you are into distributed filesystem stuff.

-----------

My nontechnical hobbies tend to be things that have a certain geeky following themselves.

I juggle every week or so with the local club.

I do a lot of origami. There can be a lot of math here, if you want to look for it, but it's not necessary to think about the math to enjoy it. There are also different kinds of origami ranging from unit/modular to traditional models to more modern animals, plants, and other objects. There are lots of good books on the subject published by Dover and Japan Publications.

I play a lot of board games with a local group. Not many of the standard American board games; we usually play German board games like The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Ricochet Robot. I also enjoy the game of Go. I think Go is interesting because computers have yet to match good human players.

Since the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second (taken from here), I am roughly 5.67 light nanoseconds tall. Interesting in a useless fact kind of way...

To answer some of the points raised on the commentary to my post, consider this article:

Sales Tax History

Sales tax, as we know it today, has really only come about since the 1930's. Credit/debit cards are certainly younger still, as are computerized records of each transaction. If the conjecture holds true that forcing the cashier to open the till helps to prevent theft, then the idea is still valid. I will admit that I don't have a good reference for this. I have no idea where I heard/read it, so it could be false. But it is not unreasonable.

Not only are they doing whatever it is that they do at ORNL (it is black stuff I am sure), they are also writing pretty cool Remedy apps for us here.

that's because you haven't tried to write distributed apps that work across NATs...

here is a list of NAT problems that I cons'ed up because I got tired of trying to explain this over and over.

there's no way to fix NAT without having a global address space, and that's precisely what NAT takes away. various groups have tried in vain to fix NAT (RSIP, MIDCOM, HIP) and all of the solutions are of limited applicability.

They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.

This johnny-come-lately "UT" is ripping off the initials and the colors of the original UT (est. 1794 thank you very much)!!

We demand that our child State of Texas cease and decist in the molestation of our look and feel.

Sincerely,
Volunteer Graduate of 1994

PS, The UTK English Department is the Home of the Vowels ;-)

I know at least one PhD who uses Jgraph (no, not that JGraph) for all her publications. I don't think it does a lot of analysis for you, though.

For a text retrieval / linear algebra project (latent semantic indexing, et cetera), I used Matlab for quick testing and experimentation. Then, when it was time to write some stand-alone code to accompany my paper, I used the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). In addition to its own operations, it provides an interface to CBLAS (C Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) which are pretty useful themselves. I considered LAPACK, but the documentation seemed less accessible. Both LAPACK and GSL are based on BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms).

For a non-research project (nautilus shell simulation for the Ball State University math department), I used Maple and the Geometer's Sketchpad.

josh

Try one of the GNU mirrors:

http://gnu.sunsite.utk.edu/software/gnuradio/image s/hdtv-samples.html

http://gnu.wwc.edu/software/gnuradio/images/hdtv-s amples.html

http://gnu.mscnetworks.com/software/gnuradio/image s/hdtv-samples.html

http://www.phildowd.com:4060/software/gnuradio/ima ges/hdtv-samples.html

Basically, append software/gnuradio/images/hdtv-samples.html to any of the links from here: http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:1KyAbWv9nRAC: www.gnu.org/server/list-mirrors.html+gnu.org+mirro rs&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

I've been meaning to get out to Oak Ridge to see if their museum's gotten better in the past 20 years.

I took my son there a little over 10 years ago, it seemed to be a bit improved from what it was over 20 yrs ago.

Dr. Johnson(sp?), one of my history instructors at UT wrote a book about OR, "City Behind the Fence" IIRC. Seemed very interesting and he was an excellent teacher. May be worth a browse if you can find it.

And exactly how is this different from the usual Slashdot posting?

I'm guessing that you're single, and not (yet) seriously considering children. Had you even come close to the Childbirth section of your local bookstore, you'd have been deluged by books such as Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana : What To Name Your Baby Now.

You haven't stumbled on to anything new here.

Or check out one of the "Moms To Be" chat boards - the importance of selecting the right name is a Big Deal, and always has been. One can't pick a name that's too popular, or too obscure. And there's that unpleasant shock when the "perfect" name has been found, only to find that it's the rising star of the Baby Names Top 10 List - back to the drawing board.

Perhaps the most important issue is "teasability". You can have hours of fun with your spouse, shooting down every name they think up by turning it into a childish taunt:

• Her: What about "Duncan"?

  You : Yeah, I can hear it now: "Come here, Mister Dunkin' Donuts!"

  Her : Isn't there any name you like?

  You : I'm just saying... But now that you mention it, have you considered "Guy"?

  Her : No. Have you considered an frontal lobotamy?

Hours of fun, kids! Those 9 months of pregnancy will be gone before you know it.

Personally, I've found the most effective strategy is to waffle until the baby's been born. Then, once your wife is back in the recovery room, all doped up and groggy from pain that men can't even imagine (thank goodness for epidurals and pain-induced memory blocks), pop your suggestion to her:

• You :So, what do you think of the name Roscoe?

  Her : (groggy): Hrm? Bosco? Yes, I'm thirsty...

  You : Excellent! Roscoe it is! Wasn't that easy?

Thank goodness for blogs on slow days like this!

Madam Tetrachromat
Faster loading link of article in text format.

All mutant tetrachromats are female, so keep your eye on em! :)

The loss of Mt. Stromlo Observatory facility is very great loss.

A number of the obvious sites related to Stromlo are down, due to the fire or due to the wide spread power outages in the area. I will make links to indirect and cached pages.

Established in 1924, the Commonwealth Observatory at Mount Stromlo, on the outskirts of Canberra. Commonwealth Observatory was recognized for its important research into the origin and future of the universe.

Astronomers at Mount Stromlo made outstanding contributions to astronomy. It would be difficult to list all of the important contributions to Astronomy made by the people working at Mt. Stromlo. Now, a few come to mind:

• Stromlo research in the 1950s provided the first clue that the Magellanic Clouds had evolved differently from our own galaxy. These results gave us important insights into galactic evolution.
• In the 1990's, astronomers from Stromlo and Sliding Springs (many km away from the fire area) showed that about 90% of disc galaxies (such as our own) are greatly influenced by ''dark matter'', in their galaxies' halos.
• They made important observations in the first hours after Supernova 1987A (the first naked eye supernova in several centuries of years) was discovered.
• Then there is the sort of work such as the Stromlo Abell Cluster Supernova Search
• The Massive Compact Halo Objects (Macho project that was the first to record many microlensing events in our Galaxy as well as in the LMC.
• Then there was all of that tedious, but vital work of spectral classification of southern stars.
• Many of the first parallax distances to Southern stars were first made at Stromlo.
• The list goes on and on ... I am sorry that I must leave out so many other significant contributions!

One of the principal instruments at Stromlo was the 74-inch (188-cm) reflecting telescope. The 74-inch telescope was erected in 1953, and until the completion in 1974 of the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Spring, this was the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. In 1982, it was used to discover the fossil star CD-38245: a star so old that it is made almost purely of gases left over from the big bang.

It also was home scopes such as the robotic 50-inch (127-cm). It was an excellent example of how an older telescope could be outfitted with new controls and instruments to perform innovative work. The MACHO project was conducted on the 50 inch.

Two historical scopes come to mind, the Oddie, and the Yale-Columbia telescope:

The Oddie, was a wonderful 9-inch Newtonian telescope. The Victorian MP, James Oddie, presented this telescope to the Commonwealth government for use in the proposed Commonwealth Observatory. It was installed on the site at "Mt Strom" (as Stromlo was originally known) in September 1911. Over the years the Oddie telescope has made valuable contributions to Southern Hemisphere astronomy; it did some of the first measurements of the brightness, color and spectral classification of southern stars.

The Yale-Columbia telescope, 26-inch Grubb long-focus refractor was erected at this site for the determination of parallaxes of southern stars (it was the largest refractor in the southern hemisphere when first installed.

Moreover, there were other scopes as well ... But alas, from what can be seen from the air at this time, most, if not all of those telescopes have been lost. At appears that heat from the burning of the nearby bush /trees was hot enough to melt many of the domes at the observatory.

The Canberra Astronomical Society used the Stromlo lecture hall for their monthly meetings. During public nights, the public had access to a domed C14 scope, the Oddie, and a number of scopes brought to the site by members ... all through the hard work and generous efforts of the Canberra Astronomical Society.

I had the privilege of observing at Mt Stromlo several times and spoke at one of the CAS meetings. I still can recall flying down from the US to a CAS member's home to see SN1987, . I was there only 36 hours after the naked eye supernova was first observed. I still recall seeing the single star, at a distance of over 168,000 light-years, change in color and rightness over the course of an evening. I was one of the most important astronomical events I have had the honor to witness. I recall that every scope up at Mt Stromlo was all pointed at the Large Magellanic Could where SN 1987A was blazing away. The previous observing board schedule was cancelled as people raced to collect as much early critical data as they could in the early hours of the event.

I had the privilege of being with the members of the Canberra Astronomical Society on two of my several total solar eclipses: 1991 in Hawaii, US and most recently the 2001 eclipse in Ceduna, AU.

(Both trips count among my several successful viewings of solar totality. Although the 1991 Hawaii was a close call that was saved because my friend (the one who introduced me to the CAS) broke his arm a very short time before the Eclipse ... which allowed both of us to have a full view of Totality in Hawaii ... but that is another story!)

My best wishes and heart felt sorrow go out to all of those people who worked so hard to make Mt. Stromlo such a wonderful place for the public to visit and who helped the observatory make many important contributions to Astronomy. Much of what was lost cannot be replaced. Still it is my hope that those who are left will be able to rebuild something anew out this tragedy.

I believe we've tangled before, friend. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to call your bluff. There's no way in hell you understand the physics of computing without a good knowledge of calculus. So where do you use Liebniz's tool? Timing, scientific computations, Fourier transforms for example. Additionally, there's always a need for calculus in calculus math packages and software like matlab. I think I'll argue that without knowing calculus you can't know what to use calculus for. And because we're friends and all I'll just dismiss the Linear Algebra line.

If we throw out calculus, why not throw out College Algebra? How many zeros of a function have you found using a computer? Or what about writing? I mean, outside of comments there's no need to learn a second syntax called English. Most programmers out there aren't writing the technical documents for the end users and technicians. And you know, I really don't think many BS in CS students end up writing interpreters or compilers or OS's so lets drop those classes from the cirriculum.

To be a programmer just requires a language and a book. To be a computer scientist means to have a language, an idea, and a means of investigating it. Most of programming indeed doesn't require a new algorithm, just some glue to plug applications together. Of course, most programming jobs don't require a CS degree either.

Machine learning is one of the most interesting fields I see in graduate level academics but sometimes it seems hard to draw the line at what AI is and isn't. I mean, is hardcoding the optimal play set into ROM intelligent? Its definately artificial, however. How do you see yourself? An average programmer? Or a great programmer? I don't know much about Bayesian networks but I do know they're something of a hot topic that looks fairly complex to me, so I'd wager you'd say "better than average" at the least. So why discard a potentially powerful tool?

Finally, don't shoot me, shoot the accrediation board and the math dept. They seem to believe that students should be familiar with calc 2 concepts as a prereq for Discrete or Combinatorics and Linear Algebra.

You may want to specify the kind of educators you want. Then invite some people by name. For example, there is a relatively lively forum mathedu on the topic of research on post-doctorate mathematics education. There are active forums on unschooling, Reggio Emilia schools, and other specific areas of education... Good luck!

FYI: Page plays the keyboards. Paul runs the board and records the shows.

I'm a molecular biologist myself, so as a rule I'm all for nanotechnology. However, the fact that the libertarian nutjob who wrote the PRI article support unfettered research makes me think regulation must be needed. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.

So, okay, he (Prof. Reynolds) makes a strong case against prohibition (of course, as a ccientist, I'm easy to persuade that R&D should never be banned outright.) Military secrecy is something I dislike, again, because secrecy is not good for science. Neither of these proposals are being floated in reasonable circles anyway, so this is something of a straw man proposal.

So, why does he oppose even modest regulation? From the paper, as it is academic in nature, it can be difficult to tell what policy he advocates, but I'm pretty sure he favores the lassez-faire option. He makes some arguments about deregulation generally which I regard as pretty vaccuous. Requiring companies to use the best available technology encourages other companies to research it and then force the first company to buy.

Anyway, to answer your question - the reason we'd want to regulate nanotechnology is because it might be dangerous. The thousands and thousands of completely harmless applications of nanotechnology - basically just material science - don't need any special regulation. It is only when the nanotechnology begins to resemble a living organism that the need for regulation comes into play. The fear, and it is remote but still legitimate, is that someone would make tiny robots that would breed out of control and become a social problem.

He points to biotechnology (which is basically unregulated, except in so far as it is also medical) as a big success. It has been - SO FAR. As yet, we have had no environmental catastrophes resultant from biotech, and the medical errors have been fairly small in scope, and would have been prevented if existing laws/procedures had been followed.

However - that doesn't mean that what we're doing is safe. It means, either, that what we've been doing is safe OR that we've been lucky. Personally, I think biotech is "pretty safe," but that agro-biotech (Monsanto, in particular) has too much free reign.

In any case, until we have a better idea of what nanotechnology will actually be like, it is premature to discuss regulation to make sure it is safe. Banning nanotechnology outright would be impossible for the reasons he has mentioned. Banning specifically self replicating nanotechnology, though I think it inadvisable, WOULD be feasable. Regulating self-replicating nanotechnology is probably desirable.

I'm a molecular biologist myself, so as a rule I'm all for nanotechnology. However, the fact that the libertarian nutjob who wrote the PRI article support unfettered research makes me think regulation must be needed. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.

So, okay, he (Prof. Reynolds) makes a strong case against prohibition (of course, as a ccientist, I'm easy to persuade that R&D should never be banned outright.) Military secrecy is something I dislike, again, because secrecy is not good for science. Neither of these proposals are being floated in reasonable circles anyway, so this is something of a straw man proposal.

So, why does he oppose even modest regulation? From the paper, as it is academic in nature, it can be difficult to tell what policy he advocates, but I'm pretty sure he favores the lassez-faire option. He makes some arguments about deregulation generally which I regard as pretty vaccuous. Requiring companies to use the best available technology encourages other companies to research it and then force the first company to buy.

Anyway, to answer your question - the reason we'd want to regulate nanotechnology is because it might be dangerous. The thousands and thousands of completely harmless applications of nanotechnology - basically just material science - don't need any special regulation. It is only when the nanotechnology begins to resemble a living organism that the need for regulation comes into play. The fear, and it is remote but still legitimate, is that someone would make tiny robots that would breed out of control and become a social problem.

He points to biotechnology (which is basically unregulated, except in so far as it is also medical) as a big success. It has been - SO FAR. As yet, we have had no environmental catastrophes resultant from biotech, and the medical errors have been fairly small in scope, and would have been prevented if existing laws/procedures had been followed.

However - that doesn't mean that what we're doing is safe. It means, either, that what we've been doing is safe OR that we've been lucky. Personally, I think biotech is "pretty safe," but that agro-biotech (Monsanto, in particular) has too much free reign.

In any case, until we have a better idea of what nanotechnology will actually be like, it is premature to discuss regulation to make sure it is safe. Banning nanotechnology outright would be impossible for the reasons he has mentioned. Banning specifically self replicating nanotechnology, though I think it inadvisable, WOULD be feasable. Regulating self-replicating nanotechnology is probably desirable.

It seems like this attempt to market something as "gridMathematica" is really a little deceiving. In reality it is more distributed Mathematica. Grids involve virtual organizations, authentication, etc. For more information see Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke's paper The Anatomy of the Grid.

There are other packages which do very similar things and have a for a long time, such as NetSolve and Ninf which allow you to do cool stuff with most any application that needs computational power.

There is also a Commodity Grid Kit (standard interface to Globus services) for Matlab that should be out soon, more info can be found here.

So for now, I'll just consider this more someone wanting to capitalize on the hype around Grids at SC2002 than anything else. Unless I'm missing something obvious.

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/hacks/05/

Of course, it's only 14.4 (~1KB/sec) but for email and even a terminal session it's not too bad. You only get around 15 minutes/month for free, and after that it's pretty steep. But you can get unlimited service for $5/month.

We're going on a long road trip early next year, and I plan to get unlimited for that month. Then I can check my email and even do some text websurfing from the car - you usually get good signal on major highways.

(Just to forestall some AC troll, no, I won't be checking email while driving.)

I think it is time for all world leaders to take a crash course in the basics. Someone needs to drill Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs into their heads. Take care of the IMPORTANT things first - First, food, potable water, and clean air. Second, shelter, personal safety and security. When those things are addressed, not only will the world be a MUCH better place, the other things will be easier to address as well. I for one am sick of hearing about a "digital divide" when people are starving and still being victimized by crime.

If my old school learning is still correct, and my brain is not complete hog dootie, the reason that spiral galaxies spin is the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. See this to get a general idea of what this Law is all about.

The directional spinning and disk shape of spiral galaxies is a direct result of this Law. Of course, there's a lot more to it in the details as to how this comes about for galaxies, but I don't think that is what you're asking for. But if you look into it, understand vector space and gravitational attraction, it will make sense to you.

I wouldn't be shocked if the man reads Slashdot.

The fat geek who dies told you - they're Connection Machines CM5s. Also seen in a few other movies (I wanted to say wargames, but I don't think it was - it played the part of some other pentagon/norad computer anyway).

The LEDs are the state for all the processor boards - CM5s used a whole heap of massively parallel microprocessors. Here's a pic of a 512-node one. According to this the processors are Sparcs. I vaguely remember an article in Omni (a long time ago) that said they were with 6502s or Z80s - maybe that was a previous model, or a strange dream.

at the U of Tenn and is very active in tech rights issues, as well as being one of the most popular bloggers around.

And I believe he claims to be a Libertarian.. rather than a Republican as suggested elsewhere (what, there are more than two parties in this country?!)

show me the evidence for your statements

This is the last comment I expected to be questioned on! It's not like I'm proposing any sort of revolutionary new idea of egyptian burial customs; it's common knowledge among those with any knowledge at all that burials were seen as transitions for the journey to the afterlife. They'd even entomb some with boats, to help them on their journey. Some mummified their cats.

If you must have evidence, try this yahoo news story.

Or, just try this google search.

And stop asking people for sources on obvious subjects. It just makes you look stupid.

It would be somewhat ironical if the DRM solution itself limited "digital rights" by using closed protocols and propietrary technologies. The product does not have to be open source, but the interfaces, protocols and standards should be well documented, public and free. Luckily, as interoperability is likely to be a key issue with DRM, this will probably be fixed automagically because nothing else makes sense (business wise).

Now, maybe someone with more insight on DRM could comment on this as well?

Intro: 'The lack of open, accessible, interoperable standards for digital rights management has often been cited by stakeholders as a leading cause for the slow adoption of DRM technologies...This document is a collection of thoughts that I have been developing and maintaining for several years on the notion of a multi-layered, open DRM standards architecture, which I think of as OpenDRM"

There used to be a theory of gravity, it is now the law of gravity. It has been proven. It has been observed many times. Gee even the folks in east Tennessee call it Newton's 2nd law. And in Oregon. And in Winnepeg. Or do a Google search.

So you are saying that you have proof of the three items you mentioned? Would you please post them for our education? But number 2 is not evolution, it is adaptation and that is totally different and can't be used to prove number 1 (see my previous post concerning the wallabys, they are still wallabys). I am not sure that number 3 can be used to prove number 1 either. There are very good arguements against DNA proving evolution. The fossil record could be misintrepreted, just as the length of time in the earth's creation is being misintrepreted. And morphology is simply studying change which is another way of saying adaptation (using big words to hide the truth).

No, I haven't seen a species or a universe being created. But I also don't refer to it as a theory (nor as a law). It is simply fact and has been declared since the beginning. The "theory of creationism" was created by scientist attempting to drag creation down to the same level as evolution.

I don't hear voices in my head, and I have never heard voices in my head. And you called me a very poor troll.

Gutenberg's second book, after the Bible, was erotic stories.