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Don't be so sure. In 3 billion years, they are going to collide! Forget Earth, out entire galaxy is going to be destroyed! Not really, but both galaxies will merely merge into a single elliptical galaxy.

This would seem to support what other people are saying about Apple's price-control tactics.

You can see my review of CMSs as a presentation (PDF) here.

Unfortunately just about all open source CMSs leave a lot to be desired in terms of out-of-the-box architecture and usability.

• Don't use Plone/Zope, Drupal, Slashcode, etc. etc.
• Macromedia Contribute, though $$$$, might be a good solution because you can lock them out from messing around with the site, but there is still a learning curve for newbies
• Good blogging software like MT mentioned earlier would work well, along with something like Gallery for photos.
• Quite frankly, Mac.com seems to be the best out there. It's really easy to use. Of course, you need a Macintosh to make it worthwhile, but it really seems to be a good solution for what you're looking for.

my poor Netscape 4.8 on the school lab computers (default Browser for CS students at U of T) have immense problems rendering the new "retooled" page. Maybe they should cookie the retooled version versus the old version so those who can't appreciate it still have an option while still allowing bandwidth savings for those who can.

my poor Netscape 4.8 on the school lab computers (default Browser for CS students at U of T) have immense problems rendering the new "retooled" page. Maybe they should cookie the retooled version versus the old version so those who can't appreciate it still have an option while still allowing bandwidth savings for those who can.

The only problem is the 10 day deadline. No university could find that kind of money that quickly, the funding/budget/beaurocratic cycles re too long.

Even better, make one side of the phone all display, and put a keypad on the other side.

That's a daft idea. How would you see the keys and what you're typeing at the same time?

Nah, I'd go with a chord keyboard. Might take a while to learn, but they are really nifty once you get going with them.

This, or something very similar, has been in the works at the University of Toronto since last year.

An article about this can be found, and the McLuhan Center's current projects page has some more information.

Begun in the summer of 1783 and completed by the autumn of 1784. First published in 1785. Asked by Cowper to suggest a subject for a poem, his friend Lady Austen submitted that he take a lighter subject than had been his custom, and facetiously set him the "task" of composing one about a sofa. His earlier poetry had, for the most part, been written in rhymed couplets, but The Task is Cowper's major work in blank verse. The poem is divided into six books, and comprises 5,185 lines. Starting with a mock-Miltonic narrative of the evolution of the sofa, Cowper soon turned to rural descriptions, the pleasures of gardening, the joys of domestic life, and other related topics. In addition, the poem is remarkable for its numerous meditative, reflective, and intensely moral didactic passages as the poet sets down, more or less at random, his comments upon the social, religious, and economic evils of his day. He had suffered throughout his life from severe melancholia, and in the early 70's had been close to insanity.

Yay for your fundamentalism. However, Eugenia wants it to still allow http://img.osnews.com/img/3131/osx.png and I agree with her.

My dock clone of choice on Windows allows me to keep apps under it (action screenshot). There is no reason for the real Dock to be inferior.:P

Yay for your fundamentalism. However, Eugenia wants it to still allow http://img.osnews.com/img/3131/osx.png and I agree with her.

My dock clone of choice on Windows allows me to keep apps under it (action screenshot). There is no reason for the real Dock to be inferior.:P

That's not really a "true" 3d solution: you still have to cross your eyes to get it to work. Really, it's no different from splitting the screen down the middle and showing one image on each side. Like this.

http://individual.utoronto.ca/iizuka/research/cell ophane.htm

I was trying to look for a report I read once that pointed to higher smog during weekdays as a major factor in rain occurring mostly on weekends.

This report probably says some of the same things, though:

Ozone Linked to Warmer Weekend Temperatures in Toronto

1. In the World of Darkness, vampires have the ability to disappear from view. In

Underworld, vampires repeatedly vanish from view.

2. In the World of Darkness, some vampires are capable of amazing speed. In Underworld, some vampires move with amazing speed.

3. In the World of Darkness, vampires "have the strength of ten men." In Underworld, vampries "have the strength of ten men."

4. In the World of Darkness, vampires are divided by age distinctions, and older vampires are more powerful and able to rule over younger vampires. In Underworld, vampires are divided by age distinctions, and older vampires are more powerful and are able to rule over younger vampires.

5. In the World of Darkness, the more ancient and powerful vampires are referred to as Elders. In Underworld, the more ancient and powerful vampires are referred to as Elders.

6. In the World of Darkness, vampires, especially Elders, are able to go into a state where they do not rise as normal, but stay alive i nan extended sleep or hibernation. In Underworld, The Elders are in a hibernation state where they do not rise as normal, but stay alive in an extended sleep.

7. In the World of Darkness, vampires in extended sleep lose blood and become more withered and mummified, and return to normal as they feed. In Underworld, Victor (a vampire Elder) awakens from an extended sleep appearing withered and mummified, and returns to normal the more he feeds on blood.

8. In the World of Darkness, a vampire in hibernation remains that way until a vampire provides them with blood. In Underworld, Selene (the main character) rouses Viktor from hibernation using her own blood, just as another Elder (Amelia) was supposed to do.

9. In the World of Darkness, even when in hibernation or when recently roused, elder vampires command a great deal of power and control. In Underworld, Victor, the Elder vampire, "radiates absolute power and control" even when recently roused.

10. In the World of Darkness, vampires are described as "alien." In Underworld, vampires are described as "alien."

11. In the World of Darkness, some vampire groups ("Sabbat") refer to themselves as Covens, and divide into Old World and New World Covens. In Underworld, the vampries divide into Old World and New World Covens.

12. In the World of Darkness, many North African or Middle Eastern vampires belong to a clan of assassins and warriors (called "Assamites"). In the Underworld movie trailer, Kahn, the leader of the Death Dealers, a group of assassins and warriors, appears to be of Northern African or Middle Eastern descent.

13. In the World of Darkness, vampires sometimes call each other "Vee," short for vampire. In Underworld, there is a vampire character named Vee.

14. In the World of Darkness, vampires are organized into Bloodlines. In Underw

This suggestion is so creative that I start wondering what's wrong with a country like Taiwan (ROC) that allows its people to protest against its own name, and what's right about a country like China (PRC) that made its people do something like this

Also, I was just watching the movie on this page and all those moving parts means radar will be bouncing off it like crazy. I would think the military applications of an orinthopter would be very limited.

Video here: http://www.utias.utoronto.ca/test/res/fm/fda-proj. html#proj1

Click a bit further ;-) home page and movie can be found here.

that'll make your current LCD-screened laptop have a 3-D display. Sounds a lot cheaper than this NEC will be.

From the CITA McKenzie FAQ: At a total cost of CDN$900K (including tax), it is probably the best price performer in the world with a price:performance ratio of $0.75/Mflops.

The poster must have mistaken an M for a G.

This really make KASY0 look even better since it beat a competing claim for price/performance by a factor of six.

C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.

Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:

1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba

[obCaveat: "Unless I'm missing the point entirely."]


Why yes! you are missing the point entirely, as others have pointed out.

Also, the they you mention is actually a he who really does know a little something about optics, not a "semi-dabbler."

Various eye and head tracking mice exist (check out this page for alternative mouse devices). They are used extensively by the disabled community, particularly by people with mobility impairments. The reason they haven't caught on more in the mainstream is primarily that using your head or eyes to control a pointer is a lot less convenient than most people think. First off, your hands are actually more precise and dextrous, secondly, you have several fingers which allows for a variety of clicking and scrolling type motions. With a head mouse, you have to dwell the pointer for a period of time in order to click (sure, there are external switches you can use, but that defeats your purpose of not having to use your hands). Also, because eye movements are often instinctive and because we also use our eyes to identify and read content on the screen, it can be difficult to control the mouse and unwanted selections are frustatingly common without long practise. I think the mouse is here to stay in one form or another (until VR style gloves become common or hand motions in open air are detected by lasers).

It is the keyboard we are for more likely to find ourselves disposing of as voice recognition gets rapidly better and better. Of course, I highly doubt that we will actually get rid of it either as many people find that they think better with the keys than with their voice and because so many programs, including games, have learned to take such advantage of the tremendous variety of input the keyboard offers.

The first guy in this google list has some funny videos. I wonder if he plays this one on his monitor while entertaining his girlfriend!

A Shaft Universe

Tongue Cancer is just a barrel of laughs!

Here's a very interesting paper on multiculturalism with an excellent bibliography should you want to look into it further.

You want stats about ethnic diversity? Compare China (.118), Japan(.01), and Korea (.004) to Canada (.75) and the USA (.50) (a higher number indicates greater diversity: it's the chance of two random people being of different ethnicity).

The point is that Canada and the US are very diverse because they're centres of ongoing immigration, even though they deal with it differently (mosaic VS melting pot: see the previous link on multiculturalism).

Yes, you do. Haven't you been told yet? (-:

When will Opera actually support the meatier parts of DHTML?

A year ago. The more important question is when MSIE will do the same. My new site currently looks like shit in MSIE even though I even made a separate CSS that did widths differently and forced alpha transparency on the logo.

The Community Memory Project had its origins in my quest for the right medium for the growth and realignment of communities. I had been through the 1960s in Berkeley, and had seen episodic community creation in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement...Like other similar systems, Community Memory stemmed from the EIES system, which was a conferencing system that had been set up at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. But there is a difference between conferencing systems and bulletin board systems. I believe that Community Memory was the first bulletin board system, and we developed our BBS software through an empirical process, one that could not have been done commercially.

In terms of "being online" France really was ten years ahead of time. At least.

The Community Memory Project had its origins in my quest for the right medium for the growth and realignment of communities. I had been through the 1960s in Berkeley, and had seen episodic community creation in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement...Like other similar systems, Community Memory stemmed from the EIES system, which was a conferencing system that had been set up at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. But there is a difference between conferencing systems and bulletin board systems. I believe that Community Memory was the first bulletin board system, and we developed our BBS software through an empirical process, one that could not have been done commercially.

You're making the same leap of faith that most people make (and I now think is incorrect): The human (or Dog) mind is a biological computer therefore an IBM with the right software is also a mind in the same sense.

It's not the message in "The Matrix" is inherently Christian/Buddist/Pagan/Geek, it's just a convenient exegetical tool for various writers to latch onto an indoctrinate readers with their own philosphical views.

Sort of like "The Tao of Pooh".

Ok, here's the calculation for you curious types, regarding how many photons arrived from the faintest star in the picture:

Let's suppose that the picture was taken in the "V" filter. I just happen to have the number of photons per second per meter squared that arrive from a star of 20th magnitude: 86.157. (taken from here ).

So the faintest stars in this picture are 31st magnitude? That's 11 mags fainter than 20, which by the handy old formula

mag1-mag2 = -2.5 * log(flux1/flux2)

which means that the 30th magnitude star puts out about 4x10^(-5) times as much flux.

Using the reference star's flux from above, this means that 0.0034299 photons per second per meter squared arrived at Hubble. The exposure was 84 hours, and the area of Hubble is (2.5m)^2*pi, so tada:

The total number of photons in the picture from the faintest star is: 20365.83

Still not too shabby. They probably could have found even fainter stuff.

As a technician on the Omega Laser I guess have a bit of an inside track on what's going on around the LLE.

First you must make a distinction between most powerful(energy/time) laser and most energetic(energy per pulse) laser, this is a distinction not made in the article. The Omega laser is currently the most energetic ultraviolet(frequency tripled Neodymium:Glass) laser in the world now at ~25 Kilojoules per pulse, very soon to be eclipsed by the preliminary first light of the National Ignition Facility. However each "shot" on the system, as they are called, is only a couple hundred picoseconds to a couple nanoseconds long (depending on the shot pulse shape) making it's peak power around a maximum of about 60 Terawatts. This is not the most powerful laser in the world. The Rutherford Appelton laboratory in England has a "Petawatt" system they just commissioned which is capable of at least hundreds of Terawatts of power albeit only with a couple hundred joules of energy per shot.

It is interesting to note that the mechanism the Petawatt upgrade at the LLE will use to achieve it's million billion watts of power in a pulse time of a few picoseconds to hundreds of femtoseconds is called Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification(OPCPA) and was invented right at THE UofR in the late 1980's!! Chirped Pulse Amplification lasers are the only means to get to petawatt intensities and they are interesting because they are the first technology to allow nuclear reactions to be directly caused by intense light radiation(ie. no implosion/ heating stage as in ICF). This is really interesting because in addition to the spark plug type inertial confinement fusion catalyzing experiments that are planned, the intensity fluences allowed by petawatt lasers approaches (possibly >10^21 watts/sq. inch) what is necessary to do an experiment called "sparking the vacuum" whereby enough energy is placed in a small enough volume of space in a short enough period of time to cause a spontaneous transformation of energy directly into particles(via E=Mc^2). Neat eh?

They actually make braille 'displays'. They're rather neat.

Here's a useful link

If you want to go beyond the media, then you might want to check out the papers by George V. Eleftheriades. BTW the article has a bad URL for the University of Toronto, is should be http://www.utoronto.ca.

If you want to go beyond the media, then you might want to check out the papers by George V. Eleftheriades. BTW the article has a bad URL for the University of Toronto, is should be http://www.utoronto.ca.

Here's the prof's page:

http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.htm l

Here's the prof's publications list; the paper that these press articles are about is right at the top.

http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/jpub/ind ex.html

The device he wrote the paper about works in the millimetre-wave regime, if I understand correctly (a bit above microwaves). It's relatively easy to build negative-index materials here, because you can do it by building oddly-shaped configurations of wires that interact in easily-controlled ways with the electric and magnetic components of the microwaves/mm-waves. To do this at optical wavelengths, you'd either need to use micromachining or find exotic compounds that have the properties you want. If I understand correctly both approaches are currently being followed.

The lower-frequency experiments are still interesting, though. The physics for the effect itself is the same, and it's easier to both build the devices and do measurements.

Here's the prof's page:

http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.htm l

Here's the prof's publications list; the paper that these press articles are about is right at the top.

http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/jpub/ind ex.html

The device he wrote the paper about works in the millimetre-wave regime, if I understand correctly (a bit above microwaves). It's relatively easy to build negative-index materials here, because you can do it by building oddly-shaped configurations of wires that interact in easily-controlled ways with the electric and magnetic components of the microwaves/mm-waves. To do this at optical wavelengths, you'd either need to use micromachining or find exotic compounds that have the properties you want. If I understand correctly both approaches are currently being followed.

The lower-frequency experiments are still interesting, though. The physics for the effect itself is the same, and it's easier to both build the devices and do measurements.

Here, see for yourself: http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.htm l.

His lenses must be working magic already. Eleftheriades was my professor for an electronics course @ UToronto, and i don't remember him having that much hair :)

This article is from the University of Toronto.

I have to say I was really skeptical when I read about this...

The U o T press release with a bit more info can be found here.

-PCB

The University of Toronto has an article about this.

Compare the UAW with the Candian Auto Workers. Since they split in the 80s, the CAW has seen a net growth of full-time, union, automotive manufacturing jobs.

They make it a priority and the members of the CAW are mobilized enough to make it happen. It wasn't but a few years ago that they occuppied a factory to keep GM from removing key pieces of machinery. GM buckled - the factory is still there.

So unions CAN oppose globilization. It does take a degree of activism by union members and engagement with other social forces so that the unions aren't isolated but it can be done.

I can see why some people are questing the value of this standards proposal.

I don't.

# acronym tag is gone

Who used this? I've never seen it used. It's demise has been overdue for a long time. I hope they killed its identical twin ABBR too. While you're at it get rid of CODE (computer code), KBD (keyboard input), VAR (program variable), DFN (defining instance), SAMP (sample program output), and ADDRESS (was this suppoed to be email or postal or both? It's ambiguity destroys any semantic value).

# q tag is gone

Good. We already have something for this. It's called the quote. It looks like this: " .

# cite tag is gone

CITE would be useful document, but without any citation fields defined its useless. Is this a standard citation like APA or MLA? Is it IEEE or ACM? Is it some sort of made up one? Or does CITE just indicate a superscript, parenthentical citation, or bracket citation? Without these fields denoted you can't do anything with it.

# img tag is gone (yes, really!)

It's handled by OBJECT, after all this is the HyperText Markup Language. Layout and textually there's no difference between an image and an applet or plugin.

Which brings us to...

# applet tag is gone (also really!)

Good. Why should Java be handled differently from Shockwave or Flash? APPLET is better replaced by OBJECT. IMG can also be handled by OBJECT as well.

# br tag is deprecated

This is a style markup, not unlike U, TT, SUP, SUB, STRONG, STRIKE, SMALL, S,I, EM, CENTER, and B.

BR will be replaced with LINE which encoses a single line of text.

# h1 thru h6 are deprecated

They were only sort of used properly. People knew they were headings, but they tended to pick them based on how they looked rather than what they meant. By depreciating these, they can be replaced by something with stricter semantics.

The University of Toronto is already doing this for its 802.11b connections. However, they do payment by assigning an account to the MAC address of your wireless card, which means that you only have to authenticate once. (Are MAC addresses easy to spoof?)

Whom is the audience for this post? Those who believe in "Fair Use" as defined under the law. Not Fair Use as "I want everything to be free, and damn the consequences to everyone else".
First a clear explanation of copyright

CAFE at the EFF
Note what it doesn't say as well as what it does.

Here as well is a "balanced" look at what's being fought for, for both sides.

A summation of positions

Note in all the above the author isn't being denied his rights, and the consumer isn't his.

Personal Computer Software Copyright Violation: An Unobtrusive Analysis of Internet Software Piracy

Looking at the "piracy" phenomena from the sociologist perspective.

White collar crime increasing

Of which copyright theft is.

The Digital Challenge to Intellectual Property Rights

Note this part of the above "To an economist, assets are valuable not because they merely exist, but because they can be bought and sold and traded.". Note to people who argue that the copyright holder has the original even if you make an exact copy are missing the point. Existance isn't enough.

. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Technology, Intellectual Property,and the Operation of Information Markets

There is more for such a complicated topic with far reaching consequences. Which I intend to expand upon latter.

I don't expect anyone to read this, partically because the battle lines have already been drawn. US vs THEM, and when that's done. Proper discussion is very hard.

Also remember that on BOTH sides there are those factions that seek only their own ends and "Fair Use" really isn't one of them.

Good posting, except for the mis-spelling of the word Lotus. :)

Nice try, but according to the fons et origo:

Ou)d' a)/ra Lwtofa/goi mhdonq' e(ta/roisin o)/leqron
h(mete/rois, a)lla/ sfi do/san lwtoi=o pa/sasqai.

Odyssey, Iota 92-93

Yet the lotos-eaters did not determine upon destruction for my companions, but to them gave lotos to eat.

(The Greek is represented using betacode, a long-standing way of doing Greek in ASCII).

lwtoi=o is the Homeric genitive of lw/tos, as per Richard John Cunliffe, p. 253 of A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Outside ascii, lw/tos is spelled lambda,omega,tau,omicron,sigma, or as transliterated, 'lotos'. This is also how e.g. Tennyson spelled in (in his poem, "The Lotos - Eaters", the title of which translates the word Lwtofa/goi (Lotophagoi) in the first line I cited from the Odyssey). "Lotus" is the Latinized spelling, and so is not incorrect, but is less correct than "lotos". If you want to be pedantic.

Not that this matters, but hey, I couldn't let that one rest, man. I'll take the karma hit.

To get back on topic, the earliest genuine science fiction is Lucian (Greek, about 2nd c. ad, to Homer's 8th c. bc.). And of course there's that Kepler story about going to the moon the earliest "modern" SF story (though hardly SF by our standards).

For recent science fiction, though, you can't beat Dune, you're right.

Sure you can. This design is pretty damned close to being near perfect.