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• Be published
• Have discussed percentage of various software being pirated.
• Have weighed total cost of ownership versus economic means

kids can get started making some pretty fun games right away.

GameMaker

The papers from the RHIC collaborations. The "liquid" state of quark-gluon plasma being discussed is called a color glass condensate.

I don't think you know what you're talking about, either. The RHIC results being discussed are not referring to a superfluid state of matter; read the papers yourself. No mention of superfluidity, just of a low-viscosity, rapidly thermalizing liquid -- what they refer to as a "color glass condensate". (This is not to say that superfluidity can't occur in QCD; it's just not what the article is talking about.)

I remember there was some discussion about this on the EMUSIC-L list, you could google for it. There are some very interesting discussions archived here: http://archive.cs.uu.nl/pub/MIDI/DOC/Tunings (I didn't read through it all though).

• The instructor knew absolutely nothing about game design and programming, or even games in general before deciding to be the instructor of the course. So, he doesn't have quite the same grasp on the concept that most college students interested in game design and programming do.
• If you'll notice I've been saying game design AND programming. Personally, I feel the two are different aspects of making a game. I couldn't design a fun game to save my life (and I've tried) but I enjoy and feel I'm fairly proficient programming games. I thought the course would cover both aspects but so far it's been only game design using an application called Game Maker. I'll admit, the application is nice and very well put together, but it tries to completely remove the coding portion of creating a game.
• The programming portion of the course is going to be implementing the game engine in C++ found in the book Sam's Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours which seems kinda lame. He does want us to extend the game engine, but it's still just cut and pasting.
• Finally, the whole damn course is Windows-centric. I'm not a Windows hater, but I really don't enjoy using it if I don't have to. I proposed to the professor before the course was even an option that he look into something cross platform like SDL, which will run on pretty much any operational operating system available now. It also simplifies many things like setting up a window, handling input(keyboard, mouse, joystick), and even network code.

Heres your evidence, SAM,16,QUITS A-LEVELS FOR OOH-LEVELS!"
scroll down to subject 21

According to this Dutch university site, the 1938 population of France was just under 42 million. According to this site French fatalities in WW2 were 810,000, which is roughly 2% (although that is fatalities only: presumably there were numerous non-fatal casualties of various kinds).

Alternatively, the Dutch site linked above gives the 1946 population of France as 40.3 million, which is a reduction of 1.6 million, or 3.9%, from the pre-war population.

Actually, I don't think that these figures do anything to undermine the parent poster's argument. It's very easy for people who have never experienced that kind of horror - and probably never will - to sit at their keyboards and decry the restriction of freedom of speech in France and Germany. Those restrictions don't exist for no reason, though. They're the result of profound national traumas way in excess of anything that any American - and even Brit (that would be me) - has had to endure in the last century or more.

All the same, the argument isn't really helped by wildly inaccurate statistics like that 70% figure.

Don't be fooled! Geeks are NOT sexy!!! You have been warned. Find yourself a DJ instead. Ravers and Transers are far sexier.

Don't be fooled! Geeks are NOT sexy!!! You have been warned. Find yourself a DJ instead. Ravers and Transers are far sexier.

The only thing I have against Lego Mindstorms is that the included programming environment SUCKS. The "functions" (MyBlocks) are really just reusable code blocks. You can't pass parameters to them. Furthermore, it's damn near impossible to update a "MyBlock", once you declare a MyBlock, it's saved to the user profile and you can only change it on a per-program basis. And the programming structure in the Lego Mindstorms software is incredibly unlike any other coding language I have ever seen.

Do your child a favor and set up NQC (Not Quite C) for him. It's simple enough, you can actually call real functions with parameters, and the child learns basic programming skills at the same time.

I think the Lego Mindstorms set is awesome, heck, I have 3. But the programming environment included is really, really lame.

- Yolego

I teach programming (among other things) to students in grades 6, 7, 8, and 9.

I teach languages in this order:
Grade 6-DRAPE
Grade 7-LOGO
Grade 8-BASIC
Grade 9-JAVASCRIPT

I highly recommend DRAPE as a way to teach programming concepts in a simple fashion. It is a FREE programming language with a simple point and click interface. Check it out!

Click HERE to go to the DRAPE homepage.

http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/calendar/isocalendar. htm

The nice thing about the ISO calendar is that it does away with months altogether. The amount of weeks per year varies, but that isn't a problem since you don't have to find a month to fit it into.

At my school the following projects and activities garner the most interest:

1. Open Source. Legal free software, cheap computers to game/chat on: excellent. Teach students to build inexpensive boxes loaded up with stunning applications.

2. Student technicians. High schools have intense computer support needs and often lack adequate funding. Students love to be trained in how to troubleshoot, like the access and status they get as techs, and work for nothing. Recruit a few girls and distribute some keys to the techs and the program will take off.

3. Movie Making. Always fun.

4. Video game creation (with a point and click marvel like GameMaker) http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/

5. Robotics, but only if you have the resources to do some significant metal work (lego robotics much better for middle school).

Cutler Cleveland (Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University) appears to be one of the leading energy analysts these days, his work is quite broad. In "Net Energy from the extraction of oil and gas in the united states", Int. Journal of Energy 30 (2005), he shows that US Oil production has a EROI of 11 for energy in/thermal energy out. And gasoline is 30-50% of this value (ie 3.3-4.5 EROI). Now that doesn't include conversion efficiency in a car or power turbine, nor does it include the embodied energy of the extraction equipment or ICE/power plant to burn it.

If you make calculations just for conversion efficiency (33% ave) of US oil converted to electricity/mechanical power has EROI of 3.6, and gasoline in a car is less than 1 (meaning that the energy to do mechanical work in a car is being subsidized by by electricity (coal) to run the extraction equipment). And still we haven't considered the embodied energy in the extraction equipment or the ICE. (now of course middle eastern oil is 3 times better than this) That is very poor EROI! And coal isn't looking much better. Both of these resources EROIs have dropped by at least a order of magnitude over the last 100 years as extraction becomes more difficult. The future of fossil fuels by EROI analysis looks bad.

As for Alsema, he does review the added embodied energy of infrastructural components in section 4.5 of the paper. For complete balance of systems analysis (inc. frames, structures, concrete, maintenance, etc) the best technologies (thin films and ribbon Si) have EPBP of 1.2-2 (15-25 EROI @ 30y, 25-41 EROI @ 50y). scSi is around 3.3 years (9 EROI @ 30y, 15 EROI @ 50y). Analysis shows that PV energy is manufacture side heavy, with little continuing energy inputs as would be expected from a solid state, fixed, and essentially maintenance free device (how often do you maintain your current roof shingles?). However, even his latest numbers are out of date as he notes getting information from manufacturers is difficult because EROI calcs involve knowing trade and financial secretes so it takes a long time to get agreements in place. Also his calcs don't use the best efficiency panels on the market, which underestimates EROI, if that was the criteria on which we made purchases. Also multijunction concentrators, should be significantly better since 1) they use less material per peak watt and 2) they have a higher efficiency. References: Here,Here, Here, Here

What's the end result? EROI calculations beyond first or second order become quite tricky and controversial. But we can show that solar in a detailed "second order" or more EROI estimate looks very favorable compared to even a "first order" estimate of oil, NG, or coal.

Cutler Cleveland (Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University) appears to be one of the leading energy analysts these days, his work is quite broad. In "Net Energy from the extraction of oil and gas in the united states", Int. Journal of Energy 30 (2005), he shows that US Oil production has a EROI of 11 for energy in/thermal energy out. And gasoline is 30-50% of this value (ie 3.3-4.5 EROI). Now that doesn't include conversion efficiency in a car or power turbine, nor does it include the embodied energy of the extraction equipment or ICE/power plant to burn it.

If you make calculations just for conversion efficiency (33% ave) of US oil converted to electricity/mechanical power has EROI of 3.6, and gasoline in a car is less than 1 (meaning that the energy to do mechanical work in a car is being subsidized by by electricity (coal) to run the extraction equipment). And still we haven't considered the embodied energy in the extraction equipment or the ICE. (now of course middle eastern oil is 3 times better than this) That is very poor EROI! And coal isn't looking much better. Both of these resources EROIs have dropped by at least a order of magnitude over the last 100 years as extraction becomes more difficult. The future of fossil fuels by EROI analysis looks bad.

As for Alsema, he does review the added embodied energy of infrastructural components in section 4.5 of the paper. For complete balance of systems analysis (inc. frames, structures, concrete, maintenance, etc) the best technologies (thin films and ribbon Si) have EPBP of 1.2-2 (15-25 EROI @ 30y, 25-41 EROI @ 50y). scSi is around 3.3 years (9 EROI @ 30y, 15 EROI @ 50y). Analysis shows that PV energy is manufacture side heavy, with little continuing energy inputs as would be expected from a solid state, fixed, and essentially maintenance free device (how often do you maintain your current roof shingles?). However, even his latest numbers are out of date as he notes getting information from manufacturers is difficult because EROI calcs involve knowing trade and financial secretes so it takes a long time to get agreements in place. Also his calcs don't use the best efficiency panels on the market, which underestimates EROI, if that was the criteria on which we made purchases. Also multijunction concentrators, should be significantly better since 1) they use less material per peak watt and 2) they have a higher efficiency. References: Here,Here, Here, Here

What's the end result? EROI calculations beyond first or second order become quite tricky and controversial. But we can show that solar in a detailed "second order" or more EROI estimate looks very favorable compared to even a "first order" estimate of oil, NG, or coal.

Cutler Cleveland (Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University) appears to be one of the leading energy analysts these days, his work is quite broad. In "Net Energy from the extraction of oil and gas in the united states", Int. Journal of Energy 30 (2005), he shows that US Oil production has a EROI of 11 for energy in/thermal energy out. And gasoline is 30-50% of this value (ie 3.3-4.5 EROI). Now that doesn't include conversion efficiency in a car or power turbine, nor does it include the embodied energy of the extraction equipment or ICE/power plant to burn it.

If you make calculations just for conversion efficiency (33% ave) of US oil converted to electricity/mechanical power has EROI of 3.6, and gasoline in a car is less than 1 (meaning that the energy to do mechanical work in a car is being subsidized by by electricity (coal) to run the extraction equipment). And still we haven't considered the embodied energy in the extraction equipment or the ICE. (now of course middle eastern oil is 3 times better than this) That is very poor EROI! And coal isn't looking much better. Both of these resources EROIs have dropped by at least a order of magnitude over the last 100 years as extraction becomes more difficult. The future of fossil fuels by EROI analysis looks bad.

As for Alsema, he does review the added embodied energy of infrastructural components in section 4.5 of the paper. For complete balance of systems analysis (inc. frames, structures, concrete, maintenance, etc) the best technologies (thin films and ribbon Si) have EPBP of 1.2-2 (15-25 EROI @ 30y, 25-41 EROI @ 50y). scSi is around 3.3 years (9 EROI @ 30y, 15 EROI @ 50y). Analysis shows that PV energy is manufacture side heavy, with little continuing energy inputs as would be expected from a solid state, fixed, and essentially maintenance free device (how often do you maintain your current roof shingles?). However, even his latest numbers are out of date as he notes getting information from manufacturers is difficult because EROI calcs involve knowing trade and financial secretes so it takes a long time to get agreements in place. Also his calcs don't use the best efficiency panels on the market, which underestimates EROI, if that was the criteria on which we made purchases. Also multijunction concentrators, should be significantly better since 1) they use less material per peak watt and 2) they have a higher efficiency. References: Here,Here, Here, Here

What's the end result? EROI calculations beyond first or second order become quite tricky and controversial. But we can show that solar in a detailed "second order" or more EROI estimate looks very favorable compared to even a "first order" estimate of oil, NG, or coal.

Alsema is a leading expert on this field on study (you'll see his name on many in-depth studies) and shows the energy pay back period to be:
Multicrystal Si: 0.8 years (EROEI 37.5 @30y, 62.5 @yr)
CIS: 0.4 years (EROEI 75 @30y, 125 @50y)
CdTe: 0.6 years (EROEI 50 @ 30y, 83 @ 50y)
Crystal Si: 3.3 years (EROEI 9 @30y, 15 @50y)

I should note that these studies are again becoming 5-10 years old again and don't reflect the improvements in efficiency. CIS for example in this study was modeled at 12% efficiency, but the best efficiency (2003) is now 19.2%. Same with crystal Si, efficiency have edged up about 3-4%. I wasn't able to find info on concentrators, but because of low materials-to-power ratio I expect they will be at least as good.

I calculated the numbers for both 30 years and 50 years. Comparisons are usually done on a 30 year basis since this is the build life of other power plants and is a typical load period. However it is a bogus, made up number for easy comparison. Many PV manufacturers are guarantying their panels for 25 years, with no or little power degradation from the specs. No reason to artificially cut their life short.

The numbers I used were the base case, not best. Of course its possible to package them with material having more embodied energy (as in the case of the silicon numbers which has a significant amount of aluminum in the frame). Now these don't include infrastructural embodied energy such as inverters, mounting systems etc, which would decrease the EROEI to about 30 @ 30 years with current techniques. But neither do the EROEIs for traditional fuels contain the externalities of generation plant embodied energy. Other energy sources are:
Coal: 9 EROEI
Oil (middle east): 10-30 EROEI
Oil (US): 3 EROEI
Light water Nuclear: 4 EROEI current (12 with improvements)
Ethanol: Likely zero EROEI, maybe negative

Now you might quibble with some of the numbers, however I think it shows that PV is at worst good, and at best really good.

3.5 Billion km Divided by 7 Years Divided by 365 Days Divided by 24 Hours gives you the aproximate velocity at which Cassini was travelling for the last 7 years in Km/h

Travel Velocity: 2,976,190.48 Km/h
Speed of Light: 1,079,252,849.00 Km/h(link)

Using the equation: KE = 1/2 * Mass * Velocity Squared (link) we get

Mass: 1 ton = 907.18474 kg - 6 tons = 5443.10844 kg (Ton Conversion Number Link)
Velocity: 2,976,190,476 m/h is = 178,571,428,560 m/s

KE = 0.5 * (5443.10844) * (178,571,428,560.0)^2 = 86,784,254,453,177,329,714,641,182.592 Joules
8.68 x 10 25 J (Amount of energy it takes for Cassini to go that fast)? Can someone help me with this? If so, how is this accomplished?
9.53 x 10 19 J (Consumption of energy by the USA in 1995) (link)

"Most toxic devices now made" - it's my second favorite baseless canard about solar energy! The best being the one about them not making back their own manufacturing energy.

Your average silicon solar cell goes through a very similar process to that of any other silicon semiconductor, the major difference being that they are then locked into crystalline modules for 25 - 30 years, rather than put into rapidly-obsoleted electronic equipment that people ship to Southeast Asia to be landfilled or taken apart with toxic acids.

University of Utrecht study;

If you were talking about the heavy-metal based thin film solar cells, they use these materials in units more than one thousand times as efficient as the NiCad batteries that I'm sure you've used (and disposed of) before. NREL in Platts.

Especially since it's been locked into an ionic crystal - think about it. Sodium - explosive toxic gas. Chlorine - military nerve gas. Sodium Chloride - table salt.

It looks like the U.S. was ~76 people/mi^2 in 1999

Sweden is about 51-56 people/mi^2

Some more useful animated gifs for demonstrating technique and construction.

Some more useful animated gifs for demonstrating technique and construction.

Indeed, I would have expected Newton's stand on Astrology and Alchemy to have made him many enemies in the Church at that time.
Astrology was widely and openly practiced. Kings and queens used it to decide when to go to war. Only a generation before, in Galileo's time, there had been no clear distinction between astrology and astronomy. People who had the mathematical skill to do astrology/astronomy often worked for the Church on things like calculating the date of Easter (which is based on the phases of the moon).

Alchemy had a tradition of secrecy, but I don't think it had anything to do with religious prohibitions.

Here's a paper on payback time by Alsema, Frankl, & Kato.

The Moon is about 356,614Km from the Earth at closest approach. China is home to about 1.3B people. A column of Chinese people, stacked in "human triangles" sitting on one another's shoulders (1m high), would reach the moon, leaving over 230M people. Half to clamber up (then down) to the Lunar surface, at a rate of about 1Km:h, reaching the surface in about 20 years, splitting their population evenly between the planets in under 4 years. And they only have to scale up their acrobat budgets, not that risky American rocket science.

Good grief, dont you people know how to use a search engine to do a little research before you post?

Freemars - Gravitational interaction (tides on the Earth caused by the Moon) transfers kinetic energy from Earth to the Moon, slowing Earth's rotation and raising the Moon's orbit, currently at a rate of 3.8 centimeters per year.

another page

and another

and another

Writers in the era just weren't well versed on the forces of rapid accelleration.

Verne deserves credit for helping to establish SF as a genre where you play with ideas. But like many SF writers, he wasn't all that careful about playing with them in a plausible or logical manner. My favorite example is Around the World in 80 Days where the ending rests on Phineas Fogg's ignorance of the circumnavigator's paradox. Which is an interesting idea -- but is it really plausible that a guy could travel from Tokyo to London without once hearing anybody mention the date?

mod_haskell

Thank god I decided a few years later to give it another chance...

I accept that Churchill could, in theory, have sued for peace at some point early in his period of office (presumably after the fall of France). Hitler certainly hoped that that would happen (hence his "last appeal to reason" speech in the Reichstag on 19 July). On the other hand, if there was any widespread political will in Britain to make peace:

• Why was Chamberlain forced out? He could have extracted the country from the war just as readily as Churchill.
• Why was Churchill the popular choice to replace him, rather than Halifax? Anyone arguing for Churchill must have known what they were going to get: his views on the conduct of the war weren't exactly a secret, whereas Halifax was far more likely to entertain the idea of reaching a settlement.

• Poland 35 million (not all under German occupation, but all under totalitarian occupations)
• Denmark 4 million
• Norway 3 million
• Holland 9 million (including Luxemburg in here: it rounds out the same)
• Belgium 8 million
• France 42 million (not all under German occupation)

I don't know how the Polish and French populations split between German/Soviet occupation and German occupation/Vichy government, but even if we assume that only half the population of each country was subject to German rule, that's still over sixty million people. Not to mention the strategic significance of a single power commanding the entire coast of Europe from the North Cape to the Bay of Biscay (and beyond, taking into account the fascist governments in Spain and Portugal). That in itself was something which Britain had fought more than once to prevent - in the Napoleonic Wars, for example.

I am absolutely not blind to Churchill's faults, but your initial posting seems to me to be an utterly bizarre interpretation of the causes of the war in Europe and Churchill's part in it.

Here is some gregorian chant, or polymetric stuff.

nonstandard key signatures,

See this example

cutout scores, feathered beaming, ossia measures, etc.

These are not supported, although feathered beaming would not be difficult to implement. However, I have played in a ensemble that plays 20th and 21st century music exclusively for the past five years, and I have rarely seen the contraptions that you mention in modern music; most of it is notated with traditional notation, with a lot of time-sig changes. In fact, publishers nowadays will not engrave such funky scores, but have them written by hand, or they will reproduce the manuscript (Unless you happen to be called Xenakis or Berio.)

I had a copy job that I originally tried to do in Lilypond via the text interface and copying one part from the score took almot nine hours of typing, rendering it, fixing it, and re-rendering it to ensure that it came out right.

YMMV; I have recently produced parts & score (4 pages for the 2nd part). It took me approximately 30 minutes. Granted, it was a straightforward piece, but the speed depends much on how well-versed you are with the software. Finally, LilyPond has progressed very much in usability over the last year. If the last time you tried it was more than a year ago, you might want to give it another go.

Lilypond would need to have a nicer MIDI-compatible interface thrown on top of it to compete.

Have you seen RoseGarden and NoteEdit.

Manufacturing some types of PV cells, particularly gallium arsenide cells, may involve the production of some potentially toxic substances. These substances are generated in a centralized facility, and proper control of the manufacturing process, and proper disposal of any toxic wastes, should reduce the risks of any environmental contamination. Disposal of PV cells after their useful life is finished, generally 30 years, could present some waste disposal problems, but most of the toxic materials in any cells can probably be recycled.

However, during module production substances are used which may be harmful for workers, the public or the environment.

I've always been fascinated by origami and paper models. Perhaps that's because I am so very bad at both. Anyway, here's some more paper goodness.

• Star Trek paper models. There's a fantastically detailed Enterprise 1701 (refit) there.
• Origami and Math. My calculus teacher in high school had a whole array (pardon the pun) of paper polyhedra.
• Origami dinosaurs. I love the paper Tyranosaurus. Now if I only had paper Marshall, Will and Holly's to go with these I could play Origami Land of the Lost!

I'm not sure I follow, but the answer I think is there was a stop symbol in the input (the user hitting ctrl-c to halt the machine).

The user observes the computer and interacts with it based with what they observed the computer doing. This is not captured in a Turing machine model. It is more than non-determinism or input sequence... an outside action is modifying the running of the machine based on what it sees the machine doing. I think that is significantly different from a fixed input set while it is possible to imagine a tape that recorded all user interactions into the future... such a model fails to demonstrate the user is actively carrying out their own "computations" based on what it observes the machine doing. That interaction can be spontaneous and non-sensical.

I'm muddling through This Paper trying to digest exactly what it was driving at. I'm not advocating anything silly ...that the Turing machine is somehow invalid... just that the model is incomplete (the classic model at least I guess). I believe the term "Oracle Turing Machine" sums up my point.

BTW: most of the architectures I've worked on do a "memory mapping" to devices. That means the CPU only writes to memory that is normally viewed as a one-dimensional array. I think there is one architecture that actually views memory in sort-of two dimensions by the virtue of extending it's origonal instruction set from 8 bits to 32 bits and reading either a 32bit word or an 8bit word depending on the specific instruction... but I think that was mainly an academic exercise.

Sorry if I lead you down too many rabbit trails but I'm just goofing off here on Slashdot and don't usually strive to put too much work into my posts. Thanks for the exercise!

I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which made 80186 systems running a proprietary OS. This is the first time I've heard of an 80186 DOS system. I've often wondered why the industry basically skipped that processor.

For US-based addresses it's either MapQuest or Yahoo maps. I think they are very simular.

For Dutch maps (where I live), I use locatienet or Andes. The first one being slightly better.

There are way too many options nowadays. See Oddens for a collection of links, including to historic maps (not useful if you just want to find an address, only for the curious of heart).

Captain Planet was a straight rip-off of the Japanese sentai format. You have a five-man team, comprised to diverse personalities and appearances (though the show was too compulsively PC to have just one token female character). The heroes are commonly linked to certain colors/elements/types of terrain, and summon their robots or super powers from these associations. The main characters each have some trivial fighting abilities to deal with the rotating villian of the day. In the end, though, to defeat any major villian, you have to combine your powers to use the stupid deus ex machina power of the day which they should've used from the very beginning (e.g. Captain Planet or Voltron's Blazing Sword). Lastly, they are led by the wise creator of their weapons against evil who lives in a remote base of operations.

Besides, the kids in Captain Planet didn't really have huge mental problems. That's mostly a 90's giant robot anime thing.

it's called Workgroup Manager. also use SSHAgent to handle the SSH key stuff transparently. and of course the terminal :-) the backup scripts were written by a mate of mine and there are a bunch of us that use them to do regular remote backups to his machine in holland. i use commandline for cvs as it's the easiest way. have tried all the guis and they just suck ass.

ok, the html parser is doing weird things to my url. Retrying: http://matilda.phys.uu.nl/~bas/rotk_trailer_480x28 0_fixed.mov.torrent

His first copy is written in pencil. Some people compose at a terminal, but Don says, "The speed at which I write by hand is almost perfectly synchronized with the speed at which I think. I type faster than I think so I have to stop, and that interrupts the flow."

In the process of typing his handwritten copy into the computer he edits his composition for flow, so that it will read well at normal reading speed. Somewhere around here the text gets TeXed, but the description of this stage was tangled up with the description of the process of rewriting the composition. Of course, rewriting does not all occur at any one stage. As Don said, "You see things in different ways on the different passes. Some things look good in longhand but not in type."

Does somebody know if a patch for pdnsd is available?

I saw a demonstration using a beowulf cluster (well, part of one)

From a glossary, I get:

"Cluster of PCs or workstations with a private network to connect them. Initially the name was used for do-it-yourself collections of PCs mostly connected by Ethernet and running Linux to have a cheap alternative for "integrated" parallel machines. Presently, the definition is wider including high-speed switched networks, fast RISC-based processors and complete vendor-preconfigured rack-mounted systems with either Linux or Windows as an operating system.

So how do you get "part of" a cluster? Isn't it like being a little pregnant? I mean, I've never seen a Beowulf Cluster (though I have to say I feel like I should know all about them having read Slashdot for a while), if it's got some workstations connected by a private network working in parallel, then it's a cluster, isn't it?

I keep reading this every once in a while, but it is simply not true. This myth probably started when solar cells were first being produced, but nowadays, the production has become much more efficient. At present, it takes about 5 years for a typical solar cell to win back the energy cost of production. That number will come down even more as large scale production becomes a reality. A lot of companies are investing in more energy-efficient production, since lower production cost means higher margin, or a lower price to beat the competition. Check out this link for a recent study on future life-cycle cost of solar cells. The worst case assumption is that payback time in the Netherlands (which does not exactly have a warm and sunny climate) by 2010 will be less than 4 years, while the base case would be 1.3 years.

There are some really nice parser combinator libraries that are beginning to show up for constructing parsers very easily.

For example, check out Parsec
a monadic parser combinator library for Haskell. Have a look at its documentation to get a feel for what I'm talking about.

The basic idea is to construct parsers for complicated things by combining simpler parsers in various ways.

Parsec also has mechanisms that allow one to provide information so that good looking error messages can be constructed for the user should the parse fail, and also allows for one to tune parsers for efficiency reasonably well, while maintaining a fair bit of flexibility (by default, parsers are LL1 for efficiency, but they can be extended so as to provide potentially infinite lookahead if necessary).

The folks on the Game Maker forum are generally open with spriting assistance. You've usually gotta have something code-wise to entice them into helping out, but that'll probably be the case in a lot of situations when you need media handouts.

XX. What kind of Kool-Aid was consumed at Jonestown Guyana?

It is a popular misconception that 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking Grape Kool-Aid laced with cyanide at their commune in Jonestown Guyana in the late 1970's. This is not true. The followers of Jones actually drank cyanide laced Flavor-aid, a cheap imitation of Kool-Aid. The Flavor-aid flavor they consumed was grape. Therefore, Kool-Aid played no part in this tragedy.

Game Maker URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/gmaker/

I don't think he can. According to http://www.library.uu.nl/wesp/populstat/Asia/china g.htm, 1.7% of the chinese population has a personal computer.

Google Directory of Games Development Software is a good start. Don't miss the Parent Directory of Game Design. I've personally tried two free ones: Game Maker and Build Your Own Net Dream.

Game Maker is similar to Klik 'n' Play. It's free and you don't have to program at all. You do have to firmly grasp object oriented conditional behavior. You can also add complicated code if you get deeply into the game.

If you want to introduce game design, history is an excellent teacher. Space War, Pong, and Breakout are excellent games to mimic as teaching devices, then move on to Space Invaders (which is really just Pong Strikes Back!), Head-On (early version of Pac Man), and Asteroids.