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Understand that almost all Universities and Colleges in Canada are public run..

Colleges aren't looked down upon like you say (perhaps because of the more sophisticated 3-year programs?)..

However, how do Americans afford post-secondary education? Even at good Canadian Universities like University of Waterloo, tuition is supposedly at most about CDN$7000/year..

In my opinion (I'm a grad student in cognitive science, but by bachelor's degree is in Mechanical Engineering, of all things) a significant fraction of CS and Engineering students don't belong in a university. University is supposed to be about making a well rounded problem-solving person, but it doesn't seem to work for technical subjects (was any of your coursework useful for this?), but it also evidently isn't too important in industry, since the students get by fine.

I think that there is a purpose for some people to study "Computer Science", but as a branch of mathematics. The rest, who apparently want to become code monkeys, don't need a university education.

The problem is that modern society considers a university degree to be such a mark of prestige that one can get little respect without one, so employers require it, even if what is taught is no more useful than could be provided by a community college.

Good code monkeys are necessary, but I put them in the same class as good plumbers and electricians. Very important work, well paid, but no university education required.

I have only been to Edmonton once (in 1993) and I enjoyed my visit. From the view of IT, however, Edmonton and UA fall below Waterloo and UW. Lots of people used WAT4 and WAT5, Maple, etc. Waterloo and Berlin form a nice community. While UW looks rather strange, I like visiting there. If you can get a Maple job, go for it. (I took a tour in 1997 of the Maple company; very nice.)

Actually, that reference matched what I thought was true which - not too surprisingly - matched exactly what the poster said. (I think my original source was something like http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/math-faq/mathtext /node18.html)

The poster never claimed that Indiana legislated the value of pi - they claimed that a bill to do so passed the state house but died in the state senate. This is in fact what the reference you point to says.

As a slashdot reader, I find this fucking hilarious. Somebody angrily refutes a post with a reference that agrees with exactly what the post said.

This PDF http://www.wi-fi.org/opensection/pdf/whitepaper_wi -fi_security4-29-03.pdf from the WIFI alliance talks about WPA2 near the very end of the document. According to this, WPA2 will use the same 802.1x authentication current used by WPA in enterprise deployments or the PSK mode currently used in home deployments of WPA.

This PDF http://jcbserver.uwaterloo.ca/cs436/handouts/misce llaneous/Intel_Wireless_3.pdf has some interesting technical details about how the AES encryption in 802.11i works.

Unfortunately, it looks like the actual 802.11i specification isn't publically available yet. According to this page http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ IEEE 802 drafts are publicly available 6 months after they are first published in PDF. I'm assuming this means that the 802.11i standard will be publicly available in 6 months?

We encourage interested parties to read our paper and our points of fact re Zdziarski.

Thomas Lynam
Gordon Cormack
June 24, 2004

We encourage interested parties to read our paper and our points of fact re Zdziarski.

Thomas Lynam
Gordon Cormack
June 24, 2004

This is actually a common trend. For example, Software WEP far outperforms hardware WEP. A modern processor will spend Jeff Mogul has a great paper describing how TCP Offloading is slower than software TCP:
http://bbcr.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/courses/856/readi ngs-new/mogul-offload-2003.pdf

In a similar fashion they've completely butchered the co-op application process, too.

Surely the same institution that came up with a distributed computing software project such as Folding@Home can handle a menial financial and record-keeping software project. If they made their own, using the GPL, then other universities could adopt it as well, and contribute to its development.

Admin would probably refuse to use it. At the University of Waterloo, they used to have an absolutely unusable dumb-terminal based system for posting co-op jobs. The students (who are renound at the undergrad level) wrote the school a new system and presented it to admininstration... at least twice... that is, wrote two different replacements. Admin didn't take either of them. They ended up taking a system from people-soft that was late and terrible to use. Administration has no respect for the work product created by their own students.

Denumerable and rational are not synonymous. Denumerability is a property of sets, rationality is a property of numbers. To make denumerability applicable to number then, one considers whether a program exists that can generate an arbitrary digit of that number, which is true for pi. If such a program exists, then because the set of all programs is denumerable we can say that the number is denumerable. There is no program of finite size which can compute an arbitrary digit of Chaitin's constant, therefore Chaitin's constant is not denumberable.

You might be interested in a (old, 1999) paper on how you can use the CREDITS file to try to figure out how the Linux kernel interacts by looking at how developers work on different parts of the system.

I think that the lack of definitiveness of the CREDITS file and copyright notices is very understandable given the way they are updated manually. It might be an argument for having meta-data associated with source code. This type of information is encoded in a revision control system if everyone uses is, but with open source, the author of some code fragment is not necessarily going to log into your cvs repository and edit the text. Someone else may be cloning the code and inserting it (with the author's GPL blessing). It would be nice if there were a standardized way to track these types of edits and code provenance. Might be especially useful in refuting SCO type FUD.

I haven't looked at what Linus is doing with enhanced copyright tracking; is that something that can be standardized/automated/shared with other projects?

Every year at the University of Waterloo the Computer Engineering and Computer Science students personally build their own operating systems (including documentation) in less than four months. This is done without any prior knowledge of how OSes work and without being taught C.

I'm sure many universities and colleges around the world do the same. Perhaps Ken Brown should investigate them as well.

http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece354/

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs452/

Every year at the University of Waterloo the Computer Engineering and Computer Science students personally build their own operating systems (including documentation) in less than four months. This is done without any prior knowledge of how OSes work and without being taught C.

I'm sure many universities and colleges around the world do the same. Perhaps Ken Brown should investigate them as well.

http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece354/

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs452/

It seems there is a Canadian atmospheric research satellite that will also be making measurements of Venus. They are using a infrared Fourier transform spectrometer and cameras with the hope of improving models for extra-solar transits (think finding ET).

It seems there is a Canadian atmospheric research satellite that will also be making measurements of Venus. They are using a infrared Fourier transform spectrometer and cameras with the hope of improving models for extra-solar transits (think finding ET).

I think all you have proved is that the limit of 2.9999... is 3, which is obvious.

2.999... denotes the limit. The proof I reproduced in my previous comment is just an informal one intended for the general audience on slashdot, if you want a more rigorous proof I'm sure Google would oblige. This may satisfy you. I am only an undergraduate maths student and not an expert, but my professor would certainly mark me wrong if I said 0.999... != 1 in an exam.

Why the reliance on Linux. FreeDos should fit into 2 Mb, and (according to the interweb) DVPeg will fit into 120k. No network support, but it'll be really simple to set up.

The microbiology of sewage sludge and Farm Manure

Within this paper, it notes in a table (toward the bottom) that "fecal coliform" bacteria (of which, e. coli is one) tend to live less than 5 days (for tropical climate - higher moisture, 20-30 C, or 68-86 F), and certainly less than 30 days (for temperate climate - lower moisture, 10-15 C, or 50-59 F), in "wet sludge" - both of which are temperature ranges well below that of a properly operating methane digester.

Lastly, no one is advocating eating of the sludge from a digester...

The `collision' mentioned here is related to the particular algorithm being used to break ECC, which is called Pollard rho for discrete logarithms.

Let's work with the integers modulo a prime p -- the algorithm works just the same with elliptic curves. Say you were told that a^b == c mod p (where == means `is congruent to'). You were also given a, c and p, and you need to figure out b. This is the so-called discrete logarithm problem.

Pollard's rho algorithm solves this problem the following way. Suppose you somehow figure out that a^x c^y == a^w c^z mod p, and of course x != w, y != z (which is the trivial solution). That's the kind of collision they found. Now this yields a solution because, as c == a^b, then a^x c^y == a^x (a^b)^y == a^x a^(by) == a^(x+by), and similarly a^w c^z == a^(w+bz). Thus a^(x+by) == a^(w+bz), so one is left with the very easy task of solving the equation x+by == w+bz modulo the group order, which is p-1 here since we are working with integers modulo p (this is Fermat's Little Theorem). For elliptic curves, it's not so easy (i.e., it may take a couple of hours, maybe days, on a single CPU for a curve of cryptographic interest) to figure out the group order but it's still possible.

And how is that collision found anyway? That's a bit complicated, but I guess it can be found on the Handbook. It has to do with the theory of random functions.

No, no, I wasn't advocating killing anybody. I simply mistyped it, damn dyslexia. What I meant was "we have lots of viagra for you, president bush, to get a hard election. kill" I mistyped 'election', and Kill is short for 'Killin', as in the picturesque town in Scotland. I was recommending he visit it, that's all.

"If you lived in the Northeast US or Canada what were your memories of the August Blackout?"

Well, a few days after the blackout I made a photo-documentary of the 'mayhem' that was downtown Toronto during the great blackout of '03.

The documentary is located here

I think all the crypto-books are wrong. One-time pad is only secure based on the assumption that random numbers do exist.

According to the Handbook of Applied Cryptography (definition 1.39): "If the key string is randomly chosen and never used again, the Vernam cipher is called a one-time system or a one-time pad."

So one-time pads are secure - but they don't actually exist if random numbers don't exist.

...as radioactivity is generated in harmful amounts given the fuels used: Deuterium and Tritium.

And if you did deuterium-deuterium (which is hard to do) you would have no lasting radiation at all!

It's true that the energy would be emitted as gamma rays. But ALL the energy would be gamma rays, and if you had no way to convert them to heat you wouldn't be able to use them. So the gamma rays can be ignored as a source of radiation since they would all be converted to heat.

For actual numbers see this page: Fusion Energy

Your logic is flawed on this front.

Caffeine falls into a category of drugs called methylxanthines which have many varied effects. One of these effects is to act on cerebral blood vessels causing them to constrict. This constriction does have relief effects for headaches, since the vast majority of headaches (including stress headaches and migranes) are due, at least in part, to dilation of the small blood vessels in the head and the inflammation this dilation causes. This is one of the reasons that Excedrin has caffeine (another being that caffeine increases your metabolic rate, causing the aspirin to begin acting faster).

However, that has absolutely nothing to do with withdrawal headaches. Caffeine is a mildly-addictive drug, and the mechanism of this dependence is well-known (see here or here). Headaches are a common side-effect of withdrawal, and are even more common than normal in caffeine withdrawal (ever hear of weekend headaches?).

PLEASE: for the sake of everyone who reads Slashdot, do not spread misinformation. Please mod parent down.

For the faunal extinction, I have physical evidence: fossils. Pollen levels are no substitute for copious amounts of plant fossils (i.e., leaf impressions, large lignite seams associated with short, quick deposition of plant matter).

I don't understand why you think that there would be large lignite seams. If the deposition happened fast enough, at the most there might be a few traces left in some places. It's not like there would be long term plant deposits. In any case, there is some indications of short term ones.

On the issue of faunal extinction immediately following a floral extinction, that is my point. You have said that one necessarily leads to the other. Where is your evidence?

Given that most dinosaurs either relied upon flora for their survival, or relied upon eating other dinosaurs which relied upon flora (and this is fairly well established, I think), what exactly are you asking for?
I don't need to know that if, for example, the world suffered enormous, nationwide crop failures, that people would starve. The food chain is pretty well established.
Guess I'm not sure what you're asking for, here. Proof that destruction of a food source on a massive scale tends to eliminate those species who rely on that food source?

I have fossils of dinosaurs.

So do I. So what? I tend to rely on the observations of people who do this for a living - and whose articles (and opposing ones) I've read for more than twenty years. Plus some field geology -

I'm an hours drive from the Badlands of South Dakota, where one can directly observe the K/T boundary. What's your point? I've hiked there (I don't take fossils from there out of respect, thank you, but I do and have reported my finds)

You have:

1) Meteor
2)?????
3) Profit!!!

Now that was exactly what I meant by trollish responses.

Oh, you also have your stomping of feet regarding my not providing links. I have run several queries of GeoREF for your evidence of large, global floral extictions and have found none.

Well, here's a couple links (I mostly rely on my personal library, but what the hell)

FLORAL TURNOVER AND CLIMATIC CHANGES ASSOCIATED WITH THE CRETACEOUS/PALEOGENE (K/T) BOUNDARY, NORTH DAKOTA, USA;

This one is also worth reading. I have many more. What I don't have is the time, nor the inclination, to post them.

I did, however, run a GeoRef search myself, and you're right. Using "K/T global flora extinction" I found very little. I suspect this is more a problem with my search terms, however, as running a Google search I found a lot more articles (not necessarily peer reviewed, but most were based on PR research). So I consider it likely that my search WRT to GeoRef was poorly worded. You might try different ones (assuming you have time). I don't.

--

Anyway, I'm sorry about the troll comment. This is an issue that I've been reading about since I saw the original Alvarez papers, and I'm thoroughly convinced. Disagreement tends to push my buttons :) and I'm busy enough that I tend to give short shrift to the arguments - not that I want to, it's just the way life is.

This is really interesting to me, but, like I said before, let's move it to my journal, or elsewhere (and you might want to google usenet, BTW), if you'd like to continue. I'd love to have something interesting to blog about there, other than slashdot stuff. In any case, this discussion on slashdot about this subject is completely irrelevant, and I'm sure you have better things to do (like writing more papers :)

This whole discussion reminds me somewhat of the debates about plate tectonics in the '60s :)

This will be my last post in this thread. Thanks for the discussion, but it's inappropriate to continue it here.

SB

So where is all the high value aluminum trinkets not obtained through bauxite processing? Aluminum use to be a precious metal, and now it isn't. I'm sure naturally occurring aluminum has some crystalline properties that processed aluminum doesn't, and yet there is no market for "natural aluminum".

You are only partially correct, but partially wrong as well. Going to an unknown school and building a network of morons is not nearly as good as going to a good school and building a network of brilliant hard-working people.

Hmmm... yes. How could I disagree? I have only one caveat. It's often hard to tell the morons from the guys who will one day be running Internet22 in first year. It gets a little clearer in upper year but even then your classmates are only part of the picture.

Go to conferences. Take jobs at great companies for possibly lousy pay. Then again, never take a joe job - always take intern positions that will push you & challenge you. Keep in touch with your bosses. Actually try to get to know those "old people" you work with.

My networking has improved a lot over the years (mostly due to how bad it was in the first place). I missed a lot of opportunities as a student mostly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. If you know you want to work on computer networks, then start meeting the right people today.

And yes, if you get into a top-tier school, that never hurt either. All the top schools are equally good. Apply to Waterloo up here in Canada!

The university of Waterloo has a fairly new software engineering department. Hopefully it will help keep some of the code monkeys out of CS.

My company makes the software that several universities in Canada are using for their used-textbook stores.

They seem to be doing well, if the record sales at Waterloo are anything to go by. They pay students a lot more than 10% of the original price, because they operate on a consignment basis: they only have to pay when the book is sold.

You're positive outlook on UW is refreshing.

While I think it's great that some students got the new signed version for free, perhaps you should keep in mind that it was only one class. The rest of the school has to buy a new edition at the rather hefty price of $159.95.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say Sedra will be making quite a tidy sum from this, especially as it is now the required course text for ECE 241.

... not to mention that the book prize Handbook of Applied Cryptography is freely available online (and is co-authored by Certicom's co-founder), and that Maple is yet another University of Waterloo spinoff.

Interesting you bring this up...for several years I suffered from episodic sleep paralysis. During dream states, your body is semi-paralyzed as a defense mechanism against acting out your dreams. People with episodic SP wake up from vivid nightmares still paralyzed. It's an extremely spooky and gut-wrenching experience. Think about your worst nightmare, and how you thought it was real. Now imagine lying in bed, eyes open, cognizant that you are awake, and your nightmare still continues. But you cannot move, and oftentimes you have great difficulty breathing, shouting out, or otherwise defending yourself from whatever horror you've cooked up. That's what episodic sleep paralysis is about.

One of the methods used to treat the condition is a form of lucid dreaming in which you train yourself to recognize, in your nightmare, that you are in control of the situation. By moving a finger or something similar to "break" the paralysis, you can then wake up fully.

For a long time sleep paralysis was treated with SSRI's, usually tricyclic antidepressants that, in light doses, would keep REM light enough to fully emerge from the paralysis stage. But if you've ever been on an SSRI, the side effects can be pretty miserable.

It's an interesting subject that has a study all its own here.

I understand that the Fortran compiler may be better than free alternatives.

iTunes supports quite a lot of different third-party players

You're wrong. iTunes doesn't support anything other than an iPod when you're running iTunes For Windows. Quote:

"Other MP3 players do not work with iTunes for Windows."

Having said that, I'm using iTunes as a catalog and jukebox on my PC with 192kbps AAC files. Taking files with me is a two step process: I drag & drop directly from iTunes onto a Python script I wrote to transcode AAC files I want to listen to on the road to 128kbps MP3 (decode to wav, encode). I then use another program (RioRio) to transfer music to my Diamond Rio 500 (because the included software was Music Match - and that thing absolutely sucks).

My 500 only has a 64MB capacity, so the transcoding doesn't take long. Yes, it's messy - but it works and I have hi-def on the desktop, low def when I'm mobile and don't care.

As an aside, anyone know of any other jukebox & catalog software for Windows that doesn't make you put files in a playlist before you can listen to them? (Which is what turned me off every other player before I found iTunes).

Ok, I know I'm asking for an Offtopic or Redundant here but as a pure math major I have to reply to this :)

Diffeq is not pure math. At least, not the way it is usually presented (there are some more 'pure' aspects to it, but usually the focus is on applications). If you want pure math, try taking an abstract algebra course, or some upper division analysis or geometry.

The question of what 'pure math' means can be rather controversial, and there are those who insist that there is no such thing as pure math, that all mathematics has practical applications as its ultimate goal (I dissagree with this). If you are interested in what pure math is, you might take a look at What Is Pure Mathematics or A Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics Subject Classification Scheme. I'm sure there are many more pages discussing this topic, but I don't recall where they are off the top of my head.

As for calculators, in pure mathematics a calculator generally won't do you much good. Pure mathematics is usually more concerned with proving theorems than with performing computations. Calculators are great at performing computations, but they can't prove theorems for you. That said, a calculator can be a useful tool, and which calculator is best to use depends on personal preference and on the application. Personally I prefer HP over TI (it's a shame HP isn't making calculators anymore), but I understand that TIs can be easier to learn to use. However, it should be noted that HPs can do symbolic manipulations, matrix algebra, regressions and such, and yes, the HP can evaluate expressions in the traditional 'algebraic' format, and you can revise them, etc.

I worked on solar cars in University. This 'revolutionary' technology the Dutch firm is using is simplay a hub motor! We've used them for years on the Midnight Sun Solar Car team at the University of Waterloo . Lots of solar cars do - they're very efficient, and no they don't make the car handle like crap.

Instead of being selectively vindictive (and enjoying it, as you seem to) it would be much better for everyone involved if fair-share traffic-shaping algorithms were the default filter on wireless routers, so that no one person could hog the bandwidth at the expense of others. The more you use it (when it's scarce), the less you get (unless you want to pony up extra ca$h for a higher minimum).

--

When I was in university I went to the monthly surplus sales racks were available pretty often and for low prices. I could have gotten racks for as low as $10 canadian. The old DEC ones looked pretty good too. I don't see why you should have to make racks.

Evangelion
RahXephon
Robotech
Gundam

I totally agree. I can see you've read Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier or the Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Menezes, van Oorschot and Vanstone. Too bad that your comment while finally saying the most important thing about crypto algorithm secrecy was modded as only (Score:2, Informative). If Slashdot moderators knew anything about crypto, it would've been modded as (Score:2, Insightful). I just wanted to say that some people understood your comment, even if they are not moderators.

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But ethically dubious experiments in which prisoners were injected with reovirus found that infection caused at most mild flu-like symptoms. Many people have been infected by reovirus as children with little effect more than a runny nose.

That text comes from section 3 of this article. So it would seem that the answer to your question was determined quite some time ago.

The algorithm they used is patented and very much open for criticism. It would need to be fore NSA to choose it. Think of it like RSA where the algorithm was patented as well (many open source applications use RSA now, since the license has expired).

Dr. Scott A. Vanstone is a professor at University of Waterloo, so it is kind of neat to see one of my profs in the news (I knew about the company, but they haven't had much going for them for a while). He teaches Coding Theory (CO 331) and is the Executive Director of Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research

The algorithm they used is patented and very much open for criticism. It would need to be fore NSA to choose it. Think of it like RSA where the algorithm was patented as well (many open source applications use RSA now, since the license has expired).

Dr. Scott A. Vanstone is a professor at University of Waterloo, so it is kind of neat to see one of my profs in the news (I knew about the company, but they haven't had much going for them for a while). He teaches Coding Theory (CO 331) and is the Executive Director of Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research

Not true. Check out University of Waterloo as an example of Microsofts approach to exposing C# to a new generation of developers. Well, engineer's, but close enough. ;-)

Unless I'm mistaken, fission plants just boil water with the heat generated by the reactor, and drive turbines. It's a new way of generating energy, but not electricity.

I remember back to first year CS at University of Waterloo (long time ago). We had been instructed to talk to others, to share information, but to leave the pencils down when you do it.

Anyways, it was the last assignment. I get back my assignment, -100%! It was a direct copy of so-and-so. Now, I'd never heard of the other guy, so I went to the TA, toting the text book I had scarfed the answer from.

When I got there, the TA said that the other student had already been in (with a different book/same author) and re-instated the grade.

I learned 2 lessons that day. Cheating gets you BUSTED, and how to attribute your sources. They hadn't told us about that, so I was LUCKY!

As research, you can check out what Waterloo has done to students that appealed the findings over the past 6 years or so.

UW Committee on Student Appeals

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