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There are still stationary engineers. There are still millwrights. Not a lot of them, though. It's an skilled blue-collar job, often unionized, with a formal apprenticeship. There are exams and certificates.

Being a system administrator is, fundamentally, the same kind of thing, with technology a century newer.

Rather, what you see in the case of lying is specific activity in the areas of the brain that are involved in the regulation of the emotional response, including ones (such as the amygdala) involved in fear and planning (prefrontal cortex).

Not to mention those involved in sequence completion (hippocampus) and configural learning (hippocampus). Configural learning has some similarities to what-if scenarios, as does sequence completion. Naturally, this is why the hippocampus is good at both.

And yes, I am a huge fan of the hippocampus.

Wow very few remote exploits
Well I feel much better now. Unix might have less high profile automated attacks against it, but don't kid yourself into thinking its any safer on the Internet then anything else.

Its not like I really had to look hard either, it took longer to write the little HTML in this post. Results 1 - 10 of about 150,000 for remote linux root exploits. (0.30 seconds)

itanium has not delivered on a single design goal since its inception. intel went full steam ahead on itanium, placing bets on a number of key technologies to pan out in order to sustain itanium development -- all of which never happened.

And which of the world's leading microprocessor companies do you run or even work for?

How do you explain the Itanium failing so badly in its design goals that it is #1 in memory bandwidth? How do you explain their failure when creating 2 of the top 5 computers in the world?

right now amd is eating them for lunch with amd64

Actually, its the Opteron that is competing with the Itanium processor, but you get extra /. bonus points for mentioning that AMD is better than Intel.

"Evolutionary Genetics tries to estimate how 'old' our current species is by dividing the number of mutations observed in a specific DNA region with the estimated mutation rate. The generally accepted figure is around 150,000 years, but..."

A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region.
Nat Genet. 1998 Feb;18(2):109-10.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ent rez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9090380&dopt=Abstract
-----
The rate and pattern of sequence substitutions in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region (CR) is of central importance to studies of human evolution and to forensic identity testing. ...We compared DNA sequences ... an empirical rate of 1/33 generations, or 2.5/site/Myr. This is roughly twenty-fold higher than estimates derived from phylogenetic analyses. This disparity cannot be accounted for simply by substitutions at mutational hot spots, suggesting additional factors that produce the discrepancy between very near-term and ...

Using rare mutations to estimate population divergence times: A maximum likelihood approach
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 95, pp. 15452–15457, December 1998
http://www.rannala.org/papers/PNAS98.pdf
-- ---
In this paper we propose a method to estimate
by maximum likelihood the divergence time between two populations,...

When applied to three cystic fibrosis mutations, the estimatorRD
could not exclude a very recent time of divergence among three
Mediterranean populations. On the other hand, the divergence
time between these populations and the Danish population was
estimated to be, on the average, 4,500 or 15,000 years, assuming
or not a selective advantage for cystic fibrosis carriers, respectively.
------

'Who are we to say how God created or didn't create the World. God could've could've chosen to create the creatures in 7 days or God could've chosen to create the creatures in the world with evolution'

Cognitive dissonance is a terrible thing.

Hmmm. It looks like the part of the Bible about everything being created in seven days is wrong. But I can't question the Bible, because that would mean confronting the fact that my beliefs could be mistaken. I guess I'll just conveniently skip over the bits that are wrong and pretend I don't see them.

I think you are making the same mistake that the hardcore bible-thumpers make: taking the Bible literally. I did myself carefully read Genesis I and I think even if you do believe in evolution (and I do, I think it's the best theory we have to date) that the account of it in the Bible is really accurate.

Remember that the Bible is best read when you take it to be what it claims to be: the word of God with the caveat that it has been written by men. In the case of the old testament this was many thousands of years ago and it has been through several translations since then.

Pretend that you are God and you want to impart some knowledge to the beings you created about how they were created. You wouldn't just go out and explain the details because they would not understand. What you can do is talk about it allegorically. This story is then fairly easily passed on through the generations and finally someone writes it down along with other stories into a book.

In fact, the entire theory of evolution is really based on what the Bible says about creation. Over many years scientists have used what the Bible says about creation as the basis for forming more complete theories by filling in the blanks. This study (AFAICT, I can't read it due to the server being down) simply fills in more blanks. Anybody who thinks the Bible literally means God created the world in 7 days as we know them today is reading it incorrectly. Had Darwin thought it literally meant 7 days we wouldn't even have the theory. But Darwin took it to be a great story and began studying how it really happened. Do you think Darwin dreamed up his theory out of the blue? Wouldn't you think he starts with the assumption that animals come before man and works his way from there?

Basically what I am saying is that without the Bible the entire theory of evolution doesn't exist because no one would even know where to begin! Consider Genesis I to be the "Cliff's Notes" version of what really happened and we're still trying to write the real story.

Thanks for this post! I disagree with your ideas on marriage, and thus agree wholeheartedly on getting the state out of the marriage business. We should not need to play politics or fight each other in court for each of us to live marriage as we believe it ought to be lived. Like other matters of morality and faith, it should be an individual decision, and one where we attempt to sway each other not with laws, but with discussion (in the honorable tradition of my namesake, Paul).

What about gold leaf?

Gold leaf is very mallable indeed. But not to the extent that you can get it down to a single atom. The thinnest we can get today is a few hundred atoms.

Doesn't anyone remember the experiment where they shot beta particles at a sheet of gold leaf, which is one atom thick, or darn close, and they saw some of the particles were being reflected when they bounced off of the nucleus.

Yes, that was Rutherford. His sheet was approximately 400 atoms thick.

The Supreme Court, the group the Constitution created to interpret the laws, correctly have held that there are limits to speech that a free and safe society must have. The old "can't yell fire in a crowded theater" adage and inciting a riot.

If you understood the circumstances of the case where that line was used, you might not be so comfortable about the court's ruling.

Yes, I read TFA. Been there, got the "Easy Does It" and "Sh!t Creek/up-and-back" t-shirts...

Ninety five percent of all US "Treatment Centers" are really 12-step indoctrination centers, and websearches bring up vast numbers of 12-step glurge sites by anonymous members. Virually everyone you ask will say "I don't know anything about it but AA is where you go if you have a drinking problem." Here are the needles in the haystack for anyone who is considering ot has had any 12-step involvement:

http://www.aadeprogramming.com/
I'll write my book on it someday, but meanwhile read the books online on this site:
http://morerevealed.com/

http://www.orange-papers.org/
http://www.peele.net/

If you're not familiar with 12-step programs, here is the "On-Line Gamers Anonymous" version of "How It Work", taken straight from the first three pages of chapter 5, "How It Works" of AA's "Big Book", "Alcoholics Anonymous"

http://p198.ezboard.com/folgafrm31.showMessage?top icID=4.topic

This is the original AA version (as originally PUBLISHED, not the "original manuscript"):
http://www.recovery.org/aa/bigbook/ww/chapter_5.ht ml

With organizations such as http://www.ncadd.org/ and judges ordering defendants to AA without revealing their own AA memberships, most other "high demand" groups would give up the equivalent of personal body parts to have the same PR and good image as AA. But at least the other cults, er, "high-demand coercive groups" have at least some negative images in the minds of the public.

One more link:
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/
Click on "Religious Group Profiles" for a list of just about every group you've probably heard of.
It even lists multilevel marketing schemes under "Para-Religious Movements."

Excessive drinking or other activity done to excess can create substantial problems in one's life, but 12-step groups are NOT the answer.

And realize that the best way to hide a secret is in plain sight surrounded by lots of other secrets that may or may not be true.

Related to business (e.g you use it in a corporation)

If you sell your software.

If you plan to use lcc-win32 in courses of programming in your University, contact us for special educational rates.

"...Ahhh yes, IT snobiness strikes again. The average person shouldn't have to "give two flying fucks" . The PC industry should get its act togeather and deliver "dumb" terminals that do exactly what people expect them to do. Chances are, you don't know anything about natural gas fittings, but you still use a stove. I don't know anything about generating and containing microwaves, but I still eat frozen burritos..."

No, but you (hopefully) know that natural gas has an additive so that you can smell it in case of a gas leak, and (hopefully) you know enough not to superheat water in your microwave so you dont get scalded.
Folks seem fond of using car analogies as well. Even Ford and Chevy put in idiot lights so you know (albeit perhaps too late) that you're almost out of oil or that you really need to have your engine checked by someone who knows what they're doing.

Ignorance is no excuse for lack of maintenence. IIRC, there was an old commercial (for mufflers?) that had the slogan... "You can pay me now, or you can pay me [more] later". That sort of sums it up.

It's not "IT snobiness", it's the fact that, no matter how much you wish it so, a computer IS NOT an appliance - it's a tool. Just like every other tool, care, simple safety precautions, and maintenence are vital for your safety as well as those around you.

http://www.justworldnews.org/ is a very interesting weblog by Helena Cobban. The blog seems to be primarily concerned with things of middle-eastern relation, but maybe that's just the way it's focused these days due to all the things going on there right now. Definitely a great website, and well worth keeping an eye on.

"Ever since the inception of government schooling in the 19th century under Horace Mann, the US has been on a downward trend in literacy, numeracy and science learning. Sometimes that trend is briefly halted, but it always continues. To the extent that there might be some mild upheaval, it seems to me that the more quickly we exit the downward spiral, the shorter the climb back up will be."

That is exactly backwards. It is a complete lie.

I confess I have no idea how one would obtain accurate readings on "numeracy," since the very concept was only popularized perhaps 30 years ago. Nor can I fathom how he could characterize "science learning" today as worse than in the days before Darwin, continental drift, and modern astronomy. (I assume Mr. Badnarik is in favor of private schooling, though our private schools mostly ignore or outright contradict Darwin, arguably the most important scientist of the past 250 years. An understanding of biological evolution is critical to epidemiology and genetics, two fields of research that in the years to come I hope will not be hampered by the growing trend of religious schooling.)

But though those claims are perhaps unprovable, his claim about literacy is outright false. It took me about 30 seconds to find this page using Google: Literacy from 1870 to 1979: Illiteracy.

(For those who want to look the numbers up themselves, U-Virginia has a Historical Census Browser. The stats on literacy start in 1870.)

The literacy of every segment of the U.S. population except the foreign-born has grown in every year (except the estimation of 1950, which is likely a statistical blip). It's not a question of the trend briefly halting: the trend is relentlessly toward higher and higher literacy rates.

Probably the most reliable indicator of literacy is that of the white population (since including segments of society largely removed from educational opportunities would bias the numbers). The percentage of illiterate white persons 14 years of age or older was as follows:

1870: 11.5%
1880: 9.4%
1890: 7.7%
1900: 6.2%
1910: 5.0%
1920: 4.0%
1930: 3.0%
1920: 2.0%
1947: 1.8%
1952: 1.8%
1959: 1.6%
1969: 0.7%
1979: 0.4%

If he wants to thrash our public schools, Mr. Badnarik will need a different switch.

Not it is not as scary as you might think.

First notice that they don't agree.

Second taak a look at hwo things work

Thirth the problem is in the details. "simple" things like extracting the plutonuim from the bomb is not as easy as a hollywood movie explains. Or making a big bang to explode a nucliear warhead.

There are other things that are much scarier and simpler to do. Like dropping planes on all kinds of objects that do NOT have a symbolic value, but are toxic (like your next door industries).

Compilers for Windows: Microsoft's, Borland's, icc, gcc-mingw


For Windows there are also

Digital Mars - used to be Symantec C++

LCC

Open Watcom

I think there are more for Linux also, like Visual Age
etc.

Most univerisities have strict policies regarding what you can and cannot connect to their network..
At least mine does:
University of Virginia Wireless airspace policy

And the medieval Residence hall bandwidth policy. 512 kbps limited + "timeout box" for people using more than 750 meg.

Most univerisities have strict policies regarding what you can and cannot connect to their network..
At least mine does:
University of Virginia Wireless airspace policy

And the medieval Residence hall bandwidth policy. 512 kbps limited + "timeout box" for people using more than 750 meg.

Election districts are entirely products of gerrymandering: majority parties design district boundaries to dilute their opponents, while empowering their own candidates, to perpetuate their power. These districts should not be designed by unaccountable politicians. They are simple demographic/geographic entities, and should be designed by simple universal rules to ensure the sampling methods of our ballots are accurate models of the people.

Each state should be mapped as an area cartogram, made up of smaller area cartograms of unit 30,000 people. The smallest state should get two Representatives, and every other state should get representatives in that proportion, rounding to the nearest district count. Each Representative district should include their proportional areas of the cartogram units, centered on the highest population density units. That would produce a House of 1000 Representatives, compared to today's 435. But that number was assigned a century ago, in 1911, when the population was only 92M; only 1/3 of today's 280M. Some other changes to modernize the representation model, like remote voting and binding teleconferences, would keep that new scale more manageable than the old one.

Putting these representation districts in the hands of dull statisticians and cartographers, and out of the hands of unaccountable politicians, will go a long way towards increasing the power of the people, especially in the House which most directly represents us. Until then, lobbyists, corporations, parties and sponsors will be disproportionately represented, at our expense.

It's the MS replacement for HTTP and HTML, and... oops, it's been cancelled.

Your point was...?

It's to late now, but if you want exact WYSIWYG, use PDF instead of HTML (and be prepared for issues such as A4 vs Letter). HTML was not and is not designed to be a layout language. Any layout you can do with it is a bonus. Get over it.

In 1920 the U.S. population was 51% urban, by 1990 75% urban. United States Urban and Rural Population 1790-1990 . Urban being defined as a community of 2,500 or more. But that isn't the whole story.

Farming employed 25% of the U.S. labor force in 1920, under 2% in 1990. Farmers and the Rural Community . In 1920 Iowa farmers alone owned $309 million dollars worth of agricultural implements and machinery. 1930 U.S. Census data . That is not low-tech subsistence farming, a peasant or yeoman society.

In the mid-twenties many farms had central heat, indoor plumbing, electricity, sewing machines, pianos, telephones, radios, cars, pickup trucks and tractors. That implies a middle class income by first world standards and a domestic market that Sears, Roebuck mined for generations and WalMart still pursues.

Here is a good URL on Jefferson's thinking on the Bill of Rights. He was really unhappy that American rights were left largely to inference in the original constitution. He felt it essential to spell them out to prevent an out of control government, like we have to day, from usurping them:

"A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. ME 6:388, Papers 12:440

Unfortunately America is short on people of the stature of the founding father today so it remains to be seen if the unparalleled wisdom of the founding father's work will be unraveled in our lifetime.

For all of the Founding Father's wisdom they couldn't prevent an ignorant and apathetic American people from electing an ignorant President, and a petty malevolent Congress who, working in unison, with soon to be stacked courts, could shred the basis of the Republic and the Bill of Rights without a whimper from the American people.

Beauty has value, and Amish folk art and furniture, for example, help make gentile houses more beautiful. Freedom has value, and they advanced larger society socially when they fought compulsory education in Wisconsin vs. Yoder. Granted, a population that is nearly all Amish would not be sustainable--the common defense would be hard to implement in a nation of pacifists--but I would say the Amish are pulling their weight in other ways.

THE AMYGDALA AND PARASITIC CASTRATION

A key structure in human fertility, particularly male fertility, is the amygdala, which dramatically reduces in size upon castration. According to Malsbury and McKay, the amygdala shrinkage can be about 25% within 8 weeks of castration. (Malsbury, C.W. and K. McKay. Neurotrophic effects of testosterone on the medial nucleus of the amygdala in adult male rats. J. Neuroendocrinology, 1994, 6:57-69.) Although reduction in size is not the only way this brain-structure may be reprogrammed to effect parasitic castration, it is a possible observable. Furthermore, since large changes in human migration patterns have occurred in living memory, there should be plenty of intact amygdala specimens that can be correlated with their genotype as well as changes in the environmental genotypes that may impose extended phenotypic parasitic castration.

During the period of greatest environmental influx of more dominant genes into the environments traditionally reserved for more recessive males in the United States, autism rates have increased four-fold, from 1 in 2000 before 1970 to 1 in 500 in 2000. Furthermore, although reporting is always problematic, the increases are most apparent in peripheral geographic regions associated with more recessive traits that have experienced some of the greatest rates of change in geneflow as measured by dominant:recessive ratio -- regions such as the Pacific Northwest.

Furthermore, as reported in The Geek Syndrome:

In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.

What genetic change has occurred in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world over the last decade, more than other times in history ?

Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.

Furthermore, according to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small. Add to that the fact that the only type A blood common among "whites" is called ABO*A2, and that this blood type is centered in northern Scandinavia, according to the gene map on page 3 of the world gene maps in "The History and Geography of Human Genes" (unabridged

Flies on the wall are necessary, especially now that tape recording equipment has fallen into disfavor after this was recorded in 1972.

... you're going to need a format that preserves color information in the new 5 color system if you're going to exploit the real improvements in this color technology: closer reproductions of actual color.

Absolutely not true.

For people with normal color vision, in addition to the "rod" pigment (which is not a significant player in color perception and daylight central vision) there are three color receptor pigments located in the "cone" cells, which have broad reception peaks with well-known shapes. The response of those three sets of cells to an image can be accurately modeled by using three sets of sensors and filters that model the three pigments' frequency response.

The problem comes when, given this measurement, you try to stimulate a viewer's cone cells to produce the response equivalent to the light you measured. If you just pick three color phosphors at the peak of the three dyes' response curves, you find that the colors don't stimulate JUST the cones you intended. The green light, for instance, will strongly stimulate the green-responsive cones. But it will also weakly stimulate the red and blue cones. Similarly, red light will strongly stimulate red cones, weakly stimulate green cones, and very weakly stimulate blue cones. Ditto the other way around with blue light.

This has two effects:

First: Even within the range of combinations of stimulus the three light sources can produce, simply playing back the signal will cause the results to be somewhat more pastel than the orignal scene. This can be compensated for to some extent - by subtracting out appropriate amounts of each color's signal from the signals going to the others color emitters.

Second: You can't make the emitters emit a negative amount of light. The result is that there are scene colors, saturated and nearly-saturated colors between the phosphor colors you chose for reproduction, that can produce color sensations that these three screen colors can't reproduce. These scene colors will ALWAYS apper somewhat washed-out if you only reproduce the image with three screen colors.

So with three values you can accurately transmit any color a normal eye can see. But with three phosphors you can't make the eye see some of these colors.

The two-dimensional representation of the relative responses of the three dies looks something like a spearment leaf with the base sliced off. (See figure 12 of this web page. And thank you, canavan) The edge of the leaf represents the response to a pure spectral color, and regions within it to mixes of colors. If you try to reproduce the response with three phosphor colors, you are picking three points on the leaf edge and drawing a triangle between them. By adjusting the relative amounts of light from the three phosphors you can produce a stimulus corresponding to any point WITHIN the triangle. But you can't produce one corresponding to the arcs of the leaf that are outside the triangle.

But by picking more points along the leaf edge you can draw a polygon and hit any point within it. This covers more of the leaf and leaves fewer colors missing. (Indeed, just a couple extra points can give you most of the leaf.)

You still send the signal with the three values corresponding to the response you want from the eye. But now your monitor processes it into more than three colors to put on the screen, to get the eye to respond more closely to the response it would have had to the original scene.

(Note that people with some forms of color blindness have cones with pigments that have abnormal frequency responses. Such people will not see a color TV image as right even with this upgrade, because the camera will not have correctly encoded what THEIR eyes would have seen. They need a camera with a different response, and yet another set of phosphors in the monitor, to get a good match.)

But not only would pixels have to be able to vary infinitely from zero to the maximum intensity you can see

The dynamic range of the eye is quite limited - That's why you have an iris to vary the amount of light that reaches you retina. Also, you don't need infinitely small ranges to adjust each color to reproduce colors indistiguishable from the original, just more than 8 bit on a linear scale (10 is good for the start, 12 should really get the job done). here is a chart showing (exaggerated) the area in which a color can vary while still remaining indistinguishable from the original for the observer.

the specific R, G, and B chosen would have to be calibrated to the viewer's cones

That doesn't seem to be necessary. Just pick red and blue far enough at the borders of the spectrum so as not to trigger the green cones, and choose a green that coincides with the minimum sensitivity of red and blue. Using rgb lasers with exacly one wavelength each, you could get close enough to to satisfy all but the few tetrachromats.

CMY are really "combinations" of R G and B.

They are on your standard RGB monitor, but not in the general case. For example, take a look at the CIE "Tongue" chart displayed e.g. here. With you monitor, you can only display colors in the red, green, blue triangle, but one could add pure cyan at 490nm and actually increase the area/gamut.

Second, there are colors that your eye can perceive that are not representable by the RGB system.

That would be the good old RCA, phosphor based RGB system. If you ran your display with e.g. lasers with 410, 520 and 700nm respectively, you could get a gamut that's almost indistinguishable from the full gamut the average eye can percieve. The smaller area covered in the green region on top of the chart would probably be neglegible due to the decreased capability of the eye to distinguish between greens. So, not RGB is the problem, but the technology to record and display it.

ever hear of lclint and other Free tools?

http://lclint.cs.virginia.edu/
http://valgrind.kde.org/

Hah, Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe (link goes to an ebook) comes to mind...

Among them is a man who is a superior Cook and House Servant, and a girl about 17 years old, a first rate House Servant, and an excellent seamstress.

Input data verification has plenty of problems with managed memory too - you can easily crash a program by supplying it with bad data, so managed memory languages still need data verification.

What you can do with non-managed memory languages to remove all buffer overflow is the use the right tools (no, not a managed heap :) ) but something like splint or
Prefast

More niggerbabble from my pet nigger.

It must really bug you that one of your ancestors was purchased by one of my ancestors at an auction like this one, eh boy?

How to Disable Windows Messenger Service" courtesy of the University of Virginia.

I need to write my Patent Rant (the short-short version is patents are just trading cards that large companies collect so they have enough IP that they can cross-license rather than ending up in the embarrasing situation of having to pay royalties for infringing on a competitor's patent), but about Microsoft specifically:

This looks like a publicity campaign to associate Microsoft with inventiveness

"Inventiveness" sounds a lot like "innovation," which has been a Microsoft buzzword for many years. I recall Bill Gates using the word several times, perhaps from the speech when he plugged in a USB scanner into a running machine, causing Win98 to crash.

There was an NPR interview about three years ago with a few young, 20-something Microsoft employees. They all said how Microsoft was such a wonderfully innovative comoany, and how happy they were to be a part of a company that innovates so much... I swear I could SEE the glassy-eyed zombies talking on the radio [chanting "Innovate ... innovate ... innovate ...]. NOBODY talks in such glowing terms about an employer unless ...

Microsoft isn't just a large "innovative" company, it is quite probably a cult (I say that in the negative, pejorative sense), and should be listed here along with Amway under "Para-Religious Movements":
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/profile s/listalpha.htm

How's that for radical discussion on Slashdot?

Sigh. Five years of lurking, and now I've got to post about this...hopefully, this will give a little context to people who aren't familar with the incident or aren't from the area or even from the US. In the final analysis, people see in it the things that they want to see, like Koresh and Waco. This posting is long and could use some editting, but if you don't like it you can ask /. for your money back.

IANAME: I Am Not A MOVE Expert.

Quickie Personal Background:
I've lived in or near Philadelphia all of my life.

At the time, my German grandmother did recieve telephone calls from relatives in the old country asking why "the mayor of Philadelphia was bombing the city". This "bombing" is true, in a sense, but not in the way most people would imagine such a bombing.

The May 13th, 1985 incident occurred in the "West Philadelphia" district, which is only a few miles from my school (Drexel University, class of '89) in the city's "University City" district. IIRC, while driving to school that morning (while sitting in traffic on Woodhaven Road, actually) I heard news of a firefight between the police and MOVE. Later that afternoon, while at school, I saw smoke from that area of the city. In other words, this was a day long event and it was the culmination of years of antagonism between MOVE, it's neighbors and the police.

What is MOVE, exactly?
MOVE is essentially a back to nature group. For some reason, they chose to go back to nature in the middle of one of the USA's largest cities. They also had a penchant for annoying their neighbors to the point where the cops would be called in.

There seems to be a reasonable (Though I think that Mumia (yes, *that* Mumia) was convicted in the death of a different police officer, not Ramp. Perhaps I've got my murders mixed up.) synopsis of what MOVE is about here http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Mo ve.html

So, what happened?
An earlier altercation between MOVE and the police occurred in 1978 in an area called "Powelton Village". This incident resulted in the fatal shooting of a police officer named James Ramp. (Incidentally, Powelton is near Drexel's dorms, fraternity houses and student apartments.)

After the 1978 incident, the MOVE house at Powelton Village was razed. It had been heavily damaged but it has been argued that razing the house was mere payback/revenge to/on MOVE. MOVE relocated to Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia and proceeded with the same behaviors that lead up to the first confrontation. I'm not quite old enough to remember the 1978 incident, so I'll leave it at that.

There seems to be a reasonable synopsis of the MOVE incidents here
http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedi a/m/mo/move.html

My recollection of the 1985 incident:
I clearly recall that the TV news had stated that firemen were kept away initially because they were fired on. I don't see why the firemen would be kept away from the fire for several hours. The fire eventually destroyed 60+ homes in the area. That section of the city is densely built, so there are many two- or three-story homes on each block. I don't think that the city government would have been so blinded by MOVE-hatred to purposefully destroy 60+ homes, the majority of which would have been owned by people who where not sympathetic of MOVE.

The "bomb" is alternatively described as designed to destroy a "bunker" or fortification on the roof of the building or as a distraction/ruse. Police today often use "flash-bang" devices to stun or disorient people in siege or hostage situations. This device was much more powerful than a flash-bang and used a military grade explosive (C4 or some similar plastic explosive, IIRC).

I recall that police were present in a building with a wall common to the MOVE house and

AFAIK they started public manifestation after the government cracked down on them. See http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/fa lungong.html#issues
In early 1999 the Chinese government launched a renewed effort against various spiritual movements. In response the Falun Gong held asilent, non-violent, mass protest. Over 10,000 people participated. The illegal protest occured outside the Communist Party headquartersin Beijing on April 25, 1999. 21 The government was frightened both by the size of theprotest and by the lack of fore- knowledge of Chinese intelligence. The government points to the size of the protest as an indication of ahigh level of the movements. Li Hongzhi and other Falun Gong members continue to claim that the demonstrations have always beenspontaneous. They argue that the lack of heirarchy and the loose nature of member networks prevent any such organization.

In the following months, practitioners were harassed while performing their group exercises throughout China. Falun Gong members were told that their phones were being monitored and that their retirement pensions would be terminated. Police broke into practitioners' homes and confiscated Falun Gong materials. Some followers have been arrested and have disappeared. The movement claims that many of its incarcerated members have died while imprisoned. Thousands of members have continued to demonstrate peacefully in about 30 Chinese cities.
Also http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/bth/falun.htm:
For over three years now, the Falun Gong (the Practice of the Wheel of the Dharma) movement has been in the forefront of the international news. After its large scale demonstration for freedom of practice at the residential area of the Chinese Communist Party elite at Zhongnanhai (Beijing) on 25 April 1999, an increasingly severe crackdown has followed, with more severe legal measures specifically introduced to deal with this phenomenon. This crackdown includes the exertion of considerable pressure on Western media in China not to pay too much attention to the suppression of the Falun Gong and Western authorities to prevent overly visible Falun Gong protest during state visits of Chinese leaders (this would influence coverage at home, as they would have to cut references to the Falun Gong out of all reports). It also includes removing Falun Gong adherents without trial to psychiatric institutions, pressurizing them through their jobs and personal networks, unannounced searches of private homes, hotels and any places where Falun Gong followers might be staying, and so forth. People arrested are be put under severe pressure and are maltreated (to the extent that even force-feeding during hungerstrikes takes place very clumsily with obvious results), which has already frequently led to permanent physical & psychological damage, deaths and suicides. Essentially, all means are considered legitimate in dealing with the movement.

The communist regime perceives of the Falun Gong movement as an "incident" and as a subspecies of the traditional category of "crooked teachings" (xiejiao, the Chinese pejorative pendant to the Western labels "cult" - Northern American - and "sect" - Western European). As someone working on new religious groups in recent Chinese history, I see the movement as an important religious phenomenon in its own right, arising out of the specific urban circumstances of post-1949 China, but responding to social, ethical and emotional needs that are quite traditional. The way in which the communist Chinese state has misunderstood this movement, and is labelling and persecuting it bears strong resemblances to the way in which the imperial Chinese state saw similar phenomena in the past.
and http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/magazine/0,975

andy, have you seen Project Gutenberg? While it's not big on new works, there's a ton of great classic stuff, fiction and non. Also, there's (for example) the UVA ebook library. It sez "for MS and Palm devices" but no worries, there's HTML as well. A quick google search about ebooks will yield fine results.

...and of(I believe, hard to judge from the one photo I've seen of him) of African decent, so stop trolling.

Ah, um, yes - so that explains why he's named after an American Indian from Longfellow's poem Hiawatha
Forgiveth me for being such a racist troll..

Yes, I readily admit I did use a pretty broad brush since I didn't want to get into a long dissertation here. I stand by my personal observations, but it's only my own opinion and worth what you paid for it.

My wife is one of those people who is both an artist and a professional writer. She switched from a Mac to a PC around 1997 so I won't disagree with you a bit that there are plenty of exceptions in both directions.

Oh, about that Mark Twain fellow, he didn't use a Mac either, he did use a typewriter, though. Well, after 1874 anyway.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

A synopsis of the article

A response to the article

This research article just seems to be flamebait and highly uncontrolled. Hell, I could give you papers from the Mac users at our school and compare them to the PC users and the Mac users would win by far. A computer does not influence a person's style of writing. If you were to get a good, large group of students, you would see that the results are flawed, and that Mac users would tend to outperform PC users.

So how come an American didn't invent the telephone,
Alexander Graham Bell?
Speaking of anti-intellectual... jeez.

I think that's a bit harsh for novels and graphic novels. Some of the comics cited above are difficult, intelligent stories with involved character development and a good story to tell.

Please, are you kidding us? I read Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which was okay, but at the back it already admitted they basically made up the last two parts on the fly under pretty intense deadline pressure. And it shows, similar to the way Coleridge's Kubla Khan took something of a dive after he was bothered out of his drug-induced state and the dropped his inspiration -- except I'm not sure Dark Knight part 1 is exactly Coleridge at his best.

Look, I enjoyed Spider-Man vs. Wolverine as much as the next fellow and I'm glad comic book characters have outlets to behave a little more maturely than they do in a short monthly comic, but if you want to find great mainstream literature these days, take a look at Umberto Eco or Toni Morrison, not Frank Miller, please. Graphic novels are perhaps better called the new graphic novellas; they simply aren't replacements for 200-600 pages of truly great writing.

I think that's a bit harsh for novels and graphic novels. Some of the comics cited above are difficult, intelligent stories with involved character development and a good story to tell.

Please, are you kidding us? I read Batman: The Dark Knight Returns which was okay, but at the back it already admitted they basically made up the last two parts on the fly under pretty intense deadline pressure. And it shows, similar to the way Coleridge's Kubla Khan took something of a dive after he was bothered out of his drug-induced state and the dropped his inspiration -- except I'm not sure Dark Knight part 1 is exactly Coleridge at his best.

Look, I enjoyed Spider-Man vs. Wolverine as much as the next fellow and I'm glad comic book characters have outlets to behave a little more maturely than they do in a short monthly comic, but if you want to find great mainstream literature these days, take a look at Umberto Eco or Toni Morrison, not Frank Miller, please. Graphic novels are perhaps better called the new graphic novellas; they simply aren't replacements for 200-600 pages of truly great writing.

Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.

huh. who knew I'd spark all this debate with an off-hand comment? interesting and amazing.

As much as I appreciate Google as the wonderful tool that it indeed is, I can't afford to think of it as the "be all end all" repository of human knowledge. It maybe the closest thing to the Library of Alexandria we have in modern civilzation. Seemingly more than most, but at that not even close to a "deep web" search engine because that problem as yet hasn't been adequately formulated yet. Tim Berners Lee and crew as well as a great many others are, no doubt, hard at work on the case.

But until the semantic web (or some alternative approach) emerges and is accepted and becomes a reality for most, all that even the best search engines are currently capable of doing is skimming over roughly the top 5% of the entire sum of knowledge and information on the web. It's the same problem that Dr. Bush addressed in his famous paper but on a much grander scale than perhaps even he could imagine.

From serendipit-e:

Firstly, it's worth remembering that Google only indexes a third of the web's nine billion pages. That it does so as comprehensively, if not more so, than anyone else, isn't at issue. Information costs money, and this has taken the sheen off the 'Internet' as it was once sold to us. The most valuable collections limit their access, for very good economic reasons: they can't afford not to.

The best collections are Web-accessible, after a fashion. For example, San Francisco Library's public collections are one of the Web's treasures - and accessible to any visitor who takes time to pick up a Library card - but beyond the crawlers. They represent the tip of the iceberg of the Internet that Google can't see - but that the rest of us can enjoy.

However this brain drain, this emptying of the commons simply isn't what we were promised ten years ago, when the Internet was first sold to the public as, amongst other things, an almost infinite source of information. Ten years on, the reality hasn't lived up to the promise, and as Net Time co-founder Geert Lovink pointed out in a panel on Saturday, and as we've noted too, Internet usage in the West is stalling. The public is not stupid, and is now reaching for the off switch.

While it isn't exactly fair to blame Google for this. Google has succeeded in becoming the branding for the Great Internet Project. But obviously, it can't be responsible for the content, which leaves us all somewhat underwhelming. But the corporation continues to highlight the metaphysical properties of its technology with some absurd claims, and at the very least, encourages commentators to describe its collection as something it isn't.

I can definetly appreciate the value of having multiple sources for your information. But as far as I'm aware, only the OED is the accepted standard for defining both current and historical usage of any word or term. The OED does not seek to impose their views on anyone, the approach I appreciate the most. They merely preserve past meanings based upon historical documents and glean neologisms emerging from popular useage. C

The electoral college has really only played a minor role in filtering the will of the people into a result for who ends up being US President. ("Minor" meaning situations where popular and electoral votes don't exactly reflect each other, while "Major" means mass chaos in the electoral system of the sort that would be akin to what the EU ministers did.)

However, electors *have* cast votes for a different candidate than the one they were expected to vote for. Tennessee in 1948 is one example.

See here or here for more details.

Ignorance is bliss. Now try to learn something.

Wow, if you're going to be snarky at least get your facts straight.

You're right about the frequency of the microwave oven, but it's not the resonance frequency of water, that's 545GHz.

Microwaves work by electromagnetically vibrating any asymetrical (polar) molecules found in the target foodstuffs. Water is usually a very large percentage of that, but you're just vibrating the molecule, not causing it to resonate. If you did, the water on the outside of the food would absorb all the energy and you'd have a cold center.

Some links:
Microwave tech
Good Eats
Water resonance chart
How Things Work

In order to understand what causes nerdism, we must first look to the nerds themselves. The most obvious observation one could make is that nerds are statistically nearly always male. While nerds routinely come in a splendid variety of shapes and sizes and hues, it is rare to see a nerd of the fairer sex. Since we know that nerdism is the fascination with tools and systems, and we know that nerds are predominantly male, we would likely gain insight in asking ourselves why females are not so driven to tinker.

There is no basic mental difference between men and women, and so there is no reason to believe that women would be mentally any less tinker-inclined than men. Therefore, in order to determine the reason why there are so few female nerds, we must turn our attentions to the ways in which men and women are known to differ: the physical ways. Immediately, the answer becomes plain. Women do not need to glut their tendencies by tinkering with computers or cars or guns because of their reproductive systems, which require a great deal more attention and maintenance than those of their male counterparts. Simply put, women tinker with their parts, and so have no interest in tinkering with electronic substitutes.

Penises and testicles, despite their initial lustre, grow boring early on. They do not exhibit quirky, moody, fixable behavior. Rather, they hang loosely and idly in a man's crotch and rarely get more attention than any other body part, and at those times that they do, tinkering is not foremost on the subject's mind. Particularly in the case of an circumsized penis, very little extra maintenance is ever needed. Contrast this, then, to the vagina, which must be carefully wiped after every use, and regularly cleaned to preserve womanly freshness. Females learn early in life that the vagina must be treated with respect, and in return they have the incomparable, primal joy of upkeep.

Women may contentedly seek non-nerdy sources of entertainment, safe in their knowledge that every month will bring them more new and exciting vaginal adventures. While some men profess to be unnerved or even disgusted by menstruation, their true feelings are probably closer to envy. Women, lucky women, may peruse those exotic aisles at the supermarket in search of feminine hygiene products, products that they need, they absolutely need, in order to keep their systems fully operational. Men never know the intimate thrill of personally dealing with menstruation by applying a tampon just in the nick of time, or the sense of deep personal satisfaction that comes with regularly eating yogurt and so having a

There is not such thing as an absolute proof of identity, only a trust relationship.