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We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962

I'm getting a lot of miles out of that speech. Going to Mars is hard. Going to the asteroids is hard. The treasure we might find there is nothing compared to the wealth in knowledge we earn along the way if we're bold enough to make the journey. We got far more value out of the moon effort than it cost.

One day children will be conceived and born in microgravity. They'll learn and live and love far from the planet we call home. They'll live out their lives and ultimately die having never set foot on any planet at all. We can't prevent this -- it is man's destiny. They'll think nothing of it because for them it will be the way things have always been. The question is: Will they be our children or someone else's?

I am not a doctor, but I'm interested in this stuff. Here is a link to a slide show I've found about how spinal fractures are spotted using radiography by the name of “Imaging Evaluation of Cervical Spine”. Of note are the types of spinal injury that one must be mindful of before moving an injured person. Most of the images are x-rays, which should give the reader some idea of how invisible yet dangerous this kind of injury can be. As has been noted, deciding if it is ok to move someone is definitely not for the layman and should be left for the professionals.

Wikipedia has some background info on how vertebrae are arranged for those of us who are new to this.

And seeing as how Thomas Jefferson distrusted government I seriously doubt he'd agree either.

The Founder Fathers' actual views rarely align with the views of those that most often and loudly invoke their memory.

Would some of Thomas Jefferson's quotes convince you?

Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government'. Quoted from the Founding Fathers. "When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny."

That was just a couple of minutes, given more tyme I best I can find more quotes not just from Thomas Jefferson but several others of the Founding Fathers.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962 mp3

We will go. The only question is: will we be first to climb this mountain, or will we be shown the way by better men?

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there." Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962 mp3

We will go. The only question is: will we be first to climb this mountain, or will we be shown the way by better men?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

John F. Kennedy, 9/12/1962

Dr Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia wrote a really interesting book that devotes some time to this subject, called A More Perfect Constitution. He talks about the gerrymandering (fixing districts so the incumbent, or at least the same party, always wins) that goes on, and proposes some interesting solutions, including making the House 1000 members to be more representative of the actual population. This, he says, would have the effect of producing smaller constituencies, require less money for someone to run for office, and invite more non-politicians into the process. It was a fairly easy read, and he provides historical perspective on why the Constitution is the way it is, and what we might do to make it better. One of his primary arguments in the book is that it is a living document, meant to be changed over time - that the founders never intended it to be so static for so long.

Check this out: Wiki on Swarm Computing.
Learn to write program to simulate your swarm overlords here: Swarm Computing Research at Univ of Virginia

--
In Soviet, swarms program you :-)..

Maybe people should just realize that "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun in English!

Several universities host ongoing paranormal research, including Princeton University, the University of Arizona, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Hertfordshire in England, and the University of Virginia. Obviously, there's enough evidence out there that needs to be confirmed or debunked (depending on your point of view) that centers for paranormal research are justified.

Zonk, why don't you leave the editorializing to those things you know something about, unless you're willing to share *your* paranormal research credentials with us...at which point I'll shut up and go away.

I have got enough of the old masters! Brown says he has "shook" them, and I think I will shake them, too. You wander through a mile of picture galleries and stare stupidly at ghastly old nightmares done in lampblack and lightning, and listen to the ecstatic encomiums of the guides, and try to get up some enthusiasm, but it won't come.

He goes on at length here, down around page 190.

I describe myself as a scientist because I honest-to-God do real science in computer vision. If you are honestly interested in the sort of work I (and other URCS Comp. Vision grads) do, I'd be glad to discuss it to the limits of my applicable non-disclosure agreements.

I'm not sure why you believe that a Computer Scientist necessary does not do science. Yes, the Scientific Method is just part of the curriculum in most CS degree paths, as are the tools for implementing it (i.e., programming, statistical models). However, what a particular alum makes of their career following their education is dependent upon themself, not on the degree requirements. As well, I would hardly call a physicist, biologist, or chemist an engineer, though they also frequently make use of tools used in software engineering.

For what it's worth, I would recommend that those who are interested in Software Engineering as a profession pursue a specific degree in it, as well as becoming licensed (if applicable in their state).

History of the Conflict between Religion and Science

... as it is quite useful as a learning language.

Actually, it's fairly well known to suck as a learning language.

Or at least some people think so.

If the tale of Jonah isn't literally true, what else in the Bible isn't true? Perhaps someone could go through with a yellow highlighter and mark off those parts I should believe, and those parts I can dismiss as mythology.

Thomas Jefferson obliged your request, figuratively speaking; the highlighter hadn't been invented yet. Not as nifty as Goldman's "good parts" version of the Princess Bride (gad, Morgenstern is long winded, even for a native Florinese), but pretty good nonetheless.

You should really try to read what I wrote. Gradualism is what is being taught. It does not fit the fossil record. Trying to point that out will get you branded as a heretic. All I'm wanting is for "science" to clean house and at least abide by its own rules. I'm not trying to get science to agree with me, just to not make thinks up out of thin air and then teach it to my kids as a proven fact.

Gene duplication is not new information, just a copy. What point mutation has created something new as opposed to removed something from the gene. If your new thing only comes from removing information, you will eventually end up with nothing.

Because if true, [recapitulation theory] would be observable evolution. That's why the hoax was created in the first place.

Recapitulation theory is a pretty obvious [example].

Pat Michaels is a good example.

I know people who have lost their job for doing good science simple because it did not agree with the prevailing opinions.

Because, Property is robbery!

I think your point is that both global warming and evolution are both essentially groups of theories rather than theories themselves. I.e., there are several models of global warming that each make slightly different predictions (AKA "conclusions"). Evolution (AKA Darwinian evolution) also refers to several slightly different theories, each of which make slightly different predictions. The simplest conception of evolution (possibly the one you're thinking of) is better stated as a law than a theory. Laws state what is happening, theories explain how (and what, of course). (Although most lay persons don't understand this, I'm assuming that you realize that theories are better than laws.)

If that is your gripe, you should realize that the same thing is true about general relativity and quantum mechanics. Each of these theories is really more a "group" of related theories. In general relativity, for example, do you want to use a Schwardzchild metric or one of my metrics (probably not)? (If you want to be exact, you would use some version of a Kerr-Newman metric, but that's a different story.)

This is definitely a cool idea. But it's just a myth. Take a look at that site--lots of wonky pseudo-science to be had. And I especially knew something was wrong when they started talking about the Mayan calendar and global warming.

At any rate, take a look at the original press release that was misinterpreted to come up with this theory here: http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~mfs4n/sgr/
And take a look at a debunking here: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/06/27/is-t he-sun-from-another-galaxy

And the wonkiness about the angle we see the Milky Way at from Earth is just plain bad math.

The astronomer quoted in that link has specifically stated that his work was misrepresented; see here and here. The Sun's orbit in the galaxy indicates that it did indeed originate in the Milky Way.

Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.

You can get as angry as you want but I'm just looking at facts.

No, you're making them up, and that's why I'm angry. In this day and age when information is available by just typing a couple of keys, people are not only still ignorant, but making up their own facts as well. For example, by taking 30 seconds and looking up the stats on Google, you'd see school violence has been decreasing for a long time. You might want to claim isolated incidents show things spiraling out of control, but anecdotes don't reflect reality. Oh, and BTW, violent crime rate is down across the board. Teen pregnancy is down. Alcohol and drug abuse are down. I'll let you spend the short amount of time necessary finding that information. So, if we follow your "logic", and fill it in with facts, removing god from school was a good thing. Big surprise.

Sorry, it is possible to wrote a worst-case O(n lg n) Quicksort. That's worst-case, not expected-worst-case or average-case. The trick is to use an O(n) selection algorithm to find the median of each subset and partition about that. Partitioning around the median guarantees that the rest of the algorithm stays in O(n lg n) as long as the finding the median can be done in no more than O(n). The reason no one ever implements it that way is that the overhead involved in the O(n) Select makes the average-case performance worse. In contrast, if you use perform a randomized partition, you get an expected-worst-case time of O(n lg n). This means that, while you can still get O(n^2) worst-case time, you can't force it to happen by running it on the same data. In order to get the worst-case to happen, you'd not only have to get unlucky with your input data, you'd also have to get unlucky with the sequence of numbers coming from your random number generator. (In other words, some malicious person can't slow down your algorithm by handing you a worst-case data set.)

The only description of the worst-case O(n lg n) Quicksort I could quickly find for free online is slide 16 of these lecture notes (PPT), but there aren't many details there. More can be found in the chapter on Order Statistics in "Introduction to Algorithms", 2nd. ed., by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

"No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of
freedom and happiness... Preach a crusade against ignorance;
establish and improve the law for educating the common people.
Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us
against the evils [of misgovernment]." --Thomas Jefferson to George Wythe, 1786.

people would rather have the government make restrictions for what everyone watches or listens to for fear that their precious children might hear a dirty word or see a tit.

Unfortunately this is all too true. Also there's a vocal minority who want a nanny state. This fits right in with some religious people's idea of how government should be, like people who follow Christian Reconstructionism, also known as Dominion Theology. These people are basically Christian Talibans and want to stone people to death for many of the things the Taliban beheaded people for such as having sex with someone who's not their spouse, evenif they aren't married. They don't care if people have the same believes, they just want to tell people how to live.

When I was a kid if my parents didn't like me watching certain programming they either changed the channel or turned off the television. I was told to go read a book or do something else constructive. The concept isn't a hard one to figure out. IMHO I think a lot of these censorship happy people are just lazy parents.

I didn't have it like that myself that I can recall. I don't recall not being able to watch anything I wanted. However I still read a lot. Because I was an insomniac, and still am, I could spend half of the night reading in bed, either by moonlight or if it wasn't bright enough by flashlight.

* The shakedown of numerous small businesses and large customers for "patent violations" based on legal instruments created by a mafia-style clique of lawyers.

Yeah, the founding fathers were surely the mafia lawyers from hell.

In contrast to those "patents-are-godgiven-rights"-zealots of today, they were very sceptic about the whole affair and had strongs reservations regarding it:

http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/ 200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/patent.html

If they had been able to see the future and what happend with patents, they would have outlawed patents in the constitution.

With this guy on board, someone needs to bring up the average hotness for the UVa faculty on this project.

When the hardware detects a problem it signals the software. The software knows the location of the problematic code by checking a "last executed branch" register. A dynamic optimizer(software) then re-orders the code in that region and caches it to be used in future passes through that section.

The trick will be getting the dynamic optimizer light-weight enough that it doesn't induce performance hits in and of itself. Also, as an above poster noted, re-ordering code on the fly is fraught with peril. It seems this could have application in general purpose laptops, cellphones, and other non-safety critical gadgets. There should definitely be a bit in the machine control register to switch off the optimizer.

First off, it's a Roland the Plogger story, so you know it's clueless. Roland the Plogger is just regurgitating a press release.

Here's an actual paper about the thing. Even that's kind of vague. The general idea, though, seems to be to insert a layer of code-patching middleware between the application and the hardware. The middleware has access to CPU instrumentation info about cache misses, power management activity, and CPU temperature. When it detects that the program is doing things that are causing problems at the CPU level, it tries to tweak the code to make it not do so much bad stuff. See Power Virus in Wikipedia for an explaination of "bad stuff". The paper reports results on a simulated CPU with a simulated test program, not real programs on real hardware.

Some CPUs now power down sections of the CPU, like the floating point unit, when they haven't been used for a while. A program which uses the FPU periodically, but with intervals longer than the power-off timer, is apparently troublesome, because the thing keeps cycling on and off, causing voltage regulation problems. This technique patches the code to make that stop happening. That's what they've actually done so far.

Intel's interest seems to be because this was a problem with some Centrino parts. So this is something of a specialized fix. It's a software workaround for some problems with power management.

It's probably too much software machinery for that problem. On-the-fly patching of code is an iffy proposition. Some code doesn't work well when patched - game code being checked for cheats, DRM code, code being used by multiple CPUs, code being debugged, and Microsoft Vista with its "tilt bits". Making everything compatible with an on the fly patcher would take some work. A profiling tool to detect program sections that have this problem might be more useful.

It's a reasonable piece of work on an annoying problem in chip design. The real technical paper is titled "Eliminating voltage emergencies via microarchitectural voltage control feedback and dynamic optimization." (International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design, August 2004). If you're really into this, see this paper on detecting the problem during chip design, from the India Institute of Technology in Madras. Intel also funded that work.

On the thermal front, back in 2000, at the Intel Developer Forum the keynote speaker after Intel's CEO spoke, discussing whether CPUs should be designed for the thermal worst case or for something between the worst case and the average case: "Now, when you design a system, what you typically want to do is make sure the thermal of the system are okay, so even at the most power-hungry application, you will contain -- so the heat of the system will be okay. So this is called thermal design power, the maximum, which is all the way to your right. A lot of people, most people design to that because something like a power virus will cause the system to operate at very, very maximum power. It doesn't do any work, but that's -- you know, occasionally, you could run into that. The other one is, probably a little more reasonable, is you don't have the power virus, but what the most -- the most power consuming application would run, and that's what you put the TDP typical."

From that talk, you can kind of see how Intel got into this hole. They knew it was a problem, though, so they put in temperature detection to slow down the CPU when it gets too hot. This prevents damage,

Some Links:

• http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/hazelwoo d.html Asst. Professor Kim Hazelwood's Home page at UVA
• http://www.tortolaproject.com/ - the Tortola Project home page

And a comment:

I'm not entirely thrilled with this idea of dynamically communicating between hardware and software. From what I got from TFA, the hardware would change dynamically based on feedback from the software. It seems to me that we already have plenty of trouble writing programs that work correctly when the hardware does not change... imagine trying to debug a program when the computer hardware is adapting to the changes in your code. (IOW: heisenbugs.)

Also, I've got some unease when I think about what mal-ware authors could come up with using this technology. Sure, we'll come up with something else to counteract that... but I think it'll bring up another order of magnitude's worth of challenge in this cat and mouse game we already have.

Her homepage,
tortola and
possibly unrelated paper

Damn! That professor is Hot!!!! And she teaches Compilers!!!!

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/kim/

Oh, and am I the only one who's tired of the old, "I'm a gamer and I'm not violent so obviously games don't contribute to violence," gem being busted out time and time again, as if its actual proof?

You are not the only one.

What surprises me is that there aren't more people pointing out the decline in youth violence. Media sources frame things such that it sounds like there's a terrible increase. The presentation is misleading, stirring up drama.

Some statistics:
http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violenc e-in-schools/national-statistics.html

This is not evidence either way for video games causing violence; perhaps violence would have gone down more without video games. But the idea seems less likely, especially since the number of video games has only been increasing.

It's not the pressure that turns the ice temporarily to water, it's the friction applied to the surface, as well as the temperature difference.

Put a frozen bag of veggies on an ice cube in the freezer. Let it sit for an hour. Go back, check it. Both are still frozen, although the back of veggies was exerting a small amount of pressure (due to gravity) on the ice cube.

For your skate theory, the coefficient of friction between the skate and the surface of the ice, as well as the skate itself being above 32 degrees (I've never worn a frozen skate to go ice skating...), combine to produce the temporary effect that you are referring to.

For some additional reading and a more technical explanation, check out the following link:
http://faculty.virginia.edu/lehmannlab/badchemistr y.html
(courtesy of the University of Virginia Chemistry Dept.)

Increased pressure would also require that the temperature be LOWER to keep it frozen. This is where barometric pressure and meteorology would come into play. It's the friction of the air against the surface of the ice that would be at issue.

I can't claim to have the precise answer to your question, but I can point out a few things that won't work.

Considering how (relatively) common school shootings have become, I'm not against the idea of drilling kids on what to do in such a situation.

Survival of the human personality after the death of the body is a concept that has long intrigued those engaged in psychical research. This survival, if it occurs, might take the form of reincarnation. Although this hypothesis has not been widely accepted in the West, some eminent thinkers have given it attention. Among them are Pythagoras, Plato, Hume, Kant and Schopenhauer.

In this study Ian Stevenson presents twenty cases that are suggestive of reincarnation. In these cases, which Dr. Stevenson has personally investigated, people have claimed that they remember having lived an earlier life on earth. These claims are usually made by a young child, whose memories of his earlier life fade after several years. When the child remembers certain facts that he has not been able to learn in a normal way in his present life, it is difficult to account for his memories unless the hypothesis of reincarnation is accepted. Nevertheless, Dr. Stevenson does not claim that these cases offer positive proof of reincarnation; he claims only that they are suggestive. The investigation he undertook and the subsequent reports he makes provide fascinating reading. Of the cases he studied, seven occurred in India, three in Ceylon, two in Brazil, one in Lebanon, and seven among the Tlingit Indians of Southeastern Alaska.

First published in 1966, this is the second edition of the book. In this edition Dr. Stevenson presents the material he obtained from follow-up interviews with eighteen of the twenty subjects. In each of the eighteen cases, at least one interview was held not less than eight years after the original one. ...

Thomas Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite.

It is easy enough to say that "information wants to be free" when your unpaid slave labor is doing the actual work. Building and maintaining Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University of Virginia.

On April 13, the 264th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors unanimously passed an historic resolution...expressing the University's regret for its use of enslaved persons from 1819 to 1865. U.Va. is believed to be the first university whose governing board has made such a statement.University of Virginia's Board of Visitors Passes Resolution Expressing Regret for Use of Slaves April 13, 2007

Enlightenment, it seems, was not for everyone.

It would be 1950 before Gregory Swanson a black graduate of Harvard would be admitted to the UVa School of Law. Seventeen years more before the first women were admitted as undergraduates.

The landed aristocrat lives on borrowed time and borrowed money. Jefferson can be as expansive as he wishes because he will never get around to paying his bills. That is a luxury the creative minds and talents of the lower and middle classes do not have.

Thomas Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite.

It is easy enough to say that "information wants to be free" when your unpaid slave labor is doing the actual work. Building and maintaining Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University of Virginia.

On April 13, the 264th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors unanimously passed an historic resolution...expressing the University's regret for its use of enslaved persons from 1819 to 1865. U.Va. is believed to be the first university whose governing board has made such a statement.University of Virginia's Board of Visitors Passes Resolution Expressing Regret for Use of Slaves April 13, 2007

Enlightenment, it seems, was not for everyone.

It would be 1950 before Gregory Swanson a black graduate of Harvard would be admitted to the UVa School of Law. Seventeen years more before the first women were admitted as undergraduates.

The landed aristocrat lives on borrowed time and borrowed money. Jefferson can be as expansive as he wishes because he will never get around to paying his bills. That is a luxury the creative minds and talents of the lower and middle classes do not have.

Why should I be required to learn art history?

Can you honestly tell me that Art history is morerelevant to my career than Topics in Real Analysis?

Try getting into Grad school from Devry.

No. There is absolutely no difference between free fall in a gravitational field and absence of a gravitational field. This is the famous Equivalence Principle of General Relativitiy. This link gives more detail: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/gener al_relativity.html [virginia.edu]

So there exists no difference at all between free fall and zero gravity. As for your second point, no experiment can distinguish between the two cases. So no observation can differentiate between the two.

This is incorrect. For a point-like object, it's true that you can't distinguish between the two. But for an extended body, if the intensity of the gravitational field varies with the position, different parts of the body will try to follow different "free falls" trajectories and this will result in very real forces inside the body - so called
tidal forces. BTW, to have any kind of measurable difference you need either a gravitational field with a very steep gradient, for example very near to a black hole center, or a very big object like the Earth.

No. There is absolutely no difference between free fall in a gravitational field and absence of a gravitational field. This is the famous Equivalence Principle of General Relativitiy. This link gives more detail: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/252/gener al_relativity.html

So there exists no difference at all between free fall and zero gravity. As for your second point, no experiment can distinguish between the two cases. So no observation can differentiate between the two.

Once more the ticker dropped ridiculously far behind, the lights in the brokers' offices and the banks burned till dawn, and the telegraph companies distributed thousands of margin calls and requests for more collateral to back up loans at the banks. Bankers, brokers, clerks, messengers were almost at end of their strength; for days and nights they had been driving themselves to keep pace with the most terrific volume of business that had ever descended upon them. It did not seem as if they could stand it much longer. But the worst was still ahead. It came the next day, Tuesday, October 29th.

The big gong had hardly sounded in the great hall of the Exchange at ten o'clock Tuesday morning before the storm broke in full force. Huge blocks of stock were thrown upon the market for what they would bring. Five thousand shares; ten thousand shares appeared at a time on the laboring ticker at fearful recessions in price. Not only were innumerable small traders being sold out, but big ones, too, protagonists of the new economic era who a few weeks before had counted them. selves millionaires. Again and again the specialist in a stock would find himself surrounded by brokers fighting to sell--and nobody at all even thinking of buying. To give one single example: during the bull market the common stock of the White Sewing Machine Company had gone as high as 48; on Monday, October 28th, it had closed at 11 1/8. On that black Tuesday, somebody--a clever messenger boy for the Exchange, it was rumored--had the bright idea of putting in an order to buy at 1--and in the temporarily complete absence of other bids he actually got his stock for a dollar a share! The scene on the floor was chaotic. Despite the jamming of the Communication system, orders to buy and sell-mostly to sell--came in faster than human beings could possibly handle them; it was on that day that an exhausted broker, at the close of the session, found a large waste-basket which he had stuffed with orders to be executed and had carefully set aside for safekeeping-and then had completely forgotten. Within half an hour of the Opening the volume of trading had passed three million shares, by twelve o'clock it had passed eight million, by half-past one it had passed twelve Million, and when the closing gong brought the day's madness to an end the gigantic record of 16,410,030 shares had been set. Toward the close there was a rally, but by that time the average prices of fifty leading stocks, as compiled by the New York Times, had fallen nearly forty points. Meanwhile there was a near-panic in-other markets--the foreign stock exchanges, the lesser American exchanges, the grain market.

You are right. It's been a while since I've delved into relativity (I'm embarrased to admit that my Master's thesis involved general relativity). The complete equation for energy, including rest mass and kinetic energy is:
E = sqrt(mc^2 + pc),
or as it's more commonly written:
E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2,
where m is the rest mass. Speaking of general relativity, I should point out that the above equation for energy is assuming a Minkowski (flat) space-time metric.

Thanks for the correction.

Also, for v much smaller than c, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) approaches 1, as v^2/c^2 approaches 0.

True. However, for v significantly smaller than c, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) approaches 1 + (1/2)v^2/c^2 + (3/8)v^4/c^4. For even smaller v, you can drop the v^4 term and get 1 + (1/2)v^2/c^2 which does yield E = mc^2 + (1/2)mv^2, which is why it's easy to make the mistake that I made. (Obviously, for even smaller v, this does approach mc^2, but that's similar to saying that kinetic energy is insignificant relative to rest energy. I say similar, because I'm also not claiming anymore that my original equation was right - just an interesting, if misleading, approximation.)

UVA has been doing a technology survey of incoming freshman since 1997 and this year's numbers are startling. The use of Macs is up to almost 20% of freshman according to this http://www.itc.virginia.edu/stuserv/ca/cainventory /compare/ survey.

And Princeton's school newspaper has reported that 45% of all computers sold on campus this year are Macs. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/10/ 12/arts/16162.shtml

As a comment on my blog also points out the pdf linked to above is not all that scientific, for example it does not cite it's sources.

I have not read this through yet but I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this subject should take a closer look at this pdf which sure does look much more worked through and authoritative on the subject.

"it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." (etext)

It was true in 1843; it is true today. Why, exactly, do people continue to be deluded in gambling real money on the belief that some company supplying some cryptographic technology has people in it who are smarter than everybody else in the world?

Oh FFS, this is the 3rd time in 3 posts I have had to state that the agreement in question covers Novell customers and not Novell directly.

Snark hunting, are we?

Now how is it that this covers any customers of the customers of Novell? If I become a client of Novell, and my team produces a PIM based on Suse that is a real MS Outlook killer, how is it that my customers are immune from the threat of patent claims by Microsoft (even though I have that immunity)?

Sir, whether you know it or not, you are blowing smoke.

A modest suggestion: Perhaps you should stop just stating the same thing time after time and present either the supporting facts that you alone are seeing or the logical connections between the public facts that no one else but you seems to be able figure out.

Pssst!.... don't tell anyone but none of them ever had irrefutable proof.

I think Pasteur had pretty irrefutable proof. They had microscopes. They knew what caused the problem. All he had to do was convince religious freaks that bacteria didn't spontaneously appear out of nowhere by an act of God. But if you feel bacteria spontaneously generate themselves out of nothing but component pieces, feel free to drink unpasteurized milk and scoff at the rest of us for being just as susceptible to disease as yourself.

I don't think science is what you seem to think it is.

I guess that all depends on whether or not you classify global warming as science. GP is simply asking for a bit more than speculation before making trillion dollar policy decisions. I don't think that is too much to ask. Climate scientists claim CO2 is one of the primary drivers of "global warming." Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. After wiping the egg from their faces, "climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists.

Given that brief synopsis, I can see a person might be skeptical. Especially when the people predicting the end of the world are asking for taxpayer dollars to do it.