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This is much better than TFA. This is a scientific study from the CSIRO, predicting major social and economic collapse within the next 50 years if we do not act on a number of looming problems - none of which relate to climate change btw.

http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Multimedia/CSIROpod/Growth-Limits.aspx

There was also this presentation last year at the Institute of Policy Studies in New Zealand:
http://mdsweb.vuw.ac.nz/Mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b5d458433d74b4d9605d143cdc64aa3

Examine slide #31. It says: "The world is tracking on the Limits to Growth 'business as usual' scenario - leads to ecological and economic collapse (possibly from 2020 onwards)". This is from an actual scientific paper from the CSIRO. It is not guesswork, hyperbole or quackery.

This is much better than TFA. This is a scientific study from the CSIRO, predicting major social and economic collapse within the next 50 years if we do not act on a number of looming problems - none of which relate to climate change btw.

http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Multimedia/CSIROpod/Growth-Limits.aspx

There was also this presentation last year at the Institute of Policy Studies in New Zealand:
http://mdsweb.vuw.ac.nz/Mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b5d458433d74b4d9605d143cdc64aa3

Examine slide #31. It says: "The world is tracking on the Limits to Growth 'business as usual' scenario - leads to ecological and economic collapse (possibly from 2020 onwards)". This is from an actual scientific paper from the CSIRO. It is not guesswork, hyperbole or quackery.

Yes, population. From there stems a great deal of problems, most obviously resource depletion.

Have a listen to this. The Australian CSIRO is itself predicting major social and economic collapse within the next 50 years if we do not act on these things. This is nothing to do with climate change.

http://www.csiro.au/Portals/Multimedia/CSIROpod/Growth-Limits.aspx

There was also this presentation last year at the Institute of Policy Studies in New Zealand:
http://mdsweb.vuw.ac.nz/Mediasite/Viewer/?peid=0b5d458433d74b4d9605d143cdc64aa3

Examine slide #31. It says: "The world is tracking on the Limits to Growth 'business as usual' scenario - leads to ecological and economic collapse (possibly from 2020 onwards)". This is from an actual scientific paper from the CSIRO. It is not guesswork, hyperbole or quackery.

As someone deeply involved in the Patents Act process in NZ (I wrote my thesis on it ;-) http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/1027?show=full And presented to Parliament on the Act; I can tell you that the Select Committee report is the final stages before the Bill is either passed in Parlimentary Session or thrown out for another full round (considering the current Draft on the Table started in 2002 I doubt that will happen).

Now's a good time to oppose this bill:
http://www.brookers.co.nz/bills/new_bills/b061021. pdf

Particularly obnoxious is Section 226. Breaking a technological protection measure (TPM) even if only to play music you legally bought can land you in prison - unless you're one of the 'qualified' persons such as a librarian.

This blog I picked from a list of Google hits has a fair bit to say about the bill:
http://artemis.utdc.vuw.ac.nz:8000/pebble/2006/12/ 18/1166402040431.html

When I can't find a place to live without signing some horrible clause in a rental agreement that lets them up the rent without letting me move out, because every single rental agreement I have ever seen has this clause, there is a problem.

You've reminded me I've still got 12 cans in a box waiting to be drunk.... wait, make that 11 :-)

V is great, and insanely popular in New Zealand. One of the graduate compsci students here (VUW) produced the following unbiased comparison with Red Bull: V vs Red Bull, which you may find useful in deciding which energy drink to purchase.

I came across one a few months ago and reported it, and it still doesn't seem to've been fixed. (Bug 273851 in bugzilla, which I'm not linking to directly because bugzilla blocks slashdot referers.) There's a short and straightforward test case - try it out.

There's also a general bug that references all popup-blocker bugs. If you'd like to see all of those that've been reported, check out bug 176958.

I suspect it's a matter of time before annoying website developers start browsing bugzilla and taking advantages of the popup blocker bugs, if they're not already. Hopefully that'll provide some decent motivation to get them fixed.

I attended a lecture held by one of the members of this team about exactly this subject in 2001 at university.

He discussed how difficult the problem was and admitted that his research would probably not be incorporated into a rover design for at least ten years, considering NASA's necessary technological conservatism.

The problem includes continually adjusting torque independently for each of the six wheels and complex continuous decision-making based on remaining power, expected power usage for a particular task, and the value of the task to the scientists.

In other words, most of any rover's available power will be wasted until NASA incorporates this research.

I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.

The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.

I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.

The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.

It is actually possible to make good time travel stories. I just read an amazing one in Axiomatic by Greg Egan. Others, like 12 Monkeys and Heinlein's "All You Zombies" are at also entertaining and well-conceived. What ruins Star Trek is just bad writing, not time travel per se. Read this paper if you're really interested in the conceptual issues in Time Travel. It will make you hate that cheapo Star Trek crap even more, because you'll realize exactly why that "second time 'round" crap they always pull with time travel is completely incoherent.

What? Walk 10 metres? At my local university and and its affiliated college, all I need to do is go to a computer in a lab and use the right software. I could already be logged in to one, bugger the 10 metres.

(Note: it's against the statutes of the university and probably the college of education to do this. I don't do it myself.)

What? Walk 10 metres? At my local university and and its affiliated college, all I need to do is go to a computer in a lab and use the right software. I could already be logged in to one, bugger the 10 metres.

(Note: it's against the statutes of the university and probably the college of education to do this. I don't do it myself.)

What? Walk 10 metres? At my local university and and its affiliated college, all I need to do is go to a computer in a lab and use the right software. I could already be logged in to one, bugger the 10 metres.

(Note: it's against the statutes of the university and probably the college of education to do this. I don't do it myself.)

ESR - Is that you?

from http://slashdot.org/articles/03/06/08/1534249.shtm l?tid=99

don.g writes "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."

Much work has been done on delivering some sort of programming environment via a browser for early CS teaching purposes - one of the students in my honours year develped a system called JavanOwl which allowed users to type simple Java programs into a textbox, and used Aspect Oriented Programming to produce an animated GIF showing the program's runtime state over time.

My favourite example of postmodern papers is the Notes on postmodern programming. AFAIC they wrote it in order to get their tickets payed to a symposium. They could have been srious, but that's a rather scary though considering it includes one page with a hand drawn and rather irrelevant image.

Quite interesting and amusing though.

Ha! If you'd come to VUW (the university on a hillside overlooking the wellington CBD) earlier this year, you'd have been able to hear Milton Ngan from Weta talking about it.

Yet another excuse to plug Interface, the VUW Computer Club, which ran that event (or more accurately, took it over from the CS department): if you're a CS student at VUW, you really should become a member.

Ha! If you'd come to VUW (the university on a hillside overlooking the wellington CBD) earlier this year, you'd have been able to hear Milton Ngan from Weta talking about it.

Yet another excuse to plug Interface, the VUW Computer Club, which ran that event (or more accurately, took it over from the CS department): if you're a CS student at VUW, you really should become a member.

apparently so

You have to bow down before the might of the internet when it can not only tell you that "bags" and "shotgun" are playground slang for the same thing, but the relative likelihood of each one being used in different parts of New Zealand.

One of the CS graduate students here, while watching the Matrix Reloaded, thought it was so disappointing that he stayed in the theatre, but started looking up reviews of it with his phone, and SMSing us to tell us his opinion of it.

But the lack of phone wouldn't have helped the movie studios: he told us all the next day how disappointing it was, ad nauseum. Didn't help me, I'd seen the first midnight showing at The Embassy already :-(

1.8 SMS Feedback for Lecturers
The Internet has had a profound impact on the ability of individuals to communicate
globally. The advent of wireless technologies means that the ability to
communicate electronically is now seen as an anyone, anytime, anyplace activity.
This project proposes to explore the impact that integrating SMS feedback
into lecture teaching has on student engagement, levels of interaction, participation
and retention of key concepts. To undertake the study, we will develop
a software framework for lecture room computers that receives SMS message
input from students, and allows a lecturer to monitor, manage, and address the
input while the lecture is underway.

1.8 SMS Feedback for Lecturers
The Internet has had a profound impact on the ability of individuals to communicate
globally. The advent of wireless technologies means that the ability to
communicate electronically is now seen as an anyone, anytime, anyplace activity.
This project proposes to explore the impact that integrating SMS feedback
into lecture teaching has on student engagement, levels of interaction, participation
and retention of key concepts. To undertake the study, we will develop
a software framework for lecture room computers that receives SMS message
input from students, and allows a lecturer to monitor, manage, and address the
input while the lecture is underway.

You can also see my page of fractals, which has a few more.

For those of you who don't know, postscript is a stack-based language, like (apparently) Forth, or like HP RPM calculators. This makes it quite fun to program in :-)

It is good for drawing fractals (especially ones like the Sierpinski gasket which involve doing the same thing on smaller scales in different places) because of the types of drawing commands it has:

The basic command is to move the "current point" to some coordinate (x0,y0), and then draw a line (or curve) to another coordinate (x1, y1). But the interesting thing is that you can change the coordinate system: you can move the origin, or stretch the axes (not necessarily by the same amount in each direction), or rotate them.

So, for instance, you can do Sierpinski by writing a funciton to draw a triangle of one unit side length, then change the scale, move the axes to the appropriate places, and make three recursive calls. Easy...

The talk was co-run by Interface (the VUW Computer Club and ACM Student Chapter) and the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences.

If you're a VUW student and want us (Interface) to do more stuff like this, you should join us .

The talk was co-run by Interface (the VUW Computer Club and ACM Student Chapter) and the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences.

If you're a VUW student and want us (Interface) to do more stuff like this, you should join us .

Well, almost the whole MCS School at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand use it. And they have at least 150 Intel boxes running it. Thats where I first used it, and how I got into *NIX.

Not true... there are so many more factors to take into consideration when it comes to earthquakes. The depth, the type (rollers are much worse), the distance, etc.

I couldn't agree more.

We had a 6.9 here on the 21st of August last year, and people barely felt a thing. A few months before that there was a bigger one (somewhere in the 7's) that's unfortunately rolled off the linked page. Again, not much was felt at all.

There wasn't any notable damage in either of them. This could partly be put down to the very strict local building codes that are there in anticipation of a big Earthquake being due, but that hardly made a difference in these cases.

5.2 doesn't mean anything. There could be a very destructive 5.2 earthquake, or all the other factors could combine to make it almost invisible.

is a nearby CS department.

The one at my local university recently got rid of around ten SPARCstation 5s. One is sitting on my desk. (running Solaris, though, as I want to use the SunPC accelerator it has).

You have to be careful, though - the 170Mhz turbosparc in this isn't supported very well under linux - it froze in the middle of X - although OpenBSD worked quite nicely.

Y'know, this kind of crap doesn't help the Geek Community At Large overcome the image of being a bunch of fanatical morons

Hemos took a lot of liberty with my submission including changing the title as well as cutting of some technical analysis at the end of my submission.

Basically the gist of my submission was that Microsoft is taking a heavyhanded and incorrect approach to attempting to solve the problems with Outlook viruses and the like. Specifically, instead of coming up with some Draconian all-or-nothing security policy why not introduce more granular access levels to Whistler?

For example, I currently run ZoneAlarm and it prompts whenever a program I haven't given permission tries to access the Internet (in fact I found a Trojan this way). ZoneAlarm has three permission settings Always Deny, Always Allow, and Always Ask. I wouldn't mind seeing such functionality moved to the OS and made even more granular so that programs have very explicit permissions as to what they can do (similar to java.policy files). Outlook should not be able to tweak the registry nor delete files (via the ILOVEYOU virus) regardless of whether it is signed by Microsoft or not.

Basically I am proposing something similar to Access Control Lists for executables on the OS, after all, there already is a central repository of information (the registry) so adding that data shouldn't be too hard.

Second Law of Blissful Ignorance

I'm not sure what it's like in Europe, but one thing that becomes a lot more relevant as soon as you leave the US is the traffic cost of the net.

The vast majority of info is hosted in the US, which is why even at my university we have only very restricted access outside New Zealand, unless we're really nice to the sysadmins. If you want a better connection you have to pay extra for it, and the cost is usually traffic based.

At the library down the road from here the net is freely available (when it works), but it's not cheap for the city to pay for. I can completely understand why they want to restrict people from using services that are going to cause people to hang around and use what they probably don't need. If people want better access there are lots of cybercafe's up and down the road.

Email seems a bit over the top though.

___________________________________
Forwarded Message
Subj.: Virus Warning!
From: HOONOZE
To: All@msn.com
To: Jake5551212@aol.com
To: President@whitehouse.gov
To: Pope@vatican.va
To: 007@MI5.com
To: Flounder@fish.net
To: Etal@etc.com

************************************************** ****************
WARNING, CAUTION, DANGER, AND BEWARE!
Gullibility Virus Spreading over the Internet!
************************************************** ****************

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Institute for the Investigation of Irregular Internet Phenomena announced today that many Internet users are becoming infected by a new virus that causes them to believe without question every groundless story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their inbox or on their browser. The Gullibility Virus, as it is called, apparently makes people believe and forward copies of silly hoaxes relating to cookie recipes, email viruses, taxes on modems, and get-rich-quick schemes.

"These are not just readers of tabloids or people who buy lottery tickets based on fortune cookie numbers," a spokesman said. "Most are otherwise normal people, who would laugh at the same stories if told to them by a stranger on a street corner." However, once these same people become infected with the Gullibility Virus, they believe anything they read on the Internet.

"My immunity to tall tales and bizarre claims is all gone," reported one weeping victim. "I believe every warning message and sick child story my friends forward to me, even though most of the messages are anonymous."

Another victim, now in remission, added, "When I first heard about Good Times, I just accepted it without question. After all, there were dozens of other recipients on the mail header, so I thought the virus must be true." It was a long time, the victim said, before she could stand up at a Hoaxees Anonymous meeting and state, "My name is Jane, and I've been hoaxed." Now, however, she is spreading the word. "Challenge and check whatever you read," she says.

Internet users are urged to examine themselves for symptoms of the virus, which include the following:

• the willingness to believe improbable stories without thinking
• the urge to forward multiple copies of such stories to others
• a lack of desire to take three minutes to check to see if a story is true

T. C. is an example of someone recently infected. He told one reporter, "I read on the Net that the major ingredient in almost all shampoos makes your hair fall out, so I've stopped using shampoo." When told about the Gullibility Virus, T. C. said he would stop reading email, so that he would not become infected.

Anyone with symptoms like these is urged to seek help immediately. Experts recommend that at the first feelings of gullibility, Internet users rush to their favorite search engine and look up the item tempting them to thoughtless credence. Most hoaxes, legends, and tall tales have been widely discussed and exposed by the Internet community.

Courses in critical thinking are also widely available, and there is online help from many sources, including

• Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability at http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/CIACHoaxes.html
• Computer Virus Myths page at http://www.kumite.com/myths
• IBM's Hype Alert web site at http://www.av.ibm.com/BreakingNews/HypeAlert
• Symantec Anti Virus Research Center Hoax Page at http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/hoax.html
• Network Associates Virus Hoax Listing at http://www.nai.com/services/support/hoax/hoax.asp
• Dr. Solomons Hoax Page at http://www.drsolomon.com/vircen/vanalyse/va005.htm l
• The Urban Legends Web Site at http://www.urbanlegends.com
• Urban Legends Reference Pages at http://www.snopes.com
• Mining Company Urban Legends Page at http://urbanlegends.miningco.com
• Datafellows Hoax Warnings at http://www.Europe.Datafellows.com/news/hoax.htm

Those people who are still symptom free can help inoculate themselves against the Gullibility Virus by reading some good material on evaluating sources, such as

• Evaluating Internet Research Sources at http://www.sccu.edu/faculty/R_Harris/evalu8it.htm
• Evaluation of Information Sources at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm
• Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources at http://refserver.lib.vt.edu/libinst/critTHINK.HTM

Lastly, as a public service, Internet users can help stamp out the Gullibility Virus by sending copies of this message to anyone who forwards them a hoax.

************************************************** ****************
This message is so important, we're sending it anonymously! Forward it to all your friends right away! Don't think about it! This is not a chain letter! This story is true! Don't check it out! This story is so timely, there is no date on it! This story is so important, we're using lots of exclamation points! For every message you forward to some unsuspecting person, the Home for the Hopelessly Gullible will donate ten cents to itself. (If you wonder how the Home will know you are forwarding these messages all over creation, you're obviously thinking too much.)
************************************************** ****************

ACT NOW! DON'T DELAY! LIMITED TIME! NOT SOLD IN ANY STORE!

Home Page of Robert Harris | SCC Home Page
Robert Harris is Professor of English at Southern California College. RHarris@sccu.edu


I keep it around for just this purpose
Mark