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I haven't used Pine for 12 years or so, but this feels like the folks writing to say that old Rover is gone...

I haven't used Pine for 12 years or so, but this feels like the folks writing to say that old Rover is gone...

Its a nice email client, but the license is restrictive:

http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html

I can understand why you would think the guy was a crackpot if he was on Art Bell. Had I not been familiar with his work and theories beforehand I'd probably have the same knee jerk impression. Not having heard the interivew I can't comment on if he sounded "crazy" or not :) but I've been very interested in his Transactional Interpretation of Quantum for quite some time having come across it while I was researching Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in grad school. I even came across it recently as a well known physicist's (Lee Smolin I think, the loop quantum gravity guy, although I guess the Super String guys would consider him a crackpot :) favored interpretation in a mainstream physics book I just read.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti/
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/no de2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cramer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpr etation

I'd suggest you guys also look into the controversy over the various interpretations of QM among physicsists nowadays. Hell how anyone ever thought Copenhagen made any sense is beyond me. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_qua ntum_mechanics

I can understand why you would think the guy was a crackpot if he was on Art Bell. Had I not been familiar with his work and theories beforehand I'd probably have the same knee jerk impression. Not having heard the interivew I can't comment on if he sounded "crazy" or not :) but I've been very interested in his Transactional Interpretation of Quantum for quite some time having come across it while I was researching Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in grad school. I even came across it recently as a well known physicist's (Lee Smolin I think, the loop quantum gravity guy, although I guess the Super String guys would consider him a crackpot :) favored interpretation in a mainstream physics book I just read.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti/
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/no de2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cramer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpr etation

I'd suggest you guys also look into the controversy over the various interpretations of QM among physicsists nowadays. Hell how anyone ever thought Copenhagen made any sense is beyond me. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_qua ntum_mechanics

Oh awesome, this is guy that came up with the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which is an alternative interpretative of quantum mechanics (and my personal favorite!) based on Wheeler-Feynman's absorber theory of Electrodynamics involving waves going both forward and backward in time (half-retarded, half-advanced, which he explains in his Lectures on Physics). Originally Cramer only proposed it as a teaching tool that gives the same answers as other interpretations, but I guess he's now trying to find experimental evidence that would actually distinguish it from the others.

The Transactional Interpretation makes *much* more sense than Copenhagen in my opinion (I still dig the Many Worlds interpretation though). Time symmetric theories like this also seem to the answer the question as to why there is an arrow of time. The laws of physics are completely time symmetric. For example, both "retarded" (those going forward in time) and "advanced" (going backward in time) waves are solutions for the electromagnetic wave equation, but the advanced ones are just "thrown out" for being unphysical because "obviously" you don't see waves converging onto an accelerating particle anymore than an egg will reassemble itself after being dropped, despite the fact neither is prohibited by the laws of physics. In these theories the direction of time is determined by the boundary conditions of the universe at it's beginning and end.

Feynman worked out the math in his absorber theory and found that if the universe where a "perfect future absorber" meaning all the waves sent into the future were cancelled all the advanced waves would be cancelled out except at the point of origin, so you never see them and the universe would have a defined arrow of time. In this theory when you push an electron it sends out waves which interact with every other particle in the universe that then send waves back in time to push on the electron at the exact instance you start pushing on it. In the transactional interpretation, there are these "offer" waves and "transactions" that work similary to entangle particles and give the "spooky action at a distance". In no case is information ever sent superluminarly (i.e. faster than light) or acausally. IMHO it also makes the universe appropriately "Machian" as well.

Check it out, very cool stuff:

http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti/
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/no de2.html

Oh awesome, this is guy that came up with the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which is an alternative interpretative of quantum mechanics (and my personal favorite!) based on Wheeler-Feynman's absorber theory of Electrodynamics involving waves going both forward and backward in time (half-retarded, half-advanced, which he explains in his Lectures on Physics). Originally Cramer only proposed it as a teaching tool that gives the same answers as other interpretations, but I guess he's now trying to find experimental evidence that would actually distinguish it from the others.

The Transactional Interpretation makes *much* more sense than Copenhagen in my opinion (I still dig the Many Worlds interpretation though). Time symmetric theories like this also seem to the answer the question as to why there is an arrow of time. The laws of physics are completely time symmetric. For example, both "retarded" (those going forward in time) and "advanced" (going backward in time) waves are solutions for the electromagnetic wave equation, but the advanced ones are just "thrown out" for being unphysical because "obviously" you don't see waves converging onto an accelerating particle anymore than an egg will reassemble itself after being dropped, despite the fact neither is prohibited by the laws of physics. In these theories the direction of time is determined by the boundary conditions of the universe at it's beginning and end.

Feynman worked out the math in his absorber theory and found that if the universe where a "perfect future absorber" meaning all the waves sent into the future were cancelled all the advanced waves would be cancelled out except at the point of origin, so you never see them and the universe would have a defined arrow of time. In this theory when you push an electron it sends out waves which interact with every other particle in the universe that then send waves back in time to push on the electron at the exact instance you start pushing on it. In the transactional interpretation, there are these "offer" waves and "transactions" that work similary to entangle particles and give the "spooky action at a distance". In no case is information ever sent superluminarly (i.e. faster than light) or acausally. IMHO it also makes the universe appropriately "Machian" as well.

Check it out, very cool stuff:

http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti/
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/no de2.html

IAAP, and this point of view (that in standard quantum mechanics no information is transmitted superluminally) is entirely correct. This will just be one more shoddy example of science reporting in a very very long line. The only question here is who got their basic facts wrong?

The physicist in question really ought to know better. Did he lie to the reporters in order to get press for his experiment?

The newspaper ought to have done some basic fact-checking; reading Wikipedia would be enough to figure things out in this case. Did they lie to the public to make the story more interesting?

So let's do some digging. The physicist in question is a proponent of the "transactional interpretation" of quantum mechanics (not coincidentally invented by this same guy). In this interpretation, particles may send signals back in time that "handshake" with other particles in the past; however, they do so in such a way that ordinary causality is always correct. See, for example, Cramer's paper at http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/qm_nl.ht ml where he says:

Can quantum nonlocality be used for faster-than-light or backward-in-time communication? Perhaps, for example, a message could be telegraphed from one measurement site of the EPR experiment to the other through a judicious choice of which measurement was performed. The simple answer to this question is "No!"

So that seems to answer that question. However, he goes on to muddy the water by suggesting that quantum mechanics as verified by every experiment to date is actually very slightly wrong, that quantum theory is actually slightly nonlinear. In that case, the delicate conservation of our usual notion of causality will break down and superluminal signals become possible again. Virtually nobody believes this is the case, but I suppose that shouldn't stop us from checking just to be sure. After all, sometimes what nobody believes still turns out to be true.

The blame here (as so very often) must fall on the reporters. Let's examine some of their shoddy work:

The problem with quantum theory, put simply, is that it's really weird.

That's not a problem with quantum theory; it's a problem with what you think is weird.

One of the paradoxes of interest to Cramer is known as "entanglement." It's also known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, named for the three scientists who described its apparent absurdity as an argument against quantum theory.

Like the twin paradox, this is not a paradox at all. Quantum mechanics predicts something. EPR say, "Hey, that sounds weird and wrong." Experiment verifies quantum mechanics. Once again, the problem is with what is perceived as being "normal", not with quantum theory.

If one of the entangled photon's trajectory tilts up, the other one, no matter how distant, will tilt down to compensate.

This one is the core conceptual problem with the whole article. It should read:

If one of the entangled photon's trajectories is measured to be up, the other one, no matter how distant, if measured will be measured to be down.

That doesn't sound very weird at all, which is why reporters persist in getting it wrong. People like to think quantum mechanics is weirder than it is; it adds some kind of mystical aura to the whole thing. But the universe is plenty weird and interesting even when you get all your facts right. I hope eventually the popular writing on quantum theory will reflect that.

Prof. Cramer home is here and the quoted article could be this one. It's a little bit older than expected!

Prof. Cramer home is here and the quoted article could be this one. It's a little bit older than expected!

We've come a long way in the past 30 years in compiler theory and language design. We can do better than C without losing speed. Or even use a whole OS in a restricted language. You can do compile-time checking of your pointers, as Spin proves.

C is, essentially, portable assembly language. I love it -- it's one of the languages I know the best, and I continue to work in it. However, I'd love to see the use of Cyclone or special compile-time checked languages for the essentials. I think most device drivers could be easily rewritten to be bullet-proof (stack overflow) this way, and such languages are easier to do state machine analysis on (since most device drivers are simple pieces of software that control the state of the hardware). Provably correct operating system design is not a theory, but no one seems to be interested.

pine is a news and email reader. http://www.washington.edu/pine/

A. n.

        I. Simple uses.

        1. The action or an act of killing.

Nah, nuclear pollution does not need to be long lived. Nuclear pollution is defined by a thing called "half life" and it depends entirely on the isotope we are talking about. So, yes, Uranium 235 is still very radioactive after a few *million* years. However, Cesium 134 lost half of it's radioactivity after not even a year. Check it out for yourself. Look at Strontium 82 for example... Some half life times are in the sub-second range, but perhaps one can't really call those "pollution" anymore.

just for the record: the post claims that ``the storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform"'' but this is quite misworded. Indeed if you look into the original research project, you see that ``the algorithm performs a wavelet transform on every image, and then collects just the few largest coefficients from this transform''.

Oh for heaven's sake! That is so misleading. The large waveform that is shown is an earthquake in the Philippine Islands that is over 100 times larger than the nuke (magnitude 6 as opposed to 4) and 9 hours _later_. The nuke is buried in the background noise about halfway up the page. The only seismic station the GSN (global seismic network) that recording anything significant is MDJ in China:

http://www.iris.washington.edu/cgi-bin/wilberII_En O_page4.pl?evname=20061009_013527.0.spyder

• 1GB iPod nano = $79
  
• 2GB iPod nano = $99
  
• 4GB iPod nano = $149
  
• 30GB iPod = $199
  
• 60GB iPod = $249

They do have robot controlled surgery here..
http://depts.washington.edu/drrpt/2003/stories/cli nicleadership/robotic.html

They are used primarily in small area's like brain surgery, and where collateral nerve damage is critical and can be kept to a minimum.

I'm a professional mathematician, I was an assistant professor of
math at Harvard 2000-20005, and I know Yau from many
discussions about research with him then. I've read both the
New Yorker article and Yau's (lawyer's) letter. I think the New Yorker
article is a typical example of sensationalist journalism; moreover it
harms mathematics research by misunderstanding and misrepresenting
mathematics culture on many levels.

The New Yorker article left me with a very bad feeling that it simply
wasn't right, was completely unfair, and that it didn't at all describe
the person I know. In contrast, the letter from Yau is consistent
with what I know.

That Yau, his co-workers (and others) stepped up to write complete
details of a proof of the Poincaire conjecture is good for mankind and
good for mathematics. The article makes their work out to be some
sort of power grab; they did *extremeley* hard work
that very few people in the world are capable of, and which will be
appreciated by numerous mathematicians and student.

  -- William; http://sage.math.washington.edu/

http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/spe nce.html

The actual content of the education itself seems to be rather irrelevant, it's mainly an exercise in branding.

On Panther it really is pico, not nano. Or perhaps something you did with Darwinports or Fink replaced pico...

I'm sorry, but the current shipping version of Mac OS X is Tiger, not Panther. Let me put it this way: The latest version of Mac OS X 10.4.7 (Intel) — you know... the one that ships with my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro — comes with nano installed, not Pico. Further, the Mac OS X 10.4.7 (PowerPC) that's installed on my Power Mac G4 came with nano, not pico. Once again, there is a static link from /usr/bin/pico to the binary for nano.

But please, don't just take my word for it. You will find nano, not Pico, on this list.

To my knowledge, it's always been this way, and it's probably for the same reason that Pico doesn't ship with the Debian Linux distribution. Pine/Pico don't actually have a fully free license, which severely complicates matters when distributing them commercially.

More information on the concept of Personal Rapid Transit sytems is available here for your enjoyment. The The Advanced Transit Association is an industry organization with many members from the PRT industry. The organization has a History of Personal Rapid Transit available.

These have typically gone by the name of PRT - "Personal Rapid Transit" systems. Google it for a lot more information on what these systems can ultimately achieve.

Back in the 70s, the big systems companies (later to be consumed by Raytheon, Boeing, etc.) was working on these mass transit systems to improve on some of the deficiencies of existing busses, subways, light rail, cars, taxicabs, etc. Ultimately they got out of the business by the 80s... I suppose municipalities aren't very visionary about such things, and it's probably much easier to just pour money into building more roads and federally-funded highways and pass/hide the vehicle costs to people to buy and maintain cars and not bother worrying about traffic congestion or pollution.

Anyway, there are a handful of PRT companies today (Ultra, Skytran, Taxi2000) still trying to push these systems out. Unfortunately, they seem responsible for lots of astroturf propaganda sites that all look and sound exactly the same. But ultimately, the decision to fund and build such broad advanced and integrated municipal systems are highly political. Yuck, politics.

So the only systems that seem to have a chance of being deployed are targetted towards campuses and airports. The only PRT-like thing in existence is a little 3-station tram system built by Boeing for WVU http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/morg.htm

But looks like Ultra is finally succeeding in putting more modern systems in Dubai and Heathrow. It's kinda ironic that these campus transit systems are primarily designed to shuttle people to and from a car parking lot :P

Oh well, one of these days we might have something that look and function a bit more like the PRT as shown in films like Minority Report. But it will take some visionary public officials to make it a priority, as well as some visionary systems engineering to define interface standards so the system can be smoothly maintained and upgraded over the decades. At least high fuel prices and increasing concern with environmentalism and sustainability may actually raise the public consciousness about this soon.

That is the normal range for velocities of propagation of acoustic and elastic waves through rocks. Qualitative table at http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~braile/edumod/waves/Wav eDemo.htm . For a typical cross-section through crust (output from seismic tomography) check http://www.ess.washington.edu/SEIS/PNSN/REPTS/Sum9 7/G03084B.jpg . Look at the color scale on the left for values.

I use Pine for my email. For those who don't know, it's a text-based email client, primary for unix, but there is a port for windows. Aside from being fast, simple & reliable, it doesn't show fonts, colors, images, and html crap. Since it is so simple, it is extremely secure.

When I show it to people, they often get annoyed that their carefully crafted html email with stationery, images, & fonts gets rendered to simple text.

Frankly, if you can't convey your message with text, you don't have much to say.

Give Pine a try. Unfortunately, I think there are only about a dozen users :)

http://dub.washington.edu/denim/

It's like paper prototyping, but without the paper!

Java tool, optimized for tablets though. http://dub.washington.edu/projects/denim/

It is really hard to build new Hydro plants because people are concerned about the environmental impact. When I livedin the northwest, I heard lots of talk about people wanting to get rid of the hydro dams because they believe it would be beneficial to salmon. (This seems NUTS to me.)

I would wager that you are only saying this because you did not hear the entire argument. What the "environmentalists" have proposed is simply breaching some of the lower-river dams. This would not impact electrical output very much, as these dams do not even begin to approach the size of some of the behemoths further upriver.

Taken from Save Our Wild Salmon. (It seems that this group is largely, but not entirely, funded by fishing groups.)

We focus our efforts on the Columbia and Snake River Basins, where in the time of Lewis and Clark up to 16 million wild salmon returned each year. Today, as few as ten thousand salmon return home to the Snake River. Our current priority is an exciting national campaign to restore these endangered salmon and steelhead by partially removing four dams on the lower Snake River, which in turn will restore the Pacific Northwest's wild salmon and free-flowing rivers as vital economic engines for local communities.

It's not like they're going to get rid of Grand Coolee or Chief Joseph.

I did a quick google search, here are some websites that give a little more information on the subject:

Center For Columbia River History

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

Oregon State University

University of Washington

I recognise that environmentalist/ism are politically charged words in the Northwest. I grew up in an area that was absolutely devastated by the whole spotted owl and anti-logging fiasco. I completely understand why people are skeptical. However, this is a very real issue that needs more level-headed public discourse.

Cramer is also the guy who developed the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

IANAP, alas, but if I understand it properly, it explains the weirdness such as the two-slit experiment and Schroedinger's Cat.

I wonder if this geotagging could be combined with this photo tourism technology?

Furthermore, perhaps these photo tourism 3D reconstructions could then be combined with google earth so you could literally browse the planet.

Neato.

It's interesting that you picked the SSC for your example.

John Cramer (a physics professor at the University of Washington) wrote a book entitled Einstein's Bridge. It's what he calls "hard science fiction", about how the SSC was actually built and resulted in an invasion by a hostile intelligence. The protagonists somehow travel back in time and manipulate the political process so that the SSC is never built.

The fire crippled many research and public service programs supported by mainstream environmental groups. For example, approximately one-fourth of the world's supply of an endangered plant species, the showy stickseed, went up in flames. [...] Slides and research material on the recovery of Mount St. Helens after its 1980 eruption were destroyed in the fire. Public outreach programs sponsored by WSU Extension-King County, including coordinating master gardeners and pea-patch gardens for the working poor, were also harmed.

I thought that must have been a typo. But nope, these assholes burned down a $4.1 million research facility that was breeding trees because one of the researches was working with genetically engineered samples in the lab. Not releasing them into the environment. Just looking at them in the lab. Unbelievable. They're lucky no one was hurt, or worse.

Vegan advocates love to trot this out in their "fact-sheets", and it's always interesting to see which particular Pimental source they use. It's like they draw it out of a hat or something, because it's always a different citation (same author, same factoid, but worded ever-so-slightly differently). A long while back I tracked down the article it was from (at the time) here. (pdf) That one is from 1997, I believe. There is also a 2004 edition. (another darn pdf)
Now for the quote-mining:

The average precipitation for most continents is about 700 mm/yr (7 million liters/ha/yr)

The water required by food and forage crops ranges from 600 to 3,000 liters of water per kilogram (dry) of crop yield (Table 2). For instance, a hectare of U.S. corn, with a yield of approximately 9,000 kg/ha, transpires about 6 million liters per hectare of water during the growing season (Benham, 1998; Palmer, 2001), while an additional 1 to 2.5 million liters/ha of soil moisture evaporate into the atmosphere (Donahue et al., 1990; Desborough et al., 1996). This means that about 800 mm (8 million liters/ha) of rainfall are required during the growing season for corn production. Even with 800 to 1,000 mm of annual rainfall in the U.S. Corn-Belt region, corn frequently suffers from insufficient water during the critical summer growing period (Troeh and Thompson, 1993).

For open rangeland (instead of confined feedlot production), from 120 kg to 200 kg of forage are required to produce 1 kg of beef. This amount of forage requires 120,000 liters to 200,000 liters of water per kilogram of beef (Thomas, 1987; Dorsett, 2003; Rangeland, 1994). Beef cattle can be produced on rangeland, but a minimum of 200 mm per year of rainfall are needed[*] (Hays and White, 1998).

As I recall from my childhood when my grandfather was raising cattle, he never irrigated. And even though he doesn't have cattle anymore, he still grows and cuts hay for his neighbors who do. No irrigation. But it would be rather disingenuous to point out how much water that actually uses vs. how much it would have required to produce a comparable amount of a given crop (assuming it could survive the heat and the depredations of the deer, hogs, rabbits, etc). The water requirement for the former is spread out over a larger area and can be met by limited rainfall with the proper selection of grasses, but for the latter it is not spread out and would most certainly require additional input. It's therefore a more efficient use of the land and water resources, and not at all "wasteful and irresponsible". Quite unlike "Vegsource".

Um, yeah, I know, I was just pointing out that other technologies available to humans besides "exploding bombs behind the spacecraft" can lift similar amounts. The one I linked to basically uses a nuclear reaction to heat up hydrogen, which can't be made radioactive, and spewing that out the back. Great for liftoff from Earth.

For operation in space, I think you're referring to this, which has highly radioactive exhaust but a wonderful ISP.

Then again, a campaign to get rid of the accents above letters in european languages and replace them with the letters or letter combinations that sound exactly like them wouldn't go amiss either.

Accents are actually the best solution we have available for the problem they solve.

In english, we use 6 symbols for vowels. American english has at least 15 distinct vowel sounds. We have multiple ways of spelling each of those vowel sounds, and no agreement on which vowel sounds are represented by which spellings.

Languages that have a separate symbol (vowel character with accent mark) for each vowel sound are definately a step up on us.

(ref: http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources /newstart.html )

You know the old saying... If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.

http://techfee.washington.edu/proposals/2006-110

Yes, that says $24,000 just for the hardware. Software is another $4,000.

• They used a 3.4 GHz computer.
• The Notre Dame example took two weeks to compute.
• only 597 of the 2635 images were used, the rest was discarded.

• They used a 3.4 GHz computer.
• The Notre Dame example took two weeks to compute.
• only 597 of the 2635 images were used, the rest was discarded.

I agree with Erich Schubert's blog post (http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/2006073102-micro soft-vapourware, found via http://planet.debian.org/) that it's more vapour than some E3 "rendered in-game" footage. Citing the UWash Photo Tour (http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/) whose technology ultimately makes up PhotoSynth, the processing power required is of the scale of two weeks to place 597 of 2635 images using a 3.4 GHz P4. I doubt that too many home computers will have the grunt to do that on a reasonable time-scale before the end of the decade. I expect it will be a serviceon Microsoft Live, where you submit the pictures and use a viewer.

This is based on research at University of Washington called Photo Tour. They have a video (mov, wmv) for the paper being presented tomorrow at SIGGRAPH that gives a much better feel for how the tours are automatically created from photos (showing Trebi Fountain, Notre Dame, Yosemite, and the Great Wall)-- it's very cool.

This is based on research at University of Washington called Photo Tour. They have a video (mov, wmv) for the paper being presented tomorrow at SIGGRAPH that gives a much better feel for how the tours are automatically created from photos (showing Trebi Fountain, Notre Dame, Yosemite, and the Great Wall)-- it's very cool.

This is based on research at University of Washington called Photo Tour. They have a video (mov, wmv) for the paper being presented tomorrow at SIGGRAPH that gives a much better feel for how the tours are automatically created from photos (showing Trebi Fountain, Notre Dame, Yosemite, and the Great Wall)-- it's very cool.

Check out the demos here, similar application, also very interesting: http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

We need to stop looking at ancient fossils, we need to go and ask the only living relative of this creature just what they were for and how they looked.

This reptile was clearly the ancestor of MC Hammer.

Back in reality now (after a cold shower) some Bats have practically identical skin flaps between their legs even nowadays.

As for diving into the fossil records, we should be trying to model our aircraft on living birds and bats and insects, at least then we don't need a computer to guess how it should work. I would rather put my trust into something when there are plenty of study models to base a design from, not a single sample guestimate.

We can already soar like an eagle perhaps we need the manoeuvrability of a bat for urban airports?

According to this website on paleoclimatology, there are some long period weather oscillations such as:

the El Niño -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - 6 to 18 months,

the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - 20 to 30 years

the Pacific-North American Oscillation (PNA) - 3 to 10 years

the The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO - 5 to 10 years

the Artic Oscillation (AO)- 5 to 10 years

the Antartic Oscillation (AAO) - 5 to 10 years

Paleoclimatologists have the records of weather condifions going back thousands of years using information such as tree rings, snow, lava, and seed deposits.

If the researchers could develop a long timescale atmospheric simulator that could replicate this data, then maybe they could predict general trends 30 years into the
future. Although unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanos) make things
bit harder, although they will probably run a large number of possible scenarios
before making any conclusions.

According to this website on paleoclimatology, there are some long period weather oscillations such as:

the El Niño -Southern Oscillation (ENSO) - 6 to 18 months,

the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - 20 to 30 years

the Pacific-North American Oscillation (PNA) - 3 to 10 years

the The North Atlantic Oscillation NAO - 5 to 10 years

the Artic Oscillation (AO)- 5 to 10 years

the Antartic Oscillation (AAO) - 5 to 10 years

Paleoclimatologists have the records of weather condifions going back thousands of years using information such as tree rings, snow, lava, and seed deposits.

If the researchers could develop a long timescale atmospheric simulator that could replicate this data, then maybe they could predict general trends 30 years into the
future. Although unpredictable events such as earthquakes and volcanos) make things
bit harder, although they will probably run a large number of possible scenarios
before making any conclusions.

Unless your system is 100% proven for all inputs (of the input classes you are using), there is the possibility that an attacker can feed an input for which your program's state machine does not halt (and, instead, goes into other states, perhaps escalating privileges or otherwise doing anything).

So this means you either have completely disconnected systems, or you only use things like Spin which are provably correct.

Here are some good papers about Google's technologies:
Sawzall (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce)
MapReduce (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.)
GFS (Google's File System)
Google's Cluster (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)
BigTable (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)

And here are some videos:
The Google Linux Cluster. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things.
Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny).
Perspectives on the Information Industry. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt.
BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).

Andrew

Here are some good papers about Google's technologies:
Sawzall (simplified scripting on top of MapReduce)
MapReduce (Google's massively parallel system based on the concept found in functional programming. The system takes care of managing jobs, parallelism, and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to more quickly produce code.)
GFS (Google's File System)
Google's Cluster (An older paper describing how Google's search cluster works. The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)
BigTable (Google's semi-structured database. There haven't been any papers released, but this is my write up based on a talk given in October 2005.)

And here are some videos:
The Google Linux Cluster. This is an older video where Urs Hoelzle talks about their system and focuses more on the hardware side of things.
Google: A Behind-the-scenes Look. Jeff Dean gives an overview of most of the technologies mentioned in papers above. I thought the demonstration of Google's internal word clustering was interesting (and funny).
Perspectives on the Information Industry. This is a technology-light (IIRC) talk given by Eric Schmidt.
BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System. The talk from which I created my BigTables notes (above).

Andrew