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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 The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)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 The cluster described in this paper is a few generations out of date.)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

First, the Rosetta method, despite being the best ab initio protein structure prediction algorithm, is still a long way from being able to produce structures that are of practical use to anyone.

Umm, that sounds like a reason to support the project. If it's a good algorithm then anything that might refine or improve it so that we do eventually produce structures of practical use sounds great. Maybe there are algorithms giving better results now, but 1) most (if not all) of those are not available to me via BOINC--so I can't help those interested in pursuing those algorithms (at least not with spare processor cycles) and 2) that an algorithm produces better results today is no indication that the Rosetta algorithm might not produce better results in the future--in part because of the application of LOTS of processor cycles to refine and improve the algorithm.

Also, for a non-specialist, like most of those considering contributing spare processor cycles, there is always a limit to how much investigation one can do into the worthiness of one's chosen projects. BOINC allows one to mitigate this problem by allowing one to share cycles across several projects, so that the person without the time or ability to evaluate the worthiness of a project's claims can simply throw a little seed all around and see where it grows.

But further, you particularly attack Baker's scientific claims (without sufficient evidence or even a signature to back them up--I think several of your claims about the project are just simply false), but the best a non-specialist can do when evaluating a scientist's work is to rely on the reactions of the scientific community, particularly that scientist's peers. This can be best measured by whether the scientist is affiliated with a reputable institution, such as a major University (Baker is at U Washington), the amount of peer-reviewed funding such a person gets, and the amount of peer-reviewed publication that person produces. Baker seems to be doing well in peer-reviewed scientific publications as displayed here: Publications and Baker's lab gets grants from the NIH, NSF, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Those journals and foundations have qualified scientists looking at the work and if they're willing to publish the results and give the lab money, then the average BOINC user who is not a specialist in the field, is justified in throwing them a few cycles. (It certainly would be more rational than deciding not to support the project based on the vague claims of someone who only identifies themself as "a scientist" on Slashdot.)

Finally you attack the entire enterprise of linking folded proteins to cures for diseases. Sure this may be unworkable at present, but, again, isn't that the point of supporting the research!? I know the likelihood of using protein research to cure diseases if no one does protein research: ZERO! So if we contribute to some research that even marginally improves those odds, that's better than what I was doing with those spare cycles before: nothing.

There was a successful AHS demonstration I believe in the 1930's, and most recently a successful demonstration in 1998. (another report)

Congress thought the successful experiment was kind of neat, but shut it down, basically saying: "Nobody's really asking for this. People seem to be pretty excited about driving, actually." (paraphrasing.)

Businesses have wanted AHS for a very long time- for many decades, they've been working on the technology, and trying to get it sorted out. (Think: highway trucking.)

What's this have to do with Cell Phones?

People are starting to value their time more. In particular, they're starting to view that car trip as useable time. Whether people really do have access to that time or not, people are taking that time, by force, with their cell phone. And the result is: crashes, accidents.

So this may be a data point towards AHS.

Where is Goldwater when the Republicans really need him.

Still quite dead, I'm sure. And only democrats vote for dead people.

Being fat isn't genetic either; parents teach thier poor habits to their children, who go on to teach them to thier children.

there is strong evidence from both human and animal studies indicating that genes also contribute to the development of obesity.

Genetics is a major determinant of obesity, however, little is known about specific genes that contribute to obesity

You link looks broken, but this description (where it is called the "Guide Wave Interpretation") points out that it is incompatible with Bell's inequality.

For a pretty thorough discussion of various interpretations, have a look at the containing article.

You link looks broken, but this description (where it is called the "Guide Wave Interpretation") points out that it is incompatible with Bell's inequality.

For a pretty thorough discussion of various interpretations, have a look at the containing article.

Note on terminology

There is a growing concern among womyn that there are important gender issues with the English language. As a result, it became common to use terms such as "chairperson" instead of "chairman". In this manual we will use the words person, per, pers and perself. These words are used just like the words she, her, hers, herself. For example, we will say: "person wrote a manual to feel good about perself, and to encourage per potential significant other's heart to become pers". These terms were introduced, and perhaps invented, by Marge Piercy, and have been first used in software documentation and email correspondance by Richard Stallman. By using these terms, we hope to make this manual less threatening to womyn and to encourage our womyn readers to join the free software community.

You have to be "in control" of the domain you want a cert for, that is you have to be able to receive mail at root@domain or what the username was. This reflects in the cert that you get, i.e. the only field that is going to be filled is the common name, as that is the only piece that CAcert can verify (sans DNS spoofing to take over a domain for a short time to intercept mail to root@domain).

To get more details in the cert, like organization, you have to take additional steps to get your identity verified, like meeting someone in person.

Apart from that, no CA "checks the validity" of any site. All a CA does is bind a key to a common name, that is a name that has some specific semantics a web browser can verify, AKA a fully-qualified domain name.

If there is a ligitimate site www.onlinebank.com and you manage to register a phishing domain online-bank.com, then any CA will most likely give you a cert for it, since they only verify that online-bank.com belongs to you. Whether that site is in conflict with another site is totally out of the scope of a CA. I think this "problem" is mostly unknown to people. They assume "cert == legitimate site" and automatically trust the site itself.

There was an article on /. regarding this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/214 3251 Basically, what the evil guys were doing was to grab a domain name (mountain-america.net) that looked similar to a bank's domain name (mtnamerica.com) and then get a cert for it. Which was totally ok, since the domain in fact belonged to them. The problem was that people who got hit by the phish basically had no idea what the real bank's domain was. And that was their problem. It's not the CA's task to only sign "legitimate" domain names or to tell people which domain names bank x uses.

To say it again: All a CA does is bind a key to a name, making sure that the person presenting the key in fact controls the name.

I found the course at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/ to be very enlightening, especially the lecture by Brian LaMacchia at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/asx/csep590tu_8_2.asx which deals with exactly this problem: What do certificates and PKI do and who trusts what?

You have to be "in control" of the domain you want a cert for, that is you have to be able to receive mail at root@domain or what the username was. This reflects in the cert that you get, i.e. the only field that is going to be filled is the common name, as that is the only piece that CAcert can verify (sans DNS spoofing to take over a domain for a short time to intercept mail to root@domain).

To get more details in the cert, like organization, you have to take additional steps to get your identity verified, like meeting someone in person.

Apart from that, no CA "checks the validity" of any site. All a CA does is bind a key to a common name, that is a name that has some specific semantics a web browser can verify, AKA a fully-qualified domain name.

If there is a ligitimate site www.onlinebank.com and you manage to register a phishing domain online-bank.com, then any CA will most likely give you a cert for it, since they only verify that online-bank.com belongs to you. Whether that site is in conflict with another site is totally out of the scope of a CA. I think this "problem" is mostly unknown to people. They assume "cert == legitimate site" and automatically trust the site itself.

There was an article on /. regarding this: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/214 3251 Basically, what the evil guys were doing was to grab a domain name (mountain-america.net) that looked similar to a bank's domain name (mtnamerica.com) and then get a cert for it. Which was totally ok, since the domain in fact belonged to them. The problem was that people who got hit by the phish basically had no idea what the real bank's domain was. And that was their problem. It's not the CA's task to only sign "legitimate" domain names or to tell people which domain names bank x uses.

To say it again: All a CA does is bind a key to a name, making sure that the person presenting the key in fact controls the name.

I found the course at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/ to be very enlightening, especially the lecture by Brian LaMacchia at http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/asx/csep590tu_8_2.asx which deals with exactly this problem: What do certificates and PKI do and who trusts what?

are publicly accessible.

check out
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/course-webs .html

Most of them probably don't have a free text book though... but it's still cheaper than tuition. Generally lecture slides are there too. I don't know if they put these pages together with public consumption in mind though.

btw, speaking as a student, the UW is an excellent school for computer science.

I guess I should take a closer look before I post things. There already is a podcast link: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse p590/06wi/lectures/podcast.xml -L

In the past, as I'm sure most here know, encryption software was considered to be munitions. I actually purchased the Zimmerman book that was just PGP in source code format at the UW bookstore. The idea at the time was how can you control a book? Now, I know that laws have changed, and the US has relaxed its stance on this. Most distributions of GNU/Linux have SSH included.

This is fresh in my mind because I recently created a specialized GNU/Linux distribution and debated about whether or not to include SSL and SSH. Although I knew the status of this software had changed, I could not find any definitive regulations regarding crypto software. Certainly the last four years don't make me any less paranoid about getting burned by making a mistake here. There is a good presentation that specifically talks about these issues here in TFA. Yes, it does talk about how the munitions stance has relaxed, but I'm still not entirely sure that I don't have to notify some government agency that I'm including encryption if I distribute the root filesystem in binary form.

"Free" as in "all the material is in proprietary Presenter/PDF/PowerPoint/WMV/WebViewer/MP3 and all of the instructors work for Microsoft".

"Free" as in "all the material is in proprietary Presenter/PDF/PowerPoint/WMV/WebViewer/MP3 and all of the instructors work for Microsoft".

Winter '06 was actually our second crypto class for UW PMP; lectures and materials from when Josh Benaloh and I taught crypto in Winter '02 are also available on-line. The material covered in the two courses is similar (we added material on cryptanalysis in '06 and updated the existing material). If you're working through the course at home you might find it helpful to work through the '02 assignments as well.

Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washingtons Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft.

Just what does a software company need a Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group for anyway? Gobal FUD? Creepy, and she's got a long history of M$ apologies and FUD to her name. Let's review,

• Not embarrassed by M$ virus penetration of Pentagon systems or disruption of NASA communications endagering the Space Shuttle and five months before the 9/11 attacks she tells us not to worry about cyber terrorists because the mighty M$ can deal with such unskilled attackers through patches., " time and access one needs to create a devastating attack, like crashing an airplane. In "Six Nightmares," Lake doesn't consider the checks that protect infrastructure from such threats. He also fails to ask an obvious question: If there are so many malicious hackers at work (19 million, by Lake's count), why have their attacks been, by and large, fairly innocuous?" M$ forsight. Let's review what happened next:
  • 9/11 demonstrated to the world that there were indeed many well organized terrorists wanting to harm US citizens and how venerable rescue efforts were to disruption of communications.
  • US Government drafts defense plan
  • Chinese attack plans are revealed by the CIA
  • Still M$ languishes and languishes working on DRM and other lock out crap.
  • M$ incompetence contributes to the biggest US blackout ever by disrupting critical company communications and overloading network. The whole thing could have been prevented.
  • North Korea launches cracker schools.
  • The US Air force Mission is updated to include net dominance
  • US Government turns to superior Free Software
  • Home and business users lag, causing havoc in hospitals, threatening medical and accounting records and creating a hotbed of exploitable computers for spam and spam and spam and denial of service attacks used against EVERYONE.
• 2004 apologies, security is too hard! Duhhhhh, if M$ is not up to task no one is, right? Wrong.
• The FUD rolls on to this day check out Her new Blog! as she spews forth Pressing Questions.
  • Get the facts about how expensive and non free software is helping India and other developing coun

Caroline Benner previously worked as policy researcher for Microsoft's Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group

Exactly. We tend to forget what happened in the early 1950s when the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry created a large quantity of wonder drugs, and in the then pro-business no-regulatory environment, we ended up with some rather horrific problems, as in thalidomide babies and such.

Another good source for information is here at the University of Washington, at the Center for Nanotechnology, which holds various informative seminars on campus, some of which are podcast.

First of all, it is judgement, not judgment.

Second, I am surprised that you would bother to trust Grammar Check at all. Not even counting the fact that MS Word's Grammar Check has been throughly disrupted, here on Slashdot (analysis here), but the fact of the matter is that grammar is what makes your voice yours.

Sometimes different pieces call for different grammars, giving different tones. Sometimes, the violation of specific rules of grammar are what give your writing character or emphasis. It is okay sometimes to use the passive voice, sometimes it is perfectly fine to start sentences with "But" or "And", or end them with prepositions. Real writers do it all the time.

Most of the rules of grammar were formed by antiquated stylists attempting to shoehorn English into Latin rules. Thankfully, English as spoken works just fine without their help.

From a 1985 paper http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw08.html/ :

When advanced-wave light travels from point A to point B it arrives at point B earlier than the time it left point A. Shortly after World War II, when radar was still new, a pulsed radar beam was first bounced off the Moon and reflected back to Earth. Measuring the round trip time of the radar pulse (about 2.5 seconds) became a very precise way of determining the Earth-Moon distance. If the same measurement were done with advanced radar waves the reflection from the Moon's surface would arrive back at the Earth 2.5 seconds before the pulse was transmitted.

From there, it isn't much of a trick to lengthen the interval with automatic repeaters which bounce the advanced waves many times, lengthening the look-ahead time from seconds to minutes or hours or even days. A computer could be hooked up to broadcast ASCII-coded advance-wave messages to the past and to receive and decode them when received. Such messages could be used in any number of schemes for fun, profit, or military preparedness. The reader who is interested in possible applications is referred to Isaac Asimov's pseudo-science-fact articles in the Astounding SF's of the 1950's concerning "thiothimoline", a kind of soluble organic crystal with the unique property that it dissolved slightly before water was added.

Guess we are almost there now.
Just think of the applications:
Knowing any stock price swing several minutes (OK, just give me one minute!) in advance.

Ah, the possibilities...

There's always pico, nano, Diakonos, gedit, ... But frankly I love using vi[m] :)

Or you could use nooks. Nooks will protect the OS from driver crashes and restart failed drivers transparently.

The answer is indeed simple: among industrial nations one of the most significant predictors of health is the gap between rich and poor. The larger this gap, the worse the health of both groups. It is not surprising that poor people have worse health, but it is interesting that riches don't buy better health. More information is available here, and here's a related editorial from Newsweek.

In short, the study looked at the following health factors: life expectancy, infant mortality, death rates, disability, quality of life, self-assessed health, happiness and well-being. The high-level summary from the linked article: "Populations whose income is below a threshold (about $5,000 - $10,000 in US per capita income) generally have poorer health. Increasing income in such societies leads to better health. Above the threshold, national health is not necessarily related to absolute income, but rather to the gap between rich and poor. Studies in the past 15 years found that where income gaps are smaller, health appears to be better."

The researchers' hypothesis is that societies with a large gap between the rich and poor have a more hierarchical organization. Such an organization is based on coercion and resignation. More egalitarian societies do not engender the negative emotions needed to sustain a hierarchy.

Perhaps what is most surprising is that despite the maturity of this research, it seems (at least to me) that very few people are aware of it.

The answer is indeed simple: among industrial nations one of the most significant predictors of health is the gap between rich and poor. The larger this gap, the worse the health of both groups. It is not surprising that poor people have worse health, but it is interesting that riches don't buy better health. More information is available here, and here's a related editorial from Newsweek.

In short, the study looked at the following health factors: life expectancy, infant mortality, death rates, disability, quality of life, self-assessed health, happiness and well-being. The high-level summary from the linked article: "Populations whose income is below a threshold (about $5,000 - $10,000 in US per capita income) generally have poorer health. Increasing income in such societies leads to better health. Above the threshold, national health is not necessarily related to absolute income, but rather to the gap between rich and poor. Studies in the past 15 years found that where income gaps are smaller, health appears to be better."

The researchers' hypothesis is that societies with a large gap between the rich and poor have a more hierarchical organization. Such an organization is based on coercion and resignation. More egalitarian societies do not engender the negative emotions needed to sustain a hierarchy.

Perhaps what is most surprising is that despite the maturity of this research, it seems (at least to me) that very few people are aware of it.

Just replace "car" with "computer":

http://www.ee.washington.edu/conselec/Sp96/project s/jeddk2/final/ee498h.htm

I wish it was as simple as that. It would sure beat what I have to do now, which is sprinkle a layer of espresso-grind coffee into my shoes, score the bottoms of my feet with a razor blade, and then tie my shoelaces really tight, so as not to leave a trail of blood after me.

I think for what you're proposing, you'd need to attach some sort of reservoir for hot water on top of ones head, with a french press type plunger to force the caffeine past the blood/brain barrier.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse 599e/CurrentQtr/

Click "schedule" on the left for slides. There was actually a presentation re: ECoG on April 24 and the slides should be up soon.

Also, a note about EEG. Poor resolution isn't the only problem - the muscles of the scalp and face actually can blow the brain signals out of the water quite easily. Some of the whiz-bang factor of EEG interfaces (remember the Mind Mouse? Good times. ) work because people train their eyebrows and scalp to flex, producing a much more pronounced reading.

Universe goes BOOM!

Much more impressive than the THX sound in creation, reconstruction and rendition.

Hmmm ... the leader of China is an engineer, his deputy is an engineer, and of the nine members of the Politboro, all nine are engineers.

So if it is true what Microsoft's research director says, that the world is becoming an internet democracy

http://flakenstein.net/lib/flake-singularity.ppt

then it won't be long before almost all engineering literature is in Mandarin. In fact, this has already happened in the field of large-scale simulation

http://courses.washington.edu/goodall/MRFM/whats_n ew.html#n0036

Isn't the winning career strategy, therefore, to study IT, Mandarin, and Microsoft administration?

You don't give anywhere nearly enough information.

I do SUN PS gigs, so if its SUN hardware, I can help out (just contact SUN). Ask for "PACP" (Performance Analysis and Capacity Planning). I helped design the service. Also, google "adrian cockcroft". Or http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/qsp/

Or IBM or HP: they have equivalent services.

You can also get any number of other people to help: try datacenterworks.com, or treklogic.com (off the top of my head).

Yes, the problem falls directly into my domain, but the service isn't free. I need to eat, too.

Ratboy.

A few operational systems listed here: http://faculty.washington.edu/~jbs/itrans/maglevq. htm The first one ever to go into service was apparently on 1 January 2003 in Shanghai, China. For $6.25 you get to go 30km @ 400km/h. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3153

The technology is only expensive cause it isn't being mass produced yet, like everything else before it. As soon as it's adopted, the construction prices of them will drop considerably. As for efficiency of them, I'd have to do some searching locally for links to articles I've read previously, but this might interest you for now, http://www.llnl.gov/str/Post.html . One article I've read showed only a minimal (less than 1% iirc) increase in overall drag when the vehicle's weight was doubled. They're also mentioned on the wikipedia maglev page as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation_t rain

I highly doubt the energy required for these systems would be anywhere near the same for a jet, but then again the speeds would likely be only about 1/3 to 1/2 for the next few decades.

This is a project that people in our department are working on.

http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/knowitall/

not sure if you can see it tho.

It's a grammatical turn of phrase. Here are some examples and exercises. I'm not the parent poster, just an interested party.

I wasnt able to find this link a few days ago but heres an interview with Dr Lai from Uof W about the hardships of publishing this kind of damning data. Its has pretty pictures of the damaged DNA . Can we see your tumor?

http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/march05/w akeupcall01.html

One way of stating the Copenhagen interpretation is to say that human perception and cognition is such that there is no possible way we can comprehend the universe; the most we can do is build models that are somewhat useful in certain limited ways.

One way of stating the Copenhagen interpretation is to say that human perception and cognition is such that there is no possible way we can comprehend the universe; the most we can do is build models that are somewhat useful in certain limited ways.

Except that Pine licensing is a booby trap. Take a look at http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html and http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html. And notice this from the FAQ:

        'In particular, the earliest Pine licenses included the words: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software... is hereby granted," but some people tried to pervert the meaning of that sentence to define "this software" to include derivative works of "this software". The intent has always been that you can re-distribute the UW distribution, but if you modify it, you have created a derivative work and must ask permission to redistribute it.'

This is, of course, unaccpetable nonsense. The original wording was quite clear, and the university has decided to try and redefine their terms after the fact. I believe the particualr case that upset them was when SSL capability was provided in some distributions, with code not from UWash because they refused to publish their code due to US export encryption regulation concerns. Mark Crispin, the core author of WU-imapd and Pine, went ballistic, and accused the publishers of code theft and copyright violation. (It obviously wasn't code theft, the SSL code was completely different from Wash U's code.)

This licensing problem has led to Pine being dropped from Debian and RedHat and numerous other Linux distrose.

Except that Pine licensing is a booby trap. Take a look at http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html and http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html. And notice this from the FAQ:

        'In particular, the earliest Pine licenses included the words: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software... is hereby granted," but some people tried to pervert the meaning of that sentence to define "this software" to include derivative works of "this software". The intent has always been that you can re-distribute the UW distribution, but if you modify it, you have created a derivative work and must ask permission to redistribute it.'

This is, of course, unaccpetable nonsense. The original wording was quite clear, and the university has decided to try and redefine their terms after the fact. I believe the particualr case that upset them was when SSL capability was provided in some distributions, with code not from UWash because they refused to publish their code due to US export encryption regulation concerns. Mark Crispin, the core author of WU-imapd and Pine, went ballistic, and accused the publishers of code theft and copyright violation. (It obviously wasn't code theft, the SSL code was completely different from Wash U's code.)

This licensing problem has led to Pine being dropped from Debian and RedHat and numerous other Linux distrose.

pine isn't even Free Software for pater's sake!

You cannot modify pine and distribute it; you have to make a patch of your changes, and distribute that along with a copy of the source code.

Mutt is superior (as is yahoo mail -except when it comes to pop3 access which is becoming less and less relevent every day)!

I first learned of the neutrino oscillation through a profs class notes. Since I respect the guy too much to actually put up his PDF (it was an example in the application of matrix diagonalisation) the best I can do is give the reference he used at the end. It looks like it has alot of detail (51 pages) but apparently it is suitable for an introductory quantum course (I haven't read it so I cannot attest).

You can do a google search for arXiv:hep-ph/9905257 or the URL for the PDF is http://www.int.washington.edu/PHYS554/2005/neutrin o1.pdf (the first link in the google search)

That'd be a Mao Suit. In the People's Republic, the proletariatarian revolution demands that every day be Casual Friday!

Of course! Don't you know that one of the basic tenets of quantum physics is that the observer always affects the experiment?

Just because a copy may remain does not mean it's easy to find. Google's Bigtable technology might retain deleted data for days, but finding the data could be nearly impossible.

Google's bigtable presentation gives some clues onto this. Bigtable purges deleted information in a batch manner, not as the delete requests are given. It seems they'd need such a CYOA term to use such a system.

I think I may have an unfair advantage in this discussion over some, since I'm sitting here with Physical and Historical Geology courses (my major), Ahtropology, Paleontology, Botany and Zoology courses as well under my belt and forgive me, but I'm having a frustrated scientist moment. Please check out the writings of Stehen Jay Gould to learn what evolution really is http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library.html Please also understand the Hardy-Weinberg Principle when talking about population evolution (sorry about the spelling error before on that name) http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/H/Hardy_Weinberg.html Lastly, on a seemingly offtopic note, but equally as frustrating: for those of you who keep bringing up gods, creationism, and intelligent design and may wish it in our schools or discussed, it already is at the college level. It is a philosophy course on the "Teleological Argument" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument Sorry all. After reading all of these posts and making some of my own, I had to get that off my chest. I will probably suffer being moderated down for this, but I'm willing to take that. Kind of makes me feel like I'm a part of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" if it happens really. http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm Yes, science is a candle in the dark, please, don't hit it with your Bible.

Any alternatives when OpenOffice.bloat panics?
http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/200 5-March/002423.html

Grapher, perhaps? (208K download)
http://students.washington.edu/bellc/grapher/viewp ic.php?pic=screenshots/gph0_93/gridlock.gif

Or Gnumeric? (15M)
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/images/gnum eric-sample.png

Create a self-contained HTML form with the submission action being a mailto url addressed to you. They can store it on their desktop or even open it as an attachment from an email you sent them. Then you can keep track of the issues in your email client. You could even have the url cc your phone or pager. Here is a page with good examples. Also note that you should ask them to test it once because there are combinations of browsers and email clients that don't work or at least there used to be back in the bad old days.

Pico is a text editor.

Pine is an email application.

But, brothers and sisters, behold: WEBPINE

It's like PINE, because it reads IMAP and has all the keyboard shortcuts you know and love, but it's like Gmail because it's a pile of javascript and html (and frames!)