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Followed the ultimate realization of _really_ astute students: "Why am I pondering such a stupid question? What a complete waste of my time!"...

Good point! You have successfully recapitulated a core part of the mystic traditions (many branches of buddhism, zennist thought, many of the pre- Christian European religions, probably all of the shammanist schools, etc). Lots of people say that there is a core Mystery to existence that is beyond human understanding.

For the geek, the most accessable expression of this is probably the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of post classical physics, which can be generalized to something like this:

Reality is not only stranger than we think; it is stranger than our ability to think can handle. We can't deal with it. We can, however, construct models like quantum mechanics that we can fool around with, and if we do it right, we'll end up with a model that is predictive, useful, and fun. But no matter how successful we make that model, we can be sure that reality itself is different from it in some important qualitative ways.

More on this here and there.

...This thought then leading to inner peace & happiness.

Uh, yeah, one path to Nirvanna is by this route, but first you have to visit the despair of recognizing that you can attach no meaning to your personal existence. Nowadays, most americans who take this route can get themselves labelled "depressed" and go on to some fun experiences with antidepressant medications and the satisfaction of having a blanket medical excuse for having botched up their lives, their relationships, and everything. That seems to me to be an unnecessary and dangerous detour, but wtf, the point is in the travelling, not the destination, right?

Assuming that this "_really_ astute" student successfully navigates around the MAO inhibitors and the SSRIs, and the various other problems en route, there is the inner peace and happiness of knowing that what is important is not who you are or what happens to you, but how you behave.

Here's a neat thought to end with:

Quantum mechanics: the dreams stuff is made of.

How has evolution been repeatedly tested? Is there a theorem, mathmatical model that can describe evolution?

Yes. Ever since the 1930s people like JBS Haldane have developed quite detailed mathematical models of evolution. Evolutionists aren't just people looking at animals frolicking around anymore. The whole field of "Evolutionary Genetics" is extremely mathematical. Take a look at some lecture notes here

Surprised no one has mentioned DENIM, it's a free (as in juice) UI design tool that basically combines the advantages of a traditional whiteboard (it uses a drawing tablet for the primary interface) and something like the VB6 IDE. Check it out at http://dub.washington.edu/denim/

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

Pine is "open source". It just isn't FREE SOFTWARE. http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html

They only burn less because they usually have a higher utilisation. And they only always have higher utilisation during rush hours.

e.g.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002197.html

Conventional mass transit isn't the answer. Packetised mass transit is...

Check out: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/theseus. html

So if amateur hobbyists were a critical component in proving the validity of the theory of evolution, where are all the experimental results published by amateur hobbyists, proving the validty of the theory of evolution?

By the way, I see from your journal (you can delete it now, since its preserved here forever) http://slashdot.org/~susano_otter/journal/24500:

The End

[ Add Friend | #24500 ]
Tuesday February 18, @08:51PM
User Journal

I'm leaving Slashdot.

Here's why.

Goodbye!

You really need to work on your consistency.

If you're going to troll, at least learn how to troll properly. Show some ingenuity. Some originality. Some insight.

Speaking as the director of a new professional MA program in computational linguistics at the University of Washington, I'd say the answer depends on what you plan to do next, and what specific computational linguistics courses are available there at MIT.

Successful computational linguists have strong programming skills, a deep understanding of algorithms and/or systems architecture, and a linguist's perspective on language, linguistic patterns and linguistic structures. An understanding of machine learning and the probabilistic methods typically employed there is important, too.

I think the best preparation you can get as an undergraduate to go into this field is a double major in computer science and linguistics, where you choose any offerings available in computational linguistics as elective courses. You might also investigate the offerings of your local library/information school as a source of possible electives (think information retrieval). Likewise, if speech processing interests you, check out offerings in signal processing in the EE department, and be sure to take the prerequisite statistics courses. If a double major is not feasible, I think majoring in one field and minoring in the other would be a suitable alternative. Designing a custom major only makes sense if you can identify required courses in one major or the other as clearly not useful to you --- which is really only something you can do in consultation with an advisor.

What I doubt you'll find at the undergraduate level (and indeed at the graduate level at most universities) is in-depth courses specifically investigating computational linguistics. I'd encourage you to take whatever courses are available (including graduate courses once you have sufficient background), but you'll probably find that a career in computational linguistics requires further training, either a graduate degree or on-the-job training.

If you plan to go on for a graduate degree, there should be plenty of time to do the in-depth courses then. Your undergraduate degree should serve to give you the foundation you need on both sides to go on in this interdisciplinary field, while giving you enough of a taste of the intersection to be sure it's what you want to do!

Make-a-Degree programs are for underwater basket weaving. Computational linguistics is an advanced topic. You won't touch it, nor should you, until a graduate program. You don't know enough about computer science to do anything advanced yet. Get yourself a CS degree and take some linguistic, anthropology, and psychology electives, then apply to a graduate program and do CL as your thesis. Read some CL papers and apply to the schools that publish in the CL journals. University of Washington has a program in CL consider applying there, or at least read their prereqs.

From time to time we hear about such brilliant minds. But what happens when they grow up? Was anyone from here a child prodigy?

Hmm well I went and looked it up and 5V is for a line in use while 48V is for a line that is not in use. And the ring is actually a lot higher and not DC.

As an interesting aside, they might get Butler Lampson to give a lecture on computer forensics...

Further implications of magnetic nozzle control can be found http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/magbeam/NIAC20 05/NIACmagbeam2005.ppt

Those who are interested should check out the truly bizarre fauna of the Burgess shale, presented in Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life," which provide examples of the enormous diversity of animals following the Cambrian explosion. Some pictures of reconstructions are at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/bshale/galle ry.html.

Five eyes and vacuum hose mouth parts... Evolutionary tinkering sounds like reasonable explanation to me.

Those who are interested should check out the truly bizarre fauna of the Burgess shale, presented in Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life," which provide examples of the enormous diversity of animals following the Cambrian explosion. Some pictures of reconstructions are at http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/bshale/galle ry.html.

Five eyes and vacuum hose mouth parts... Evolutionary tinkering sounds like reasonable explanation to me.

Here is a survey of recent system engineering articles in the INSPEC database:

graphics: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS/literat ure.gif
numbers: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS (see readme.tex)

We see that most of the system engineering literature already is written in Mandarin; the Chinese engineering community surpassed the US (and Japan) about five years ago.

The Chinese Journal of System Simulation shows the depth and sophistication (and the military focus) of this literature:

Yikes! What to make of this?

The history of the Jamestown Colony is instructive, because the USA treats its scientists and engineers much like the Jamestown colonists. The colonists were told by their British investors to focus mainly on prospecting for gold, not on the mundane tasks of farming. Result: not much gold was found, few crops were raised, and the members of the colony starved.

Similarly, American scientists and engineers are told by their funding agencies and corporate employers to focus on breakthroughs. Result: not too many breakthroughs, very few new commercial products, and the economy is foundering.

The Chinese are quite open about their strategy of balancing research and engineering more equally. And they make no secret of their intent that this strategy will eventually yield, first, economic dominance, then military and cultural dominance, in accord with the classic Chinese strategy "deceive the sky to cross the ocean".

Obligatory "I for one welcome ... " joke omitted, because I've got a son in the USMC.

Here is a survey of recent system engineering articles in the INSPEC database:

graphics: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS/literat ure.gif
numbers: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/SPINS (see readme.tex)

We see that most of the system engineering literature already is written in Mandarin; the Chinese engineering community surpassed the US (and Japan) about five years ago.

The Chinese Journal of System Simulation shows the depth and sophistication (and the military focus) of this literature:

Yikes! What to make of this?

The history of the Jamestown Colony is instructive, because the USA treats its scientists and engineers much like the Jamestown colonists. The colonists were told by their British investors to focus mainly on prospecting for gold, not on the mundane tasks of farming. Result: not much gold was found, few crops were raised, and the members of the colony starved.

Similarly, American scientists and engineers are told by their funding agencies and corporate employers to focus on breakthroughs. Result: not too many breakthroughs, very few new commercial products, and the economy is foundering.

The Chinese are quite open about their strategy of balancing research and engineering more equally. And they make no secret of their intent that this strategy will eventually yield, first, economic dominance, then military and cultural dominance, in accord with the classic Chinese strategy "deceive the sky to cross the ocean".

Obligatory "I for one welcome ... " joke omitted, because I've got a son in the USMC.

...but am I the only one who still prefers pine?

The M2P2 experiment used a plasma-inflated magnetic bubble for both propulsion and shielding. Shielding concepts for a lunar base and space station were proposed.

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/

16bit is enough to represent a dynamic range of 90dB, which is far more than what you'll hear in the overcompressed crap that populates the charts today.

Most people who care about music aren't listening to the "overcompressed crap" that populates the charts today :) A commenly cited value (in academia) for the dynamic range of the human ear is 120 dB So 90 dB is definitely quite a bit short of "enough". Moreover, you seem to minimize the importance of higher sampling frequencies. Yes, their primary effect is to make the design of low-pass filters (both digital and analog) easier. However, the low-pass filter is a very significant and complex part of most analog designs, and giving the designer the headroom to use a more gently sloping low-pass filter can have a very big impact on the quality of the signal in the audible band.

Try this example, for a radiation therapy machine. You might also try this paper on formal specification of TCP/IP and parts of C.

The problem isn't that specification itself is bad. It's that most "specifications" are written by people who don't know what they're doing, and end up being vague and wishy-washy.

... but the guitarist just graduated from the University of Washington's Computer Science program. Perhaps this partially explains why they tried this experiment, mentioned their encoding settings on the download page, etc.

They performed (along with The Presidents of the United States of America) at the UW this week as part of a "welcome back" concert (pictures here... ironically enough, it was partially sponsored by Dell and Napster), and it wasn't until they played "Flagpole Sitta" that many people realized who they actually were. Most people claim they don't know them or "Flagpole Sitta," but I'm sure they'd recognize it if they heard it. That's not to say that's their only good song, though -- their entire set rocked.

That makes it sound like the favorite mailer of people who pretty much lose help desk support if they use anything else, just like Pine was when I attended UW. And universities are hotbeds of Free Software, so they all should have known better than to do anything important with this proprietary crap.

I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.

More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels ... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse.

This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.

For example, GCC is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's compilers. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD.

This actually has nothing to do with the CLT. The CLT is a statement about the distribution of a sample average in relation to the population average.

OTOH, TFA is about information markets, which concerns comparisions between the average of people's forecasts of events, and the "true" (or natural) frequency of events. We are not comparing a sample average to a population average. (In other words, to apply the CLT here, we'd make a statement comparing the average forecast of 100 people to the average forecast that would be made by all the people in the population. We're absolutely not doing that.)

Instead, the concept to discuss here is what is sometimes called calibration. This is a concept used to measure the accuracy of forecasters (such as meterologists). It works like this: say we look at all the days a weatherman said "chance of rain is 30%". Then, we'd hope to see rain on around 30% of those days in order for that kind of prediction to be accurate. Calibration (roughly) asks: How accurate were all such statements that were made by the weatherman? (I.e., check "chance of rain 0%", 10%, 20%, etc... looking at each subsample of his forecasts.)

Here (pdf) is a randomly chosen article on this kind of calibration.

For those that read TFA, did you see the graph? Calibration asks for those two lines to overlap. Whether they do or not has nothing to do with the Central Limit Theorem.

Using my superior pattern recognition skills I've deduced that a iPod Pico will be forthcomming.

Apple has already bypassed the arcanely licensed pico by releasing the more modern and free nano. As you know, several years ago Apple introduced emacs. It is clear Apple's next product will be vi based.

So there will still be money to fund truely useful projects like repairing the Hubble telescope? Really?

Information Wants to be Free (Full Text)

Microarray analysis shows that some microRNAs downregulate large numbers of target mRNAs
Lee P. Lim1, Nelson C. Lau2, Philip Garrett-Engele1, Andrew Grimson2, Janell M. Schelter1, John Castle1, David P. Bartel2, Peter S. Linsley1 and Jason M. Johnson1

Top of pageAbstractMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of noncoding RNAs that post-transcriptionally regulate gene expression in plants and animals1, 2. To investigate the influence of miRNAs on transcript levels, we transfected miRNAs into human cells and used microarrays to examine changes in the messenger RNA profile. Here we show that delivering miR-124 causes the expression profile to shift towards that of brain, the organ in which miR-124 is preferentially expressed, whereas delivering miR-1 shifts the profile towards that of muscle, where miR-1 is preferentially expressed. In each case, about 100 messages were downregulated after 12 h. The 3' untranslated regions of these messages had a significant propensity to pair to the 5' region of the miRNA, as expected if many of these messages are the direct targets of the miRNAs3. Our results suggest that metazoan miRNAs can reduce the levels of many of their target transcripts, not just the amount of protein deriving from these transcripts. Moreover, miR-1 and miR-124, and presumably other tissue-specific miRNAs, seem to downregulate a far greater number of targets than previously appreciated, thereby helping to define tissue-specific gene expression in humans.

Gene expression analysis has helped find targets of an overexpressed plant miRNA4, but such an approach has not been reported in animals, where, in contrast to plants, miRNAs are believed to act mainly through translational repression rather than messenger RNA (mRNA) cleavage1, 2. Nonetheless, a microarray analysis showed that unintentional reduction of transcript levels can be observed following small interfering RNA (siRNA) transfection of HeLa cells, and it was observed that several of these downregulated, off-target transcripts contained sites of partial complementarity to the siRNA5, reminiscent of those seen between metazoan miRNAs and their targets. This observation, together with the documented overlap between the potential activities of siRNAs and metazoan miRNAs6, 7, 8, 9 led us to hypothesize that the off-target effects of siRNAs are due to miRNA-like activity, and therefore using microarrays to screen for changes in gene expression following transfection of human miRNAs would shed light on natural miRNA functions.

We focused on two miRNAs noted for their tissue-specificity in mammals: miR-1 and miR-124. miR-1 is preferentially expressed in heart and skeletal muscle and miR-124 is preferentially expressed in brain10, 11 (Supplementary Fig. 1). miR-1 or miR-124 RNA duplexes were transfected into HeLa cells, and mRNA was purified and profiled on microarrays (Fig. 1a). Filtering the expression profiles for genes characterized by the LocusLink database12 that were significantly downregulated (P http://www.ensembl.org./ Following removal of polyA tails, sequences were masked for repeats (A. F. Smit & P. Green, RepeatMasker at http://ftp.genome.washington.edu/RM/RepeatMasker.h tml) and analysed by MEME using the 'zoops' model, setting motif width 'w' incrementally from four to ten. Otherwise, MEME default parameters were used. Sequence logos were constructed using WebLogo (http://weblogo.berkeley.edu./ Background sets of genes were constructed using LocusLink genes that were represented on the chip, and that were either associated with annotated Unigene 3' UTRs or represented in the expression atlas, as appropriate. Orthologous UTRs were aligned with ClustalW30 using default parameters.

Luciferase reporters
Eight miR-1 targets were chosen randomly from those downregulated genes that possessed at least two 6-nt seed matches within a 1-kb segment of their 3

I've put up a torrent of the video: http://blackbox04.cs.washington.edu:11223/torrents .php?t=mdis_depart.mpeg.torrent

The author Paul Glister's blog @ Centauri Dreams keeps tabs on new propulsion technologies ++ space geek topics in general.

One technology, Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) comes complete with a 7 meg flying coffee can flash demo.

Glister's book, Centauri Dreams, gives me some hope that science and discovery will drive NASA again.

The author Paul Glister's blog @ Centauri Dreams keeps tabs on new propulsion technologies ++ space geek topics in general.

One technology, Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) comes complete with a 7 meg flying coffee can flash demo.

Glister's book, Centauri Dreams, gives me some hope that science and discovery will drive NASA again.

where you will need to download the pdf and read Part I Chapter 7. I keep a copy of the book on my desk (next to my RHCE study book as a psychic counterweight) and often refer back to it whenever I've spent too much time with things like X configuration.

It's very funny, even more so when you know just a little bit of Unix and even more than that when you know too much which is to know any, really. ; )

I see that you have been fooled by the marketing gimmicks. Let me clarify for you, so you don't get duped into thinking you're buying HD, when you actually are not.

Look at that link you provided and go to the line that says "Native" resolution. Notice that it says 1024x768. That means there is an array of mirrors on the DLP chip that is 1024 mirrors wide by 768 mirrors tall. Each one of these mirrors can display one pixel (ie, the color reflected off that mirror is the color of the pixel on the screen**). So the full 1024wide x 768tall represents the full picture on the screen. You can never get any more pixels in the width or any more pixels in the height, because you don't have any more mirrors on the DLP chip to give you those pixels.

Now, let's look at a 720p signal. A 720p signal is (digitally) 1280 pixels wide x 720 pixels tall. So, if you lay the 720p signal directly onto the mirrors on the DLP chip, 256 pixels would be hanging off the side, with no mirror to display them on the screen. The DLP chip is 1024 mirrors (pixels) wide, and the signal is 1280 pixels wide. Even though the signal is sending you more than 1024 pixels in width, it is physically impossible to display more than 1024 of those pixels ... you just can't, there are no mirrors to display them. So, what do we do, and what does the projector do?

The projector uses an internal scaler to remove some pixels, and remix the colors on other pixels. So, the scaler takes a 1280x720 signal, removes a bunch of pixels, remixes a bunch of other pixels, and gives you a new signal: 1024x576***. Hooray, this new signal is small enough to be displayed within our 1024x768 mirrors on our DLP chip. Sure, we are wasting some mirrors on the top and bottom (we need to retain the original aspect ratio so that the signal doesn't appear squished), but at least we can display the signal. These wasted pixels are the black bars on top and bottom that you see on the screen.

So you might ask, why is this not HD? Well, it's not HD because you've compressed the signal and lost some of the information from the original 720p (HD) signal. Heck, if you compress the signal even further, you can get a 853 x 480 signal (480p). Or you can compress even further and get a 64x36 pixel signal ... is that HD? Hell no. You could barey discern one blob from another in that signal.

So there you have it, hope this helps you out in your quest for HD. Just because it says it can display 1080i, doesn't mean the native resolution is 1920x1080. DLP projectors that can actually (truthfully) display a 1080i signal cost a minimum of $20,000.

**Well, it's actually more complicated than that because the mirrors only reflect white light from the lamp, but then it passes through the color wheel at the right time to project the proper color. But for simplicity of a resolution discussion, we'll leave the color wheel for some other time.

***This is called a WSVGA resolution, do a search for projectors with it ... oddly enough there are a bunch projectors at this resolution ... I wonder why?

More links:

Discussion on why broadcasters are using "i" signals versus "p" signals, ie 1080i, 720p, 480p. Note: DVDs are a 480i signal.

More information on HDTV and broadcasting than you probably care to know.

A

No, it's not. Read the description. A plasma beam is used alright, but it's on the in-orbit system, not the crew carrier. The point is that the energy is gathered by solar panels over a long period of time and used to heat a small amount of plasma to very hot temperatures. The m2p2 system on the crew carrier deflects the plasma beam which causes thrust. You'd have to restock the plasma material on the in-orbit system pretty rarely.

According to NASA the russian spacecraft Soyuz chases the station for two days before it docks. Considering that the Soyuz is the smallest manned spacecraft to dock with the ISS you gotta wonder how much of its total mass is fuel needed for that maneuver. According to the russian space web the total mass of the Soyuz at launch is 7.1 tons. The propulsion module takes up 2.6 tons of that. Note the amount of payload the Soyuz can actually deliver - 3 crew and 30kg. Less than 1% of the total mass. Oxygen aint that heavy. So other than the heat shield on the descent module (total weight 2.9 tons) what's taking up so much of the total mass? It's gotta be fuel right? So what happens if you gather solar power in space and use it to propel your orbiter? You could use a MagBeam to do it. All of a sudden you havn't got much to lift up to orbit. Just those nice light humans and some nice light oxygen so they don't suffocate on the way and a nice light inflatable heat shield so they don't burn up when you take them home.

But here's a silly question. Who says we have to take up a whole heat shield on every launch? We could send up parts of the heat shield, sew em together in orbit, tie together all the descent modules we've launched in the last 10 flights and send everyone home together.

The room for innovation in manned space flight is astronomical. We just havn't seen any because there's no motivation to reduce costs when your space program is funded by taxpayer dollars.

This is as close to sacrilege as a secular institution can get. (Leaving all jabs about Texas aside for the moment.) Much has been made of the argument that e-books are easier to store and to search through, but paper-based texts are more pleasant and efficient to handle. Those are important arguments when you have both formats available, but the most critical issue is the amount of information not available at all in digital format. It's not just "the classics" that would have to be digitized in order for this to be an acceptable move. They would have to convert every title in existence to an e-book. I'm a double major in a humanities subject (Spanish) and in information science. I am intimately acquainted with the research content available at my school, which has one of the best libraries in the nation. Despite the huge number of online journals and research services we subscribe to, I have often found books to be the most authoritative and complete sources, especially when researching in the humanities. With the digital content base, not only are there thousands of services that a library has to subscribe to (each using their own metadata and query system - attempts to unify them, such as InfoTrac, inevitably miss some sources) but one frequently gets a citation to something the library doesn't have full-text access to. Then it's an exciting romp through a variety of channels to get the article. Often, the citation leads to something that's never been digitized - you must find the paper copy, no matter how sophisticated the digital search was. If you think this isn't relevant to more technical works... well, the best example I have is from trying to find an article in the Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Computer Security. CiteSeer had only the abstract at the time. Between me and three reference librarians, I ultimately had to get the print edition through inter-library loan.

This is as close to sacrilege as a secular institution can get. (Leaving all jabs about Texas aside for the moment.) Much has been made of the argument that e-books are easier to store and to search through, but paper-based texts are more pleasant and efficient to handle. Those are important arguments when you have both formats available, but the most critical issue is the amount of information not available at all in digital format. It's not just "the classics" that would have to be digitized in order for this to be an acceptable move. They would have to convert every title in existence to an e-book. I'm a double major in a humanities subject (Spanish) and in information science. I am intimately acquainted with the research content available at my school, which has one of the best libraries in the nation. Despite the huge number of online journals and research services we subscribe to, I have often found books to be the most authoritative and complete sources, especially when researching in the humanities. With the digital content base, not only are there thousands of services that a library has to subscribe to (each using their own metadata and query system - attempts to unify them, such as InfoTrac, inevitably miss some sources) but one frequently gets a citation to something the library doesn't have full-text access to. Then it's an exciting romp through a variety of channels to get the article. Often, the citation leads to something that's never been digitized - you must find the paper copy, no matter how sophisticated the digital search was. If you think this isn't relevant to more technical works... well, the best example I have is from trying to find an article in the Proceedings of the 12th National Conference on Computer Security. CiteSeer had only the abstract at the time. Between me and three reference librarians, I ultimately had to get the print edition through inter-library loan.

Your contention that there is a linear correlation between body size and amount of time sleeping seems to be untrue. Mice spend the vast majority of time asleep? If 50.3% is the vast majority, then yes, they do. See here.

slightly offtopic, but you can view a matrix scene in your browser. in ascii art. klicky

Sounds like you are just putting the vehicles on rails. If that's the case, why not just go ahead and do it? Most destinations are predictable anyway. On a PRT system, you just put a station there.

Besides that, even 2 to 4 people per vehicle is still a very low cargo to weight ratio.

Can someone please give me a legitimate technical reason why individual average citizens are permitted to operate several thousand kilogram machines in close proximity to one another in wreckless fashion on paths that often pass through major cities?

Why does everyone think that trying to automate this insanity is the future? Why would we even be considering it instead of PRT's, light rails, and intercity trains & planes?

Given the alternatives and the energy problems of the states, I no longer consider the automobile anything but a ridiculous & deadly cash cow.

Read up on PRT's and you might ending up with the same conclusion.

• The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians--and How We Can Survive Them
• Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@ (scroll down to "To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis")
• How to spot a psychopath at work
• Is your boss a 'corporate psycho'?
• Psycho parasites lurk in most surprising spots
• USC Study Finds Faulty Wiring In Psychopaths
• The Origins of Antisocial Behaviour, Twin Study
• Original sinners? Evidence that psychopaths are born, not made

She wrote extensively about memory modification and memory loss

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/

The second result is pretty good introduction

Other results include more details.

"If Amazon.com says "we're going to have a great next quarter! Two quarters from now, though, we're going to be out of business", people would sell Amazon stock like hotcakes."

yes, but Amazon wouldn't say that. if they were about to go out of business, i would guess that, given what previous companies have done, they would most likely try to cook the books.

"You're telling the daughter of an oil pres/VP and niece of a former US congressman. That's bloody rich. Sorry to ruin your fantasy world, but we don't live in a batman comic."

oh, it's rich alright. so's this.
http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/00/09/200 0921959.html
wow. a "cost of living" increase. and they even set it up so that they don't have to vote for it!
hey, would your uncle pass a law that would put your dad's company in peril? oh, wait, this isn't batman is it?

"It's called economics."

my point exactly. if you notice in my previous post, i said that the reason why we still have the same design...
"it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are."

i was simply trying to say that there are plenty of smart people out there and that we could do a lot better than the internal combustion engine. if you sit there and say, "well, we've made a lot of improvments," i would respond, is that good enough? why should we settle for 30% efficiency?

and now, i hope can restrain myself as i respond to this...
"How on earth are these applicable to the oil industry? Heck, you could at least have cited things that were illegal - there's certainly enough of them out there. Oh wait, though, if you had cited companies doing illegal things, you'd then have to cite their punishments, and that would ruin your argument."

are you a moron ?
in case you are, here are some more links...
(warning, some may involve oil companies...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon-Mobil
(scroll down to allegations)

http://www.law.washington.edu/pacrim/abstract/12.2 .htm#Awaiting_doe

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20 C14FB3B5B0C778DDDAB0994D9404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50 617FD38590C708EDDAC0894D9404482

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1313246.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1180985.stm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00 E11F63B5D0C738EDDAB0994D8404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0 71EF83C5D0C778DDDAF0894DE494D81

oh, i got more...
and if you keep responding, you get a lot more.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars, http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/AlbertEydelman .shtml and http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/resources/ mars_data-information/temperature_overview.html (the latter are the first 2 results on Google for "mars temperature"), Mars can already reach about 20C/70F near the equator. With that in mind, 50C doesn't seem too high, especially for an equatorial plane. Still, it's strange to think that Mars could be as hot as the heat record in Phoenix (though 45C is pretty common).

I know what you're talking about -- now it's driving me crazy too! It was hyped here a few times, years ago. As you say, its name was an English word...

Was it NachOS? I think that's the right name, although I'm not sure if this is the same project.

This is an interesting claim. I've not understood Intelligent design to be inherently Creationistic, or otherwise.

Take, for example, the views of the Chemistry professor I work for. This man is a well known professor at the University of Washington. He holds a PhD. in Analytical, Environmental, and Nuclear Chemistry from MIT. He's an extremely scientific man, and yet he believes in total cooperation between the scientific method and the Bible. His views can be categorized as intelligent design, because he believes that the Universe has been "fine tuned" by God. In the last two sections of that website, he points out a large number of reasons why the Universe must be the way it is for life to exist, with the belief that things are that way because God designed it to be so.

It's actually really fun to talk with him about this stuff, because he knows so much about the chemistry of the universe.

Fortunately he was an honest man and didn't sell the list, rather he contacted the DoJ and DoJ contacted DISCO to help get their shit together. The instructor was making the point that when you surplus equipment that you really need to make sure that you wipe the drives and any other storage media. His bias was that the easiest way to do this was to physically remove and destroy the media because you could never really be sure if a wipe program had worked (well you could go over the drive to make sure that it had been erased, but who's going to do this?).

When I don't want to physically destroy a drive but want to make sure that it's gone I either wipe it with a low-level hardware format utility such as the one built into Adaptec SCSI cards, or I use a program such as autoclave by Josh Larios (which he isn't supporting any more outside of the University of Washington community) although now I guess I'll have to try the recommended replacement Darik's Boot and Nuke. A side benefit of programs such as this one is that they really exercise the Hell out of your disks, which is great to smoke out any potential failures.