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PE's are useless outside the civil engineering though. Among EE's they are paricularly scoffed at. The test for EIT certification is so incongruent with modern electrical engineering that even recent (or imminent) graduates take a separate course to master the material. EE's who feature PE's too prominently in their resumes are actually given less consideration than those who don't have them (or leave it off); the reasoning is that such a candidate is looking for a different sort of job than what most EE's do.

It is not impossible to work your way up to "real" engineering, with little to no formal education, even today. It does seem less common than 15 years ago, not that it was common even then. To do that you need to work in a large engineering organization for a long time, a work environment that becomes rarer with every passing year. Most who do that are ME's; I've heard of such EE's & ChemE's but never actually worked with one. I can't speak for CivE's but I suspect that it is rare gven the pevalence of PE certification.

Most EE's who get PE certification get it so they can

• Advertize a consulting shop using the word engineer
• Give expert testimony in court, in patent cases for example. Some go on to get a law degree and then really rake it in doing the most unrewarding work imaginable.
• Be able to sign drawings for particuar sorts of government work.

Now there are several such languages available (other than slate). Once they're all a bit more stable (some are stable now) it will be interesting to do a bake-off and see how they compare.

These seem to be the most influential and active (at least at the moment) :

• Self for solaris, x86, several web sites
  
• Cecil
  
• prothon prototype language in the python mood
  
• IO Desktop
  

Are there other major/active languages in this vein?

I'm half serious on this, actually. At some point I went all "eye candy" and I do most of my work with pretty GUIs and such. And I still have to open pine in a terminal window and it looks weird.

Note that while that sounds like star-trek babble, it's actually right. There are serious problems with the naive Alcubierre design though, it's not just "exotic energy" you need, you need "negative energy".

For those interested in dual mode transportation, I'll recommend University of Washington's Dualmode Debate Page. The page mentions all the projects and has a lot of papers describing the systems and discussing the benefits and problems with them.

Also MIT Alumni brought an article proposing the US should invest $1000 billion in dual mode over the next 10 years. According to the author the investment would pay back in only 2 years! What are we waiting for?

The University of Washington (when speaking of their general computing lab) has a considerable amount of Macs (G5 Towers) but 3 times as many PCs (Dell). This makes the most sense anyway; during 'rush hours', they PCs ALWAYS fill up first.

Thankfully, I don't generally care which I use (well, since Mac OS X came around).

Here's a web site with the UW's tech specs for various labs: http://depts.washington.edu/sacg/facilities/labs/t echinfo.shtml#general

The idea of software that lasts 200 years reminded me of a discussion on the radio the other day about the origin of a joke: "I've had this broom 50 years, its had 5 new heads and 3 new handles". The identity issue played with here dates back at least to Plutarch's Ship of Theseus - if you keep replacing parts of a thing, until no original parts remain, is it still the same thing?

The relevance to software is captured with an example: Is Linux still Linux? How much remains of the kernel originally published by Linus? Would would you say that Linux has been around for X years (pick X to suit)?

Most people would agree that it's still Linux. What Linux, the broom, and Theseus' ship have in common is that they could be modified to meet the demands of time, while retaining their identity.

I've always thought that maintainability is the highest virtue software can strive for, above other quality-oriented goals like being bug-free, or performant. If its buggy, but maintainable, it can be fixed; if its slow, but maintainable, we can make it faster. I think it could also be argued that software, like Theseus' ship, needs to be maintainable to last 200 years; but the version 200 years from now may not resemble the original in the slightest.

Just my 2c

Baz

The GYRE robot, which flew last year, did just that. And hopefully will do so again.

Unless you are absolutely sure that you have completely sanitized it.

That's where Autoclave comes to the rescue. Your data is as sanitized as you want it to be. It's open source so if you don't trust Josh Larios or the University of Washington web server then you can go ahead and build it yourself.

Of course non-x86 based machines need to look for other solutions but for the vast bulk of business or personal computers, this little program is an outstanding solution to a possibly serious problem.

A warning for those who will be getting rid of old computers: make sure the hard drive is wiped clean (and I don't mean with format). I would recommend using software similar to Autoclave. Every once in a while we get stories posted here about people picking up HDs from eBay and finding all sorts of goodies still on them... Don't be one of those people.

Researchers at UW have been working on a long-term project to keep track of what a patient with alzheimers is doing and remind them if they forget, so that they can continue living in their home. linkage

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slash dot.html#alternatives

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slash dot.html#alternatives

With that out of the way, sorry to say you're incorrect. The cholera toxin is quite nasty, whether you get adequate water/electrolytes or not. Nothing compared to anthrax toxin or botulin, but still quite potent. My employers sells fluorescently labeled cholera toxin to bind to a sugar moiety. I guess that makes it a lectin. More info here.

Whoa! its not all tritium.
According to these lecture notes from the University of Washington's Oceanographic Institute and estimate there was only 3.5 Kg of the stuff in existence before nuclear testing. Nowadays there is only about 200 Kg of the stuff on the planet. Remember tritium concentrations are not measured in PPM (Parts Per Million), PPB (Parts Per Billion) or even PPT (Parts Per Trillion) but rather TUs (Tritium Units) which is something like 10^-18 or something silly like that

You joke, but there have been days that I have been seriously tempted to do that very thing ...

I used to refer to this but ever since Jon Katz stopped contributing, I no longer have a #1 reason ...

According to this site on metabolism and aquatic animals a moderately active blue shark needs to consume .2 to .6% of its body mass in food per day. Larger animals tend to be more efficient in regards to metaboloism (with regards to sharks anyways) but lets assume the figure holds true. Also allow us to assume that this link on shark fossil identification is correct in its statements of the megalodon's size (up to 25 metric tons) so it would need to consume a whopping 50 to 150 pounds of food a day. given the size of its potential prey (other pages say sperm whale sized animals so call them 80,000 pounds) I don;t think the megalodon would have to eat very often to survive. Of course this is all completely conjecture based on insomnia and a reasonable set of google searches.

1. Dev Todo is a wonderful outliner and task manager. Today I ported it to win32 using mingw to use at work (it pisses me off that windows dropped ANSI color support in their crappy CMD! I knew it was bad, but I still use it more than msys or cygwin because it is quicker on my slow box). Dev Todo stores everything in beautiful XML. I intend to make a filter for XSLT for my biweekly progress reports. My boss wants me to list things I've gotten done & what I plan to do & this great app can store all of that.
2. Pine-I don't care if RMS doesn't consider it free. It is the best IMAP client. I do like Mulberry as well, though.
3. GNU Screen-I mostly just detach/reattach. I'd like to learn to use it more.
4. VIM-My editor. Again, need to learn it better.
5. Lynx on windows and ELinks on Linux for browsing.
6. I have aliased "fuck" to use cowsay to tell me to calm down. Great stress relief.
7. GPG
8. LaTeX. I hesitated to include this, but I use it on both linux and windows & it is technically interactive. I have started using it more than standard word processors (WordPerfect>OpenOffice>MS Word) and I want to use it instead of impress/powerpoint/whatever.
9. OpenSSH because my box is so much better than the one I use at work
10. NcFTP best ftp client I found, though I have been having much less need to use it.

Intrabody Signalling 1995

Can touch this 1996

What someone needs to do is set up a site where people can help fight this crap by supplying references to prior art for bogus patents.

1.- pine and pico (yes, I know the license issue)

2.- jdkchat (a telnet based chat system)

After several attempts to live solely on the console, here are the best apps I've found:

Links: a superior web browser alternative to Lynx that formats things correctly on your screen.

Mutt and Pine: Two great email clients that allow you to work much more quickly than with any graphical client.

Nano: My favorite text editor. I refuse to feel guilty that it's easy to use!

Micq: a very nice ICQ client that works much better than the various AIM console clients that are out there.

Finally, last, and well yes, basically least, Seatris: This is the best -- the best! -- of all the console tetris games. It takes me back to wasting hours in the various UC Santa Cruz computer labs.

Um, Go Banana Slugs! Go Stevenson College! I think that takes care of this year's quota of school spirit.

Mutt has a feature that I haven't seen in any other email client

Pine

It doesn't mean they communicate or teleport.

It's not like a092156fg.akamai.net is in Seattle and k1039665.akamai.net is in Saskatoon. Instead, all of *.akamai.net goes to whatever cluster is "closest" to the requesting IP (based on BGP, Colonel's Secret Recipe, etc)

Of course, I could be completely wrong. I'm not a routing god, just a guy who thinks Akamai is a cool hack.

This is an argument that Steven Weber makes in The Success of Open Source, which I reviewed recently. For more info, check out the list of reviews I've put together. While it's possible that the Economist thought of the idea on its own, I'm disappointed they didn't at least mention his previous work.

... which used to be Tera, Inc. they are in Seattle as well, I am wondering if THAT connection is more important than the MS one. Not that Burton Smith (CTO of Tera, err., Cray, and overall VERY cool guy -- I used to work with him on a project) and Thomas Sterling ("farther of Beowulf", really! ;-) ) work on the next-gen supercomputer (see, e.g., here, I am wonderng what the implications are... Paul B.

There is one great example of a journal on Artificial Intelligence that is peer-reviewed and available for free: JAIR. This is by the way a journal with a good reputation, so (being online != sleazy). I wonder why we don't see more example of this model, where the journal is available online, but you can always buy the paper version if you want to.

When you receive a message with an attachment, you should be able to right-click on the attachment in the attachment box and choose "Delete" from the popup menu. That would mark the attachment as deleted and if the message is moved or the folder is compressed, the attachment data itself would be removed, but the rest of the message would remain unmodified.

may be a dupe. It's not that hard to do a wipe of the HD.. I use a nice little utility on a floppy called Autoclave The only down-side is that it takes a while to do a high level over write of a large drive. If you're in a hurry, then take the sledge hammer approach...literally.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

Yep, and they were off by a factor 20, whereas the Venus method allowed 18th century astronomers to calculate the distance to within about 10% of the correct value.

Reference:
Greeks

When I had a disc that was failing under warranty, I used a bootable hard disk wiping utility as the final step before sending the drive back.

Autoclave is the one I used. It is quite nice, fits on a bootable floppy. I felt better sending my drive in for warranty replacement after using this program.

Also see:
UBCSwipe
Darik's Boot and Nuke

Jim

Pine and Pico are registered trademarks of the University of
Washington. No commercial use of these trademarks may be made without
prior written permission of the University of Washington.

And that is from the copyright file of pine.
So where was pine written?

1. Pine Is No-longer Elm
2. Program for Internet News and Email

They clamp down because video games are currently "cinematographic works", which (as per Japanese copyright law) cannot be sold more than once. Here's another pageful. Blech. Not even rentals are allowed. I'm glad Nintendo lost their bid to stop US game rentals back in the NES days.

The fact that we are unable to provide satisfactory estimates of the probability that a conveyor shutdown will occur or of its consequences is certainly reason to be extremely prudent with regard to CO2 emissions. The record of events that transpired during the last glacial period sends us the clear warning that by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, we are poking an angry beast (Fig. 5).

Of course, there are exceptions.

Somewhat unrelated, but perhaps they could use something along the lines of this.

Who is the RIAA trying to represent? They say that they are representing the five major music labels. And in turn the music labels say that they are representing the artists themselves. But even the artists don't agree with the RIAA's methodologies.

"According to the study, 60 percent of those surveyed do not believe the RIAA's efforts to halt file sharing through lawsuits will benefit musicians and songwriters.

Additionally, 35 percent believe free downloading has helped their careers, 37 percent believe it has not had any effect and only 5 percent believe it has exclusively hurt their careers. Of those interviewed, 83 percent have provided free samples of their music online."

http://www.washington.edu/cambots/archive/april1/0 956.gif

The point is not the redirect.

The point is that you are making Akamai customers pay for this bandwidth. Everyone knows how Akamai URLs work.

• Slashdot: Benevolent* Dictatorship
• Kuro5hin: Socialist Communism

* -- Although many would disagree with this. As with any political system, there are those who seek to overthrow it: one example, and another.

I think Mac OS X is structured like a microkernel but everything's compiled and statically linked together for speed. With this setup, you can have your clean design but you still get rid of the context switches. That said, the design itself will impose some overhead (though the tradeoff may be worth it).

Another solution is to use a safe language to eliminate the need for address space separation and let the kernel JIT code when it's loaded. Compilation techniques for safe languages are getting better and better so performance is becoming less of an issue. One example is Brix, which runs everything in kernel space (even applications).

However, I don't know how you would deal with a misbehaving process in a shared address space (i.e. how would you write an OOM killer?). The Spin OS has a way of detecting badly-behaving code, but I think that dynamically-loadable code is restricted in what kind of functions it's allowed to perform.

The feat of the no-hitter is indeed special, but you do truly have to be a sports fanatic to really be moved by the act. Ironically, the act of hitting a baseball is statistically one of the most difficult feats to perform (a 90 mph fastball crosses the plate approximately 0.4 seconds after it leaves the pitcher's hand (for those who need perspective, try this test Reaction Time) as the hitter must determine location (strike or ball), spin on the ball (curve, slider, fastball, splitter) and then swing a round bat to hit the round ball providing for a small margin of error for effective contact...not to mention that there are 9 guys on the field trying to catch the ball too...surprising that there aren't more perfect games. Thus, it is no surprise that those people that are considered "Hall of Famers" that have .300 batting averages failed roughly 7 out of 10 times. Or was that software projects?

You may not care about using Free software, fine. That doesn't mean Fedora "sucks ass". Quite the contrary. You should give such distributions and their users (Debian, Fedora) some respect, since they're sacrificing their own short-term convenience for everybody's (including your own) long-term prosperity.

Not only that, but the CIA dumped lost of Cocaine into, you guess it, south central L.A. Of course, they themselves denied everything.

They also have nice slides on airplane/spacecraft design,
also in PDF here

They also have nice slides on airplane/spacecraft design,
also in PDF here

They also have nice slides on airplane/spacecraft design,
also in PDF here

Roughly in chronological order are:
The original Copenhagen Interpretation
Bohm's Interpretation
The Many Worlds Interpretation
The Transactional Interpretation
My own Aethereal Interpretation (blatant plug :)

When the Calendar Access Protocol gets finished. Of course, now their talking about having to modify iCal and such to deal with inconsistencies caused by the CAP draft. The CAP draft itself is on draft 12 which is 6 years of development.

If you want a server, see if you can help get CAP out the door: IETF Calendaring & Scheduling group

From what research I've done, everyone seems to think this will be the final draft, sets up a new project. Although, I am hopeful that the UW project will be successful, although I have no clue how tough to integrate with Cyrus or Postfix it will be.