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Enter The Darknet.

PTO rarely gets involved because there are rarely any requests for re-examination (I think only a handful so far this year).

Legislation was passed last year to encourage more non litigation challenges to existing patents. Here is an informative piece detailing what more needs to be done.

Meanwhile, just use one of the plenty of distributed computing programs that already exist for scientific research, if ever you got bored by SETI@home...
Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group
evolution@home
eOn
Climate Prediction
Distributed Particle Accelerator Design
LifeMapper
etc...

No doubt someone here will do the math that I never bothered trying to do.

I ran some numbers and the feasibility depends pretty much entirely on the weght of the spacecraft.

If we assume a 250,000 mile race, completed in 10 days, (with no resting, since that complicates things more than I want to deal with right now), that means you need a constant acceleration of 0.11 cm/s^2. Not very much, right? Not if you're just accelerating your own weight. In fact, if *all* you had to push was, say, 60kg, it'd be fairly easy. You'd have to generate about 20W of power, sustained, transforming about 1700 food Calories per day into thrust (assuming 25% efficiency).

However, you have to have all of your food, air and water, the spacecraft structure, engines and reaction mass. If all of that (plus your own body) masses 1000 kg, you'd have to sustain 334 W of energy output continuously for 10 days. It's extremely unlikely that any human could do that (even ignoring the non-sleeping issue). According to an article I found, maximum sustained human energy output is around 150-200 W. It also mentions that Bryan Allen, in his 1979 English Channel crossing in the Gossamer Albatross, managed to sustain ~250 W for 49 minutes, and it wiped him out.

Even a 500 kg gross vehicle weight requires a sustained output of 167 W. 300 kg would require 100 W, so you'd have to be somewhere in that range.

In practice, of course, these numbers are really messed up by the no-resting assumption, so it's really harder than they would show. On the other hand, in practice the vehicle mass would not be constant, it would decline as reaction mass and other consumables were ejected, which means you can get away with higher vehicle masses.

And, finally, these numbers don't even attempt to account for initial velocities or any kind of realistic trajectories.

Conclusion: Your guess is as good as mine!

My favorite proposal from the near past was the magnetic bubble. Create a large static magnetic field - a simple dipole will do- in space, and then fill it up with plasma. The plasma causes it to expand greatly in size, which is important because the dipole field decays as r^-3. It would act much like the Earth's own magnetosphere with a shock upwind and a long tail. But unlike at Earth, this magnetic bubble can be oriented in any direction. It has been compared to a balloon in operation.

Not to mention a school of pufferfish.

Well, there's at least one other possibility.

Mind you, an Orion launched from orbit, outside the Van Allen belts, would pose essentially no risk to the inhabitants of Earth, and is fairly cheap and well-studied. The best description of it is in Project Orion by George Dyson, Freeman Dyson's son. A fascinating read.

I agree with your premise. That is precisely the problem with NASA. Although I'm sure there are individuals there with every bit as much vision as any of us. I'm impressed with some of their small research projects including ion propulsion. Unfortunately the most ambitious of all NASA research projects, the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project is now completely out of funding.

What we need is the return of exciting space exploration that actually is exploration. After all, exploration is the whole justification for a space program in the first place. If you're not going to do that why even bother?. All these LEO missions are a joke. I guess NASA is too worried about being completely canceled to really plan ambitious projects to mars and the Jovian moons or even to Proxima Centauri, but that's exactly the kind of exciting, ambitious space program that we need. I'd rather see us have a manned mission to a Jovian moon every 10 years than a shuttle launch to LEO every few months.

And you're right about projects like Iraq. Bombing Arab countries may be fun, but it's not nearly as exciting as space exploration. Either project is simple entertainment, but I would argue that in the long run seeing video shots of great martian canyons and spouting Io volcanos is more exciting than a few mushroom clouds.

The technician was seated when he knocked over a small quantity (between 100 and 230 ml) of hydrofluoric acid (HF) onto his lap, splashing both thighs.

The technician sustained burns to 9% of his body, despite washing his legs with water at 6 liters/min. No calcium gluconate gel was applied to the affected area and contaminated clothing was not removed during the flushing with water. His right leg was amputated 7 days after the incident. He subsequently died from multi-organ failure 15 days after the hydrofluoric acid spill.

Considering this school is in the top 50 doctoral programs in Computer Science, it undeniably proves that you are more ignorant than the targets of your diatribe. This implementation will probably help their standing in the academic community, and is probably a good investment.

I've been a hardcore netizen since 1998, when I used to dial up from my uncle's home to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-) I remember waiting minutes to download a single JPEG file, then transferring it to my local machine using Kermit, and opening it up in Internet Explorer 3.0 on Windows 95, only to realise that it's the wrong one! Those were the days when I learnt to use Pine and Lynx, my favourite mail/www combo.

Those were the days of Internet success stories: ICQ, Napster, Winamp. Remember ShellSock?

In a perfect geek encounter, I met bluesmoon on comp.lang.java. Google didn't even exist back then.

Now, when I look around, I see "techies" with 5-10 years of experience in the software industry and no clue what All Your Base... means :-) Clearly, these guys have been here for the money. I, however, am here because I love it. The Internet is changing lives, and I want to be responsible for some of it. Somebody give me that perfect job! :-D

"Prisimq" sounds like a name belonging to one of the characters in a certain Jim Theis story.

i find slashdot is #1, and at #7 is this

i`ll save you from going to find out what it is, here's the title:

Top Nine Reasons to Quit Slashdot.org

mod this flamebait and you're homosexual with a small penis, mod this 5 and you're hetrosexual with 61 children by 74 different women, but still with a small penis.

#3: Gullible editorial staff continues to post links to bogus pseudoscience articles by crackpots.

I guess when you come from an environment where this seems complicated, then you really can't grasp how important those concepts are when designing non-trivial systems.

Maybe because he is talking about apps that he "would want to run." Slithy is much better than powerpoint, by the way.

And who needs rabbits?

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GF.

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GF.

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GF.

Since she is kind of cute and in the interest of slashdotting, I submit to you the following links for your viewing pleasure:

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GF.

Since she is kind of cute and in the interest of slashdotting, I submit to you the following links for your viewing pleasure:

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GF.

Since she is kind of cute and in the interest of slashdotting, I submit to you the following links for your viewing pleasure:

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GF.

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Wow! The results are impressive!

Chinese scientists announced that now they'll focus research in catgirls.

I thought water vapor was the most serious greenhouse gas contributing 95% of all global warming. If there is more water isn't it more likely to get more vapor? Of course our contribution is something that wasn't there before us but that's another thread.

I think substantial new features, such as NUMA and RCU could never be considered at the same level as a "translation", "editorial revision", "elaboration", etc.

Anyway, SCO admits IBM "owns" copyrights on NUMA and RCU. That admission means SCO knows these works must be, at least "seperate works". Since IBM is not SCO, I'd think "independent" applies as well.

So SCO's contact says "derivative", but their evidence and PR keeps saying "collective work". It seems, the two are different things.

From Washington University...

Compilations

A "compilation" is defined in 17 USC 101 as "a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." A "collective work" is a type of compilation and is defined as "a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves are assembled into a collective whole."

Derivative works

A derivative work is defined as "a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a derivative work."

Futher, from the law itself:

"The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material." 17 USC 103 (b)

Indeed.

It's 2003. So where is he? AI has not seemed to improve much despite ambitious software projects and even games that would seem to require neural networks. Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of much improvement in VR, with disappointing progress in input devices and 3D and other monitor technology. Voice synthesis has made some improvements though. Not bad, although it's still not HAL quality. Voice recognition seems to have matured quite a bit as well. IMO, the most significant progress has been in graphics cards with processors nearly as impressive as the main CPU. The impact this has had on games cannot be underestimated.

It's 2003. So where is he? AI has not seemed to improve much despite ambitious software projects and even games that would seem to require neural networks. Perhaps the most disappointing is the lack of much improvement in VR, with disappointing progress in input devices and 3D and other monitor technology. Voice synthesis has made some improvements though. Not bad, although it's still not HAL quality. Voice recognition seems to have matured quite a bit as well. IMO, the most significant progress has been in graphics cards with processors nearly as impressive as the main CPU. The impact this has had on games cannot be underestimated.

The official standard for top secret classified information says melt 'em. Of course, if you don't have a furnace of a few thousand degrees, that might not be feasible, in which case I would suggest microwaving them and then dousing them in a bucket of cold water (like a sibling post said) and then a blowtorch. Don't stop until your drive platters are the texture of pea soup :)

Of course, I'm professionally paranoid. Normal people use Autoclave, and I've heard it works well.

In response to Blackboard, the University of Washington has come up with its own suite of online tools, free for use by faculty, students, and staff. While not as fully integrated as Blackboard, it is fully online and the developers are absolutely anal about having every single thing work from IE to Mozilla to Lynx on PC, Mac, and Linux. When I worked there, we had visiting delegations from MIT and Stanford coming personally to ask how the hell we did it with just a few developers and undergrads.

I was reading some of their documents, and I did not find a specific definition of the rules for this type of aircraft.

There was a UAV which crossed the Atlantic years ago. It was designed and built by a collaborative effort betwen the Insitu Group, and the University of Washington's AA department (my alma matter).


I'm just wondering if there are additional restrictions under FAI rules for the vehicle.

Zeno's Paradox of the Arrow

A reconstruction of the argument

1. When the arrow is in a place just its own size, it's at rest.

2. At every moment of its flight, the arrow is in a place just its own size.

3. Therefore, at every moment of its flight, the arrow is at rest.

Aristotle's solution

* The argument falsely assumes that time is composed of "nows" (i.e., indivisible instants).
* There is no such thing as motion (or rest) "in the now" (i.e., at an instant).

Anyway, I'd suggest using an Inquiry Physics texts - Here The Physics Education Group at University of Washington presents Physics/Physical Science/Math from a purely hands-on/experimental method. The Physics by Inquiry texts are designed to teach teachers who are not traditional science teachers (elementary and high school) and are written in a very clear and precise manner.

They are broad in material (traditional physics/physical science/astronomy all using applied math) and every experiment relies mostly on things you can get around the house.

--Tim

Wow, the amount of time I wasted just by following that link...

I saw this picture with a nice landscape. Decided to investigate and after a bit of Googling it turns out it's from somewhere in Kamioka, Japan. That's where physicists from around the world built this huge toy which they call Super-Kamiokande.
Some pretty impressive pictures, especially when you see that they built many of these to make this, just to fill it with water (warning huge pic, here's a smaller one), and conduct experiments into neutrinos, dark matter, and other cool stuff like that... Wow.

There you go, just learnt a few things, and added Kamioka to my list of places to visit ;)

Thanks, but no thanks.

My mail is held on an IMAP server. So, the best email program for my needs is PC-pine on win32 (closed source). When on linux, use pine (open source).

I like the extra customization ability, the small footprint and the platform independence pine gives me. Attachments are a breeze. Ability to write accents in pine. Good thread support in recent versions (not talking about process/threads). Etc...

Thanks, but no thanks.

My mail is held on an IMAP server. So, the best email program for my needs is PC-pine on win32 (closed source). When on linux, use pine (open source).

I like the extra customization ability, the small footprint and the platform independence pine gives me. Attachments are a breeze. Ability to write accents in pine. Good thread support in recent versions (not talking about process/threads). Etc...

Thanks, but no thanks.

My mail is held on an IMAP server. So, the best email program for my needs is PC-pine on win32 (closed source). When on linux, use pine (open source).

I like the extra customization ability, the small footprint and the platform independence pine gives me. Attachments are a breeze. Ability to write accents in pine. Good thread support in recent versions (not talking about process/threads). Etc...

given enough time, it could catch up with desirable data speeds

Liquid crystals are really slow. You really have to struggle to get 35 ms switching out of them, which is what the movie people want. These diffraction switches are a lot faster, but I doubt they'll ever get faster than 0.5 ms.

The basic problem is that you're dealing with long strands of polymers which orient themselves almost but predictably not quite parallel to each neighboring polymer strand, unless a current is flowing, in which case they just align strictly parallel to each other. It takes time, lots of time, for the reconfiguration to occur, because it is a fundamentally mechanical process.

The article cited did a horrible job IMHO of representing the underlyng science. The regularity of the crystal droplets has nothing to do with the new effect -- which is using a thinner layer of liquid crystals to difract instead of polarize, which requires thicker LCs. The droplet regularity is an artifact of the thinness, not a cause of the essential property as is purported.

HTML rendering was added to Pine only fairly recently. Given the quantity of HTML spam out there, it might have been a mistake.

Skimming over the changelog, it appears that Pine has had support for HTML rendering since the release of version 4.00, 8 July 1998. That's a bit over five years now.

In any case, my hunch is that rendering html in a text based mail client like Pine or Mutt should be pretty harmless. The biggest danger in rendering of html is pulling in all the images, and by so doing announce to the spammers that you are alive, well, and eager to read their mail. Pine will attempt to do a sensible layout of the HTML content, but it won't download any images.

IMO that's only a good thing -- the messages don't look like gibberish when you get html mail (whether that mail is spam or whether it's another email forward from your AOL using mom), and your privacy is still safe unless you actually follow one of the links. There's really no downside, and it short circuits a lot of the earnest but silly mailing list debates over the evils of html mail: of course html mail is evil, but with Pine (or if they ever add similar support, Mutt), you are innoculated from the risks.

HTML rendering was added to Pine only fairly recently. Given the quantity of HTML spam out there, it might have been a mistake.

Skimming over the changelog, it appears that Pine has had support for HTML rendering since the release of version 4.00, 8 July 1998. That's a bit over five years now.

In any case, my hunch is that rendering html in a text based mail client like Pine or Mutt should be pretty harmless. The biggest danger in rendering of html is pulling in all the images, and by so doing announce to the spammers that you are alive, well, and eager to read their mail. Pine will attempt to do a sensible layout of the HTML content, but it won't download any images.

IMO that's only a good thing -- the messages don't look like gibberish when you get html mail (whether that mail is spam or whether it's another email forward from your AOL using mom), and your privacy is still safe unless you actually follow one of the links. There's really no downside, and it short circuits a lot of the earnest but silly mailing list debates over the evils of html mail: of course html mail is evil, but with Pine (or if they ever add similar support, Mutt), you are innoculated from the risks.

...with psychological disorders. Virtual treatment for phobias has been shown to have a positive effect.

Just to be pedantic, it's not U Waterloo, but the University of Washington (http://www.washington.edu/pine/)

The FSF's interpretation of the LGPL only applies to software owned by the FSF. If I had a different interpretation of the LGPL (which is certainly possible -- many parts are quite vague), that interpretation would apply to my software, and the FSF can do nothing about it.

This all only applies if you do not modify the GPL or LGPL text in your distribution. Once you modify the text, it is no longer a GPL or LGPL, and the FSF cannot and will not defend your licensing rights. So while you are certainly free to add the requirement that someone "Buys you a beer next time they're in Boston," to your license, you should understand that this means your license is no longer GPL or LGPL and the FSF cannot protect it.

Another real-world example is Pine. Early versions of Pine had a BSD-like license, which allows "modification and distribution". The University of Waterloo interpreted this to mean that you could modify Pine, or distribute an unmodified Pine, but not distribute a modified Pine. This was contrary to everybody else's interpretation, but they owned the copyright so they got to decide. (More recent versions have a different license).

Actual quote from linked article:
I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue lies there.

Feh, most great minds are. His waning years sound rather like the trials of Kurt Vonnegut. Disillusioned with the fact that his recent literature has not been well recieved, he blames it on the population rather than himself. It's a shame though: Kurt Vonnegut's earlier work was revolutionary, just like Philip K. Dick's writings.

Pirates are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants.

Facts:

1. Pirates are mammals.
2. Pirates say "Rrrrrrr," ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the pirate is to dig for treasures and plank people.

or, try Quantix, which is derived from cluster knoppix. A self-booting ISO with data analysis software, based on Knoppix. This is geared more for scientific apps; it doesn't come with open office, etc, which cluster knoppix does.

http://www.washington.edu/imap/documentation/SSLBU ILD.html

I don't think it uses stunnel. I've also done forwarding of port 110 over SSH.

The sun gives off not only light, but also spits off extremely fast moving plasma, called the solar wind. The wind, though not very dense, typically moves as a speed of several hundred miles per second. That's around a million miles an hour. (You can check current contitions here). The idea is to use the momentum from the solar wind, which is mostly ionized hydrogen, not the light from the sun, to propel the spacecraft. (There are some very good images on the website.)

The most interesting approach was suggested by Robert Winglee of the University of Washington. He suggest using a giant magnetosphere (essentially a magnetic field stretched out by a plasma) as a sail. The magnetophere deflects the solar wind, transferring momentum into the spacecraft. There is also another advantage - the magnetosphere works as a shield to keep the wind from damaging the spacecraft itself.

The "sail" is made from an ionized gas trapped in a magnetic field. It's easy to let the sail out and take it in, and if the sail ever "breaks," you can just make a new one using more plasma.

So, despite what the paper has to say, solar sail research is alive and well. It's just that the most promising designs work a little differently than the author thought.

M2P2 is a much more viable alternative -- no massive sheets to drag around, low power consumption, and a clever way of doing things. More on it here and here and here and here and here.