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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.

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.

Hold on here. Think about this... The disk itself is part of the focusing mechanism. The final lens in the player is more of a collimating lens. The player projects a beam (not a pure euclidean line, but a column) of light. When the light hits the plastic, it starts narrowing the beam. Don't take my word for it. Check this out (about halfway down, the bit about playback), or grab a copy of the Red Book. It's well known that the disk is part of the focusing mechanism. It's part of what makes CD's such a reliable mechanism.

To put it another way, you could use the angle of 27 degrees and the index of refraction given as 1.55 to prove that the substrate thickness must be 1.2mm.

Oh, and I no longer work there, but give me an address and I'll see if I can get some of my friends that still work there to get me a couple of pictures and I'll send them to you.

The deformation in the plastic is part of the optical properties of the disk. It's not possible to separate what of the dye is causing the changed properties, and what of the shape of the plastic is causing it. You can't have one without the other. It's simply part of the gestalt of CD-R's.

My semi-sarcastic blurb about the AFM was intended to point out that I'm not just making this stuff up, nor am I passing it off second hand. I did this for 4 years. I've personally examined hundreds of disks, "stampers", "mothers", "fathers" and masters. I've done it both with electron microscopes, and later with AFM's.

Now, for all I know, you could be one of the authors of the orange book specs, but speaking as one who's "worked in the trenches" smoothing the manufacturing process, I know how this works. My (admittedly over-simplified) definition of how the disks work stands.

Sorry if this comes off as a rant. Guess I'm just bored on a Sunday afternoon.

Oh, and I no longer work there, but give me an address and I'll see if I can get some of my friends that still work there to get me a couple of pictures and I'll send them to you.

Here Here!

Fellow Kendo and Iaido practitioner.

For some reason, archery and swordfighting seems to draw a lot of nerds and geeks. The archery and kendo clubs at the University of Washington were over 50% science and engineering.

I highly recommend people try these. Archery (recurves, not compounds) is very relaxed physically, but requires discipline of the mind. Kendo is very structured as a martial art, and is more "search for perfection of technique" rather than the "sport" nature of western fencing.

Here Here!

Fellow Kendo and Iaido practitioner.

For some reason, archery and swordfighting seems to draw a lot of nerds and geeks. The archery and kendo clubs at the University of Washington were over 50% science and engineering.

I highly recommend people try these. Archery (recurves, not compounds) is very relaxed physically, but requires discipline of the mind. Kendo is very structured as a martial art, and is more "search for perfection of technique" rather than the "sport" nature of western fencing.

Aside from the time issue (nerve conduction is blazingly fast), you would serve your function staying in silicon.

Blazingly fast ? WTF? I think you meant to say that silicon conduction is blazingly fast.

Nerve impulses can be measured in tens or hundreds miles per hour, pulses over wire or silicon is measured in tens of thousands of miles per second.

This page is aimed at kids but happens to have a good chart of various speeds of various nerves; the top speed they show is about 225 mph, and they compare it to a commercial airplane, not the speed of light like electrical impulses are compared to.

Why do you think our minimum reaction time is measured in tenths of a second, rather then nanoseconds, even when the reflex only takes one layer of nerves to activate (like spinal cord reflexes)?

And quit reading /.

According to this page, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corp., attained the rank of Life in the Boy Scouts.

According to this page, William H. Gates, Bill Gates' father and the "William Gates" relevant to the Preston-Gates law firm linked in the slashblurb (note that said lawfirm is now slashdotted), is an Eagle Scout and served as a board member on the Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts of America from 1985 to 1990.

I found this one on slashdot. This is the C programming course from the University of Washington in Seattle, if you poke around you'll find the other online available courses.

Here is the code to which I was refering. It's for creating 1d binary cellular automata. The main block is below:

%%this for loop is going to calculate the number for each cellar from a binary combination of the previous row
%%use its value and its neighbors from the previous generation and store it in 'n.' it then encodes the next slot
for i=2:x+runs
n = (2^2)*copyRedds(1,i-1) + (2^1)*copyRedds(1, i) + (2^0)*copyRedds(1, i+1);
nextRedds(1, i) = ruleArray(1, 9 - (n + 1));
end

%%now calc the first and last
n = (2^1)*copyRedds(1, 1) + (2^0)*copyRedds(1, 2);
nextRedds(1, 1) = ruleArray(1, 9 - (n + 1));
n = (2^2)*copyRedds(1, x+runs) + (2^1)*copyRedds(1, x+1+runs);
nextRedds(1, x+1+runs) = ruleArray(1, 9 - (n + 1));

I'm using gnu octave 2.1.36 on windows. I just installed the binaries that they distributed so I'm not really sure what it was compiled with.

See the following for a discussion of "shop rights" and how it relates to "work for hire":

OWNERSHIP, SHOP RIGHTS AND THE WORK FOR HIRE DOCTRINE

An excerpt:

An inventor, who is an employee of someone else, makes an invention as an employee on the employerâ(TM)s time, and perhaps uses some of the materials that are supplied to him or her by the employer. Now that raises, in most legal systems and in the United States, the possibility that the law will imply certain rights in the patent to the employer. In the United States, we have developed over time the law with respect to shop rightsâ"which could be based on estoppel theories, could be based on implied contract theoriesâ"for deciding when we will give, as a matter of law, a royalty-free license to the employer.

The Matrix has spawned a new era in pseudo-psychology, it seems. Plato first had this idea many thousands of years ago, in the Allegory of the Cave. A Brief Explanation of the Allegory What the Wachowski Bros. have done is reintroduced the concept of the Cave to society. Unfortunately, these topics have been gone over before, in much more depth than your average Matrix fanboy cares to think about.

Yes, this is a perfect solution. Except it creates the perfect enemy. Nuclear waste. US has spent iirc $6 billion looking for a place to stash waste. Waste that it knows will last another couple tens of thousands of years, many lifetimes that of man. Waste that will require extra-ordinary amounts of work to contain, to isolate, to cut off from our reality. We're talking Final Fantasy seal in crystals work here ladies and gentlemen.

That's not strictly true. The long half-life Actinides (Plutonium etc.) can (ahs should) be recycled into more fuel. The fission products have half lives of around 30 years or so. Quite simply, this stuff only has to be kept safe for perhaps 300 or so years before it becomes as radioactive as granite, for instance. Only if you ban reprocessing (for political reasons) do you get a severe problem.

A cynic would point out that Green opposition to nuclear power has effectively contributed more to global warming, by keeping coal as a power source instead, than all the SUVs in America.

Either way, I'm still a reknewable man myself. It'd only be like five or ten times the cost (guess came from out of mi arse again). And I'm a big fan of the distributed system. Just put solar on everyone's house. Couple huge honkin wind farms. Less of these gargantuan power lines everywhere.

I would certainly agree to mandating solar panels for all new roof construction and replacement. And as a condition for anyone installing air conditioning in their home. Wind farms are best suited for things like generating hydrogen (or other alternate transport fuels), since this removed the problem of episodic supply.

Despite telescope pictures of "Martian windstorms", Pathfinder's wind sock didn't move much. Those "windstorms" are drifting clouds of very fine dust, more like air pollution than sandstorms.

Wind-powered travel on Mars doesn't look promising.

That code is under GPL, period, or else they can't distribute without THEM violating the codes license.

I just realized that they might actually intend to go for that.

You see, they might say that the proprietary code that they distributed along with their Linux is not distributed under GPL. In that case, the users have no right to use it without a license from SCO.

Yes, yes, distributing non-GPL stuff in GPL software would be a violation of GPL and copyrights, but so what? That might not nullify their copyrights to their own code. FSF or some other entity would certainly sue them for the violation and demand compensation for...what damages? Yes, there is a concept of statutory damages, but those damages have limits, while the potential profits (hundreds of millions) from a SCO-Linux license do not.

However, it would probably not work that easy. While the statutory damages have a ceiling, a judge can rule that the defendant must pay damages for each violation if he continues to violate the copyright knowingly (after the ruling)! Such possibility makes sense -- a violator should not profit from continuing to break someone's rights.

The problem is that SCO would then have to stop selling their own Linux. That would not stop them from milking Linux users until Linux is dead.

This makes me worry.

IANAL, BIPOOSD, IDKA, IAN.

Wave/particle duality is another way of saying that we have evidence of many worlds, but don't want to admit it.

David Deutsch says that if (when) quantum computers get above a few hundred qubits (they're at seven? now), that will also constitute proof, as the calculations that they will do will require more steps than there are atoms in the visible universe.

The more I reread your post, the more I am convinced that it is a subtle troll. I mean the wrong statements that nevertheless have a certain crazed right of logic to them: "If the roads are too crowded, build bigger roads" and "Cars ... are the most economically efficient solution"; coupled with the emotional appeal to the rugged American frontier spirit that is so woefully inappropriate to the modern urban world: "I want a back yard. The bigger the better."

Then there are inflammatory statements "stupid things like the Big Dig in Boston.", an absence of any evidence for your claims, and finally a disregard for technical advancements such as this: http://taxi2000.com/ http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick. htm

This gets +5? Our moderators are not on the ball today.

It's not an abstract -- people realize the amount of time and money they are wasting, as well as the stress. Mass transit just isn't stepping up to meet the problem -- busses are a fundamentally crappy means of transportation, and the train system only works for a small set of trips, as both ends have to be close to a station, and transfers mean going out of your way and losing a lot of time. Plus it's expensive -- as an individual mass transit is fine, but in groups of three or more it quickly becomes impractical.

Chicago is a lot worse than most places -- in New York everyone is used to it, but we beat out most other cities. But still, everyone is feeling the pinch, it's getting rapidly worse everywhere. More roads aren't solving the problem -- there's a serious scaling issue going on here. To summarize: I don't think it would be hard to sell people on an alternative to cars.

The alternate system needs to be orthogonal to traffic -- light rail just compounds traffic with at-grade crossings, not to mention having a tiny capacity. Buses suffer from traffic, so they can't attract riders.

PRT seems by far to be the best option to me. But if not PRT, then at least monorail or other elevated systems. It's a big investment, but we were able to invest in these systems 50 or 100 years ago, we certainly ought to be able to afford them today. Nobody else is offering a real alternative.

Of course, transit is only part of the problem (though it's a really large part of the problem). But PRT still offers lots of advantages -- safer streets (less cars), more intimate neighborhoods (because it takes less space), and it would get people to at least walk short distances, which is still a whole lot better than attached garages.

PRT is a starting point that doesn't depend on idealism -- there are real practical benefits, so the mass of people who don't follow their ideals (sad, but true) can still come on board.

Given a choice, what transit system would you ride?

• A train that you have to walk 2 miles to catch, you might have to wait 15 minutes for, and which averages 15 mph over your trip.
• A car 1/4 mile away, is waiting for you when you get there, and averages 30 mph over your trip.
• A PRT car that you have to walk 1/2 mile to reach, is waiting for you when you get there, and averages 40 mph over your trip.

PRT systems have almost all the advantages of a car.

• Direct point-to-point transit. No stops.
• Average speed is higher than a car, even if 3/4ths of the trip is freeway.
• No need to share space with strangers.
• The transit system waits for you, you don't wait for it.

Every non-PRT public transit system has proven itself a failure. That is, the systems fail to attract significant percentages of commuters. And, they fail to cover operating costs by huge margins, let alone recouping capital cost.

The best public transit models available suggest that PRT systems would attract a significant percentage of commuters, cover operating costs, and eventually recoup the capital costs. It's amazing to me that no one has built such a system yet.

Then again, Atlas Shrugged. The auto industry and rail industry have a pretty entrenched interest in preventing progress. Politicians want to be able to say "it's not my fault that the transit system failed. We used proven technologies." Proven to fail, but proven nonetheless...

Support your local PRT movement.

Don't you know that because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the more you read about quantum physics, the less you can actually know about it? Stupid Heisenberg...

no no, it's a 200-level course!

get it right!

You were thinking spamvention

You can do better than that guys!

Dolemite

You can do better than that guys!

Dolemite

My suggestion about #3 is that you read this site. Some of the statistics in the papers on that site show that brutalizing your users as you suggest doesn't solve the problem, it just moves the problem. It just depends on where you think your biggest threat is.

I also consider this to be an excellent paper on the topic of network security. It's short, but it brings up most of the big issues.

But then, I'm posting on /. so I probably don't know what I'm talking about either. ;-)

for what it's worth,
Michael

Simula-67

and

Smalltalk

(a historical comparison of both)

Also the first web server: CERN httpd

combined with the first web browser

(history of the WWW)

If they could even tell I'm using more than one computer (which they can't), the only 'right' they have is to cancel my service. I then have the 'right' to go somewhere else and they have the 'right' to go out of business. Free markets rule like that.

Thanks for the link. I'm glad to see they're still using Alvin for this expedition. It's a fascinating little vehicle. I read a book a while back about some of Alvin's adventures around the volcanic vents called The Octopus' Garden . It's written by an Alvin pilot and has some great sketches the team made of what they found on their explorations.

Not cool enough to sign up to get spammed by their voyage diary, though. I'll let the NSF give that to the school kids, and read the results when they make it back to shore and through peer review.

You can find a great site about Neuroscience provided by Dr. Eric Chudler of the University of Washington.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/introb.html

It is designed for kids with numerous topics to explore. It is well done with many many graphics and easy-to-follow breakdowns. It includes many fun topics like the fly-through of the brain:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/flash/brainf ly.html

The Dr. Math website provided by Drexel University is a great site for mathematics of interest to all ages:

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/

The many gracious Dr. Maths respond to questions of all shapes and sizes. You will be impressed with the clever ways they answer questions, from how to understand 2 - 9 to proofs for struggling C.S. students.

Best of luck with your pursuit. It sounds like a great one ;)

You can find a great site about Neuroscience provided by Dr. Eric Chudler of the University of Washington.

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/introb.html

It is designed for kids with numerous topics to explore. It is well done with many many graphics and easy-to-follow breakdowns. It includes many fun topics like the fly-through of the brain:

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/flash/brainf ly.html

The Dr. Math website provided by Drexel University is a great site for mathematics of interest to all ages:

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/

The many gracious Dr. Maths respond to questions of all shapes and sizes. You will be impressed with the clever ways they answer questions, from how to understand 2 - 9 to proofs for struggling C.S. students.

Best of luck with your pursuit. It sounds like a great one ;)

They say we only use 2% of our mental capacity, so what if we could build a machine that was better then ourselves?

I work for the IT department of a rather large university. When we get a complaint about illegal sharing (has to be a complaint, we don't search for it ourselves), the user gets a warning. Second time, their account (and wall port) are disabled until they come talk to our manager and promise to never ever do it again. We would NEVER provide the student's name to the RIAA (pretty sure that would be illegal). We've got a good AGO at our school, plus construction is almost finished on the William Gates School of Law (damn, I gave away my school) so I doubt the RIAA would pick on us.

modern tools like
Links
and
Pine

Gotta Get at Me ascii pron.

It could be worse: it could be Seattle (an earthquate caused by Juan de Fuca plate movement could cause a Tsunami AND erupt that little ol' volcano they have just outside the city).

Not to mention the potential strength of the next "Big One" in the Seattle/Vancouver area. 8 Million people, suddenly swimming...

The Cascadia Megathrust Event is due.

The Applied Physics Letters paper is just two pages long. There is no new physics here. Here's the skinny.

Sphere A is charged up; the two others, B and C, are at different distances from A. Each sphere is polarized in a non-uniform way (because each sphere has two hemispheres, one closer to the charged sphere and the other farther... just as tides form on Earth due to the moon).

The potential at the surfaces of B and C might be uniform but the charge distributions are not: they are dipole. Due to this dipole interaction (the more negativey charge hemisphere of one sphere wants to be closer to the more positively charged surface of the other sphere), Spheres B and C then tourqe to a different angle and will either a) stay there in the presence of some friction or b) oscillate back and forth in the absence of friction. Of course, there is always some element of friction due to the air and wire, but one can compensate by also oscillating the potential of A to make positive feedback, I imagine.

The press release was, in this physics grad student's opinion, horrible. Implications that this research has some impact on our understanding of electrostatics or (gasp) quantum mechanics is irresponsible. It's a cute trick, though, and I'll bet it will find applications in mico-,nano-tech and perhaps other research areas (e.g. experiments requiring precision angular measurements ).

Seymore Butts is (sort of) getting into the auto business. His new design is based on the Lada "a sturdy, proven design", spouts Seymore, who's dual stigmatism, and constant beer consumption has made for many false starts in his new one-man car company.

Off the shelf WWII components in a hap-hazard box style chassis, a barebones 'Butt-Mobile' will be around 300 USD and require a motor, seats and wheels. Complete systems should start at around 650 USD.

Could you give some examples of fractal structures in a human?

Or the branching of blood vessels. Or bone microstructure. Or nerve cells.

"The UW Calendar project is building an open-source calendaring system for higher education. UW Calendar will support personal, public and group events, use existing open standards, and support web-based and other forms of access, including uPortal integration."

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

Do you figure that Linux should just pick a default window manager now and build upon that to allow a seamless interface from those coming from Windows XP to Linux?

You definitely want to have a look at Richard Kenney. His themes are largely technological and scientific. See particularly his collections Orrery and The Invention of the Zero, the latter of which deals with code very specifically. Here's a passage:

Descent
he said. O, luck! like Alice through the bisqueware
chip, we've crossed our glass. What man in nineteen forty-
two could have predicted that queer antecendent
to the gunsight? Microchip: the square
projection of the crystal ball -- imagine, 4-D
programmatic greenhouse! Earth-at-seed,
and re-evolving seas and lands, to frame all Eden
in a pane of sand --

His CV is online.

Personal thoughts: I got an M1 head-mounted display, but I found it to be too cumbersome (heavy on the head) and it distracted other people. Not a hardware hacker, so I haven't done any of the covert mods. Anyway, I switched to a monaural headset (just a single earphone+mic, looks like a handsfree kit) and am using Emacspeak for sound output. I still occasionally get confused, but it's pretty decent. I use a Twiddler for key input. The whole thing is pretty unobtrusive. I look like I'm listening to music and/or texting.

Try Government Surplus Auctions if you want some drug dealer cars, or heavy industrial equipment. Also check your local University for a surplus store and periodic auctions like UW's. If you want to get your garage genetics lab off the ground and don't mind using ten-year-old equipment, these outlets can be ideal.

Also, non-profits can sometimes get the surplus stuff free or at a cut rate.

they implemented caps using packeteer to limit the dorms p2p to 20mbps download and 2mbps upload. They did this in reaction to the insane amount of usage, almost 40% of the campus bandwidth.

An interesting paper was written recently by a group in the CS Dept on content delivery systems. They monitored the campus network's border routers for 9 days. The result - Kazaa consumed almost 14TB outgoing and only 2TB incoming. This is in comparison to 3TB outgoing for web and 1.5TB incoming.

What surprised me the most was that more p2p content is leaving the dorms than coming in.

My school allows you to use the wireless in the libraries to access pages that are outside their network after you enter your NetID and password. This doesn't rely on your MAC address, thus they could charge you for your use and works across multiple platforms.

Correct, mostly. The congestion window is measured in bytes, but it is incremented by one full packet (by SMSS bytes) whenever a new ACK is received. So the self-clocking behavior I described (get an ACK, send one new packet) and the multiplicative decrease (lose a packet, cut your window in half) are both true. Referring to N=7 packets instead of the equivalent number of bytes was an oversimplification to make the Van Jacobsen paper and RFC-2581 fit in a Slashdot comment. :)

The fact that the congestion window is measured in bytes, but incrementing it is measured in full segments leads to interesting vulnerabilities.

The technique you suggest is one of several proposed by Stefan Savage in TCP Congestion Control with a Misbehaving Receiver. He called it TCP Daytona. :)