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At the time, they said the accuracy of the measurement was +/-5 inches. How did they improve this?

Check these patents:

Silly patents

Really silly patents

Really Very silly patent

Plain absurd patent

Even law firms admit many patents are silly

Are you getting bored of all this silliness yet?

I can go on

And on

And on. Even in Spanish

Incidentlly, I have just made my own patent application:
Method of recieving Karma Points from www.slashdot.org utilising process of relying entirely on external sources and/or hyperlinks - "Karma Whoring".

Actually, according to his webpage, the purpose is to perform a precision test of general relativity.

The project is called APOLLO.

It's a plug for the Evil Empire, but their natural keyboards have a small usb hub built in now. They've also got an array of "Internet Buttons" along the top that are basically useless to me, but I've been using my USB mouse through it just fine.

Also, the HP machines at the EE department of my alma matterhad headphone and mic ports in them. It may not be as convenient as if they were in the monitor, but then again it's a smaller sting to replace a keyboard than a monitor if things start to flake out.

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Seach for "Jon Katz idiot" on Google and you will see this page is NUMBER 1!

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Seach for "Jon Katz idiot" on Google and you will see this page is NUMBER 1!

Hell. Make a web site about how much slashdot sucks. I don't know of any of those besides this one (although I have not searched exhaustively for them.)

Try going to the same bank each time you work with your money and deal with human employees. That's what I do. They know me. I know them. There is no chance of an imposter, short of a disguise artist, ripping me off.

The problem is that people are being encouraged by the banks and corporate bodies to engage in impersonal money practices which ARE prone to identity theft, and in which Bio-metrics would be useful. As you pointed out yourself, the problem is only when such systems are abused.

And THE problem is that those who are trying to implement identity tracking systems will almost certainly perpetuate abuse. They cannot be trusted.

I have cut & pasted a short response made to somebody else above which I think addresses some of your conceptions. . .

Down at my local business supplies warehouse outlet, you can already buy thumb print readers designed to lock all but 'favored users' out of computers or whatever.)

For those of you who don't see why this is bad, consider how much fun it would be to have yourself locked out of the economy for having dissident political views. --Or for failing to pay a traffic ticket. You only get to buy bread if you heartily agree that Arabs are evil. Mm. Fun!

Being able to accurately trace & identify any individual, (National I.D. cards), and the on-going movement towards a virtual money society, (debit & credit cards: note the effects of the Euro introduction, where citizens are being strongly encouraged by authorities to avoid 'confusion' with the new cash by relying only on plastic money), will make it MUCH easier to control the populace.

Anybody who thinks that any aspect of this is a good thing should remove from their ears and eyes the filters which only allow in the 'Very Reasonable Sounding' B.S. arguments as supplied by the U.S. propaganda departments, and take a good, hard look around.

9/11 was almost certainly manufactured, and even if it wasn't, it is being exploited to the hilt. Turn off CNN, (propaganda), grow a spine, (ignore the accusations by the popular kids of 'tin-foil hatters'; Time to grow up, ignore the Gap wearing sheep and their desperate to be accepted /. counterparts, (Harsh, I know, but unfortunately quite true), and rely on yourself to form your own conclusions), --And get down to doing some critical research.

If you are critical enough, (of words from BOTH sides of the fence; Very important), intelligent enough, -and if you work for long enough to get a solid feel for all the available information, then you will begin to see another reality rise from the fog.

Otherwise, you might as well just accept a nice ear-tag.

Remember: Sheep get tagged & numbered. They also get fleeced. And eaten.

Some links to get started:

A brief, but solid essay on the nature & mechanics of propaganda, with examples from the U.S. during WWI to present. A 7 minute read, approx.

An article about Gulf War propaganda, outlining how the 'Babies Torn from Incubators by Iraqi Soldiers' was manufactured and used by Bush to instill war fever. 2 minute read.

Article on how IBM made a fortune during WWII by covertly supplying Hitler with the punch card technology used to process Jews for termination -Throws an interesting light upon national identification tracking systems.
7 minute read including excerpt.

Significant anomalies regarding the flight lists of the planes used in the terror attacks. 5 minute read, (10, including searches of the passenger lists to verify the writer's sources)

Empty but maintained concentration camps in the U.S. This link is half sensationalist, alarmist B.S.. Read with caution. Although it is worth noting that FEMA and the Rex 80 programs are real; the laws can be found on-line. Food for thought.

Okay. That's enough for now. Read. Think. And I hope nobody bothers me with dip-shit flames unless you've actually read this stuff. Flames are usually a waste of time with me, but if you have legit questions or criticisms, I'm always happy to respond and/or update my own knowledge base. Growing and learning is fun!

Good luck.

-Fantastic Lad

Some links to get started:

A brief, but solid essay on the nature & mechanics of propaganda, with examples from the U.S. during WWI to present. A 7 minute read, approx.

An article about Gulf War propaganda, outlining how the 'Babies Torn from Incubators by Iraqi Soldiers' was manufactured and used by Bush to instill war fever. 2 minute read.

Article on how IBM made a fortune during WWII by covertly supplying Hitler with the punch card technology used to process Jews for termination -Throws an interesting light upon national identification tracking systems.
7 minute read including excerpt.

Significant anomalies regarding the flight lists of the planes used in the terror attacks. 5 minute read, (10, including searches of the passenger lists to verify the writer's sources)

Empty but maintained concentration camps in the U.S. This link is half sensationalist, alarmist B.S.. Read with caution. Although it is worth noting that FEMA and the Rex 80 programs are real; the laws can be found on-line. Food for thought.

Okay. That's enough for now. Read. Think. And don't waste my time with dip-shit flames unless you've actually read this stuff. Flames are usually a waste of time with me, but if you have legit questions or criticisms, I'm always happy to respond and/or update my own knowledge base. Growing and learning is fun!

Good luck.

-Fantastic Lad

Some links to get started:

A brief, but solid essay on the nature & mechanics of propaganda, with examples from the U.S. during WWI to present. A 7 minute read, approx.

An article about Gulf War propaganda, outlining how the 'Babies Torn from Incubators by Iraqi Soldiers' was manufactured and used by Bush to instill war fever. 2 minute read.

Article on how IBM made a fortune during WWII by covertly supplying Hitler with the punch card technology used to process Jews for termination -Throws an interesting light upon national identification tracking systems.
7 minute read including excerpt.

Significant anomalies regarding the flight lists of the planes used in the terror attacks. 5 minute read, (10, including searches of the passenger lists to verify the writer's sources)

Empty but maintained concentration camps in the U.S. This link is half sensationalist, alarmist B.S.. Read with caution. Although it is worth noting that FEMA and the Rex 80 programs are real; the laws can be found on-line. Food for thought.

Okay. That's enough for now. Read. Think. And don't waste my time with dip-shit flames unless you've actually read this stuff. Flames are usually a waste of time with me, but if you have legit questions or criticisms, I'm always happy to respond and/or update my own knowledge base. Growing and learning is fun!

Good luck.

-Fantastic Lad

What I want to know is whether this is the Peter St George-Hyslop who is working on Alzheimer's vaccines at the University of Toronto, or the Peter St George who's a TA in landscape architecture at the University of Washington, or the Peter St George who left Salomon Smith Barney in Australia last May. Also I'd like to know why they can't "provide investment opportunities to residents of Kansas". Is fraud especially illegal in Kansas or something?

Too bad /. doesn't have an AI (I mean, besides Hemos). They could program it to detect those of us with brains and give some credit. For the sake of argument, lets call them "Kudos". Lets say the scale would be 1-10. A normal user would start off with "0". Before getting any "Kudos", you would need to be an active poster for a predefined period of time, have no more than "x" negatively moderated posts, and already be at your maximum karma.

These theoretical "Kudos" would be calculated based on many factors. Activity of UID proportional to age, Sustained number of posts moderated highly, years of formal education (For no other reason than efficency of thought process). These "Kudos" points would then be plugged into an equation which, like the Karma system thoretically was supposed to do, would enable you to be hailed as "Enlightened".

There are a number of reasons which I will not get into that lead me to believe the moderation system is flawed. One reason I will mention, however, is taken directly off of Quit Slashdot Today!, which is: Technical opinions refereed by popular vote means lousy technical opinions.

For Instance - Since you've posted ~1600 comments, Have a UID you could sell on e-bay for lots of money, and are an established member of academia, you would get, say 6 karma points. Users such as myself who value the intelligent posts, instead of the opinions of 14 year olds caught up in the heat of the open source counterculture.

(These opinions are not neccecarily those of me. Being human, I am prone to sudden attacks of multiple personality disorder. One of these personalities has a particularly quixotic nature. He tends to post rants on slashdot all day.)

Men have no practical way to carry change... As soon as I get home, I also dump all my change in a bin. Unfortunately, I never have time to sort it out. What that means is a lower velocity of money and a higher savings rate, but that savings never makes it out as a loan, so it doesn't cause more monetary growth.

When I traveled in Europe and Canada before, the high denomination coins annoyed me (the Canadian twoonie and the 10ff coin are notable offenders), since I felt obligated to carry them and use them, or I'd never have a use for them when I got home. Italians must feel equally miffed, since their largest coin is 500Lira (about 25 cents) and you probably could go a week in Italy without ever using a coin.

The right solution if you're worried about reissue cost is smart cards and cryptographically anonymous cash. One reason I use credit cards everywhere I can is to reduce the amount of cash I need to keep around. I'd definatly carry a smart card around if it were legal tender...

Speaking as a pedigreed biochemist, you are correct in the extreme of vanishingly small samples. But these devices are still working with enough volume such that an analyte of interest at a substantial concentration (glucose, cholesterol, etc.) is effectively present at the same concentration at nearly all sample volumes.

Things DO fall apart (as you intuit) when the concentration of the analyte gets vanishingly small. We see this routinely when we try to quanitate DNA using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) methods. PCR is sensitive enough that we can detect ONE copy of a DNA molecule in a volume of sample. So if you have say, one copy in 1ml of volume, and you sample .1 ml and do your PCR, your test would come up negative upon repeats (on average) 9 out of 10 times. With small numbers of copies you can use Poisson statistics to calculate your hit rate. With higher concentrations your Poisson distribution collapses to a gaussian that gets narrower and narrower, which is the regime that most normal wet analytical techniques work. For example, fasting blood glucose is about 100 mg/dl, which is about 5 mM. Assuming your device can work with 1 nanoliter sample size (this is about 100x smaller than a volume about the size of the proverbial period at the end of a sentence) you would have 3x10^12 molecules of glucose in it. Assuming your technique is sensitive enough to register the presence of this "small" number of molecules, you are still far away from seeing sampling errors on repeats of the same sample due to random fluctuations of the number of molecules (the "concentration") in any given sample.

Paul Yager at U. Washington (Seattle) has a good introduction to microfluidics:

Microfluidics Tutorial and Prognostication

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

...on Mars. Silicon is an important ingredient in the manufacturing of computers and according to some experts it is possible to construct artificial life using computers. The inescapable conclusion is that this is evidence that life once inhabited the Martian surface.

All audio CD players implement error correction, price nonwithstanding. Error correction is a part of the Red Book CD standard, it's not an option. There is a substantial amount of careful error-avoidance and error-correction encoding going on in the Red Book format, and it's quite impossible to read the audio data at all without using at least some of these mechanisms (the EFM encoding, in particular).

More expensive players may be able to read dirty/scratched/warped discs better. They may be able to handle huge data losses that overwhelm the CD's built-in error correction codes more gracefully than cheaper players. But the error correction system is thoroughly specified and deterministic. There are no variations on the application of the technique that could produce "more correct" results, since proper application results in perfectly correct results.

CD-ROMs use even more error-correction data than audio CDs do, because the data is more important.

More info in the form of some EE class lectures.

Pretty much everytime i read slashdot i am overcome with the urge to punch people in the face. Most of the people are fucking total morons. They are totaly lost in a maze of FUD and misconceptions with no chance of escape and they will not allow themselves to be led out of it. Then the people that aren't morons have massive delusions of grandeur and think they are fucking Euclid reborn or something, which still leads to face punching urges. The best way to avoid this problem is to quit slashdot today!I am a recovering Slashdotter in the midst of a relapse do to all the busts. Trust me if you quit you will have more free time you will learn more, have more skills, and spend significantly less time per day annoyed by idiocy. Ok i have to put an end to this binge. Good day.

Here's a secret tip: OpenXP is the open source version of legendary mail/news offline reader "CrossPoint". It runs in a console window, is very fast, and has all the features you could ask for, including support for various protocols and its own dialer (you can also use an existing Internet connection). OpenXP may take a while to get used to, but it's definitely worth it. I've used CrossPoint from ca. 1993-1996, and a friend still uses it today, although he doesn't care about the new versions.

For mail on Windows, I've been using Pegasus Mail for quite some time. It's more than a decade old and was recently released in version 4.0. Its interface, while graphical, takes a bit to get used to, and it's not open source (Windows freeware doesn't have Unix' open source tradition because of the lack of free compilers), but it is extremely feature-rich, renders HTML (terribly) and supports the Unix mailbox format for its folders. Only downside: I don't know if this relates to crashes of my NT machine (different story), but I've had some mail indexing problems with Pegasus, which made the search ignore some messages.

The situation was much worse with Netscape Messenger, which is the reason I haven't tried out Mozilla's successor yet: Messenger once ate a whole huge mailbox of mine during the process of "reorganization", when not enough disk space was available for this. So I would definitely be careful with Mozilla's Mail module, especially since it's not yet widely tested: You want your mailer to be reliable and not to lose data, ever.

Another semi-free contender is The Bat!, which is trialware and costs 25 bucks for students. I've heard very good things about it, but I have not yet had the need to switch from Pegasus.

On Linux, there are many more choices, and good things are increasingly being said about Ximian's Evolution -- perhaps it will be ported to Windows? Similarly, Balsa and KMail are nice graphical e-mail clients, and there's a huge list of text-mode clients which all have their strengths and weaknesses. You really don't have to decide on either one permanently because they can all access the same mailbox files (neat, huh?). Generally, because of the interoperability and reliability of Unix mail, if you have a choice, I recommend using a Unix system for all email. It may be a bit trickier to set up at first, but once you have a nice procmail and mailer(s) configuration running, you won't want to switch back.

Too bad my Pine 3.95 (the version on our university system) doesn't have an "r" command in setup. It apparently lets you set up "rules" for filtering, according to the Pine FAQ.

Hi,

Neutrinos interact with matter only through the weak nuclear force (and probably the gravitational force; whether they have mass or not is still kind of open, although it seems increasingly more likely that they have a non-zero mass). You are correct that the neutrino reaction does not directly produce a gamma ray photon.

The collision of a neutrino with a chlorine atom changes one of the chlorine atom's neutrons into a proton (note: a weak nuclear reaction), thus transforming the Chlorine atom to an Argon atom (atomic numbers 17 and 18, respectively). The reaction also produces an electron (charge must be conserved).

The particular isotope of argon produced (Ar-37) is unstable to radioactive decay. In a few days it spontaneously reverts back to Chlorine-37, producing an anti-electron in the process:

Ar(37) -> Cl(37) + neutrino + e(+)

The anti-electron immediately finds its way to the nearest electron, and they annihilate, producing a pair of gamma rays, which lead to a cascade of optical photons, which are detected by the experiment.

Whew.

Note that Super-K (the Japanese experiment that was damaged recently) doesn't actually use this chlorine setup, it uses something similar using ultra-pure water as the reactant. Also, I believe the water-based detectors rely on the kinetic energy of the electron in the first reaction to produce cerenkov radiation, rather than a subsequent beta decay/annihilation of anti-electron.

Here are some links on neutrino detector experiments. Google has all these and more.

The Solar Neutrino Problem

Review of all experiments

Sudbury Neutrino Observatory uses deuterium (a/k/a heavy water)

Super-Kamiokande

AMANDA uses Antarctic Ice as the reactant.

I recommend the first link for a detailed overview of solar neutrinos.

enjoy,
Jason

Good point about stupid users, but I have to trot out the usual counter: If you are not running as 'root', the damage you can do, accidentally, intentionally, or otherwise, is limited. In Windows 9X, you are always 'root'. Damage potential is therefore unlimited. Not so under *nix. Nevertheless, "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." I digress.

Now I am off to find a replacement for ICQ. [Grumble]

Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor.

Superficial reading of the Ananova article would give one the impression that they are talking about a partly human chimera (it is hard to read "combined human-animal embryos" any other way); which would be a horribly unethical monstrosity.

What they're undoubtedly talking about (though I can't verify it since I can't read Japanese) are transgenic animals which express human proteins which is nothing new and posses no real ethical challenges (other than those involving the safety issues of xenotransplantation such as the real posibility for introducing various pathogens into the human population).

Ok, I think eveyone needs to go and read The Halting Problem and Worse is better

I just can't keep all those bosons and their quarks straight !

Here are a couple links about measuring Big G (Luther and Towler):

An entertaining mix of real science and Star Trek
The Controversy over Newton's Gravitational Constant
Enjoy !

Premature at best.

It's a real shame, the loss the Japan lab, but I can't help but think that the lab being built in Western South Dakota will be even more important. I cannot find a decent date on completion, but this page explains a newer, better neutrino detection lab being constructed right now.

The location even better (8,000 feet deep, insulated from nearly every form of interference) and the site has fanstastic support from the state and federal government. The Japan lab isn't the only one in existance -- there are others in Ontario and the South Dakota lab has had facilities in operation since 1967.

The articles, both the Slashdot commentary and the NYTimes article, predict a savage demise. But other labs, especially the South Dakota lab, offer a huge potential to pickup the slack.

The spec for CDDA (red Book or IEC-908) is Here, and there is some more stuff here.

Play Dance Dance Revolution!

The Nintendo Power Pad was a great idea in concept, but the system wasn't powerful enough to provide a decent entertainment experience with it. DDR is addictive and fun. If you don't want to play in the arcades where people can see you and make fun of you, then get a home set - It's domestically available for PSX, though Konami has only domestically published two titles, and has a third in the works. If you import, Japan has over ten Dance Dance Revolution titles, and they're almost totally in English anyway, so you'll only need to get a modchip or a GameShark.

Konami also released two DDR games for the Dreamcast in Japan, and a Disney-themed DDR for the N64 (Which is also now available for the PSX) but I don't think they made any first-party dance mats, so you'll have to stick with third-party crap mats if you want to play DDR on your Dreamcast. To my knowledge, nobody makes 3rd-party mats for the N64.

Don't knock it until you've tried it. It's loads of fun, and while you might not be very good at it right away, it doesn't take that much practice to get good. It's especially fun to show off in front of a crowd at your local arcade.

..and here's some info on it:
here and here

Metacrawler was developed at the University of Washington, but the old search site doesn't seem to work any more. You know, dot com cash and all...

I am posting anonymously because Slashdot doesn't seem to accept my login at the moment.

In 1937, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was created to educate the American public about the widespread nature of political propaganda. The institute, which has published several books about propaganda techniques, is composed of social scientists and journalists.

Here is a link to their website if you would like to acquaint yourself with some propaganda techniques.

"So far as individuals are concerned, the art of democracy is the art of thinking and discussing independently together."

I am posting anonymously because Slashdot doesn't seem to accept my login at the moment.

In 1937, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis was created to educate the American public about the widespread nature of political propaganda. The institute, which has published several books about propaganda techniques, is composed of social scientists and journalists.

Here is a link to their website if you would like to acquaint yourself with some propaganda techniques.

"So far as individuals are concerned, the art of democracy is the art of thinking and discussing independently together."

Adequacy is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Adequacy community when last month Slashdot confirmed that Adequacy accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all trolling. Coming on the heels of the latest Geekizoid survey which plainly states that Adequacy has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Adequacy is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by placing third-to-last in AST's recent listing of top five trollsites.

You don't need to be a streetlawyer [geocities.com] to predict Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: Adequacy [adequacy.org] faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] because Adequacy [adequacy.org] is dying. Things are looking very bad for Adequacy [adequacy.org]. As many of us are already aware, Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to lose site traffic.

Let's try to keep the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot [washington.edu] leader Rob "CmdrTaco" [cmdrtaco.net] Malda states that there are about 5000 semi-regular posters to Slashdot.org [washington.edu]. How many users of Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] are there? The ratio of Slashdot [washington.edu] to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posts is roughly in ratio of 100 to 1. Therefore there are about 5000/100 = 50 occasional Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters. The ratio of Adequacy [adequacy.org] posters to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters is about 5 to 1. Therefore there are 50 * 5 = 250 occasional posters to Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]. This is approximately equal to the number of editors [adequacy.org] listed on Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s website added to the eleven non-editors who read the site.

Traffic [adequacy.org] to Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to diminish. In July 2001, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received approximately 160,000 pageviews. In August, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received only 80,000 pageviews. The number of pageviews in September (as of September 10, when Adequacy cowardlyly hid their statistics) is 60,000, a paltry 37% of its July traffic. At current rates, the amount of Adequacy [adequacy.org] traffic will hit 0 by the end of the year.

According to Netcraft [netcraft.com], Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s situation is grim. Due to the troubles of Speakeasy DSL [speakeasy.org], DoS attacks and so on, Adequacy [adequacy.org] was forced out of business and was taken over by JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] which hosts another troubled website [geekizoid.com]. Now JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] is also dying, its corpse being turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Adequacy [adequacy.org] has steadily declined in readership. Adequacy [adequacy.org] is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Adequacy [adequacy.org] is to survive at all it will be among right-wing maniacs [mynra.com], Libertarians [nazi.org], and trolls [kuro5hin.org]. Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle [thepope.org] could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] is dead.

Adequacy is dying

Adequacy is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Adequacy community when last month Slashdot confirmed that Adequacy accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all trolling. Coming on the heels of the latest Geekizoid survey which plainly states that Adequacy has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Adequacy is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by placing third-to-last in AST's recent listing of top five trollsites.

You don't need to be a streetlawyer [geocities.com] to predict Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: Adequacy [adequacy.org] faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] because Adequacy [adequacy.org] is dying. Things are looking very bad for Adequacy [adequacy.org]. As many of us are already aware, Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to lose site traffic.

Let's try to keep the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot [washington.edu] leader Rob "CmdrTaco" [cmdrtaco.net] Malda states that there are about 5000 semi-regular posters to Slashdot.org [washington.edu]. How many users of Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] are there? The ratio of Slashdot [washington.edu] to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posts is roughly in ratio of 100 to 1. Therefore there are about 5000/100 = 50 occasional Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters. The ratio of Adequacy [adequacy.org] posters to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters is about 5 to 1. Therefore there are 50 * 5 = 250 occasional posters to Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]. This is approximately equal to the number of editors [adequacy.org] listed on Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s website added to the eleven non-editors who read the site.

Traffic [adequacy.org] to Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to diminish. In July 2001, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received approximately 160,000 pageviews. In August, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received only 80,000 pageviews. The number of pageviews in September (as of September 10, when Adequacy cowardlyly hid their statistics) is 60,000, a paltry 37% of its July traffic. At current rates, the amount of Adequacy [adequacy.org] traffic will hit 0 by the end of the year.

According to Netcraft [netcraft.com], Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s situation is grim. Due to the troubles of Speakeasy DSL [speakeasy.org], DoS attacks and so on, Adequacy [adequacy.org] was forced out of business and was taken over by JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] which hosts another troubled website [geekizoid.com]. Now JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] is also dying, its corpse being turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Adequacy [adequacy.org] has steadily declined in readership. Adequacy [adequacy.org] is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Adequacy [adequacy.org] is to survive at all it will be among right-wing maniacs [mynra.com], Libertarians [nazi.org], and trolls [kuro5hin.org]. Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle [thepope.org] could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] is dead.

Adequacy is dying

Adequacy is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Adequacy community when last month Slashdot confirmed that Adequacy accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all trolling. Coming on the heels of the latest Geekizoid survey which plainly states that Adequacy has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Adequacy is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by placing third-to-last in AST's recent listing of top five trollsites.

You don't need to be a streetlawyer [geocities.com] to predict Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: Adequacy [adequacy.org] faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] because Adequacy [adequacy.org] is dying. Things are looking very bad for Adequacy [adequacy.org]. As many of us are already aware, Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to lose site traffic.

Let's try to keep the facts and look at the numbers.

Slashdot [washington.edu] leader Rob "CmdrTaco" [cmdrtaco.net] Malda states that there are about 5000 semi-regular posters to Slashdot.org [washington.edu]. How many users of Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] are there? The ratio of Slashdot [washington.edu] to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posts is roughly in ratio of 100 to 1. Therefore there are about 5000/100 = 50 occasional Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters. The ratio of Adequacy [adequacy.org] posters to Geekizoid [geekizoid.com] posters is about 5 to 1. Therefore there are 50 * 5 = 250 occasional posters to Adequacy.org [adequacy.org]. This is approximately equal to the number of editors [adequacy.org] listed on Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s website added to the eleven non-editors who read the site.

Traffic [adequacy.org] to Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to diminish. In July 2001, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received approximately 160,000 pageviews. In August, Adequacy [adequacy.org] received only 80,000 pageviews. The number of pageviews in September (as of September 10, when Adequacy cowardlyly hid their statistics) is 60,000, a paltry 37% of its July traffic. At current rates, the amount of Adequacy [adequacy.org] traffic will hit 0 by the end of the year.

According to Netcraft [netcraft.com], Adequacy [adequacy.org]'s situation is grim. Due to the troubles of Speakeasy DSL [speakeasy.org], DoS attacks and so on, Adequacy [adequacy.org] was forced out of business and was taken over by JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] which hosts another troubled website [geekizoid.com]. Now JAT Computer Consulting [jatnet.com] is also dying, its corpse being turned over to another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Adequacy [adequacy.org] has steadily declined in readership. Adequacy [adequacy.org] is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Adequacy [adequacy.org] is to survive at all it will be among right-wing maniacs [mynra.com], Libertarians [nazi.org], and trolls [kuro5hin.org]. Adequacy [adequacy.org] continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle [thepope.org] could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Adequacy.org [adequacy.org] is dead.

Adequacy is dying

You can get the Pine usage stats on the official webpage.

Here are just a few of the tools that are considered traditionally in UNIX/Linux/BSD territory that are available for Win32. In all actuality, there's enough out there to get as much of Linux running on Win32 as Win32 running under WINE.
XFree86: http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/xfree/
KDE: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
GTK/PHP/Libglade: http://gtk.php.net/download.php

Apache: http://www.apache.org
PHP: http://www.php.net
PHPTriad: http://www.phpgeek.com
Perl: http://www.activestate.com
Ruby: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/ruby/downloads/ ruby-install.html
Python: http://www.python.org/download/download_windows.ht ml
TCL/TK: http://www.pconline.com/%7Eerc/tclwin.htm

MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
MySQL ODBC: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-myodbc.html
PostgreSQL: Included in cygwin (only works on NT)

ATT's U/WIN* Unix for Windows: http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/
Cygwin: http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/
DJGPP: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/
Native UNIX command-line binaries: http://www.wzw.tu-muenchen.de/~syring/win32/UnxUti ls.html

vi: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html
Emacs: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org

Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org
GIMP: http://user.sgic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/

List of GNU software for Windows: http://www.gnusoftware.com/
And so on . . .

There's a list over at DMOZ.org of a lot of this.

The idea of making course material available on the web is great, but it's already being done, and is already available to the public.

Here are some links I know about:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/course_i ndex.html

http://www.amath.washington.edu/courses/

I'm sure there are many others at other schools, other departments. So, what is so new/innovative about MIT's approach? They'll make it easier to find the material? They have a better brand name?

The idea of making course material available on the web is great, but it's already being done, and is already available to the public.

Here are some links I know about:

http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/course_i ndex.html

http://www.amath.washington.edu/courses/

I'm sure there are many others at other schools, other departments. So, what is so new/innovative about MIT's approach? They'll make it easier to find the material? They have a better brand name?

Don't worry. No goatse links. Just a collection of "Racks of the World"
rack rack rack rack rack rack rack rack

I'm in the Informatics program at the University of Washington and we do almost 100% of our assignments in groups. The method of making sure everyone pulls their own weight is simple: group evaluations. Everyone in the group evaulates the others and themselves.

I could be really cynical and suggest that if there's a war, there's something in it for them but I don't think they'd be that cynical. They do seem to be more provocative than Bush's more careful position at the moment, though. Oh, on the subject of propaganda, try this...

"Liberty" is a very popular word these days. Read more about it here (careful you don't catch Liberty Measles...)

They also draw heavily on work that predates widespread internet usage, like the stuff this guy wrote. Your post and Freenet both owe him quite a bit. Besides, no "creative/original" idea will work if improperly implemented, which is, like, the hard part. And the implementation would seem to be what they are addressing.

You mean something like SubTropolis or Parkville Commercial Underground? The Homestake gold mine in Lead, SD is being turned into a lab 8000 feet below the surface. There are other examples at www.subsurfacebuildings.com. While using retrofitted mines may be cost effective, I doubt they would be cheap as building a skyscraper if it was done from scratch. One also has to remember, that there is a considerable amount of underground construction in Manhatten as it is. Sioux Falls is nice, but the buildings aren't as awe inspiring as those found in NYC.