Slashdot Mirror

• Earth by David Brin - really more of a cosmic string/knot type thing but an excellent read, probably my favorite work by him.
• Einstein's Bridge by John Cramer - a hard sci/fi book about the SSC and wormholes.
• Others??

• MIT is a private institution. Yes it gets money from public grants & programs, almost every accredited institution does. MIT is no more a public or government entity then the trade schools that advertise on late night TV. Furthermore even parts of the US Gov't doing public work can now claim IP on some of their products.
• Yes MIT uses Graduate Students and no they don't generally earn much. On the other hand putting them to work probably does keep their tuition down a bit and heck, if you don't like it you can always go someplace else (courts rarely require X years attending MIT as part of a sentence and the campus is very open, one is free to leave it and not return at any time.) However this has nothing to do with the topic and just gets brought up every time a .edu issue is raised.
• The US HDTV standards happened after the FCC ran a competition in which four finalists emerged. Rather then a winner-take-all situation emerging (which would of taken years with the legal wrangling) a pooling of the "best" of a various technologies was brokered. As the patent & other IP issues around HDTV were spread out amongst several institutions and companies a pool was created held by the companies who now dubbed themselves "The Grand Alliance". Then as any other number of projects have done (DVD, Firewire, etc.) an examiner was brought in to determine exactly what IP was required then a formula was put in place to compensate the IP owners and everything got signed off on.
• MIT earns some large sum of money every year from it's IP material, money which helps fund them. Sony does the same from it's own portfolio. In this case MIT's IP is used through the Grand Alliance agreement, something which Sony seems to have now decided to ignore. Whether or not you agree with all details of all IP in this case it seems rather strightforward and not to fall into any of the areas which so many folks find offensive.
• Yes MIT (a US institution) can sue Sony (a company HQ'd in Japan.) Internationial trade has been going on since we first worked out nations and the laws are rather straightforward in cases like this. Did anyone other then a few sappy posters think that this was a new situation, that one couldn't sue an offshore entity?

One word:

mutt

Trust me, I've used them all. I even used to be a program manager at Microsoft (where we had rather integrated groupware, and a *lot* of mail), and nothing else has come close to handling the volume of personal email, work email, mailing lists, etc., that mutt does.

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot. If you have given up on text based email readers because pine doesn't cut it, or GUI clients because eudora and outlook express don't do it for you, then you likely haven't taken the time to realize the potential of mutt.

As we all know, slashdot sucks. And I mean it really, really sucks ass. And not just a tight, narrow fourteen-year-old's ass, but an ass as big as Hemos'.

You can do something about it. Just read this page to see the alternatives.

Actually, it was an anthill. And you know, what you've said is funny and absolutely mindnumbingly frightening at the same time. Science - and "life experience" - isn't about coming up with better ways of experiencing what we ***think*** is out there - that's the definition of entertainment. Science and "life experience" is doing our best to observe what ***really is*** out there. And as science becomes more and more depenent on machines to aid our powers of observation we must work harder to consciously be aware of this separation between science and entertainment. Hey, when they get those laser retinal displays perfected I'm gonna try em out, too. Should be amazing. The video games will be VERY entertaining and that's a good thing. But if it's showing me a picture of the Milky Way that came off a hard drive somewhere as a tiff or jpg file, that's going to be a lot closer to entertainment than a life changing experience flat on your back in the New Mexico desert. We need both to be all we can be.

Look at this link: http://www.washington.edu/hdtv/nab/press.html. The University of Washington sent 4 HD streams down to Las Vegas. In LV, all the video switching, chroma key, and digital fx were added. The resulting stream was sent back to Seattle for broadcast. Each stream was in the 200Mbps range. Nice.

The University of Washington (UW, not WU) already did this about two years ago. And using studio quality HDTV to boot. There were two different types of streaming, one which was around 40Mbps and a higher quality one at 200+ Mbps. Check out http://www.washington.edu/hdtv/ for more info.

The standard for uncompressed HDTV is a document called SMPTE-292M -- it's a 1.485Gb/S synchronous stream typically carried over coax. There is an IETF draft RFC for carrying uncompressed SMPTE-292M over IP HERE.

The University of Washington, with the assistance of Sony and Enron, presented a demonstration of seven channels of HDTV compressed to 200Mb/S over an OC-48 backbone at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention in April of 2000. In this demo, they produced a HiDef newscast on the floor on the Las Vegas Convention Center, while the newcasters, cameras, and the broadcast transmitter were all in Seattle.

I know there were limited demonstrations of highly compressed HDTV over internet protocol almost a year before that. One group that has been working on that is a University consortium called The Research Channel.

By the time the MPEG toolkit compresses a video signal down to 50:1, a LOT of data has been discarded. You see strange artifacts (if you're watching carefully enough) such as arms disappearing while the football player is throwing the ball, or water behind a moving boat looking more like clouds. Yes, for some still images you still get the 1920X1080 resolution, but mostly you get interpolated fuzz lower than the resolution of standard-definition video.

University of Washington folks have been working on this for a while, take a look at:
http://www.washington.edu/hdtv/
and the Research Channel:
http://www.researchchannel.com/hdtv/

What's new besides the mutlicast aspect? Hasn't this already been done.

Don't know about video feeds, but the UW team has a page linking a few galleries and such.

I especially like the idea of giving the user a feeling of spatial orientation when browsing the internet (but what would that mean??)...

I'm reluctant to post this without having had more time to revise, but one way of spatializing the data is by making it into more familiar terrain. Again, still early stages, but for an example, how about the terrain described by the hyperlinks surrounding Slashdot in a typical week.

The foresight institute's official definition of "molecular nanotechnology":

Thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter based on molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts of molecular manufacturing.

From the web page of the University of Washington Center for Nanotechnology (the first PhD. program in nanotechnology in the world, I believe):

Nanotechnology refers to the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules, making it possible to build machines using molecular building blocks or create materials and structures from the bottom up, designing properties by controlling structure.

From the sci.nanotech FAQ:

Nanotechnology is an anticipated manufacturing technology giving thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter. The term has sometimes been used to refer to any technique able to work at a submicron scale; Here on sci.nanotech we are interested in what is sometimes called molecular nanotechnology, which means basically "A place for every atom and every atom in its place."

The main reason, I believe, that this work can be considered nanotechnology is because it takes advantage of the concept of self-assembly. Self-assembly is the property of certain molecules to spontaneously assemble themselves into ordered super-molecular structures. Looking for ways to take advantage of self-assembly processes is a major focus of state-of-the-art nanotechnology.

I have seen 1.5Gb/s HDTV streams (and interactive video) at SC2000 (this particular demo wasn't over IP; University of Washington uses Gigabit Ethernet cards and interlaced HDTV: roughly 700Mb/s). It's quite impressive; now I know why I never want to watch movies on regular TV.

Personally I think that magnetic sails are far more promising than mechanical ones.
Recent research shows that a small amount of plasma can extend a magnetic field tremendously.

I declare this contest pointless. I further declare that, by definition, Jim Theis' The Eye of Argon wins all bad writing contests from here on out. Period. Even ones that are only supposed to judge an opening sentence. End of Discussion.

Secret message to MST3K fans: Do not under any circumstances read the link above. Read this one instead. Friends don't let friends read this thing without Mike and the bots.

the lameness filter makes this really difficult, so these aren't my favorite but they work.

export PS1='\[\033[1;30m\]--\[\033[0;36m\][\[\033[0;37m\] \d \t \!\[\033[0;36m\]]\[\033[1;30m\]--\[\033[0;37m\]\n\ [\033[1;30m\]--\[\033[0;36m\]]\[\033[0;37m\]\h\[\0 33[1;37m\]:\[\033[0;37m\]\w\[\033[0;36m\][\[\033[1 ;30m\]--\[\033[0;37m\] '
--[Fri Jul 6 08:44:52 333]--
--]ceylon:~[--

export PS1='\[\033[0;36m\][\[\033[1;30m\]+\[\033[0;37m\]\ u\[\033[1;30m\]+\[\033[0;37m\]\h\[\033[1;30m\]+\[\ 033[0;36m\]]\[\033[0;37m\]\n\[\033[0;36m\][\[\033[ 1;30m\]+\[\033[0;33m\]\w\[\033[1;30m\]+\[\033[0;36 m\]]\[\033[0;37m\] '
[+dirt+twist+]
[+~+]

i had more, but man, the lameness filter is pretty lame.

---

Just because it's a public university does not automatically mean it's public property. Professors show their work by publishing, but they are VERY private about what happens before they publish. Publication is the result of a long effort, and to be open about the process of development that lead to the publication would allow others to "swoop in" at the end and take credit. How would you feel if you worked on something for years, and in the last 1 month of work, someone came in, took it, and released it under another name as thier own work? (Despite GPL, it happens, who actually looks at "previous maintainers and developers" vs. "current project maintainers and contacts").

I've used PINE since 1994, and the PINE history doesn't say how it started, or in who's office and with what funding.

Now, IMHO, if PINE was the work of a CS professor, and he want's to keep it as a project of his undergrad or grad students, more power to him! It's an excellent project to learn on, and not a bad thing for the students to put on a Resume. Better that they actually learn to write and debug. For, if PINE was GPL, his students would learn NOTHING more than project management (an MBA skill) and server maintaince, because PINE is popular enought that they would probably get patches hourly.

On the other hand, if PINE was something that the University of Washington had a IT staff member write, as part of their paid job, or if it was something UofW paid a consultant to write, DAMN RIGHT IT SHOULD BE GPL!!!

So, my question is, what is the REAL origin of PINE? I _really_ want to know!

The robot refered to by Anonymous Coward is the Therac-25.
You can read about it here, or in Leveson's updated account.

ahb

Siggraph is -the- computer graphics conference (look it up) and is pro-active about computer graphics as art. 2 things I saw there: This wasn't GG, but it is art, whereas this is computer graphics, and art, and maths, and cute.

If you can get it via a library or someone who went to Siggraph, look up the Siggraph Electronic Art and Animation Catalog and show it to the people who aren't convinced.

10.2 Weren't earlier Pine licenses less restrictive regarding redistribution of modified versions?

No. License wording has changed from time to time, but the owner's intent has not. When it was discovered that some individuals were misinterpreting the intent of the University, the license wording was clarified.

In particular, the earliest Pine licenses included the words: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software... is hereby granted," but some people tried to pervert the meaning of that sentence to define "this software" to include derivative works of "this software". The intent has always been that you can re-distribute the UW distribution, but if you modify it, you have created a derivative work and must ask permission to redistribute it. There has never been implicit or explicit permission given to redistribute modified or derivative versions without permission. The license wording was therefore changed to clarify this point.

Someone from each of the *BSDs and from each Linux distribution needs to grep through the COPYING files for occurrences of the above text, or text like it, and ask the author for clarification. It would be best to get rid of this permission notice altogether, and change to something less ambiguous.

This stuff is being researched by the University of Washington with Microvision being the consumer path or whatever. They've been working on it for about 5 years with mucho funding from the military (of course). As for some of the comments about shooting a laser in your eye, these things will put less energy in your eye than normal ambient sunlight so it's quite alright, in theory, anyway. :) I've met, although briefly, the head of the research at the uw. Here's the url for the department if you're curious: The Human Interface Technology Lab (http://hitl.washington.edu)

To evaluate the safety of this product, it would be necessary to do double-blind, controlled, peer-reviewed clinical studies which compared a test group who used the product under real-world conditions -- which is to say, several hours a days for weeks or months -- with a control group who did not use the product. The comparison would need to test for eyestrain, visual acuity degradation, and other possible effects on the visual system, as well as potential neurological or psychological effects such as headaches. I haven't seen anything remotely like this.

There are two studies which could be mistaken for something like this on the site. One is Laser Safety Analysis of a Retinal Scanning Display System. This does not do any clinical evaluation, though -- it's just a comparison of the power output of the system to established laser safety standards. As I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't deal with issues of prolonged exposure from everyday use or possible effects of raster scanning. It takes standards created for an entirely different laser usage mode and applies them to this new product category. It doesn't do any clinical testing for visual or other problems.

The other is Decreased Flicker Sensitivity with a Scanned Laser Display, but it's actually not about safety or health effects at all. It just compares one aspect of visual acuity between traditional displays and retinal scanning displays.

There are also some papers on the safety of laser ophthalmoscopes, but since those aren't used for hours a day for extended periods of time, again it's a whole different usage mode.

So, it's a big site and it's possible I missed something. If there has been such a clinical trial, I'd appreciate a specific reference. Thanks.

Tim

To evaluate the safety of this product, it would be necessary to do double-blind, controlled, peer-reviewed clinical studies which compared a test group who used the product under real-world conditions -- which is to say, several hours a days for weeks or months -- with a control group who did not use the product. The comparison would need to test for eyestrain, visual acuity degradation, and other possible effects on the visual system, as well as potential neurological or psychological effects such as headaches. I haven't seen anything remotely like this.

There are two studies which could be mistaken for something like this on the site. One is Laser Safety Analysis of a Retinal Scanning Display System. This does not do any clinical evaluation, though -- it's just a comparison of the power output of the system to established laser safety standards. As I mentioned in my first post, it doesn't deal with issues of prolonged exposure from everyday use or possible effects of raster scanning. It takes standards created for an entirely different laser usage mode and applies them to this new product category. It doesn't do any clinical testing for visual or other problems.

The other is Decreased Flicker Sensitivity with a Scanned Laser Display, but it's actually not about safety or health effects at all. It just compares one aspect of visual acuity between traditional displays and retinal scanning displays.

There are also some papers on the safety of laser ophthalmoscopes, but since those aren't used for hours a day for extended periods of time, again it's a whole different usage mode.

So, it's a big site and it's possible I missed something. If there has been such a clinical trial, I'd appreciate a specific reference. Thanks.

Tim

For perhaps a better set of information about safety concerns and the like, go to the academic source of the technology in the first place: UW's HITLab.

The retinal display page is here, for starters. I don't imagine that the publicly traded company which got the technology would be as interested in disseminating this kind of info....
For what it's worth, they actually did quite a few trials of this at the UW's Medical Center, which is actually a very well respected hospital, and felt quite confident in it's safety.

Go Huskies!

For perhaps a better set of information about safety concerns and the like, go to the academic source of the technology in the first place: UW's HITLab.

The retinal display page is here, for starters. I don't imagine that the publicly traded company which got the technology would be as interested in disseminating this kind of info....
For what it's worth, they actually did quite a few trials of this at the UW's Medical Center, which is actually a very well respected hospital, and felt quite confident in it's safety.

Go Huskies!

For perhaps a better set of information about safety concerns and the like, go to the academic source of the technology in the first place: UW's HITLab.

The retinal display page is here, for starters. I don't imagine that the publicly traded company which got the technology would be as interested in disseminating this kind of info....
For what it's worth, they actually did quite a few trials of this at the UW's Medical Center, which is actually a very well respected hospital, and felt quite confident in it's safety.

Go Huskies!

This isn't really a new idea. For instance, the SPIN OS offers extensibility which permits web servers to operate within the kernel. Additionally, exokernel systems offer the same potential. Still, it's good to see it finally happen - I'm surprised it hasn't shown up sooner in the more popular OS options.

Why is running Tux inside the kernel so great? IIS has had a kernel module since IIS 1.0. And Microsoft got hell when it moved NT's graphics code into the kernel in NT 4.0.

This reminds me of a joke my CS professor made about operating system research: the "endo-kernel". Microkernel researchers try to move OS features from the kernel to userspace processes for extra protection and modularity. Other researchers (such as UW's SPIN OS and now Tux) move application "modules" from userspace into the kernel to boost performance. So now the "endo-kerenl" OS will be upside-down: OS running in userspace processes for protection, but applications running in kernel space for performance! ;-)

Cramer quotes an anonymous source as saying that if the sign of these numbers had been reversed (positive instead of negative), there would have been a big press conference announcing that they had shown the neutrino to have a nonzero rest mass.

I sent email to Cramer maybe five years or so later, asking what had happened with these results. He told me that nothing had happened; there has been no followup, and nobody has shown them to be wrong.

The super-Kamiokande experiment seems to have been carefully designed to show nonzero rest mass for at least one kind of neutrino while yielding no information on the actual value of the squared rest mass (in particular, its sign.) This experiment measured only the difference in squared rest masses between two types of neutrinos. (If this difference is nonzero, then one of the two neutrino types must have a nonzero squared rest mass.) It is consistent with either a positive or negative squared rest mass.

This latest result also carefully avoids the issue of the actual value (and sign) of the squared rest mass. It appears that everybody wants to get their Nobel for showing that the neutrino has a nonzero rest mass, but nobody wants to be labeled as a crank for presenting data that would indicate the neutrino has an imaginary rest mass!

Based on the description of the article, I looked up some things. What can I say? Somebody modded me down, so I'm at 49, and I'm incomplete without that karma point.

Amdahl's law

Amdahl's law

On chip multiprocessing

Simultaneous multithreading

So your hair follicle will be frozen solid and blasted into oblivion by cosmic rays over the millenia. Big deal. What everybody really wants is to get to space alive. I've had an idea for quite some time that could be expanded to cover this option ... and adding YOUR VERY OWN DNA (YVOD, registered trademark) might just provide the funding required....Basically, there are some bacteria that love heat and acid, and Venus just happens to have that environment in cloud droplets at 40-50 Km. So let's get space colonization underway and send these little guys on the ride of their life. Before they go, we could add plasmids spliced with YVOD (tm) and instead of inert frozen DNA, it would actually be active in the bacteria, contributing to its evolution and creation of the Venesian ecosphere by expression of your non-bacterial proteins. This isn't a nutty idea, already there is bacterial ecosystems being discovered in Earth's clouds. Any remaining dot-com millionaires out there who want to provide seed (pun) funding, I actually AM a rocket scientist and would love to get a project based on this idea (minus the plasmids, even) off the ground....or even just start a discussion about it.

The move to Java is not, however, motivated by the fact that it may or may not be more valuable on the market. Those who enter the major currently have to learn Java anyway in our programming languages class. Our department is really into teaching the concepts of computer science and not the particular applications. It has been decided that Java a better language for teaching those concepts, without the pain and suffering associated with dynamic memory allocation, dangling pointers, useless error messages, etc.

There is a good paper by Ben Dugan, who argued strongly for the switch to Java today and against our switch from Ada to C/C++ 7 years ago.

-Jordan Andersen jordan@cs.washington.edu

PinePGP provides Pine with "hooks" to GnuPG and various versions of PGP.

If I'm not mistaken, RedHat is bundling GnuPG hooks from PinePGP package in their Pine RPM package.

We also have one blooming in the greenhouse at the University of Washington as well. I believe that the two Universities are planning on mating the two plants together.

An Edward Gorey renderer:

http://students.washington.edu/cread/gorey/goreyli nks.html

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/3441/object1. html

--Jim

Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets is misleading and often just plain wrong. We hope that the answers provided here will clarify many misconceptions about lift and that you will adopt our explanation when explaining lift to others. We are going to show you that lift is easier to understand if one starts with Newton's laws rather than the Bernoulli principle. We will also show you that the popular explanation that most of us were taught is misleading at best and that lift is due to the wing diverting air down. Most of this diverted air is pulled down from above the wing.

Let us start by defining three descriptions of lift commonly used in textbooks and training manuals. The first we will call the Mathematical Aerodynamics Description of lift, which is used by aeronautical engineers. This description uses complex mathematics and/or computer simulations to calculate the lift of a wing. It often uses a mathematical concept called "circulation" to calculate the acceleration of the air over the wing. Circulation is a measure of the apparent rotation of the air around the wing. While useful for calculations of lift, this description does not lend themselves to an intuitive understanding of flight.

The second description we will call the Popular Description, which is based on the Bernoulli principle. The primary advantage of this description is that it is easy to understand and has been taught for many years. Because of its simplicity, it is used to describe lift in most flight training manuals. The major disadvantage is that it relies on the "principle of equal transit times", or at least on the assumption that because the air must travel farther over the top of the wing it must go faster. This description focuses on the shape of the wing and prevents one from understanding such important phenomena as inverted flight, power, ground effect, and the dependence of lift on the angle of attack of the wing.

The third description, which we are advocating here, we will call the Physical Description of lift. This description of lift is based primarily on Newton's three laws and a phenomenon called the Coanda effect. This description is uniquely useful for understanding the phenomena associated with flight. It is useful for an accurate understanding the relationships in flight, such as how power increases with load or how the stall speed increases with altitude. It is also a useful tool for making rough estimates ("back-of-the-envelope calculations") of lift. The Physical Description of lift is also of great use to a pilot who needs an intuitive understanding of how to fly the airplane.

A church that's 800 years old looks like the day it was built to my eyes, and that most of the wear and tear that I'm used to has occurred just within the past century.

No kidding! Just look at this picture of the Church of St. Dmitrii from the exhibit, and compare it to this one, taken in the early 1990s. The recent one is filthy.

That the deterioration to these buildings occurred largely in the last century is correct, but do not place the blame solely on the industrialization. The Soviet state had a much greater effect on the current poor condition of Russian Orthodox churches.

During the rule of Lenin and Stalin, thousands of churches were completely destroyed, most famously, The Church of Christ the Saviour, in Moscow. Many more were damaged and looted, others were used as clubs or wharehouses, like the magnificent Church of the Savior on the Blood in St. Petersburg (picture here). It has only been relatively recently that major restorations have been undertaken to return some of these architectural landmarks to their former glory. Furthermore, a state obsessed with military parity with the West had few resources left to perform even simple maintenance to clean the facades of many buildings.

Something else that is interesting is how, in some respects, so little has changed from the time these pictures were taken. Aside from the clothing, this picture could have been taken in any Russian town this very day. And a train ride through the Russian countryside reveals many villages that look similar to this even today.

Prokudin-Gorskii's photographs are simply amazing, though, a real treasure. I agree with many of the other posters who said that these pictures place one's black and white mental image of the past in a whole new light. Kudos to the Library of Congress for this exhibit. I am sure it will be of immense value to scholars and students world wide.

I'm an undergrad in the UW CS department.
No games-specific content in our classwork, per se. We do have world-class AI, networking, and graphics faculty, which helps. Also, there is a capstone design course that I am currently taking. In it, you and 5 other students tie together everything you've learned in a 3D networked multiplayer game. Monolith donates the lithtech engine for this class, and most people use it, though it isn't required.
-Brian

I'm an undergrad in the UW CS department.
No games-specific content in our classwork, per se. We do have world-class AI, networking, and graphics faculty, which helps. Also, there is a capstone design course that I am currently taking. In it, you and 5 other students tie together everything you've learned in a 3D networked multiplayer game. Monolith donates the lithtech engine for this class, and most people use it, though it isn't required.
-Brian

I'm told that The University of North Texas and UW have good gaming stuff going on. I'd investigate further and come up with better URL's, but then all hopes of getting this post moded up would fade because it'd be too late, and I am a whore!

Well technically this sort of thing has been done once already. As the article mentions, a group of robotics researchers already sent a 29 pound aircraft to make the same flight in 1998. Here is a link. I believe they are now planning a Pacific crossing. Their original Atlantic plane cost around $10,000 dollars though, its now hanging in a flight museum in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. The plane, named "Laima" after a Latvian Goddess of Good Luck, was the third of four of their planes to attempt the crossing. The first and fourth were lost in transit and the second died because of a flight computer malfunction shortly after takeoff. Now this smaller craft has all the same problems of size Laima did, but with the added problem of significantly flimsier construction and probably weaker flight AI. Somehow I doubt its going to make it but good luck all the same.

Sadly, given Celera's past history, it will almost certainly be proprietary. Although they have benefited immensely from government funded research and data collection, they have refused to make their sequence data publicly available in GenBank. Most journals require you to publish your sequence data in GenBank as a condition for publication of papers related to the sequence data. Celera was granted a special exemption to this policy by Science when they published their paper on the human genome recently and I anticipate a similar special exemption will be allowed for the mouse data as well, though I haven't closely followed what's going on with the mouse genome, since I work on Acetabularia Acetabulum (this is my professor's web page, not mine, the views expressed here are not ...and so on)

If you want to analyze publicly available gene sequence data, you can use GenBank at NCBI and software from Bioinformatics.org. There is also a great directory of online molecular biology tools and information here

Sadly, given Celera's past history, it will almost certainly be proprietary. Although they have benefited immensely from government funded research and data collection, they have refused to make their sequence data publicly available in GenBank. Most journals require you to publish your sequence data in GenBank as a condition for publication of papers related to the sequence data. Celera was granted a special exemption to this policy by Science when they published their paper on the human genome recently and I anticipate a similar special exemption will be allowed for the mouse data as well, though I haven't closely followed what's going on with the mouse genome, since I work on Acetabularia Acetabulum (this is my professor's web page, not mine, the views expressed here are not ...and so on)

If you want to analyze publicly available gene sequence data, you can use GenBank at NCBI and software from Bioinformatics.org. There is also a great directory of online molecular biology tools and information here

This probably reminds you of the project from UoW's HITL because it *is* the project from UoW's HITL. It'd be nice if Microvision bothered to mention that. Oh well, at least the Dev team's page at UoW mentions that Microvision are the ones developing commercial applications for it. Also has an actual picture of the prototype, which isn't nearly as high-tech as the Microvision site would lead you to believe.

I remember seeing a prototype retinal scanning display that Tom Furness and his team had developed at the Virtual Cockpit project for the air force in Dayton. This was almost 10 years ago when he packed up the project and moved it to the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology lab in Seattle. At the time it was bulky but it looked real and ready for refinement. Yet it is still under development and not really here -- not even for the military, who tend to be early adopters of this kind of tech when it's expensive and clunky. So how soon will this *realistically* take to appear in the real world?

(Anybody remember the IBM commercial where the guy on the park bench is jerking around like some kind of Tourette's sufferer -- until they zoom in and we see he's using a wearable to day trade? It's already getting hard to tell the crazy people from the people who are just using cell phones with headsets. How much worse is it going to get with things like this?)

I remember seeing a prototype retinal scanning display that Tom Furness and his team had developed at the Virtual Cockpit project for the air force in Dayton. This was almost 10 years ago when he packed up the project and moved it to the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology lab in Seattle. At the time it was bulky but it looked real and ready for refinement. Yet it is still under development and not really here -- not even for the military, who tend to be early adopters of this kind of tech when it's expensive and clunky. So how soon will this *realistically* take to appear in the real world?

(Anybody remember the IBM commercial where the guy on the park bench is jerking around like some kind of Tourette's sufferer -- until they zoom in and we see he's using a wearable to day trade? It's already getting hard to tell the crazy people from the people who are just using cell phones with headsets. How much worse is it going to get with things like this?)

In short, Philip and ArsDigita have done a lot more than just try to make a lot of money. Unlike Yahoo who just uses free software, Philip and aD actually create it and then go a step further -- They train you on how to use it and make a slew of resources about it and related technologies available on their dime and no cost to you. That's a lot more than most companies can say.

Some web journal have peer review. The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research is a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal.

There's a research project called Detour at the University of Washington to look into fixing this kind of thing.

The only working link I can find right now is

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/savage/papers /I EEEMicro99.pdf