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you should be able to dispatch with his pathetic claims in a matter seconds

No way. That takes decades of studies.

One piece of data for those thinking China is just about to take over: China GDP per capita $6,500 (slightly better than Namibia, slightly worse than El Salvador). by comparison USA: $46,000. As far as living standards go, China has a looong way to go and some major transformations on the way.

It's sometimes useful to think of China as two countries; a somewhat-developed country of about 400 million, mostly in the coastal provinces, plus another 900 million rural peasants. There's a formal registration system ("hukou") to enforce this division, tying peasants to their home area. It's not as rigid as it once was, but it's still in effect. Most of the economic gains are being realized by urban workers.

For my money this is one of the most exciting "terminal Masters" degrees out there right now (of course, I'm a linguist, so probably biased).

It will serve you in bioinformatics should you choose to continue in that field subsequently, will definitely tax/challenge your coding chops, and will teach you some cool stuff about language. Also, some of the people who run this program are affiliated with MS Research (you know, the cool arm of MS), and doing this degree is plausibly some kind of foot in the door there.

While we're at it, I'll put a plug for my program. The University of Washington has a professional masters program (that is, the purpose is to put people in industry, not academia) in computational linguistics, though if you like the research you can stay for a Ph.D. If you're not willing to locate to Seattle, they offer parts of the degree (if not the whole thing) online (i.e. slides/audio broadcast in real time, so you can ask questions as if you were sitting in the class).

We do, but keep in mind that an ICE is only about 18%to 19% efficient (the engine itself is about 20% http://courses.washington.edu/me341/oct22v2.htm, but not all of that gets to the pavement - 80%+ of the energy from burning gasoline ends up as heat or sound. Electric cars on the other hand are much more efficient - about 70% of what ends up in the battery goes to turning the wheels. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/urban/vehicles/road/electric_en.htm .

Then you have delivery and fuel management. With gasoline, you used a lot of energy in the refining process, and then you have to put it in trucks and deliver it. Of course, transmitting electricity has it's problems as well - the average line loss is somewhere around 6.5%, and the uranium for nuclear plants, and the coal, natural gas and fuel oil needs to be obtained and refined, so I would call this one a wash, with perhaps an edge to electric since sending electricity down the wire is more efficient than delivering the fuel by truck

On average electricity generating stations (hydro excepted) are about 35% to 40% efficient. of that about 93.5% gets to your outlet. Of that 99.8% gets to the battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_polymer_battery from the charger, and 99.8% gets from the battery to the motor (there are some minimal losses in the battery cables)

Bottom line is that (not counting transmission and production expenditures) assuming a quantity of energy: Joules x .998 x .998 x .70 = .697Joules for electric car, and .20 Joules for an ICE. An electric car is more than 3 times as efficient as an ICE powered car.

Babies are born knowing how to learn; people only need to relearn that if it has been stomped out of them, as is done through most conventional compulsory schooling. This is not to disgree that college can also be an effective filter for businesses to use to obtain compliant workers who know certain basic skills and who also are unlikely to seriously challenge authority. Related links:
    http://ilabs.washington.edu/news/scientist_in_the_crib.html
    http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

> Basing emplyment on IQ is pointless as it doesn't actually predict "real-world" performance.

IQ does correlate with job performance, especially for higher-complexity jobs.

See, for example:

http://faculty.washington.edu/mdj3/MGMT580/Readings/Week%202/Schmidt.pdf

Something like that has actually happened, though the paper doesn't specify whether it was a Xerox printer: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/

I believe most 3D will "make your eyes hurt" for extended use until they solve vergence and accomodation issues. While there is some work (e.g., accommodation display at Fraunhofer and some work at HITlab) to resolve these, I'm afraid we might not see the results of these at Best Buy anytime soon.

Having demonstrated 3D technology to hundreds of adults and kids, my experience has been that kids below 12 _generally_ don't seem to "get" 3D. Perhaps it's their visual system, or perhaps it's because the inter-pupillary-distance (IPD) is wrong on most systems for how far apart their eyes are. I don't this they'll be missing out on too much if they skip out on the 3D games until their visual systems catch up with the tech.

All this aside, I'm personally thrilled that all this 3D technology is becoming mainstream, but I wouldn't (and wouldn't recommend for anyone to) use the 3D technology for more than a couple of hours a day at most. Still, the fear-mongering articles and the 3-D bashing that accompanies them (probably by people who can't see the 3D effect) kind of ticks me off..

Doe v. XYC Corp. New Jersey Appellate Division, No. A-2909-04T2, 12/27/05

Some places, you can even go to jail for not reporting it:

I'm not going to jail for people who can't check their libido at the door.

There's this thing called the Meno's Paradox . It interested Socrates. Maybe you and other awesome slashdotters who are wired to every journal and patent db on the planet would do well to learn about our problem - that we really can't inquire about something if we don't have a definite idea of what we are looking for.

D'oh!

Corrected link here:

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/

You have to watch those guys. One day they're innocently printing email so that managers will be able to read it, the next they're urgently requesting your assistance in confidential financial matters.

What's next? Printers downloading copyrighted material through p2p networks? Those things are a menace!

Find a game with good modding potential

Isn't that Slashdot? :p
We could argue that discussion boards have some role-playing element.

P.S.: And you can get addicted to it as well! (Some say that "Slashdot is a plot by Microsoft to destroy the productivity of Linux users".)

Just don't live in any of the cities. They're all built on previous lahar deposits. =p Seriously though, there are quite a few cities that sit on the remains of previous lahars. Though an Osceola sized event may not happen again for a while, the lahar deposits don't respond well to shaking.

Ed Lazowska (UWCSE professor quoted in the article) says this is "a crappy hatchet-job article where the reporter had an agenda and ignored counterbalancing input", and Franzi Roesner (also from the article) agrees.

Because it doesn't matter how efficiently power is generated at a big plant somewhere. It has to be delivered to a location for the vehicle to be charged at. The vehicle has to be charged. Then and only then is the power delivered to the motor to propel the vehicle.

And according to this material from a college mechanical engineering course, only about 35% of the of the energy in the gasoline burned goes to moving the pistons and about 20% of the total power in the average modern automobile gets to the wheels. So I'd say you are setting a really low bar for electric cars; considering it's almost trivial to create electric motors on the scale needed for electric cars that have an efficiency of >=50%, there's no reason not have an electric motor independently powering each wheel (rather than the loss inducing transmission system that ICE's require), and the power loss rates for the entire modern bulk power transmission process are usually in the single digits.

Back when the tea party movement actually was grassroots (for about 2 weeks) before Dick Armey's freedomworks and Fox News co-opted it. This is how the tea party movement got it's start.

Look. There's no excuse for violence at a non-violent protest. In any group some people are asses. I'm not faulting the tea party movement for it's fair share of idiots, I'm faulting it for the racist element it harbors above and beyond its idiot quotient. Aside from the really overt and disguistingstuff, there's only so many times you can say "real americans" need to "take back america" from Obama who isn't eligible to be president because he's a secret Kenyan Muslim Manchurian candidate before it comes across as racially motivated.

When polling finds this:

For instance, the Tea Party, the grassroots movement committed to reining in what they perceive as big government, and fiscal irresponsibility, also appear predisposed to intolerance. Approximately 45% of Whites either strongly or somewhat approve of the movement. Of those, only 35% believe Blacks to be hardworking, only 45 % believe Blacks are intelligent, and only 41% think that Blacks are trustworthy. Perceptions of Latinos aren’t much different. While 54% of White Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be hardworking, only 44% think them intelligent, and even fewer, 42% of Tea Party supporters believe Latinos to be trustworthy. When it comes to gays and lesbians, White Tea Party supporters also hold negative attitudes. Only 36% think gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to adopt children, and just 17% are in favor of same-sex marriage.

When you put it all together, it's impossible to conclude that racism isn't an important motivating factor in the tea party movement.

Where to start.
Shoddy craftsmanship. Highly illogical. Dumb all over (and maybe a little ugly on the side).
After using PINE http://www.washington.edu/pine/ for a couple of years I was confronted with OE on someone's computer somewhere. It was like a kick to the balls. Now get of my lawn : ).

http://www.nthelp.com/50/Outlook_error_codes.htm

There's so much confusion about global warming now I feel like just telling people to shut up for 10 years until they get their stories straight.

THEY DID! Here is a paper about this very phenomenon from 1991. Almost two decades.

Furthermore, most of us don't actually find it that confusing. "Some pollutants actually cool down instead of warm, but they don't last as long as the ones that warm" is something a child could understand. If you are confused, then take your own advice and wait to comment on climate issues for 10 years until you understand them.

Quite a bit is localized to the cortex, such as motor control. It's also used for higher thought, but that's too random to really do much with. Humans have the most advanced cortex of any animal, although that also means it's thicker (1.5 - 4.5 mm), which may present the problem you propose.

An AC recommends, "You should take a look at Friend2Friend systems like http://oneswarm.cs.washington.edu/"

Thanks, this looks like an interesting option.

Addendum: there's a link to a higher-quality QuickTime copy of the demo video, and also a Youtube copy if you dislike Vimeo.

Yes, video. Not commercially yet, but it's on its way. Take a look at Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene, from 2007. It's ... rather impressive. Removal of defects and occluding objects is shown in the demo video at 00:44 onwards and 6:00 onwards.

Judging from the results of several Google searches, one of the people credited for the demo, Aseem Agarwala, works for Adobe -- look for interesting things in After Effects CS5. One of the others, Pravin Bhat, apparently works for Weta Digital; and two of the others, Michael Cohen and Sing Bing Kang, are with Microsoft. The rest appear to be academics.

I've recently started exploring some Augmented Reality toolkits, and I got to say that for now I -really- like ARToolkit: An open source toolkit, which is very easy to set up, and I'm astonished at how good it is.
If you want to fool around with AR, be sure to give this package a go. Very easy to set up, and the results are amazing.

Only downside (imho) to this is that, for now, it only supports .wrl 3d models (VRML 2.0): But other than that, the source is very cool to modify, and I've been able to let it run (albeit slow) on my N900. Still a lot of work to do though.

Photosynth actually started as a PhD project called Photo Tourism before it was taken over by Microsoft. There was a presentation where they downloaded a lot of pictures of the cathedral in Strasbourg. Given enough samples they were able to find typical viewpoints, they managed to align day- and night-shots, and they even could detect obstruction.

UW Academy. They didn't give us high school diplomas, but once you have a bachelors, who cares if you graduated from high school? (Also, the continued success of the program is proof that at least some 16 year olds can handle themselves in a university setting)

To give a not-yet-litigated example of what I think would be the 3d analogy: A 3d model exactly capturing the surface of the Washington Monument is not copyrightable, because it's mere facts. However, particular photographs or films of the Washington Monument are copyrightable, as they have creative presentation. However (again), someone who collected a bunch of photographs or films of it and extracted a 3d model of the Washington Monument from them, would not be violating the copyright on the photographs or films, because they were merely copying the facts (the 3d spatial position of the stones).

That's an interesting question - would the result be a derivative work and hence subject to the original's copyright? Each photo provides the photographer's view and distorts the actual relationship by the very act of capturing in 2d a 3d object.

I'm not saying that should be the case; but it could be.

Any real IP lawyers care to chime in?

Too bad it only exists in Unix/Linux world.

Now that is not entirely true: https://www.washington.edu/pine/getpine/pcpine.html

If it was not copyrightable then there would be no way to recoup the cost of creating 3-D models of buildings. Think of how much it would cost to 3D model New York City.

Isn't that essentially the "sweat of the brow" argument U.S. copyright law explicitly rejected? The mere fact that it takes a lot of effort to compile some facts doesn't make them copyrightable.

(And in any case, it actually isn't very expensive to crowdsource a 3d model of a whole city.)

To give a not-yet-litigated example of what I think would be the 3d analogy: A 3d model exactly capturing the surface of the Washington Monument is not copyrightable, because it's mere facts. However, particular photographs or films of the Washington Monument are copyrightable, as they have creative presentation. However (again), someone who collected a bunch of photographs or films of it and extracted a 3d model of the Washington Monument from them, would not be violating the copyright on the photographs or films, because they were merely copying the facts (the 3d spatial position of the stones).

The article mentioned in Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science. Cheryan et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 97(6), Dec 2009, 1045-1060.. My institution apparently doesn't subscribe to this APA journal. Here is the lead author's website. She posts reprints of many of her papers on her lab's website, but this current paper is listed as in press. I agree with Laird that it would be nice to read what the article actually said. But I also think that it was weak to posti a blog response criticizing a popular news medium's reporting on a scientific paper, without first reading the paper. The blog post consists of suppositions of how the popular report may have differed from the facts in the academic paper. And then warns that the popular media is just trying to attract eyeball to advertising rather than establish "truth". Of course, the rich irony here is that the blog post is based on no primary source (e.g. an interview or the academic article in question) and makes a controversial opposing claim based on little to no information or evidence, and does all this on an advertising supported site!

The article mentioned in Ambient belonging: How stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science. Cheryan et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 97(6), Dec 2009, 1045-1060.. My institution apparently doesn't subscribe to this APA journal. Here is the lead author's website. She posts reprints of many of her papers on her lab's website, but this current paper is listed as in press. I agree with Laird that it would be nice to read what the article actually said. But I also think that it was weak to posti a blog response criticizing a popular news medium's reporting on a scientific paper, without first reading the paper. The blog post consists of suppositions of how the popular report may have differed from the facts in the academic paper. And then warns that the popular media is just trying to attract eyeball to advertising rather than establish "truth". Of course, the rich irony here is that the blog post is based on no primary source (e.g. an interview or the academic article in question) and makes a controversial opposing claim based on little to no information or evidence, and does all this on an advertising supported site!

Fortunately their is a comment on the blog that has some interesting insight...

http://www.itworld.com/tictacns

Not enough Women in Tech

I believe this may be the article that MSNBC was referring to:

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=54341

"It was brought to my attention in an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) newsletter.

My opinion is that Tech is a tool, a means to get from point A to point B, like a car. I think women want to be the travelers, using Tech to achieve their goals and using the auto industry analogy, they generally do not want to be the mechanics. When we hear about tech, we usually hear about the techies/mechanics, we do not hear about the many other skills that the tech industry requires to thrive and people tend to not pursue things they are not aware of."

That.

Prior to the tech inovations of computers and the internet, we had cars and trains as the feets of an earlier generation where the people who were most into building and working on hotrods were men, but many mechanics have ladies who loved their vets and mustangs. People who have fascination with trains have mostly seemed to come from men as well, though many woman use them as a means of transportation and wouldn't think twice about hopping on a trolly, light rail or subway, though they don't care about how it works, just that it does. To some degree this affects many sciences...

Perhaps this says somethign more about differences between men and women...

perhaps someday privacy will be a concern, in addition to piracy. Until then, use OneSwarm.

In this case CoralCDN was effectively acting as a proxy - the IP address wasn't being falsified. Although these guys did appear to have some luck with falsified IP addresses: Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice

Well, he was wrong about one thing...

...he surmised that these "content providers" (the RIAA/MPAA) would actually change and upgrade their "investigation" methods.

That's proven to be untrue... ah well. All the more cannon fodder against them.

is there a pine port for windows?

Right here.

how hard would it be to just check the article to see if what you're asking was covered, before running your mouth off and sounding like a retard?

Oddly enough, almost all of the information I got (aside from the printer story) came from what I understood from the article.

Sigh.. I'll try again tomorrow I suppose.

...requests to BitTorrent trackers can also use CoralCDN, as these are simply HTTP GETs with a client's relevant information encoded in the tracker URL's query string, e.g., http://denis.stalker.h3q.com.6969.nyud.net/announce?info_hash=(hash)&peer_id=(name)&port=52864&uploaded=231374848&downloaded=2227372596&left=0&corrupt=0&key=E0591124&numwant=200&compact=1&no_peer_id=1. Notice that the HTTP request includes a peer's unique name (a long random string) and a port number, but notably does not include an IP address for that client. It's an optional parameter in the specification that many BitTorrent clients don't include. (In fact, even if the request includes this IP parameter, some trackers ignore it.) Instead, the tracker records the network-level IP address from where the HTTP request originated (the other end of the TCP connection), together with the supplied port, as the peer's network address.

In this case CoralCDN was effectively acting as a proxy - the IP address wasn't being falsified. Although these guys did appear to have some luck with falsified IP addresses: Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice.

As the article points out, these practices are identical to the lax enforcement practices described last year on slashdot and elsewhere.

The use of indirect evidence as "proof" of downloads is known, the interesting bit here is that in spite of pushback from ISPs and users, industry practices have not changed.

Perhaps this (and the widespread lack of privacy in cloud-based services generally) will drive more users to privacy-preserving data sharing options, such as OneSwarm.

Weather is not climate. Many weather patterns are driven by oceanic oscillations. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes Alaska to be warm and cool on a sixty-year cycle, with the current warm phase placed just right for the AGW types to show polar bears stuck on ice floes.

I live in Texas, where El Nino/La Nina can flip the weather suddenly from drought to flood. In fact, that happened just this year, where about two months ago, central Texas went from a drought and heat wave to sufficient rain that I've barely had a good chance to mow the back lawn since it started. There is a prediction of snow tomorrow, so I plan to mow the lawn this afternoon in 40F temperatures, below normal here in December. At least the drought killed off a patch of some nasty clump grass that I had been trying to get rid of for years.

I heard years ago about the weather in the Australian outback. A given area could be all nice for farming for years, then once farmers had time to settle in, bam, there's a ten year drought. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this could happen to other parts of Australia every now and then. This sounds very much like there are some ocean current oscillations that affect precipitation there. Once they flip back, the rain will return. I haven't heard any of these named, so maybe you folks need to learn more about what's going on in the southern hemisphere oceans.

You don't need encryption, you need anonymity.
There are a few networks like OneSwarm and GNUnet and you can run a Gnutella network or BitTorrent on top of I2P. Don't expect to find much, though.
You can also sign up for an anonymous VPN service like Relakks and continue to use whatever you are used to.

I once wrote a tool called "StarPatch" that lets you run StarCraft in a window. It works by 1) patching a calls to CreateWindow and some DirectDraw initialization functions, 2) patching calls to DirectDraw's Lock and Unlock to return a fake video memory pointer, and 3) periodically copying the fake video memory to the real video memory.

The source code is almost ten years old at this point, but I've made it available again at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/supersat/starpatch.c. You'll need to tweak it to work with anything other than StarCraft 1.10, but you can modify it to scale up pixels, etc.

- Karl

You really should do some homework in economics. WWII pulled us out of the great depression(which by the way seems to have been caused largely by over confidence in Free Market Deregulation.) The "New Deal" managed kept us from collapsing into abject anarchy. WWII build up is what saved the economy. At the close of WWII Eisenhower set the tax rates very high to pay down the war deficit. By the late 50's the economy was stalled. Kennedy takes over from Eisenhower and struggles with a 2 phase plan to jump start the economy, but Congress isn't buying into it... Heck even Kennedy wasn't really sold on it. Eisenhower had instilled "Fiscal Responsibility" into the peeps, which along with the high taxes was creating too much of a load on the economy.

Heller had this idea that if you give big business tax incentive for capital investment, then a short time later give consumers a big fat tax cut It stimulates production, quickly followed by consumer spending, when the consumer tax break kicks in about a year or two down the road. The core notion was that the Guberment had to expand the economy by investing in it. There are really only two ways to do that.... cut taxes, or to borrow money and spend it. Congress wasn't going to give Kennedy a blank check, so he went for the tax breaks. There were naysayers who wanted Kennedy to cut social programs too, but then some would not get any benefit, maybe too many to allow the defibrillation to take hold. Some even said that it was socially unjust to reduce taxes on the top 2% only 7% while dropping taxes up to 37% on the middle and lower income brackets. But lets face it... the working class stiffs in the lower 80% generate a lot more spending than the top 20% ever could. Worked like a charm once Kennedy figured out how to sell it to Congress. Sad thing is that if he hadn't been assassinated The Revenue Act of 1964 might not have been passed.

What we face today is a throw back to 1929. Same shit.

As for Mr. Fusion? How about some cleaner cheaper fission first. I'd rather see molten salt fission reactors get developed. It's much more likely to result in viable power reactors and generates very little waste, in fact most of the waste from molten salt breeder reactors is the kind of stuff that is useful, once it goes through a short cool down phase. Very little long term waste. Also molten salt reactors use Thorium as a feed stock (which is a wonderfully abundant feed stock). Uranium is only used to start the reactor the first time.... after that the breeder makes slightly more than enough uranium to sustain the reaction, and the little extra can be saved up to start the next reactor. MSRs do not make enough extra for weapon development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

Maybe by then fusion could be done using z-pinch, which results in a continuous plasma field rather than pulses or insanely complex Tokamak structures. http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/sharpe/486/pasko_f.pdf

Probably the best short term (5 year) fix for the economy:

If you are too big to fail; then you are too big. Period.
Prosecute execs for malfeasance and fine some big offender corps down to a manageable size.
Pry regulatory agencies out corporate orbits.
Fund education based on teacher performance and education reform at K-12, University reform...

Too much has been left to commercial interests. The real pirates in the developed world wear power ties.

Hmm I wonder if this law will let me disconnect a router from the internet... or a Root name server.

• Tracking the trackers
• Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice
• The Inexact Science Behind D.M.C.A. Takedown Notices

Hmm I wonder if this law will let me disconnect a router from the internet... or a Root name server.

• Tracking the trackers
• Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice
• The Inexact Science Behind D.M.C.A. Takedown Notices

The day the 3-strike-and-you-are-out law came to my country I fired up OneSwarm in defiance. I haven't been using gnutella or BitTorrent much in the last year or so because of fear, yes, but also because it was getting increasingly inefficient: my ADSL modem would slow down and then disconnect after less than an hour. I'd tried OneSwarm before, to find it very slow and with a rather poor interface. So on that day I fired it up and I was astounded to be able to download 6Gb in one night ! Needless to say, I consider that this law made great improvements to P2P technology !!!

This has been around a while : http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/vrd/ -s

And thousands WERE in their place, and did not. How many people were in the homebrew computer scene at the time? How many dinked around and wrote their own versions of BASIC? How many started their own companies? How many succeeded? How many had the same exact background and opportunities... and did nothing?

Ask Woz. He was there and figured out how to sell a $500 computer that cost $250 to make.

Many people have been at the helm of Apple, and only one has driven it to success. Twice. Is that luck? Would just anyone have made the same choices? Would just anyone have had the same insights? Would just anyone have the same vision and commitment and drive?

Steve is just a freak - the sort of guy who can sell anything to anyone. Watch the video above. It's really long, but there's a whole lot about what launched apple.

Can you honestly conceive of "technological advances" that would make FTL communication possible?

Yes, and I'm not the only one. There are legitimate scientists who believe wormholes are possible. Also there may yet be a way to use this whole quantum entanglement business.

Or a computer that could compute all the evolution of the universe in a second?

Sure, as long as the computer exists outside of the universe in question (and therefore outside its spacetime.)