Slashdot Mirror

I know that this is a site catering primarily to the major media of common perception but, as a nation of technomancers who arose from educated mathematicians and computer science and engineers, could we please recognize a few things?

The majority of society is managed by wealth. The wealth is maintained in a very primal mechanism of nature: hate. Those individuals who rise to the tops of their professions are the most cutthroat and methodical in executing their plans, at the expense of their coworkers and peers, because they condition themselves to be that way. That conditioned training is taught to them by maintaining, daily, throughout life, a personal list of hate. They have more, they get more, they take more, they will devise ways to bilk you out of whatever you have that they will always have more and you will always do what they say to get any.

Nothing feeds the execution (as in executing program code) of a list of hate than being able to watch and listen in on other people who are unaware of the surveillance. Microphones and cameras are available in extraordinarily tiny sizes and may be placed anywhere. Do not think of it as a conspiracy to be dismissed. Simply accept that there is not a single inch of your public, your homes, your restaraunts, your shopping centers, and your marital retreat vacation resorts that isn't mic'd and cam'd. Nothing is more useful in defeating the competition and maintaining an edge over your enemies than watching them have sex when they believe that they are alone in private... NOTHING.

The Lord creator of the universe has placed a little joke on time and space by including, in the design of subatomic physics, the concept of matched oscillating modes for particles. On the macroscale this translates into crystals, such as diamonds. A large crystal neatly fractured into two parts will continue to resonate and oscillate in modes (both audio and electromagnetic) as if it remained as a single crystal. If the second half of the crystal is fractured into multiple pieces then each individual piece will compose some polynomial factor of the entire function which models the complete oscillating mode of the first half. It is plain to see that diamond chips for microphones and phonograph pickup needles operate on oscillating modes--each and every microphone and phonograph crystal was fractured from a mother piece. The ancient Egyptian pyramids were designed with cochlear shaped passageways that the temple priests could listen in to the chips, embedded in tokens or amulets, given to the population, which mother chip was buried in a properly designed subwoofer box at the audio apex of the cochlear design. The ark of the covenant contained a matched set of listening crystals. This is not new technology.

There is no such thing as privacy. Just get over it.

"List" "of" "hate"
"mob" "of" "cell"
"cell" "fon" "mob"
"listen" "of" "hate"
"shadow" "of" "death"

Well, if there's one part of my life as a corporate drone that I miss it would be working with the LFS team. Greets to the LFS IRC team.

The Genesis six reference is about early birth. That should really be one hundred and twenty cycles, first trimester. The dialogue around Genesis six is about the "sons of heaven" who get the women pregnant and then leave town--causing the women to develop a solution for the single mother problem (Noah's Ark)..

The relevant quote which you really want is Psalms 90:10 (seventy is the sum of our years or eighty for those who are strong); which indeed indicates that humans are not "in fact living longer lives" but that we are plodding along, more or less at the same pace as suffocated and wet candles always have.

If you wish to live longer you must improve the way your body actually functions. Follow the rehabilitation program.

Most sinus infections are not really infections at all. They are the result of a breathing timing adjustment between diaphragm, lungs, larynx, nose, facial (epidermal) and sinus (dermal) muscle control. The timing adjustment is similar to a sneeze--something in the environment checked your breathing cycle and caused you to begin breathing with your muscles out of sequence. It takes the brain about two weeks to reestablish a coordinated cycle after a sufficiently significant event. The events are often caused by the deliberate application of a blowgun--a pulsed air cannon--or by improper resonances established in the air between walls, buildings, hallways, or by significant disturbances such as working around diesel engines or power machines or sitting in front of a fan for too long.

The solution, and references to the condition, is as old as biblical.

Observe and practice the rehabilitation program.

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

Did Mohammed make a real pilgrimage? He isn't alive today, so it's obvious he didn't make 'fast' (to be fair, neither did Jesus Christ--I have).

What's with the descendants of Ishmael and Esau getting all bent out of shape over a few words here and there? I don't see Salmon Rusdie exposing the historical biblical immolation of human babies, or the puppet party system, or the antics of the world's wealthy, or the mirror within mirror gumby system that turns females into lifelong murderers.

Characters and content.

http://mapfortu.wikispaces.com/
http://hairpinblue.wikispaces.com/

any government claiming to be "of and by the people" should draft legislation

Government, such as the US, has the power to borrow money on the credit of the nation (Article I, Section 8, claus 5). The borrowed money exists within a system which grants credit only with the collateral of a delicately immolated human being tracking the exact monetary amount. The global worldwide financial millenia-old system is obviously crooked, depraved, and unconscionable from day one.

Voila, moi.

any government claiming to be "of and by the people" should draft legislation

Government, such as the US, has the power to borrow money on the credit of the nation (Article I, Section 8, claus 5). The borrowed money exists within a system which grants credit only with the collateral of a delicately immolated human being tracking the exact monetary amount. The global worldwide financial millenia-old system is obviously crooked, depraved, and unconscionable from day one.

Voila, moi.

any government claiming to be "of and by the people" should draft legislation

Government, such as the US, has the power to borrow money on the credit of the nation (Article I, Section 8, claus 5). The borrowed money exists within a system which grants credit only with the collateral of a delicately immolated human being tracking the exact monetary amount. The global worldwide financial millenia-old system is obviously crooked, depraved, and unconscionable from day one.

Voila, moi.

The notion that every person is famous to his or her "friends" would effectively convert recognizable figures within any community or sphere, however small, into individuals whose lives may be fair game for the ever-expanding (social) media

Roasted human flesh for sale. You, too, could be the focus of attention for hundreds of people daily. You, too, could be the life of the party. One full immolated human child. Roasted human flesh for sale. Who wants to be a prophet?

Your prophets are the rich kid body doubles for the babies chosen to wear the coat. The system of identity theft has been going on for thousands of years.

If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?

I have followed this story since the beginning, so I'll try to explain what happened.

Almost 2 years ago, a team of programmers released an open source chess engine, named Ippolit:
http://ippolit.wikispaces.com/home
This engine was stronger than Rybka 3 (100+ ELO difference).
Immediately, Rybka's author (Vas) claimed that it was a decompilation of Rybka, and succeeded in blacklisting this program from international competitions, without giving any proof !

A few months later, an unnamed chess expert disassembled Rybka 3 and compared it with Fruit.
The biggest change is that Vas used bitboards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitboard to improve the speed of Fruit.
The expert also detailed the small differences between Rybka and Fruit, his report was incredibly detailed and there was no doubt that Rybka 3 was a slightly improved version of Fruit (sorry, I don't remember where you can find his analysis).
At this moment, Vas claimed that his computer crashed, and he lost the source code of Rybka 3, so he started working on Rybka 4.

I remember that Fabien Letouzey (Fruit's author) was worried that opening his source code would lead to commercial abuse.

Vas has always been dishonest about Rybka, for example by claiming that other engines stole his code (and always pretending that it didn't copy Fruit), or by displaying the wrong depth search (yes, Rybka does a 19 ply search, and displays as a 13 ply search !).
Also, he used his results in the Chess Championship to make loads of money, which is quite irritating when you know the whole story, and this is why he deserves to be banned and cannot claim that Rybka is the World Chess Champion Program anymore.

What saddens me is not that Vas has been punished, but that all his team is punished:
http://www.rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Rybka+team
since I'm pretty sure they did a tremendous work in good faith !

BTW, the ICGA members are well known and respected programmers, so please, show some respect !

you'll find the same issues with Chrome :P
It's really easy to get the 3.6 UI back, though: http://gamefaqspc.wikispaces.com/Firefox+Addons#Firefox%20Addons-Make%20Firefox%204%20have%20the%203.6%20User%20Interface

I don't disagree with this part. But analyzing logic for chessgames is really new btw. And it isn't they way programs like rybka and fritz win at the moment. It just isn't. I hope someday it will be, but at this point in time it just isn't.

Yes, that is exactly how rybka and fritz win. They have an opening book that gets them to a certain point, and beyond that, all moves are dynamically decided upon in-game.

You fundamentally do not understand computer chess. I recommend you stop posting about it and go read, then come back when you understand that information.

A blog has been setup to help people with the problem and to track the issue: http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/

Someone's made a Wiki of shameful reporting by "journalists".

Yeah, someone zealous enough to demand that the media censor any actual pictures of the events in Fukushima, since letting people see the pictures may upset them.

Saw a link on Twitter to an Italian news site that said the background radiation in Rome was higher than in Tokyo. Yeah, well done media, 0.04uSv?!?!

Someone's made a Wiki of shameful reporting by "journalists".

If I had the expertise, I'd made a fake video with a fake Geiger counter display, and then showing how the skin is boiling off my arm, put it online and see how much the media would fall for it. They'll probably put it all over the internet news sites (Shittington Post) and fucking CNN, with the weasely disclaimer of "unconfirmed video", which only protects themselves from embarrassment of being hoaxed as well as contributing to the mass panic those blonde airhead news-readers (not journalists) are causing

Oh well, as of now the media's voice is "radiation, what's that? Oh look at those boys bombing Gaddafi!"

You are right in that I don't understand what do you mean by "economic coercion when .. the government is controlling you" as opposed to physical force. What is this economic coercion by the government that does not involve force? How can coercion of any kind not involve physical force?

Just as a quick example that takes place today, farm subsidies. Or the government can require certain concessions in order for me to obtain grant money that I need to stay competitive with rivals, who are also getting the grant money.

You need to be more specific. By what mechanism can he stomp out products competing with his? How does he stop rival corporations and rival billionaires from competing with him and how does he force customers to buy his products as opposed to the competition's products? The evidence is that even without anti-trust laws, the free market does not tend to concentrate anything like that sort of power in the hands of a one or few people and even when it does in a particular market, it does not last for long.

He doesn't stomp out direct and equal competitors. The two collude until they either merge, or one gains enough of an edge to buy out or quash the other. It is utter hogwash that this doesn't happen. As to what he does to smaller companies, to continue our specific example: Microsoft's mergers and acquisitions. That was usually the easier course, but they could also just Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. And hell, by historical metrics, Microsoft wasn't even that bad as far as monopolistic companies go.

What you are saying is unfounded religious speak. Please provide specific historical examples where true monopolies resolved themselves.

The chart was just one example. For some perspective, in 1600s life expectancy in England was about 35 years which hasn't improved much for centuries prior to industrial revolution. The % of children who died before the age of 5 in London went from something like 75% to 30% in only a few decades. Population: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/worldpopulationgrowth2%5B1%5D.gif [wikispaces.com] All charts about the period look the same. Why do you think people moved in huge numbers from countryside into the cities to take factory jobs unless it meant a better life and a chance for all four or five children to survive instead of just one as or two was the norm before.

Again you give overly broad statistics and then willfully interpret them to support your stance. Life expectancy was only in the 40s at the start of the 20th century, and a large portion of even that modest growth came from the other statistic you mentioned: infant mortality rates plummeted. This had nothing to do with living in cities and everything to do with medical advances such as pasteurization of milk. The more interesting statistic is that the rate at which people survive through childhood didn't get better at all until much later, because strangely enough, having 8 year olds operate heavy machinery for huge numbers of hours a week in squalid conditions actually was not conducive to a long and happy life.

You've also just flat made up causation that sounds good to you for why people moved to cities. The reality was that between technological advances and population growth, there actually weren't jobs that they could have taken instead away from the cities. They didn't get up one day and say "hey, all those factory workers with their soul crushing poverty sure seem like they have a great life! Let's quit my job fixing shoes for my local community, which is considered a respectable trade and earns me liveable wag

The problem is that Rand convolutes physical violence and economic coercion when she talks about the government controlling you, but then turns around and only addresses physical violence when it comes to what we can do to each other. She's changed the definition of "force" mid-argument, and you've fallen for it wholesale.

You are right in that I don't understand what do you mean by "economic coercion when .. the government is controlling you" as opposed to physical force. What is this economic coercion by the government that does not involve force? How can coercion of any kind not involve physical force?

You can't really pick an example from within our controlled economy and have it say anything about a laissez faire system. If all regulation today were dropped, Bill's corporation could stomp out products competing with his, and then they could control how you or anyone else interacts with a computer.

You need to be more specific. By what mechanism can he stomp out products competing with his? How does he stop rival corporations and rival billionaires from competing with him and how does he force customers to buy his products as opposed to the competition's products? The evidence is that even without anti-trust laws, the free market does not tend to concentrate anything like that sort of power in the hands of a one or few people and even when it does in a particular market, it does not last for long.

The awesome thing about your chart is that it is not descriptive at all of the quality of life for the bottom quintile of income earners during the same time period. That graph could look like that even if the poorest people got twice as poor, provided the people at the top made enough more money.

The chart was just one example. For some perspective, in 1600s life expectancy in England was about 35 years which hasn't improved much for centuries prior to industrial revolution. The % of children who died before the age of 5 in London went from something like 75% to 30% in only a few decades. Population: http://apworldhistorywiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/worldpopulationgrowth2%5B1%5D.gif All charts about the period look the same. Why do you think people moved in huge numbers from countryside into the cities to take factory jobs unless it meant a better life and a chance for all four or five children to survive instead of just one as or two was the norm before.

I'll be sure to let the factory workers dying over at Foxconn and the slaves in Immokalee, Florida picking the tomatos for you to eat that being beaten, locked in a van any time they were not working, and charged $5 to bath with a bucket and a hose that while their rights might have been abused, I have it on good authority that it was not "gross" abuse.

This is hardly worth replying to. People will sometimes abuse other people, free market or not. This abuse happened in as you say "controlled" economy, so how does that present any evidence in your favor? On the other hand, I have good evidence that government actions (with best intentions in mind) have directly caused over 100 million deaths in the last century through disastrous effects of the central planing of the economy.

But hey, I could provide you reading material all day that contradicts what you've been taught by revisionists about how previous free market experiments have worked, and I'm sure you'll just outright ignore them because that's not how you know it was.

Please provide reading material that proves that government planning of the economy works better than the free market, I need a good laugh.

I didn't go into the moral connotations she some how attached to her economic theory because they are preposterous. Without mora

Here are some statistics showing that far fewer New Yorkers own cars than the average American.

I've not been to NYC since I was a child, but I do live in London. I don't know many people who own a car, and of the people that do, many of them don't use it to travel to work -- they use it to go grocery shopping once a week and take the occasional trip to the countryside. I cycle past lines of parked cars in residential areas at 9:45 every morning, many clearly don't move for weeks.

Suburbanites hardly walk at all. The 5-minute walks between stations and destinations aren't much, but they add up to a lot more than hardly anything.

So the article was devoid of anything of particular interest other than some jargon. The jargon, on the other hand, led to fascinating little technique about reconstructing the color of the grayscale image from "chroma dots". The actual method was discovered by a BBC engineer, and you can read more about it here: colour-recovery.wikispaces.com.

http://colour-recovery.wikispaces.com/

a link tends to work better.

The politics behind the Chroma Dot story is intriguing and in some places unpleasant. The instigator of the team was James Insell, and a method was created to perform the chroma dot extraction by a man named Richard Russell. Insell became a bit proprietorial over it all, and he and Russell parted ways, and now Russell it doing it alone. The original Colour extraction blog is here but they don't seem to have made any huge advances since Russell left. There is some more info, plus a link to Russell's own work (including software download) on my own Dr.Who webpage here

I agree with the point about "magic-just-ignore-this code". But that comes from teaching non-OO programming in an OO language.

I suppose with the right language and lots of instruction before you start writing code, you could avoid some magic code. I just don't see why you'd *want* to start with it. It seems foolish to me to teach OO design before the student has a solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming.

Try drawing up a few lesson plans and I think you see what I mean.

My point is the OO is as much - maybe more - of a basic concept as iteration and branching.

I don't we'll find much common ground here. I can't even conceive of how OO could in any way be as or more fundamental than iteration and branching. (I honestly don't understand how you could reach this conclusion. I'd be interested if you had a way to explain this to me.)

I view OO in terms of design. (You can write OO code in non-OO languages, from a design point of view.) In that sense, it can be quite useful when applied to specific types of problems -- but in no way is it essential. (certainly not as essential as iteration or branching) I'd go as far as to say that the OO way can even be a very poor way to design an application.

I'm reminded of a question posted on a discussion board about writing a chess program. The submitter was working on a way to represent the board. He was toying with a 'piece centric' approach. (See this page for a better understanding of the problem. Board representation involves more than just a data structure.)

One of the replies was from a "pure OO" advocate, who suggested that a piece class be created from which specific piece classes (pawn, biship, etc.) could be derived.

Now, in a chess program, potentially millions of boards will be created, evaluated, and discarded as the computer attempts to determine its next move. Using the OO approach, in this case, is quite obviously the wrong thing to do.

Now, you might rightly say that this is OO misapplied (and it is), but how is a programming novice able to identify this?

A programmers first 'hello world' should be taught as giving a string object to the system object.

Again, I would disagree. It just seems too far away from what's actually happening in the computer -- and completely useless outside of the OO approach. (Which, as illustrated above, is not always the most sensible way.)

One surprising advantage of unstructured BASIC as a teaching tool is that the approach you take to structuring your programs is reasonably close to the way you'd structure a program in assembly. So close, in fact, that even in this discussion you'll find that many micro users made the leap from BASIC to assembly without difficulty.

There is no direct connection from the OO way to the machines way -- not that I expect many people to work in assembly in this modern age -- but I can see how it could hamper a transition to an imperative language. (Granted, this would be a disadvantage for declarative and functional programming as well.)

giving a string object to the system object.

I was never comfortable with strings being objects, though being an aggregate structure I could at least understand it -- the idea that scalars should be objects is just insane!

When I see things like this, it makes me think that the "pure OO" movement has taken the 'everything should be an object' mantra just a bit too far.

Please understand that I'm not anti-OO in any way. OO design is excellent for simulation or any similar design case where you have otherwise discrete components which can be seen as communicating with one another. It's just not all that useful (and potentially detrimental, as in the chess example) in other design cases.

That said, OO design, being non-essential, should wait until after the student has a solid grasp of programming fundamentals -- an advantage which imperative programming languages hold as teaching aids over OO languages for reasons stated earlier.

GRAMPS is an outstanding piece of software. When I first began using it a few years ago, it was a little rough and it was difficult to install on Windows. This made it great for me while running Ubuntu, but difficult for me to recommend to family members. It seems to have much better support now under Linux, Windows and Mac. It also uses an open XML-based file format that at least one working group is looking at as the basis for an updated standard to replace the aging GEDCOM format. I think this is definitely the candidate for best OSS Genealogy.

PHPGedView is another good, open-source, web-based genealogy package. This is a good one to use if you're planning to build your family tree collaboratively among several family members. My biggest complaint about it is that it's a little clunky looking and some family members seem a bit intimidated by it, so they don't make changes or additions when they could. I began building a new theme and layout for it, but I put it on hold when I felt like it was taking time from working on the family history itself. Of course, it also requires that you have a server to host it on.

A similar online family tree is Wikitree.com. It looks promising, but I haven't yet found a good way to sync changes between it and my local genealogy software. It's still in its infancy though.

All that said, my favorite genealogy software is the closed-source Legacy Family Tree. The standard edition is free and the full "deluxe" version is inexpensive. Unfortunately, it's Windows only (I've had mixed luck running it through WINE). It's advantage though is that it's very easy to install and use and has some powerful tools for sourcing and merging trees. It also creates some very impressive, customizable family tree charts that can be saved in a variety of formats or printed through their mail-order service. It also saves your genealogy database in several formats including GEDCOM.

Ancestry.com is the necessary evil of the genealogy world. They have many records on their site that aren't available elsewhere on line, but they have made quite a few business decisions over the years that don't sit well with many family historians. They also produce the "Family Tree Maker" software which I recommend avoiding.

Most open source projects are only developed by one person. X.org for example has only 12 main contributors even through it's a 20+ year old project.

This is why open source games never go anywhere because a game needs far more then one person working on it, people quickly get bored due to lack of progress and the project dies. I've seen it over and over again on open source games.

Also I think this is a good guide that sums up the situation too.. http://cube.wikispaces.com/How+not+to+start+a+mod

His view is commonly held. The people who are arguing, most likely, are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing. I can't say whether he "knows best" as a general principle, but it's a good call. And an obvious one.

When's the last time you heard the word "swastika" and didn't immediately think about its role in Nazi Germany? Here's my stream-of-consciousness: "NAZIS! HITLER! WORLD WAR II! DEATH CAMPS!" and then, if I think about it a little longer, I might think, "Hindu mythology? Wait, was that Hindu or something else? Maybe Sikh? I don't think that's really a Sikh thing...they've got the turbans but I'm not sure what else...what other religions are there in India? Jainism? No, that's not right...it's not the Buddhists, I don't think...must be Hindu. Doesn't it point the other way, though? Do they do it both ways? I should check out the Wikipedia article. Maybe I should look up Sikhism, too."

When's the last time you saw a swastika in a movie or a flier or a tattoo or a T-shirt, and it wasn't this bad boy or a reference to it?

These people live in the same universe as we do; it's merely a matter of being contrarian, and a video game (correction: this video game, I won't speak for all possible video games) is not really an appropriate platform for reclaiming the symbol.

Their FAQ, http://pagalegba2010.wikispaces.com/FAQ, has a link to the experimental FCC license: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/FieldTest3/STAGrant.pdf

PropJavelin, for the HYDRA.

Which XNA version lets the public program for the Wii or Playstation?

I think the no confidence voters have been a bit slow to get their message out, the BCS has already sent out shiny information packs explaining why you should vote for them (I abstained due to this information shortage). I voted no about scrapping the rule of 50 members for a vote of no confidence though, seems like a nice democratic safeguard to me.

Yes, presumably the BCS (ie, our) resources are being used to put out the material opposing the original motion, whereas those who called the EGM probably don't have the resources for a publicity campaign. The key issue seems to be one of financial transparency, with suspicion of irregularities.

Then war is art.

One of the world's most famous books might indicate that, but personally I think war is better perceived as inspiration than as an art itself.

If former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, a former telecom exec, could not figure out his satphones needed to be charged to work in the days before Katrina, well, what are the odds you'd get satphones charged in the 3rd world?

Instead, until http://www.jpaerospace.com/ perfects the aerostat station, build a series of Sky Pup-based http://skypup.wikispaces.com/ really cheap drones with Arduino-type autopilots http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844:BlogPost:35640 and huge honkin' loudspeakers.

The Hawaii wing of the Civil Air Patrol uses manually-piloted Cessna 172s for the same mission, but Cessnas and pilot training are both spendy, whereas Sky Pups can be locally produced with minimal tools.

I have to say that unless you are studying chemistry at university computers play a very limited role - even then I'd say you only really use software significantly when studying for a graduate degree. Having said that, there are some resources that may be useful 1. Labskills e-learning software http://www.labskills.co.uk/ This software was designed to allow students to gain some understanding of practical chemistry, the principle being that it allows them to explore using lab equipment and basic reactions and play around in a way that it is not easy to enable them to do in a lab. It's not supposed to replace labwork, more give them some preparation and complement practical chemistry. 2. There are some interesting videoclips on youtube, but you need to hunt and sift through lots of rubbish. You might find the channel called periodic table of videos (run by staff at the University of Nottingham) http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos 3. You might find ChemSpider useful. (www.chemspider.com). It's a site which aims to bring together knowledge relating to chemicals. Depending on the compound you might be able to find spectra (UV, NMR IR etc) and other interesting information the record for cholesterol (http://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.5775.html) is a good example of the sort of information you might find. 4. If you really need to use a chemical drawing package there are several programs that are free (as in beer) software, symax (http://www.symyx.com/micro/getdraw/) or Acdlabs ChemSketch (http://www.freechemsketch.com/) - this would be my recommendation. 5. You might find http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/All+Reactions an interesting read 6. It's probably above the level of your students but this can be fun/educational too. http://spectralgame.com/ I hope this is useful

The FCC is not necessarily always trustworthy, IMHO. They were scolded by a federal court when they tried to force adoption of BPL because they "...failed to satisfy the notice and comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act ('APA') by redacting studies on which it relied in promulgating the rule and failed to provide a reasoned explanation for its choice of the extrapolation factor for measuring Access BPL emissions." [ source ]

The long and short of this story is that the FCC wanted BPL deployed, and was (according to two federal judges) apparently willing to suppress factual data to 'get it done' regardless of the harm it would do to Amateur Radio - you remember those guys that provide emergency communications when the fancy trunked systems die in emergencies? Yeah, them.

The judges said (quoted from the above article) that "...the Commission redacted individual lines from certain pages on which it otherwise relied...there is little doubt that the Commission deliberately attempted to 'exclude [ ] from the record evidence adverse to its position'"

Of course I hope people will send me balloon entries at http://red40k.com/ but there is a wiki that lists many other teams.
it is at http://redballoon.wikispaces.com/Groups.

I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on!

http://vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/28/rare_ripe_garlic_shoots.jpg

http://ballardfarmersmarket.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/green-garlic/

http://inpraiseofsardines.typepad.com/blogs/2006/02/spring_is_just_.html

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text? More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on! Did Edith Sherwood ever stop to think that maybe -- similar to numerology in The Bible -- she'd be able to make words out of any strange text regardless of its true origin? Here's a real gem:

This brief sentence indicated that the use of anagrams should be investigated. This was further supported by reading Wikipedia’s report that anagrams were popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and that some 17th century astronomers, while engaged in verification of their discoveries, used anagrams to hide their ideas.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me. This is the game that will be played with the Voynich Manuscript. Every so often people will claim to have 'decoded it' by offering up a small part of the manuscript which very imaginative minds have pulled together 10+ very very flimsy clues that point to some individual. The fact that there are so many coincidences will add weight to it being the real explanation. But it oddly won't work for 99% of the manuscript. Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense. If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

Remember when making criticisms of a work, one must consider both the audience intended for the work and the work's context. This piece was aimed at a low-tech audience, designed to explain the basic concepts of her discovery to the layman. It was published on the Internet as opposed to an academic journal. For those reasons, the tone, style, and sources cited are appropriate.

Eldavojohn, she uses a method of decryption that is similar to how the Rosetta Stone was decoded. The decoder of the Rosetta Stone was considered a genius. The method: you find a page or a section with proper names that can be identified, or just guessed, and then use that decoded portion to slowly decode the rest of the text. She used the page with herbs, vegetables and drawings because, as you mentioned, the rest of the block text gives no clue as to the subject matter of the text and therefore unlikely to yield the decrypt key.

Using Wikipedia as a source of inspiration to find the key to decryption isn't idiotic: it's inspired. Mentioning Wikipedia as a source of inspiration is not the same as citing it as an academic source. One is appropriate; one is not. And, with respect, this is not the type of academic project that a Wikipedia source detracts from. This is a problem to-be-solved, not a new theory of genetics or history that de facto relies on the reliabilit

On this note, it may not hurt to point out that the Voynich/Sherwood drawing (as previously linked) does more closely resemble these pictures (1, 2) of wild garlic I found with a quick Google Image search. Still not a perfect likeness, but the Voynich drawing might imperfectly depict something more closely related to that wild garlic than the grandparent post's modern cultivated garlic.

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on! Did Edith Sherwood ever stop to think that maybe -- similar to numerology in The Bible -- she'd be able to make words out of any strange text regardless of its true origin?

Here's a real gem:

This brief sentence indicated that the use of anagrams should be investigated. This was further supported by reading Wikipedia’s report that anagrams were popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and that some 17th century astronomers, while engaged in verification of their discoveries, used anagrams to hide their ideas.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me.

This is the game that will be played with the Voynich Manuscript. Every so often people will claim to have 'decoded it' by offering up a small part of the manuscript which very imaginative minds have pulled together 10+ very very flimsy clues that point to some individual. The fact that there are so many coincidences will add weight to it being the real explanation. But it oddly won't work for 99% of the manuscript. Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

As of 2009/03, Insteon is fully supported for open source on unix or windows, but for this you must use a P(ower)L(ine)M(odem) (not a serial or USB PLC) and use it with misterhouse.

A favorite site of mine is Linux Home Automation. Decent amounts of good information.
I am of the opinion that Home Automation isn't as far along as it should be.

The goals:
* Determine the security risks associated with editing this code in the field.
* Determine what this code does, and if it does so honestly, effectively or in a legal fashion.
* Determine if this code even legally exists or meets the legal definitions for a "voting system" at all under federal or state published guidelines.

They can't say at the moment whether vote rigging could or did take place, they simply have gotten access to code that Sequoia apparently wanted kept secret, and are studying it and making it available for others to study. It may turn out that regardless of the relative security and trustworthiness of the code, it may be in violation of Federal laws for other reasons. Let's not jump to any fun conspiracy-theory conclusions (although I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they turn out to be correct). There will be plenty of time to hang people after we know more about what was found.

same torrent, new link.

http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/file/view/sequoiacompletefile.zip.torrent

Show me the section in federal law that cites wiki!

OK, I'll quote this instead:

"4.2.2 Software Integrity

Self-modifying, dynamically loaded, or interpreted code is prohibited, except under the security provisions outlined in section 6.4.e [sic - see note below]. This prohibition is to ensure that the software tested and approved during the qualification process remains unchanged and retains its integrity. External modification of code during execution shall be prohibited. Where the development environment (programming language and development tools) includes the following features, the software shall provide controls to prevent accidental or deliberate attempts to replace executable code: ...

IANAL, but that seems pretty clear cut. Maybe not in regards to the SQL, but as far as to what they mean.

Seems like the files don't really amount to much. They are SQL Server 2005 backups where the would-be interesting data (any code in the form of stored procedures and triggers) were removed.

http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/message/view/home/15697868
http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/message/view/Discussion+Related+To+The+Original+Data+File+And+What+Sequoia+Did+To+It./15697404

Seems like the files don't really amount to much. They are SQL Server 2005 backups where the would-be interesting data (any code in the form of stored procedures and triggers) were removed.

http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/message/view/home/15697868
http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/message/view/Discussion+Related+To+The+Original+Data+File+And+What+Sequoia+Did+To+It./15697404

The more you read at the ultimate site more you realize the people digging thru this garbage know nothing about what they are reading, and not much about programming either.

You could have kept reading, you know.

See also the 2002 edition of the "Voluntary Voting System Guide" published by the Federal Election Commission especially this bit in Volume 1:

Self-modifying, dynamically loaded, or interpreted code is prohibited [...]

The FEC standards say "prohibited". They do not say "Any self-modifying, dynamically loaded or interpreted code is only okay if someone who is a really good programmer says it is" or "Interpreted code is okey dokey as long as it isn't called all that often". If the database itself contains application code which modifies the database, then that's a problem. It doesn't matter what kind of code it is or how benign you think it is, it should not be there at all.

If you would like to share your educated opinion where it matters, feel free to comment in the wiki. That's what it's there for.

"Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin' in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What's down in the dark will be brought to the light"

    -Johnny Cash

Quote taken from the index of http://studysequoia.wikispaces.com/. Wishful thinking, but how apt.

"although we are starting to see more private-care options due to long waiting lists for some procedures in some parts of the country"
Uh-huh.
More ethnically diverse?
CIA factbook
US
white 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61% (July 2007 estimate) note: a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean a person of Latin American descent (including persons of Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican origin) living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.); about 15.1% of the total US population is Hispanic
Canada
British Isles origin 28%, French origin 23%, other European 15%, Amerindian 2%, other, mostly Asian, African, Arab 6%, mixed background 26%
I wouldnt say either blows away the other.
More spread out?
https://travelcanada.wikispaces.com/file/view/population_map.gif
most of the population of Canada is within 300 miles of the US border.
Oh, the population of Canada is 30 million or so? Pretty close to NY + LA. When India or China successfully implements publicly run health care (and openly documents it) we can think about it. My first hilighted statement of yours implies maybe its not such a raging success.