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(*) Nearly, meaning it actually did 'kill' him several times on the way to the hospital by inducing multiple heart attacks.

Fyi, here's a link to the full text (HTML, actually) TFA... http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/117902419/HTMLSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0/. IANANS (I am not a neuro scientist) but some of my friends are. While some information about brain activity and function can be gleaned from techniques such as deep brain stimulation, the technique can also be likened to tossing a screwdriver into the back of a television and trying to discern how TV broadcasts work by observing what functions of the set are "enhanced", or not. Although it's impressive to see the extent to which the subjects were tested pre- and post-operatively, it seems a little early to jump to conclusions about enhancing memory function even in the short term.

Hey, we still have jury trials :-)

Being less facetious, the rights you are read upon arrest in England and Wales are [1]: You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. A little less scary than your quote. In particular, witholding information does not harm your defence (like your example would require), unless you only bring it up once the case has reached a court. The court must still hear evidence beyond reasonable doubt in order to find guilt. In other words, it's saying that an alibi you mention immediately will be considered more credible than an alibi you've taken 6 months (& half a dozen lawyers) to think up.

[1] I couldn't find an authorative resource for Scotland, hence the English and Welsh one will suffice. I believe in Scotland, the warning is the simpler: "You do not have to say anything. But anything you do say may be noted in evidence.", but I'm not sure.

I found a relevant link. I live 17 miles from a power plant I firmly believe was the motivation for "The Simpsons", and I have two small children. At this distance, I suspect air pollution and stupidity at the plant are bigger health risks to my family.

Here in NC, we poison ourselves in many different ways. I have some old gas in my garage because my boat-mechanic told me to just pour it on the ground when I asked where I could find his recycling bucket. That was 100m from a major reservoir. I got our hunting/fishing state guide and read that it's not safe to eat as much fish as I want from most of our rivers. Even though my electrical power nuclear, the air here is nearly toxic from up-wind coal plants. The funny thing is I'm pretty sure most of us are willing to pay to clean up the place, but it's just not anyone's job to do it.

Due to the way wordperfect and word differ in where they store the formatting information; this is stored above each paragraph in word, and at the place where it needs to be applied (like in html without a stylesheet) in wordperfect, a reveal formatting screen like the underwaterscreen is impossible in word. There was a product called crosseyes that would try to emulate this feature in word for people addicted to this thing, but it was not at all as powerful as the thing built in WP. This reveal formatting window you describe that exists in word 2003 is even less powerful than that. In the WP screen, absolutely every piece of formatting code, where it starts, stops, what text it applies to, etc. is shown and can be deleted, copied, cut and moved to different parts of the document. Here's a (small) screen shot I found with google: http://media.wiley.com/assets/194/92/0-7645-4352-0_000300.jpg/ which might illustrate it a bit.

Whoops, reposting with correct formatting:

Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998).

Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians.

I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things.

* Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball.

** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes

*** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step

Similar results have been found in Chess Grandmasters, Mathematicians (Gustin 1985), and world-class athletes (Helsen et al 1998). Many people look at the greats like Euler, Newton, Bobby Fischer, Ronaldinho*, etc, and think "oh, they did what they did because of such great natural talent," but in reality those guys worked HARD. Certainly some people are incapable of their achievement - mentally retarded people, or those who have developed a learned helplesness in the face of tough problems - but after some point all human brains are in some sense "turing equivalent". At the high levels pure speed of thought is less important than thorough understanding - most prodigious mental calculators and memory savants fail to make good mathematicians. I would hypothesize that most readers of this site, if they dedicated 10 hours per day to directed practice from age 15** for 40 years straight***, would do similarly amazing things. * Soccer is a sport where physical genetic characteristics appear to have little effect on achievement at the highest level, and mental training (game tactics, decision making, and muscle coordination) is of key importance. Tall, short, heavyset, lanky, even people with physical deformities (eg: Garrincha) have risen to the top level of the game. Apparently soccer is deep enough to allow a role for people of different body types, whereas natural gifts like height would render my argument false for a game like basketball. ** Start at age 10 and continue for 25 years for athletes *** not just trying the same failed strategies again and again but actually making effort to understand and learn at every step

Intelligent Agents were a big deal at the beginnings of the dotcom bubble era. There are plenty ofBooks and Articles about them. A good part of Java's sandbox security model evolved from the anticipation that we would be allowing agents to come visit our computers to do their intelligent activities. In the real world other technologies did a better job at whatever agents were designed to do. As the article points out, Google and other well constructed search engines are much better at finding online information than a series of wide-flung bits of software. Well designed APIs filled much of the gap for more specific applications. Intelligent Agents did find one toehold in the marketplace though, spyware and botnets show just how useful it can be to have your software running on someone else's machine. Of course they're completely outside of any security 'sandbox' and get to do what they please. It sounds as if someone is making an attempt to capitalize on some IP before it expires.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/106587008/PDFSTART

It's a 2meg pdf but worth it for the little blue dot picture.

It is evolving faster than probably any language ever has before, and the rate of its change is likely to increase.

• The language reforms
  
• Massive importation of loan words
  
• Influence of manga on culture
  
• The massive effects of the rapid changes to traditional Japanese social hierarchies on "respect language."
  
• The modern industrialization of Japan.
  

Sorry, I am too lazy, but you can read the exerpts from here

http://ca.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd- 0471798142,descCd-tableOfContents.html

But I am not that confident just by looking at the Table of Content.

Certainly has a plethora of "design" uses if not many "functional" uses.

Check out the picture: The liquid in a magnetic field

And those of you with Interscience acccess here's the pdf

A neat aspect of this is it simply reflects light. It's not a light source. I could see a pool in Vegas using a derivative of this (albeit with a NO PACEMAKER SIGN on it) to make a multi-color pool. Or imagine what the Cirque du Soleil engineers could do with this.

I agree those, in terms of LCD replacement we'd really have to see what the chip guys can do.

Really? Then
why is technical
and industrial know-how
locked up in
pay-to-view websites
in the US?

anyone who wants to can go and read about finite element analysis; there's no secrets there.

Great. Now where are the directions for extracting stigmasterol from soybeans and using it to make corticosteroids?

US health care system is similar to their economical system - it is easy to find dramatic and glaring cases of failure but overall it provides better care than for example EU or UK.

For a "broken system" these are pretty darn good statistics.
To summarize them, if you suffer from a serious illness , you are better off in USA than practically anywhere in the world, REGARDLESS of your income.

I am not going to comment on sicko because it brings nothing new to the table - it is simply a clever compilation of cherry picked examples of failures in US vs idealized "theoretical" status quo in EU.

As someone who emigrated from EU to USA I will tell you that in my case, the reality looks much more different than presented in Sicko.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2007/05/10/ncancer10.xml

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_3 07614.html

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/106592618/ABSTRACT

http://www.startoncology.net/capitoli/interno_capi toli/default.jsp?menu=professional&ID=67&language= eng

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20 030914/ai_n12516915

http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0503/151.htm

http://gut.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/54/2/268?c k=nck

I read recently about Frank A. Tinker who got a piece published in the International Journal of Energy Research where he claims he has figured out a way to boost internal combustion engine efficiency by something like 30%.

I browsed the list of their biological journals and have found nothing of value.

The blog didn't reproduce, it directly (I assume screenshot, it has been subsequently removed) copied the source from the images. Since then she reconstructed the data from the source using her own graphs-- which (should) be perfectly fine. Most journals (not open access) require written permission (several weeks/months of waiting) to copy a figure from their paper. There are exceptions in some cases (e.g., if you are an author of the original work), but basically, you give up a lot of your rights to the material when you publish in a non open-access journal.

A brief read of the PLoS copyright compared to the present article's copyright Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture copyright really shows the difference between Open-access journals and others.

To clarify, it's not the electron itself that traverses the chlorophyll molecule(s), but the energy of the electron (somewhat analogous to kinetic energy transfer in Newton's Cradle). See also (Resonance Energy Transfer )

Do you have any references to back up that claim with?

The fact that you closed with an ad hominem barb leaves me doubtful. More referenced research and less willfully ignorant babble please.

Energy pay-back time and CO2 emissions of PV systems
"energy pay-back time was found to be 25-3 years for present-day roof-top installations and 3-4 years for multi-megawatt, ground-mounted systems. [...] This leads to the conclusion that in the longer term grid-connected PV systems can contribute significantly to the mitigation of CO2 emissions."

(found by typing 'photovoltaic payback time' into google)

What produces Windows applications that are as small as WTL/SDK, and don't "look like Ass" to quote another poster?

Mono is like a third rate knock off of .Net, which seems pointless to me since the original produces bloated applications.

XUL seems to be some Mozilla internal XML handwaving used by Firefox, and not be much to do with developing small GUI applications.

If portable GUI class libraries didn't suck so much, people would use them instead of the non portable Microsoft solutions

Looking more at WTL (links here), I am so very glad I'm learning gtkmm instead of it.

There have been studies that support your theory.

Ok, I'm not sure what you're arguing. As you say, you are not an expert in statistics, so I wouldn't know how to begin refuting your "pedantic" claim.

I'll say that the paper was taken seriously enough to be published.

Journal of Genetic Epidemiology
November 2006
A scan statistic for identifying chromosomal patterns of SNP association (p 627-635)

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/112715921/ABSTRACT

It seems like the status of "official sea smell" is contested. Now dimethyl thioether doesn't smell like sea, it smell like cabbage. (Note that technical grade thioethers typically contain extremely malodourous impurities.) It's a component in seawater smell, but not the defining one. The characteristic smell of seawater comes from exciting molecules called dictyopterenes, particularly the cyclopropane dictyopterene A.

They are exciting because they are products of natural carbocation rearrangement, when carbocation rearrangement in the lab requires extreme acidity (one I did was catalyzed by sulfuric acid with anhydrous acetic acid as the solvent). Also, the cyclopropanes have not only unusual structures (carbon triangles), but unusual reactivity, resembling alkenes more than cyclic alkanes, because are actually more like double-bonded than single-bonded (exactly: a three-center two-electron bond of three carbenes).

See: Chirality & Odour Perception and Angewandte Chemie, Volume 39, Issue 17, Pages 2980-3010.

P.S. Just found a list of all the data models that Silverston has in his 2 Data Model Resource books:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-106466.ht ml

And, here's a list of all the (eleven) articles he did for Data Management Review:
http://www.univdata.com/pubs.htm
(this includes the clickstream analysis data model article previously listed as well as others about "Universal Data Models for Financial Services", "Universal Data Models for Health Care", "Using "Universal Data Models to Jump-Start Your Data Modeling Effort", etc.)

This is my second post to this thread. Here is a link to the paper mentioned in the article. It is not on Svesnmark's site I think. Also it is not the latest issue of Astronomische Nachrichten (Astronomical Notes), which is Dec. 2006. Actually he wrote two articles that seem to be the focus of the Space.com article, and both articles are published in AN's Nov. 2006 issue.

It seems we get clobbered when we pass through spiral arms, last time maybe 31 million years ago. So the idea of a static neighborhood that I mentioned in the other post is too simplistic since we appear to be moving faster than the spiral arms (else how could we cross) at any rate, even without the full papers he claims an extraordinary link to the the fossil record, using 3 Gyear fossil record and 200Myear galactic data. Obviously the key is to staying out of the arms so maybe this should be used to tune Seti searches?

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/113391302/ABSTRACT
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/113391301/ABSTRACT

The full text PDFs are not accessible to guests. Anyone have copies?

Here are the two abstracts.

Cosmic rays and the biosphere over 4 billion years
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)

Keywords
Cosmic Rays Climate Biosphere

Abstract
Variations in the flux of cosmic rays (CR) at Earth during the last 4.6 billion years are constructed from information about the star formation rate in the Milky Way and the evolution of the solar activity. The constructed CR signal is compared with variations in the Earths biological productivity as recorded in the isotope 13C, which spans more than 3 billion years. CR and fluctuations in biological productivity show a remarkable correlation and indicate that the evolution of climate and the biosphere on the Earth is closely linked to the evolution of the Milky Way. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 14 June 2006

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1002/asna.200610651 About DOI

Imprint of Galactic dynamics on Earth's climate
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Marie Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)

Keywords
Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics Earth

Abstract
A connection between climate and the Solar system's motion perpendicular to the Galactic plane during the last 200 Myr years is studied. An imprint of galactic dynamics is found in a long-term record of the Earth's climate that is consistent with variations in the Solar system oscillation around the Galactic midplane. From small modulations in the oscillation frequency of Earth's climate the following features of the Galaxy along the Solar circle can be determined: 1) the mass distribution, 2) the timing of two spiral arm crossings (31 Myr and 142 Myr) 3) Spiral arm/interarm density ratio ( arm/ interarm 1.5-1.8), and finally, using current knowledge of spiral arm positions, a pattern speed of P = 13.6 ± 1.4 km s-1 kpc-1 is determined. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 26 June 2006

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1002/asna.200610650 About DOI

This is my second post to this thread. Here is a link to the paper mentioned in the article. It is not on Svesnmark's site I think. Also it is not the latest issue of Astronomische Nachrichten (Astronomical Notes), which is Dec. 2006. Actually he wrote two articles that seem to be the focus of the Space.com article, and both articles are published in AN's Nov. 2006 issue.

It seems we get clobbered when we pass through spiral arms, last time maybe 31 million years ago. So the idea of a static neighborhood that I mentioned in the other post is too simplistic since we appear to be moving faster than the spiral arms (else how could we cross) at any rate, even without the full papers he claims an extraordinary link to the the fossil record, using 3 Gyear fossil record and 200Myear galactic data. Obviously the key is to staying out of the arms so maybe this should be used to tune Seti searches?

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/113391302/ABSTRACT
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/113391301/ABSTRACT

The full text PDFs are not accessible to guests. Anyone have copies?

Here are the two abstracts.

Cosmic rays and the biosphere over 4 billion years
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)

Keywords
Cosmic Rays Climate Biosphere

Abstract
Variations in the flux of cosmic rays (CR) at Earth during the last 4.6 billion years are constructed from information about the star formation rate in the Milky Way and the evolution of the solar activity. The constructed CR signal is compared with variations in the Earths biological productivity as recorded in the isotope 13C, which spans more than 3 billion years. CR and fluctuations in biological productivity show a remarkable correlation and indicate that the evolution of climate and the biosphere on the Earth is closely linked to the evolution of the Milky Way. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 14 June 2006

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1002/asna.200610651 About DOI

Imprint of Galactic dynamics on Earth's climate
H. Svensmark
Center for Sun Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Juliane Marie Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
email: H. Svensmark (hsv@spacecenter.dk)

Keywords
Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics Earth

Abstract
A connection between climate and the Solar system's motion perpendicular to the Galactic plane during the last 200 Myr years is studied. An imprint of galactic dynamics is found in a long-term record of the Earth's climate that is consistent with variations in the Solar system oscillation around the Galactic midplane. From small modulations in the oscillation frequency of Earth's climate the following features of the Galaxy along the Solar circle can be determined: 1) the mass distribution, 2) the timing of two spiral arm crossings (31 Myr and 142 Myr) 3) Spiral arm/interarm density ratio ( arm/ interarm 1.5-1.8), and finally, using current knowledge of spiral arm positions, a pattern speed of P = 13.6 ± 1.4 km s-1 kpc-1 is determined. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Received: 28 May 2006; Accepted: 26 June 2006

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1002/asna.200610650 About DOI

NeXT multiprocessed the guts of OS X on 2-4 processors. The result is that the mach kernel doesn't scale the processors linearly. There isn't the straightline performance boost of adding another processor beyond 4 cores with Mac OS X's mach kernel.

Let's assume for the moment that none of us in this forum actually know anything factual about how many years Apple (or even NeXT before them) have been running Mach on machines with more than 4 processors on the corporate campus behind locked doors.

However, we can probably reason this out if we try. We're all bright geek types, right? There are several clues. NeXT bought Apple for a negative $400 million or so in what, December of 1996?

The heritage of NeXT that you mention is a pretty big clue. I don't recall off the top of my head how many processors were supported by the production shipping Mach build for SPARC and PA-RISC back in the NeXT days, but let's assume it was 2, just for the sake of argument. Both of those platforms offered ready availability of systems with many processors even way back then. Perhaps there were systems like that in the lab.

Mach was originally a research project with an interesting goal: clean support of certain abstractions in a platform-independent way. One of those abstractions was support for multiple processors, beyond the typical SMP architectures we see today, which means that the author's concept of platform-independent went quite some distance beyond a different instruction set in a different risk architecture. Dig this:

Mach kernel
Unlike UNIX, which was developed without regard for multiprocessing, Mach incorporates multiprocessing support throughout. Its multiprocessing support is also exceedingly flexible, ranging from shared memory systems to systems with no memory shared between processors. Mach is designed to run on computer systems ranging from one to thousands of processors. In addition, Mach is easily ported to many varied computer architectures. A key goal of Mach is to be a distributed system capable of functioning on heterogeneous hardware.

That text is unattributed at the Wikipedia page, but comes from this document: Appendix B from the book: Operating System Concepts

An excellent book entirely about Mach is: Programming under Mach, which also mentions the design intent.

The original project was funded by DARPA, with the specific goal of developing operating systems technologies which would support super computers with hundreds or thousands of processors.

The Mach project developed new techniques which have migrated directly (via actual Mach code to OSF, NeXT, Mac OS X, et. al.) or indirectly into pretty much every modern operating system.

Mach research spanned a very long period of time, and two Universities. Curious, bright, and arguably insane people (or they would have been making money instead of slaving away making Mach on grad-student salary) with access to multiple processor machines with DARPA funded directives to make it scale to hundreds of processors. Hmm... that seems like a clue.

NeXT was, and Apple is a hardware engineering company. Apple has been building multiple processor boxes since before the reverse acquisition. I know, I had the, uh, perverse and shameful pleasure of running BeOS on one of them for sport.

If any joker with a web site can get ahold of pre-

NeXT multiprocessed the guts of OS X on 2-4 processors. The result is that the mach kernel doesn't scale the processors linearly. There isn't the straightline performance boost of adding another processor beyond 4 cores with Mac OS X's mach kernel.

Let's assume for the moment that none of us in this forum actually know anything factual about how many years Apple (or even NeXT before them) have been running Mach on machines with more than 4 processors on the corporate campus behind locked doors.

However, we can probably reason this out if we try. We're all bright geek types, right? There are several clues. NeXT bought Apple for a negative $400 million or so in what, December of 1996?

The heritage of NeXT that you mention is a pretty big clue. I don't recall off the top of my head how many processors were supported by the production shipping Mach build for SPARC and PA-RISC back in the NeXT days, but let's assume it was 2, just for the sake of argument. Both of those platforms offered ready availability of systems with many processors even way back then. Perhaps there were systems like that in the lab.

Mach was originally a research project with an interesting goal: clean support of certain abstractions in a platform-independent way. One of those abstractions was support for multiple processors, beyond the typical SMP architectures we see today, which means that the author's concept of platform-independent went quite some distance beyond a different instruction set in a different risk architecture. Dig this:

Mach kernel
Unlike UNIX, which was developed without regard for multiprocessing, Mach incorporates multiprocessing support throughout. Its multiprocessing support is also exceedingly flexible, ranging from shared memory systems to systems with no memory shared between processors. Mach is designed to run on computer systems ranging from one to thousands of processors. In addition, Mach is easily ported to many varied computer architectures. A key goal of Mach is to be a distributed system capable of functioning on heterogeneous hardware.

That text is unattributed at the Wikipedia page, but comes from this document: Appendix B from the book: Operating System Concepts

An excellent book entirely about Mach is: Programming under Mach, which also mentions the design intent.

The original project was funded by DARPA, with the specific goal of developing operating systems technologies which would support super computers with hundreds or thousands of processors.

The Mach project developed new techniques which have migrated directly (via actual Mach code to OSF, NeXT, Mac OS X, et. al.) or indirectly into pretty much every modern operating system.

Mach research spanned a very long period of time, and two Universities. Curious, bright, and arguably insane people (or they would have been making money instead of slaving away making Mach on grad-student salary) with access to multiple processor machines with DARPA funded directives to make it scale to hundreds of processors. Hmm... that seems like a clue.

NeXT was, and Apple is a hardware engineering company. Apple has been building multiple processor boxes since before the reverse acquisition. I know, I had the, uh, perverse and shameful pleasure of running BeOS on one of them for sport.

If any joker with a web site can get ahold of pre-

3) Calculate winning lotto numbers and donate the money to random charities

(Ben) Pak Ching Li is the guru if you are actually interested.

(link) to one of his papers.

Whoops, I lied. That's not from the article Slashdot linked to, it's from the actual study, the link to which I found on a similar BetaNews story. Do yourself a favor--skip the writeup in The Register and read the abstract yourself: Wiley InterScience Journal - Abstract.

Actually, this Nobel laureate http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd -3527312757.html has proposed a "methanol economy" as being better than the hydrogen version.

The actual article is available from The Anatomical Record Part B: The New Anatomist" volume 289B, Issue 1 , Pages 38 - 46. The abstract's free, although the article itself may require a subscription or university account. The flareup seems to be with this sentence in the abstract (I haven't read more yet): "In evolutionary terms, extreme spikes in environmental stress make possible the emergence of new genetic and consequent developmental and epigenetic networks, and thus also the emergence of potentially new morphological traits, without invoking geographic or other isolating mechanisms." In other words, a change in the environment puts organisms under extreme stress, overloading the ability of various DNA repair mechanisms to counteract DNA damage and mutation, occasionally resulting in novel, beneficial mutations. Several other posters have already said this really isn't anything new, for instance it's known that some bacteria actively mutate their DNA in response to extreme environmental stress. The author (Schwartz) may be hyping his claims some, but really it looks like a case of the reporter going gonzo, and might be a creationist yahoo to boot.

On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage.

They provide another value: they allow me to browse titles from many different publishers - and compare and contrast them, and review comments on them - at one central, easily searchable location. Eg, I got to Amazon.com and search for 'Java' and get a big list of java books, as opposed to going to www.awprofessional.com, www.samspublishing.com, www.mkp.com, www.wiley.com, etc., etc. and doing many different searches, etc.

I don't mind buying direct from the publisher, but in practice I rarely do, for that exact reason. Often I don't know - ahead of time - *who* publishes the book I'm looking for, because I often don't even know the title of the book I'm looking for.

Are we missing this?

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd -0764549979.html

Anecdotes don't make for strong statistics.

A small sampling of the more popular studies:
http://www.springerlink.com/(dt10aj3uaf0uc555jygud a55)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&bac kto=issue,5,10;journal,57,79;linkingpublicationres ults,1:100150,1
http://www.anesthesiology.org/pt/re/anes/abstract. 00000542-199805000-00001.htm;jsessionid=DulLk2jICr 21YEWNWncR3KAVuVUI511gQGn56CR2brpxYvhd46WX!4796555 35!-949856144!9001!-1
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstrac t/110504879/ABSTRACT

And be sure to look at:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&client =firefox-a&q=scholar%3A+smoking+cancer+risk&btnG=S earch

Smoking may well be beneficial to a small number of people. Particularly for certain kinds of pain management, I would expect nicotine to be an effective stimulant. However, you'd almost certainly be safer with a nicotine patch, and the rest of us around you would definitely be better off.

I agree. Which, if you note, is why I suggested some money should be thrown at the research first, so we can have a better idea of what is the best direction to be throwing tens to hundreds of billions in. The cost to the American economy and taxpayers of an unneeded Kyoto implementation would be staggering. The cost of repeated rebuilding from ever increasing hurricanes would be comparably staggering. Let's get some more raw data, some more rigorous statistical analyses, and have some nice testing for correlations to competing and null hypotheses to boot. At a later point, sic some economists into the mix to deal with finding which of the solutions likely to give the least overall costs, and come up with some proposals for the most equitable distribution of said costs.

Perhaps, maybe, we ought to blow up a lot of nuclear bombs to cause a likely "Global-Winter" in order to compensate for the possible "Global-Warming" that might possibly be happening.

Possibly. However if it comes to that, using the nukes to deliberatly induce volcanic eruptions is likely to yield greater net cooling per curie of radioactives released; additionally, volcanic ash is generally beneficial to soil fertility in the modestly longer term.

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure we're not there yet. You don't use an impulse drive if a conventionally fueled rocket will work... especially until you're sure what trajectory you want. There's the old question of whether human-CO2 impact is the only thing delaying an ice age.

All I hear as proof is media stories linking to each other as absolute proof.

Yes, yes, we all read Slashdot: far too much of science reporting in the media is bad reporting, even leaving aside the Weekly World News and such. But how much time do you spend reading refereed climatology journals?

Elegant troll, by the way. =)

"...Unfortunately, microkernels can suffer from performance decreases due to increased system function overhead. Consider the history of Widnows NT. The first release had a layered microkernel organization. However, this version delivered low performance compared with that of Windows 95. Windows NT 4.0 partially redressed the performance problem by moving layers from user space to kernel space and more closely integrating them. By the time Windows XP was designed, its architecture was more monolithic than microkernel. (82)

And Mach was born out of BSD.

Some history for you...

(From this document.)
"Mach's development followed an evolutionary path from BSD UNIX systems.
Mach code was initially developed inside the 4.2 BSD kernel, with BSD
kernel components being replaced by Mach components as the Mach componentswere
completed. The BSD components were updated to 4.3 BSD when that
became available. By 1986, the virtual memory and communication subsystems
were running on the DEC VAX computer family, including multiprocessor
versions of the VAX. Versions for the IBM RT/PC and for Sun 3 workstations
followed shortly; 1987 saw the completion of the EncoreMultimax and Sequent
Balance multiprocessor versions, including task and thread support, as well as
the first official releases of the system, Release 0 and Release 1.
Through Release 2, Mach provides compatibility with the corresponding
BSD systems by including much of BSD's code in the kernel. The new features
and capabilities of Mach make the kernels in these releases larger than the
corresponding BSD kernels. Mach 3 (Figure B.1) moves the BSD code outside
of the kernel, leaving a much smaller microkernel. This system implements
only basic Mach features in the kernel; all UNIX-specific code has been evicted
to run in user-mode servers. Excluding UNIX-specific code from the kernel
allows replacement of BSD with another operating system or the simultaneous
execution of multiple operating-system interfaces on top of the microkernel.
In addition to BSD, user-mode implementations have been developed for DOS,
the Macintosh operating system, and OSF/1. This approach has similarities to
the virtual-machine concept, but the virtual machine is defined by software
(the Mach kernel interface), rather than by hardware. As of Release 3.0, Mach
became available on a wide variety of systems, including single-processor Sun,
Intel, IBM, and DEC machines and multiprocessor DEC, Sequent, and Encore
systems."

Go look up who got a patent on the car, and how much they had to do with actually developing the technology.

Here's a link; basically, someone patented an existing invention, then set up a consortium to enforce the patent by way of a licensing agreement. Ford would've joined, but they demanded he set the price too high, so he got the patent killed.

Remind you of anything?

I doubt a laptop CPU emits enough microwave radiation to irradiate your gonads. It may run at 2.4 GHz but as I understand it, it emits plain non-microwave heat - the type you get when a resistor is heated by an electric current.

It's well known that heat (hot bath, sauna, etc) causes a drop in male fertility, but it's temporary IIRC. Just don't use a laptop while trying to conceive a child.

Of more concern are studies on microwave cooking that suggest it induces molecular changes to the food that may be harmful to humans: here's a discussion about a Swiss study once subjected to a gag order. Some label this pseudoscience. However, it's a known fact that the mechanics of microwave cooking are fundamentally different from traditional cooking and can lead to worse nutritional outcomes

I couldn't believe that, but look at this exerpt of the book (pdf).

On page 19, the author actually says:
In my view, you should design Web pages for Internet
Explorer (IE) version 6 running on a typical 17'' monitor. Why? Here are the reasons:
-more than 95 percent of the people visiting your Web site use IE 6.
-You can take advantage of lots of cool effects that work only in IE or IE 6. Your job is much easier if you're designing for a predictable, stable canvas.

It's extremely stupid to give such an advice. I suggest that people email either the author, Richard Mansfield or the publisher, Wiley.

Might makes right, I guess.

Or, to quote an apropos line from a page on Wiley's site for the book Brand Name Bullies:

...it may be entirely legal, but the distinction doesn't matter if you can't afford a lawyer.

The Model T sold for $825 in 1908 when it was first sold to the public.

The Model T sold for $575 in 1912. According to Forbes magazine: "When it sold for $575 in 1912, the Model T for the first time cost less than the prevailing average annual wage in the United States." (link)

Using the CPI:
$825 in 1908 would cost $16327.82 in 2005
$575 in 1912 would cost $11383.77 in 2005
(link)

The buying power of the average American family is much greater than it is today. There is no real good way to bring the price of the Model T into "2005 Dollars", but $32000 is probably really close.

Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology
Adam Young, Moti Yung
ISBN: 0-7645-4975-8
Paperback
416 pages
February 2004

Published by Wiley: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd -0764549758.html

Full Disclosure: I work at Wiley and have done work on eGrade Plus, so I am biased.

In the past year, we've launched eGrade Plus here at Wiley which is a full course management system which a professor can choose to adopt along with one of our textbooks for his or her class. It is not Open Source though we do run it on Linux servers and used a lot of open source tools for development. I used WebCT in college a couple years ago for a few of my classes and have worked with other educational products from the back end since then, but eGrade Plus is at least a generation ahead of most of these (though I too am also very interested in Sakai and have actually been messing around with it recently on a development server).

eGrade Plus is entirely web-based and runs on our servers, but the customers are assigned to domains over which they have a lot of control. We provide a large library of question banks and default assignments for each textbook, but the professor is free to make new questions, alter or create new assignments, and generally to customize the course as much as is desired.

As we make more courses to go with more of our titles, the feature set has been expanding. For our Calculus and Physics titles, we've integrated Maple into the backend to support complex symbolic notation for calculating and entering answers by whatever mathematical method the student uses to arrive at them. There's lots of pretty cool stuff we're experimenting with here based on our own ideas and feedback from our customers, most of which has been very positive.

As I mentioned before, it is not open source. Furthermore, it is only offered for use with our textbooks. Having said that, it is very very tightly integrated with our textbooks -- each registered student has access to a full electronic version of the textbook (as well as many eGP-only supplements) which is cross-referenced with all the other assignments, questionbanks, concept demos and other supplements through their domain.

While eGrade Plus does come with the textbook we also allow and encourage students who don't like to keep their textbooks after the semester is over to purchase a registration code for eGrade Plus only instead of buying a hard copy of the book. You will have semester-long access to the electronic version of the full text for considerably less than the cost of the hard copy and with some extra features to boot.

Finally, eGrade Plus can be integrated with Blackboard and WebCT if that's what your college ends up adopting in the end (just thought that was worth a mention). If you're interested in reading even more, go here.

Anyway, good luck finding the right solution, I'm very interested in some of the other links I've seen posted here too. Sorry if I sounded too much like a not-too-slick marketing droid -- sales pitches aren't really my department, I'm just a code monkey interested in this stuff only partially because it's my job.