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Infrared pictures are just not as pretty as those made in visible light.

I beg to differ. And I'm an optical astrnomer.

Nearly all PR images released by professional astronomers (and many by amateurs)--especially NASA--are not "true color". Nearly every multi-color image you see is from multiple actual observations that are combined in an image processing program. How "pretty" you want to make them is partly dependent on how much time, experience, and (frankly) money you have to spend on them. Keep in mind that "prettifying" pictures does not necessarily make them better for the science.

And all pretty cosmic phenomena Spitzer can see are also observable by the Hubble telescope.

Absolutely false.

Interstellar dust attenuates light, especially in the plane of the Milky Way. The survey project I linked to above penetrates much further than any visible light instrument can. And they only use 2 second integrations. Deeper, focused observations can detect distant gas and stars even better.

Infrared pictures are just not as pretty as those made in visible light.

I beg to differ. And I'm an optical astrnomer.

Nearly all PR images released by professional astronomers (and many by amateurs)--especially NASA--are not "true color". Nearly every multi-color image you see is from multiple actual observations that are combined in an image processing program. How "pretty" you want to make them is partly dependent on how much time, experience, and (frankly) money you have to spend on them. Keep in mind that "prettifying" pictures does not necessarily make them better for the science.

And all pretty cosmic phenomena Spitzer can see are also observable by the Hubble telescope.

Absolutely false.

Interstellar dust attenuates light, especially in the plane of the Milky Way. The survey project I linked to above penetrates much further than any visible light instrument can. And they only use 2 second integrations. Deeper, focused observations can detect distant gas and stars even better.

Dang. Hate to reply to my own reply, but sorry for not including the formatted link in the reply!

Google, Wiki, BurnWorld, and about 40k other sources disagree with you. Please stop spewing bogus information yourself.

Google - Results 1 - 10 of about 48,000 for cd burn pits.

The information on a standard CD is encoded as a spiral track of pits moulded into the top of the polycarbonate layer

Recordable and rewritable media are made of different materials. Recorders (burners) use a laser to burn pits into recordable media, which are composed of material designed for this purpose.

actually heats the surface of the blank CD up so that the chemical coating of the CD will react and form a pit.

In CD burners, a laser is used to burn the pits ...

That's not a link; that's a URL. This is a link.

Plus it has to be an actual fucking link: http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/hamers.html Are you fucking stupid, or just too fucking lazy to put <URL:> around the URL?

http://www.news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/hamers.html

Probably because it was used as an example in the landmark case of Schenck v. United States.

The fact is, you have an INVIOLABLE right to yell Fire in a crowded theater, for the very simple and obvious reason that there might in fact be a fire.

Okay, now you're just being obtuse. Try not taking everything so literally, and understanding context. Or just look at the original:
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

Adobe are bundling the Yahoo Toolbar with the new Acrobat Reader 7 for Windows, along with Photoshop Album SE and 7.2 MB of extra plugins. The Yahoo Toolbar then installs not only to IE, but also to the Reader itself. To hide it in Adobe Reader, you need to right-click its toolbar and untick "Search the Internet".

But they do at least offer you a choice: you can choose not to download any or all of these extras, by unticking a few boxes on the download page, which appear after you've chose Windows as the target OS. And they're not pushing this junk with their SVG viewer. Yet. :)

As noted above, this only affects users of MS Underpants Exploder for now. But I wonder if Adobe, Macromedia or other vendors will start offering Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox soon, and on other OSes? Linux and Mac versions of the Firefox Toolbar are reportedly on the way.

It's just one more good reason to use Free and OSS software whenever possible, like GPLFlash, Ghostscript and PDFcreator: no clueless marketing droids "adding value" unasked.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~dusseau/Classes/CS739/Pape rs/dean.pdf

Would you be screaming about this if some Republican representatives and senators who didn't cosponsor the last bill put up this proposal, or are you just engaging in knee-jerk anti-"liberal" rage?

Yes, I would have. Because I've brought it up here and in other forums whenever I've had the chance. And I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I voted for Kerry (on the sole basis of this speech excerpt), not Bush.

Technically, it's true--technically, states were free to set the drinking age to whatever they saw fit, and technically, research labs are free to conduct embryonic stem cell research on new cell lines.

[...]

There exist only a bare handful of labs who can afford to lose government funding. When the government says "Do this or you'll lose your federal funding", a PI can either do what the government says or close up shop--which means losing years of research, losing his livelihood, and firing a group of highly trained, carefully sought-after and brilliant scientists.

I'm sorry, but you're completely and utterly wrong.

Research institutions with federal funding are already easily working around the federal funding restrictions.

For example, the University of Wisconsin - currently the number one recipient of federal research grant money in general, and recipient of the greatest number of R01 NIH grants - launched the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a private research institute, in part to work around these restrictions. The institute can pursue embryonic stem cell research without affecting federal funding at the University of Wisconsin in any way. The NIH even has guidelines and recommendations about how institutions can work around federal funding guidelines for embryonic stem cell research, so as not to jeopardize other funding. California is doing the same sort of thing.

"Acknowledge the reality of the situation," indeed.

You're completely wrong. Universities and other institutions can and do already work around this. For example, the University of Wisconsin, where I'm located, is launching the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a partly private research institute, which will allow it to get around this issue. This is well known and is being done at dozens of sites around the country.

> nearly the performance of their sparc

I disagree. Running ps2pdf to convert a large postscript file to a pdf took me close to 30 seconds on a Blade 2000 - this was writing to local /tmp and reading from local /tmp. On an Athalon xp2000, this same file, under linux, took around 10 seconds. This is an incomplete benchmark by any means, but it raises the wtf flag. For the price of this system (~$12,000) it should blow the pants off a $300 pc system doing something like a graphics conversion. I am not comfortable siding with the RISC vs. CISC argument anymore - especially since the PC is not clocking out instructions at 8mhz anymore, and the marketing dept is always looking for that edge with the buzzwords. Sun is still making some bitchin looking cases though.

He should have used xspim.

Wait, simulating MIPS assembly code is ILLEGAL?

In a Grid context, people usually mean Condor-G.

What on earth are you bothering with X-grid for?

You have the in-house developed Condor that's amazing!

There are enough cool things without being needlessly sensational, and invoking the Wipe-Out-All-Civilization radius definitely counts as sensational.

I couldn't agree more. There are only 10 stars within 10 light years of us -- one trinary, two doubles and three individual stars. None of them are anywhere near being potential supernovae. The BBC sensationalism was pointless and misleading.

The actual quote from which that comment was derived was probably the one in the New Scientist article:

That relatively small distance, coupled with an accurate energy measurement by NASA's RHESSI satellite, means the explosion was not as powerful - at source - as more distant bursts linked with black holes. Nevertheless, it "may have sterilised any planets within a few light years of it", says Rob Fender, an astronomer at Southampton University, UK, who is studying the lingering radio emission from the flare.

Assuming this is correct, the BBC journalist seems to have taken an off-hand comment and put it into an unreleated and meaningless context.

I don't buy that. This wasn't meant (I think) to be a supervisory aid - I think it was meant to be more of a failsafe.

Well, if it works then people will become reliant on it. At which point the teacher no longer needs to call out names and look at the students to take attendance? How long will it be before the teacher doesn't even bother getting to know the kids in their class?

That is a tricky one. I guess it depends on the specific details of how it was implemented, but I could certainly see where it would lead to problems.

Like a rat learning its way through a maze. No security system is perfect, and the kids will eventually figure out how to exploit it. Of course, this only applies if there is sufficient motivation to do so, but I could think of a few reasons a grade schooler would want to.

Totally disagree: this wasn't meant to protect against psycho mom, but I think it does help. If Jill student IS wearing her tag and "goes missing", her absence should be noticed immediately. Not that this is a reasonable argument for or against - nothing stops mom from picking up "her kid" in the current system or the RFID system for a "doctor's appointment" - in canada...

Well, the system isn't really designed for physical security. Going back to my first point, the teachers, right now, might notice that something is amiss if they know the child and the reason the parent is picking them up.

If kids are in public schools, that right is released by their parents.

Well, aren't all children required to go to school? Private schools are usually even more invasive when it comes to privacy, so I don't see how you can argue that. Also, it's my opinion that a person is entitled to their rights (even though privacy is a bit sketchy in the constitution) unless they themself choose to give them up. If parents could do this, they why not sell the kid to the circus or whatever?

There is no change from the current system to the RFID system in regards to this. At home they have (one hopes) parents. In school they have overseers.

That isn't necessarily a good thing though. With today's "sue anyone for anything" world, I practically felt like I was wearing one of these in school.

Three hurricane paths intersect in single season. Never happened before.

South Atlantic's first hurricane? Probably never happened before.

1977 U.N. treaty banning military created earthquakes and tsunamis. Isn't that interesting.

However, I know from experience that disagreeing with the premises of a Slashdot story means this comment will remain at 1 or below. Yeah, reframing the argument is probably off topic on the post-911/idiotized Slashdot.

I will definitely miss that loading time (of approx. 2 minutes) of Acrobat Reater and that invaluable information on those 4573 (or something) patents that they have for one document reader software!

Use Ghostscript then. The GSview graphical interface is available for Windows, OS/2 and Linux (though I personally prefer gv there). It supports PDF and Postscript formats (PS, EPS, etc.), and can display, print and easily convert between them, and even convert them to raster formats, so it is actually much more useful than Acrobat Reader, while being much less bloated at the same time. Ghostscript and GSview are always present on my CDs with useful Windows software, along with OpenOffice.org (which can save as PDF, nota bene), AbiWord, Firefox, ClamWin and PuTTY, to name just a few. If you work with serious printing, Ghostscript is a must.

I will definitely miss that loading time (of approx. 2 minutes) of Acrobat Reater and that invaluable information on those 4573 (or something) patents that they have for one document reader software!

Use Ghostscript then. The GSview graphical interface is available for Windows, OS/2 and Linux (though I personally prefer gv there). It supports PDF and Postscript formats (PS, EPS, etc.), and can display, print and easily convert between them, and even convert them to raster formats, so it is actually much more useful than Acrobat Reader, while being much less bloated at the same time. Ghostscript and GSview are always present on my CDs with useful Windows software, along with OpenOffice.org (which can save as PDF, nota bene), AbiWord, Firefox, ClamWin and PuTTY, to name just a few. If you work with serious printing, Ghostscript is a must.

I will definitely miss that loading time (of approx. 2 minutes) of Acrobat Reater and that invaluable information on those 4573 (or something) patents that they have for one document reader software!

Use Ghostscript then. The GSview graphical interface is available for Windows, OS/2 and Linux (though I personally prefer gv there). It supports PDF and Postscript formats (PS, EPS, etc.), and can display, print and easily convert between them, and even convert them to raster formats, so it is actually much more useful than Acrobat Reader, while being much less bloated at the same time. Ghostscript and GSview are always present on my CDs with useful Windows software, along with OpenOffice.org (which can save as PDF, nota bene), AbiWord, Firefox, ClamWin and PuTTY, to name just a few. If you work with serious printing, Ghostscript is a must.

Funny how well-written Mac applications, and indeed most Mac applications, all do take sensible, full advantage of contextual menus. Of course, it shouldn't be arbitrarily polluted with crap, or used extensively inappropriately.

Additionally, it seems that you seem to have missed that about 72% of eligible Iraqi voters turned out, some literally in tears at the prospect of voting, and only 40 people were killed the entire election day by a determined insurgency in a country of over 25 million people. Additionally, Zogby polling within Iraq at polling places showed that over 58% of Iraqis believe there should be religious pluralism and freedom, with less than 30% favoring some form of Islamic council, and a significantly smaller percentage (~1%) favoring a Taliban style Islamic theocracy. But, I'm sure it makes you feel better to gloss over all of this, and think that Bush & Co. are on some evil mission to dominate the entire globe and turn the US into a police state, while spreading propaganda to keep Americans in fear to allow them to continue warmongering to line their pockets, instead of actually considering the truth that even Kerry understood about the threat of Panislamic radicalism in the mideast, and the fact that the US's economy, as well as that of our allies in Europe, is heavily intertwined with the stability of the petroleum economy. And before you say "UM, DUDE, IRAQ WASN'T A HOTBED FOR TERROR, IT WAS ALL LIES", read the fucking link

Nice way to work in *Iraq* in a fucking article about single-button mice, though...

You don't see RMS going after ghostscript despite it not using the GPL.

There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.

If the above were completely true, humans would produce about 1 TRILLION tons of C02 each year. according to http://www2.biotech.wisc.edu/jeffries/faq/carbon%2 0dioxide/CO2.html and http://www.mindfully.org/Air/CO2-US2000-DOE.htm US CO2 production is about 1.3 to 1.5 Billion tons each year. Given that the US produces about %25 of CO2, that means that Global CO2 production is at most 6 Billion tons or about 55 times as much as volcanic eruptions. Hardly anywhere near the 10,000 number you and they throw out.

Using the USGS All of humanity produces 22 Billion a year and volcanoes 130-220, that is 100-170 times the volcanoes, still much less than 10,000.

Now for large volcanic explosions such as Mt. Saint Helens and, Krakatoa? Still trying to find info on them, but has to be much more than their average.

The US annual military budget is used in disaster recovery. Hence why we had an entire carrier group and more helping out the tsunami victims.

As for the US being the biggest culprit? We produce 25% of the CO2 recorded. However, the figure does not include all the forests being burned in China and the Amazon.

Here is a link to CO2 production by country: http://www2.biotech.wisc.edu/jeffries/faq/carbon%2 0dioxide/CO2.html It shows Russia and China as not far behind the US.

Try this. It should perform a lot better.

...you (and a few others who got partial downloads) probably got nailed when I restarted apache. It is indeed the full movie, but is currently up in the form of a locally hosted, locally seeded torrent (there's apparently another torrent out there now as well). So for now you can download the full movie via torrent here.

1984macintro.torrent

Here's a mirror, hosted, appropriately, on an Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID:

http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors/temp/1984m acintro.mov

The first known government funded weather experiment was in 1890. And by now much of the weather may be under the control of man. What is the evidence of weather control? I don't claim any of this as evidence, but I do find it interesting:

Three hurricanes in 2004 intersect in a short period of time. This has never happened before. And over the town of Homeland?

image 1
image 2

How would your steer a hurricane? Hurricanes are steered by high/low pressures and wind currents. By heating or cooling large enough sections of the troposphere you might control updrafts/downdrafts and create the steering high/low pressures. Technologies to heat up the atmosphere: HAARP perhaps?

South Atlantic (south of the equator) in 2004 seems to experience its first (as far as they know) hurricane.

The 2004 tsunami? The U.N. had a convention in 1977 discouraging military induced earthquakes and tsunamis.

It's easy to be spun off into the dialectics of whether global warming is true or false, or whether it's global warming or global cooling. But why not man made global weather control? You create a weather crisis that allows you to bring in weather control that people will be more inclinded to accept. Purpose: a control mechanism for a one world government.

Reminds me of the Self-Referential Aptitude Test. The answer to this question is (A) A, (B) B, (C) C, (D) D, (E) none of the above.

What, this story has been up for an hour or more and no one's stalked the home page of the researcher and no one's mentioned that she's hot?
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/funny pics.html

Is it just me, or does she seem a bit too good to be true

1) She likes video games
2) She's hawt
3) Her name is German for "beer cooler"

I reckon there's some perl script out there generating these web pages and a press release to go with 'em. It could pass on emails from venture capital companies to a human scam artist.

Maybe someone forgot to disable it after the .com bust.

I'm sorry to hear of what happened to you. Have you heard of this lab-grown skin technology? Here is another article. I believe it is now being used by a company called Stratatech. The patents have the title "Immortalized human keratinocyte cell line". The article says most lab-grown cells last only 15 weeks, while these accidentally discovered cells have lasted for years, since 1996 if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure, but I think one of it's intended uses is to eliminate the need for donor sites for skin grafts for wounds and burn victims. I haven't read anything else about it other than what is in those articles, so I don't know if it has passed human trials for its intended uses yet, or how well it works, if at all.

My Sony DSC 717 takes infrared photos. You can hear the "clunk" as it moves the IR hot mirror out of the way for "Night Shot" mode. It would be perfect for a low-cost scientific aerial mapping application (e.g., http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~wayne/aerial_photos/aer ials_2003_06_14/), replacing custom-built cameras worth thousands of dollars.

But, because somebody once took naughty pictures with a Sony Handicam (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-214389.html?legacy= cnet, Sony crippled the IR function. Now it only works at wide apertures and slow shutter speeds, leaving aerial IR pictures hopelessly overexposed (yes, I tried ND filters) and blurry (I can only slow to about 70 MPH or the nose rises, as do the passengers' gorges). A simple "don't do that" hack to the firmware would suffice. You *know* that the cripplage is only a couple of lines of code:

if (nightShot) {
honkExposure();
}

But, when asked formally and with the full references to the scientific research we were doing (the lead prof, BTW, is internationally renowned in the field, we ain't just grubby grad students looking to save a buck and peek at Auntie Bowdler's bra), Sony blew us off.

Open source firmware? You bet we'd go for it.

Why didn't they just use an RTG on Huygens instead of Batteries.

See for instance http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/SPRING00/lecture6 .pdf. An RTG needs quite a bit of supporting material besides the fuel pellets, gives way more power than Huygen needs and wouldn't fit.

1.> Install a new local printer on your system that prints to a file. Select any of the Apple or HP PostScript printers from the printer wizard... If you pick a color printer driver (ie: HP Color Laserjet 8500 PS), it will do color as well as B&W. When you print to this printer, it will prompt you for a location to save the output, which will be a normal postscript file.

2.> Download and install ghostscript and gsview (same site) that are both free and will allow you to convert your ps files to pdf.

3.> Edit your document (PDFs in this case) or whatever you want to save as a PDF.

4.> Print to the printer you just installed...

Well, I'd be interested in hearing it, because I've cancelled our event at the University of Wisconsin:

http://apple.doit.wisc.edu/news/mwsf2005/

Our Apple account executive has gone up to the executive level at Apple, and confirmed there will NOT be satellite downlink for non-Apple-corporate sites, and no satellite coordinates will be distributed externally, including to the media.

I think you'll find your event will be cancelled. If you still seem to think it's going to happen, I'd like to get in touch with someone within your university responsible for the showing. I can be reached at das@doit.wisc.edu, and all of my contact information is here.

Well, I'd be interested in hearing it, because I've cancelled our event at the University of Wisconsin:

http://apple.doit.wisc.edu/news/mwsf2005/

Our Apple account executive has gone up to the executive level at Apple, and confirmed there will NOT be satellite downlink for non-Apple-corporate sites, and no satellite coordinates will be distributed externally, including to the media.

I think you'll find your event will be cancelled. If you still seem to think it's going to happen, I'd like to get in touch with someone within your university responsible for the showing. I can be reached at das@doit.wisc.edu, and all of my contact information is here.

As long as the guy in charge of network security gets to decide where the exceptions are, that's fine (except when it comes to a SCIF).

so, every time an admin grants you a little more than you should have, do you think the head of network security signed off on that? Do you think he even knew? Then again it wasn't in a SCIF (or "black area" or "four eyes zone" or whatever the kids are calling it these days) - and neither is this.

The fact that network security professionals recognize that there are multiple zones with different levels of security is just another aspect of flexibility in security. Think about it this way: the ultimate security is easy enough to implement - just turn all the machines off. But then you're out because the network is suddenly useless. So you make exceptions. You try to make rules or procedures out of these exceptions, mostly because it makes it easier to implement and administer as the size of your infrastructure grows (and the guys in audit got all starry eyed too). If we look at the different scenarios here for granting a professor "Administrator access on their local machines" there's very little trouble they could get into that you couldn't stop on the wire (unless they feel they need to send millions of emails as part of their study, of course. maybe they're sociologists or something). We can argue that back and forth for a while, but the point is, its a strategy.

Another one in this thread is here.

You could easily mix and match between these and other strategies (help here ;)) as long as you stay flexible.

Which you can't do if your first reaction is to throw all of your toys out of the pram.

The better approach is to create one or more large files of random data and feed that into the apps; this is better because it gives you a reproducible stream. (Or you can use a Perl script with a known srand() seed.)

The term "fuzz testing" comes from a seminal 1990 paper (and followups in 1995 and 2000) by Barton Miller et al., who, incidentally, found much higher quality in GNU tools than in their proprietary counterparts. Before my tendinitis got too bad, I used to run The Bulletproof Penguin a one-man project devoted to stamping out such bugs (my initial goal, easily achieved, was to eliminate all the bugs reported in the original paper). Ben Woodard was doing something very similar for a while, but I don't know whether he still does.

Incidentally, this makes a certain recent Slashdot story more embarrassing: it seems that free Web browsers crash on malformed input, the kind of case that free software normally handles better than its proprietary competition.

A house with these panels can provide most of its energy, and on sunny days even feed excess back into the grid (electric company pays YOU)

And as you can imagine, the electric companies hate this. They oppose it everywhere they find out about it. Usually they claim it's on technical grounds (i.e. the installation isn't done properly, the equipment will cause massive blackouts, etc.) which are usually complete BS. Some installations might, but if it's done right, then it will work perfectly.

Considering the enery crisis, and terror threats to centralized power, it would seem irresponsible NOT to try and push for distributed solar power generation. It makes sense in almost every way (money, eco-friendly, security)

Unfortunately, solar panels aren't quite yet cost-effective enough to replace electricity, but they're getting closer and closer. Further research in this area could only help. If I were unfortunate enough to be stuck living in California, I would insist on having a solar-powered home, even if I had to build it myself. There are just way too many blackouts, brownouts and shortages there...

We haven't really went that far yet since my deadline proceeds the attempt to develop it as a free software project. Though it's not outside of my thinking. Though likely it will be GPL and released on SourceForge.net.

The site is a grand experiement so a lot of infustructer may be change when we release in May. But I'll bring it up to the team and start thinking about moving towards that end. The problem is trying to build parts that fit into Emerson College, yet still can be used at other colleges. A pain the arce if you ask me!

As far as a tech side, it's currently using the folowing:
PHP
PostgreSQL
ADOBdb (via Interakt PHAkt)

I'm also using KTML from InterAKT, but that's released under the AFPL which isn't good. I couldn't find an easy WYSIWYG tool that works in at least in IE and Firefox/Mozilla. If anyone knows any thing, please come forward!

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=239735 (video)

Doug Chapin, a nonpartisan election analyst, finds the claims to be baseless. "There were no problems that would lead me to believe that there were stolen elections or widespread fraud," he said.

"There was no overwhelming reason to cast doubt on the outcome of this election," seconded Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "George Bush got more votes this time."

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11 /10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed/

Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result.

Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.

''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities.

''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."

''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/11436220p-1 2350492c.html

All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.

"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."

As for exit polls, often brought up in the context of electronic voting, here is one expert's view:

I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.

The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.

If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit poll

I graduated debt-free and my alumni network is huge... ;)

Great link -- it hadn't occured to me, but 3D modelling with simple polygons like those earlier FPS games is probably the easiest application to apply a sketch filter to. Nifty.

Also, there's good news for you -- the page you linked connects to this one, which is a rough replacement OpenGL driver to postprocess any application's OpenGL calls with any sort of filter ... *very* cool stuff, though the page isn't dated, and there's no source, so it's hard to tell if it's still alive. Does have a screencap from Quake 3, though, and instructions to try it yourself.

Had to mention this for those who didn't catch it in 2001. Some students in Wisconsin created a Quake II mod that converts the Open GL rendering engine output to non-photorealistic sketches. Looks like the A-ha video in realtime. I'd really like to see someone bring this to more modern 1st-person-shooters like Doom 3 or Quake 3.

NPR Quake.