Slashdot Mirror

The catch to these devises appears to be that if you have a strong enough electrostatic field to contain the ions then you will also lose A LOT of high energy electrons (Rider 1995), thus reducing the confinement efficiency. As Rider notes, capturing the escaping electrons to recover their energy may make the scheme feasible for D-T fusion ( there are other issues as well however).

Personally I think stellarators are more promising. For those who don't know stellarators are a bit like Tokamaks, except rather than relying on an electric current in the plasma to create the necessary twist to the magnetic field for confinement, they twist the confinement vessel itself ( a bit like a moebius strip ), making them a lot more stable than Tokamaks, and allowing them to operate continuously (You can't induce a DC current in the plasma so Tokamaks necessarily operate in pulses ). Main problem seems to be that since stellerators have a lot less symmetry than Tokamaks the calculations become more difficult, but if computing power continues to rise this will probably be solveable.

As a bonus stellarators look damn cool ; )
http://www.efda.org/pictures_html/stellarator_schema_and_live.jpg
http://www.psl.wisc.edu/hsx.jpg

There are GPL versions of ghostscript. They are not as up-to-date though.

The non-commercial licenced one gets new code first it seems.

See here.

I use GSview. Is that vulnerable to this backdoor exploit? I suspect that it is not because I don't believe that this PDF viewer does anything special with URLs.

The first statement is false. For tax year 2007, the personal exemption is $3400 and the standard deduction is $5350 for single filers. Thus, at least the first $8750 of income is effectively exempt from taxation. Your other two statements are correct, but in my personal experience it's unusual for TA/RA stipends to approach that amount.

The stipend is same for everyone and is advertised on the department website.

Yes, and if we're talking about universities that were anything like the one I attended, they're much less than $8750 a year - for everyone.

No they are not exempt!

In fact, stipends *are* exempt from Social Security taxes, provided that one works fewer than 20 hours a week, and only while regular classes are in session. See, for example, http://www.housing.wisc.edu/jobs/PDF/payroll_information.pdf. And for a canonical reference that applies specifically to nonresident aliens on student visas, see http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=131635,00.html.

The number you quote seems to be closer to the extraterrestial solar flux of between 1.3 and 1.4 kW/square meter.
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brooksdr/DRB_web_page/papers/UsingTheSun/using.htm/
According to ASHRAE, a horizontal surface on the earth will get around 256 btuh/sq ft peak at noon on a clear, sunny day. By my calcs, that's about 800 Watts/sq meter.
For yesterday's data on actual insolation at the surface in the Western US, see this:
http://www.soils.wisc.edu/wimnext/insol/westinsol.html/
Here's a little more on the subject:
http://www.solar4power.com/solar-power-insolation-window.html/
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas//

Who needs more realistic graphics? I wish these guys would work harder on getting the non-photorealistic sketch mods working better with quake 3 and 4. Doom 3 would be nice as well.

Seth

1) What is the usual failure rate for replication?

2) Do the letters routinely get published?

3) You just do that for work you're following up with experiments, not for everything you cite, right?

Unfortunately, I'm not in a hypothesis-driven lab, so I can't speak to any of these from direct experience. I know that I routinely see such letters published (frequently as "technical comments"), and I know that I go to seminars and routinely see people get raked over the coals for not having verified someone else's results. The only time you would do so, though, is for results on which your work depends directly.

Of course, there are perfectly valid reasons why that validation might fail, reasons that have nothing to do with someone being sloppy or deceitful. For example, many oft-used cell lines mutate as they are cultured, so your flask of MCF-7 breast cancer cells might not behave the same as the MCF-7 cells used across campus.

Step by Step with screenshots
http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=6436#500

Adeptus

There is a lot of research being done along the lines of Helium-3. http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep533/FALL2001/lecture25.pdf is the technical side of the argument and it's been said to be more valuable than {insert your favorite precious metal here}. He-3 is said to be easier to work with than some other options and even a short cut, but that a point for the Advance Physicist and Engineers to work out. I am just the message on this subject.

My only hope is that the folks here even have a clue as to what we are talking about.

Not as much of a joke as you think.

Like the old Dilbert cartoon: "The network is down! ...But I'm feeling better." It's just too bad the guy didn't just take out his own Windows box.

Ghostview will allow you to open and print ps files.
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

Ontop of the Os400-zOS DB/2 Driven Filesystem I suggested you look @:

(As well as how pagefile.sys uses "raw writes" to bypass filesystems (iirc that is, could be wrong here on SQLServer as well, since I do know that in RAM it maintains its OWN "filesystem for devices"))

For your research?

CHECK THESE OUT! ZFS & after that, "IRON FILESYSTEMS" in the 2nd URL below:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=123

(A great read, & great model for a filesystem (I like the fact you do NOT have to "manage disks" anymore in it, & have a "storage pool", singular one... which is PROBABLY WHY spanning & striping is SO EASY in it...))

Yes - MacOS X users have a treat coming... @ least on the server models!

(Perhaps, later on, maybe even on end-user/home models too, but I don't even KNOW if there are distinctions like that on MacOS X, though I have used it & actually LIKE IT, quite a lot, I do not do much research into them (market share & all that - have to go where the dollars are made, to live, & that my friend...? Is WINDOWS!)

BETTER YET, GET A READ FROM THIS FELLOW (PhD) on "IRON FILESYSTEMS":

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/wind/Publications/vijayan-t hesis06.pdf

This one? I think you will LOVE, a great deal... & good luck on your quest/researches into it... this guy? HE HAS THE RIGHT IDEA!

(Combine it with ZFS features, + the possibility of bypassing filesystems drivers, even if ONLY @ TIMES (such as SQLServer does, maintaining its OWN devices in RAM & on DISK iirc, doing so, much as pagefile.sys read/write does, & faster than normal read/write I-O by far too) & man... WoW!)

On a related note - you KNOW somebody is a "nerd/geek", when they get excited about filesystems... lol!

APK

P.S.=> And, on the thing that MIGHT NOT exactly have you "too enthusiastic"?

I have my score on CIS TOOL now up to 85.185!

(Exceeding in fact, the "theoretical max" on this test MOST folks have obtained (around 84/85 range, & in fact, the BSD user who has tried it I cited earlier on here was told, iirc, that is the "usual max"... so much for THAT!)... apk

This monster is about 6 feet below my desk...
http://www.hsx.wisc.edu/

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

See that little * next to my name?

That means I'm a subscriber. Can you say "sub-SCRI-ber"?

That means I get to see stories early. Sometimes I see stories early I'd like to comment on.

Sometimes I write my comment, and it's already done when the article goes live. And then I post it. Sometimes it's even first.

Like a lot of other subscribers do, since that's one of the benefits of being a subscriber.

Sorry to rain on your little paranoid parade.

How about instead of saying garbage like "Apple-apolegetic manner" (sigh) and "potential collusion", you do a little bit of thinking and learning how slashdot's subscriber system works, and then maybe try to point out anything I said that is actually inaccurate in my comment, or perhaps even being more concerned with someone filing a lawsuit over a cell phone battery, instead of anonymously posting your idiocy in response to a sensible comment on a ridiculous abuse of our legal system, which seems to be all the rage with Apple?

Bullshit.

They've also not made it useable by people without arms, or by people without brains. So? Your point is what, exactly? That we are an evil society because we (the sighted) dare to actually use our eyes?

No, what you are proposing is a considerable change in the entire design. A highly visual touchscreen device isn't exactly going to be blind-friendly with one or two minor modifications.

I'll support any change that does not impact me or the other 99% of the people in any major negative way. If it costs another $5 to make a blind-friendly iPhone, fine with me. Well, as long as that doesn't mean $5 for the blind, $5 for the arm-less, $5 for the deaf, etc etc etc.

However, I do think there is some wisdom in going forward without looking out for the slowest one at every step. If only because otherwise you wouldn't get forward at all. I'm sure most of the nice technology that makes life easier for disabled people would have never been developed if it had been a requirement from day one

There's more CO2 in the ocean, and then there's even more that's been taken up in limestone.

http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/chemweek/CO2/CO2.html

One can get much of the overall story online here.

I've been living in Iowa, financing my own education -- I just finished ugrad in 2005, and I'm now working and starting my grad degree. I'm not just making this up.

This fall total tuition and fees for most majors at Iowa State is $3080.66 / semester:
http://www.iastate.edu/~registrar/fees/tuition0708 .html

Minnesota: $4705 / semester
http://admissions.tc.umn.edu/costsaid/tuition.html

Wisconsin: $3365 / semester
http://www.admissions.wisc.edu/costs.php

Those figures don't include "Room & Board" because you need "Room & Board" whether you're in school or not, so it's a little silly to pretend that it's a cost related to your education. Even if you include R&B, which is on the order of $6k/year at those schools, you could make that much working a student-wage job for an annual average of 20 hours/week (or 14 hours/week if you work full-time for 12 weeks in the summer).

Wow, Dave is at it again, bringing us useful information. Please mod him up. He must be an IT genius.

You want me to spend a minimum of $59.99/mo. + $499 for an iPhone?

What else can you expect from a fat cat sconnie [wisc.edu] who prides himself on the BMWs he's owned [wisc.edu] and lists his top 'interest' as Apple?

Wow, Dave is at it again, bringing us useful information. Please mod him up. He must be an IT genius.

You want me to spend a minimum of $59.99/mo. + $499 for an iPhone?

What else can you expect from a fat cat sconnie [wisc.edu] who prides himself on the BMWs he's owned [wisc.edu] and lists his top 'interest' as Apple?

This is one of the biggest misnomers in University IT systems, IT'S NOT FREE

University systems pay a blanket fee to install as many copies as they want, but IT'S NOT FREE

We get a great discount so that all of the people who come out of college use Microsoft products and have no idea on how to use anything else.

You are part of DOIT, please stop telling people this! You should know better!

daveschroeder writes "Apple and AT&T today announced service plans for iPhone, 4 days before its release in the US at 6pm local time on Friday, June 29. The plans are $59.99/mo for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes, and $99.99 for 1350 minutes, and all include unlimited data, 200 SMS messages, rollover minutes, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling.

daveschroeder writes "Apple and AT&T today announced service plans for iPhone, 4 days before its release in the US at 6pm local time on Friday, June 29. The plans are $59.99/mo for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes, and $99.99 for 1350 minutes, and all include unlimited data, 200 SMS messages, rollover minutes, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling.

Have you seen this jokers homepage http://das.doit.wisc.edu/ On facebook (referenced on the page) Shows as Dept. Of Homeland Security (FUD Inc.)

Regarding linux and C++ backwards incompatibility, please read these to get an idea why what you are suggesting is a bad idea:
http://www.baus.net/statically-linking-libstdc++
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~psilord/blog/2.html

You can ship your own libstdc++, but often libstdc++ is incomptabile with the customers installed copy of libgcc.

Please point me to a kernel trace toolkit that can replace the level of functionality found in DTrace. I'm skeptical.
If such a tool exists, I'd like to know more about it.

...so 80 MB for under $12K indeed sounds good. Actually, 10 MB for $12,500 sounded pretty good because it was the brand-new just-out replacement for the previous model, which was 10 MB for $22,000 or thereabouts.

It was the drive for a Datacraft 6024/5. The department only had a budget of about $30 or $40,000 for the thing, and we were very excited about the chance to get an actual disk drive and stay under budget... we'd been afraid we'd have to do it all with magnetic tape.

The 10 MB consisted of a removable top-loading disk pack and an internal fixed disk, each capable of storing 5 MB. Those 5 MB disk packs cost something like $100 or $150 each. This would have been in the early 1970s...

...the radiation-emitting fungi.

• The U.S. expends three times as much energy per person for food than developing nations expend per person for ALL energy activities. And fossil fuel energy inputs into food production and distribution increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century.
• The modern production and distribution system expends 10-15 calories of energy for every calories of food energy produced.
• Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are based on petrochemicals. Between 1960 and 1980, chemical fertilizer use in the U.S. expanded three times, and herbicide use, over 4.5 times.
• Chemical fertilizers alone accounted for 30% of energy use in agriculture in 1974.
• Different food sectors use different amounts of the total fossil fuel energy used in food production and distribution: on-farm production represents just 17.5 percent of the whole, while processing accounts for 28.1 percent, distribution for 9, transportation for 11, restaurants for 15.9 percent, and home preparation for 25 percent.

What's the over/under that this technology will be bought by ford / gm and killed in development?

• Research, publications at Lund University
• Research at Chalmers University of Technology
• Research at Stanford University
• Research, publications at University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Research at University of California, Berkeley

It should give at least a brief introduction to what people who have funding tend to use IEC for (neutron generation and maybe someday energy through the D-He3 reaction if we had He3).

I can't tell you exactly why the Navy isn't funding Bussard but I can ask a question that I bet the Navy asked. Bussard wants $200 million dollars to scale up his fusor based on the few results he found before the fusor broke. Why not apply for a grant to rebuild the device and actually demonstrate results? If thats not good enough why not scale it up slightly before going for the whole $200 million dollar large scale system? There are hundreds (thousands?) of small research companies with great ideas all competing to have their ideas funded and those companies often only ask for $100,000 (approximately an average phase I grant). Is it worth gambling $200 million on something that hasn't demonstrated results when that money could go to so many other ideas that have? I'm not sure how big the grant for this cold fusion research was but I am willing to be its pretty small.

I won't even go into all the side benefits of ITER (large scale international collaboration, developing new technology on U.S. soil, wide spread support from the majority of fusion scientists), but I will say that all these conspiracy theories that no money goes to anything but ITER should google "innovative confinement concepts"

Sorry I guess this was pretty off-topic, but really, look at my karma, how much worse could things get? ...

The Z machine is cool, but I think a more cost efficient method might be these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm

Let me clarify the clarification. Even getting head is not so bad. Clinton's actions were "assholish" on two counts:

1. He was married at the time. Granted, there are open marriages out there where it may be ok to get some on the side, I don't recall any evidence that this was the case with the Clintons. The fact that he had to seek her forgiveness, in fact, supports that it was a move with "asshole" status.

2. He was getting it from a subordinate employee approximately half his age. Retire the cup.

The parent is correct that the only reason it became grist for Congress' mill was the fact that he lied about it under oath. Besides, rumors abound that he wasn't the first president who might have got his winky wet the wrong way.

You have to consider that schools and universities are usually not going to go out and release something that extensive without doing some insane amount of testing. How many schools are running Vista at present? From my limited experience here in Aus, whilst we have the machines to run Vista (e.g. specs wise), none of them are actually running it. I personally don't expect a large campus wide rollout until the next year, after SP1, and once most applications have had a chance to get ported to Vista. Schools, and especially universities, run all sorts of specialized programs. I picked two off the top of my head, Matlab and SPSS. Matlab is heavy in the Science side of thing and SPSS (at least at my Uni) is heavily used and taught in Statistics. One site (UMich, http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/vista_ac/archives/2006/ 04/matlab_70.html) notes that Matlab 7 doesn't appear to run, however another (UW-Maddison http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=5175) notes that Matlab 2007a is compatible (updated I would suggest) but SPSS isn't working. Applications will release patches to fix things but its not going to be instantaneous. Mac OS X 10.5 will go through a similar process, though I don't think it will be as drastic an issue, IT support departments are going to want to thoroughly test it before it gets released. This goes for any large deployment organisation and the number of smaller applications that need to be supported (e.g. compilers for smaller languages like Haskell, Prolog or LISP) the longer it will take to get fully tested.

Except for the fact that the University of Wisconsin isn't cooperating with the RIAA in its latest efforts:

University of Wisconsin-Madison Bucks RIAA
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/20/015121 6

UW to RIAA: No way
http://badgerherald.com/news/2007/03/21/uw_to_riaa _no_way.php

It may be illegal...
http://www.doit.wisc.edu/news/story.asp?filename=8 12

This technology was developed years ago. If it's in undergraduate research, it's not cutting-edge. http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanolab/TiO2/index.htm l/

Titanium Dioxide Dye solar cells have been around for a while now. What is limiting them is the 'speed' at which and electrons are donated from the dye to the conduction band of the titanium dioxide semi-conductor and the re-filling of the electron hole after it's traveled through your circuit or the grid (if that's the case). There are two ways to improve the 'speed'; the first being to use nanotubes of TiO2 which constrains the electrons to specific quantum levels (band states) in the semi-conductor. Then there is less of a chance that the electron will in-advertently run into hole as it migrates out of the solar cell. By the way, it doesn't have to be TiO2 either, but any broad-band semi-conductor. The second way is to improve the dye so it can donate more electrons when a photon hit it. It sounds like this is what these people have done.

Here is site the tells how to make your own TiO2 solar cell using raspberry juice as the dye.

http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanolab/TiO2/

Wisconsin ranked first among universities in nonfederal research support, attracting $329.5 million from nonfederal sources. Of that, state and local governments funded research to a level of about $35.9 million, industry provided $17.9 million, private gifts and grants accounted for $210.2 million, and other sources provided $65.5 million in 2004.

"That is simply not true. Did the poor in the 1950s have access to the kind of healthcare that someone on Medicare has to now? Did they drive better cards? Did they have access to the kind of technology ppl have access to today?"

Americans are brainwashed by media propaganda idealizing the 1950s as a better time. Well, maybe if everything was just like the sanitized boolshite Hollywood puts out, but it wasn't.
Health care and emergency medicine were primitive, cars and trucks were pretty but unsafe (watch Signal 30 on YouTube for what crashes looked like!), racism was normal, etc.

Poverty stats:

http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm

"In the late 1950s, the overall poverty rate for individuals in the United States was 22 percent, representing 39.5 million poor persons. Between 1959 and 1969, the poverty rate declined dramatically and steadily to 12.1 percent. As a result of a sluggish economy, the rate increased slightly to 12.5 percent by 1971. In 1972 and 1973, however, it began to decrease again. In 1973, the poverty rate was 11.1 percent. At that time roughly 23 million people were poor.

In 1975 the poverty rate increased to 12.3 percent. It then oscillated around 11.5 percent for the next few years. After 1978, however, the rate rose steadily, reaching 15.2 percent in 1983. Thereafter it remained mostly higher than 13 percent. In 1993 it reached a new high of 15.1 percent, and then began to fall slowly. In 2000, 31 million people were poor (11.3 percent of the population). In 2001 the number of poor and the poverty rate both rose as economic difficulties moved into recession, and the rate has continued to rise; in 2003, 35.8 million people were poor by the official measure of poverty. By 2005, the number had risen to 37 million people (12.6 percent of the population)."

This book. Its companion site. SPIM.

Why would this not be free? PDF is a fully open, documented standard; Adobe licenses their patents on it royalty-free.

There's no reason to be stuck with Adobe Acrobat Reader(tm). Go get a real PDF editor and modify away! Dump the whole thing to text or LaTeX if you want.

I didn't RTFA, but I did get a chance to RTF email!

Subject: UW-Madison copyright compliance notice
Date: 03/16/2007

The recording industry is threatening lawsuits against those who may have engaged in illegal file sharing. They are currently targeting students who live in university residence halls. Recently, UW-Madison and other universities have been notified that they will receive settlement letters that are to be passed on to the individuals whom the senders believe to be guilty of copyright infringement. Consistent with current network management procedures and our understanding of federal law, UW-Madison does not plan to forward these letters directly to campus network users. We will, of course, comply with a valid subpoena.

However, if the UW-Madison is given cause to believe that a student, faculty or staff network user may have infringed on copyrights, it will take action. University network policies empower the CIO to terminate that person's network access until the matter is resolved. The Dean of Students office (for students) or supervisors (for employees) will be notified and other disciplinary action may be taken, as appropriate.

Unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted works is illegal in many circumstances, and a violation of the university's Appropriate Use Policy. Please be advised of your rights and responsibilities under these rules. For more information, see: http://www.doit.wisc.edu/security/policies/appropr iate_use.asp

Fun stuff--Pretty glad I'm out of the dorms. Maybe I'll get one of these from Charter...

Ten years ago the internet was just coming into the public awareness, there was tons of infrastructure growth, and lots of issues that didn't have very clear cut solutions.

Because I bought it used. It wasn't the very latest and greatest, but it works just fine, thanks. And yes, they really did sell it to me without an OS.

The NMI Build and Test Facility at UW-Madison might be useful. They keep a fleet of Linux (x86, x86-64, IA64, and PPC, on most of the major distributions), Windows, MacOS X, HP-UX, Tru64, FreeBSD (only x86 for now) and SPARC Solaris running to do nightly build and test runs of a number of different projects.

http://nmi.cs.wisc.edu/files/nmi_lisa2006.pdf