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Effective Cycling by John Forester has interesting statistics, including the effect of training (his course at MIT naturally) on accidents:

http://www.wright.edu/~jeffrey...

From memory, the biggest threat to the cyclist is first themselves, hitting things or loss of control of the bike, then being hit by other cyclists (aka, asshats riding against traffic), and then vehicles.

The "scariest" scenario most people think of is being hit from behind by a car. That is surprisingly less than 1% of all accidents, although it is the most deadly accident.

This is why we need separate bicycle paths and lanes separated from other traffic by barriers

It's pretty expensive to fully grade-separate a bicycle path. Anything less than full grade separation is hardly an improvement in safety, especially for experienced bicyclists, because being hit from behind is relatively rare.

I've looked over the comments on this thread with frustration, seeing that the conversation swiftly derailed into being *just* about Crypto. The MCTL covers all areas of technology that may be deemed militarily critical. It is not really possible to find a publicly hosted .gov or .mil site that gives much info any more, but this university page stills shows the 20 areas covered: http://www.wright.edu/rsp/Security/T1threat/Mctl.htm , including things like space systems and nuclear technologies.

The goods get more expensive for the people in the country. So they have to spend more money. Money they could have spent on something else. The tax goes back to society (through less efficient government programs) . What tips the scale is the dead-weight loss which is the value of wasted resources devoted to expanded domestic consumption and expenditures devoted to less desired substitutes brought about by the tariff.[1].

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_deadweight_loss_of_a_tariff

Or in other words

"If we look at the national market graph, we can see why these are deadweight losses. The consumption effect of the tariff is the loss of consumer surplus for those consumers who are squeezed out of the market because the tariff "artificially" raises the domestic price, even though foreigners remain willing to sell products to the importing country at the lower world price. The production effect of the tariff is the loss from using high-cost domestic production to replace lower-cost imports (available to the country at the unchanged world price). The high production cost is shown by the height of the supply curve, for each of the extra units produced because of the tariff."

http://www.wright.edu/~tdung/Chapter7_Pugel.htm

In short, poor people are left out , due to the higher price.
Extra resources are wasted due to higher production costs. Which could have been spend on other activities.

I'd suggest you start here:

http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/mede.html

It's a wireless camera installed in a false eye. He doesn't see out of that eye with it. It isn't connected to his retina or optic nerve or any other sensory mechanism. If he was drunk it would record exactly what it would record if he was sober. He can't see the feed in real time unless he watches his own video stream (in which case it would be a video stream of him staring at a monitor).

That wasn't the GP's question. The GP was asking if the effects of alcohol on vision are physiological or psychological.

If the blurred vision was because of a chemical change in one's eye, then it would be pretty disorienting. The bionic eye would be giving back a clean signal, while the flesh eye would give back a distorted view.

If it's a psychological change, then everything would be blurred.

I can't answer that, but at least one part of vision which would change would be the eyelids. Your lids would be more closed, and both eyes would take in less light. Also, given the effects of balance on alcohol on balance, the feed would get more wobbly as the bionic commando pounded shots.

---

Just did some research,

Paper on alcohol and eyes

Consuming alcohol can have short-term negative affects on vision. For a low blood alcohol level, visual performance is less affected by the visual changes than by alteration in brain functions [1]. Brain functions can be impaired by alcohol within minutes of consumption since alcohol is absorbed in the blood and the brain is supplied with more blood than other organs.

When the legal blood-alcohol level is reached and surpassed, depth perception and night vision are affected. It becomes impossible to accurately judge how far away objects are when depth perception deteriorates. Vision becomes blurred or you may see double since eye muscles lose their precision causing them to be unable to focus on the same object.

Alcohol affects night vision by keeping the pupils from adapting from darkness to light. The oncoming headlights of a car will cause a drunk driver to be dazzled much more severely than a sober driver. Alcohol consumption also produces tunnel vision and can make night blindness worse [2].

Alcohol affects eye muscles, pupils, etc. So, yes, the bionic eye would give a clear shot while the fleshy eye goes wonky.

I currently attend WSU. Dr. Mateti is certainly a great professor (he says after changing majors after taking Mateti's OS course) and did push hard for an "ethical hacking" class. I was going to take it before I changed my major, but I heard from several friends that they learned more in that class than any other class they took at WSU.

For anyone interested in the class (CEG 429), Dr. Mateti licenses all his lecture notes under the Open Publication License.

None of the things that you mention are facts. They are observed phenomenon that may have alternate explanations. For instance, it might not be that our universe is getting larger, we may be getting smaller. For more information concerning why it is impossible to verify this, consult Descartes. The first meditation pretty much sums it up.

QuickTime 6, the basis of the MPEG-4 international,...

, it's no surprise that the ISO chose the QuickTime file format as the foundation for the new MPEG-4 standard.

Apple seems the most likely to pursue an MPEG-4 standard-based approach -- not surprising given that its technology forms the base of the MPEG-4 specification.

Requesting Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
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Feel free to complain all you want. http://www.wright.edu/

It may not be finishing in four years, but a guarantee is certainly useful.

http://www.engineering.wright.edu/cecs/employment- guarantee.shtml

I'd guess most computer professionals' work is "not a tangible object". Apparently you are a student at Wright State University. After you graduate with your CS major, what exactly are you planning on doing? Selling hot dogs? Hopefully you don't plan on being a software engineer, systems admin, database admin, or well almost anything else that a typical CS major would be interested in.

Sorry, Mr. Dowd. There is no such thing as ethics anymore. There is only more money.

My school works extremely closely with the DoD. Subsequently, most of the people that graduate end up working there through job placements (they guarantee a job within 6 months of graduation). Needless to say, I'll probably have to turn down a few offers which will invalidate my guarantee. I'll be broke, but at least I'll be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning.

and another: Pocket Book of Technical Writing by Dr. Leo Finkelstein, Jr.

I had Dr. Finkelstein as an instructor for a CS/CEG required technical writing course.

His book has come in handy since then.

I'm not sure how they did it, but back when i was in school, they were using 4 cameras and pattern matching to create 3d models of subjects, and were doing all sorts of other techniques to build models. Some of the research can be found here http://www.cs.wright.edu/~agoshtas/lab.html/

TFA:
A fully compromised system cannot be trusted to tell you the truth. Even virus scanners must at some level rely on the system to not lie to them. If they ask whether a particular file is present, the attacker may simply have a tool in place that lies about it.

Your critique:
If by "fully compromised" it means that the BIOS has been flashed and now lies about the files it reports, I then more or less agree. However such a tool is improbable (not enough room in the BIOS memory and not all BIOS can be flashed at will). So by "fully compromised" that's probably not what they meant. How would then an attacker lie when booting from a CD and running the scan from the CD? Or when hooking the compromised HD as a second HD on a clean system? It's not like everybody run their virus/trojans/rootkits scanners from the suspicious host.

Well actually, do what you like best. If you cant decide, then it probably wouldn't be too hard to dual major. You may want to try working with your advisor and the dean. They may be able to come up with a "computer engineering" program if they don't have one already.

Luckily my college offers a dual CS/CEG program, in which I'm enrolled. If your school does something similar, you may be able to dual major/dual degree with only an extra quarter or 2 of work.

...but here it's an expectation? Well, I guess this is what you get for giving these places the "rich man's loophole" by making it a nice large (and possibly price fixed) admission fee that's conditionally waived for the undeserving. Now when some Ohio State (or even better, Wright State) students would return the favor for the Wright Flyer stunt at MIT, that'd be news, not some high-tax state that caters to the same crowd as MIT's nearby neighbors, also home to Caltech's evil neighbors.

Lets not forget the FSLN

Feel free to also use a scholarly paper I wrote.

I know you're just making a joke, but I get free dial-up from my university but I'd still pay for DSL. Once I move out of my shitty apartment, I most certainly will.

A low turnout ... but higher than usual, which could make a difference in a close race.

In my experiences on campus, it seems to be popular to vote for Kerry. You know, all the cool people are doing it.

Furthermore, it is considered cool if you are voting for Kerry even though you hate him due to the fact that Bush is so incredibly bad. Its like the popular thing to do is pretend Bush is the anti-christ and then vote for Kerry based on that alone.

Yes, my generation is a bunch of sheep.

The university I attend, Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, has an excellent disability services office with professionals who are willing to help every step of the way for both the mentally and physically disabled. I have been truly impressed by their aid. As a result, a whopping 5% of the campus population happens to have a disability -- 5% is much, much higher than the average.

• Travis Doom named his cats Certain and Impending.

• Luscious N. Delicious changed his name from Scott 5 or 6 years back.

Although your comment can be applied to most forms of christianity, there are plenty of religions that don't require any specific belief system.

Read "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. Read the Unitarian Universalist Principles. Read "Introduction to Bhuddism". Read the Tao Te Ching and the Lieh Tzu. If you make it through all that and you aren't either convinced or sound asleep, read George Fraser's "Golden Bough" (which is a sure-fire soporific).

Saint Augustine's argument from faith is not the only Christian "proof" either. It's just the most popular these days. Some people prefer the famous ontological proof from Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" (which is a hell of a lot more readable than Fraser, Graves, or Augustine).

*** read the sources *** instead of asking some slashbot you don't even know to tell you what Descartes wrote!

You show exactly how clueless you are by saying rootkits are only a problem because of using unencrypted passwords over a network

From a lecture on internet security (located here):

"Rootkit is a collection of programs whose purpose is to allow an intruder to install and operate an Ethernet sniffer (a program that captures and decodes every packet on a network) on an unsuspecting SunOS 4.x or Solbourne host using /dev/nit or Linux host using the eth0 interface. With this sniffer, an intruder can obtain the userids and passwords, including root, to your most sensitive networked systems."

Other than DoS'ing, there are really only four serious security threats to any system: 1) Password hacking, 2) Poorly configured software, 3) Poorly designed software, 4) trojans and viruses.

The first problem cannot actually be completely solved. You can minimize the likelihood of a successful attack by ensuring that passwords are never transmitted unencrypted on the network, and by instituting policies on passwords that have the greatest overall chance of making it so the passwords will be hard to guess by random attempts.

The second problem can be solved by not having lazy or incompetent system administrators. This is not often a problem at mission critical sites because they don't hire people who don't know what they are doing. It happens from time to time, and must be dealt with, using appropriate measures, but ultimately this is a solveable problem simply by education. Of course, this problem can only be addressed to the extent that the operating system itself enforces policies which practice security at every stage of execution.

The third problem is solveable by ensuring that the operating system does not allow _any_ application permission to do something that there is no plausible reason for any application to do, even as root. Examples of this are executing code that is in the heap or is on the stack without first programatically informing the operating system where the executable code actually is in memory. There are small performance penalties for adding this level of security, but if security is really the goal... having the applications run marginally slower is probably not that big a deal.

The fourth problem becomes a non-issue if users are educated to _not_ open any email attachments, regardless of who they think the mail might be from, unless they had specifically requested the file in question from the person. Also, of course, the fact is that even the amount of damage a trojan can do is radically minimized when not running as root.

I am sorry that your system was repeatedly getting scanned by idiots too stupid to practice the above policies, but whether you believe it or not, trojans and viruses aren't really that serious a problem in Linux (the web page you referred to even said that the trojan was mostly a "proof of concept" rather than an actual threat), as long as people have the wherewithall to not always log in as root.

Practicing all of these mechanisms doesn't guarantee security... as I admit, there is no guaranteed defense against lucky guesses for passwords short of disconnecting a system from a network completely.

What Is Case Law?

Case law refers to decisions in the various court systems which set precedent for future decisions and are therefore part of the common law.

The effect of a court decision depends on the level of court at which a case was decided. A decision of an appellate court is binding precedent in all lower courts in its jurisdiction. A U.S. Supreme Court decision is binding precedent in all courts dealing with any aspect of federal law.

Descartes was one of the first christian philosophers to actually try to find other explanations for the way things worked other than "God willed it that way"

If he was, he wasn't terribly successful. In the Meditations, "God willed it that way" is what follows right after "Cogito, ergo sum". Specifically, Descartes argues

1. He might be a battery.
2. Cogito ergo sum. This gets us to "I exist", but he spends the rest of Med. II belaboring the fact that it gets us absolutely no further, that all he can know of himself is that he exists.
3. So in Med. III he turns to examining the plausibility of there being a Deceiver.
4. Which he tells us he will approach thus... "But, that I may be able wholly to remove it, I must inquire whether there is a God, as soon as an opportunity of doing so shall present itself; and if I find that there is a God, I must examine likewise whether he can be a deceiver; for, without the knowledge of these two truths, I do not see that I can ever be certain of anything."
5. So he goes into a proof of the existence of God based on the idea that if he has an idea of God, God must exist.
6. From there, he explains how he knows God is a nice guy who would never deceive him:

   "And, in truth, it is not to be wondered at that God, at my creation, implanted this idea in me, that it might serve, as it were, for the mark of the workman impressed on his work; and it is not also necessary that the mark should be something different from the work itself; but considering only that God is my creator, it is highly probable that he in some way fashioned me after his own image and likeness, and that I perceive this likeness, in which is contained the idea of God, by the same faculty by which I apprehend myself, in other words, when I make myself the object of reflection, I not only find that I am an incomplete, [imperfect] and dependent being, and one who unceasingly aspires after something better and greater than he is; but, at the same time, I am assured likewise that he upon whom I am dependent possesses in himself all the goods after which I aspire [and the ideas of which I find in my mind], and that not merely indefinitely and potentially, but infinitely and actually, and that he is thus God. And the whole force of the argument of which I have here availed myself to establish the existence of God, consists in this, that I perceive I could not possibly be of such a nature as I am, and yet have in my mind the idea of a God, if God did not in reality exist--this same God, I say, whose idea is in my mind--that is, a being who possesses all those lofty perfections, of which the mind may have some slight conception, without, however, being able fully to comprehend them, and who is wholly superior to all defect [ and has nothing that marks imperfection]: whence it is sufficiently manifest that he cannot be a deceiver, since it is a dictate of the natural light that all fraud and deception spring from some defect."

Which is a pretty crummy argument, logically speaking. It boils down to "I just know God wouldn't do that to us. Mneh." There doesn't seem (to my eye) to be any argument in the Meditations that it is possible to know whether we are philosophers or butterflies, save that rests on the presumption of the knowledge of God (and a very particular conception of "God", too).

I've always wanted to /. my uni server. Here's the 1985 version of spacewar(the farce one). You'll need something to slow it down.

Living near Dayton, OH, we're always hearing about stuff like this. I just helped rebuild this site about the Wright Brothers Flyer and go to Wright State University. Also, I hear Stickman uses one on occasion.

The Wright Brothers' "impact" was only visible in retrospect and as a result of legend-building by the aerospace industry.

They were only one of dozens of teams out to achieve the same goal, and only by slightly better skill and knowledge, and significantly better luck, were they the first not to fail.

Remember also that it wasn't for five years after they performed their first powered flight that they recorded their first sale of a powered aircraft.

Until that sale, to the U.S. Army, many people disbelieved they had actually done what they claimed.

But by that time there were others who had accomplished the feat, and perhaps hundreds who had seen airplanes flying in person.

And also by that time, and for several hundred years before, there were many attempts that ended extremely badly.

Heck, they didn't even bother to get a patent for the first three years of their success.

(Wright State U. Special Collections has online more documentation than you'll ever want to read about this unless you throw a shoe and become a biographical historian - and it's just a catalog!)

I'm with those who think that it would be suicide to ride this thing into the sky the first time it's launched. There's no reason a sandbag and some remote control gear couldn't go as a test, except pure stupidity.

Even if he succeeds, what will he have proved?

That rockets fly? It's been done.

That peroxide and silver make a propulsion unit? It's been done.

That hypercomplex systems can work on the first try? Not any more than any other Lottery has proved that you can win the first time you buy a ticket.

--Blair

The Wright Brothers' "impact" was only visible in retrospect and as a result of legend-building by the aerospace industry.

They were only one of dozens of teams out to achieve the same goal, and only by slightly better skill and knowledge, and significantly better luck, were they the first not to fail.

Remember also that it wasn't for five years after they performed their first powered flight that they recorded their first sale of a powered aircraft.

Until that sale, to the U.S. Army, many people disbelieved they had actually done what they claimed.

But by that time there were others who had accomplished the feat, and perhaps hundreds who had seen airplanes flying in person.

And also by that time, and for several hundred years before, there were many attempts that ended extremely badly.

Heck, they didn't even bother to get a patent for the first three years of their success.

(Wright State U. Special Collections has online more documentation than you'll ever want to read about this unless you throw a shoe and become a biographical historian - and it's just a catalog!)

I'm with those who think that it would be suicide to ride this thing into the sky the first time it's launched. There's no reason a sandbag and some remote control gear couldn't go as a test, except pure stupidity.

Even if he succeeds, what will he have proved?

That rockets fly? It's been done.

That peroxide and silver make a propulsion unit? It's been done.

That hypercomplex systems can work on the first try? Not any more than any other Lottery has proved that you can win the first time you buy a ticket.

--Blair

The philosophical antecedent for The Matrix is really the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes:

I will suppose, then, . . . that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity; I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these; I will continue resolutely fixed in this belief, and if indeed by this means it be not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false, and being imposed upon by this deceiver, whatever be his power and artifice.

Plato's story of the cave ( Republic, Book VII) is with the nature of things (ontology); Descartes' concern is rather with how we know what we thing we know (epistemology), which is the concern of The Matrix. (Granted, if you can draw a clear line dividing ontology from epistemology, you win a philosophy Ph.D., but the distinction is generally serviceable.)

I don't think it's necessary that a film's ideas be wholly original, but it's necessary that the film present those ideas in a new way. The idea that aliens might long ago have visited the earth long predates 2001, but the image of ape-men inspecting a black monolith does not. The Matrix was successful because it presented its themes in a new and visually stunning way.