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From the overview:

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE) is a freely available, open-source object-oriented (OO) framework that implements many core patterns for concurrent communication software. ACE provides a rich set of reusable C++ wrapper facades and framework components that perform common communication software tasks across a range of OS platforms. The communication software tasks provided by ACE include event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, signal handling, service initialization, interprocess communication, shared memory management, message routing, dynamic (re)configuration of distributed services, concurrent execution and synchronization.

If you consider CORBA check out TAO (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html), it is a reliable open-source implementation that is widely used. You can get commercial support for it from OCI (http://www.theaceorb.com./

If CORBA is too heavyweight for you take a look at ACE (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html). ACE is an open-source portable framework that is used within the TAO real-time CORBA. It allows you to write portable networked applications in C++ but is a lot smaller than CORBA as it does not implement the ORB etc. Several companies use ACE as a lightweight middleware as it has a very permissive license. You can get commercial support for it from Riverace (http://www.riverace.com/).

If you're aiming for performance you might check out ICE (http://www.zeroc.com./ ICE is available under the GPL and commercially and is a really fast middleware that is not CORBA but is portable between several languages.

All options provide you with a good framework to develop reliable and maintanable code.

If you consider CORBA check out TAO (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html), it is a reliable open-source implementation that is widely used. You can get commercial support for it from OCI (http://www.theaceorb.com./

If CORBA is too heavyweight for you take a look at ACE (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html). ACE is an open-source portable framework that is used within the TAO real-time CORBA. It allows you to write portable networked applications in C++ but is a lot smaller than CORBA as it does not implement the ORB etc. Several companies use ACE as a lightweight middleware as it has a very permissive license. You can get commercial support for it from Riverace (http://www.riverace.com/).

If you're aiming for performance you might check out ICE (http://www.zeroc.com./ ICE is available under the GPL and commercially and is a really fast middleware that is not CORBA but is portable between several languages.

All options provide you with a good framework to develop reliable and maintanable code.

One of the fundamental modern Bayesian papers is Jaynes' "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?", which can be found on the web along with lots of other interesting things. Jaynes' conclusion is that we must be Bayesians under the skull. It's a compelling paper, even now.

These experimental results are exactly what Jaynes theory predicts, which is a very nice confirmation of his work. But they are not the "discovery" of anything--they are empirical confirmation of something we already knew. When light-bending by gravity was measured it was not a discovery, it was the confirmation of a theoretical prediction. This is the same.

that should be left visual field not left eye. See here for why this is so. The short version is that a single eye is connected to both hemispheres of the brain. But anything viewed to the left of center of vision will be sent only to the right hemisphere and anything viewed to the right of center will be sent to the left hemisphere.

BTW, if you don't believe me, look at the images in this paper which shows significant dendritic spine loss after 25 minutes of lethal hypoxia.

ACE http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html is one of the best all around libraries that they have. Right now i'm using it and the STL within the same environment. They do really well at complimenting each other. ACE is very good if you need a prototype/test server quick.

1. Java is not a magic bullet, like any language it needs skill and reasoning to use properly, that is not in dispute.

2. Objective-C is a native 'C' compiler based language with no defined security model, thus has many flaws which VM and GC based languages, like Java, lack.

3. I don't care about super computing mathematics, that is a niche activity; all out speed is not my target, reliablity, security, development speed and good enough processing speed are very important to me, my employer and their clients.

Developer time is pretty critical, I don't have the luxury of loads of time to hunt down nasty pointer and buffer overflow bugs, data type glitches or write vast amounts of wrapper code to secure some dated language, a client can lose serious money in that time, I need the language to be secure so that I can concentrate on getting new features and bug fixes out fast, with minimal surprises. The Java compiler and virtual machine has several levels of built-in security, which can be further tightened using code and/or properties files, this prevents most of the classic bugs and security issues of less secure (native) runtime environments. The JVM also automatically profiles running code and compiles busy sections to machine code, so that you can get pragmatic speed optimisation almost for free! Garbage collection is not a significant concern in Java 1.5 and can be greatly reduced with minimal extra design/coding effort. As a bonus the range of support libraries for Java is truely vast and due to the standard file format you don't have the dialect, compiler, linker or make issues of C, C++ etc, even Java version differences can be worked around by using free third party libraries.

As for Java applications:
(most are multi-platform and some are multi-lingual too)

"DBVisualiser" A multi-platform database tool
http://www.dbvis.com/products/dbvis

"Force Field Explorer" A computational chemistry and molecular engineering tool
http://dasher.wustl.edu/ffe

"Azureus" A multi-platform Bittorrent P2P client/server
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus/

"Eclipse" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.eclipse.org/
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

"Net Beans" A multi-platform IDE and GUI framework
http://www.netbeans.org/

Many of Borlands development product e.g. JBuilder, C++Builder, C#Builder etc., all multi-platform.
http://www.borland.com/us/

Numerous graphics, video, audio and graphical modelling and visualisation tools.

Various GUI charting libraries (Free & commercial), including Crystal Reports...

Loads of web servers, web frameworks and order types of servers: Tomcat, Web Sphere etc.

Loads of XML Tools and libraries, both free & commercial!

After some months of correspondence I first met J. R. Oppenheimer in September 1946, when I arrived at Berkeley as a beginning graduate student, to learn quantum theory from him -- the result of Bill Hansen having recommended us strongly to each other. When in the Summer of 1947 Oppy moved to Princeton to take over the Institute for Advanced Study, I was one of four students that he took along. The plan was that we would enroll as graduate students at Princeton University, finish our theses under Oppy although he was not officially a Princeton University faculty member; and turn them in to Princeton (which had agreed to this somewhat unusual arrangement in view of the somewhat unusual circumstances). My thesis was to be on Quantum Electrodynamics. ...
But, as this writer learned from attending a year of Oppy's lectures (1946-47) at Berkeley, and eagerly studying his printed and spoken words for several years thereafter, Oppy would never countenance any retreat from the Copenhagen position, of the kind advocated by Schrödinger and Einstein. He derived some great emotional satisfaction from just those elements of mysticism that Schrödinger and Einstein had deplored, and always wanted to make the world still more mystical, and less rational. ...
If this meant standing in contradiction with the Copenhagen interpretation, so be it; I would be delighted to see it gone anyway, for the same reason that Einstein and Schrödinger would. But I sensed that Oppy would never tolerate a grain of this; he would crush me like an eggshell if I dared to express a word of such subversive ideas. I could do a thesis with Oppy only if it was his thesis, not mine.

While it seems to be successful test of pattern recognition, calling this "self awareness" is really stretching the term and making it sound like something much more than it really is. This is more like "Likelihood of object three meters ahead being a mirror - 99%. Likelihood of visual feedback within object confines being reflection of this unit - 99.9%." If that robot experienced the spontaneous thought of "My hips look fat," or "Why do I look so ugly?", I'd be more inclined to think of this as a staggering achievement that the headline makes it out to be.

I strongly disagree with Mr. Takeno's statement - "In humans, consciousness is basically a state in which the behavior of the self and another is understood," This is a vast over-simplification of consciousness, the entity of a beings "self", or soul, if you'd prefer.

Being a fascination of mine, I remember reading several articles suggesting that consciousness may be the manifestation of quantum effects within protein microtubules within neuronal fibers in biological beings. Here's one reference (www.artsci.wustl.edu) that I came across offhandedly. If someone created a robot that had structures that behaved in a quantum manner as well as circutry that was purely digital, perhaps it would actually be possible to create an artificial being that actually had a "soul". The ramifications of such an achievement would be staggering.

Just as a side note - Do living beings actually have to be conscious? Just a strange thought, since it doesn't seem to be a necessary attribute for living beings to survive and evolve. And if the theorey of quantum effects being responsible for consciousness hold true, there's no way that animals other than humans could be excluded. It would be a sweet, joyous poke in the ribs to the crowd that's been tainting rational science with creationism, ID, and such.

A soul being some random effect that just happens by accident would be the cherry on the cake. :D

In particular, Voice Stress Analysis appears to be a total fantasy. Don't believe it? Get some VSA freeware and run some double-blind experiments yourself.

Don't forget ASCII games like Angband and Nethack. I maintain an Angband variant named Entroband. it has a heavy japanese and tolkien influence. try it out!

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~bcbarnes/band/

-Brian

I used to be very pro-science, but not so much anymore. I still like and support science, however what I no longer do, is I no longer let science define my worldview for me.

The problem for me was that science was teaching me that I was just a bag of meat, and not really a person. Since I am just a bio-robot, there is nothing in me that's any better than, say a chicken, or a clod of earth. If I have an issue, instead of thinking my problem through, I could theoretically swallow just the right kind of pill and my issue would go away, since pretty much any negative life perceptions these days are considered brain imbalance. Depressed? Brain imbalance. Unhappy? Brain imbalance. Solution -- "happy pill".

NO! I said, no, that's not what I am, and I refuse to seek solely physical means to solve every problem in my life. I am not a bio-robot. I am not a meat machine.

I am not telling you the whole story here. It's not that I just didn't like how science made me feel and rejected it based on some sentimental reason. Not at all. My feelings caused me to examine the issues seriously and I came to realize that the hinging point is the issue of identity and the nature of cognition. Essentially science and maths take identity as an axiom, but it's not an axiom. If examined, one can see how and why it doesn't make any sense. But this can be difficult to explain because most people are not used to questioning axiomatic beliefs, and so react negatively and aggressively to such ideas (thus no useful discussion can take place).

Briefly put, science is dehumanising. If scientists could somehow address that, I feel that science would experience a revival. However, I am affraid that it's not going to happen, because scientists pretty much refuse to challenge the "everything is matter and energy and mind is just an illusion" view of materialism.

(yes I am accusing the scientific community of being aggressive and hateful toward any non-materialists, with the possible exception of quantum mechanics people who are a bit more open minded usually, since they are not as stuck on the classic ideas of identity, matter and energy)

Organizational impediments -- e.g., developing, deploying, and supporting systematically reusable software assets requires a deep understanding of application developer needs and business requirements. As the number of developers and projects employing reusable assets increases, it becomes hard to structure an organization to provide effective feedback loops between these constituencies.

Economic impediments -- e.g., supporting corporate-wide reusable assets requires an economic investment, particularly if reuse groups operate as cost-centers. Many organizations find it hard to institute appropriate taxation or charge-back schemes to fund their reuse groups.

Administrative impediments -- e.g., it's hard to catalog, archive, and retrieve reusable assests across multiple business units within large organizations. Although it's common to scavenge small classes or functions opportunistically from existing programs, developers often find it hard to locate suitable reusable assets outside of their immediate workgroups.

Political impediments -- e.g., groups that develop reusable middleware platforms are often viewed with suspicion by application developers, who resent the fact that they may no longer be empowered to make key architectural decisions. Likewise, internecine rivalries among business units may stifle reuse of assests developed by other internal product groups, which are perceived as a threat to job security or corporate influence.

Psychological impediments -- e.g., application developers may also perceive ``top down'' reuse efforts as an indication that management lacks confidence in their technical abilities. In addition, the ``not invented here'' syndrome is ubiquitous in many organizations, particularly among highly talented programmers.

• Utah State University
• New Mexico State University
• Washington University at St Louis
• University of Texas
• University of Colorado
• Arizona State University
• Pennsylvania State University

This isn't for residential pools, so the math is not relevant; you're adding $100K of cost for even $1K-$3K plastic pools or hottubs, which is nonsense. You want the number of public pools. Those are the only ones that will have a life gaurd in the first place. You also want to include near drownings, which are at least six times more common and can lead to death in the hospital or permanent brain damage.

As an aside, read this CDC report Prevalence of Parasites in Fecal Material from Chlorinated Swimming Pools and you probably won't want to swim in a public pool again. The CDC also has a hand healthy swimming site for more information.

• Naval Ships: the US navy is converting to having Windows 2000 run their ships. In fact it was on the USS Ronald Reagan when it ran in circles. We made lots of fun here about that.
• Airplanes: I currently work at Jeppesen; The company that makes aviation maps as well as does the data for Flight Simulator, etc. I happen to know that some of our products are on Windows 2K and are in the cockpits (in fact, I was hired to help with the move to Linux). More importantly, a number of the other manufacturers are on Windows 2K and yes, they have their product running in cockpits (as in autopilots). The FAA wants a Do-178B (or is it DO-200, I never remember or care) OS to run the cockpits. But out of the country, as well as for the military, is a different matter. The Airforce has a number of systems that are based on W2k. And yes, it is in some of our more advanced military aircraft (scary thought).
• Missles: what exactly do you think controls a cruise missile? what some monkey with his hand on the stabilizers? Or perhaps, you think it is a mainframe computer? Well, clue time; it is simple computers. In fact, to simplify their lives, companies use Windows, Linux, Unix, etc. with fast CPUs. Yeah, a hard real-time can not run Windows, but others are doing so. The cruise missiles are using inputs from a number of sources, generally, GPS, followed by visual. Some are using laser guidance. I know of at least one of the missiles that use a GPS system that was developed on Win 2K. considering that they do not offer it on any other OS, I doubt that it was ported to another system just to run on missiles. (Oh, I do have a clue on how to do the task)
• Banks: Just go to the ATM. Most are either OS2 or Win2K. Enough said.
• nuclear power plants: did you miss the fact that several power plants had issues during the last major virus? in fact, there was a nice big outage in the east. One of the things that came out of that, was that Windows 2K was being used in nuclear power plants.

Another potential positive aspect is relicensing. Some companies are so GPL-phobic that they will pay to have you (or your company) give them a one-off, non-exclusive waiver, so they can use your code without the (perceived) GPL albatross hanging round their necks. I've worked on open source projects (e.g. HMMER) that have made money this way.

It's all still around. Aminet.

I can't say how many hours I spent dloading stuff from there. Probably too many.

One example of some cool stuff:

Short: Boot into Amiga Unix from AmigaOS
Author: Markus Wild
Uploader: polluks@sdf.lonestar.org (Stefan Haubenthal)
Version: 1.1c
Type: misc/unix
Requires: arp.library

Did you ever want to boot into Unix from AmigaDOS without needing to reboot, waiting for the bootmenu, selecting that partition... ??

Well here we go, I took the boot sources from /usr/sys/amiga/boot, and made them use DOS instead of device-IO. The assembler files were converted from SGS syntax into MIT syntax, which will probably shock any non-gcc users;-)) The result is a simple but useful program called unix_boot, that can be used to boot from any ELF-kernel file you'd use on floppy or your harddisk.

q

The counterargument, from the linked page, is

In response, Searle claims that if we simply imagine the person in the Chinese room to memorize the look-up table, we have produced a counter example to this reply.

Not really. Bearing in mind that the Chinese Room is assumed to be a Turing machine, this is no different from moving the lookup tables from the hard disk into RAM. It just contracts the system geographically.

Reading your link, it seems that Searle's actual argument has been that although the Chinese Room reasoning doesn't prove that it's impossible to write such a list of instructions and such a pile of dictionaries, it does prove that the Chinese Room would not actually be conscious. Perhaps, but does that matter? How would we know? What exactly is the difference between a Turing machine running ChineseRoom 1.0, capable of convincing a Chinaman it's conscious and speaks Chinese, and a Chinaman's brain in a vat inside a similar room?

Certainly, the Chinese Room Turing machine would say it was conscious, in perfect Chinese; it would compose poetry, it would discuss philosophy, it might discuss whether or not Turing machines can be conscious, it might even agree that they can't (has anyone told it what it is?) If it didn't show all the signs of the same inner being and spirit that humans do, it wouldn't convince our jury of Chinese that it's conscious and intelligent.

Conclusion: maybe it IS impossible to write a Chinese-room program, and maybe it wouldn't be conscious, but Searle hasn't proved it to be so, not by a long shot.

It's probably obvious by now that I side with Turing over Searle. If something acts like it's conscious, we may as well assume that it is conscious. Otherwise we wind up arguing solipsism: how do I even know you're conscious? You might be a zombie!

You're thinking of Sucrosa(tm). The origonal news release is no longer available but there's a reprint here:

http://dcl.wustl.edu/~jzacks/Psych301/protected/ar ticles/sucrosa.html

He's pretty good at this. He's on to something - but if you need maths to prove that a pile of dictionaries don't posess consoiusness, let alone a spirit....

That disease is know as "government," and it has always existed to some extent or other. It's just that corporations have gotten increasingly good at exploiting it recently.

I fully agree with you about IP and its detrimental effects, though; rather than repeat myself, I'll point you to an article I wrote recently.

Anyhow, the Bandit was pretty cheap. I recall them saying it was $5,000 for all the electronics and $40,000 for the booster -- "It would be the cheapest thing on the shuttle at those prices", quoting the professor.

The Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX) project.

The Field-programmable Port Extender (FPX) is an open platform that augments a network with reprogrammable hardware. It enables new data-processing hardware to be rapidly developed, prototyped, and deployed over the Internet. A diagram of the FPX combined with the Washington University Gigabit Switch (WUGS) is shown above. This enhanced system enables research, development, and implementation of new hardware-based networking applications, intelligent packet processing, custom data processing, and real-time systems.

Xilinx Virtex 2 pro FPGA with gigE support. http://www.xilinx.com/xlnx/xil_prodcat_landingpage .jsp?title=Virtex-II+Pro+FPGAs

for those who don't know what FPGAs are: very basically, it's a chip with many logic elements (mostly look-up tables). You can configure the contents of the look-up tables and how they connect to each other and other specialist circuits on the chip. The result is that you can configure pretty much any digital ciruit you can design. Obviously the complexity is limited by the chip in use.

The one I linked above has up to 99000 logic elements: capable of simulating millions of gates.

The important thing is that while it's programmable, it's still hardware. It all runs in parallel as if you built the circuit. It's not firmware. It's definately not software.

Finally, once programmed, the memory need not be connected to anything so it can't be hacked without physically opening the box.

Anyway. Back to my main point: What you want can be done with existing tech but I couldn't find any for sale. This isn't to say they don't exist, it's just that they don't tend to advertise how they work. FPGAs are very popular to networking and DSP so I'm sure an FPGA-based firewall is commercially available.

Sorry for babbling.

Whatever happened to heliox?

I think what most people miss is that there are limited possible locations for the elevator, because you have to make it orthogonal to earth's rotation axis and, ideally, you want it on the equator - even better would be anchored to a mountain on the equator.

What's really interesting about the tensile stress is that it's possible to make the cable long enough so that zero anchor force is required at the surface of the earth :) You can also reduce the maximum tensile stress requirement if you allow compressive stresses at earth surface.

You can be imprisoned for months, or even years, without a trial. Under the USA-PATRIOT act, you can be imprisoned indefinately without ever being CHARGED with a crime.

The cases of Kevin Mitnick and Jose Padilla are a sobering reminder that our Constitutional right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury has become a hollow sham.

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/courses/306/af rica_diamond_wars1.htm

most of our clients are now asking questions that require approximate or probabilistic answers

Bioinformatics databases are a good example of this. DNA and protein sequence databases are often searched by approximate string-matching algorithms based on "dynamic programming" to hidden Markov models and other stochastic grammars.

Historically, drug target-hunters in Big Pharma created a market for accelerated hardware to facilitate dynamic programming searches, some of which (e.g. Paracel's Fast Data Finder chip) was originally marketed to government agencies who, um, shared an interest in approximate string-matching ;)

While I have never taken a class on anti-trust a pretty good summary of what is required is at http://law.wustl.edu/Organizations/SBA/Outlines/Up per%20Level%20Outlines/Antitrust/Drobak/Antitrust% 20(Drobak1).htm
I can see several problems, first of all he has to allege that the scheme harmed him- he is alleging that the GPL has driven down the job market for computer programmers, something that seems hard to prove.
He has to show that there is an "anti-competive activity" he is alleging that this is the GPL itself. In order to do this he is charcterizing this as an "adhesion contract", that is a contract that one party has no real choice but to accept. This seems laughable given that the acts that invoke the GPL requirements are completely voluntary, I personaly have never accepted the GPL because I am not a programmer and don't distribute softweare. Yet I use GPLed softweare extensively. This is very much in oppstion to the licesne agreements that came with my proprotaty stuff.

Please don't be offended at the subject, it is intended in the best spirit of Wicked Witch of the West broom-riding cackling.

I think it would be cool if places like NASA let scientists pick thier projects. Or even let outsiders in, for example if you have a masters in geography and you're interested in helping map the surface of mars, that you can sign up for that work.

Well, if you're motivated, you can look at and work with data from NASA planetary missions. Data collected from the first 270 days of MER rover operations are available.

Would you abolish copyright and patents, too?

In a word, yes.

The book was published posthumously in tree form but there are still .pdf and .ps available on the web.

I haven't read this book, but I doubt that the world would be much better off if they learned the proper implementation of Bayes' theorem...just teach them not to use logical fallacies, PLEASE!

Oh yeah, PDF and PS links.

The book was published posthumously in tree form but there are still .pdf and .ps available on the web.

I haven't read this book, but I doubt that the world would be much better off if they learned the proper implementation of Bayes' theorem...just teach them not to use logical fallacies, PLEASE!

Oh yeah, PDF and PS links.

pdf with the original paper here

11 years for the data to be analyzed.

It happened this way for two reasons:

1. Only limited funding has been available for lunar research. In the last 10 years, there has been much more funding available for Mars-related work, so many people who would otherwise study the moon have chosen to study Mars instead.

2. New ideas can prompt scientists to look at older data in new ways.

Of course, if you wish to analyze the data yourself, they are publically available.

Instead of going for this book, which sounds rather weak, try this syllabus: http://bio5495.wustl.edu/ by Sean Eddy, one of the world's most effective bioinformaticians. You'll learn more. If the biology is incomprehensible, the classic introduction is probably still Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, now in its 5th edition: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805 34635X

One key breakthrough will be to give computers the ability to take an intentional stance (short definition or longer essay) with regard to users. If Google could infer why I am searching instead of just what I am searching, it would be able to do a much better job. This would move from search-as-data-retrieval to search-as-intelligent-dialog.

I'm not sure if this can happen by 2015, but it seems like a key goal that is much more important than adding "Genuine People Personalities" to computers

I think most of the math actually used in our CS department (considerably more courses were required for graduation) was either taught in the CS class for which it was required (computer graphics) or in the one semester "introduction to logic" class that taught logic and counting math for algorithmic analysis. Outside of actual numecial programming, it seems that if you are good at math, you can learn what you need when you realize you need it. On the other hand, I think everyone, regardless of their major, should learn a good bit of calculus. Mostly because "it makes you a better person."

Whether this makes you happy or not, the majority of Americans are not amenable to the idea of killing undeveloped babies for medical research. Then why do so many people fight for legislation against things such as Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer when it is the technology that could replace the need to use human embryos to create stem cells? It still makes no sense to me.

Humans are more similar to chickens than you think. We share around 60% of our genes. Something that raises the fetal death rate over 450% in chickens certainly suggests that further investigation on human damage is needed.

fully grown human beings

Who says it's only fully grown human beings using cell phones? Around these parts, I even see kids as young as 10 with cell phones. They are about to enter their growth spurt, including maturing their reproductive cells, which could be subject to damage. And what about expectant mothers? Should cellphones have Surgeon General's warnings on them that they should not be used by pregnant women? I certainly think it bears further investigation.

Please tell me why the article link goes to Science Blog when the entire entry is simply a copy & paste of an original article from the Washington University in St. Louis University News? Were the extra two clicks too much work for CowboyNeal before approving the post? Pretty sad, IMO, since the submitter BenSullivan is the same Ben Sullivan who produces the attempt at moneymaking blog.

Herding cats? Patents? It's not as if "patent disclosure law very much resembles the proverbial herding of cats".

Here's a picture.

It has nothing to do with pipelining, and what he/she said is correct, I think you've missed his/her point; in CISC architectures the number of clock cycles per instruction varies depending on the complexity of the instruction, whereas in "traditional" RISC architectures you had 1 instruction per clock.

See here for examples: http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs306/res ources/helppc/asm.txt.html. Pipelining only came in on the 586 (i.e. Pentium).

Rather, it is all based upon experimental results that leave very little choice.
I wouldn't say results leave us very little choice. Imagination plays a huge role in science; physics is just mathematical models to explain what we observe. People can imagine different models based on the same data. Dark energy is one model for a set of observations, but there are alternative models such as F !=ma for small values of a, or modified gravitational theory, that can also explain the same phenomenon.
Schrodinger's cat also has many theoretical explainations (ie "many worlds"), and to some degree it comes down to faith, in which theory you "believe" at any point in time (though not blind faith as religion dictates).
In fact, getting back to dark energy, Einstein discarded the theory because it didn't fit what he "believed" the universe was like. There is some degree of faith in science, the important part is that by it's nature science continually tests to strengthen the belief in a theory or forces us to reform our ideas and opinions.

I hate to reply to my own post, but I went back and checked the earlier links again:

FYI, Slashdot has a tendency to sometimes insert spaces into long URLS. This makes them invalid. I didn't put the space between my and otox, the system did. People who aren't clueless newbees know about this fault, and when it shows up, cut and paste to get a valid link.

http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/neuromuscular/mother/my otox.htm

What you see above just worked for me when tested in preview mode. If it quits working, cut and paste it, or quit yer bitchin.

The link originally went to a story about a Gene-Engineered bacterium that produced massive amounts of Tryptophan. Tryptophan harvested from this source and marketed as a dietary supplement killed at least 37 people (Note: some sites give this number as 27, some as 37, 37 appears to be the right figure) and made hundreds more ill and may still be contributing to premature deaths on the parts of hundreds more.
I'm sorry the first reference got removed. Here's another one. If it gets taken down too, please try Googling for either "Tryptophan Fatalities" or "Gene Engineered Food Deaths" and see if you get some hits.

http://www.neuro.wustl.edu/neuromuscular/mother/my otox.htm/