This partner arrangement has already been available for a while through AltaVista--not that anyone uses that search engine for anything, mind you. Take a look here. You can get to the NYT articles at the top without registering because of the PARTNER=ALTAVISTA1 at the end of the URL (and some of the garbage before it).
Of course no one really new about this because no one uses AltaVista anymore (at least not their news area). The only reason I knew about it was because Matt Drudge occasionally uses links from there on his page.
And, I guess with Google News you can get any NYT article without registering.
Narrator: The moon. For several years, she has fascinated many. But will man ever walk on her fertile surface?
Democratic hopeful Adlai Stevenson says so.
Stevenson: I have no objection to man walking on the moon.
Narrator: By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the moon, ideal for family vacations. Once there, you'll weigh only a small percentage of what you weigh on Earth... Slow down, tubby! You're not on the moon yet!
The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?
I've never seen them myself either, but I'd love to. According to this page,
The best time to look for an aurora on any given night, unfortunately, is toward the middle of the night and into the morning (If you're an early riser that's okay!). It's always best to look for a weak green glow low in the northern sky. But when big disturbances occur, the aurora can be seen much earlier in the evening and much higher in the sky. If a bright display occurs early in the evening, there is a good chance that another display will follow a couple of hours later. Its colors can vary from green to red, and you can see much shimmering.
According to the article from the San Francisco Chronicle,
"The measure banning unsolicited text messages to cell phones and pagers emerged after Assemblyman Tim Leslie, R-Tahoe City, read about the case of Rodney Joffe, who had been interrupted during a performance of "Riverdance" by a text message advertising new mortgage rates."
So, while spam messages on cell phones are still fairly rare, they are happening, and it was only a matter of time before it would have gotten out of hand. Links to the text of the bills Gov. Davis signed are below. How the state actually plans on enforcing the part on spam emails is anybody's guess.
SB 1560 - This bill creates a statewide "Do Not Call" list to be maintained by the attorney general. AB 1769 - Here is the bill making it a crime to send unsolicited text messages to cell phones or pagers. AB 2944 - Here is the bill closing a loophole in CA's junk fax law, and decreeing that all spam emails include "ADV:" at the beginning of the subject line or "ADV:ADLT" in the case of adult material.
Many people believe there are better things to do with their computers than search for aliens. That's fine. United Devices' Cancer Research project, for instance, is certainly a worthwhile distributed computing alternative to SETI@Home.
However, for those who need some motivation for running SETI@Home, the following quote from Carl Sagan's Contact is a bit inspiring:
"We're just beginning SETI. You know how many possibilities there are. This is the time to leave every option open. This is the time to be optimistic. If we lived in any previous time in human history, we could wonder about this all our lives, and we couldn't do a thing to find the answer. But this time is unique. This is the first time when anybody's been able to look for extraterrestrial intelligence... Nobody's guaranteeing success... Imagine them out there sending us signals, and nobody on Earth is listening. That would be a joke, a travesty. Wouldn't you be ashamed of your civilization if we were able to listen and didn't have the gumption to do it?"
Last month, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists released a study modeling the effectiveness of direct injection of carbon dioxide into different oceans at different depths.
They've proposed injection into the ocean as a way to slow the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Injections were simulated at 800 meters, 1500 meters and 3000 meters for 100 hypothetical years near the Bay of Biscay, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Tokyo, Jakarta and Bombay.
The models showed that injection at 3000 meters is quite effective at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for several centuries while injections at shallower depths are less effective. (Not too surprising.) In general, injections into the Pacific Ocean (San Francisco and Tokyo) were more effective than injection at the same depth in the Atlantic Ocean (New York City, Rio de Janeiro and the Bay of Biscay).
If you live in California, you can write a letter to Gov. Davis urging him to sign AB2944, as suggested in this recent editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle.
If you're not in California, well, you can still write to your local politicians.
As my EE professor told the class earlier this semester, it's a shame that broadcast television eats up such large chunks of frequency in the radio spectrum, a total range of over 400 MHz. Since almost all televisions are tethered anyway (by their power cords), the television signal should just be delivered over land wires. Frequencies in the radio spectrum, a finite resource, should be allocated to truly wireless devices, he believes. Of course, that means that everyone would have to pay for basic cable just to watch the Simpsons.
Just an interesting thought about the legacy of broadcast television...
What are the odds that the day after my classmates and I have to implement Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm for our final CS project this semester, the venerable founding father of computer science passes on?
An interesting coincidence, no doubt, but nothing more than that.
UC Berkeley's ResNet is capped at 40 Mbps for a couple thousand students. In addition, usage is tracked, and if you exceeded a certain amount each week, you'd get a warning. After enough warnings, they might shut off your connection.
The tracking didn't do much to restrain P2P usage though, as the network would constantly hit the peak of 40 Mbps, and everything would slow to a crawl. Most of the time, web pages downloaded at about the speed of a 56K modem. The only time I could get decent speeds was early in the morning, or around winter/spring break when many people left for home early.
Connections within the campus and to other campuses were still fast, though. And, the network connection for the rest of the non-residential buildings on campus is always fast with a much higher cap.
...was published right after the 2000 elections when we didn't know who the next president would be.
Within days of election night, The Onion came out with one of its greatest stories ever: Bush Or Gore: 'A New Era Dawns', accurately satirizing just how similar the two candidates were.
News.com is reporting that IBM has signed a deal with Landmark Graphics, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to build Linux supercomputers and PCs for oil and gas companies, the companies will announce Friday.
Read the story: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-922068.html">
U.C. Berkeley has been working on implementing a wireless network around campus. You can read up on the project here. It mentions some of the technical issues they face like 2.4GHz cordless phones and even interference from old microwave ovens.
I don't know about you, but fluorescent lights always put me to sleep.
Anyway, Compact Fluorescent lights have been known to interfere with IR devices and radios. Like others have said, I would guess it's probably just putting out a lot of noise.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, why does it have to be the butt of so many jokes?
Of course no one really new about this because no one uses AltaVista anymore (at least not their news area). The only reason I knew about it was because Matt Drudge occasionally uses links from there on his page.
And, I guess with Google News you can get any NYT article without registering.
Stevenson: I have no objection to man walking on the moon.
Narrator: By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the moon, ideal for family vacations. Once there, you'll weigh only a small percentage of what you weigh on Earth... Slow down, tubby! You're not on the moon yet!
The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astro-men. Will you be among them?
SB 1560 - This bill creates a statewide "Do Not Call" list to be maintained by the attorney general.
AB 1769 - Here is the bill making it a crime to send unsolicited text messages to cell phones or pagers.
AB 2944 - Here is the bill closing a loophole in CA's junk fax law, and decreeing that all spam emails include "ADV:" at the beginning of the subject line or "ADV:ADLT" in the case of adult material.
However, for those who need some motivation for running SETI@Home, the following quote from Carl Sagan's Contact is a bit inspiring:
Injections were simulated at 800 meters, 1500 meters and 3000 meters for 100 hypothetical years near the Bay of Biscay, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Tokyo, Jakarta and Bombay.
The models showed that injection at 3000 meters is quite effective at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere for several centuries while injections at shallower depths are less effective. (Not too surprising.) In general, injections into the Pacific Ocean (San Francisco and Tokyo) were more effective than injection at the same depth in the Atlantic Ocean (New York City, Rio de Janeiro and the Bay of Biscay).
The full press release is available here.
If you're not in California, well, you can still write to your local politicians.
Just an interesting thought about the legacy of broadcast television...
An interesting coincidence, no doubt, but nothing more than that.
Now showing on satellite TV: secret American spy photos
The tracking didn't do much to restrain P2P usage though, as the network would constantly hit the peak of 40 Mbps, and everything would slow to a crawl. Most of the time, web pages downloaded at about the speed of a 56K modem. The only time I could get decent speeds was early in the morning, or around winter/spring break when many people left for home early.
Connections within the campus and to other campuses were still fast, though. And, the network connection for the rest of the non-residential buildings on campus is always fast with a much higher cap.
The people proliferating these files are probably the same as those who are unwittingly sharing their entire hard drives.
The story is also available on Yahoo! and Netscape.
Can you get to the Onion's story through the Google Cache?
Within days of election night, The Onion came out with one of its greatest stories ever: Bush Or Gore: 'A New Era Dawns', accurately satirizing just how similar the two candidates were.
It seems only natural for Berkeley to host a class on the topic.
He put up a wallpaper mural in his living room. Seems like a lot less work, and it still looks pretty cool.
News.com is reporting that IBM has signed a deal with Landmark Graphics, a subsidiary of Halliburton, to build Linux supercomputers and PCs for oil and gas companies, the companies will announce Friday. Read the story: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-922068.html">
U.C. Berkeley has been working on implementing a wireless network around campus. You can read up on the project here. It mentions some of the technical issues they face like 2.4GHz cordless phones and even interference from old microwave ovens.
You gotta hand it to them for trying out new (old?) ideas.
Anyway, Compact Fluorescent lights have been known to interfere with IR devices and radios. Like others have said, I would guess it's probably just putting out a lot of noise.
It wasn't too much to get excited about. I'm in Berkeley, and my monitor jiggled side-to-side a bit, but that was it.