The 'yogas' from the Bhagavad Gita are various spiritual disciplines that don't necisarily have any 'physical' component. Bhakti yoga, for instance, is simply the practice of demonstrating love and devotion to an aspect of the divine (usually your favorite Hindu deity)
The yoga that is being taught in the workplace is a physical discipline of stretching, posture, breathing, etc. It is a course of exercise. It need not have any particularly religious component.
Yoga, coming from the Sanskrit for 'yoke' (as you correctly observed), refers to any course of discipline or training. This can be a spiritual discipline (such as bhakti), aimed at bringing the practitioner closer to god, or it can be a physical discipline or training, such as 'physical' yoga. Sending your kids to 'time out' could probably be called yoga, if you wanted.
So while yoga (or meditation) can be explicitly religious in tone, they don't have to be so, any more than any other activity. The religious component lies in how they are presented, and in the attitude of the participants. I'm sure there are some folks at these companies who think of it spiritually, and quite a few that think of it as the Eastern Hokey Pokie ("put your left leg in, put your right arm out, draw your breath through your chakra and . . . ")
My experience taking classes where computer postings were required has been that the posts quickly become dismissed as busy work. Many people ignore them, or make only a token effort. They put in less effort than they would if they had to discuss in class, because a lame post to a course web site gets ignored in the flury of posts before the deadline for the weeks response, whereas there's no way to step back from a moronic comment made in a regular discussion. So I would recommend against required web/blog based assignments. Particularly in non-technical courses, they often seem contrived.
On the other hand, an idea that several of my professirs took up was to allow students to use computer-based forums (web boards, email lists, etc.) as alternatives to class participation. In some cases, students who were obviously petrafied of speaking in front of a live class could offer insightful comments and lively debate via a web forum or email list. Meanwhile, folks like myself who enjoyed shooting their mouths off in front of the prof kept discussions going in the physical world. By having the class room and online activities compliment eachother, rather than forcing one or the other down the throat of a student for whom they might not be appropriate, you give some folks who might not otherwise contribute an opportunity to get more out of (and give more to) the class.
Another useful thing that I've seen in non-tech courses is providing access to sources via a course web site. This is, unfortunately, subject to a variety of copyright restrictions, but students appreciate being able to get sources as a pdf or other document via a web site rather than having to trek out to a library reserve and feed their laundry money into a copying machine. It also has the advantage that no single student (or subset of students) can tie up a resource during a critical period- such as right before a paper or test. I had a professor who would post copies of articles from his private collection of out-of-print sources on obscure East and Central Asian history as pdf or ps documents on the course site, and their availability this way saved a lot of time and money in trying to track down sources.
So the overall recommendation would be this; make it flexible, make it helpful, and make it appropriate for the medium. If you can't say definitively "this is so much better than doing it offline", then it probably means you're about to embark on a serious folly.
This report seems to include only wiretaps granted by judges in the course of criminal investigations. Thus it wouldn't reflect any intelligence gathering monitoring, which gets approval for domestic-related wiretaps from courts that are not required to report anything about their decisions (there are judges that are appointed with the duty of granting these orders; they never hear oppositional arguments, thus they almost always grant them). Furthermore, anytime one end of the call lands outside the U.S, all bets are off. I'd say this is probably a good indicator for what it's talking about; wiretaps used to break up gambling rings and catch murder-for-hire schemes. Little or no reflection on U.S use of wiretaps for intelligence/terrorism/etc. purposes (remember, they're not criminals- they're 'enemy combatants')
You're not kidding. All of GW's promotional literature refers to it as 'The games workshop hobby'- little or no mention of role-playing, table-top gaming, or the idea that anyone other than GW might have ever thought of it. In addition to the numerous 'official' rules that GW has for retailers, I have heard from employees, owners, and managers of several independent or semi-independent (part of a non-GW chain) hobby shops that GW has a habit of 'loosing' orders from shops that don't stick to the party line (MSRP, for instance).
This is all heresay, of course, but a number of hobby shops in my area have exited the GW market entirely because they could no longer make a profit on it; they were being forced into ordering too much stock from GW, and then felt intimidated into selling it at prices that kept it from moving. They also have probably the highest 'churn rate' (rate of introducing 'new and improved' versions of products, and then discontinuing/depricating old ones) of any gaming company I've ever seen. They ban any miniature more than a few years old from any 'official' competition (cons, tournaments)- not old rules mind you, but old lumps of metal that look almost exactly like the new lumps of metal. Now, only the most dedicated of fans care a whit about these nerd-fests, and these are the people who have invested years, hours, and cash by the fistful in the hobby. And those are the poor saps getting shut out in the cold by GW.
The basic truth that a lot of people feel is that they no longer care about anyone old enough to notice or care about these things; they want to get 10 year olds hooked on it for two or three years, have their parents burn through a couple hundred buck at every holiday/birthday, and then chuck the whole thing in the trash in time for the next product cycle to start. Which is a shame, because long ago GW produced some of the most interesting games on the market (there are episodes of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game that are still classics), but much of their new material (except for that produced by licensees like the all-too shortly lived Hogshead, and that under extreme conditions of creative restriction) is schlock- a conscious choice to aim at the least common attention span. If we're lucky, they'll draconian policy themselves into a turnaround when they realize there's not much money in being overpriced and disliked. . . but I'm not putting any money on it- just like I stopped giving GW any money when it became clear they were getting worse instead of better with regard to both their product and their policies.
The article makes it sound like this is primarily aimed at countering the presence of Linux in the embedded/handheld market, but I wonder if this won't do more harm to PalmOS in the short term. Palm has allowed its licensees a pretty free hand in making alterations and requesting features and changes to the OS, at a pretty low level. This is part of what has made it possible for licensees like Sony to run with the platform, and do a lot more with it than Palm's own handhelds do.
If MS extends this kind of freedom to their licensees, then new clients (which Palm is going to try and acquire more aggressively once the device/platform split in the company is complete) will have one less reason to work with Palm rather than MS. So this is pretty win/win for MS; they get some extra edge on Palm during a vulnerable time for the company, when the pending division could cause things to go either way, they get some enhancements and/or fixes to their code from their lincensees, and they get to collect their royalties no matter what. I doubt that there are any real principles relating to support of Free Software involved; it's just a smart business move.
Remember, there's a reason they got to be the Evil Empire, and it doesn't necisarily involve the quality of their products. . .
Whitey started life as a thug in South Boston's Winter Hill Gang, an Irish organized crime ring. He agreed to turn informant for the FBI in exchange for protection from prosecution and other favors. The FBI agents charged with handling his case were both enamored of him; one of them had grown up in Southie idolizing him as a local hero, and the other was following his bosses lead.
Whitey largely provided information of dubious value to the FBI, but his handlers continued to hype him as the most valuable informant in the Boston FBI system. They protected him from prosecution numerous times, and in at least one case refused to give any kind of warning to a witness that Whitey and his associates later killed. Bulger was shielded from multiple murder investigations, as well as a number of associated crimes.
Most importantly, most of the information that Whitey gave the Feds regarded the Italian mafia that was operating in Boston's North End at the time. The FBI moved in and largely wiped out the Italian Mafia- giving Whitey's Winter Hill gang the opportunity to take over all of Boston's organized crime. Whitey then systematically eliminated his rivals in Southie, and effectively made himself underworld king of Boston- with the FBI doing a lot of his dirty work, thanks to helpful "tips" regarding criminals that he wanted out of his way.
Finally, one of the FBI agents assigned to the case had an attack of conscience, and the whole story began to emerge. Whitey bolted, and no one has been able to find him since. The past several years in Boston, not a day goes by that there isn't a story about Whitey; sightings from Maine to Mexico, and periodic excavations of isolated fields where victims of his spree are allegedly buried. The scandal tore the Boston FBI office to pieces, and was one of the biggest black eyes that the Feds have received in recent years
The 'Aryan' people who moved into India and provide the genetic background for a lot of Northern Indians were from Persia, not Europe. And while some of these Persians did continue to migrate into Europe later on, I don't think they made it as far as Scandinavia, where the red-headed gene has its genesis (red-heads in Ireland and other parts of Europe are largely a product of intermixing with Vikings). There aren't many red-headed Iranians that I know of, so it seems unlikely that Indian red-heads come from Persian stock.
On the other hand, there were a lot of European genes that moved through Asia Minor, India, and into Central Asia and China along the Silk Road. They've found ethnically Caucasian mummies in China that are a result of this migration and mixing. Unless the Kashmiri red-heads are a product of a local mutation that was concentrated in the population, it seems more likely that these genes were brought from Northern Europe much later than the Aryan immigration from Persia. The Vikings got around, so it seems reasonable that they might have sent some genetic material into the near-east and the subcontinent one way or another.
Unless you're willing to go through the (somewhat exhaustive) process of having your little organization accredited as a college (which may not be possible for such an org- I'm not sure what the standards are, but I think having your own curriculum might be one), such degrees would have no more standing than the '6.99 Ph.D Extravaganza' message I keep getting in my hotmail inbox. Using MIT's information to actually issue degrees might also introduce some copyright problems- you're no longer using their info for personal enrichment, you're using it to run a business. Trouble would ensue.
I think we've probably already found just about all of the large, land vertabrates that exist.
You might be surprised. While I doubt that they'll be a sudden boom in the sasquatch finding industry, there may be more reasonable sized land vertrabrates around than we expect. Every year, a few more are found in the rain forests of South America (that is, those species that don't wind up caught in the treads of a bulldozer. Or maybe that's how we find them), including rodents, monkies, snakes, and the like. A number of quite large (deer-cow sized) animals have been found, or rediscovered for the first time since the turn of the century, in areas of Asia. There are whole regions of Cambodia, for instance, that are basically untouched since the start of the war, that are only now being explored. Scientists have found entire herds of animals in this region, never described before. So there may be a good deal left to find.
Both of those statements are objectively correct. Gates is/was/eternally-will-be-despite-the-title the head of an extremely competetive company, and is also quite generous with his money. I don't recall the exact stat, but I believe that he gives more annually to world health initiatives than the US government. And, arguably, Gates has focused less on the day-to-day running of the Evil Empire and more on his other work in the days between 96 and 2000.
Someone brought up the irrelevancy of the language below, but I think the poster meant to indicate something else. Yes, a product is not significantly different (and deserving of a seperate patent) because it is implemented in a seperate langauge. But, to quote the original post:
it would have been useless if it were not hooked up to the portable computer he used to build it.
It sounds like the earlier machine relied on an external computer system running a piece of homade software to fiddle the inputs from the sensors and produce the balancing effect. The new machine has a built in computer, integral to the device, that implements the logic to operate the scooter either in hardware, firmware, or embedded software. At any rate, the new scooter does not require an external computer connected to it in order to operate correctly.
Of course, this is just an incrimental improvement over the external-computer model, but combined with the other improvements, could warrant a different patent. More importantly, it represents more of a difference between the two systems than just being implemented in a different language. So we can all stop ragging on the original poster now;)
A couple things: First and foremost, it is quite possible to crash even good console games. I used to lock up NHL 2001 on the PS2 once every month or so last spring. Haven't had the same problem with 2002. So crashes with consoles are possible- maybe they're just a little more rare.
Secondly, don't undervalue the complexity of writing for differing hardware settings. The fact that console games only have to run write on a few known variants of hardware is invaluable. One game may run on 3 consoles, but that's 3 hardware sets as opposed to the literally thousands of combinations of chipsets, firmware revs, peripheral hardware, and interfaces used in PC's. It simply is not possible to test every one. You hit the prominant ones, and hope that the rest work. The OS does perform abstraction, but the complexity of performing that abstraction can introduce problems. Badly designed hardware that doesn't play well with others can neccesitate work arounds that introduce instability and the potential for disaster into the system, even when the abstraction barriers are maintained. Never mind the fact that in recent memory, many of these abstraction barriers were quite permiable to allow developers to tweak performance and the like. Once you have people playing with hardware directly in application code, the opportunity for a gotcha hits the ceiling.
Last but not least, compare not only the price of a PC vs. Console game, but also the complexity. Games for the PC and console are similar in price, which leads to the conclusion that there's no more money for hardware testing PC games than there is for console games- and there we're back to the 4 hardwares vs. 4,000 problem. For the more expensive applications, we're talking about office suites, development suites, networking tools, servers- that sort of thing. The functions that these programs perform, even if they are computationally less intensive than hardcore graphics crunching, are much more complex. The complexity of games is rising, with the ability to add modules and perform in-game scripting to more and more games, but there's still a lot more potential issues to be dealt with in trying to construct other software.
Not that I am defending the fact that every 4th time I boot into windows, the system blue screens without any user intervention, or the fact that Visual C++ locks my machine if I attempt to tab switch between windows while programming OpenGL applications. There needs to be more work done on the QA end of the software world, rather than the out-the-door, patch-it-later school that dominates now. But I don't think the design philosophies between the console and PC world are that wholly different- the results are different because they are dealing with different sets of problems, with differing levels of difficulty.
Absolutely. I've been consistantly frustrated by the tendancy of Linux documents to spend pages covering administrative esoteria that only a few people will ever use, while giving inadequite attention to resolving basic problems in getting a system, package, or feature up and running properly. Those obscure details need to be there and documented for those that need them, but that's no excuse for skipping the obvious problems.
A second complaint that you could lodge against the available documentation is that a lot of widely available docs simply have not kept up with the progress of more intuitive, simpler, GUI based config tools. Part of the problem is that these tools have exploded in recent years- things are simply developing too fast to keep up with everything. Every time Red Hat comes out with a new release, they usually include some new configuration bells and whistles. But while these may be documented in spotty places on the system or from a distro's website, the docs that most folks look to (HOWTO's and the like) often don't catch up on these things. I look at documentation for how to install or configure something, only to find later or while I'm working that part or most of the config is already done, or that there is a simpler tool for doing the work that I find documented in some obscure spot. I think when the pace of development for new config tools slows a bit, the docs will catch up and it will be easier to teach everyone easier ways of doing things. In the meantime, when someone asks, I teach them the hard way- because that was the only way that was documented when I learned.
The bookstore can keep your experience of thumbing around (which they recognize that customer's love), while still improving their ability to sell. Imagine if they only bought a single copy of each title that they normally carry. No more in the back, no being shipped or stored. A 'browsing copy', that you can look through as much as you want, but if you buy a book, you buy one printed new. This means that they still get to reduce stock and floorspace (how many '50 of every harry potter book' displays have we seen in the past few years?), while preserving the customer experience. You also don't have to worry about stock being damaged by people browsing- if little Billy tears a page while looking through Whorton Hears a Who, you didn't lose the sale of a 7 dollar book, you've just had minor damage to a display copy that will cause you to take it off the shelves maybe a week earlier than you would otherwise.
This sounds compatible with, but distinct from, a theory offered up several years ago in an issue of scientific american. The idea was that there was a sieche (could be spelling this incorrectly), or a standing water wave, oscillating inside Loch Ness. These waves produce some very weird wave forms, such as waves in the apperant absence of wind, glassy calm at odd times, et cetera. At times, they 'go exponential', and the waves grow to a size where they begin dragging debris up off the bottom of the lake, such as sunken tree trunks. The combination of weird looking waves, weird water patterns, and dark colored, water-logged debris surfacing can make for a very convincing monster show.
What makes the theory more interesting is the fact that the same sort of wave has been identified in Lake Champlain in Vermont, which is, as all good Vermonters know, the home of Champy, the Lake Champlain monster. Both Champlain and Ness are deep, narrow lakes, of the sort given to producing sieches. Of course, on at least one instance, the monster in Champlain has been a gigantic sturgeon (it was shot and killed by a woman who saw it thrashing in the water behind her house), but a wave of this sort, periodically disturbed by seismic activity, would seem to be likely to produce the off shapes in the water that people have reported seeing.
And as someone may have mentioned, the best argument against there being a Nessie in the sense of a giant monster is the ecology of the lake. Several studies have been done of the lake, and every one of them finds that the food chain in the lake could not support a large predator, much less the breeding stock that would be neccesary to keep the sightings going for hundreds of years.
I'm not so sure of this. At my school, in undergraduate classes of significant complexity, professors have no problem with students usuing publicly available code, as long as there is significant original content. If you are writing a spiffy new server that performs a fairly novel function for a networking class, no one minds if you make use of an existing bit of GPL code to parse and error check URL's on the client.
Yeah, infinite hello world is useless to GPL. But I've written some sizable bits of undergraduate code that I, or someone else, might want to use at some other point. If I did some research and found a solution to a problem that someone else might have to solve on the way to solving another problem, then GPLed code could prove to be of use. Allowing GPLing not only ensures that other people will be able to use it, but that the university cannot restrict your ability to re-use your own work in other areas.
An example: my roomate and a friend wrote a program for a DB class to do image queries by sketch. To do so, they needed something like a paint program. The professor was not interested in their ability to write paint; she wanted to see the scoring method that they had researched which promised to give better matches on image queries. They borrowed a GPL'ed paint program, which could have been written by some other kid at some other college, writing code for a graphic UI class, and adapted the code to work with the system. Two seperate, undergraduate level problems. No reason that one couldn't benefit from the other, however.
If my college, or the college of the lad who wrote the paint program, were more restrictive about GPL'ing and releasing projects done for the college, my roomate and his partner would have never finished. They would have wasted their time re-writing paint, instead of being able to implement their query algorithms. A really nifty project would have been impossible.
Dead on. People saying "learn assembler, it'll teach you how the computer works" need to recall a couple things, such as the fact that there is no single langauge called 'assembler', and that learning any particular assembly language teaches you primarily how a single processor or family of processors works.
The last chip I programmed assembly on was a Dallas variant on an 8051. It had a Harvard architecture (seperate code and data spaces), only accessed external RAM through a 16-bit data pointer register in an otherwise mostly 8-bit system, and had a number of other strange quirks.
Was it useful to learn more about low level workings of computers? Sure. But I question wether a total newbie would be assisted that much by learning such small details of a single architecture. Before you have an adequite high-level picture, there is no framework to integrate this information into. You don't know what is generally true, and what is a quirk of the architecture you're using. Give students the big picture, and then let them work out the details as they gain more knowledge and experience. It sure sounds cool to say your education mirrored the development of programming through the ages, but it isn't clear that this is really a better educational tool.
The point of the article was not that the computers are bringing in new germs or fungus. The fungus existed in the ICU before, carried in by patients and the like. However, patients leave, and most areas of hospitals are regularly scrubbed down with anti-bacterial and anti-fungal products. But if places aren't cleaning the inside of their cases, there is a nice safe haven for fungus and bacteria, which is almost immediately re-introduced into the environment by the exhaust fans of the computer.
I doubt it. It isn't the airflow from the fan that causes the fungus, it's dust and warm, moist air passing through the computer. While laptops might pick up a little less dust, they probably would still take up enough to be contaminated. On the other hand, without active exhausts, like fans, laptops might be less likely to spread the fungus outside of the computer's case, even if it were growing inside.
First of all, this seems to dodge the question. I think we can rely on the poster to know his needs. Secondly, paper reports are obsolete only if you like having your eyes cross. The current state of the industry in data display technology means that most folks have monitors that are ill-suited for long term reading. Even if you have a nice setup with a laptop that you can move around, there still isn't a lot done to prevent 'screen eyes'. People blink less when they use computer screens, and have less control of the distance between them and the screen. The result is that reading long sections can be quite dreadful. For hard contact wearers, there's nothing quite like blinking after your eyes have dried out, thus scraping the contact along your dusty eyeball.
So until there are some better, lighter, and more eye-friendly solutions to reading through computers, paper will still have a place in and out of the workplace.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:Cloning of an organ will not be allowed.
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Send out the Clones?
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Well, not exactly. The transfer of a somatic nucleus into an egg cell is the procedure currently used to close whole animals (a la Dolly). If you could come up with an organ cloning procedure that did not involve this, than you would be legal. The issue is placing somatic nuclei from humans into egg cells, which are still totipotent (capable of creating any and all other forms of cellular matter through division). Maybe there could be a way to simply use a single liver cell if you wanted to grow a liver; no one knows yet, because frankly we're not very skilled at cloning yet, much less starting to figure out how to grow individual organs (though we have caused a few flys to grow eyes all over their bodies- that's a long way from transplantable organs, however)
I'd been given the impression that one of the main reasons that reprocessing was abandoned was that the process could be used in the creation of isotopes suitable for nuclear weapons. As I recall, in the 70's we signed some treaties basically renouncing the process and creating an international ban on the process in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. I'd never heard that saftey was the main reason that it was dropped, but rather international politics. Not sure how recent the info was, though. . .
Anybody got a more recent answer on why the US has pulled back from reporssesing, or is it really just the saftey issue?
You definately have me on the first point. I wasn't aware that that had not been shown to be NP-hard. Thanks for the notice. However, even if it is only in NP, finding a solution for an NP complete problem would still provide a solution to factoring, even if finding a solution to factoring would not provide a solution to all other NP problems. On the second point, I agree, there may be other ways to break RSA. But finding an effecient algorithm for factoring would break RSA. My point was never that RSA was the same as factoring, but that it was "based on" factoring, in the sense that solving the factoring problem would defeat the encryption system. Even if there were a proof that factoring was the only way to beat RSA (which you claim, and I believe as well, that there is not), this would not prove RSA to be secure as long as it remained to prove that the factoring problem could not be solved. So I agree, you're correct in both cases. But I don't think that alters the main point of my argument. I will admit, however, to spreading misconception by having been a victim of it. Thanks!
What is meant by "provably secure" here is, I think, not what you are thinking. Rabin is not saying "there is no way for this system to ever be broken.". He is saying that from a mathematical standpoint, it is provable that this cannot be broken. Big difference. Almost all current algorithms are based on a NP-complete math problem- something like factoring, in the case of RSA. This is all well and good as long as P != NP. However, there is no proof that this is true. Therefore, no system based on this premise can be mathematically shown to be secure, because someone discovering a polynomial time algorithm for any NP complete problem breaks the system. Rabin's algorithm is provably secure from a mathematical standpoint, given certain assumptions, but without the assumption that P != NP. So from this respect, there is such thing as a provable true cipher. If you have a nice proof that the set p != the set NP, a number of other ones become provably true. As for the distribution of the one time pad, the question is answered in the article. The one time pad is the random number stream, which is available to anyone that wants to listen to it. But, you have to know what stream to listen to, and which numbers to pick out, a communication that can easily be made using existing cryptography. It relies on the fact that the random numbers are being generated too quickly to be stored on a computer, due to limits in memory. The thing to remember is that Rabin is an academic, and not a "security guru". What is "unbreakable" to him is not a system that forces idiots to not make their passphrase "password". It refers to the mathematical consistancy of the system. Take away the side-attacks and the idiots with their mother's maiden name as a password, and the system is unbreakable. Take those away from any other existing cryptographic system, and the system is still not proven to be secure. So it's not snake oil, not only because he isn't selling anything, but also because it appears that his claims are, in the regime in which they are made, true. This is an article about an academic work, not a press release for "security blackbox 4000".
Very true. Just about every nation in the region had real damage done to it by imperialism. There would not have been a Khmer Rouge, or a Pol Pot, without the efforts of imperialists and the fallout from the Vietnam War. But Cambodia faired in many ways worse than most. Vietnam had as many or more problems with foreign entanglements, but now has an economy and social order that is much better recovered. Pol Pot systematically murdered an entire generation of the educated and intelligent people of Cambodia. The actions of the West certainly left the nation ripe for his plunder, but I doubt anyone could have imagined the level of carnage that took place under the Khmer Rouge. The Communists literally emptied the cities of Campbodia, and systematically killed almost every member of the educated classes, from college professors and business people to Buddhist monks and nuns. It's one reason why educational programs like this are so important in Cambodia; these people are effectively missing an entire generation of educated leaders, not to mention that areas of the country have been out of contact with the rest of the world up until the past 5-10 years. The monk Mahagoshananda began leading peace marches in Vietnam in the past years, and in many case his procession of monks and peace advocates were the first contact that some villages had had with the rest of the country since the start of the reign of the Khmer Rouge. New species of large mammels (some the size of cattle) have gone undiscovered in Cambodia up until the past 3 years because parts of the country were effectively cordoned off by left over Khmer fighters, land mines, and destroyed infrastructure. So while imperialist interferance has played a big role in bringing Cambodia to its present state, I would still say that the bulk of the blame for Cambodia's rough economic and educational fortunes lies squarely with the Communist government of the Khmer Rouge.
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The 'yogas' from the Bhagavad Gita are various spiritual disciplines that don't necisarily have any 'physical' component. Bhakti yoga, for instance, is simply the practice of demonstrating love and devotion to an aspect of the divine (usually your favorite Hindu deity)
The yoga that is being taught in the workplace is a physical discipline of stretching, posture, breathing, etc. It is a course of exercise. It need not have any particularly religious component.
Yoga, coming from the Sanskrit for 'yoke' (as you correctly observed), refers to any course of discipline or training. This can be a spiritual discipline (such as bhakti), aimed at bringing the practitioner closer to god, or it can be a physical discipline or training, such as 'physical' yoga. Sending your kids to 'time out' could probably be called yoga, if you wanted.
So while yoga (or meditation) can be explicitly religious in tone, they don't have to be so, any more than any other activity. The religious component lies in how they are presented, and in the attitude of the participants. I'm sure there are some folks at these companies who think of it spiritually, and quite a few that think of it as the Eastern Hokey Pokie ("put your left leg in, put your right arm out, draw your breath through your chakra and . . . ")
On the other hand, an idea that several of my professirs took up was to allow students to use computer-based forums (web boards, email lists, etc.) as alternatives to class participation. In some cases, students who were obviously petrafied of speaking in front of a live class could offer insightful comments and lively debate via a web forum or email list. Meanwhile, folks like myself who enjoyed shooting their mouths off in front of the prof kept discussions going in the physical world. By having the class room and online activities compliment eachother, rather than forcing one or the other down the throat of a student for whom they might not be appropriate, you give some folks who might not otherwise contribute an opportunity to get more out of (and give more to) the class.
Another useful thing that I've seen in non-tech courses is providing access to sources via a course web site. This is, unfortunately, subject to a variety of copyright restrictions, but students appreciate being able to get sources as a pdf or other document via a web site rather than having to trek out to a library reserve and feed their laundry money into a copying machine. It also has the advantage that no single student (or subset of students) can tie up a resource during a critical period- such as right before a paper or test. I had a professor who would post copies of articles from his private collection of out-of-print sources on obscure East and Central Asian history as pdf or ps documents on the course site, and their availability this way saved a lot of time and money in trying to track down sources.
So the overall recommendation would be this; make it flexible, make it helpful, and make it appropriate for the medium. If you can't say definitively "this is so much better than doing it offline", then it probably means you're about to embark on a serious folly.
This report seems to include only wiretaps granted by judges in the course of criminal investigations. Thus it wouldn't reflect any intelligence gathering monitoring, which gets approval for domestic-related wiretaps from courts that are not required to report anything about their decisions (there are judges that are appointed with the duty of granting these orders; they never hear oppositional arguments, thus they almost always grant them). Furthermore, anytime one end of the call lands outside the U.S, all bets are off. I'd say this is probably a good indicator for what it's talking about; wiretaps used to break up gambling rings and catch murder-for-hire schemes. Little or no reflection on U.S use of wiretaps for intelligence/terrorism/etc. purposes (remember, they're not criminals- they're 'enemy combatants')
You're not kidding. All of GW's promotional literature refers to it as 'The games workshop hobby'- little or no mention of role-playing, table-top gaming, or the idea that anyone other than GW might have ever thought of it. In addition to the numerous 'official' rules that GW has for retailers, I have heard from employees, owners, and managers of several independent or semi-independent (part of a non-GW chain) hobby shops that GW has a habit of 'loosing' orders from shops that don't stick to the party line (MSRP, for instance).
This is all heresay, of course, but a number of hobby shops in my area have exited the GW market entirely because they could no longer make a profit on it; they were being forced into ordering too much stock from GW, and then felt intimidated into selling it at prices that kept it from moving. They also have probably the highest 'churn rate' (rate of introducing 'new and improved' versions of products, and then discontinuing/depricating old ones) of any gaming company I've ever seen. They ban any miniature more than a few years old from any 'official' competition (cons, tournaments)- not old rules mind you, but old lumps of metal that look almost exactly like the new lumps of metal. Now, only the most dedicated of fans care a whit about these nerd-fests, and these are the people who have invested years, hours, and cash by the fistful in the hobby. And those are the poor saps getting shut out in the cold by GW.
The basic truth that a lot of people feel is that they no longer care about anyone old enough to notice or care about these things; they want to get 10 year olds hooked on it for two or three years, have their parents burn through a couple hundred buck at every holiday/birthday, and then chuck the whole thing in the trash in time for the next product cycle to start. Which is a shame, because long ago GW produced some of the most interesting games on the market (there are episodes of the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game that are still classics), but much of their new material (except for that produced by licensees like the all-too shortly lived Hogshead, and that under extreme conditions of creative restriction) is schlock- a conscious choice to aim at the least common attention span. If we're lucky, they'll draconian policy themselves into a turnaround when they realize there's not much money in being overpriced and disliked. . . but I'm not putting any money on it- just like I stopped giving GW any money when it became clear they were getting worse instead of better with regard to both their product and their policies.
The article makes it sound like this is primarily aimed at countering the presence of Linux in the embedded/handheld market, but I wonder if this won't do more harm to PalmOS in the short term. Palm has allowed its licensees a pretty free hand in making alterations and requesting features and changes to the OS, at a pretty low level. This is part of what has made it possible for licensees like Sony to run with the platform, and do a lot more with it than Palm's own handhelds do.
If MS extends this kind of freedom to their licensees,
then new clients (which Palm is going to try and acquire more aggressively once the device/platform split in the company is complete) will have one less reason to work with Palm rather than MS. So this is pretty win/win for MS; they get some extra edge on Palm during a vulnerable time for the company, when the pending division could cause things to go either way, they get some enhancements and/or fixes to their code from their lincensees, and they get to collect their royalties no matter what. I doubt that there are any real principles relating to support of Free Software involved; it's just a smart business move.
Remember, there's a reason they got to be the Evil Empire, and it doesn't necisarily involve the quality of their products. . .
Whitey started life as a thug in South Boston's Winter Hill Gang, an Irish organized crime ring. He agreed to turn informant for the FBI in exchange for protection from prosecution and other favors. The FBI agents charged with handling his case were both enamored of him; one of them had grown up in Southie idolizing him as a local hero, and the other was following his bosses lead.
Whitey largely provided information of dubious value to the FBI, but his handlers continued to hype him as the most valuable informant in the Boston FBI system. They protected him from prosecution numerous times, and in at least one case refused to give any kind of warning to a witness that Whitey and his associates later killed. Bulger was shielded from multiple murder investigations, as well as a number of associated crimes.
Most importantly, most of the information that Whitey gave the Feds regarded the Italian mafia that was operating in Boston's North End at the time. The FBI moved in and largely wiped out the Italian Mafia- giving Whitey's Winter Hill gang the opportunity to take over all of Boston's organized crime. Whitey then systematically eliminated his rivals in Southie, and effectively made himself underworld king of Boston- with the FBI doing a lot of his dirty work, thanks to helpful "tips" regarding criminals that he wanted out of his way.
Finally, one of the FBI agents assigned to the case had an attack of conscience, and the whole story began to emerge. Whitey bolted, and no one has been able to find him since. The past several years in Boston, not a day goes by that there isn't a story about Whitey; sightings from Maine to Mexico, and periodic excavations of isolated fields where victims of his spree are allegedly buried. The scandal tore the Boston FBI office to pieces, and was one of the biggest black eyes that the Feds have received in recent years
The 'Aryan' people who moved into India and provide the genetic background for a lot of Northern Indians were from Persia, not Europe. And while some of these Persians did continue to migrate into Europe later on, I don't think they made it as far as Scandinavia, where the red-headed gene has its genesis (red-heads in Ireland and other parts of Europe are largely a product of intermixing with Vikings). There aren't many red-headed Iranians that I know of, so it seems unlikely that Indian red-heads come from Persian stock.
On the other hand, there were a lot of European genes that moved through Asia Minor, India, and into Central Asia and China along the Silk Road. They've found ethnically Caucasian mummies in China that are a result of this migration and mixing. Unless the Kashmiri red-heads are a product of a local mutation that was concentrated in the population, it seems more likely that these genes were brought from Northern Europe much later than the Aryan immigration from Persia. The Vikings got around, so it seems reasonable that they might have sent some genetic material into the near-east and the subcontinent one way or another.
Unless you're willing to go through the (somewhat exhaustive) process of having your little organization accredited as a college (which may not be possible for such an org- I'm not sure what the standards are, but I think having your own curriculum might be one), such degrees would have no more standing than the '6.99 Ph.D Extravaganza' message I keep getting in my hotmail inbox. Using MIT's information to actually issue degrees might also introduce some copyright problems- you're no longer using their info for personal enrichment, you're using it to run a business. Trouble would ensue.
You might be surprised. While I doubt that they'll be a sudden boom in the sasquatch finding industry, there may be more reasonable sized land vertrabrates around than we expect. Every year, a few more are found in the rain forests of South America (that is, those species that don't wind up caught in the treads of a bulldozer. Or maybe that's how we find them), including rodents, monkies, snakes, and the like. A number of quite large (deer-cow sized) animals have been found, or rediscovered for the first time since the turn of the century, in areas of Asia. There are whole regions of Cambodia, for instance, that are basically untouched since the start of the war, that are only now being explored. Scientists have found entire herds of animals in this region, never described before. So there may be a good deal left to find.
Both of those statements are objectively correct. Gates is/was/eternally-will-be-despite-the-title the head of an extremely competetive company, and is also quite generous with his money. I don't recall the exact stat, but I believe that he gives more annually to world health initiatives than the US government. And, arguably, Gates has focused less on the day-to-day running of the Evil Empire and more on his other work in the days between 96 and 2000.
It sounds like the earlier machine relied on an external computer system running a piece of homade software to fiddle the inputs from the sensors and produce the balancing effect. The new machine has a built in computer, integral to the device, that implements the logic to operate the scooter either in hardware, firmware, or embedded software. At any rate, the new scooter does not require an external computer connected to it in order to operate correctly.
Of course, this is just an incrimental improvement over the external-computer model, but combined with the other improvements, could warrant a different patent. More importantly, it represents more of a difference between the two systems than just being implemented in a different language. So we can all stop ragging on the original poster now
A couple things: First and foremost, it is quite possible to crash even good console games. I used to lock up NHL 2001 on the PS2 once every month or so last spring. Haven't had the same problem with 2002. So crashes with consoles are possible- maybe they're just a little more rare.
Secondly, don't undervalue the complexity of writing for differing hardware settings. The fact that console games only have to run write on a few known variants of hardware is invaluable. One game may run on 3 consoles, but that's 3 hardware sets as opposed to the literally thousands of combinations of chipsets, firmware revs, peripheral hardware, and interfaces used in PC's. It simply is not possible to test every one. You hit the prominant ones, and hope that the rest work. The OS does perform abstraction, but the complexity of performing that abstraction can introduce problems. Badly designed hardware that doesn't play well with others can neccesitate work arounds that introduce instability and the potential for disaster into the system, even when the abstraction barriers are maintained. Never mind the fact that in recent memory, many of these abstraction barriers were quite permiable to allow developers to tweak performance and the like. Once you have people playing with hardware directly in application code, the opportunity for a gotcha hits the ceiling.
Last but not least, compare not only the price of a PC vs. Console game, but also the complexity. Games for the PC and console are similar in price, which leads to the conclusion that there's no more money for hardware testing PC games than there is for console games- and there we're back to the 4 hardwares vs. 4,000 problem. For the more expensive applications, we're talking about office suites, development suites, networking tools, servers- that sort of thing. The functions that these programs perform, even if they are computationally less intensive than hardcore graphics crunching, are much more complex. The complexity of games is rising, with the ability to add modules and perform in-game scripting to more and more games, but there's still a lot more potential issues to be dealt with in trying to construct other software.
Not that I am defending the fact that every 4th time I boot into windows, the system blue screens without any user intervention, or the fact that Visual C++ locks my machine if I attempt to tab switch between windows while programming OpenGL applications. There needs to be more work done on the QA end of the software world, rather than the out-the-door, patch-it-later school that dominates now. But I don't think the design philosophies between the console and PC world are that wholly different- the results are different because they are dealing with different sets of problems, with differing levels of difficulty.
A second complaint that you could lodge against the available documentation is that a lot of widely available docs simply have not kept up with the progress of more intuitive, simpler, GUI based config tools. Part of the problem is that these tools have exploded in recent years- things are simply developing too fast to keep up with everything. Every time Red Hat comes out with a new release, they usually include some new configuration bells and whistles. But while these may be documented in spotty places on the system or from a distro's website, the docs that most folks look to (HOWTO's and the like) often don't catch up on these things. I look at documentation for how to install or configure something, only to find later or while I'm working that part or most of the config is already done, or that there is a simpler tool for doing the work that I find documented in some obscure spot. I think when the pace of development for new config tools slows a bit, the docs will catch up and it will be easier to teach everyone easier ways of doing things. In the meantime, when someone asks, I teach them the hard way- because that was the only way that was documented when I learned.
The bookstore can keep your experience of thumbing around (which they recognize that customer's love), while still improving their ability to sell. Imagine if they only bought a single copy of each title that they normally carry. No more in the back, no being shipped or stored. A 'browsing copy', that you can look through as much as you want, but if you buy a book, you buy one printed new.
This means that they still get to reduce stock and floorspace (how many '50 of every harry potter book' displays have we seen in the past few years?), while preserving the customer experience. You also don't have to worry about stock being damaged by people browsing- if little Billy tears a page while looking through Whorton Hears a Who, you didn't lose the sale of a 7 dollar book, you've just had minor damage to a display copy that will cause you to take it off the shelves maybe a week earlier than you would otherwise.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
This sounds compatible with, but distinct from, a theory offered up several years ago in an issue of scientific american. The idea was that there was a sieche (could be spelling this incorrectly), or a standing water wave, oscillating inside Loch Ness. These waves produce some very weird wave forms, such as waves in the apperant absence of wind, glassy calm at odd times, et cetera. At times, they 'go exponential', and the waves grow to a size where they begin dragging debris up off the bottom of the lake, such as sunken tree trunks. The combination of weird looking waves, weird water patterns, and dark colored, water-logged debris surfacing can make for a very convincing monster show.
What makes the theory more interesting is the fact that the same sort of wave has been identified in Lake Champlain in Vermont, which is, as all good Vermonters know, the home of Champy, the Lake Champlain monster. Both Champlain and Ness are deep, narrow lakes, of the sort given to producing sieches. Of course, on at least one instance, the monster in Champlain has been a gigantic sturgeon (it was shot and killed by a woman who saw it thrashing in the water behind her house), but a wave of this sort, periodically disturbed by seismic activity, would seem to be likely to produce the off shapes in the water that people have reported seeing.
And as someone may have mentioned, the best argument against there being a Nessie in the sense of a giant monster is the ecology of the lake. Several studies have been done of the lake, and every one of them finds that the food chain in the lake could not support a large predator, much less the breeding stock that would be neccesary to keep the sightings going for hundreds of years.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I'm not so sure of this. At my school, in undergraduate classes of significant complexity, professors have no problem with students usuing publicly available code, as long as there is significant original content. If you are writing a spiffy new server that performs a fairly novel function for a networking class, no one minds if you make use of an existing bit of GPL code to parse and error check URL's on the client.
Yeah, infinite hello world is useless to GPL. But I've written some sizable bits of undergraduate code that I, or someone else, might want to use at some other point. If I did some research and found a solution to a problem that someone else might have to solve on the way to solving another problem, then GPLed code could prove to be of use. Allowing GPLing not only ensures that other people will be able to use it, but that the university cannot restrict your ability to re-use your own work in other areas.
An example: my roomate and a friend wrote a program for a DB class to do image queries by sketch. To do so, they needed something like a paint program. The professor was not interested in their ability to write paint; she wanted to see the scoring method that they had researched which promised to give better matches on image queries. They borrowed a GPL'ed paint program, which could have been written by some other kid at some other college, writing code for a graphic UI class, and adapted the code to work with the system. Two seperate, undergraduate level problems. No reason that one couldn't benefit from the other, however.
If my college, or the college of the lad who wrote the paint program, were more restrictive about GPL'ing and releasing projects done for the college, my roomate and his partner would have never finished. They would have wasted their time re-writing paint, instead of being able to implement their query algorithms. A really nifty project would have been impossible.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Dead on. People saying "learn assembler, it'll teach you how the computer works" need to recall a couple things, such as the fact that there is no single langauge called 'assembler', and that learning any particular assembly language teaches you primarily how a single processor or family of processors works.
The last chip I programmed assembly on was a Dallas variant on an 8051. It had a Harvard architecture (seperate code and data spaces), only accessed external RAM through a 16-bit data pointer register in an otherwise mostly 8-bit system, and had a number of other strange quirks.
Was it useful to learn more about low level workings of computers? Sure. But I question wether a total newbie would be assisted that much by learning such small details of a single architecture. Before you have an adequite high-level picture, there is no framework to integrate this information into. You don't know what is generally true, and what is a quirk of the architecture you're using. Give students the big picture, and then let them work out the details as they gain more knowledge and experience. It sure sounds cool to say your education mirrored the development of programming through the ages, but it isn't clear that this is really a better educational tool.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
The point of the article was not that the computers are bringing in new germs or fungus. The fungus existed in the ICU before, carried in by patients and the like. However, patients leave, and most areas of hospitals are regularly scrubbed down with anti-bacterial and anti-fungal products. But if places aren't cleaning the inside of their cases, there is a nice safe haven for fungus and bacteria, which is almost immediately re-introduced into the environment by the exhaust fans of the computer.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I doubt it. It isn't the airflow from the fan that causes the fungus, it's dust and warm, moist air passing through the computer. While laptops might pick up a little less dust, they probably would still take up enough to be contaminated. On the other hand, without active exhausts, like fans, laptops might be less likely to spread the fungus outside of the computer's case, even if it were growing inside.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
So until there are some better, lighter, and more eye-friendly solutions to reading through computers, paper will still have a place in and out of the workplace.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Well, not exactly. The transfer of a somatic nucleus into an egg cell is the procedure currently used to close whole animals (a la Dolly). If you could come up with an organ cloning procedure that did not involve this, than you would be legal. The issue is placing somatic nuclei from humans into egg cells, which are still totipotent (capable of creating any and all other forms of cellular matter through division). Maybe there could be a way to simply use a single liver cell if you wanted to grow a liver; no one knows yet, because frankly we're not very skilled at cloning yet, much less starting to figure out how to grow individual organs (though we have caused a few flys to grow eyes all over their bodies- that's a long way from transplantable organs, however)
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I'd been given the impression that one of the main reasons that reprocessing was abandoned was that the process could be used in the creation of isotopes suitable for nuclear weapons. As I recall, in the 70's we signed some treaties basically renouncing the process and creating an international ban on the process in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. I'd never heard that saftey was the main reason that it was dropped, but rather international politics. Not sure how recent the info was, though. . . Anybody got a more recent answer on why the US has pulled back from reporssesing, or is it really just the saftey issue?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
You definately have me on the first point. I wasn't aware that that had not been shown to be NP-hard. Thanks for the notice. However, even if it is only in NP, finding a solution for an NP complete problem would still provide a solution to factoring, even if finding a solution to factoring would not provide a solution to all other NP problems. On the second point, I agree, there may be other ways to break RSA. But finding an effecient algorithm for factoring would break RSA. My point was never that RSA was the same as factoring, but that it was "based on" factoring, in the sense that solving the factoring problem would defeat the encryption system. Even if there were a proof that factoring was the only way to beat RSA (which you claim, and I believe as well, that there is not), this would not prove RSA to be secure as long as it remained to prove that the factoring problem could not be solved. So I agree, you're correct in both cases. But I don't think that alters the main point of my argument. I will admit, however, to spreading misconception by having been a victim of it. Thanks!
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
What is meant by "provably secure" here is, I think, not what you are thinking. Rabin is not saying "there is no way for this system to ever be broken.". He is saying that from a mathematical standpoint, it is provable that this cannot be broken. Big difference. Almost all current algorithms are based on a NP-complete math problem- something like factoring, in the case of RSA. This is all well and good as long as P != NP. However, there is no proof that this is true. Therefore, no system based on this premise can be mathematically shown to be secure, because someone discovering a polynomial time algorithm for any NP complete problem breaks the system. Rabin's algorithm is provably secure from a mathematical standpoint, given certain assumptions, but without the assumption that P != NP. So from this respect, there is such thing as a provable true cipher. If you have a nice proof that the set p != the set NP, a number of other ones become provably true. As for the distribution of the one time pad, the question is answered in the article. The one time pad is the random number stream, which is available to anyone that wants to listen to it. But, you have to know what stream to listen to, and which numbers to pick out, a communication that can easily be made using existing cryptography. It relies on the fact that the random numbers are being generated too quickly to be stored on a computer, due to limits in memory.
The thing to remember is that Rabin is an academic, and not a "security guru". What is "unbreakable" to him is not a system that forces idiots to not make their passphrase "password". It refers to the mathematical consistancy of the system. Take away the side-attacks and the idiots with their mother's maiden name as a password, and the system is unbreakable. Take those away from any other existing cryptographic system, and the system is still not proven to be secure. So it's not snake oil, not only because he isn't selling anything, but also because it appears that his claims are, in the regime in which they are made, true. This is an article about an academic work, not a press release for "security blackbox 4000".
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Very true. Just about every nation in the region had real damage done to it by imperialism. There would not have been a Khmer Rouge, or a Pol Pot, without the efforts of imperialists and the fallout from the Vietnam War. But Cambodia faired in many ways worse than most. Vietnam had as many or more problems with foreign entanglements, but now has an economy and social order that is much better recovered. Pol Pot systematically murdered an entire generation of the educated and intelligent people of Cambodia. The actions of the West certainly left the nation ripe for his plunder, but I doubt anyone could have imagined the level of carnage that took place under the Khmer Rouge. The Communists literally emptied the cities of Campbodia, and systematically killed almost every member of the educated classes, from college professors and business people to Buddhist monks and nuns. It's one reason why educational programs like this are so important in Cambodia; these people are effectively missing an entire generation of educated leaders, not to mention that areas of the country have been out of contact with the rest of the world up until the past 5-10 years. The monk Mahagoshananda began leading peace marches in Vietnam in the past years, and in many case his procession of monks and peace advocates were the first contact that some villages had had with the rest of the country since the start of the reign of the Khmer Rouge. New species of large mammels (some the size of cattle) have gone undiscovered in Cambodia up until the past 3 years because parts of the country were effectively cordoned off by left over Khmer fighters, land mines, and destroyed infrastructure. So while imperialist interferance has played a big role in bringing Cambodia to its present state, I would still say that the bulk of the blame for Cambodia's rough economic and educational fortunes lies squarely with the Communist government of the Khmer Rouge.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"