An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a Stanford news release: "Politics aside, most energy experts agree that cheap, clean, renewable wind energy holds great potential to help the world satisfy energy needs while reducing harmful greenhouse gases. Wind farms placed offshore could play a large role in meeting such challenges, and yet no offshore wind farms exist today in the United States. In a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of engineers at Stanford has harnessed a sophisticated weather model to recommend optimal placement of four interconnected wind farms off the coast of the Eastern United States, a region that accounts for 34 percent of the nation’s electrical demand and 35 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. ... Among its findings, the Stanford model recommended a farm in Nantucket Sound, precisely where the controversial Cape Wind farm has been proposed. The Cape Wind site is contentious because, opponents say, the tall turbines would diminish Nantucket’s considerable visual appeal. By that same token, the meteorological model puts two sites on Georges Bank, a shallows located a hundred miles offshore, far from view in an area once better known for its prodigious quantities of cod. The fourth site is off central Long Island."

brothke writes "It has been a decade since Oracle started their unbreakable campaign touting the security robustness of their products. Aside from the fact that unbreakable only refers to the enterprise kernel; Oracle still can have significant security flaws. Even though Java supports very strong security controls including JAAS (Java Authentication and Authorization Services), it still requires a significant effort to code Java securely. With that The CERT Oracle Secure Coding Standard for Javais an invaluable guide that provides the reader with the strong coding guidelines and practices in order to reduce coding vulnerabilities that can lead to Java and Oracle exploits." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.

Last week, you asked questions (many rather pointed!) of Amir Taaki, co-founder of Bitcoin Consultancy, which develops Bitcoin related services, exchanges and Bitcoin itself. (They also own Britcoin.co.uk.) Says Taaki: "When creating video games I spent much time imagining tools to make artists lives easier, and how we could keep funding developers to write free software. One contribution of mine to the community was a site where developers could get funded for developing features and I'd love nothing more than to pay people to write free software." With regard to Bitcoin, similarly, "We need fulltime developers thinking about the problems and solutions needed to keep this system running. We aim to get all the creative thinkers from the community and provide a mechanism for enabling their work." Below find his answers to the questions readers raised.

Michael J. Ross writes"Experienced Web designers and developers will readily admit that the most challenging aspect of their professions is not the technical work itself, nor learning the tools of the trade, but rather dealing with clients. Within that area, the most frustrating type of work — aside from the ever-joyless chore of collecting on invoices — is getting (non-technical) clients to understand the possibilities and limitations of Web technologies, design decisions, and all the other factors that can make or break a website project, as well as the site itself. Yet this process can be just as unhappy, and far more confusing, to prospective site owners, who typically are quite knowledgeable of their own fields, but have little to no understanding of how best to ensure the success of any website project they sponsor. Aiming to bridge this gap, is the appropriately-titled Website Owner's Manual." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Michael J. Ross writes "Slow Web page loading can discourage visitors to a site more than any other problem, regardless of how attractive or feature-rich the given site might be. Consequently, many Web developers hope to achieve faster response times using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), since only portion(s) of an AJAX page need to be reloaded. But for many rich Internet applications (RIAs), such potential performance gains can be lost as a result of non-optimized JavaScript, graphics, and CSS files. Steve Souders — a Web performance expert previously at Yahoo and now with Google — addresses these topics in his second book, Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his idea for mass adoption of anti-virus software: "If the US government did more to encourage people to keep their computers secure — by buying TV ads to publicize free private-sector anti-virus programs, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software — we'd all be better off, on average. That's not just idealistic nanny-statism, but something you can argue mathematically, to the point where even some libertarians would agree." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

ruphus13 writes "Playing DVDs on Linux that required proprietary codecs has been a source of much pain. Ubuntu (or anyone else, for that matter) is not legally allowed to redistribute these codecs. So, users were left with sub-optimal choices. Convert the multimedia to an open format, acquire new media, or use a codec 'found' on the web, which may be illegal. In its continued effort to have a seamless and slick user experience, Canonical made the hard choice to offer the sale and support for proprietary codecs that users had to actually purchase for Ubuntu. This is not a fight Canonical can fight alone, and they are sure to get some grief for the decision."

segphault writes "Ars Technica reports that Mirus has teamed up with Linspire and plan to ship budget desktop PCs with Linspire preinstalled. From the article: 'Designed specifically for optimal Linux compatibility, the Mirus Koobox line computers feature AMD processors and Linspire preinstallation. The Koobox systems, which start at US$299, will come with a variety of open source applications, including Firefox and OpenOffice. [...] At this point it is hard to assess the potential of the Koobox systems. If it succeeds, the product could help legitimize desktop Linux and bring it further into the mainstream. Regardless of how many get sold, the availability of yet another budget Linux PC illuminates the growing popularity of the Linux platform, and contributes to the perception that Linux is applicable to desktop computing. With Dell selling low-cost computers sans OS, and Apple selling the popular Mac Mini at a price that doesn't look as much like typical Apple extortion, Mirus is going to have to fight an uphill battle to pick up a worthwhile chunk of the desktop PC market.'"

Jim Holmes writes "I'm new to the .NET environment and have been looking for solid books in the same class as McConnell's Code Complete, 2nd ed., or Kernhigan and Pike's The Practice of Programming. Those books, to me, are must-haves on any serious developer's bookshelf, but while they're terrific books, they're general in nature. Bill Wagner's book Effective C# is a great companion to those books because it's specific to C# and hits hard the implementation details of working in that language. (Disclaimers: 1) I got this book for free from Addison-Wesley as a regular giveaway for our .NET Developers Group. 2) I attempted to get SRT Solutions, the author's consulting company, involved in a software development project several years ago. The project tanked due to customer constraints and other business issues not related in any way to Wagner or his company. End Disclaimers.)" Read on for the rest of Holmes's review.

book_reader (Gary Cornell) writes "Wow, what an intriguing title! When I was getting my Ph.D in math, the words 'sex' and 'mathematics' were not juxtaposed all that often, and I suspect we would have been more likely to expect a book titled 'Mathematics and the (lack of) Sex.' But, hey, times change and the author, who is not only a mathematician but also someone who was voted one of Australia's 50 most beautiful people in their equivalent of People magazine -- and remember this is the land of Nicole Kidman -- has a point. As she says, echoing G.H. Hardy's famous comment in 'A Mathematician's Apology': 'Mathematics is the study of patterns: their discovery, their interconnections and their implications.' And what is sexual behavior but the most intriguing pattern of all?" Read on for the rest of Cornell's review.

donour (Donour Sizemore) writes "I recently bought a high-performance automobile that has a reputation for its tuning potential. Before making the purchase, I joined several online forums for enthusiasts in order to get a good reading on how happy people are with the particular model. I was amazed at the vibrant communities built around websites such as evolutionm.net and nasioc.com. A wealth of information is available, but the data is surrounded by noise. For every knowledgeable enthusiast, there are many more misinformed or incorrect speculators whose opinions usually spring from personal preference or a need to hear themselves talk. Enter David Vespremi's Car Hacks & Mods for Dummies." Read on for the rest of Sizemore's review.

A little while ago you asked Forth (and now colorForth) originator Chuck Moore about his languages, the multi-core chips he's been designing, and the future of computer languages -- now he's gotten back with answers well worth reading, from how to allocate computing resources on chips and in programs, to what sort of (color) vision it takes to program effectively. Thanks, Chuck!

Reader bughunter contributed the review below of K.W. Jeter's Noir, which sounds like a good book to not read aloud to your small children, but otherwise intriguing: Dark, twisty speculation in the same vein as William Gibson and other pioneers.

Thanks to Mike Bouma who put together a paper with the help from a number of the Phoenix project members which gives more information regarding what's going on with QNX and why it matters.

GSearle writes: "A new plasma propulsion technology could cut the time it takes to get to Mars in half, and open up the rest of the solar system to more aggresive exploration. A short version of the news release appears on the NASA site. (Read More for the full release)".

Professor Pollack put a lot of time and thought into answering your questions, and it shows. What follows is a "deeper than we expected" series of comments about Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property distribution from one of the acknowledged leaders in both fields.

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Monday we had over 550 assorted questions and comments for and about Bjarne Stroustrup. Excellent moderation (Thanks, Monday Moderators!) helped cull this mass down to 10 extremely high-quality questions Bjarne has kindly answered in amazing depth, for which he deserves a loud round of applause. Update: 02/28 02:12 by R : Bjarne later took the time to dig through all the comments and reply to some of them. The additional material is appended to the end of the original Q&A session.

The American Academy of Pediatrics is so worried about technology, culture and kids that it wants to ban TV for small children, restrict access for all kids and start recording media histories of all the young. Even pedes are muddling technology, truth and medicine against a horrifying backdrop of bullets flying all over the country.

jpatters tells us that Micro Processor Report is reporting (via MacInTouch) that a russian company (Elbrus International) claims to have a CPU design that achieves 135 SPECint95 and 350 SPECfp95. This compairs to Merced's scores of 45 and 70 respectively. It is claimed to run in a 0.18 micron process at 1.2Ghz consuming only 35 watts and 126 square millimeters of silicon. It includes a 256 Kbyte of on-chip L2 cache. It should also be both x86 and IA-64 compatible. Elbrus 2000 seems to exist (look at what Shevtsov is working on now), and seems to have had some history. Here is Shevtsov's FPU patent. S : I've tried to verify this story, but can't find the copy of MPR -- anybody else have it? Anyone care to speculate how it was done? Assynchronous logic? 256Kb L2 seems rather low though unless they're using a special point-to-point bus.