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The InfoWorld article describes a secure distributed storage system, not just plain old messaging connectivity. There aren't too many such beasts around; usually it's more of a "distributed, secure, usable - pick two" kind of thing. Some of the projects that approach the goal of combining all three actually seem to sharing the IRIS award - i.e. OceanStore at Berkeley and various projects at NYU. I don't know off the top of the head how ICSI and Rice fit in, but I'm about to go check their sites because I'll bet it's interesting.

Three words (and a couple links):

Kite Aerial Photography -- good site, but down right now, and another site

Alternatively, there is the idea of making that claim on your homeowner's insurance after your house has burnt completely to the ground and showing up with 10 megapixel photos (which you wisely stored off-site, perhaps on CD-R) of all rooms in your house showing model numbers of electronic components, etc. This will really put a damper on the insurance agent's desire to give you only $500 for your high-end audiophile stereo system, $1500 for your high-end PC, etc.

Click Working Calender for Powerpoint slides. See also

Click Working Calender for Powerpoint slides. See also

Some Caltech CS courses
are already on-line including CS294,
by Professor DeHon, formerly of MIT & Berkeley.

Another model is SEDA ("Staged Event-Driven Architecture"). This was mainly examined by the guy who wrote what became Java's new java.nio package.

Here's a link: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/proj/sandstorm/

If I remember correctly, SEDA uses a few thread pools to handle clients at different stages of their work.

From his website:
"We have built a number of applications to demonstrate the SEDA framework. Haboob is a a high-performance Web server including support for both static and dynamic pages that outperforms both Apache and Flash (which are implemented in C) on a SPECWeb99-like benchmark. Other applications include a Gnutella packet router and Arashi, a Web-based email service similar to Yahoo! Mail."

Friends and I worked at the MIT Logo lab in 1980, where we did the first mass-market Logo, for the TI 99/4 (though I didn't contribute to it), and Logo for the Apple II (where I did). I then went on to Terrapin, which had originally been started by Danny Hillis and others to sell turtles, and we got Terrapin to sell Logo. I enhanced the Apple II version, and did the Commodore 64 version and we did a Mac version (plus some other ones like C128, C264, and C16 where the boxes never shipped, and some that only shipped a little, like Music Logo). I did Logo translations (with others), in Japanese, German, Italian, and French.

When Mitch Resnick was at MIT LCS and started the *Logo project as a grad student, I was a bit jealous as I'd been working on the same thing in my spare time, but I didn't have the resolve he did (thesis). It's funny, because the idea for *Logo came from StarLisp, of course, which was came from Thinking Machines, which was also started by Danny. The *Lisp stuff was fun, and I've often wished that Mitch would bring out StarLogo so I could play with it again.

I think my favorite Logo that I didn't write was the "1986" version mentioned by another poster -- it ran on a dual-processor PDP-11 / bit-slice machine with a vector graphics display. The drawing was done by adding to a "display list" which the vector processor displayed. This feature allowed Hal Abelson and Andy diSessa to develop some interesting observations about group theory (see their book "Turtle Geometry" ("Turtle Geometry: The computer as a medium for exploring mathematics" by Abelson & DiSessa, 1981, MIT Press, Cambridge MA).

The interesting thing about that version of Logo was that in addition to forward and right, it had grow and spin, which introduced time-varying elements into the display list. grow :n made a line that grew at a speed on n, and spin :n made an angle that turned at a speed of n. With fd and rt, the following draws a star that grows asymetrically. With grow and spin it explodes! Lots of fun taking any random old chestnut Logo program and taking it up a level.

to wow :n
if :n > 200 then stop ; yes, no brackets in those days
grow :n
spin 144
wow :n+5
end

My favorite non-Logo that I did write was at MIT AI and LCS and later at UC Berkeley, called Boxer, which presently runs on the Mac, but might be out on PCs sometime. It takes direct manipulation interfaces to the extreme -- the entire workspace is shown as the screen, and every data item and every procedure is represented as a box, a square container on the screen, and all are inside other boxes. To make a menu, you make a box with a keystroke, and put the names of the commands you want in the box. To execute the menu, you point and click. Pretty simple. There's all sorts of other features, like hyperlinked boxes, boxes that are portals to other resources (web sites, other people's computers, etc.). Look for it someday.

Despite all our fond memories, the turtle graphics portion of Logo isn't all there is to it, and in fact is an optional (although obviously very common) element. Logo (which means word in Greek) was originally developed to manipulate words and sentences. In fact, the core Logo language, of which we were only exposed to a little, is really a cute little Lisp-like language.

For a taste of a more full Logo (which also includes the turtle graphics), check out UCBLogo, a widely ported and robust implementation of Logo.

There are plenty of options to run and manage setiathome. First is to realize that the screen saver version is just eye candy to hook those that need visual stimulation. If you run the command line version, it will run at least twice as fast, use a lot fewer resources, and stay out of your way. It actually runs at idle priority and effectively replaces that idle loop that executes when there is nothing else to execute. You can get the Windows client
here. (Don't let the 'unix' in the URL fake you out. They put all the non-graphical clients on that page.)

This tip is brought to you by the crunchers at Ars Technica Team Lamb Chop.

You should also look at ucblogo and Brian Harvey's 3 books. He has a couple chapters on the above website (including a simple BASIC interpreter written in LOGO and even a pascal compiler in logo!).

I prefer logo to lisp or scheme for some reason. It's a functional language, but you can write procedural code easier than scheme, if you want to. When I get some spare time, I'd like to write a logo plugin for gimp. You can write some 10-line routines to draw amazing graphics.

I personally don't think that either a purely visual approach is necessarily better. Anyone looking into this should probably build it from the ground up by looking closely at how actual programmers write code, and treat it as a usability problem. Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct. This would mean autogeneration of text (auto-completion of variables and syntax), and restrictions to prevent the developer from entering impossible code.

I think the mistake people have made is often to start out with unfounded assumptions about how it should be done - such as assuming that a "drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines" approach is the right direction (I don't think it is - or we would all be programming with Javabeans right now).

All-electric cars are a boondoggle since they only serve to translocate the energy problem, and they are not as efficient as hybrids. In fact, all-electrics do worse than nothing: the additional generating capacity needed to serve them as a practical matter has to come from fossil fuel (and some of that the dirtiest kind: coal.) It is a very good thing this path is being shelved.

In contrast, fuel cell technology is not only more efficent than batteries, internal combustion or hybrid, but it offers more flexibility in source feedstock. Yes, you can use electricity to make H2 (at low efficiency) but that's not the most practical or promising path.

First of all, as it is today most hydrogen isn't even made using electricity. The most common process uses a high-temperature steam-and-catalyst reforming process to crack methane or other hydrocarbons into hydrogen and (unfortunately) carbon dioxide. The energy for the process comes from burning the carbon monoxide that is an intermediate reaction product (basically redirecting some of the methane's potential energy) with a subsequent reduction in yield. More recently, there is discussion of using this process on other longer-chain biofuels, such as sink-trap grease (PDF link - sorry.)

Even more promising is a new process that uses algae that requires neither fossil fuels nor generates CO2 emissions. As a photosynthetic process, it could actually tend to remove CO2 from the air instead of produce it.

Moving to hydrogen-based distribution is good if you accept global warming as fact. Moving to renewable resources is even better, at least for the reason that as it decentralizes control of energy resources and the economic power that comes with it. These are goals worth striving for, even if they seem far-fetched now. Just the fact that there is a serious effort and visible progress is of great strategic importance.

- dvd_tude

BTW, does anybody know where or in what file on your computer they store the SETI@home password? It MAY still be on my parents old computer.. somewhere amongst all the files... I WOULD like to recover it if possible.

I had sinced switched that computer to prime95 which runs all the time on the computer with little to no significant impact on the system; however, they barely use that computer anymore anyways, so now it's not participating in any project.

I currently run a few other projects on my own system. Basically, the SETI @ home project gets boring... there are other projects, as has been said that either 1) will impact scientific knowledge 2) have a definite end, or points of production when you feel like you actually are accomplishing something. SETI@Home proved it's point.. that millions of people are interested in the project, and also just willing to use their unused processor time to run a distributed computing project. Did SETI@Home ever get beyond their "this is an experiment and even though we have far outpaced our capacity, we won't open it up for other possibilities"? According to their own website, they are going to be winding down the SETI @ Home project and starting new ones over the next year.

IMHO, it uses up too much processor time, and slows down computers, whereas other projects I can run on even slow/old computers and not get it slowing down the system. Also, that 'pretty screensaver' gets boring, too, and technically it doesn't "save the screen" anymore because it repetitively displays the same images over and over again in the same place, not like most of us have to worry about monitor-burn-in anymore, BUT...

If I decide to start doing something actively in the field of space/astronomy (In addition to Seti@home) I will find an asteroid and name it "SLASHDOT" instead of something like J002E2 (Pronounced how?). Then everyone can make silly posts about the REAL slashdot effect that will end the world.

Broody is reporting that he won't be purchasing next year's Intel processors which include hardware support for "Palladum" nor installing M$ software supporting M$'s DRM system. Sadly since AMD seems to have sold out as well it seems likely 2003 will be year of the PPC for him baring sudden SPARC price drops.

On a more serious note, I doubt this will last into next year. It will be probably be one of those flash in the pan ideas that you can disable in the BIOS like PSN once the grumbling starts and the masses bust out the tinfoil hats. Of course, if they push it to track terrorists, all bets are off.

It's nice to know there are others out there who know state machines are the One True Way

Oh, but they're not. Yes, I know you were joking, but it's also a serious matter and a mistake many people make. I love state machines, I'm notorious among my past and present coworkers for using them, but they're not the only way to break out of the naive multithreaded model. In fact, naive state-machine implementations are often even worse than naive multithreaded implementations since they're all too often utterly incapable of using more than one CPU.

The best-known alternative to the two representatives of this false programming-paradigm dichotomy is probably Matt Welsh's SEDA. I've also written extensively on the subject: here's an archive of past articles and my server-design guide that sums it all up. The basic idea, which goes back much further than either my work or Matt's, is to break processing into stages. Interactions between stages are asynchronous event- or message-based, while what occurs within a stage can be either state-oriented or thread-oriented according to programmer preference, availability of non-blocking I/O interfaces, etc. The programmer thus has a great deal of control over how a task-appropriate balance between the relative advantages and drawbacks of the two "standard" models is achieved.

Ideally you have exactly as many threads as CPUs

An excellent point. In fact, this is the area where Matt's thinking and mine diverge, and thus deserves special attention. SEDA tends a little toward the bounded-thread-pool model of having more threads than processors (though not infinite) and I believe that's a mistake. My own model more sharply limits the number of threads that are used. Though there might transiently be more active threads than processors under certain conditions, this is not a persistent condition; it's simply more costly to eliminate those rare transient cases than to allow them. Another difference is that SEDA attempts to reduce context switches and stage transitions by "batching" (passing multiple requests through a stage in a single pass) whereas I tend more towards "run until completion" (passing a single request through multiple stages). While the two approaches are probably equivalent in most ways, I believe the latter has a cache-warmth advantage; there's usually more data shared between the processing of a single request through multiple stages than between multiple requests in one stage.

I guess we're getting a little off-topic, though. Maybe we should find an alternate venue to discuss this if people are interested.

Labor strikes used to be broken up with armed troops

This is true, but misleading. This makes it sound like the strikers were being forced at gunpoint to return to work. They were not. The troops were used to protect workers (or "scabs") who were hired to replace the striking worker. It was common practice in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries for striking workers to physically assault the scabs, or even to seize the factory by force and refuse to allow anyone else in.

Sources:
http://www.detroit300.org/detroit300curriculum/dl_ pdf/D/D6.pdf
http://www.labornet.org/viewpoints/meister/sitdown .html
http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/casey.h tml
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/WarOfT heClasses/scab.html

The 2nd law does define the maximum efficiency of a heat engine.

Just an interesting thought about the legacy of broadcast television...

Kinda stupid to reply, but do you think someone actively went around correcting the spellings of words?

I am glad that you asked. Benjamin Franklin "actively went around correcting the spellings of words." As you can see from this page, Benjamin Franklin was a proponent, early on, of reforming spelling in the English language. His work inspired Noah Webster, leading to many of the spelling reforms we enjoy today.

Depends on what you mean by AI. According to AIMA there are at least four schools of thought within the AI research fields (act rational, think rational, act humanwise, think humanwise).

The system described within the cited article attempts to act humanly, the underlying mechanics are of no concern, it is the actual result that matters. To some researchers this is AI, to others it is simply a clever mechanism. Most AI research is trying to focus on making computers "act rationally" nowadays.

1. Current debate exists over the low quality of all currently issuing patents, not just software patents A better patent system

2. Theoretically speaking, the patent system was set up in this country in order to induce the expenditure of resources in order to achieve the innovation that would then allow our country's economy to evolve into one that could compete on a global basis.

This fostering of innovation applies to software innovation as well.

Difficult innovations that could be solved via software that would not attempted without the lure of patent protection DO EXIST.

The patent system is appropriate in order to foster innovation in these areas.

3. The problem lies in devising a system in which the software innovations as described in #2 above are rewarded patent protection and the majority of trivial software innovations are not. One interesting proposal suggests a reduction in the protection afforded most software patents

This is the old Susan Reed (a.k.a. The Invisible Woman) ploy, though she pulled her shit off a bit differently. Lacking psychic abilities derived from cosmic rays or that Hyperspace thingy, this may be the joint for some people... ahem.

...is an amusing century-old story about competitive brothers who devise two different methods of achieving invisibility. It's online here.

In his fictional story, both methods have problems. The problems are more than fictional, since one of the methods relies on the nonsense supposition that since black is the absence of light, the only reason you can see something that's black is that the black isn't PERFECTLY black, and that if you could achieve perfect blackness you could achieve invisibility.

However, the method described in the parent article here is equally flawed, since it would work only for an observer placed in a specific view location. One wonders how the equipment is supposed to locate the observer; if there are several observers, how does it decide which of them should be prevented from seeing the object?

The method bears a close resemblance to Hollywood special effects processes (glass shots, matte shots, etc.) Special effects processes are notorious for having visible edge effects if not done carefully, and I'm sure this would be true of the proposed method as well.

In "The Shadow and the Flash," one invisibility cloak could be detected by a sensation of darkness and depression whenever the concealed individual was nearby; the other suffered from occasional rainbow flashes due to mismatches in the index of refraction. I'm sure that the proposed method would have similar problems.

I'm glad someone mentioned G&T, and not just because my PhD supervisor is one of the managing editors, and my MSc supervisor is the other one :)

If I remember correctly, the whole thing was sparked off by Rob Kirby's article on the pricing of research journals. There's an interesting article by Joan Birman in the Notices of the AMS (vol 4, no. 7, Aug 2000, pp770-774) which discusses the various issues, and includes detailed discussion of the day-to-day overheads of running a free, properly peer-refereed research journal. It's available from her web page, in PostScript form.

G&T (and its sister journal Algebraic and Geometric Topology, and the related Monograph series) isn't some low-quality vanity-press thing - it's a real, proper, peer-refereed journal with high standards. At a quick glance, I recognise the names of three Fields medallists on the editorial board, as well as some other very eminent names in the field. And yet it's being run with virtually no overheads by two university lecturers (one of whom is semi-retired) in addition to their normal departmental duties (lecturing, administration, supervising research students).

I understand that a lot of the procedure is automated, with a mixture of TeX and Perl, with copies of all articles being submitted to the arXIv.

Ah yes, I'd almost forgotten about the arXiv. A central repository for research preprints in mathematics, physics, and computer science. It's an unrefereed archive for research announcements, preliminary reports, and preprints. Papers submitted to refereed journals often take up to a couple of years to actually appear in print, so the idea is that you issue a preliminary version of your paper to faster communicate your ideas to anyone else who might be interested.

This stuff is great - it's all about collaborative research and the free and efficient sharing of ideas, and it gives me a great sense of hope for the future.

-- nicholas

How about this?

There are a number of documents discussing the pros and cons of the Big Bang, although I don't know if there are any serious alternative theories.

I think the real answer to your question is that Evolution, as has been correctly pointed out by both proponents and opponents, undermines the idea that the universe was created for the sake of man. In that regard, it's extremely contentious, and I believe this is the only reason why Evolution is considered "controversial" by anyone. Certainly, there's no doubt in scientific circles of the truth of the theory. The fundamentalists are edgy and on the warpath because the advance of empirical science has significantly undermined their authority. I think evolution is an important symbolic battle for them. Although it is a little disingenuous that they are really only agitating for their own version of the creation myth. I mean, what about the Hindus, or the Native Americans?

However, if you really are curious, the history of the tectonic plate theory is pretty fascinating. It was considered as kooky as the search for E.T. for a while.

but it won't actually be useful. At all

Which lawyer should I hire?

Perhaps this one?Macarthur Fellow.

Nope she would probably be tipped off that a discussion on the HIPAA-MS matter exists on /. and preview it in order to gain an initial broad understanding of the specific technological issues at hand.

RMS makes a better counter-argument than I could make.

Also see the last quote on this page.

Patents cover ideas, whereas copyright covers (written) "works".

-Peter

For those who don't already know what a "pie menu" is, here is a nice animation that may be helpful.

Well... some of us are SETI@Home fans ;) .

-silent

It reminds me of the consequences of the book "The Jungle," which led to the mandatory listing of all ingredients of a food on the label.

Actually, 'sabre-toothed tiger' is a bit of a misnomer. You are referring to the Smilodon, which is not closely related to tigers at all.

Sabre teeth were actually a relatively common evolutionary phenomenon during the Cenozoic period, and not only in cats.

Too much to write about. Go read :)

Talisman

Trillian, gaim, and others use oscar, I'm certain of that. AOL hasn't touched TOC since 1996, they did their bit as required by the FCC and have since moved on. If you've looked at the specification it's blindingly obvious that trillian, gaim, and the ohters couldn't do half the things it does if it used TOC. Tik is one of a very small number of AIM clients that uses the TOC protocol.

Because oscar is a closed protocol, gaim, trillian, and any other unofficial AIM clients that use it have only information from reverse engineering to work with. The diffrences between TOC and oscar are covered well enough in gaim protocol page.

One of two things probaly happened:
1) AOL extended the oscar protocol to handle the new charachters
2) The other clients can't handle the @ and . in screen names

It has never crashed.

DeanT

If I remember correctly, amino-acid chains cannot exist in the current atmosphere (I don't know that for sure). If that is the case, then at some point along the way the atmosphere changed, and at this moment life would have had to change with it. The chances of this happening are extroirdinary

Hardly: life itself did the change. The atmosphere and life on earth co-evolved.

Very well, let us assume that the gliding pre-bat was equipped to survive. Why isn't it still around?

It was outcompeted by "better" mammals (their children), better meaning that they were better adapted to the changing enviroment.

Why isn't there any fossil record of it?

Not everything fossilizes: the fossil record is not perfect. (And I'm making an assumption just because I haven't heard of this particular transitional form.) Perhaps you'd be willing to settle for the whale linage instead, where we have a set of really nice intermediates ranging from legged land dwellers to current whales? (Although the exact relationship between them is still a subject of debate.) Or the transition from dinosaurs to birds?

If they were a viable species why didn't they continue to live?

Again, outcompeted. You seem to be under the impression that once a species forms it never changes again and is perfectly optimal. This isn't the case: even the best optimized species may not survive if the environmental niche it occupies changes enough: it may either go extinct or evolve into something better suited for its new environment.

And if they didn't continue to live, how did they live for long enough to mutate into something else?

They did: that's what bats are.

This is without a doubt of the more impressive HCI developments I have seen in the last decade, and steady progress is being made.
I note that progress is also beging made in the reverse process (generating an image by monitoring neurons firing in the visual cortex). Check out this paper:-

Visual Decoding

Which details images generated directly from a cats brain.

One point to keep in mind is that sadly this technology can only help people whom had sight at birth, but lost it after early childhood. If the patient has been blind from birth, the parts of their brain that would be normally used for vision have not developed and have been "reassigned" to other sensory tasks. (Which is why blind people tend on average to have more actue senses of hearing, smell, touch and taste - there are more neurons available to process them!) If this device was deployed on such a person, it is doubful that they could make much sense of what they could "see".

This essay from the cypherpunks archive discusses a bit more the theme of technology as political catalyst.

This essay from the cypherpunks archive discusses a bit more the theme of technology as political catalyst.

I have some knowledge of this subject. You've severely overestimated the amount of energy you need to receive in order to transmit a bit. If you encode the info by time between bits, you really only need to receive on average 20 photons or so over the course of a nanosecond to ensure good probability of detecting a bit with a triple coincidence detector like this one. Time between bits could be microseconds or hours, depending on the rate you really want. Twenty photons at 500 nm wavelength turns out to be 8E-18 Joules.

You've also messed up on your laser divergence calculation. A 1 mm diameter beam at 500 nm wavelenth has a diffraction limited divergence of 5E-4 (1.7 arcminute). You'd really want to use a telescope to transmit a large diameter collimated beam. With adaptive optics, the 10-meter Keck telescope could transmit a 40 milliarcsecond beam (divergence 2E-7). The diameter of the beam at 2 light-years would be 3.7 million km. Flux density per Joule of tranmitted power would be 9.4E-20 Joule/m^2. Keck has an area of 75 m^2, so it would receive 7E-18 Joules for each Joule transmitted. Therefore, the energy required per pulse is of order 1 Joule in order to transmit a pulse 2 light years. A small Nd:YAG pulse laser is 10 Joules and would be detectable 6 ly away. The largest ever built is 100 kJoules and could be detected 600 ly away.

You are correct that there aren't any mirrors a light year away, let alone and a couple million kilometers in diameter. You are incorrect in stating that it would be energy prohibitive to send data via laser to interstellar distances with current technology.

1. They meant the Icon programming language, see here

2. There are such things as graphical/icon programming languages. (After all, isn't that what a flowchart is?) The may make the most sense in simulations, where each box can be a type of transform, and you can connect them together in (presumably) interesting ways. Here's one link that might be interesting. Or not.

An interesting coincidence, no doubt, but nothing more than that.

>Thus, they probably have another technique which cleans up the film grain by comparing it to subsequent and/or prior frames.

Yes, and you can try it yourself. Its VERY much worth the effort, even if it takes a lot longer to postprocess your video.

The more random the noise, the better. Its excellent for TV shows on VHS or from broadcast TV (or so I've found).

Oh, and if you like to make things disappear without noticing it (great for those HUGE ads in the corner of a TV show) try this, or this.

[Somebody with some experience please port these to Linux! You would be so well thanked! This would be really nice too! No, I can't do it myself, I'm really not that good.]

The precedents set so far do not seem to clearly indicate what would happen if an offshore webcaster began filling the void left by the stations that were effectively shut down by the recent CARP ruling.

However, the RIAA could probably argue for jurisdiction in some American court if said webcaster did not go through a few steps to ensure that it's audience was not American. Indeed, the courts will probably weigh heavily on the interpretaton of the webcaster's intent, target audience, and the effect of their service (If, at the end of the day, it's still easy for most Americans to receive service from said webcaster without licence fees being paid to the RIAA, said webcaster would probably be in for a rough ride).

The only way a foreign webcaster could fight this would probably be to execute an origin check, say with a combination of IP address identification/localization, a clickwrap agreement, and even probably an offline check such as a credit card number (for the billing address)

Net result? American audiences would still be left without access to these offshore webcasters. Such measures need not be 100% effective though, as it seems that the courts will accept that this is near impossible. Nevertheless, it would probably have to be shown that a concerted effort was made to block 90-95% of the American audience.

What if the webcaster ignores this and proceeds? The US courts, due to the lack of a defending opinion from the webcaster, would probably rule that jurisdiction applies. The RIAA would get a monetary judgement, probably for estimated licensing fees outstanding + legal costs, and try to have it recognized by the webcaster's local courts. The local courts would once again have to decide if jurisdiction applies. Even if they decide in favour of the webcaster, the webcaster's executive, and any funds/financing they have would have to avoid US control for the remainder of their lives. Not an enviable position.

So, I don't recommend trying to circumvent by attempting to operate outside the USA, IF a webcaster indends to target a US audience. My advice would be to stick to the basics, and support this bill. Call your congresperson, etc.

Like previous posts, I agree that as students in the field of CS, we are lucky that most of our 'greats', 'leaders' are still alive - maybe because CS is relatively new, etc, for a discipline

A professor that teaches eecs20 predicted that in the future (this was in a paper): Link to Paper Software would be taught akin to Literature, where students would be studying the 'greats' (he cites Kernighan, Knuth, Linus Torvalds) and there would be things such as 'slang' etc, in the syntax, SO why do you think that we really have scarce knowledge of the greats now?

Well, just some random thoughts.

How has 'building|making' been/is confused/missused/associated with 'destroying|demolishing' things?

Case :

I think before publishing material publicly, one should do some research and confirm sources/results with other relevant people on that subject.
(eg. confirm "hack[er|ing]/crack[er|ing]" with (a) guru[s] in computers, like ESR).

This goes aswell to the slashdot editors for their (subject)postings; and all other form of publishing (you know who you are).

Reference :
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/hacker.htm l
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/hacker-eth ic.html
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/cracker.ht ml
http://www.tuxedo.org/jargon/html/entry/cracking.h tml
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=hacker
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=dark-side %20hacker
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=cracker
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html
http://home.planet.nl/~faase009/Ha_hacker.html
http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0 ,,sid14_gci212220,00.html
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0 ,,sid14_gci211852,00.html
....and many more are out there, on the World Wide Web.

robots.net frequently has articles on Micro Air Vehicles and Micromechanical Flying Insect robots. The Berkley MFI Project Overview is another good place to get more info.

The industry's most common data-scrambling technique designed to keep out eavesdroppers, called the wireless encryption protocol, can be broken -- usually in less than five minutes -- with software available on the Internet.


WEP actually stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy. It was intended as a means of ensuring that wireless users could have the same level of privacy as users using a wired network-- not as an secure communications protocol. (Of course, WEP does not even provide that level of "privacy").

Aren't there better privacy/security options available for Wireless devices?

Degrees are handy if you want to work for others, as it makes it easier for them to believe you when you say "Im worth hiring". But makes not one ounce of difference when you want to do things for yourself

I disagree. Degrees are earned by taking curriculum. Curriculum forces you to take subject that you may not be interested in but have to anyways because they are part of the standard. Because of this a degreed technical person can have concepts that a nondegreed person would never think or want to know. But these concepts are helpful in programming, even business DB work.

It's a rare nondegreed person I talk to who understands order notation. To have to teach them that inorder to begin to address algorithmic efficiency is a task that doesn't have to be done with a degreed person. Rarer than that is one who knows what a state machine is and how it applies to parts of their work. Rarer still is one who understands stochastic algorithms and what variance is.

But even if you decide to bone up on these things there will still be things you don't learn because you haven't been forced to do so. Getting a degree from a good university really does make you a better person. When working on a tough problem at work and going through pages of results related to it in Google, the curriculum you know will help make the pages make more sence. I doubt that before my degree I could answer many of the questions on this page. I answered all but 3, and the 3 I didn't answer were because they would take more programming time than I cared to put in and 2 were covered in courses I took (the other is the spiral one which is relatively trivial). I'm fairly sure if I didn't go to university, I'd have been lost at O(n).

And no matter what you are "doing for yourself", you are working for someone else if it's income related. Be it the client as an independent contractor, the bank for a private company, or shareholders for a public company, everyone is accountable to someone. Having a CS degree will help you in programming, design, and architecture jobs. A CTO really should have an understanding of CS concepts in order to be an effective decision maker.

And if what you're doing for yourself isn't income related, then an educated background gives you a richer understanding of the things you do.

Artificial Intelligence. Russell, Norvig

I'm getting this one, but I'm waiting for the next edition which should be out later this year.

I hope I'll be able to get it for yule as a present for my self, but I've been waiting a long time now.

Don't be a slimebag. Go the the library.