Slashdot Mirror

And thus I retort.

https://www.brown.edu/academic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You were saying?

What book do you recommend? I do know that monsoonal rains in southwest are directly related to the warming of the gulf of California during the summer. The warmer it is the earlier and more prolonged the monsoon. What do the scientists in your 'book' claim?

This is one of many articles connecting global cooling with desertification.....
https://news.brown.edu/article...

You can go to Brown University and take a class on "Being Bored."

No you can't. You can go there and take a class in the English course about expressions of boredome in literature:

https://www.brown.edu/academic...

I can't see why you'd disapprove of that unless you think that people should study subjects you don't really know much about only in the particular ways you approve of. then again you do identify as Republica, so that kinda makes sense.

Native American Studies?

You won. They lost. Everyone should get over it. No need to study anythig about them any more.

Sarcasm by the way.

IRAN-CONTRA REPORT - Arms, Hostages and Contras - How a ...
www.nytimes.com/.../iran-contra-report-arms-hostages-contras-secret-foreign-policy-...
Nov 19, 1987 - Col. Oliver L. North, a National Security Council aide, to contra leaders in Honduras. ... 20: Israel sends 96 TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran. Sept ...

New Israel-iran Revelations - tribunedigital-chicagotribune
articles.chicagotribune.com/.../8703310444_1_private-israeli-arms-dealers-iran-contr...
Dec 4, 1987 - Israel has acknowledged shipping weapons to Iran with U.S. approval in the Iran-contra affair, but has officially denied independent sales to the ...

The Iran-Contra Affairs
https://www.brown.edu/Research...
However, from these meetings came the idea to sell U.S. arms to Iran via Israel and the suggestion that, to gain the U.S.'s approval for the scheme, American ... Iran–Contra affair - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Contra_affair The Iran–Contra affair also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran–Contra scandal, was ... It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment.

You would do much better if you were less snarky.

The actual numbers are pretty hard to come by: possibly due to the logistical difficulties of gathering information on the ground. However, estimates of the dead in Iraq range up to 500 000 with 250 000 being directly attributed to the war. Estimates for Afghanistan suggest about 92000 .

Estimated civilian deaths under Obama are somewhat shy of 10000 which is still an astoundingly high number, but an order of magnitude less. Given he didn't start those wars, attributing Iraqi/Afghan deaths to the Obama administration is somewhat skewed. Especially considering those wars were not started with any notion of furthering the interests of the United States, nor, to date, has any plausible reason for invading Iraq been forthcoming, let alone one that justifies even a single Iraqi death, let alone 250000.

Under normal circumstances, we might regard Obama's actions in killing people (2400 at last count) using drones to be somewhat homicidal. How does one justify something like that? But we forget scale. We forget that Bush, in Iraq, set a new precedent, and we live in a new normal. Back in those days, I could log on to Slashdot and hear people justify Abu Graib, justifications or indiscriminate torture and rape, justify the killing of and dismemberment of children, and lie lie lie to us about why: why were these people killed? Why were kids blown apart? why were people strung up, and hung, why did people have electrical current passed through their genitals?

So yep, Obama's actions ought to be closely examined and he needs to justify those deaths. But to compare his administration to the butchery under Cheney/Bush administration just show you've already forgotten what happened.

It is what "conservation of momentum" means when applied to an engine like this one. This or this may help.

This is one of the "hidden" costs of doing business in China. You can pretty much count on the theft and exploitation of your designs. How dare they exploit us back!

However, given the fact that this is a luxury good and status symbol, I don't think Apple is too worried about this, except if consumers are fooled into buying one. No one wants to show off a knock-off status symbol. It defeats the entire purpose.

"An electron in liquid helium forces open a cavity referred as an electron bubble. These objects have been studied in many past experiments. It has been discovered that under certain conditions other negatively charged objects can be produced but the nature of these “exotic ions” is not understood. We have made a series of experiments to measure the mobility of these objects, and have detected at least 18 ions with different mobility. We also find strong evidence that in addition to these objects there are ions present which have a continuous distribution of mobility. We then describe experiments in which we attempt to produce exotic ions by optically exciting an electron bubble to a higher energy quantum state. To within the sensitivity of the experiment, we have not been able to detect any exotic ions produced as a result of this process. We discuss three possible explanations for the exotic ions, namely impurities, negative helium ions, and fission of the electron wave function. Each of these explanations has difficulties but as far as we can see, of the three, fission is the only plausible explanation of the results which have been obtained."

Research group website
Non-paywalled copy of paper

TLDR: This research group studies exotic electron effects in superfluid helium. They see a particular effect that is not currently explained. There are a few possible explanations, and they argue that a particular one is probably true.

Inaccurate "news" articles ensue.

(The physics is subtle enough that, despite reading the abstract and bits of the paper, I would not venture to try to summarize it. You can smell a mile away, though, that this article is poor understanding mixed with hyperbole. The specific flavor is, "Quantum Mechanics is Philosophical Magic".)

"An electron in liquid helium forces open a cavity referred as an electron bubble. These objects have been studied in many past experiments. It has been discovered that under certain conditions other negatively charged objects can be produced but the nature of these “exotic ions” is not understood. We have made a series of experiments to measure the mobility of these objects, and have detected at least 18 ions with different mobility. We also find strong evidence that in addition to these objects there are ions present which have a continuous distribution of mobility. We then describe experiments in which we attempt to produce exotic ions by optically exciting an electron bubble to a higher energy quantum state. To within the sensitivity of the experiment, we have not been able to detect any exotic ions produced as a result of this process. We discuss three possible explanations for the exotic ions, namely impurities, negative helium ions, and fission of the electron wave function. Each of these explanations has difficulties but as far as we can see, of the three, fission is the only plausible explanation of the results which have been obtained."

Research group website
Non-paywalled copy of paper

TLDR: This research group studies exotic electron effects in superfluid helium. They see a particular effect that is not currently explained. There are a few possible explanations, and they argue that a particular one is probably true.

Inaccurate "news" articles ensue.

(The physics is subtle enough that, despite reading the abstract and bits of the paper, I would not venture to try to summarize it. You can smell a mile away, though, that this article is poor understanding mixed with hyperbole. The specific flavor is, "Quantum Mechanics is Philosophical Magic".)

Said by someone who has never been here, or you would know that Dallas is the least segregated big city in the country. http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010...

A cochlear implant is not a "hearing aid", which is a microphone and speaker inside the ear canal. A hearing aid is basically a modern ear trumpet, because it drives the cochlear with sound waves via the ear drum. A cochlear implant, on the other hand, is a neural prosthesis. Electrodes are surgically inserted into the cochlear and "sound" is delivered via direct electrical stimulation that drives the auditory sensory neurons. These devices allow people who would otherwise be 100% deaf to hear, assuming that their auditory nerve is intact and the innervation of the cochlear is still present. The problem, however, is that these implants have relatively few electrodes (of the order of 10 or so) and this results in a distorted picture of the world. Here are details with photos of the surgery.

I mean selling crack to American school kids to buy guns for Osama bin laden is only the tip of the iceberg.

Wow.. Give me some of what you are smoking. Also, a few creditable links to this information would be nice. I have a feeling you are conflating several different things.

He's a little off, but pretty likely referring to the Iran Contra Affair.

Where do I sign up? If I could get a "code reviewed by third party" stamp on my papers, I'd feel a lot better about publishing the code and the results derived from it.

Believe it or not, some computer science programming language conferences are doing *just that*.

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Conference-Artifact-Evaluation/
http://ecoop13-aec.cs.brown.edu/
http://splashcon.org/2013/cfp/665

Where do I sign up? If I could get a "code reviewed by third party" stamp on my papers, I'd feel a lot better about publishing the code and the results derived from it.

Believe it or not, some computer science programming language conferences are doing *just that*.

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Memos/Conference-Artifact-Evaluation/
http://ecoop13-aec.cs.brown.edu/
http://splashcon.org/2013/cfp/665

SUVs cause global warming, not global cooling. Meanwhile, I just saw this morning at national Geographic that It was caused by extraterrestrials. Not alien life, but a comet or asteroid that smacked Canada, melting glaciers which screwed up the currents in the Atlantic causing a cooling cycle (the glaciers had been retreating before the object hit).

It seems their main argument has less to do with genetic diversity and more to do with distance from each other. They claim superior technological advances are a driving factor and I do not see how that relates to genetic diversity.

From Page 3 in here:

"The beneficial effect of diversity, on the other hand, concerns the positive role of heterogeneity in the expansion of society's production possibility frontier. A wider spectrum of traits is more likely to contain those that are complementary to the advancement and successful implementation of superior technological paradigms. Higher diversity therefore enhances society's capability to integrate advanced and more efficient production methods, expanding the economy's production possibility frontier and conferring the benefits of improved productivity."

Unless in the unlikely case that new ice is being added, dust will completely cover the ice, so it will not be visible to multi-spectral cameras (color is just for press releases). Here's a paper I was involved with explaining how radar can be used to find ice under dust and debris. That said, craters are horrible places for radar. Too much surface clutter at exactly the time you're looking for subsurface echos. I don't know how many talks I've seen where people claim to see ice in craters and it's only echos from the sides.

I assume you got modded funny, because your post comes off as an arm chair rocket scientist.

Everything, including CO2 and water must be provided to the plants. That has to come from somewhere.

Last I knew, people tend to breath out CO2. So if you get people and oxygen, you'll get CO2.

Also, lunar soil contains CO2, which may be a good way to start things.

Eat it ? You would die if you even tried to touch it (unprotected).

Of course, the metallic snow is a hypothesis, to explain the high radar reflectivity observed in the Venusian highlands. There are other explanations. To find out, someone needs to send a lander (but don't hold your breath on that one).

The more I learn about Watson the more I'm inclined to believe he was a dick.

http://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI0020_Miller/dh/guide.html

--
That cliche seems to be true here too "Behind every successful man ... is most likely a woman!" Hmm, Watson - check, Einstein - check, where is/was Newton's woman? =)

If you want to read something intelligent about "memory storage theory", here's a better article--from Brown University, November 14, 2006.

Pull-quote:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Daily events are minted into memories in the hippocampus, one of the oldest parts of the brain. For long-term storage, scientists believe that memories move to the neocortex, or "new bark," the gray matter covering the hippocampus. This transfer process occurs during sleep, especially during deep, dreamless sleep.

> science, questioning is encouraged.
You mean like how Watson treated Franklin?
http://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI0020_Miller/dh/guide.html

> In the other--christian superstition--questioning is actively discouraged.
Maybe you should try another religion where all questions are encouraged, instead of a bastardized fear-based one?

For upper limb amputations, between 2/3 and 3/4 are due to trauma: motorbike crashes and soldiers. sources: [1], [2], [3]

For lower limbs, they are mostly vascular-related, secondary to heart disease and diabetes.

> there is finally a real world example of using Scheme to write Android applications that others can inspect

You mean for those who've been hiding in a cave since March 2009?

Moby

You're really funny. Brown (http://cs.brown.edu) has no University-wide requirements. We also have one of the best [13th according to some random website Google just showed me] CS departments in the US, and, as an Ivy, I somewhat suspect we're accredited. *cough* </snark>

I came here because I had roughly the same attitude as you, and, looking at the upmodded comments, I'm the only one who seems to be agreeing-ish. That said, most of the other upmodded comments make valid points. Let me elaborate:

Just because you don't have any requirements for gen-ed classes doesn't mean you want to take only CS classes. Almost everyone (all but 1 person I know) in the CS department who came in with our mentality has come to realize

1. taking only CS-ey classes is FAR too much work (at least for Brown's CS classes.)
2. unless every aspect of CS interests you, you'll run out. Don't OD on CS your first couple semesters.
3. being here [Brown] gives you a unique opportunity to take, with little risk, anything that sounds interesting. Taking a general "how to write" class, feh. On the other hand, "Beyond Narnia: The Literature of C.S. Lewis", "Color Me Cool: A Survey of Contemporary Graphic Novels", "Human Sexuality in a Social Context": you're not going to get opportunities like that in your life ever again. Seriously.

Love,
Jon Sailor (cs.brown.edu/~jon)

Actually, those same researchers at Brown University are working on developing a wireless interface for just such a system.

http://cs.brown.edu/system/hardware/desktops/ used to be Sun workstations, not anymore with assembled PCs

You may be interested in the Teach Scheme! project. The idea is to teach the programming fundamentals with Scheme where the syntax is simple and use those experiences as a scaffold for more complex languages. The project offers both a LGPL Scheme interpreter, Racket, and an online textbook, How to Design Programs. Follow up with How to Design Worlds, and students could be making games in no time! An intro course to game design might give that touch of creativity you were looking for.

I've worked with Na-22. It definitely puts out plenty of gamma. I could easily read the radioactivity through a lead brick. But I agree that with a half-life of a couple of years, it's not much of a concern in terms of nuclear waste.

Have you considered just going for a standard master's degree in chemistry, biology, etc.? You'll probably have to take 4-6 remedial courses, but that wouldn't be the end of the world unless you absolutely can't invest the time/money.

If you really want to do a program that has one foot in Computer Science, maybe something like Brown's computational molecular biology program? It's PhD-oriented, but I'm sure they'd take your money in exchange for a master's degree.

What you want is IPTV over multicast. A number of universities have done this - one is the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which has a pretty bare bones approach using IP multicast and Apple Quicktime. They are also pretty good about giving technical clue if you run into trouble and ask nicely. If you want to spend more money, there is the HaiVision Video Furnace, which is used by, e.g., Brown University.

I have no idea if your contract with Comcast will let you do this, but I believe that the Universities do it by restricting use to only people on campus, so you might be able to do the same.

There are many physical principles that seem to run counter to intuition.
This is why we called freshman physics lectures "Magic Shows". Here's one you can try at home:

Put a string on a spool and pull the string.
The spool will come toward you faster than you are pulling the string; it will even roll up the string as it moves forward!

Lay the spool on its side so that it can roll along a table, and wrap one end of the string around the shaft of the spool.
The string comes off of the spool at the bottom.
Make sure the spool is well coupled to the table (weight, friction), and the string is tightly tied to the spool and comes off at the bottom.
Pull on the string in a direction parallel to the table.

Ooh---magic (waving Jazz hands...)

The math is here.

Try different angles.
Notice how the force required on the string varies with the speed that the spool eventually moves towards you.
(That last one should help you debunk some of the free energy charlatans)

Also I forgot, from the functional programming side there is a pretty cool learning system from Brown built with PLT Scheme and the DrScheme IDE. It's approach is to complement Maths classes in school, so that Maths teaches about functions like f(x) = x^2, then in DrScheme there is the same notion of functions, but instead of just acting on numbers they act on anything, including graphics. Systems are then composed from a load of these functions acting on "the world", and there is an Android port I've played with called Moby. You can find this stuff at http://world.cs.brown.edu/

Which is why it makes an easy target for a Scheme compiler, right?

http://github.com/dyoo/moby-scheme
http://planet.plt-scheme.org/display.ss?package=moby.plt&owner=dyoo
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Talks/Moby-Bootstrap/

You asked for it...

A summary of some literature:
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Provost/Advance/Valian%20Power%20Leadership%20&%20Politics.pdf

For peer-review...
http://www.advancingwomen.org/files/7/127.pdf
"Peer reviewers cannot judge scientific merit independent of gender."

For letters of recommendation...
http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/14/2/191
"Letters written for female applicants were found to differ systematically from those written for male applicants..."

There's a lot out there.

I take that back about prescribing meth:
http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Health_Services/Health_Education/atod/od_meth.html

"Some people are prescribed methamphetamine for the treatment of narcolepsy or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, these are limited uses and the doses are much lower than doses that are typically used illegally."

But my original point remains.

What I'd like to know is: what are the best languages to study?

Hmmmm, I'm not sure this is going to be a fruitful discussion. It's not too clear to me what kind of game development interests you most. The truth is that games have been written in many languages and developers often scoff at any guideline to restrict them from writing a game in -- say Java -- when there are more efficient languages. Assuming you want to get into console games and/or PC games, I would suggest starting out with simple authoring tools and just tinker with them. Download GameKit and get it building on your development machine. Then set weekly goals for yourself to modify the Space Invaders game by changing graphics, sound, maybe even mechanics. Once you've done that and are bored, move on to another kit/sdk.

You see, I doubt the importance is that you know how C++ or Lua works ... they are both great languages for different tasks. It's more important that if you want to be a graphics engine guy you understand how major APIs are laid out to implement tiles and shaders and renderers ... Go here to start thinking aobut what aspect of the game interests you most.

What are the minimum diploma or degree requirements that most games companies will accept?

This is a topic I could drone on for hours about. Enjoy life, man. They'll take you with a 2 year tech degree or less if you're built for coding. But don't do that. Enjoy the college expereince, go to a four year liberal arts college. Explore math, physics, chemistry, biology, literature, music, etc. I took enough music theory to major in music but I didn't. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Finally, is C++ the way to go? ASP? LUA?

You should really concentrate on one of three types of games: web, console, PC. While the last two are related, the idea of catering to hardware probably has an effect on games. Is a PC developer going to care about Sony's Emotion engine while a console guy might live and breathe it. Honestly, fool around with Allegro, SDL and OpenGL if you're looking to do serious game coding.

You've got a long difficult road ahead if you're going down this path. You're going to have your heart broken by Blizzard and end up over worked and underpaid at EA. Game programming seems to find you, you can only prepare yourself for it. Read John Carmack's story in Masters of Doom or just wait for the upcoming movie about it.

I've also heard -- and I can't verify this -- that it helps to have a notebook full of sketches, stories, game mechanics, ideas you've had in relation to games. You keep this and bring it to an interview. You pass the technical aspects and then you let them know that you really want this and that you are also creative and not just technical.

Don't forget to have fun and good luck!

> so important to keep secret that not even opposing counsel can know about it.

NYCL can correct me on this, but I don't believe that court-sealed documents are kept secret from parties in the suit. General public, yes. I have inferred that documents are sealed to protect a party or person from annoyance, embarrassment, oppression, or undue burden or expense.

Things like medical records, identity of assault victims, trade secrets, that sort of thing. See, for example, this treatise on sealing documents.

That reference notes that two most common argument for sealing are: a party in the case will be harmed, or that it affects another court case.

Given the number of cases the RIAA has in the air, I would suspect the latter. Remember, the RIAA is the defendant in the class action case. So the sealing was in the interests of the defendant. What I find odd is that the plaintiff was not apparently given the opportunity to object to the sealing. (Are such objections only made after the fact?)

The source code for their project is still available: http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/download/ or svn co http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/svn/graffiti/

The source code for their project is still available: http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/download/ or svn co http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/svn/graffiti/

On April 11 around 11:50 (all times EST) I noted yet another spammer, so I deleted and blocked him as usual. But there was something a bit unusual - the current asshole was actually nicer than usual and left an explanation URL, http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/. So I went there and used some deductive reasoning to figure out the spammer's email address, and at 11:59 I sent him a one-line message:

Don't you ever spam my site again, asshole.

At 12:56 I got a response:

Thanks for writing. We're sorry if caused you any inconveniences, but be assured that this is strictly a research project. Could you please give us the domain name of the site in question, so that we can disable it in the system?

Might I also suggest that you enable MediaWiki's anti-spam features?

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Anti-spam_features

Our system currently skips sites if we see a CAPTCHA. The simple "puzzle" anti-spam feature is useless; we broke that with 5 lines of Python.

To this I wrote back at 13:20:

A stupid research project indeed.

You took a habit of shitting on people's front lawn leaving a note "I will not clean up after me, but if you clean up for me and send me an email with your address, I will try not to shit on your lawn again, and besides, all front lawns should be fenced". And just to be even nicer, you didn't bother supplying your email address (I had to guess yours, from your URL). For your own benefit, you can only hope you didn't shit on the front lawn of anyone you really care about or will care about later on.

It will be best if you stop your project altogether, but at least, grep your files and remove anything that has "drorbn" or "katlas" from them.

I got no response and next I heard of this was on slashdot.

Pretty easy to see through the whole "durr we are helping site owners secure their wikis" crap considering the original page said nothing about security, only a possible way of distributing files. The garbage about "abandoned" wikis is also transparently false, as the site makes no reference to even checking when the last edit(s) were made to the wiki through Recent Changes, as well as my own personal experience and several others. It's also a hilarious rationale considering wikis have pages-by-views counters built into them and any site owner would easily notice hundreds of peers downloading plaintext off a wiki regularly faster than they would the results of some graduate student's pet CS project.

It's a shocker, but some wiki owners like to allow anonymous edits, and they have the right to do so. It's equivalent to abusing other site resources like public uploads in everything but style. This "project" is not only unethical but now they're blatantly lying about (or at best misrepresenting) its purpose.

At Brown (cs.brown.edu), we've tried teaching with Alice in intro classes, and it's gone terribly. Have you considered TeachScheme or How to design worlds?

They don't touch the liver. It just takes plasma from your blood, pumps it through the filters and then returns it. Bunch of diagrams and pictures here, here and here

But there are examples of subsets of a species that when separated over time become unable to interbreed. In GP's scenario, the fish became unable to interbreed with the original species. for a real world example, see CASE HISTORIES OF SPECIATION I&II .

There is also the issue of ring species in which one subset (A) can breed with a nearby subset (B), and subset (B) can interbreed with a third subset (C), but subset (A) cannot interbreed with subset (C).

This blurs the line between species, as, by the popular definition of species, varieties A and B are the same species, and varieties B and C are the same species, but A and C are two different species.

I address this question in the paper and on the tiny FAQ here. Basically, DHAs require a spammer to interactively query an email server and blindly guess popular names: here, the server can throttle or block access to these requesters, and the success rate is very low.

With MicroID, the tokens are meant for public use, and thus can accessed with a simple HTTP GET. Cracking them yields much higher success rates (25% from Digg) than DHAs, as well as a "verified" user email, & links to that user's associated content (e.g., favorite Last.fm songs for ringtone spam, favorite Digg articles).

I address this question in the paper and on the tiny FAQ here. Basically, DHAs require a spammer to interactively query an email server and blindly guess popular names: here, the server can throttle or block access to these requesters, and the success rate is very low.

With MicroID, the tokens are meant for public use, and thus can accessed with a simple HTTP GET. Cracking them yields much higher success rates (25% from Digg) than DHAs, as well as a "verified" user email, & links to that user's associated content (e.g., favorite Last.fm songs for ringtone spam, favorite Digg articles).

Diablo II

That's plenty colorful. It seems people are complaining about the pastel and washed out colors more than anything.

Contrast != indistinct darkness.

I'm a Brown CS concentrator, and I thought, and still think, that the program there is excellent. I can't imagine an academic department being any more supportive of its students, or any more interested in making its subject matter accessible and engaging to both first-year novices and senior-year concentrators. The Brown program integrates upperclassmen (and -women) in the running of the department in a way that creates a real community, by providing many, many opportunities for collaboration between professors and students, and by making undergraduates teaching assistants in a way that improves the quality of learning for all parties. It also gives its students a damn good education: it starts by building strong fundamentals in CS theory, mathematics, and practical systems engineering, and then builds on those fundamentals to produce very well-rounded CS graduates with a depth of expertise in a variety of sub-specializations (graphics, theory, systems engineering, operating systems, AI). Brown CS professors are demanding, rigorous and brilliant, but the majority also see their first priority to be to mould the next generation of Computer Scientists, and their second priority to be academic research.

I don't know how Brown's program compares to MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. in terms of providing real research opportunities for undergrads (probably pretty well, in fact); it certainly does not have the same reputation for graduate studies. Brown CS does accomplish something that I think is even more difficult (and important) than simply providing a strong computer-science education, however: it makes computer science compelling even for those people (like me) who would never have even thought previously to dedicate their professional lives to computers. I would say that Brown CS may be the ideal undergraduate program in computer science; it inspires a devotion for the discipline that can last an entire career, and provides a rigorous and strong preparatory basis for further development, whether that development be provided by industry or by other, more graduate-oriented institutions like Carnegie-Mellon or Stanford. Randy Pausch's story about how he became a computer science educator is really illustrative. Randy Pausch's mentor, Andy van Dam, is only one of the many devoted men and women that make up the department.

and its more of the same! Its hinged but cleverly! Its a slider instead of hinges! Its glorified Nintendo DS combined with an iPhone!

Or, they pick the low hanging fruit of "It'll be faster and more efficient!"

How about stuff like what Andy Van Dam and his students are working on? MathPad lets you use a tablet to write equations and have the computer solve them for you, or draw a primitive sketch and have it animate depending on an equation you wrote. Or there's ChemPad which lets you draw chemical equations and then it generates the 3-d structure on the fly.

If we extrapolate what their research does today, 7 years from now could be brilliant. In the end wouldn't it be great open up your computer, and start writing on your desktop? And you could write anything and your computer (with more computing power 7 years from now) would be able to contextualize what you're writing and immediately know that the diagram you drew was an animation for your graphics class that was a pinwheel dependent on an equation? Or, perhaps you're a manager and you draw a lot of diagrams and write notes like "Setup meeting with Jim and Susan, 2:30 tomorrow" and your computer can figure it all out and do it for you?
Yes, designers are great when they get it correct (iPhone is brilliant) but I'm waiting for the computer to understand what I'm doing as well.