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At my school, there's a page set up for your basic freeware (acrobat reader, PuTTy), and other more expensive site-licensed software (X-Win, CRT, Dreamweaver) require a user logon to download. The IT department keeps a log of all the downloads, and whoever's logon is used is responsible for the software. For the really expensive stuff (MATLAB, Mathematica), paperwork is necessary.

Take a look at it: http://www.bu.edu/software/

My sister-in-law is starting her second year at Boston University, and I swear getting emails from her is like getting an email from Prince.

"Hey! I got a msg 4u. It's gonna be 2-cool 4evr!!! :-)"

I can't decide if that's more annoying than my sister and father, who still, in spite of my best efforts to educate them, haven't figured out the basics of the capslock key, new paragraphs, and punctuation in email.

Man, if I had this pent up I'd be releasing prematurely too!

Releasing prematurely? they have ways to fix that.

The skin finding hack to locate faces has been used a lot.

The trick for those of you are interested is to convert you image from RGB (or whatever format you have your image in) to HLS coordinates (hue, lightness and saturation). Or TLS (tint).

As skin (regardless of race excepting albinos) is colored with melatonin and the "color" varies with the amount of melatonin the hue is roughly a constant for most people. Using that and LS info and connectedness you can improve your hits.

Of course there are better methods and a google reveals some of them.

Using hue and ratio of red/green ratios seems to work very nicely.

Boston has some of the worst, one-way, no-block streets in the country, and because of that and the normal traffic, it can actually be pretty safe to ride your bike around the streets. At least that's been my experience.

I've been reading (slowly) the book "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence W. Deacon, which covers the evolution of language in humans. It goes into the selective pressures that could have worked in favour of language development. Without these, any single mutation would not have gone very far towards our current language abilities. You can check out a summary of the book here.

Quite similar to Image Mosaics, a project we did in the Image and Video Processing class with Prof. Sclaroff. Here's my take on the project (inluding the source code), with a pretty good explanation of how to do this: Go here...

Quite similar to Image Mosaics, a project we did in the Image and Video Processing class with Prof. Sclaroff. Here's my take on the project (inluding the source code), with a pretty good explanation of how to do this: Go here...

>But distributing power over large distances incur large losses.

Not at a 1/2 million volts (some places use that voltage now, others may go higher).

Assuming you want to transfer 2.1 MW of power, that's 4.2 Amps.

Here's a chart to help with the below.

Line loss at 000 AWG for 500 km (for example):

Ploss = I^2 * R
Ploss = 4.2^2 * (0.2 * 500)
Ploss = 17.64 * 100
Ploss = 0.001764 MW (assuming the earth as a return)
Ploss = 0.003528 MW (assuming a two wire system)

Of course, this is over-simplified, but I doubt the losses will even reach 1% with anything I haven't thought of factored in.

They think it because it's true. For example, see the emission spectrum of a standard white LED. This spectrum has two very distinct peaks, and poorer coverage in other areas of the spectrum. This still produces something approximating "pure" white light, but it's done by combining two relatively narrow-spectrum sources, and that's what makes it seem unnatural.

The Sun produces a much more constant intensity over the entire visible spectrum, as can be seen on this page. The Sun's spectrum is far from "poorer and narrower", as you described it - it would more accurately be described as "richer and wider". It does have somewhat lower intensity at the blue end, but that's nothing compared to the gaps in a white LED's spectrum.

The above link also lets you see the spectrum of a fluorescent bulb, which despite some peaks, is still more constant across the spectrum than the LED is.

The issue here is not purely one of human preference, either - in a room illuminated with white LEDs with a spectrum as shown in the first link, reds will be poorly illuminated, and objects with some colors will appear brighter than others. So, I stand by my statement that current LED technology has "a much narrower spectrum of light than any commonly used bulb technology - sort of the opposite of the 'natural light' bulbs that some companies sell."

In future, it's quite possible and likely that LEDs will be used to produce lamps with a wider and more even spectrum, but that certainly isn't the case today.

Now you are asking to be pooped on (17 MG file).

Woz

dominik@schnitzer.at, mozparty-at-subscribe@relax.ath.cx, dominik@schnitzer.at, david_markvica@web.de, johannes_richter@gmx.net, kairo@kairo.at, rossi@chello.at, markush@world-direct.com, cbiesinger@web.de, jenskager@gmx.net, jo-at-mt@gmx.net, johann.petrak@gmx.at, dviper01@gmx.net, simon@simonschwaighofer.net, dreckskerl@glump.at, wt-lists@trexler.at, dusty@strike.wu-wien.ac.at, kasparhauserjr@hotmail.com, b.schallar@gmx.net, mutato@libero.it, phil@goli.at, diddalick@gmx.net, studio@paw8.com, croco@utanet.at, petru@paler.net, jlemmerer@node.at, bigkub@time2change.at, patrick@seher-it.at, ronald@hartwig.at, mozilla_party@webterminate.com, stefan@kleinhans.it, horst.jens@gmx.at, jjan@gibts.net, mjahn@agency.at, gpoul@gnu.org, green@eggs.ham, gerhard.hipfinger@openforce.at, mailto:moz@moz.org>, florianweinwurm@yahoo.com, christian@precht-jensen.dk, Bill_Gates@microsoft.com, Tux_the_penguin@linux.rules.microsoft.sux.open.sou rce.is.the.way.to.go.net, domi@schnitzer.at, joe_ringmaster@gmx.at, sifu@isohypse.org, dk@perm.ru, nobandwidth@bigpond.com, nobandwidth@bigpond.com, luke@strangemonkey.com, mrundataker@optushome.com.au, mcgarry@tig.com.au, chris@think.net.au, Mathias.Burbach@Bigfoot.com, acuteparanoia@optushome.com.au, syzh401@cse.unsw.edu.au, maillist@jasonlim.com, ram@digitalmethod.org, jason@sydneypubguide.net, geek@digitalone.com.au, curious@ihug.com.au, bill@maidment.com.au, kristof@staesis.org, bill@microsoft.com, belle@netset.net.au, ksosez@softhome.net, jruderman@hmc.edu, andyed@surfmind.com, down8@yahoo.com, mozparty@sigkill.com, bulbul@ucla.edu, gavin-mozparty@doughtie.com, roger@digitalfountain.com, matt@linuxschooltorrance.com, mozparty@ventura.nu, rombouts@compuserve.com, ian@freenetproject.org, tristanreid@yahoo.com, groovefx@yahoo.com, jj@lacasabonita.com, gmoudry@hotmail.com, eyezero@yahoo.com, ian@primewave.net, jlawson7@adelphia.net, el_arturo@att.net, janie@freenetproject.org, 145371217@numenor.net, infinite_8_monkey@yahoo.com, charshman@divus.org, mozparty@shadowlurker.net, john@marinapacific.com, ilanterrell@yahoo.com, aafes@psu.edu, bustamam98@yahoo.com, mozparty@myunixbox.com, yaten@sbcglobal.net, joelinux@pacificnet.net, dgc@penguino.net, poserskater69@yahoo.com, lheartb@hotmail.com, ncmother@zimage.com, daniel@likeicare.com, digital.evil@lycos.com, cjeburke@yahoo.com, jblow@hotmail.com, zachary.anthony@verizon.net, boogah@23.org, mebelost@yahoo.com, nickkricheff@netscape.net, mikemcg@ucla.edu, gogomozilla@denofslack.net, mike@mm1.com, seanmcoleman@attbi.com, jsm@bigfoot.com, hoarycripple@crippl3.net, mozparty@nslu.x.myxomop.com, mozparty@camworld.com, mozpartyNYC@isoga.net, ccarlen@netscape.com, h@rediffmail.com, lefever@rcn.com, tedjackson@accounting.org, darren@ny.com, marlon@nyc.com, plui@hyperreal.org, dzeluff@zeluff.com, joel@natividads.com, ken@bigbadapple.com, treebeard@treebeard.net, florent@nyc.com, chad@macristy.com, spud@montelshow.com, gbman_of_gvill@yahoo.com, eam-mozparty@learningpatterns.com, pkrause@primavera.com, tossoffus@yahoo.com, ryan@pantz.com, nichomof@eecs.tulane.edu, billg@microsoft.com, DevilsRejection@msn.com, petergunn@hotmail.com, bagerj@sullcrom.com, isaac@structuredsystems.net, bobk@panix.com, ngellner@hotmail.com, luke@sigterm.org, vivake@yahoo.com, jon@mediavortex.com, groovefx@yahoo.com, brendan@sighup.net, jds@panix.com, bluerose@bluerose.com, chris@allermann.net, dimkal@yahoo.com, preppyl@yahoo.com, blujoker@blujoker.net, nowell_h@hotmail.com, aragorn@cs.stanford.edu, treed@cpr.com, brt204@nyu.edu, andreas@antonopoulos.com, dj@randomwalks.com, lists@pote.com, mike@mhudack.com, reliable57@yahoo.com, jared@geek-boy.com, ondadl@mac.com, floss@myrealbox.com, xod@thestonecutters.net, mozilla@sectae.net, tywonm@screamingmedia.com, Odin_NT@hotmail.com, crooney@panix.com, bg25222@binghamton.edu, eugenem@brainlink.com, dave@downneck.net, romspace@mac.com, sdaejo@yahoo.com, masseo1@yahoo.com, jim@fearandloathing.net, mike@mjoy.us, miles@openly.com, LuciferSD@hotmail.com, nsdilwor@intertechmedia.com, chrisdowden@yahoo.com, pgs10@columbia.edu, sbrennan@ovid.com, lthomiso@rcn.com, paralox@paralox.ath.cx, Jester_458@yahoo.com, jsadove@beltion.net, stuehmke@yahoo.com, mike@realfx.com, alex@risky-roosky.com, shava@efn.org, kra10@columbia.edu, saihung@ix.netcom.com, gropo@mac.com, scottnym@yahoo.com, shaas@vibe.com, roon_toon@hotmail.com, ajaygautam@yahoo.com, jhdaly@mindspring.com, manuel@sphinx.ms, very_itchy_rash@yahoo.com, emeldrum@drew.edu, jeld@mindless.com, as867@columbia.edu, slams@penguin.rutgers.edu, wassa@columbia.edu, tony@vegan.net, zilla@bibliotrack.com, zeno_lee@hotmail.com, fosh@fishnet.cx, linux@gpl.us, jblow@hotmail.com, dkrook@hotmail.com, ivesti@yahoo.com, arek@arekwyderka.com, bljoechang@yahoo.com, brian@tribrothers.com, sparky@marklife.org, charles@softwareprototypes.com, scottkundla@hotmail.com, ccharabaruk@meldstar.com, ian@pottinger.ca, netdemonz@yahoo.com, diatribe@mailcity.com, nick@tomkinet.com, shawnlin@yahoo.com, sculley@pathcom.com, herd.killing@rogers.com, dave@renouf.com, aliyamin@hotmail.com, aswitzer@ispgn.com, netm0nkey@ispgn.com, hyakugei@hotmail.com, geduggan.mozparty@peri.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, lwhite@darkfires.ca, jorel@the-wire.com, js@tap.net, davew@tap.net, tmh@whitefang.com, vid_mozillaparty@zooid.org, anon@foolswisdom.org, morris_mk@yahoo.ca, colinmc@idirect.com, marcus.brubaker@utoronto.ca, akish@kishcom.com, nconway@klamath.dyndns.org, jason@thegeekcave.com, rampaging_simian@hotmail.com, garret@sirsonic.com, piowie@myrealbox.com, m5m5m@yahoo.com, ivan.brovko@net-sweeper.com, returnofthedorks@hotmail.com, axxackall@yahoo.com, tednye@sympatico.ca, darren.fuller@bell.ca, jbailey@nisa.net, swangeo@yahoo.ca, Hercynium@yahoo.com, cinetron@passport.ca, jotaroh@hotmail.com, aghajani@principle.com, fzv@yahoo.com, rocketmail_com@rocketmail.com, foo@bar.com, wolfe@alt.net, drew@xyzzy.dhs.org, jimmiejaz@nixhelp.net, bofh@swma.net, nilesh_mehta@email.com, mslack@rogers.com, m-cahill@rogers.com, tworkowski@sympatico.ca, george@openlight.com, irina@openlight.com, ilia@lobsanov.com, rjs@tao.ca, paul-mp@it.ca, alvarolists@aycuens.com, xan@dimensis.com, ike@lab.org, miguel@asiinfo.net, marevalo@marevalo.net, iolalla@yahoo.com, peluz0n@justice.com, weeddeveloper@yahoo.com, alfonsobugs@terra.es, sgala@apache.org, z_gringo@hotmail.com, santiz@madritel.es, murphy@litio.net, fox@mozilla.gr.jp, party@mozilla.org.uk, danj@fledgeling.com, fun@thingy.apana.org.au, moz@the-allens.net, onelists@hotmail.com, joel@fysh.org, simon.mozilla-party-if-its-in-central-london@rumbl e.net, bigboyjim@excite.com, andrew.and.friends.iff.central.london@sent.freeser ve.co.uk, itwillbecentrallondon@mozilla.org.uk, noahsark2x2@tiscali.co.uk, mmm-central-london@smileyben.com, jonathan-for-central-london@peepo.com, dave-Party-in-Central-London@dgta.co.uk, DJGMOL@netscape.net, srick@europe.yahoo-inc.com, moz-party@zpok.demon.co.uk, moz-party-central-london@trickofthelight.org, marc@brosystems.com, party@budge.net, rillian@telus.net, uphillsurfer@hotmail.com, edward@debian.org, mozilla@robertbrook.com, reagan@technomoose.com, lew@saltbeefsandwich.co.uk, osama@afghanistan.com, barking@insaneworld.org.uk, john@billabong-media.com, leith@cs.bu.edu, mozparty@noseynick.org, jonasj@jonasj.dk, bugzilla@kenneth.dk, chr_damsgaard@hotmail.com, alring@email.com, hp.grondal@get2net.dk, martin@marquentein.dk, Lovechild@foolclan.com, Kim@schulz.dk, kl@vsen.dk, mbendix@dunghill.dk, schnitzer.at@tange.dk, tommy@svindel.net, moz10@pbb.dk, dezral@despammed.com, nick@tioka.com, ask@fujang.dk, gecko@c.dk, spam@deck.dk, bugzilla@gemal.dk, b@bogdan.dk, kenneth@gnu.org, jee@email.dk, daniel@rtfm.dk, umfalvo@yahoo.com, christian@ostenfeld.dk, xor@ivwnet.com, Jason@screaminweb.com, alex@spamcop.net, dustym@riseup.net, rmcgee1@earthlink.net, dr_zeus@hotmail.com, chris.lozano@myrealbox.com, looney_binn@yahoo(dot)com, apendell@attbi.com, dantrevino@wrevolution.org, fireball1244@mac.com, tommyo@hargray.com, natas@redtailboa.net, emmett_in_dallas@yahoo.com, razzbuten@yahoo.com, igdavis@truculent-telephone.org, foobar@null.net, bob@kludgebox.com, cgrimland@yahoo.com, ghamlett@swbell.net, bgood@inceptual.com, slot0k@pogox.org, kwhudson@netin.com, jimjamjoh@softhome.net, jimmys@utdallas.edu, charlesv@mfos.org chris@focus2.com jest6r@hotmail.com steve@ncc.com, usrg@mail.utexas.edu, steve@deltos.com, alex@avengergear.com, mkoenecke@alum.haverford.edu langley@hex.net mordred@inaugust.com swapan@yahoo.com drosoph@hotmail.com, goulash1@mac.com, ean@brainfood.com, vj@vj.com lpret42@hotmail.com bugoff@hotmail.com chad@digitaltriage.net, stewart@digitaltriage.net scottvr01@yahoo.com adam@dfwuptime.com dsaint@gnumatt.org naltrexone42@yahoo.com, webmaster@bast.net, tommyo@hargray.com, ladd@kryp.to, jtaylor5@bayou.uh.edu, jgschmitz@linuxmail.org, enslaver@enslaver.com edfierro@yahoo.com, moz@photonsphere.com, rayw@fuckmicrosoft.com, rfmobile@swbell.net, kevin@unif.com trident5@bigfoot.com Erik_Osterholm@ieee.org, tmunson@houston.rr.com, alessi_brand@hotmail.com, rballa1@lsu.edu, wasted@kewlhair.com, jofficer@martinapparatus.com, idiot@mylinuxisp.com, j0sh01@ev1.net faust@wintermarket.org bouncer@hotmonkeyporn.com tk-mozparty_@perljam.net janisch@students.zcu.cz, aha@pinknet.cz kuzi@atlas.cz scat@reboot.cz, petr@dousa.cz, ruzicka@core.cz, roman@management.cz, hojan@students.zcu.cz, tille@soti.org, cas.tuyn@hetnet.nl, aeon@pandora.be, sensi_millia2000@yahoo.com, crypto@shiftat.com, jan.fabry@vsknet.be, monkeyboy@fruru.com, adulau@foo.be, johan@linux.be, karu@pobox.com, soggie@soti.org nick@tomkinet.com, why_are_you_too_lazy_to_drive_1_hour_to_toronto@yo u_lazy.com try_grammer_class_a_while@get_a_life.com john@interlynx.ca asharp@axo.cc, unionstation@ryder.ca, prade@hotmail.com, 2600@hamilton2600.ca, chris.lozano@myrealbox.com, dantrevino@wrevolution.org, jksteinhauer@netscape.net, i_love_junk_email@yahoo.com, cmiller@surfsouth.com, jan@bestbytes.de, me@phillipoertel.com, sebastian@pixelsalon.de, ccozan@andtek.com, ben@itlib.de, martin.ament@gmx.de, pulsar@highteq.net, muid@gmx.de, cedi@zooomclan.org, soapy@soapy.ch, deep_blue_ocean@gmx.ch, stamp@zooomclan.org, hans@switzerland.com, milamber@zooomclan.org, mtettea@switzerland.com, cylander@zooomclan.org, duke@zooomclan.org, pegirun@gmx.ch, pilif@pilif.ch, mlati@yahoo.com, Mozillzooom@holophrastic.com, erichiseli@yahoo.com, la_burdet@yahoo.com, rkoerber@gmx.de, dotzmasta@hotmail.com, B.Eckstein@cli.de, rtfm@linux.de, info@phosmo.de, gz@disintegrated.de, byronbay@gmx.de, stiwi@mac.com, mage@koeln.netsurf.de, mozilla@portfolio16.de, wrede@fh-aachen.de, ilikemozilla@html.de, cloud@final-fantasy.de, sfricke@sfricke.de, info@flossbau.de, no@dom.de, julian.suschlik@gmx.net, omero@m4d.sm, lapo@lapo.it, alcor78@email.it, info@fuelcat.it, mutato@libero.it, ildella@inwind.it, a.marabini@spinthehumanfactor.com, uomoman@criticalbit.com, thefl74@netscape.net, elbardo@libero.it, clem131@libero.it, t-i-e@bigfoot.com, gng74@libero.it, moz.party.20.gnes@spamgourmet.com, ema.cerqui@libero.it, ubertob@tin.it, mozparty.20.anagoor@spamgourmet.com, gianpaolo@preciso.net, ian@deepsky.com, marco@porciletto.org, planetx2100@hotmail.com, billabong@tiscalinet.it, piofree@libero.it, skunkyboy@tiscalinet.it, vincenzo@mondopiccolo.net, macmatteo@interfree.it, contreras@jce.it, hereandnow@libero.it, pza@students.cs.mu.oz.au, caedwa@students.cs.mu.oz.au, mgi@students.cs.mu.oz.au, bah@humbug.net, mfp@cs.mu.oz.au, nospamplease@indevelopment.org, peter@simplyit.screaming,net, pmj@users.sf.net, xanni@sericyb.com.au, agh@kalcium-is.com, felicityconsult@ozemail.com.au, lucas@lucaschan.com, andrewg@nopninjas.com, andym@abnormal.com, ts@meme.com.au, jasonpell@hotmail.com, syngin@gimp.org, mhammond@skippinet.com.au, szutshi@devraj.org, rmoonen@bigpond.net.au, fawad@fawad.net, ufs@softhome.net, kotrade@yahoo.com, ben@benscorp.com, stevesmith@columbus.rr.com, kkimmelosu@yahoo.com, neal.lindsay@peaofohio.com, pat@linuxcolumbus.com, chrisbaker@iname.com, hiroki2c@yahoo.com, seth@remor.com, jsohn@columbus.rr.com, ross@nanonet.net, mark@cushman.net, swinghammer.2@osu.edu, roberto.12@osu.edu, farhat@hotmail.com, pgunn@dachte.org, jwagner@gcfn.org, bp@osc.edu, joepletch@postmark.net, dsherman@iwaynet.net, glenn@uniqsys.com, bernstein.46@osu.edu, trent_reznor@nothing.com, erikniklas@bobanddoug.com, walters@gnu.org, timo@bolverk.net, annek25@aol.com, jlamb@leader.com, bart@osc.edu, jason@mcvetta.org

There's a good index of various references at

http://cs-www.bu.edu/~dm/pubs/replaytv.html

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

By the way, I put up the relevant court document PDFs on my Web page (where I also managed to capitalize SONICblue correctly): http://www.cs.bu.edu/~dm/pubs/replaytv.html

Here's part of the actual order. On April 26, Judge Charles Eick of the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, gave SonicBLUE 60 days to:

(1) take the steps necessary to use their broadband connections with ReplayTV 4000 customers to gather all available information about how users of the ReplayTV employ the devices, including all available information about what works are copied, stored, viewed with commercials omitted, or distributed to third parties with the ReplayTV 4000, when each of those events took place, and the like;
(2) implement Defendants' offer to collect available data from a second source -- the MyReplayTV.com web site -- about how users of the ReplayTV employ the devices, but for all time periods for which that data can be collected, rather than just for a short period;
(3) provide the foregoing data to Plaintiffs in a readily-understandable electronic format and provide any technical assistance that may be necessary for Plaintiffs to review the data;
(4) provide Plaintiffs with all documents about Defendants' consideration of what data to gather or not to gather about their customers' uses of the ReplayTV 4000; and
(5) provide Plaintiffs with any other documents (such as emails or logs) reflecting what works have been copied with the ReplayTV 4000 and how those works have been stored, viewed, or distributed.

Now who gets all of this data? The plaintiffs in the case against SonicBLUE (the makers of the ReplayTV 4000). Roughly, Time Warner, HBO, Warner Brothers, TBS, New Line Cinema, Castle Rock Entertainment, WB TV, MGM Studios, Orion Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal City Studios, Fox Broadcasting, Paramount Pictures, Disney, NBC, Showtime, United Paramount Network, ABC, Viacom, CBS, Columbia Pictures, Columbia TV, and Tristar. The plaintiffs are also ordered to pay 3/4 of the cost of gathering the data.

Come on. Our courts have no business ordering a company to spy on its own customers just because big media wants to put the company out of business. We at the Privacy Foundation saw a lot of consumer outrage after we released our report about TiVo's privacy disclosure and practices. TiVo did a pretty good job of responding to the situation; they spent a lot of time with the press, and they wrote a white paper explaining what had happened. (We still have some gripes about their system, but that's another story.) The point is that companies are very sensitive about tweaking their customers' privacy, because they know customers don't have much patience for it. So when the court orders a company to spy on their customers, it's basically a punitive act. The customers will revolt and get mad at everyone. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure the discovery of evidence phase of a lawsuit isn't supposed to be punitive.

In this case it's worse than just a privacy squabble. Either the court doesn't understand or the court doesn't believe ReplayTV's repeated explanation that they simply don't have the information demanded by this order. See, in April 2001 some months after our TiVo report came out, I showed a ReplayTV exec my traces that proved that their current model also collected some type of viewing information. This scared them, and in May 2001 - before the ReplayTV 4000 existed - they disabled the collection function, since they had never used the data for anything. This is what they told me, and this is what they've sworn to the court in testimony.

Now the ReplayTV 4000 is a different product than the one I investigated, and ReplayTV has said that they never reenabled the old tracking code, nor did they update it to make it monitor the newer features - like automatically skipping commercials and sending recordings to other ReplayTV 4000 units. But that's precisely the type of data that the plaintiffs are demanding to see in this case!

So what we have is a court ordering SonicBLUE to prepare a new software release that implements new spying features, and then ordering them to force it upon all of their customers, out of fairness to Big Media in their case against them. Considering that SonicBLUE has probably updated their customers' software only a few times ever, this is like ordering Microsoft to create, distribute, and maintain a new version of Outlook that checks to see if any of its users are sending MP3s as attachments!

I guess this is a sneak preview of the type of consumer broadband "protection" we can look forward to in the very near future.

What happens next: SonicBLUE is planning to file papers with the overseeing judge in U.S. District court objecting to this order. If that doesn't go their way, then I guess they'll be working on a new software release.

David Martin
http://www.cs.bu.edu/~dm

Example: I am at BU ans getting 6ms ping times to internet2.edu, slashdot is 22ms.

Cream of the crop though is the mighty wonderborg" [channel.or.jp] which *everyone* should play with!

I did a dissertation on something similar a while back, due to a paper by S. Redner:

Redner, S. (1998). How popular is your paper? An empirical study of the citation distribution.

This paper looked at how the citing of academic papers follows a power law distribution - that many papers are never cited, some are cited a few times, but a tiny percentage get cited a massive number of times.

My dissertation actually looked at whether this could be applied to the more general concept of ideas: whether there are lots of good ideas, some never catch on, some catch on a little bit, whilst a tiny proportion explode with popularity. I wrote a little java app to model it.

Among many other things:

Gish says, in your link, that "Arthur claims that the mandate of the modern creationist movement is to introduce the biblical story of creation into public school classrooms by disguising it as science. This is a false accusation that is repeated frequently in science journals and the mass media."

It's interesting, then, that at least two courts found that the point was to introduce the Bible into schools, and that creationism is not science.
Yes, evolutionists are getting seriously tired of a belief system held by people who "view this whole battle as one between God and anti-God forces" (Paul Ellwanger, author of the creationism bill enacted in Arkansas), or people from the Institute for Creation Research, which makes all its members swear to the truth of Biblical creation. Maybe if they were consistently dealing with scientific arguments, they would be inclined to listen. But Creationists have almost invariably "met God", and are spouting "divine truth", not scientific evidence.

McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education. A court of law found that creationism is not science.

Purely to add a little bit of the aesthetic to the list. [Check it out]

No, it doesn't have 3-D graphics or sound or blood or explosions. But that lets the players focus on tactics: probing for weaknesses, cutting off bases, making diversionary attacks, drawing enemy troops into a trap. It sucked up more of my time in graduate school than all other computer games combined.

The caveat is that it's only partially supported. A branch adding a computer player was started recently, but the client-server version (as opposed to the old X-networking version) has languished.

The folks at Digital Fountain are indeed using a highly-tuned (and proprietary) version of tornado codes. I also recommend the following papers if you're interested in what I think has the potential to be the greatest thing since TCP: tornado codes + end-system multicast

<shameless plug>
I'm currently working on a research project with John and others that integrates tornado codes and end-system multicast into a Freenet-like system. Best of all, it's GPL'd!
</shameless plug>

The folks at Digital Fountain are indeed using a highly-tuned (and proprietary) version of tornado codes. I also recommend the following papers if you're interested in what I think has the potential to be the greatest thing since TCP: tornado codes + end-system multicast

<shameless plug>
I'm currently working on a research project with John and others that integrates tornado codes and end-system multicast into a Freenet-like system. Best of all, it's GPL'd!
</shameless plug>

The folks at Digital Fountain are indeed using a highly-tuned (and proprietary) version of tornado codes. I also recommend the following papers if you're interested in what I think has the potential to be the greatest thing since TCP: tornado codes + end-system multicast

<shameless plug>
I'm currently working on a research project with John and others that integrates tornado codes and end-system multicast into a Freenet-like system. Best of all, it's GPL'd!
</shameless plug>

And I'm still not sure where we're going to get all that hydrogen. In the US most of it is made with steam reformation of Natural Gas. This releases all the C02 from the methane into the atmosphere, and isn't particularly efficient either. Creating H2 with electricity is also possible but highly inefficient even when compared to the lowly lead-acid battery. Finally, where do we get our electricity from?... Oil and Coal. Back to where we started from. Watch out for the shell game folks!!!!

Still we have to do something about our oil gluttony. I think some better fuel efficiency standards would probably be the best thing.

Here is a link to the
actual paper itself. It's a PDF file though

This game really is intresting when players are equally good at it its not real world simulation.

We use (commercial) AFS extensively at Boston University. We've historically had some trouble with getting updated client software for new operating system versions in a timely matter, so OpenAFS is pretty exciting to us. We have been using arla as our Linux client, but unfortunately have some serious reliability issues, so we've been testing OpenAFS and will probably ship that in the upcoming BU Linux 2.0.

F.I.D.E stands for Fédération Internationale des Échecs. It is the international governing body over chess. Individual countries like the U.S. Chess Federation. Each governing body has its own rating system. For example, the USCF's rating system .

This is unlikely, because protons apparently don't decay. I've heard other places that the estimated half-life for protons is longer than the age of the universe, and expected to be longer than the total lifespan of the universe. Physics majors please correct me.

So, neutrinos can actually provide early warning*about a supernova. Light from SN1987a was in fact preceeded by neutrionos that arrived 18 hours ahead of time (ref-1) (ref-2).

Here is a really good page (among a bunch) that explains supernovae.

So, neutrinos can actually provide early warning*about a supernova. Light from SN1987a was in fact preceeded by neutrionos that arrived 18 hours ahead of time (ref-1) (ref-2).

Here is a really good page (among a bunch) that explains supernovae.

Pretty much everything in quantum mechanics is hiding somewhere in the damn thing, nobody can actually solve it for all cases, and it's complex enough to boggle the minds of 99.9% of mortals (yours truly included).

There's a good example (LaTeX->image) here.

Good for them. Like I said, that's what we do with BU Linux. ("Gee"?)

For example, file/transfer sizes seem to follow what's called a "Heavy-Tailed" distribution (usually modelled as Paretto). This means, roughly, "most of the files are small; most of the bytes are in big files."

The parameters of the distribution depend on where in the network you take the measurements (inside the client, mid-net proxy, server).

• W3C's Web Characterization Activity
• Generating Representative Web Workloads for Network and Server Performance Evaluation - BUCS TR 1997-006 - Crovella and Barford
• Changes in Web Client Access Patterns - BUCS TR 1998-023 - Barford, Bestavros, Bradley, Crovella
• etc etc etc...

There are some old studies of which low-level protocols appear most on the backbone (UDP vs TCP for picking out "streaming" candidates etc); they're harder to get now that the backbones are commercial instead of research-centric.

As for how much is porn and how much is business, well... I've been involved with some studies that have casually looked at that, too; In one trace I checked out, about 13% of requests included some word that would indicate a site with strong sexual content (The 13% number is without trying very hard; it's also worth noting that the percentage of bytes in responses to those requests was a larger percentage, on the order of 20-something IIRC). Unfortunately, it's a little harder to differentiate "business" from "casual/home" with heuristics, so no numbers there.

For example, file/transfer sizes seem to follow what's called a "Heavy-Tailed" distribution (usually modelled as Paretto). This means, roughly, "most of the files are small; most of the bytes are in big files."

The parameters of the distribution depend on where in the network you take the measurements (inside the client, mid-net proxy, server).

• W3C's Web Characterization Activity
• Generating Representative Web Workloads for Network and Server Performance Evaluation - BUCS TR 1997-006 - Crovella and Barford
• Changes in Web Client Access Patterns - BUCS TR 1998-023 - Barford, Bestavros, Bradley, Crovella
• etc etc etc...

There are some old studies of which low-level protocols appear most on the backbone (UDP vs TCP for picking out "streaming" candidates etc); they're harder to get now that the backbones are commercial instead of research-centric.

As for how much is porn and how much is business, well... I've been involved with some studies that have casually looked at that, too; In one trace I checked out, about 13% of requests included some word that would indicate a site with strong sexual content (The 13% number is without trying very hard; it's also worth noting that the percentage of bytes in responses to those requests was a larger percentage, on the order of 20-something IIRC). Unfortunately, it's a little harder to differentiate "business" from "casual/home" with heuristics, so no numbers there.

So where is this extra information located? It is obvious that there must be some other mechanism at work. I would posit that the mechanism is supernatural.

Z = Z^2 + C

The above equation, when iterated over each value Z on the complex number plane (where Z is decomposed to X + Yi), produces the Mandelbrot set.

An amazing amount of complexity is evident in the Mandelbrot set. Yet, the basis is simply that one-line equation.

The genome is similar to that equation, in that it is relatively simple when viewed as a string of bases, an abstraction that ignores the existence of the cell that surrounds it. However, in terms of a biological system (DNA is near-useless without the complement of chemical reactions that work on it), the genome becomes a basis for the generation of life processes--much like the equation becomes the Mandelbrot set when iterated.

Mind you, this does not discount the possibility that some deity may have originally set these processes in motion. But I feel that whatever the origin of these processes, the amount of information that can be derived from the human genome should not be underestimated.

-W-

"Is it all journey, or is there landfall?"

Neutrino experiments have indeed measured a lot of good stuff, say from the sun, reactors and accelerators, and cosmic rays.

However, since neutrinos are so hard to measure, these measurements are not nearly as precise as you would like. Compared to the accelerator measurements, they are orders of magnitude less precise! The better nu measurements we make, the better information on how leptons behave the theorists can use in building their models of how everything is put together.

Also, the only neutrinos from stars that have been measured are from the Sun and a few from Supernova 1987A. We would dearly love to see neutrinos from other astrophysical sources, but being far away really kills the signal when the Sun (which is right next door) only gives you a dozen or so nu interactions per day. We need to wait for another nearby supernova (check out our Supernova Early Warning System SNEWS!) or build a Really Big neutrino telescope like AMANDA.

Finally, here's a great place to find a lot of neutrino links: The Ultimate Neutrino Page.

The Connection, a nationally syndicated call in show from WBUR in Boston, ran a radio interview with the author this morning.

Click here for The Connection's Pride Before the Fall web page.

Click here for the Real Audio interview.

DF's work is based on Tornado Codes, which use some really neat tricks with graphs and XORs to reconstruct an N-packet file from any N+e (small e) out of a stream of KN (for some non-trivial K, say 4) packets. John Byers is largely responsible for this invention - see his SIGCOMM98 and INFOCOM99 papers, among others. He's currently doing lots of work in the multicast/congestion control/next-gen network areas. (How do I know this? His office is maybe 20 yards from mine.)

Umm....if you have a sound card and can play RealAuido .rm files, you can hear it any time you like at: the link from the originally referenced page -- which goes to The Connection's archive of it (at Boston University).

--

But they do! Yes, I am serious! There's a condition often called 'lazy eye'. Where by one eye cannot focus and/or be controlled as finely as the other. One treatment for this is to cover the 'good eye' with a patch, forcing the 'bad eye' to 'practice'. Now here's the 'videogame treatment' angle; 20 minutes of viewing PONG is worth approximately 8 hours of 'normal' viewing on average. (yes, some videogames have more value in the matter than others) This is scientifically supported but I can also provide personal anecdotal evidence. My niece had a 'lazy eye' and the doctor said the condition was so progressed that it would probably take three years of wearing the eye patch to correct it. But in only 4 months with at least one hour a day of various videogames the doctor pronounced the condition cured. And yes, this 'videogame treatment' was done with the doctors full support.

Videogames to treat ADD/ADHD
Diffamblyopia (lazy eye)
Videogames and Parkinson's Disease
Videogames to treat inflammatory bowel disease and juvenile diabetes
National Institutes of Health and Videogames
Amblyopia (advice from another doctor)
more amblyopia advice
yet another doctor's opinion)
Reduce risk of getting Lyme Disease
Healthy anger management for kids
Avoiding/dealing with Nebulizer side-effects
still more amblyopia advice
Super Nintendo treatment for asthma (Bronkie the Bronchiasaurus)
Super Nintendo treatment for Diabetes (Packy & Marlon)
Super Nintendo anti-smoking (Rex Ronan)

There is a Java compiler implemented in Java in the works here.

And (according to the web page) a fully working one here.

I THINK that both of these should run in the JVM for EPOC, but I suggest checking before running out and buying a 5mx (~$500, but well worth it) strictly for Java use.

The other thing to keep in mind is the limited memory on these devices. You may need to add a CF card to hold all of your development environment. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

This isn't relevant to the topic of "Girl Geeks", except for clouding the discussion. Sommers' arguments tend to miss feminist points in a way that looks deliberate to me. Take for instance the that Atlantic Monthly article you linked ...

"today's girls outshine boys" (Sommers' words in my italics) because they "now outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and in debating clubs". The skills practiced here are mostly social, not deeply technical. Actually so are many examples of girls' behavior illustrated in this article -- irrelevant to the subject of math/science education for girls.

Boys as a group probably have a different constellation of needs that aren't being met in the school system (as acknowledged not just by Sommers but by Sommer's feminist whipping girl Carol Gilligan). This doesn't disprove or contradict that girls with potential to excel in technical fields are shortchanged, only that boys are probably shortchanged in different ways.

That Summers chooses to characterize this issue as a "feminist" "War on Boys" strikes me as opportunistic and unnecessary, like she's looking for the big media attention that was given Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe (as opposed to the academics she criticizes but nobody reads). Even her Atlantic Monthly bio lists "tart essays about feminist disingenuousness" as one of her specialties. Nothing wrong with criticism & honest debunking, but she could address this issue without invoking her pet demon.

Sommers makes good points in that there are prejudices against boys, and attention needs to be given in schools to how they socialize, and they have special needs that different from girls. And it's obvious that Sommers care about boys a lot. But I'd be a lot more receptive to what she has to say if she didn't spend so much time vilifying feminism in general, and the American Association of University Women's "fishy" research (not my phrase, or even Sommers' come to think of it) in particular.

Here's a link to an NPR show with Christina Hoff Summers discussing her War Against Boys idea, with RealAudio. The host likes her a lot.
__________

I haven't been able to find much in the way of handwriting recognition software for Linux. Anyone have any pointers? It would certainly make my Ricoh G-1200s a lot more useful.

To plug some work done in my department, Azer Bestavros has done
some nice work on network
profiling : the idea I liked most was a way to make the TCP binary
backoff work better by grouping together similar packets: this can be
done entirely end-to-end, and really gets big improvements in overall
performance. See in particular the paper `QoS Controllers for the Internet'.

We're working on just this at Boston University. Our original plan, as reflected on the BU Linux web site was to base our distro on Bastille Linux -- that was back when Bastille was in super-early development and was planned as an actual distribution. They've gone the route of a hardening script, something we'd like to avoid. (We'd like all of our changes to be to RPMs, rather than pasted on afterward, for better system upgradability and managability.)

So, we're starting work on a distro of our own, integrating ideas from Bastille with Red Hat, and adding things we need like Kerberos IV, AFS (Arla, probably), Amanda, etc. If this sounds like what you're doing, please contact me at mattdm@bu.edu . It seems worthwhile to at least share ideas, even if we don't end up combining our work.

--

We're working on just this at Boston University. Our original plan, as reflected on the BU Linux web site was to base our distro on Bastille Linux -- that was back when Bastille was in super-early development and was planned as an actual distribution. They've gone the route of a hardening script, something we'd like to avoid. (We'd like all of our changes to be to RPMs, rather than pasted on afterward, for better system upgradability and managability.)

So, we're starting work on a distro of our own, integrating ideas from Bastille with Red Hat, and adding things we need like Kerberos IV, AFS (Arla, probably), Amanda, etc. If this sounds like what you're doing, please contact me at mattdm@bu.edu . It seems worthwhile to at least share ideas, even if we don't end up combining our work.

--

If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.

No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.

[N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]

Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.

Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:

http://bmerc-www.bu.edu/needle-doc/emacs/ .

If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.

___
DC

P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here.