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Either you are truly ignorant, or you're a Scientology member (and a pretty good one, too). Just in case you're unaware of the fact that the IRS caved in to Scientology, here's a link to get you started: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/irs.html

So yes, Scientology actually outspent and outmaneuvered the friggin IRS. Yes, crimes have been committed by Scientology, and have been reported to the police. Unfortunately, Scientology is very, very good with lawsuits and personal defamation, which means that no one has been able to actually kill them off.

Right now, I regard them as a bigger threat to society than the Mafia.

The video that they forced off of YouTube can, thanks to Gawker, be found here.

As a non-scientologist, this is scary. Possibly the most scary part of it is the editing. I have no problem with people having convictions but when he talks about "fightin' the fight" and "people needing them" and "people depending on them" ... I get a little frightened that people around me think like that. You may be able to argue that it's little different than Christianity or Islam but what I really fear are the people who are part of Sea Org or offshore from the states and may have given up their rights as a civilian & American to have some sort of special standing in this group.

Whatever the case, I will not ever affiliate myself with a Scientologist and after reading Have You Lived Before This Life, I will do everything in my power to convince those that I know and love to avoid Scientology.

The thing that concerns me about Scientology is that after reading some books by Hubbard about it, I have found very little criticism of it. A book & some articles with the most notable one being Time Magazine. It seems like such an easy target. It takes seconds to find books criticizing Catholics or Muslims ... why are there so few publications attacking Scientology? There is definitely something scary about a very powerful organization and if they have people dumping money into them, I do not doubt they are capable of silencing anyone (unfortunately, even Slashdot).

He is a Kernel file system hacker, not a Cyrus Imap hacker -- they have the wrong man :-)

While Touretzky prefaces his page on the subject with "Computer professionals who have examined these mechanisms have found them easy to defeat", I miss something able to decrypt or print the latest crop -- where APDFPR says

APDFPR Error
The document was created with 'eBook Exchange (EBX_HANDLER) 128-bit security v.3' encryption handler. This protection method is not supported.

Having the eBook and the etx.etd file I guess that should in principle be possible, but how's that done in practice?

http://wcohen.blogspot.com/2008/01/measure-twice-cut-once.html

The original idea: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/#sw and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/postscript/sdm-2007-leak.pdf

I've just installed it. Seems to works for me.

http://wcohen.blogspot.com/2008/01/measure-twice-cut-once.html

The original idea: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/#sw and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/postscript/sdm-2007-leak.pdf

I've just installed it. Seems to works for me.

I don't have $100k but I do have $40, a web browser and a basic knowledge of electronics. If you do too you might want to try this link.

I worked on this with Seth through Prof. Rudich's Andrew's leap program last summer. Interesting stuff. Sure, what my group and I were working on wasn't exactly nanotechnology (in fact, we were working with balloon-based models over 1m cubed, one of which I still have), but hopefully some of the data that was collected will ultimately help produce catoms on a more useful scale. Weather I'll see catoms in my life is debatable, but it's still an interesting field to explore.

How about "Christmasbush" for all the Robert Forward or Hans Moravec fans.

although posey is still a research project, it is being developed on linux in python.

the source code is available from the code lab mercurial repository here:
http://code.arc.cmu.edu/hg/pyposey

if you are interested in building an application for posey send me an email.

And you have a little demo app that demonstrates that, right?

Not mine, but yes.

Well, that is actually something the Wiimote can tell. The distance between the two IR dots from the sensorbar tells you how far you are away from the screen, at least as long as the player is pointing to the screen.

That would only be true if it can pick out the exact position of the dots in the image. I'm not entirely sure the image sensor has that kind of control. If so, then you're right.

Social Logic will help mitigate obstacles. Technology Logic as infrastructure is a partial solution. Business logic only, will fail.

A community (Social Logic) is always sharing implicit content to sustain the social relationships (work, pay, play, safety ...). In the work environment infrastructure (significant, maybe complete) community implicit content can be collected, grown, and maintain then mined, recovered, and recycled for business logic purposes.

With internal VoIP, email, PIM+, web-browsing history, VTC/Social conferencing, BioPKI tokens/authentication ... data/content bulk collection and Biz and HR essential information ... it should be possible to initially chart the conceptual ideal core-biz processes to core-personnel, then to external B2B/B2C processes and their essential contact information. All along this flow/path the core data/content bulk can be used to convert internal into explicit codified knowledge publications. Then, you must maintain the data/content bulk/audit trail to discover innovative, transitional, and situational variations in new implicit activities for intelligently transition of explicit knowledge publications and future BizTransformation (why, because shit happens and things change, thank god).

Tools to consider as part of the solution:
CMS, Syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML
CMS, Syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax
CMS, Syntax: http://www.w3schools.com/
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=XML
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Content+Management+System
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/services/buy/service_providers.php?words=XML+schema+syntax+
KMS, Semantics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
KMS, Semantics: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/swsig/
KMS, Semantics: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Knowledge+management+system
BPM, Semantics: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Bussiness+Process+management
BRM, Synergy: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=business+relationship+managemnt
RMM, Synergy: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=relationship+managment+model
RMS, Synergy: http://nwn.blogs.com/
RMS, Synergy: http://secondlife.com/whatis/
TCM, Practical: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/isis/model-problems.htm
TCM, Practical: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/intro/documents/concept/
TCM, Practical:

Social Logic will help mitigate obstacles. Technology Logic as infrastructure is a partial solution. Business logic only, will fail.

A community (Social Logic) is always sharing implicit content to sustain the social relationships (work, pay, play, safety ...). In the work environment infrastructure (significant, maybe complete) community implicit content can be collected, grown, and maintain then mined, recovered, and recycled for business logic purposes.

With internal VoIP, email, PIM+, web-browsing history, VTC/Social conferencing, BioPKI tokens/authentication ... data/content bulk collection and Biz and HR essential information ... it should be possible to initially chart the conceptual ideal core-biz processes to core-personnel, then to external B2B/B2C processes and their essential contact information. All along this flow/path the core data/content bulk can be used to convert internal into explicit codified knowledge publications. Then, you must maintain the data/content bulk/audit trail to discover innovative, transitional, and situational variations in new implicit activities for intelligently transition of explicit knowledge publications and future BizTransformation (why, because shit happens and things change, thank god).

Tools to consider as part of the solution:
CMS, Syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML
CMS, Syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax
CMS, Syntax: http://www.w3schools.com/
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=XML
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Content+Management+System
CMS, Syntax: https://sourceforge.net/services/buy/service_providers.php?words=XML+schema+syntax+
KMS, Semantics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
KMS, Semantics: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/swsig/
KMS, Semantics: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Knowledge+management+system
BPM, Semantics: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=Bussiness+Process+management
BRM, Synergy: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=business+relationship+managemnt
RMM, Synergy: https://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=relationship+managment+model
RMS, Synergy: http://nwn.blogs.com/
RMS, Synergy: http://secondlife.com/whatis/
TCM, Practical: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/isis/model-problems.htm
TCM, Practical: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/intro/documents/concept/
TCM, Practical:

Segmentation and intersecting arcs can be difficult for automated attacks: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1054972.1055070

You know those annoying flash advertisement games (shoot the monkey for a free iPod)? Well, they could potentially be adapted for CAPTCHAs as well: http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2006/posters/misra-poster_abstract.pdf

...the only reason for its existence.

Mod parent up. Whilst I can see it being a hassle at public kiosks, it may be useful at home where you're the only user. Johnny Chung Lee has a project similar to this.

I believe he already did something at least similar. See the multi-point interactive white boards at his page.

If they found a way to do this with two projectors, though, you'd probably be able to avoid even that (though alignment/convergence issues would be a bitch).

Johnny Lee, who is actually mentioned in a post further down, did this already using low cost projectors and surfaces.

Look at Automatic Projector Calibration on his website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/thesis/

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/thesis/

The first video demonstrates this. The next videos on this page are just faster and more dynamic ways of auto-calibrating. This is also the guy who's done all of the crazy wiimote stuff, like the multitouch poorman's interactive whiteboard. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/, second video on the page.

Guess he's pretty ahead of the game.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/thesis/

The first video demonstrates this. The next videos on this page are just faster and more dynamic ways of auto-calibrating. This is also the guy who's done all of the crazy wiimote stuff, like the multitouch poorman's interactive whiteboard. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/, second video on the page.

Guess he's pretty ahead of the game.

He already did: it's a project called "Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote" located at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/.

"Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems."

Not really. The best software as usual is free and Open Source. The trouble is that (1) It lacks a marketing budget so few people know about it and (2) it is software "by Phds and for Phds" meaning that it is not packaged with a slick installer and GUI.

The Mac and PC software we are talking about here mgame out of CMU decades ago and the basic science was funded mostly by DARPA. Well DARPA is still funding CMU and you can see their latest up to the minute work here
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/ but like I said above the software's target user base has an advanced degree in computer science.

So Nuance does not have a monopoly on SR. They only have the monopoly on packaging and marking SR. Ste of the art SR part is available to anyone for free.

This reminds me of MouseHaus, a collaborative pedestrian simulation environment. Here's a video -- the pedestrian simulation stuff is about 2/3 into it. http://code.arc.cmu.edu/lab/html/video59.html

It was done by collaborators of my advisor.

Of course it's possible to rewrite the simulator in any other language. It's just a question of how much work would it be, and how sure you would be that it did the same thing.

It was comparatively little work to rewrite C code in C++, because that's exactly what C++ was designed to do: take old C code with global variables and functions, and encapsulate it in a class with a well defined interface. Because C++ has the implicit this parameter to each member function, and it's not necessary to explicitly specify this when accessing member variables and methods, you don't have to change C code very much to translate it to C++. A different language with explicit this (or self) would require meticulously changing every line of code, and that would be orders of magnitude more work.

The first step to translating a big pile of C code to another higher level language is understanding and strictly defining what it does. Translating it to C++ is the first step in that process. That gives the code a lot more structure and coherence, without disrupting how it works.

The next step is to clean it up and toss out everything that isn't relevent -- all the old user interface and operating system hacks that no longer are necessary and have nothing to do with the simulator.

Once you have a clean core of code that verifyable works with well defined interfaces and without any irrelavent crap in it, it's much easier to start rewriting it in other languages like Python or Lua. (I would NOT suggest using Perl, though. That is a horrible, dead end language, antithetical to teaching kids how to program.)

Alan Kay and I have been having an interesting discussion about how to rewrite SimCity in much higher level languages than Python and Perl, specifically visual programming languages like eToys, Star Logo, Max/MSP, KidSim (Stagecraft Creator), Bounce (Body Electric), SimAntics, etc, along the lines of Robot Odyssey.

What we want to do is to open up SimCity to the Python scripting language as a first step, and then write a high level visual programming language in Python, easy enough for kids to use, but powerful enough for real programming.

Here are some references:
Ideas for Sugar development environment from HyperLook SimCity
OLPC Visual Programming Languages for Education
Discussion with Alan Kay about Visual Programming
Discussion with Alan Kay about Robot Odyssey
OLPC Visual Programming Language Discussion with Guido van Rossum and Alan Kay
Alan Kay on Programming Languages
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines
Kurt Schmucker (inventor of the C++ Barf Bag ;-) at Apple wrote "A Taxonomy of Simulation Software"
Tim Smith at Anglia Polytechnic University in Essex wrote "A review of simulated and micro-world environments"
Brad Myers: Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization

-Don

It was a case study used in the 1999 AP test given in C++. Here are the answers... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/mjs/ftp/99-solutions.txt but I can't find the quesitons.

Reminds me of Johnny.

[ xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D wrote] Anyway, at least publicly, GM is probably the most impressive car company in terms of researching these sorts of things....Maybe they're a little bit Microsoft-ish in that their research department is heavily insulated from the rest of the company, I don't know.

Carnegie Mellon did this type of thing as well from a still image.
http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060613_3d.html

Yeah, the big breakthrough in this, IMHO, was a 1994 paper by Takeo Kanade of CMU's Robotics Institute titled "A Sequential Factorization Method for Recovering Shape and Motion from Image Streams", which did a pretty good job of factorizing out the 3D model as well as the camera motion from a video stream... it could tell you not only the dimensions of the house you were videotaping, but the stride of the person holding the camera. This laid the groundwork for a lot of other "model from video" work done throughout the 90's. More recently a group there has done a lot of work on "Shape from Sillouette" which looks closer to the technology that this product uses.

I've been waiting for this technology to go big on eBay for a decade... maybe this'll be the year.

Yeah, the big breakthrough in this, IMHO, was a 1994 paper by Takeo Kanade of CMU's Robotics Institute titled "A Sequential Factorization Method for Recovering Shape and Motion from Image Streams", which did a pretty good job of factorizing out the 3D model as well as the camera motion from a video stream... it could tell you not only the dimensions of the house you were videotaping, but the stride of the person holding the camera. This laid the groundwork for a lot of other "model from video" work done throughout the 90's. More recently a group there has done a lot of work on "Shape from Sillouette" which looks closer to the technology that this product uses.

I've been waiting for this technology to go big on eBay for a decade... maybe this'll be the year.

Of course, there are plenty of other uses for robots besides war machines and bar disarmament.

I think the Wii whiteboard hack and the Wii head tracking hack are loads cooler than anything on the list. ...Of course there's no "CrackNotHack" tag on the story, so no wonder.

However, the C# version was already done by Johnny Chung Lee

"Betta step up yo game"

NOTE: For most of these projects, you don't need the Nintendo Wii console. You only need the Wii controller and a bluetooth connection.

As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significatnly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. It contains a 1024x768 infrared camera with built-in hardware blob tracking of up to 4 points at 100Hz. This significantly out performs any PC "webcam" available today. It also contains a +/-3g 8-bit 3-axis accelerometer also operating at 100Hz and an expandsion port for even more capability.

Emacs, unlike Office, is a powerful and useful tool where all the bloat is there to help get the job done more efficiently

Emacs, unlike Office, is a powerful and useful tool where all the bloat is there to help get the job done more efficiently

Yes, they're called counter-notices and (as far as I understand) the only recourse after receiving one is to take legal action. Though the 'under penalty of perjury' claus probably discourages people from using these handy tools.
A nice template for such a notice can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Terrorism/form-letter.html.

I guess you need a bigger TV. Its pretty accurate for me and is never off by an inch. You're either using a 4 inch display or you're wii is broken.

Have a look at the tracking capabilities of the wiimote on even a 32 inch surface...it seems pretty accurate:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

This is something I've found kind of interesting ever since I first heard of it a couple years ago. However, we may not be limited to simply looking much longer. For example, a newer application of the Wii Remote that allows users to convert any display into a digital white board could allow fog display users to directly manipulate both the fog and the image being projected over the affected area simultaneously, making it possible to do things like carve directly into the display itself. (Though, much of it may initially come off as a gimmick similar to some of Apple's interactive quicktime movie demos, such as realtime water ripples created on mouseclicks.)

Eventually, I'd love to see a way to do this that doesn't require the fog, like maybe using lasers to intersect at a single point in 3D space in such a way that the polarization reflects the light back to the viewer at that point, while remaining invisible elsewhere.

That picture is not actually from the new research, it is from old work at Carnegie-Mellon. Here is a bigger version:

http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterstrider/STRIDE_water_strider_big.jpg

It is part of the work of the NanoRobotics Labaratory at CMU.

That picture is not actually from the new research, it is from old work at Carnegie-Mellon. Here is a bigger version:

http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterstrider/STRIDE_water_strider_big.jpg

It is part of the work of the NanoRobotics Labaratory at CMU.

I hunted for the video. In my search I came upon the original site, not the article talking about the site.

http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterstrider/

Here is the actual project including how it works (Pizo) photos of both prototypes, the light and dark one, and detail on the robotics in it.
It includes 3 videos including the walking on water video.

BTW your link to dynamic content has expired. Here's another link to section 1201 of the DMCA. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/dmca-1200.txt

Upon seeing this video, I sent the following email to some non-technical friends of mine:

###
Subject: These Assholes are going to Kill us All.

Gentlemen,

http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/crusher/videos/index.htm

See this collection of videos. Feel the fear that arises when you come
to the inevitable conclusion that the descendants of this soulless
automaton will be used for one thing, and one thing only: to crush the
fucking proletariat. Sure, there'll be a lot of talk about "casualty
reduction" and so on, but does anyone really believe that? Really?

I know I don't.
###

I, for one, can't wait to live in a future where mechanized killbots with facial-recognition software patrol the world's working-class neighborhoods to keep us "safe".

Thanks, Dudes!

The reason CMU got this funding is primarily due to the fact that we built Crusher (I'm a grad student at the Robotics Institute), for which some of this funding is directed to upgrade. Crusher is, hands-down, the biggest beast of a robot I've ever seen. It's a six wheeled, 6.5 ton, autonomous vehicle - this thing can drive up 4 foot (1.2 meter) steps, has 30 inches (76 cm) of suspension travel, and can carry 8000 lbs of payload. There isn't much that this thing can't handle.

If you have never seen Crusher in action, you've got to see it to believe it. There's a bunch of videos here: http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/crusher/videos/index.htm.

The quote in the original post is a little misleading - I don't really think NREC is going to be working on mounting weapons on the new vehicle. Primarily they're continuing development on autonomous mobility - can it properly plan and quickly execute a good route to get from point A to point B over rough terrain. Check out the CMU press release for a little more detail on the grant.

The reason CMU got this funding is primarily due to the fact that we built Crusher (I'm a grad student at the Robotics Institute), for which some of this funding is directed to upgrade. Crusher is, hands-down, the biggest beast of a robot I've ever seen. It's a six wheeled, 6.5 ton, autonomous vehicle - this thing can drive up 4 foot (1.2 meter) steps, has 30 inches (76 cm) of suspension travel, and can carry 8000 lbs of payload. There isn't much that this thing can't handle.

If you have never seen Crusher in action, you've got to see it to believe it. There's a bunch of videos here: http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/crusher/videos/index.htm.

The quote in the original post is a little misleading - I don't really think NREC is going to be working on mounting weapons on the new vehicle. Primarily they're continuing development on autonomous mobility - can it properly plan and quickly execute a good route to get from point A to point B over rough terrain. Check out the CMU press release for a little more detail on the grant.

I think it's safe to say Carnegie Melon is focused on industry applicable results when it comes to robotics.
Maybe you should check out the NREC.

CMU got the $14 million because the Robotics Institute already has an autonomous tank, Crusher. The money was given specifically to create an updated version of it.