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Then again, this is Disney; they abhor the public domain, so it oprobably stands to reason that they wouldn't dare touch that prospect.

Not necessarily so. They open-sourced their Panda3D game engine, used most notably for their game Toontown Online.

Here's a bit from their FAQ:
Panda3D was originally developed at the Disney VR Studio. Disney VR used a proprietary IRIX-specific system called DWD (Disney's World Designer) to create several DisneyQuest Virtual Reality Attractions, such as "Aladdin's Magic Carpet VR Adventure", "Hercules in the Underworld", and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold", between 1997 and 2000. In 2000, Disney VR embarked on the Toontown Online project, and decided to build a new engine that contained many of the DWD design principles, but would be more modular, so it could be ported to more platforms, and more easily change over time. The new engine was dubbed "Panda3D", ostensibly standing for "Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture".

In 2002, Disney VR decided to make the engine open source, so they could more easily work with universities (such as UNC) on Virtual Reality research projects. However, the system, although quite usable by the team that developed it, was not quite "open source ready". There were several interested users, but building and installing the system was incredibly complex, and there was little in the way of documentation or sample code, so there was really no significant open source community right away.

In 2003, Jesse Schell left the VR Studio (on good terms, he claims) to join the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. The ETC was looking for something like Panda3D -- a 3D engine powerful enough to create compelling experiences, but also open and flexible. Since then, ETC students have been working to make Panda3D usable at the ETC and by the world at large.

Then again, this is Disney; they abhor the public domain, so it oprobably stands to reason that they wouldn't dare touch that prospect.

Not necessarily so. They open-sourced their Panda3D game engine, used most notably for their game Toontown Online.

Here's a bit from their FAQ:
Panda3D was originally developed at the Disney VR Studio. Disney VR used a proprietary IRIX-specific system called DWD (Disney's World Designer) to create several DisneyQuest Virtual Reality Attractions, such as "Aladdin's Magic Carpet VR Adventure", "Hercules in the Underworld", and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Battle for the Buccaneer Gold", between 1997 and 2000. In 2000, Disney VR embarked on the Toontown Online project, and decided to build a new engine that contained many of the DWD design principles, but would be more modular, so it could be ported to more platforms, and more easily change over time. The new engine was dubbed "Panda3D", ostensibly standing for "Platform Agnostic Networked Display Architecture".

In 2002, Disney VR decided to make the engine open source, so they could more easily work with universities (such as UNC) on Virtual Reality research projects. However, the system, although quite usable by the team that developed it, was not quite "open source ready". There were several interested users, but building and installing the system was incredibly complex, and there was little in the way of documentation or sample code, so there was really no significant open source community right away.

In 2003, Jesse Schell left the VR Studio (on good terms, he claims) to join the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. The ETC was looking for something like Panda3D -- a 3D engine powerful enough to create compelling experiences, but also open and flexible. Since then, ETC students have been working to make Panda3D usable at the ETC and by the world at large.

By the tone of your post I'm not sure if you don't understand or are bitter.

Perhaps a bit of both... (or maybe just jaded) I'd inferred you were including GUI development in reference to your comments, since that's what the article was about and I don't see how testing can be simplified that far for GUIs.

inputs are finite and outputs are finite...

By that logic all encryption is "breakable" because it requires finite computations to break it. In a sense this is true, but that sense isn't very practical.

It is quite trivial to create a system in which the number of possible inputs is much too large to feasibly test. Theoretically, 128 bits of meaningful data is plenty to ensure no exhaustive proof is feasible in the near term. More practically GUI inputs including timing, mouse position, button clicking and general mayhem provides much larger sets of possible input.

Your point... "The only way you can "prove" your program is correct is by mangling the specification one way or another" is absolutely false...

That depends on your definition of specification. I was thinking along the lines of what is requested/desired by a customer, in the form they choose to request it in. You seem to have already limited specification to mean only "a precise and testable set of inputs".

I suppose I was thinking mostly of custom software , since that is the area I work in, but even a specification drawn up based on case studies, user surveys and the like can contain elements that don't break down well into small testable pieces.

The simple point is that certain types of specification can be validated to one degree or another (statistically if not exhaustively), but fulfilling the user's desires and intents, not meeting a specification drawn up by consultants and/or developers, is the primary goal.

Using proofs based on specifications is a bit like using test-driven development. The development process can become more controlled and predictable, but when you step back and look at overall project success rate and customer satisfaction, the numbers aren't much better than any of the other methodologies. This is because the rift between end-user and satisfaction exists just the same whether it is between user requests and developer understanding of the problem or between developer understanding and implementation. Decreasing the rift between developer understanding and implementation can be very helpful, but tends to increase overall cost and limit developer flexibility (ie: we can't do X because it isn't easily testable) therefore decreasing overall customer satisfaction.

(Note: All I really know about test driven development is what I've read. In trying it, I've read through a few examples, but they always leave a bad taste in my mouth... High level acceptance testing seems to have much more aesthetic appeal. )

As a counter-example to proof/test driven design I'll hold up the tiniest known C implementation of the CSS descrambler at the gallery of CSS descramblers. This is, in my opinion, an awesome piece of code. I don't see how anything close (in terms of size and speed) could be written using TDD or some other proof driven form of development. (obviously some level of testing is possible on this piece of code, but there's certainly no easy way I can think of to verify it as "100% correct" or "contains no bugs") Note: if you're going to read the code, you'll want to use a de-obfuscating tool of some sort to fix the lack of white space...

By the tone of your post I'm not sure if you don't understand or are bitter.

Perhaps a bit of both... (or maybe just jaded) I'd inferred you were including GUI development in reference to your comments, since that's what the article was about and I don't see how testing can be simplified that far for GUIs.

inputs are finite and outputs are finite...

By that logic all encryption is "breakable" because it requires finite computations to break it. In a sense this is true, but that sense isn't very practical.

It is quite trivial to create a system in which the number of possible inputs is much too large to feasibly test. Theoretically, 128 bits of meaningful data is plenty to ensure no exhaustive proof is feasible in the near term. More practically GUI inputs including timing, mouse position, button clicking and general mayhem provides much larger sets of possible input.

Your point... "The only way you can "prove" your program is correct is by mangling the specification one way or another" is absolutely false...

That depends on your definition of specification. I was thinking along the lines of what is requested/desired by a customer, in the form they choose to request it in. You seem to have already limited specification to mean only "a precise and testable set of inputs".

I suppose I was thinking mostly of custom software , since that is the area I work in, but even a specification drawn up based on case studies, user surveys and the like can contain elements that don't break down well into small testable pieces.

The simple point is that certain types of specification can be validated to one degree or another (statistically if not exhaustively), but fulfilling the user's desires and intents, not meeting a specification drawn up by consultants and/or developers, is the primary goal.

Using proofs based on specifications is a bit like using test-driven development. The development process can become more controlled and predictable, but when you step back and look at overall project success rate and customer satisfaction, the numbers aren't much better than any of the other methodologies. This is because the rift between end-user and satisfaction exists just the same whether it is between user requests and developer understanding of the problem or between developer understanding and implementation. Decreasing the rift between developer understanding and implementation can be very helpful, but tends to increase overall cost and limit developer flexibility (ie: we can't do X because it isn't easily testable) therefore decreasing overall customer satisfaction.

(Note: All I really know about test driven development is what I've read. In trying it, I've read through a few examples, but they always leave a bad taste in my mouth... High level acceptance testing seems to have much more aesthetic appeal. )

As a counter-example to proof/test driven design I'll hold up the tiniest known C implementation of the CSS descrambler at the gallery of CSS descramblers. This is, in my opinion, an awesome piece of code. I don't see how anything close (in terms of size and speed) could be written using TDD or some other proof driven form of development. (obviously some level of testing is possible on this piece of code, but there's certainly no easy way I can think of to verify it as "100% correct" or "contains no bugs") Note: if you're going to read the code, you'll want to use a de-obfuscating tool of some sort to fix the lack of white space...

she won't need to. the system works even if you just apply one of the reflective stickers to the forehead, or better yet to the headset microphone, if she uses one. couple that with sphinx (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/), and bob's your uncle.

And here.

First, Tannebaum's OS is Minix, not "minux". Second, here's a link for you and anybode else who can't fucking use Google: LINUX's History.

.......unless, obviously, they start trying this: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/. My father is an MD, which in italian roughly translates into " his handwriting is a Brownian function", and I know he'd love a good speech recognition program. what hampered its development until now is that it is a resource hog (http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/athlon64-350 0/index.x?pg=7

.As a language, Java isn't anything new

Actually, I'd say that's one of Java's strengths: it brought useful concepts and features to mainstream coders that used to only be in non-mainstream languages. C++ did the same thing.

Sure, they're both far from ideal, but for whatever reason the more perfect languages have (sadly) not succeeded in business. Since I have use an imperfect language on the job, I'm glad there are these less painful compromises.

As Guy Steele (one of those Lisp-loving geeks) says about his work on Java:

We had to make hard choices about what to fix before releasing it.

And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?

Note that the Economic Times and the Times of India, while part of the same group (Bennett and Coleman Ltd.), are two different newspapers. The former, which carries the article, is a respected (if slightly sensational) business daily, while the latter, which you cite, is just toilet paper.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Unofficial/Canadiana/legis latures.html

Robots can do it too!

CC.

Was Marine Doom the first example of using a video game as a military training tool or does something predate it?

Personal Software Process, devised by the SEI TSP team at CMU.

In its non-infectious form, the protein normally helps to read and convert the DNA code into other proteins. But in its infectious form, the prion stops working. This means that many proteins are manufactured slightly sloppily.

The team believes that prions may therefore offer a speedy way for yeast to evolve, because those cells with the infectious prion churn out a whole range of slightly altered proteins. Normally this is bad news for the yeast, but when the cells find themselves in a tough spot, one or two of them may grow better in the new conditions as a result, and so help the colony to survive.

Yes, I was being funny. Its still right though- if you don't breathe, you die. The dead can't commit violent crimes. So killing everyone would stop violent crime (after the killing is over, of course).

But you're still quite a bit off. To prove causality, you don't need a control group. You need an intervention. You need to take a random group of people and force them to play 40 hrs of violent video games a week, and see if that increased their tendancy to violence.

Merely comparing to a control group is statistical noise. It could mean A caused B, it could mean B caused A (far more likely IMHO, that violent people like violent games), it could mean A and B have a common cause, or it could be pure luck. An intervention setting the rate of violent media at a set level would be able to tell if it really does cause violence. Anything else proves nothing. A good resource on this is found at CMU's open learning initiaative

Well, we're talking biochemistry here, so there's really no cause or need to invoke the Incompleteness Theorem.

Further, no--it's not possible to demonstrate every ill health effect. A thought experiment, if you will...

Consider the very rare but highly feared disease X, which affects one of every million people. Consider also potentially toxic compound Y. It is present in the drinking water of every person in Los Angeles (population approximately ten million), and nowhere else in the state.

One would expect approximately ten cases of disease X in the city population, but there will be some deviation due to random clustering. One expects the number of cases to follow a Poisson distribution, giving a standard deviation of about three cases.

Under those circumstances, there's a 95% chance that the number of cases observed in the city will fall between 5 and 15. To have any hope of discerning a risk associated with compound Y, you need to see more than fifteen cases. Realistically, you probably need to get out to about twenty cases observed before you can start saying anything about the 'dangers' of Y. In other words, for this compound and this population, if chemical Y increases your risk of disease X by less than about a factor of two, you're not going to be able to clearly see it.

Clearly a jump from 4 to 8 leukemia cases means practically nothing -- statistically. But I don't think it's always good science, esp. when dealing in real-world non-controlled systems with intangible variables, to rely on statistical analysis as the impetus for public policy decisions.

If there is sound evidence (good animal or at least biochemical models) that particular conditions are harmful, then by all means such evidence should be considered. Controlled trials in the laboratory are very useful for sorting out cause and effect. In the absence of demonstrated mechanisms for harm in the lab, epidemiological data are all that we have. If sound statistical analysis reveals a significant correlation--that cannot be reasonably explained by other means or attributed to confounding factors--then it may be a fair basis for policy decisions.

I suppose the problem arises when one asks what constitutes a 'sound' analysis...and in some cases that's a difficult question.

I haven't heard of any great indian computer scientist. The good ones will always survive.

Carnegie Mellon has done studies on closing the gender gap, and they also have a book out, Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing

That would be Mach, right?

To start with, get rid of mailscanner. It doesn't play safe with Postfix.

sasl_pwcheck_method: saslauthd

Actually, a good CS program will teach you how to think. Programing is secondary.

Raid article from Wikipedia, it is released under the GFDL so is able to be reproduced fully or in part anywhere.

--

In computing, a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (more commonly known as a RAID array ) is a system of using multiple hard drives for sharing or replicating data among the drives. The benefit of RAID is increased data integrity, fault-tolerance and/or performance, over using drives singularly. Put more simply, RAID is a way to combine multiple hard drives into one single logical unit. So instead of four different hard drives, the operating system sees only one hard drive. RAID is typically used on server computers, and is usually implemented with identically-sized disk drives. With decreases in hard drive prices and wider availability of RAID options built into motherboard chipsets, RAID is also being found and offered as an option in higher-end end user computers, especially computers dedicated to storage-intensive tasks, such as video and audio editing.

The original RAID specification (which also used the term, inexpensive instead of independent) suggested a number of prototype RAID Levels, or combinations of disks. Each had theoretical advantages and disadvantages. Over the years, different implementations of the RAID concept have appeared. Most differ substantially from the original idealized RAID levels, but the numbered names have remained. This can be confusing, since one implementation of RAID-5, for example, can differ substantially from another. RAID-3 and RAID-4 are often confused and even used interchangeably.

The very definition of RAID has been argued over the years. The use of the term redundant leads many to split hairs over whether RAID-0 is real RAID. Similarly, the change from inexpensive to independent confuses many as to the intended purpose of RAID. There are even some single-disk implementations of the RAID concept! For the purpose of this article, we will say that any system which employs the basic RAID concepts to recombine physical disk space for purposes of reliability or performance is a RAID system.

History

RAID was first patented by IBM in 1978. In 1988, RAID levels 1 through 5 were formally defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy H. Katz in the paper, A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~garth/RAIDpaper/Patterso n88.pdf). This was published in the SIGMOD Conference 1988: pp 109-116. The term RAID started with this paper.

It was particularly ground-breaking work in that the concepts are both novel and obvious in retrospect once they have been described. This paper spawned the entire disk array industry.

[edit]

RAID Implem

The cool thing about this robot is that it learns from experience: it watches to see where the ball goes, learns a model of how that depends on its stroke parameters, and tries to compute a better way to sink it next time. As pointed out by another poster, it doesn't plan ahead to the next shot, which is an important aspect of the game.

I think the more general term Evolutionary Algorithms would be more appropriate here, as Evolution Strategy would also apply to what you're suggesting.

I think the more general term Evolutionary Algorithms would be more appropriate here, as Evolution Strategy would also apply to what you're suggesting.

Seems to me some of this technology might be able to be put to good use for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, in which autonomous vehicles race across the U.S. desert, driven by their waypoints and obstacle avoidance systems. I'm not at all surprised Cornell is doing some of this autonomous vehicle research.

Last year, The Ohio State University's TerraMax and Carnegie Mellon's Red Team did very well at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Here's some good coverage on Science Blog. There was some other really good blog coverage that gave a play-by-play breakdown of how each autonomous vehicle did the day of the event and what kind of troubles it ran into, but I can't find that via the Googling right now. :) There's also tons of previous Slashdot coverage on the Grand Challenge, and there's a pre-2005 event coming up very soon for interested people, I know.

Seems to me some of this technology might be able to be put to good use for the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, in which autonomous vehicles race across the U.S. desert, driven by their waypoints and obstacle avoidance systems. I'm not at all surprised Cornell is doing some of this autonomous vehicle research.

Last year, The Ohio State University's TerraMax and Carnegie Mellon's Red Team did very well at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Here's some good coverage on Science Blog. There was some other really good blog coverage that gave a play-by-play breakdown of how each autonomous vehicle did the day of the event and what kind of troubles it ran into, but I can't find that via the Googling right now. :) There's also tons of previous Slashdot coverage on the Grand Challenge, and there's a pre-2005 event coming up very soon for interested people, I know.

Does this count?

It seems to me that if you performed it, it would be legal.

There are several things you can do to get more out of your battery.

If you have a variable speed CPU like the AMD Ahtlon XP-M then you can use SpeedSwitchXP (or similar) to force it to run at the slowest speed. For the tasks you mention 500 MHz is plenty of power.

Rip your DVD to the HDD and play it from there.

Disable WiFi and Bluetooth even if they aren't actually connected. They will continously ping looking for other devices, which does hurt battery life. Most notebooks have a keyboard shortcut to disable it.

One of the most useful utils is MobileMeter. This app will show the amount of current your notebook is currently consuming, so you can play with various settings (like backlight intensity) and see the exact affect it has on power consumption.

Finally, what's wrong with using a spare battery? Modern notebooks can hibernate and resume in less than a minute, which is trivial downtime to swap batteries.

Dan East

I'm pretty rabidly anti-electronic voting (as currently implemented), but these two papers I stumbled across have me rethinking my position:

CFP'93 - Electronic Voting - Evaluating the Threat

Paper v. Electronic Voting Records - An Assessment

WSJ's OpinionJournal.com has a pretty poorly written article as well at:

No Doctored DRE (Subscription might be required for this one though)

Enjoy.

Segway soccer is looking to become the newest Robocup league. Though it sounds a little silly, it is significant in that it will be the first Robocup league to feature competition between humans and robots, which brings Robocup a little closer to its goal of having a humanoid team that can beat the World Cup team by 2050.

The secret is that you know you're trying to do, and by asking a question, you're implicitly telling the debugger what the program should do. The debugger doesn't have to be smart; you're the smart one. It just has to be predictable.

We've found that programmers always know what their program is supposed to do, but they're frequently wrong about what their program is actually doing. The key innovation of the Whyline is that it reveals any discrepancies between what you think your program did (implicit in your question) and what it actually did. Sure, you could spend half an hour littering your code with print statements, checking all of your assumptions, fixing code that ain't broke, but why not have the computer do what it's good at: automatically collect and process ****load of data?

The interface for the tool (yes, its merely a tool, not a panacea), has little to do with English. The question menu divides the millions of runtime events by the object and method or data on which the event occurred. It gives the menu items in the hierarchical menu reasonable names; you could just as easily click on something on-screen (such as some printf output) and say "why isn't this x?" or "why didn't that do_the_method_I_thought_was_going_to_happen()?" An English-based anything goes straight against everything we know and love in HCI (show what can be done, how to do it, and what happened afterwards).

If you're interested in seeing the Whyline in action, download the Quicktime version of our talk, which was presented at CHI 2004 this past year.

Alice is used by the students of Building Virtual Worlds to create 3D VR environments. The students are CMU undergrads in every department from Computer Science to humanities to fine arts.

I wouldn't consider Alice a "language for children," since 20-something-year-old college students learn it and use it extensively. If you learned C++ in middle school, would you call it a language for children?

You call CNN "Bad Bad journalism," yet you leap to the wrong conclusion about a language you know nothing about. You mustn't be new here.

You could ask InterScope questions like "Who calls FOO?" or "What function called by BAR stores into ZOT?". It answered by referring to a pre-computed database. Naturally, this kind of thing was made easier by the fact that LISP programs are represented as LISP data structures.

One really has to ask whether there's anything really new in The Whyline apart from a pretty interface.

Video editing for porn? Why else would they use that graphic? :)

"Well I say he does have to shoot me now! So shoot me now!"

Cases of Polio go up in the summer. Amount of ice cream eaten goes up in summer. The two are linked. Therefor, ice cream causes polio and must be banned!

Don't be too ashamed, its a common misunderstanding to think correlation means causation. I highly suggest reading this course on Causal Reasoning from CMU.

Neural networks have been investigated for years as a text classification tool, and no, they don't tend to work very well. In addition, it usually takes so long to train them that most categorization researchers don't bother too much with them anymore.

(For the non-cricket followers, an international match of proper cricket - there are shorted fast-food versions -is scheduled to last 5 days, though many will finish in 4. If it's over in 3, someone got seriously stuffed.)

I have to agree with the basefall fans below. The time it all takes is part of the fun. Like any drama has a natural pace; the unbelieveable tension that can be created on the 5th day needs the preceeding 4 to happen. Highlights miss a lot of the point. Consider, for example, the insights into the human condition offered by the highlights of Hamlet.

The link posted here: http://www.cmu.edu/ does not work, however http://cmu.edu/ does.

Magnetic monopoles were hardly considered crackpot in 1977, and Hans Moravec is hardly considered a crackpot in engineering. It is always dangerous to try to predict future advances in engineering based on present speculative theory -- as was necessary when trying to derive the "unobtanium" required for various proposed structures such as the Rotovar(tm). He did at least spend the lions share of his speculation on graphite "whiskers" which is related to carbon nanotubes.

Since the prior story is about Carnegie Mellon its rather ironic that the most intriguing launch technology was left off entirely -- and it is out of the robotics department of CM: the Rotovar(tm) by Hans Moravec.

We investigate a cheaper system. A satellite in low circular equatorial orbit has two long cables extending in opposite directions. It rotates in the orbital plane, and the cables touch the planet each rotation, with the rotational velocity canceling the orbital velocity. The system acts like two spokes of a giant wheel rolling on the equator.

The orbit is stable, and the taper is minimized when the satellite's diameter is one third the planet's. On Earth it is 4000 km long and touches down every 20 minutes, every 2 hours at six points. Cable motion near the ground is vertical and uniformly accelerated at 1.4 g. The maximum velocity in the atmosphere is 2 km/sec. One eighth the strength of graphite gives it a taper of 10:1, and it can lift 1/54 of its own mass at each contact.

The central idea in this paper, of a satellite that rolls like a wheel, was originated and suggested to me by John McCarthy of Stanford. He also encouraged the work and provided many of the resources for it. The symbolic mathematics was done with the MACSYMA system being developed at MIT. This program behaves like a programmable desk calculator that deals with algebraic expressions instead of simply numbers. It is capable of solving equations, integrating formulas, taking limits and much more.

Is my operating system supported? NO
Is my web browser supported? NO
...

I'll bite anyway, just in case you are genuine.

To follow through with your auto-mechanic analogy, their tools are probably not speech, but descriptions of their methods most certainly are speech. Don't you think it would be a violation of mechanics' right to express themselves if they were prevented from publishing their methods as manuals? In much the same way, a programmer's computer is not really speech, but the code compiled and run on it is.

What you say about comments is true, although I would have said this shows that code is the same as speech, as any natural language text can be thrown into a comment in code, and the code is still valid.

One useful way of looking at actual program code though, is as a description for how to do something. For people well-versed in the language used, it is often a more precise and concise way of expressing that description than using a natural language. You could instead choose to describe the exact same process in English or Swahili, although it would most likely be a lot less efficient. This does not change the fact that the content would be identical.

It is possible to take the text of code, and express it in a way that shows it is undeniably speech - putting it on a t-shirt for example. You can't run it directly any more, although the text is unchanged. You can hardly argue that text on a t-shirt is not speech. Particularly in the case of the OpenDVD t-shirt, worn to make a political statement.

Even more to the point, any code expressed in a Turing-complete language can be expressed in natural languages as pseudocode. The best example is the De-CSS haiku - while it is code of a sort, it is also poetry!

Code expresses ideas. Ideas are speech. Not that complicated.

Where in Dianetics does Hubbard use the word "Xenu"?

Dunno. Maybe you have to pay the big bucks to get the document containing that particular bit of pulp SF. I guess if "Revolt In The Stars" had been finished and filmed, you could have gotten it much cheaper on DVD.

Where in Dianetics does Hubbard use the word "Xenu"?

Dunno. Maybe you have to pay the big bucks to get the document containing that particular bit of pulp SF. I guess if "Revolt In The Stars" had been finished and filmed, you could have gotten it much cheaper on DVD.

So what is life like in Vinge's 2020?

The biggest technological change involves ubiquitous computing,
wearables, and augmented reality (although none of those terms are used).
Everyone wears contacts or glasses which mediate their view of the world.
This allows computer graphics to be superimposed on what they see.
The computers themselves are actually built into the clothing (apparently
because that is the cheapest way to do it) and everything communicates
wirelessly. Scientific American had an article about this in the April
issue, http://www.sciam.com/techbiz/0402feiner.html.

In Vinge's hands this is an astonishingly powerful technology.
Remember the mediatrons from Diamond Age, where any surface could be
turned into a display? You have the same thing here, except it's all in
the eye of the beholder, so to speak. If you want a computer display,
it can appear in thin air, or be attached to a wall or any other surface.
If people want to watch TV together they can agree on where the screen
should appear and what show they watch. When doing your work, you can
have screens on all your walls, menus attached here and there, however
you want to organize things. But none of it is "really" there.

It goes beyond this. Does your house need a new coat of paint? Don't
bother, just enter it into your public database and you have a nice
new mint green paint job that everyone will see. Want to redecorate?
Do it with computer graphics. You can have a birdbath in the front yard
inhabited by Disneyesque animals who frolic and play. Even indoors,
don't buy artwork, just download it from the net and have it appear
where you want. You can change your decor theme instantly.

These kids are teenagers. Got a zit? No need to cover up with Clearsil,
just erase it from your public face and people will see the improved
version. You can dress up your clothes and hairstyle as well.

Of course, anyone can turn off their enhancements and see the plain old
reality, but most people don't bother most of the time because things
are ugly that way.

Augmented reality automatically produces sight-and-sound virtual reality.
Some of the kids attending Fairmont Junior High do so remotely. They
appear as "ghosts" indistinguishable from the other kids except that
you can walk through them. They go to classes and raise their hands to
ask questions just like everyone else. They see the school and everyone
at the school sees them. Instead of visiting friends the kids can all
instantly appear at one another's locations.

They even have tactile VR systems but you have to buy special clothes with
"gaming stripes", whatever those are.

A related technology is the localizer network. These are small,
inexpensive network relay nodes that are scattered about, solar and
battery powered. Each one sets up connections to the local nodes and
provides for network access. They also have some sensors, sight and
sound apparently, which can enhance the augmented reality system.

The computer synthesizing visual imagery is able to call on the localizer
network for views beyond what the person is seeing. In this way you can
have 360 degree vision, or even see through walls. This is a transparent
society with a vengeance!

The cumulative effect of all this technology was absolutely amazing and
completely believable. It's as far beyond our current communications
media as the net is beyond the telephone. It's very exciting to imagine
this technology coming into existence.

Current proposals for implementation of the Hans Moravec's original design rely on a hypersonic air-breather of advanced aerodynamic design like the Boeing DF-9 (that exists only on paper).

Can /. readers think of anything likely come along in the near future that could take paylods to 100km and mach 12?

Probably the same thing that is driving the bureaucrats to make all this noise about space elevators now.

A key to the Rotovator(tm) is getting hub mass in place to keep it out of the atmosphere while it picks up mass from 100km@mach12 -- but that mass can be any old space junk -- at least at the hub where it counts the most for high strength materials like carbon nanotubes. However, you can do a Rotovator(tm) with off-the-shelf commercially available fibers and still have a factor of 2.

Nice thing about Rotovators(tm) is that they can be built with much lower capitaliztion over a much shorter period of time using existing commercial materials. All you need is a bunch of mass orbiting near earth, some quite-doable tethers, and sufficient manuverability and speed in the atmospheric leg to hook up with the tether as it reaches the nadir.

I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive.

I spilled Sprite on my Thinkpad X30, down the left side of the keyboard. It stopped booting, and I started to panic but then I washed it in the sink and it worked again (completely true.. washes the crap off of the motherboard. AFIK this works for mechanical things too. You should use distilled water so that minerals don't get deposited)

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