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• USB camera to record events
• some face tracking abilities(neat!)
• A wireless (bluetooth or 802.11b) connection between other robots for cooprative tasks(soccor match anyone?)
• Voice synthizier (just grab rsynth)
  
• enough RAM to do accurate mapping
  
• inexpensive to connect a GPS unit up to USB or serial (often these units have a built-in electronic compass as a bonus)
  

Oh, I get your point.

Personally, I have idolized a man called Herb Simon. Dr. Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his 1950's work on the subject of Satisficing (among other things). Carnegie-Mellon University realized the intelligence of this man, and, as a result, he ended up teaching courses as diverse as Economics, Philosophy and Computer Science.

Unfortunately for all of us, that man died in 2001. I would have loved to have even audited one of his classes. But, it didn't happen.

Anyway, he wins the fucking Nobel Prize in Economics. He ends up teaching Philosophy and Computer Science courses. Un-fucking-believable. That man was a stud. We should all bow down at the mere mention of his name.

If anybody ever asks me again about the value of their Econ 101 course when they are a Physics major, I'll ask them to check out Herb Simon.

Oh, I get your point.

Personally, I have idolized a man called Herb Simon. Dr. Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his 1950's work on the subject of Satisficing (among other things). Carnegie-Mellon University realized the intelligence of this man, and, as a result, he ended up teaching courses as diverse as Economics, Philosophy and Computer Science.

Unfortunately for all of us, that man died in 2001. I would have loved to have even audited one of his classes. But, it didn't happen.

Anyway, he wins the fucking Nobel Prize in Economics. He ends up teaching Philosophy and Computer Science courses. Un-fucking-believable. That man was a stud. We should all bow down at the mere mention of his name.

If anybody ever asks me again about the value of their Econ 101 course when they are a Physics major, I'll ask them to check out Herb Simon.

I was actually wanting to do something pretty much just like this with ferrets.

Unless the Constitution protects the individual's right to own all kinds of arms, there is no principled way to oppose reasonable restrictions on handguns, Uzis or semi-automatic rifles.

If indeed the Second Amendment provides an absolute, constitutional protection for the right to bear arms in order to preserve the power of the people to resist government tyranny, then it must allow individuals to possess bazookas, torpedoes, SCUD missiles and even nuclear warheads, for they, like handguns, rifles and M-16s, are arms. Moreover, it is hard to imagine any serious resistance to the military without such arms. Yet few, if any, would argue that the Second Amendment gives individuals the unlimited right to own any weapons they please. But as soon as we allow governmental regulation of any weapons, we have broken the dam of Constitutional protection. Once that dam is broken, we are not talking about whether the government can constitutionally restrict arms, but rather what constitutes a reasonable restriction.

The 1939 case U.S. v. Miller is the only modern case in which the Supreme Court has addressed this issue. A unanimous Court ruled that the Second Amendment must be interpreted as intending to guarantee the states' rights to maintain and train a militia. "In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a shotgun having a barrel of less than 18 inches in length at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument," the Court said.

The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.

Work and Fun Graduation

and the player keys could still be a trade secret

What player keys? Thanks to cryptanalysis, it's possible to recover a disc's keys within seconds.

the source for their 3d ranging application would be very beneficial to many people. I mean, the rovers are able to compute their surroundings in 3d using only 2 cameras. The degree of success and repeatability of these 3d measurements far exceeds any other available 3d ranging software.

Are you certain of this?

MER's stereo imaging and navigation software is indeed well made. Still, I suspect it's incorrect to claim that it is the best ever written. Stereo imaging and 3-D structure from motion are very well established fields, and improvement is ongoing. It would probably be straightforward for you to find some recent conference papers and code up something in MATLAB that works better than the rover's flight software.

The quality of the 3d ranging results from Mars are impressive, but for more reasons than you might suspect. I spent summer 2002 interning at JPL. One day, Mark Maimone, the MER mobility software engineer, mentioned to me that images of Martian terrain (with scattered rocks, etc.) are just about mathematically optimal for stereo ranging. (He wrote his thesis on this stuff.) On Mars, it's easy to find correlations between pixel patterns in images. Now imagine how well it would work if the robot were staring at a blank wall--no vision algorithm can handle that!

So--don't think that the success of the imaging is just the well-made software.

JPL has a lot of experience in robotics and the gain in knowledge when such code is released is sure to be great for anyone in the field of robotics.

True, to a point. Bear in mind that while JPL does work on novel robotics research, they're also extremely concerned about preserving expensive, hard-to-replace robot systems. As a result, a lot of the software is based on well-established systems that, in the research world, have been surpassed a while ago. The rover autonomous navigation software, for example, is related to navigation software written here at Carnegie Mellon some four or five years ago.

Furthermore, a lot of the research advances made by JPL are presented at conferences and published in journals. It's not like they work in isolation and keep everything quiet. In fact, some of my fellow grad students work on large projects alongside JPL researchers and researchers at other institutions. So, in an academic sense, there's already a lot of sharing going on.

--Tom

That's why many reverse engineering firms have two separate teams: one to describe a piece of copyrighted code and another to implement it.

That's why many reverse engineering firms have two separate teams: one to describe a piece of copyrighted code and another to implement it.

Raph Koster of Sony Online adds that it "was startling to me... that (the federal comment process) is identical to how we build our patches and patch notes", although since the government has "a legal obligation to protect the privacy of people submitting comments on legislation", this means some disadvantages compared to MMO feedback, as Koster explains: "We get to know the people who are good testers, who are good at catching bugs. The federal government is legally not allowed to do that."

This is not true. I can come up with at an example that should work from a practical standpoint off-the-cuff.

You can build a black-box database that can identify the same persona as being the source of multiple input submissions. This box must be given supeona-proof status. There are a lot of improvements you could make to the thing, but this should work at a basic level.

Now, this may or may not be acceptable in terms of data logging. However, statistical analysis of the text will inevitably allow linking of comments to some degree, and if the MMO guy is right about a practical benefit to logging, this should work. There would be some onus on users to not submit information that could be linked back to their real identity, but that's true of just about any anonymous feedback system I can think of.

There are people much more experienced in this field who could give a much more intelligent answer than I do -- if the gov't wants a good system that can provide a certain set of functionality with certain privacy restrictions, they and similar folks should be talked to. It's hardly an insoluable problem.

At least here at Carnegie Mellon University, we have access to the statistics of Faculty Course Evaluations. Anybody with a login can see how professors were rated by their students in past semester, based on a number of different criteria. This is an incredibly useful tool for determining which classes to take. I'd be surprised if other schools didn't do something similar.

Yeah, but how does this compare to the penguin worship formations we already know are there? That "crab" looks more like a "martian booger" to me.

In the article they mention the 'Mori Uncanniness' problem- there is a point that is the 'most anthropomorphic' you can get, before the thing becomes about as pleasant as santorum. IANARS, but the RS's at CMU's Robotics Institute state in A Survey of socially interactive robots

[if a robot needs to portray a living creature,] it is critical that an appropriate degree of familiarity be maintained. Mashiro Mori contends that the progression from a non-realistic to realistic portrayal of a living thing is non-linear. In particular, there is an ?uncanny valley? (see Fig. 8) as similarity becomes almost, but not quite perfect. At this point, the subtle imperfections of the recreation become highly disturbing, or even repulsive...

FWIW There are many more issues than just cannyness, and that paper gets into a lot of em...

In the article they mention the 'Mori Uncanniness' problem- there is a point that is the 'most anthropomorphic' you can get, before the thing becomes about as pleasant as santorum. IANARS, but the RS's at CMU's Robotics Institute state in A Survey of socially interactive robots

[if a robot needs to portray a living creature,] it is critical that an appropriate degree of familiarity be maintained. Mashiro Mori contends that the progression from a non-realistic to realistic portrayal of a living thing is non-linear. In particular, there is an ?uncanny valley? (see Fig. 8) as similarity becomes almost, but not quite perfect. At this point, the subtle imperfections of the recreation become highly disturbing, or even repulsive...

FWIW There are many more issues than just cannyness, and that paper gets into a lot of em...

ltmodem-2.6-alk-v00.tar.gz
ltmodem-2.6.tar.bz2
(I have not tested them)

Universal Standard Disclaimers.

Yeah, yeah I know they are not the same as TOS, but they're still a good read!

I wouldnt exactly agree with this. Information Networking Institute is one of the best places for this stuff, and I guess I would know, since I'm a graduate student here. Did you know that Wireless Andrew started here as a student project ?
And do you also know about the new CYLAB initiative ?

Yeah, that'd describe us pretty well =)

We actually do have a Inormation Networking Institute, but it's a grad program and I haven't exactly heard the best things about it from true CS / ECE grads.

An excellent course taught in Carnegie Mellon University is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" - CS:APP or 15-213, the course number by which it is better known. A better way to put it is that they are teaching computer systems and not computer science, which by definition is much wider in scope. A book based on this course, (which is immensely popular among CS and ECE majors here) is also available. Check it out at http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu

As always the truth is not as it is made out to be...

If you read a transcript of his speech I think you'll see that Mr. Dean is not trying to take away everyone's personal freedom.

The FUD stops here.

Here's some advice applicable to your question unlike the other 98% of unrelated opinions already posted:

OCW will get you started on the right foot, but I would recommend finding a suitable research field to apply those skills to.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been in a research lab at my alma mater's comp sci dept. And several of these grad students came from a non-computer science background such as physics, chemistry, genetics, etc. Once they found an immediate application for their programming skills, their skills progressed at an amazing rate. This does not mean that all science-based individuals are good programmers, but the purpose and foundation for learning (and learning properly) is already there.

So my advice? Use the internet to start researching some of the better computer science schools research groups and see if there is anything out there you like. Conjoining your medical background with a CS focus might lead to neuro/bio/medical -informatics, or maybe computational biology. You can also go into simulation, such as scientific visualization of specific area of medical research or even go into computer graphics. There are literally thousands of specific areas to look into.

Here's on example: Sticking with the foundation learned in OCW and applying proper programming techniques (such as learned in "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers) to fields such as computer graphics can be a great way to get immersed in the field - as long as you have an end application to apply your skills. So picking up a project like applying computer graphic visualization and simulation to a medical process or generating physical-based character animation can be extremely beneficial. You'll obviously have to learn computer graphics programming somewhere along the way, but that that'll just sharpen both your math skills and visual sense, along with having another great tool under your belt.

Go research some of the current projects going on at research labs at the top computer science schools. Here are some suggestions for you to check out:

And of course not all computer science research falls under the header of the computer science department. Research medical departments doing interdisciplinary research with both engineering and computer science.

Almost all research labs have papers of their work (even their most recent) avaialble in PDF format. Download some of the earlier papers to get a feel for the research focus and try to find something that interests you. Try to implement the same techniques and algorithms using your skills. This will bea great way for you to realize what you still need to learn and get a great foundation in a new area of research.

But always keep in mind that proper programming is of utmost importance. So while your trying to leanr a new area of research by applying your skills, also focus on the studying from the better programming books out there that teach you how to become a better programmer. Go on amazon for suggestions. Start with looking up my previous suggestion and go from there.

Good luck, and sorry about all of the hundreds of wasted postings coming from IT people bitching about their lack of applicable skills.

Martin

One possibility for somebody with your background is to get involved with medical robotics, perhaps getting an MS or PhD. I know my own university has several projects in the area to create things like robot surgery, robot care assistants, and so forth. I'm sure these sorts of programs probably have a shortage of medical professionals who are also technically astute.

hmm, Its been done. Im looking for it on google -- cant find it.

An geeky 'artists' collective got a grant to do just that. They put spray paint on the back of a remote control monster-truck. 4-5 cans of different colours were lined up in the back... as the truck moved, it would spray various dots and write slogans.

What you described is mentioned on this geek's website.

AH! Here it is! have a look at the GraffitiWriter and Streetwriter projects from left menu. These two projects seem more fitting for a sneak-up and tag scenario, though they do it underfoot with less visibility.

Look

I don't remember where I got it from, but I have an ASF of the movie. Decided to throw it up on my CMU webspace so lets see if we can /. andrew =)

CtrlAltDel.asf

Oh, the movie doesn't start 15 seconds for some reason. Wasn't me.

Carnegie Mellon. A professor threatened to fail my ex girlfriend on an assignment last year because somehow turnitin.com didn't work for her, but she didn't know, and it didn't submit. He wasn't all that willing to let her submit it to the site after the deadline and not punish her, even though she gave him a hard copy on time (as did everyone else in the class)

Is this the same Declan McCullagh that once allegedly shoved his girlfriend down a flight of stairs?

Vocaloid has been covered on Slashdot before. It is one of the many impressive projects to have at least in part come out of the Music Technology Group at Institut Universitari de L'Audiovisual in Barcelona.

This is one of many impressive Music Technology groups in the world who is kind enough to provide us with open source software such as CLAM. Similarly there are some groups out there doing interesting things. Needless to say, I could link all day...

I am a graduate student in this field

Clearly what everyone is missing is to have the car drive itself!

see here and here

So, what length is secret?

According to the tenets of cryptography, a cipher applied to a work is considered secure with regard to key length if it takes more effort to brute-force the crypto than to go about gaining access to the work some other way.

Anyway, I'm not sure it can be reasonably brute forced. At 100 million keys per second, it will still take some hours to break.

Frank Stevenson reports three attacks on various parts of CSS, ranging in complexity from 2^24 to 2^8. For a ballpark comparison, my PC bought in late 2000 running the distributed.net client can run through 2^20 RC5 keys in one second. With such a short time to break, the limiting factor for DVD decryption becomes not the time to brute-force the key but rather the time to read all the data from the optical disc. The user of an app that plays DVD Video discs using a brute-force CSS implementation might not even notice the delay.

I just can't agree that a weak encryption mechanism should be excluded from the law purely because it is weak.

Would you approve of XOR with a constant 8-bit key being called "encryption"?

I will agree that the law shouldn't protect them in the first place.

Judicially narrowing the scope of what constitutes "access control" with respect to the strength of the crypto involved may work toward accomplishing this goal. In addition, have courts determined what constitutes "authority of the copyright owner"?

So, what length is secret?

According to the tenets of cryptography, a cipher applied to a work is considered secure with regard to key length if it takes more effort to brute-force the crypto than to go about gaining access to the work some other way.

Anyway, I'm not sure it can be reasonably brute forced. At 100 million keys per second, it will still take some hours to break.

Frank Stevenson reports three attacks on various parts of CSS, ranging in complexity from 2^24 to 2^8. For a ballpark comparison, my PC bought in late 2000 running the distributed.net client can run through 2^20 RC5 keys in one second. With such a short time to break, the limiting factor for DVD decryption becomes not the time to brute-force the key but rather the time to read all the data from the optical disc. The user of an app that plays DVD Video discs using a brute-force CSS implementation might not even notice the delay.

I just can't agree that a weak encryption mechanism should be excluded from the law purely because it is weak.

Would you approve of XOR with a constant 8-bit key being called "encryption"?

I will agree that the law shouldn't protect them in the first place.

Judicially narrowing the scope of what constitutes "access control" with respect to the strength of the crypto involved may work toward accomplishing this goal. In addition, have courts determined what constitutes "authority of the copyright owner"?

...my tapes which I encoded with the C64 version of DeCSS again ?

...my tapes which I encoded with the C64 version of DeCSS again ?

Microsoft hates Xbox hacking, and is using every legal mean to stop it, in particular, the DMCA. Nintendo might use the same tactics, as they have used the DMCA in the past. The DMCA is increasingly being used as a way to defeat competition and enforce shoddy business practices -- not to uphold legitimate rights. If it continues, it won't be long before auto manufacturers are including chips to defeat third-party auto parts from working with their vehicles, and you can look forward to seriously inflated prices when you need to get new brake pads or whatever on your car because they'll be suing the competition out of business.

When you buy a product, it should be YOURS, period, end of story. If you want to mod your Xbox into a PC, and you have the skills to do it, then you damn well ought to be able to do so. Once you pay your $175 (or whatever they're going for) for an Xbox, Microsoft should cease to have any control over what you do with it -- save voiding the warranty if you decide to take it apart and start modding it.

"I want the technical community to become professionals," Humphrey says,

Humphrey also has conceived of even more radical changes, including a software engineering curriculum modeled on medical school, complete with professional internships.

"I want the technical community to become professionals," Humphrey says,

Humphrey also has conceived of even more radical changes, including a software engineering curriculum modeled on medical school, complete with professional internships.

Here's another good picture of some disturbed ground. I'm not sure if NASA has named it yet.

Wheres the one that looks like Tux?

right here.

It's been hard keeping it online because the government now has beams weapons that can penetrate not just aluminum foil hats, but aluminum server cases as well.

That's an "urban" legend, up there with the supposed bureaucratic folly behind NASA's pens, which is also nonsense. When it shut down the Apollo program, NASA didn't shrug and say "Nice trip, let's throw away the map." They kept the Saturn V plans for the future, of course. The problem with a new Saturn V would be recreating old technology -- making boosters would be a particular sticking point -- and getting the launch pad stuff ready for them rather than, say, shuttles.

(Not that going to Mars necessarily has anything to do with Saturn Vs -- or Atlas-Agena B target ships for that matter, as long as we're assuming we're re-creating old technologies.)

Look at the failures of unmanned Mars spacecraft. Even if we had the technology, you would expect a few human-less dry runs first, much like the Apollo missions.

What does that have to do with anything? Um, yeah, speaking of Agena-B unmanned docking ships, they'd obviously have some steps along the way.

The loss of robotic probes, meanwhile, is a reflection of the way those programs work; they accept higher risks in exchange for the lower costs, because there's not the same safety concern. The rover on Mars right now landed in the higher-risk of the two landing sites chosen by the science team. They played the odds, hoping they'd get at least one of them down safely. You can take chances with robots. Beagle 2 was made on the cheap, for an example, with little redundancy in systems. (Oh, well -- it was really the orbiter with its deep-scanning radar that's the bread and butter of that mission, though we're disappointed in the lost chance on the ground.)

GTA really rocks!

The best part is that its got such a cool narrative and storyboard, and the way it takes you through it is awesome.

You wouldn't believe it, but an Interactive Fiction & Media class that I'm taking this semester taught by this guy actually requires us to play GTA3 and analyze the gameplay! :) Go see the course site!

And its kinda fun seeing why it really succeded - the whole story sometimes follows what seems to a post-modernist approach to storytelling, and its a great mix of both narrative and game-theory approach with a non-singular series of puzzles. And believe it or not, its success has really changed the way acadmic people look at gaming and at simulation and storytelling.

I can't wait to see whats coming up next! :)

That would be the Personal Exploration Rover. Here's the press release.

This looks very similar to GNU Stow, which a derivative of CMU Depot. By the way, we (a University right down the street from CMU) also used an internal derivative of Depot, called Parcel, but we've mostly phased that out now.

I'm also reminded of the Supreme Court striking down a bin on virtual child porn, as well. Both the court and common sense seperate real crimes from virtual crimes.

They have a PIC 16F877 controller driving 8 digital tristate I/O lines, and 8 analog lines (which I think were just input, IIRC). So we plugged the modified servos in as motors, and for sensors had switches, photoresistors, and an infrared rangefinder. The students were able to code in a somewhat-limited subset of C (due to the freeware compiler we had -- there was a better one available, but the instructor couldn't get funding for it) and compile it down, then transfer to the board (via a built-in serial port). It worked well for those applications, though with only a couple K of memory. In fact, I ended up writing a prettied-up API for the students, because the instructor decided he wasn't all that pleased with some of the low-level, non-intuitive calls (which would be trouble for those students who'd never coded before, let alone in C).

More info here on robotics at Leap: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~roboleap/

The Cerebellum was conveniently easy for this level, but I'm surprised they're using it for these rovers. I didn't think you could get Linux that small!

Hey, I like some of their nomenclature for the parts. They have got a "Cerebellum board", which I presume controls aspects of stability or movement?

In short, I agree, bring back the grit! Bring back the humanity! Bring back Phasor Diplomacy!

BTW, here is a link that describes the Scientology Star Trek connection. The connection is described about half way down the document. Go to the page and search for "trek".

Kind Regards

See page 6 of this pdf for what the article refers to... This is what Moz does.

Well Done DVD-Jon

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

There is a beautiful Gallery of CSS descramblers by Dr. David S. Touretzky (Carnegie Mellon University).

His site is a gallery devoted to representations of a piece of software that has been deemed illegal because it can be used to break through the copy-protection system on DVD movies.

"It never occurred to me that someone would actually try to prevent people from publishing code that they wrote," he said. "The idea just struck me as so deeply offensive that I felt I had to do something about it."

To make his point about free speech, he offered several exhibits from his gallery, including a description of the DeCSS code in plain English and a T-shirt on which the code was printed -- both of which could be considered illegal under the copyright act.

Breakfast Cereal Data Structures

The kernel (Mach, in Mac OS X's case) doesn't matter much to a media player. Obviously things like hardware support and i/o latency make a difference, but more or less any modern OS will support something that supports MP3 playing. It probably wasn't a matter of a quick recompile, but iTunes works fine on Windows, which has a completely different hardware and low-level software architecture.

What makes the difference here is having a media architecture. iTunes floats on QuickTime, which Apple trusts to work really well with various audio codecs (and their DRM schemes). Besides that, it's (")just(") some GUI, network, security, and disc-burning code. QuickTime is the central issue here; Apple would not make iTunes for mpg123/ALSA/whatever.

But if you're asking "Why haven't they ported QuickTime to Linux yet?", I agree. I suppose they might be thinking like this:

1. We want to sell Macintoshes, and, if possible, software.
2. Let's make a killer app so people will want to buy Macs, and call it QuickTime.
3. But wait ... if we make it Mac-only, not even Mac users will want to use it, because it'll be outnumbered by whatever Microsoft comes up with the stamp it out.
4. So let's port it, and make it a model citizen in the Windows envirnoment, so most everyone will be able to use it while associating it with Apple.
5. Port to Linux? Why? We want these people to moan and whine about not being able to watch .mov trailers, and talk themselves into buying a tibook. Obviously they're already vulnerable to Unix. Mwahahahrahra!

In other words, they have to port to Windows if they want it to survive at all. But they're the powerful ones in comparison to Linux, and they can just try to borg its users.

Disclaimers: (1) this is pure speculation, (2) I use Mac OS X considerably more than Linux these days, and (3) I'm feeding a troll.