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Prosecutors Hammer Away At DVD Jon

Meanwhile, back in the Land of the Brave and
Somewhat Free is a Gallery of DeCSS Scramblers, courtesy of
Carnegia Mellon University.

Very truly yours,
Woot

Better recalculate those schrodinger equations.

Oops, I forgot to carry the one.

Here is one of the sites we used for new ideas in my CS class at cmu

http://www.seanet.com/~brucemo/topics/topics.htm

Here is another one

Enjoy

Here's a link to the DeCSS Descramblers courtesy of Carnie Mellon
University. This is what academia is all about.

Cheers,

Woot.

Abstract: CSS is a scrambling system used in the distribution for movies on DVD ( Digital Versatile Disc ) a high capacity CD like storage system. Its main purpose is to prevent the unauthorized duplication of disc contents. This is achieved through encrypting the files, and storing keys in hardware. Here we will describe the system, and show that even if the keys can be securely stored in hardware, the data will not be protected from unauthorized copying. Severe weaknesses in the ciphers effectively voids the need for the hardware keys when decrypting the content.

2600 got in trouble for linking to DeCSS[1], but it seems like websites could just put in plaintext information to other resources.

METHOD 1:

http://google.com, http://the.real.truth.com

History has shown that we humans are very resourceful and will find a way around pretty much any type of restriction. (many of us on /. seem to be more gung-ho than the AverageJoe(tm) about circumventing rules and regulations... :)

Now aside from the average company who might circumvent the regulations, let's take LittleJohnny(tm), age 12. He can't tell other kids where his *real* website is with a link, but he can use METHOD 1.

But then maybe the Internet Police come and tell Johnny that he can't used METHOD 1 -- it's just a link that has to be copied into the 'address' field. So Johnny tries something else:

METHOD 2:

Hi everyone. check out my other website -- it's cool. Just call me at (123) 456-7890, and I'll tell you! Or you can email me at LittleJohnny@subversive.kids.us

• most kids have .com email addresses -- does that mean that they can't use email to communicate? -- no linking to non-".kids.us" content, remember.
• ads (already covered), but what about misuse? what if a 'censored' ad makes it out into the wild? think about the harm it could cause for all of the MILLIONS of kids blisfully surfing the CensoredWeb(tm) to see censored material!
• who decides what's in/out? I could potentially see this going to the Supreme Court, IF the domain is publicly-funded, required or pushed in schools/libraries, etc...

Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?

I find whenever I am coding that it is a profoundly creative process, and while it may not always be poetry, it often is very akin to writing prose (as I have done). Indeed, in at least one case code is literally poetry, in an inspired implimentation of DeCSS as haiku:


How to decrypt a

DVD: in haiku form.

(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)


see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/wsj-04- 12-2001.html for the rest ... slashdot's asinine lameness filter won't let me include it here. It concludes...


Have mercy on me,

Lord, and lesser judges, and

on Jon Johansen.


You are correct in part: coding also has very substantive aspects of engineering to it. You are incorrect to differentiate it all too greatly from architecture IMHO. Coding is actually very, very similiar to architecture: a blending of art and engineering in the creation of an edifice that is expected to be both beautiful and functional.

You are wrong to assert some sort of "universal" agreement on what is and is not good code. My experience (admittedly only 15 years or so) is that there are many disagreements amongst professionals on these very points. Indeed, just like architects and artists of one school or another do tend to agree on what is "good" and what is "not", so to with programmers, and so too are there different schools which disagree with one another's aesthetics and argue vehemently amongst themselves as to what does, and does not, constitute good code.

I don't quite understand where this Inexpensive crap came from. RAID was around long before IDE RAID controllers started showing up and of course SCSI RAID arrays almost always use very expesive disks. It's Redunant Array of Independent Disks, always has always will be.

It probably comes from the original reseach paper... A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks in the Proceedings of SIGMOD International Conference on Data Management, 1988. (Pages 109-116.) SCSI drives were an inexpensive option compared to other storage technologies that offered high performance and fail over safety.

Over time the acronym expansion was changed to become "redundant array of independent disks" as RAID become more popular (and affordable) for smaller systems.

Some references: here, here and here

There are plenty of others schools--some accredited--with programs aimed at the games industry. Check this listing

Everyone go get a copy of the DeCSS source here, along with any other DMCA-infringing stuff you can find, then print it out and turn yourself in to the police. Insist that they arrest you. Alternatively, mail copies of same to the Attorney General/Congressional Representatives/Movie execs, with a note explaining how you downloaded it and your conscience has been really bothering you about it. Provide an address where you can be arrested.

> The only real effect of the DMCA is that companies can't openly distribute stuff that violates the DMCA.

I don't think that's really true. The DMCA is used to intimidate and annoy regular well-intentioned folks like myself on a weekly basis. Check out my dmca troubles over a font program I wrote, for instance.

The idea behind immobots seems to take it a bit further than that by actually reducing the amount of control neccessary.

Whereas mobile robots (Mobots) require more human interaction. Exactly how does a computer not provide a service which any businessman with half a brain or more wouldn't have an administrator/engineer oversee?

Computer vision is extremely expensive computationally.
Not necessarily. The CMUcam was developed to work with pretty low power Scenix and PIC chips.
See: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/
Also, there are several toy IC chip manufacturers that are doing similar kinds of things plus word and character recognition. Sunplus and Sonix are good examples.

Palm pilot controlled robot - http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pprk/

I built a similar one ... -
http://www.wpidalamar.com/projects/robot/

> What Lisp or Forth lacks is: Apparently you aren't aware of the reader. This is one of many implementations of infix syntax support for any Common LISP.

This is an attempt to clarify some issues. Correct me if I'm wrong, Darwin's histroy is complicated and I might be off here and there. In my opinion, the question if GNU-Darwin is Apple Darwin or not is the mirror image of asking if Linux with BSD toolchain instead of GNU toolchain is Linux or not. Darwin is an operating system developed by Apple, which serves as a basis for OS X.

Apple's Darwin distribution is a BSD flavor, with a kernel based on CMU Mach, and most of the utilities taken from FreeBSD. It is released under the APSL.

GNU-Darwin is a distribution of Darwin with some favorite GNU software ported to it, as well as the FreeBSD ports tree. It is not Free Software, as the Darwin part is APSL, and thus considered non-free by the FSF. Despite its name, its not a GNU package either. Nor is it GNU/Darwin, as that would imply that it is the GNU system on a Darwin kernel; AFAIK GNU-Darwin is a BSD system.

I don't know anything about OpenDarwin and am too lazy to go find out right now. Hopefully I have managed to enlightened some of you who were wondering what all this is.

We have tools like Sprint Relay On-Line that will do text-to-speech... and every state provides confidential relay services to begin with. Many states are moving towards making 711 a standard relay number.

If a deaf person wanted a "cell phone", they'll probably have one from Wynd Communications, a two-way pager with text/e-mail and other services built right into the damn thing. They're all the rage here. Screw lip reading over the phone. This technology is pure eye-candy. Nice, but how useful will it really be?

I don't think any company could reach level 5 without having that understanding. Thats why there are so few CMM-5 sites, probably less than .0001% of all development shops have it. I know that around March 2001 there was only a total of just eight CMM-5 sites in the entire world (random fact: 4 of those sites at that time who had it were Lockheed Martin sites)

Some info for those not familiar with the CMM

what's this? a computer in a keg?

Well, you should read the DMCA (search for 17 USC 1201). That law essentially exists to outlaw mod chips, cable descramblers, etc. It's written with hardware in mind; that's why they're always talking about "circumvention devices" and not circumvention programs!

Now, I don't like the DMCA (especially after my own run-in ) but what you say in your post is simply wrong; they have a fairly strong case against Lik-Sang. Here are the reasons I can think of that the case isn't completely clear-cut:

- The DMCA might be unconstitutional
- Lik Sang is in another country (China?) and is probably not really under the jurisdiction of the DMCA
- Mod chips have other non-circumvention uses: playing import games, hobbyist development

I don't know -- the folks who posted it prominently got quiet very fast. It was dramatic. They could do the same thing to these other sites until ISP's and universities wanted it off their servers even faster than kiddie porn. Note than I'm not endorsing any of this.

And DeCSS is laughably simple. I liked the guys who put it on T-shirts, and there's even a haiku. Some scary precedent is getting set down. Don't even ask me to say where the line between protected free speech and unprotected illegal code is drawn, considering we've been pointedly calling them computer languages all these years. I'm a lawyer, not an oracle, but I do know the first amendment doesn't protect everything in writing (copyright for example; trade secrets, espionage, blackmail, obscenity, etc.).

The more complex solutions will be harder to spread around anonymously, and won't look as innocent or amusing as a haiku or T-shirt. (These folks are practicing civil disobedience and rubbing the industry's face in it, which I think is just fine, and probably illegal or it wouldn't be civil disobedience.) Public sympathy will be less, and that's important. Look how hard they came down on Sklarov! He is fortunate to attract a lot of sympathy, and to be a fairly innocent looking guy, an academic more than a black market profiteer. I was amazed, if you look at how lax the gov't is to enforce lots of other "economic harm" laws. I don't know many honest people will want to get involved inthis, and really it's the honest people who need to be won over to the cause.

So ... the crime won't always be so trivial or safe to commit. Either fix the law or somehow make the crime unnecessary. Piracy will never go away, but it can and should be corralled, without destroying innocent fair use.

I keep a bunch of "classic" bookmarks around. Some are undisputed gems, others are, well, to my taste. Bytes being cheap here's a batch.

• Ars Technica: The PC enthusiast's resource
• AmbySoft Inc. White Papers: Scott Ambler's Online Writings
• windows.oreilly.com -- Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
• TQ
• The Rise of ``Worse is Better''
  
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
  
• Theist Hall of Shame
• Internetworking Technology Overview
  
• Software Technology Review
  Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics
• P.S.: More Than Just Words
• Welcome to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• John McCarthy
  
• Slashdot | Net Translations of Dead-Tree IT Classics
  
• advICE
  
• 0xdeadbeef archives
  

Lo, many years ago I had a lot of luck with EARS on my 66MHz 486. It's a very simple discrete trainable recogniser; you have to teach it every word before it would recognise it. But it was fast then, it should be really fast now, and was pretty decent for recognising simple commands.

The unability of creating artificial intelligence might be more because of a lack of processing power than because of a fundamental problem.

In an article in Scientific American, it was estimated that the human brain has a processing capacity equivalent to around 10^12 instructions per second. We just need to wait until the computers are factor 1000 faster than today to get somewhere, which would take around 20 years according to Moore's law.

I'll leave the reasons behind this feature omission to your imagination. :-)

From the FAQ:
Regarding remote publishing to the user's server: [http://userv.web.cmu.edu/userv/FAQ.jsp#remotepub]

Under "Limitations:"
The upload form does not work properly with the Mozilla browser due to a bug in the current (1.0, 1.1) version of this browser. We have reported the problem and hope it will be fixed in an upcoming release in the not too distant future.

Quite some universities study some NLP related small little subtopic, but there are hardly any real large departments - say the size of a computer science faculty.

There are probably others ( search google.com, freshmeat.net, sourceforge.net )

The article is a nice read, but it is obvious that the author have little experience in commercial software production.

Quality and security of a commercial software product is a financial decision, not a technical. Much like how software architecture is a strategic and not a technical decision, which many software developers do not realize.

When the cost of continuing to improve quality and security exceeds the income from support contracts, you have to draw the line. If you don't provide or charge for support, you draw the line when your investment exceeds your targeted income projections.

There are software products that are secure and virtually bug-free, but you and I can't afford them. They run nuclear plants, space shuttle command centers, etc etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on that software, and it is not a question about "the user is evil". It's about having a thorough and mature development process and organization, preferable at CMM level 5.

So, I really don't know where the article would apply. Maybe when writing simple VB games for your website. Absolutely not when writing commercial grade software.

This approach is more commonly called "Naive Bayes" classification in the field of machine learning. It is naive because it considers each word to be a feature (dimension), but it also considers each word in an email to be conditionally independent of all other words in the document (which is not true, but really useful in practice).

The author of the web page on using this technique to classify spam (Paul Graham) has a better explanation of Naive Bayes on this web page.

I've written my own naive Bayes classifier to identify spam, with less positive results than he reports. However, naive Bayes can be a very effective technique, and I can believe his results.

The two things you have to beware of when using it are "smoothing" probabilities of words you've never seen (you don't want them to always be zero, as straight naive Bayes will give you), and you need LOTS of training data for naive Bayes to work well. That means that you need to already have a fair amount of spam to identify spam well.

You can see a paper I wrote on using naive Bayes to classify hard drive failures here, or look for more stuff on naive Bayes on Google. Also, don't reinvent the wheel: Andrew McCallum has written a very good toolkit for doing these sorts of things in Bow.

Is this a "copyright" bit? (Like the bit set when you make a digital copy of a minidisc?) If so, be careful if you release this program, or you might run into problems similar to my own bit-flipping software !

Newer distros just dont fit in less than 16-32MB ram, so I had to use a 2.0.x kernel on my linux box

Wow.

Just the other day I was looking through the bookmarks I have saved in Lynx on an old shell account. The search engines I'd bookmarked were Lycos as lycos.cs.cmu.edu and Altavista as altavista.digital.com. Neither of them had a www at the start, and both still resolve today.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for some of the gopher:// links I had in there too. :(
We've come a long way in a very short time...

Have you looked at Cyrus? It is probably best known as an IMAP server, but it has very nice pop3 support as well.

Cyrus stores messages in a variation of the maildir format - it maintain a database of the flags, headers, etc for the messages in a folder to speed up access.

Notable features include shared mail folders (with independent views), quotas, multiple mail partitions (with the ability to move users across partitions on the fly), duplicate email checking, and a server side filtering language (sieve).

Most of this would probably be most useful if you were using IMAP, but it should scale quite well as a POP server.

How many books are we talking about? Those out of copyright and not in PG.

Well, under the current state of US Copyright Law (TM), anything before 1923 is public domain. In addition, some things after 1923 are public domain due to legal technicalities (e.g., forgetting to re-register the copyright, explicit gifts to the public domain, etc.). So, that number is very big and pretty much uncalculable.

According to the latest Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter (which are sent to the Book People Mailing List, archived here), there are 6267 books in Project Gutenberg.

So, for a simple calculation:

how_many_books_we_are_talking_about = ${Number of books printed before 1923} - 6267

You could check out Netreg/Netmon from CMU which interfaces the ISC DHCP and BIND servers to a SQL (mysql, postgresql, etc.) server.

http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg/

Ah good, someone got in before me :) It is definatly a good idea to separate out the GUI part when dealing with cross-platform applications, since a lot of portability problems reside there.

In all honesty, I don't recommand Qt or wxWindows - they are great toolkits, but you lose out heavily on productivity compared to visual development environments with GUI builders. While both of these have associated builder tools, I don't consider them very mature of capable compared to VB or Delphi/C Builder. There is also a write-once-debug-and-tweak-everywhere concern (just getting wxWindows looking good on Windows and Solaris takes some effort).

Java is a great choice as it is supported on many platforms, has powerful GUI classes, a couple of builder products, and has several means for client/server support, including CORBA. But for UI applications it isn't hugely productive (strangely enough).

Some of your other options include ParaGUI and SDL, gTk, GraphApp, V, Mozilla's XPToolkit and XUL, and WideStudio.

I have grappled with exactly this question (legacy C/C++ needing to go cross platform with GUIs), and the best answer I've come up with so far is to keep your main code in C/C++ (since you have the legacy code AND the skills), define a clear UI abstraction layer, and create the UI in a scripting language such as Tcl or Python. Use SWIG to tie the script to native C functions.

I have more experience with Tcl/Tk, and believe it is more widely portable (especially the GUI consistency), but it is slower and arguably more difficult to program than Python. Still, this depends on what skills you can acquire, and what your UI requirements are.

Prechelt has an empirical comparison of some languages, including C/C++, Python, Tcl and Perl, and most importantly he has productivity figures! Keith Waclena has a Language Crisis page of comparisons, and Doug Bagley hosts the Great Computer Language Shootout. There are all invaluable resources for determining a balance between portability, functionality and productivity.

Sure, they're a problem, but they're a great way to get free boards that you can pretty easily fix :)

The pics page is linked to at the very bottom.

Pr(h|D) = Pr(D|h) * Pr(h)

where Pr is probabilty, h is the hypothesis and D is the data. In this case it would be

Pr("SPAM"|Email) = Pr(Email|"SPAM") * proportion of spam.

The trick is how to estimate the second term. This is a very popular machine learning algorithm due to its simplicity and elegance. For more info, check out this link Bayes

I like this idea. I think of general literacy as not so much a state you achieve but a way of life. You're never done. And I think knowing something about a field is better than knowing nothing, as long as you maintain skepticism about your own knowledge and abilities. I wouldn't want, as Tbonium warned, "...an influx of people who think they know something about computers. These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it."

As computers are now a huge part of our culture, people ought to know something about them. Demystifying is good, and if somebody has an "Aha" experience, that's great. Somebody might get interested enough to make a contribution to the field. Not everybody who has made contributions majored in computer science or engineering. Here's Eric Raymond's description of his computer education:

"Undergraduate studies (including some graduate-level courses) in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. I have never taken any courses in computer science or software engineering."

He must have had an "aha" experience somewhere along the line.

And Kernighan's course will have practical applications for some of these students. I did part of a PhD program in psychology. My knowledge of simple programming, networks, and databases helped me a lot. The other students were highly intelligent, but ignorant about computers. They couldn't use the tools to make their lives easier, and their data safer. Even a bit of experience with text editors and simple programming can help you when you start SAS programming. There were people who were quite good with statistics who needed a lot of help with the computer. "Where are my files?" "Is a text file an ASCII file?" "How do I telenet [sic] to a server. And what does that mean?"

And lots of people, once they're shown, like to use a folding programmer's editor for prose writing.

Interesting quotes from Kernighan in an interview:

When I have a choice I still do all my programming in Unix. I use Rob Pike's sam editor, I don't use Emacs. When I can't use sam I use vi for historical reasons, and I am still quite comfortable with ed.

I don't use fancy debuggers, I use print statements and I don't use a debugger for anything more than getting a stack trace when the program dies unexpectedly. When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business.

The only computer science book I read more than once, that I actually pick up every few years and read parts of again, is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, a great book.

There are other books that I reread that are relevant in computing. Books on how to write, write English in my particular case, like "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. I go back and I reread that every few years as well, because I think the ability to communicate is probably just as important for most people as the ability to sit down and write code. The ability to convey what it is that you're doing is very important.

Sometimes I do write C++ instead of C. C++ I think is basically too big a language, although there's a reason for almost everything that's in it. When I write a C program of any size, I probably will wind-up using 75, 80, 90% of the language features. In other words, most of the language is useful in almost any kind of program. By contrast, if I write in C++ I probably don't use even 10% of the language, and in fact the other 90% I don't think I understand.

Anyone else have a dog-eared 1st EDITION K&R C out there?

Liberal Arts? Really? Hmmm. I've got one of them valuable degrees. Had to go back and get a Master's in Computer Science it was so useful.

Perhaps I need to re-read an interview with Brian Kernighan

BTW, let's remember that Brian Kernighan is not a "high creator" of C. All he did was write the book with DMR. Here's an exact quote from the aforementioned interview:
"I can't comment on the 'worse', but remember, C is entirely the work of Dennis Ritchie"

Still, liberal arts? I guess so. I remember several times thinking "crap, this could be automated" ... That said will, as the TIMES article states, students doing "... projects like making their own Web pages and writing a few simple programs ..." give them anything more memorable than music appreciation gave business students twenty years ago?

Personally, I think K would do everyone a favor is he actually did send the artsy ones into the inner regions of the macines. Computers are likely to be an every day tool in their careers - but just that - a tool. The students will need to learn how to remain creative and original in spite of the conveniences of a computer automating the drudgery of composing notes, sentences, graphics, etc ...

Just the same way we need to keep teaching elemenatary school kids their times tables - in spite of the fact that they are now equipped with solar powered calculators.

On a lighter note, in a paper by by Dennis Ritchie detailing the history of Unix we get this juicy quote about K's wit ...it was not well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name 'Unix,' in a somewhat treacherous pun on 'Multics'...

Of course, I can't let this go by without asking the all important question "What Would Bjarne Do?"

I don't wanna boast, be elitist, troll, whatever here, but I actually think the OpenBSD 3.1 installer is one of the best installers I've ever seen. Sure enough, it doesn't have a GUI, but it fits on one 1.44 MB diskette and uses little RAM.

The installation process is as simple as answering questions that are in plain English. The one thing that sucks about it is the disklabel part. I think it would be helpful to do some ad-hockery to come up with sensible defaults here. Nevertheless, help is available in clear English and a swap and root partition (and whatever more you deem necessary) are soon enough created.'

Now I am going to abuse the rest of this post for stating what other improvements (besides the disklabel editor already mentioned) I would like to see in OpenBSD. The default install ships with many services (fully or nearly completely) preconfigured but commented out. This is a Good Thing. However, although SMTP and POP3 are mostly set up this way, the same is not true for their secure (tunneled over SSL) versions. I think that OpenBSD, especially with its focus on security, should really offer this.

Another thing that would be good for OpenBSD to have is a secure distributed filesystem. This applies to other operating systems as well, and I know there are various options that work, each with serious drawbacks. Two options that I consider of special interest are Coda and SFTP. Coda is said to be in alpha stage (and has been, for a long time), but is reported to work quite nicely. SFTP is not technically a filesystem, but can be used as one by Linux with LUFS. I think a LUFS-equivalent for [Open]BSD would be a huge win.

Actually the Mach kernel is MUCH older than Linux--started in 1985 and has a long and rich development history. Apple bought NeXT, and used OpenStep as the basis for OS X. OpenStep/NeXTStep was based on Mach. Also see the HURD.

You don't have to be an expert in backends, but if you come to CMU and become a CS major, you can take a class in searching the web from the dean of the School of Computer Science. Honest!

Regrettably, I did not get to try it out with my own (terrible) handwriting. I'll have to wait until it's on sale at CompUSA so that I can play with it firsthand. It can do things that the Newton couldn't, such as recognizing handwriting written on slopes or curves. Also, it can remember text associated with handwriting while still displaying the handwriting. (You search for "foo," it highlights your handwritten "foo.") I'm not sure about the Newton's ability to do this.

No idea about whether it works with anything but the latest and greatest Office apps. Someone else mentioned OpenOffice, for which support is unlikely; Microsoft has nearly EOLed Office 97, so that's unlikely as well.

The lecture series was called "Microsoft Days @ CMU," and was sponsored by Microsoft with the support of the School of Computer Science. Microsoft paid the bills; SCS provided the rooms. While it was promoted heavily through direct e-mail campaigns and on-campus flyers, the web presence for it is limited to a calendar entry on the SCS web site and a plug on Microsoft's College site. You may also want to contact Assistant Dean for Industrial Relations Catherine Copetas for any direct inquiries.

Hope this helps.

Regrettably, I did not get to try it out with my own (terrible) handwriting. I'll have to wait until it's on sale at CompUSA so that I can play with it firsthand. It can do things that the Newton couldn't, such as recognizing handwriting written on slopes or curves. Also, it can remember text associated with handwriting while still displaying the handwriting. (You search for "foo," it highlights your handwritten "foo.") I'm not sure about the Newton's ability to do this.

No idea about whether it works with anything but the latest and greatest Office apps. Someone else mentioned OpenOffice, for which support is unlikely; Microsoft has nearly EOLed Office 97, so that's unlikely as well.

The lecture series was called "Microsoft Days @ CMU," and was sponsored by Microsoft with the support of the School of Computer Science. Microsoft paid the bills; SCS provided the rooms. While it was promoted heavily through direct e-mail campaigns and on-campus flyers, the web presence for it is limited to a calendar entry on the SCS web site and a plug on Microsoft's College site. You may also want to contact Assistant Dean for Industrial Relations Catherine Copetas for any direct inquiries.

Hope this helps.

One thing I can't help noticing is that the picture looks very similar to Digital Ink, which was developed at the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at CMU and won the 1997 Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award. I don't know about the functionality.

The main obvious difference seems to be that the logitech one needs the special paper. Does anyone know if there's a relation?

CMU

We have a very well thought out balance of theory and practice. In two semesters we go from SML (ultimate theory language) to C hacking.

(except perhaps the old Lira, which was so worthless as to require several million to buy a mellon)

"Lira" was the currency of Italy until it switched to the Euro. "Melon" is either a fruit or a large female human breast. "Mellon" is either the M in CMU or the Sindarin word for 'friend' (pl. "mellyn") and is the password to the Doors of Durin (topical: the Doors of Durin are in a fantasy world that just hasn't been MMORPGized yet). I assume that you aren't referring to "buy a friend" because as far as I know, slavery is illegal in Italy and the rest of the European Union. Or "buy a friend" as in a campaign contribution on the part of a political action committee?

OK, that was a bad joke.

Didn't the Scientologists for DECADES also claim that el ron was "on a cruise", when the truth was that he was "swimming with the fishes"?!?!?

No, L. Ron Hubbard actually was on a boat during that time. The reason was that out of fear of U.S. government prosecution, he decided to spend the rest of his life in international waters. Accounts vary as to the details-- some say the government actually was planning on arresting him, some say he was just being paranoid, and a couple sources claim that he did this becuase he was actively violating U.S. pedophilia laws on said boat (although these sources don't really have any documentation, so we should not be taking them too seriously).

One way or another, though, it's generally documented that l.ron's reasons for getting on this boat were because he believed it would put him out of the reach of U.S. government prosecution.

Anyway, he actually went back to the mainland in 1975 and lived for 11 more years after that, during which time several of his books (including "battlelield earth") were written, so i don't think there's much question whether he was alive during the time on the boat.