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"... interested in receiving and publishing the following kinds of information:

Technical descriptions of the access control and encryption mechanisms associated with PDF files and/or eBooks.

Technical descriptions of remedies for these mechanisms, e.g., patches, key recovery algorithms, modified plug-ins, etc.

Source code for implementing these remedies.

[visit his website before submitting to see what he is already aware of. His website Gallery of Adobe Remedies already lists ElcomSoft, Xpdf, Ghostscript, but no Haiku ... yet]

Dr. Dave Touretzky notes that his web site is for "discussion of purely technical information of interest to computer scientists and lawful content users".

Dr. Dave Touretzky further notes that he is "not interested in receiving rants about Adobe or the DMCA" suggesting that said rants be submitted to Boycott Adobe wishing to keep his site focused on "Adobe's access control mechanisms and the remedies people have devised [i.e. 'lawful ways a purchaser desires'] to deal with them."

Tangential Editorial Comment by RM3 Frisker FTN ... why don't people get as bent out of shape when the Second Amendment protections [Eric Raymond's Linux Gun Nut Page] are screwed with?

If you want a RDBMS, by all means use mysql. If you want to learn SQL, use a Parser.

mefus
--
um, er... eh -- *click*

That being said, I don't think there's any theoretical reason someone couldn't build a fairly realistic highly-complex "brain" using, say, 100,000,000 simplified neural units (I've heard of a guy in Japan who is doing such a thing), but I don't really know what it would do, or if it would teach us anything that is interesting.

I don't get why everyone's calling this a nuclear-powered rocket.

All the radiation does is heat the hydrogen to a point that it reacts at an efficient rate with the ramjet flow of normal air (20% oxygen) instead of with a huge tank full of LOX.

You still need a huge tank full of hydrogen, and you need an atmosphere full of oxygen. Which, guess what, there ain't none of in outer space. You can't get to ramjet speed without some other propulsion system that works in the atmosphere, and you can't navigate into orbit without some other propulsion system that works outside the atmosphere.

Robert Heinlein told a story 55 years ago (Rocketship Galileo) about a couple of kids who reach the moon using atomic power alone as propulsion. They evaporate zinc*. No oxidizer involved.

Basically, I'll be impressed when they make the heater for this hybrid ramjet solar powered.

--Blair

* - That link is way cooler than just the book mention. Way, way, way cooler.

Time passed, and I got a second warning. The head admin forwarded the letter to the legal dept who replied to the Barney Lawyers something to the effect of "Yeah, we agree it is offensive but it is not illegal." Haven't heard from them since. I have this all written up here.

Time passed, and I got a second warning. The head admin forwarded the letter to the legal dept who replied to the Barney Lawyers something to the effect of "Yeah, we agree it is offensive but it is not illegal." Haven't heard from them since. I have this all written up here.

Time passed, and I got a second warning. The head admin forwarded the letter to the legal dept who replied to the Barney Lawyers something to the effect of "Yeah, we agree it is offensive but it is not illegal." Haven't heard from them since. I have this all written up here.

As for type declarations, they're there both for speed and correctness. The optional type declarations in CMUCL can serve both purposes. There is a tradeoff here: on the one hand, the need to keep track of the type information is a burden on the programmer when it is inessential to the logic of the program; OTOH, compiler needs this information to produce compact code and sometimes, catch errors. I like the CL's approach the best: it provides you with the option ONLY when you need it. Also, when programming in CL, I find type errors are rare; most bugs are logical.

Python is a very nice language, especially for beginners. But I doubt anyone who know CL well will prefer Python over CL. The expressiveness, the flexibility, the speed, the maturity of compiler and runtime system technologies; those are enough reasons for me to stick with CL.

As an aside: I like Python, and I've been watching Python's development for a while; however, I've yet to see a PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) which cannot be implemented *within* the language in CL with a page or two using Macro, MOP, etc. Therefore I concluded that it is much less effort to bring libraries to CL, than it is to bring Python up to the level of CL in terms of language maturity.

In short, I think it is much easier to find happiness in CL! I believe most people will feel the same, too, if they're persistent enough to master the few beautiful concepts underlying the design of CL.

Why not ditch this ancient tech and pour some more $$ into developing affordable solid-state disks?

Because moving media is orders of magnitude cheaper and more durable. But if you are looking for research projects dealing with new storage technologies, why don't you start here or here?

The FAQ is very informative. Don't all visit the image gallery at once!

The FAQ is very informative. Don't all visit the image gallery at once!

For those of you who like it direct, the home page of the project at CMU

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/sunsync/

For those of you who like it direct, the home page of the project at CMU

http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/sunsync/

Here's DeCSS as music: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Castleman /css_descramble.mid.

I am currently an undergrad at CMU. I was also in the internship market this last semester (as I have been the past two or three years).

Overall, no matter what job market there has been, finding an internship has been damn easy for me. Here's what I think really helped me get those internships:

Find a job you're interested in. Sounds pretty easy, and it was for me - I'm interested in pretty much everything in computer science. However, I think this is the most critical thing to do, because of the next reason:

Know what you're talking about. This sounds pretty obvious at first glance. However, there are a lot of idiots out there that have no clue what the fuck they are talking about. If you followed my first piece of advice, then you have a better chance of having this part taken care of. Also, if you are interested in the job, and know what you're talking about, this really tends to come out during interviews.

Have a good resume. Well, this seems to be less important to me, but you should have a resume that's easily readable and gets straight to the damn point. HR people don't need your life story, but they need more than your last job and why you quit. I personally have had internships in the past, which have been pretty good for dressing up my resume. If you're looking for your first one, then highlight the best stuff you've done - contests you've done, community work you've done (at school or whatever), etc. Independent projects (ahem, open source projects) are especially good.

Go for it. I personally hate online job applications. The reason is that I feel my resume just gets lost in the sea of crap. I don't mean to sound better than everyone else, but that's the way I feel when I compare my skillz against other people applying to the same job. Find a way to make your resume stand out. Send it to a friend at the company, or if it's a startup, have the audacity to send it to one of the founders - I think they get a kick out of that.

Bleh, that's all I can say. I've interned for MetaCreations (graphics software), Akamai, and now I'm interning for Microsoft (hey - I couldn't pass up Xbox, would you?).

Also, I had three internship offers this year, so I don't see where all this "crappy job market" stuff is coming from. I think that all the idiots are being filtered out, for the most part.

If you have a solid Technology background (i.e., a 4-year Engineering/Science BS), I would suggest you consider pursuing a degree in Operations Research (OR). OR is the "hard technology" side of Management. You would be expected to use quantitative techniques (analysis, modeling, simulation, etc.) to gain insight and solve problems in business, government, military, etc.
Some good sites to check out include:
Michael Trick's Operations Research Page
Institute for Operations Research and Management Science

About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)

George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind . It's a fascinating read.

After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.

The evidence is pretty anecdotal, but each person's internal map of pecking orders and trust networks seems to grow not much beyond that size. You and I can track coolness factors for about 150 of our closest friends, no more.

This is not entirely true. I know that this has been the result of some experiment in social psychology, but there is enough evidence that the sizes of individual ego networks may vary greatly, often beyond those 150 heads. These results have been problematic mainly due to the environmental settings their test persons were subject to, i.e. their role within Western culture. However, if you look at the ego network of someone really prominent within one's society (a famous scholar, a politician etc., someone who knows and has to communicate with lots of people independently and intensively), you'll find that they are often larger. I know of no historical examples where there are scientific surveys, but one is currently in preparation about an Arabic scholar in 18th century Egypt who had intensive scholarly contacts all over Northern Africa, Arabia and most of Asia, and his ego network comprised of well over one thousand individuals.

Of course, this does not invalidate your idea.

Personally, I find the idea to have something like a permanent trend database collected from what individual users considered "cool" at a given time rather fascinating. It allows for some really interesting social analyses, for example whether coolness trends originate from individuals who are in the position of "hubs" in a social network or rather from individuals more to the edge and so on.

However, the proposal definitely has the problem of anonymity. When individual user's trends are trackable, individual anonymity can no longer be guaranteed; effectively, DoubleClick already does quite a lot of what you want the trend database to do! I doubt whether just anonymizing the data will solve this fairly basic problem; social networks are very often harder or even impossible to reconstruct when the data is fully anonymized (because it is much harder to reconstruct who interacts with whom), and partial anonymization is practically equivalent to no anonymization at all, because when you speak of "User A" instead of "Joe User", but keep track of his taste, his age, gender and so on, as well as his social interaction within the observed framework, you may just as well keep the name because it would be rather easy to correlate the data with external material and thus recover the individual's identity.

And just to give the crowd some material regarding social networks, here are some social network-related links:

• The Oracle of Bacon - play and delve into the network of Hollywood actors (i.e. who acted with whom)
• Visualizing Social Networks - paper by Linton S. Freeman, social network scientist, that explains some of the theory, with applications
• Freeman's personal homepage, with links and papers - no, I'm not associated with him in any way :-)
• The International Network for Social Network Analysis - scientific association with fairly self-referential name, with links

That would be Carnegie Mellon, among others

That would be Carnegie Mellon, among others

Take a look at Dr. Touretzky's Gallery of CSS descramblers. It's got DeCSS in nearly every way you can imagine.

Yeah, somehow I don't see Harpers magazine being allowed to publish instructions to make dangerous radioactive devices!

What do you mean? It's not like Harper's published anything really dangerous... like DeCSS.

Postfix is well-designed, small, high-performance, and very secure. I recently had to select a new mail server for our company, and it fit the bill perfectly.

There are a number of things that I like about Postfix, but one of the most noticable is its ease of configuration. There are just two configuration files, and they're very simple -- much simpler than even Apache's httpd.conf. One of the things that you can configure is relaying--for certain hosts, certain networks, or authenticated users.

For mailbox services, I would recommend Cyrus (http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ). It's a very full-featured POP3/IMAP/KPOP server.

There are webmin modules for both Postfix and Cyrus, solving your web-based management problem.

I've gone through this situation in several discussions for mid- and large-scale operations. Your answer will somewhat depend on how much money, time, and work you want to put into this system, with the usual tradeoff of ( more dollars ) = ( less ( time + effort ) ).

For a free solution, I've found that a sendmail-based solution works quite nicely on Solaris. We ran some internal mailservers with a combination of sendmail for smtp, qpopper for pop3, apache and php for web access, and ActiveState PerlMx for mail filtering. There are many passable imapd programs that would fulfill your IMAP requirement, among other things, cyrus imapd

Don't be fooled, though; this took some elbow grease, and a little tweaking with sendmail and qpopper (mostly for the remote-administration bit; you don't want all of your customers in /etc/passwd on your server!)

If you'd prefer to just lay down a little cash to get a working solution out the door, Openwave has a very reasonable email platform or two. It seems like it supports everything you're looking for, above.

Also, don't forget that Sendmail, Inc. creates some very sophisticated sendmail-based products; it looks like Advanced Message Server may have all of the solutions you're looking for.

The postfix/cyrus combination already offers most of what you want. Although I haven't looked into the web based part yet, the management is probably best done with webmin. For reading mail from the web, there's so many perl scripts floating around I'm not even going to bother picking one for you...

I'm leading the development of Audacity, a cross-platform audio editor, for Linux, Windows, and MacOS (both 8/9 and X), using wxWindows. MacOS is a very important platform for me - I love Linux, and I've advertised Audacity on a number of Linux sites, but we still get more MacOS downloads than Linux (and far more Windows downloads than either of those). A year ago, when I started this project, Qt wasn't an option. I think I'd still choose wxWindows, but Qt is definitely looking better.

I'd also disagree with the statement that cross-platform apps have to target the LCD. In Audacity, all of the audio I/O code is written natively for each platform and supports some special features on each one. wxWindows fills in a lot of features that are missing on one or more platforms, for example providing a tree control and file dialog on Linux, but allowing you to use the native ones on Windows. Also, the Linux version of Audacity supports a lot of command-line options that just aren't available for Windows and MacOS, but the MacOS version lets you drag and drop files onto the application, for example.

Also, there are plenty of other cross-platform apps that target MacOS, both 9 and X. How about Mozilla?

The problems with metrics on software has always revolved around the abstract nature of software itself. Almost any sort of metric can be misrepresented one way or another.

Long ago, companies measured programmer productivity by using the KLOCKs, 1,000-line blocks of code. The more KLOCKs you could kick out in a given time period on a task, the greater the perception was that you were working harder. We all now know how easy it is to manipulate that perception. 500 lines to add two integers, sprinkling 1000's of lines of useless looping code documented to look like it's crucial to the system.

Proper measurement of failure is further compounded by the complex nature of most products written in OOP. Underlayered components, physical devices, and operating system issues could be mistaken as problems with the software application, when in fact the application itself requires no modification to fix the problem. Metrics also rely on fixed points of time as references which make matters worse as some problems are beyond the scope of the project (i.e. product works fine, but customer later upgrades video drivers that cause app to break).

Carnegie Mellon University has pioneered the software maturity analysis area with its Capability Maturity Model for software shops (think ISO9000). If I was a large customer (say Boeing), I would probably make my purchase decision more along the lines of the CMM rating of the software team that created the product rather than some silly arbitrary metric that most suits probably wouldn't comprehend anyway.

The problems with metrics on software has always revolved around the abstract nature of software itself. Almost any sort of metric can be misrepresented one way or another.

Long ago, companies measured programmer productivity by using the KLOCKs, 1,000-line blocks of code. The more KLOCKs you could kick out in a given time period on a task, the greater the perception was that you were working harder. We all now know how easy it is to manipulate that perception. 500 lines to add two integers, sprinkling 1000's of lines of useless looping code documented to look like it's crucial to the system.

Proper measurement of failure is further compounded by the complex nature of most products written in OOP. Underlayered components, physical devices, and operating system issues could be mistaken as problems with the software application, when in fact the application itself requires no modification to fix the problem. Metrics also rely on fixed points of time as references which make matters worse as some problems are beyond the scope of the project (i.e. product works fine, but customer later upgrades video drivers that cause app to break).

Carnegie Mellon University has pioneered the software maturity analysis area with its Capability Maturity Model for software shops (think ISO9000). If I was a large customer (say Boeing), I would probably make my purchase decision more along the lines of the CMM rating of the software team that created the product rather than some silly arbitrary metric that most suits probably wouldn't comprehend anyway.

if you want a space power facility -- you need a way to build them. http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/skyworker

Carnegie Mellon has a fence which gets painted almost every day, it seems. Nearly anything goes, and while a lot of times it's used for frat party announcements, it also enjoys some other uses from time to time. They claim on campus that it is "the world's most painted object". I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were.

Carnegie Mellon has a fence which gets painted almost every day, it seems. Nearly anything goes, and while a lot of times it's used for frat party announcements, it also enjoys some other uses from time to time. They claim on campus that it is "the world's most painted object". I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were.

At the end of the day, its about perception. Let me try to explain.

It is possible that I might be able to explain the merits of the DeCSS case to a disinterested party such as my mother. However, if she discovered that the person behind DeCSS was also creating web sites with expletives in their names then she would conclude that Corley was a foul mouthed yob who doesn't deserve her support. I agree that this conclusion has no legal validity, but it is how very many ordinary people think. Also remember that although judges are supposed to consider cases purely of objective legal grounds, anyone who believes that they are not influenced by their personal feelings towards the plaintifs needs a reality check.

Why do you think that of all the sites containing DeCSS the MPAA went after 2600? Just go to www.2600.org and have a look at it. Can you conceive of a site better designed to offend the average judge. The MPAA know that once they have won against 2600, it will be much easier to move on to more difficult targets like university professors.

Now, I am sure that DeCSS and F***GeneralMotors are both cases of great merit (although the latter does strike me as being remarkably juvenile). But I can't help feeling that the former would be better off if they were being fought by different people.

I'd also like to point out the correct citation for Henson's "destroy them utterly" quote. It comes from L. Ron Hubbard's 1955 article "The Scientologist, A Manual on the Dissemination of Material". Hubbard wrote: The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.

This is one of the most famous of all Hubbard quotes, having been cited in dozens of legal cases against the Scientology cult. It is a reflection of Scientology's "fair game" policy, which is still in full effect today. Keith Henson is just the latest in a long string of victims. But he may yet have the last laugh.

"Picture 1980. Ted Nelson is running around with his Xanadu guys: Roger Gregory, H. Keith Henson (now waging war against the Scientologists) and K. Eric Drexler, later to build the Foresight Institute. They dream of creating what is to become the World Wide Web. Nowadays guys at hacker cons might dress like vampires. In 1980 they wear identical black baseball caps with silver wings and the slogan: 'Xanadu: wings of the mind.'"

1994-current. Work continues on the second XOC fine-grain hyper-sharin transpublishing server, under Roger Gregory and Keith Henson.

o In 1992, the Church of Scientology had become the first religious organization in Canada to be convicted of criminal conduct. Specifically, stealing documents from law firms, public associations and government entities -- and breach of trust. In addition, in the Casey Hill litigation, Scientology was ordered to pay millions of dollars to Canadian lawyer, Casey Hill, for slandering his reputation.

No. What he wrote was satire, if you know what the word means.

Besides that, have you ever fucking read the scientology documents? These things come from scientologists themselves, so their validity is not suspect, because we aren't supposed to see them.

Most of their major founders were arrested for spying on the government and tax fraud for Pete's sake. They became a religion for tax purposes! This is not a valid religion! How can you fucking defend a pseudo-religion that has a mantra that unbelievers can be tricked, lied to or destroyed?

Germany and France have it right. Take a fucking psychology course and see just why the Scientology courses work as they do.

Read Time if you don't believe me. Nobody makes this shit up, it's stranger than fiction!

This guy's being railroaded. Fuck off.

Andrej Bauer's Random Art Generator

Scottd's Random Art Generator

[enter subtle prompt here for people to post links to other interesting but not-directly-related to-Aaron-itself projects.]

Andrej Bauer's Random Art Generator

Scottd's Random Art Generator

[enter subtle prompt here for people to post links to other interesting but not-directly-related to-Aaron-itself projects.]

Take some code, say the tinest known CSS descrambler in C. Maybe compress it into a nice tight zip/.gz binary. Now convert it to a DNA sequence (It seems you could actually make a couple possible sequences by switching around the letters) I wonder what the odds are of finding one of these sequences in the billions of combinations currently being sequenced? W
-------------------

Take some code, say the tinest known CSS descrambler in C. Maybe compress it into a nice tight zip/.gz binary. Now convert it to a DNA sequence (It seems you could actually make a couple possible sequences by switching around the letters) I wonder what the odds are of finding one of these sequences in the billions of combinations currently being sequenced? W
-------------------

For this purpose, this document is a decss in plain english, illustrated with C code...

Dr. David Touretzky from Carnegie Mellon has compiled the DeCSS code into a variety of artistic expressions, including Haiku format, and a link to musicians using the DeCSS code as artistic elements in their music (including one who transposed the DeCSS code into DTMF tones and recorded it.)

This HAS to qualify in some manner as "expressive speech".

Dr. David Touretzky from Carnegie Mellon has compiled the DeCSS code into a variety of artistic expressions, including Haiku format, and a link to musicians using the DeCSS code as artistic elements in their music (including one who transposed the DeCSS code into DTMF tones and recorded it.)

This HAS to qualify in some manner as "expressive speech".

XP sounds like a good idea for a ground up effort, but how can it be implemented in a project already in production? Now granted, I haven't read much on it, but it doesn't seem to include anything about change control or CMM (Capability Maturity Modeling) . Or, maybe that't one of the non-core items that should be left behind or concentrated on by managers.....

http://info.bio.cmu.edu/Courses/03441/TermPapers/9 6TermPapers/spontaneous/spontaneous.html

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

A professor at my school set up a neat network from the top of one of the buildings on campus out to houses in the surrounding suburbs. Check it out here.

Aw, hell, I found the link. It's the same paper that I linked to before. Here it is again.

Jonathan David Pearce

Their prototypes are not nearly as ridiculous sounding as the press articles I have seen, and aren't really that great except for their extremly low power consumption:

The power consumption could be the kicker! As so many others on this item have posted, the Shannon limit is just that, a limit. You can use more of the spectrum to get more bandwidth, but then you start hitting other walls, like being unable to build antennae with the characteristics you need. So the search for more bandwidth is constrained--there's only so much out there.

But have you seen the cost of wireless communication in terms of power? Power requirements for wireless transmission technologies in use now are on the same order of magnitude as computation; I don't care whether it's narrow-band or wide-band. There's lots of sneaky things people are doing to lower the power consumption of CPUs. However, the return on those sorts of optimizations is getting less and less important because of the power requirements of the rest of the system. Consider that the power requirements of the CPU, display, and hard drive are all the same order of magnitude (6W to 4W to 2W in at least one system).

But on top of that, in the next, say, eighteen or twenty-four months, communication is projected to be more than three quarters of the power budget of a handheld wireless device. (And I can't find the goddamn link for this one.) That's where a wireless transmission technology with low, low power requirements could really make it in the market.

To get that pie-in-the-sky handheld Roblimo was dreaming about the other day, the power consumption of these sorts of systems has to come way down. Targetting the power use of communication is an important first step.

Jonathan David Pearce

Not being a big consumer of Danish goods, I'll be able to watch interestedly, worrying only about the free speech issues. No big difference there- it's been worrying me for a while. This just adds fuel to the fire.

And they tried to harass David Touretzky's site - here is the threat, explicitly referring to the 2600 case.