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BTW: The people making it have a web page which I havn't seen linked to: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/virtualized-reality/main.htm l

--Ben

Here is some information about the technology they are using, from Carnegie Mellon University. (Sorry for not linking properly.)

Here is some information about the technology they are using, from Carnegie Mellon University. (Sorry for not linking properly.)

Some info. I'm a senior business administration student at Carnegie Mellon University. Our final huge strategy class is called "Management Game". Essentially this class consists of a simulated market in which student run companies compete. In other words, it's a game. In order to do well in the class you have to do well at the game.

Of course, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than Starcraft. And requires a lot more work, teamwork, analysis, and intelligence.

I've only been in the class for two weeks, and already it has forced me to use knowledge and skills from almost every other class I've taken in the business school.

Don't talk to management, ever, for any reason, until you read some Steve McConnell, such as Rapid Application Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Also, check out some of the stuff from SEI, such as Investment Analysis of Software Assets for Product Lines. If you're going to commit millions of dollars of your employer's money, you'd better have some research and data to back it up.

Don't talk to management, ever, for any reason, until you read some Steve McConnell, such as Rapid Application Development: Taming Wild Software Schedules. Also, check out some of the stuff from SEI, such as Investment Analysis of Software Assets for Product Lines. If you're going to commit millions of dollars of your employer's money, you'd better have some research and data to back it up.

What if someone were to make a compiler that would compile simple computer instructions written in English into C source code or an executable?

It's been done. Omri Schwartz wrote C to English to C perl scripts a/k/a DECSS (Descriptive English for C Statements and Subroutines).

An English version of css-auth.c produced with this program can be downloaded from Dr. David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

What if someone were to make a compiler that would compile simple computer instructions written in English into C source code or an executable?

It's been done. Omri Schwartz wrote C to English to C perl scripts a/k/a DECSS (Descriptive English for C Statements and Subroutines).

An English version of css-auth.c produced with this program can be downloaded from Dr. David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

The URL for the Gallery is cited in the amicus brief. I'm proud to point out that among the co-sponsors of this brief there are four Carnegie Mellon faculty, including the dean of the School of Computer Science. MPAA has been keeping a hands-off attitude toward the Gallery, perhaps because they realize how bad it would look if they tried to censor an academic work.

Here is a link to more info on the technical details
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~virtualized-reality/

Although I believe the different methods produce similar results, the NFL stuff is the work of Takeo Kanade, the former director of the CMU Robotics Institute. Check out the page here for information on the research which I assume led to this.

In a smaller way, your answer is also found in the 6th of Henry Spencer's 10 Commandments for C programmers... no doubt this will spawn groans from partisans of other languages.

The Ten Commandments for C Programmers
Henry Spencer

1. Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgement oft exceed thine.
2. Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.
3. Thou shalt cast all function arguments to the expected type if they are not of that type already, even when thou art convinced that this is unnecessary, lest they take cruel vengeance upon thee when thou least expect it.
4. If thy header files fail to declare the return types of thy library functions, thou shalt declare them thyself with the most meticulous care, lest grievous harm befall thy program.
5. Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
6. If a function be advertised to return an error code in the event of difficulties, thou shalt check for that code, yea, even though the checks triple the size of thy code and produce aches in thy typing fingers, for if thou thinkest ``it cannot happen to me'', the gods shall surely punish thee for thy arrogance.
7. Thou shalt study thy libraries and strive not to re- invent them without cause, that thy code may be short and readable and thy days pleasant and productive.
8. Thou shalt make thy program's purpose and structure clear to thy fellow man by using the One True Brace Style, even if thou likest it not, for thy creativity is better used in solving problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to understanding.
9. Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system.
10. Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that ``All the world's a VAX'', and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

Carnegie-Mellon's Software Engineering Institute

While I was interning last year several top-level programmers were sent there for seminars. Granted, they all had been CS majors in college, and it wasn't a degree program, just a seminar, but CMUs undergrad CS courses are starting to incorporate some of the ideas from SEI.

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

This is a real player video of a staged wrestling match between my former calculus professor, and my former discrete math professor from spring 2000. For this reason, they had to be great teachers, and that they were.

KlausTolle.rm
--------

This site has a gallery of different ways to conceal decss source code, including pics.

I go to one of the top CS schools and I have never seen anyone actually use Jabber or its clones...but Hemos et. al. seem to treat it like its popular and everyone uses it...

Do people out there actually use it, and if so, what's so great about it? Or is this just GNU/FUD? ;-)
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Yes, there have been signals sent out on the hydrogen bands from various radio telescopes, mostly as part of a PR campaign for SETI research.

Except possibly for some, low power, illicit, transmissions, we've never transmitted on the hydrogen line.

I think you may be thinking of the Encounter 2001 transmissions (science URL given, not the commercial one). These used 5,010.024 Mhz.

The much earlier one, from Arecibo, was somewhere around 2,250 MHz, although I cannot find a reference to positively confirm that just now.

These frequencies are chosen because they are the frequencies of existing planetary radar transmitters, and, in turn, might represent frequencies near military radar frequencies; they were not chosen because of any likely significance to ET.

Some of the signals have been sent to stars that are close (as stars go) and some to other galaxies.

The Arecibo message was sent to the (historic) position of a globular cluster (M13) in our own galaxy. The Encounter 2001 messges were sent to the (proper motion and light time corrected) locations of relatively close stars.

Such pictoral messages are unlikely to be very effective, if ever encountered by an alien intelligence; they are too human-centric and require way too many assumptions about visual acuity and pattern recognition and the ability to understand letters. Even people used to some languages on Earth would have great difficulty understand it. What's more, the actual transmission that was actually sent had typos in it! Nice job.

Raw transmissions such as Lincos like languages are largely mathematical, have no required geometrical interpretation to be understood, and are much more straightforward to decipher.

For an example of a Lincos-like language that was easily deciphered by amateurs, see The Contact Project. For an example of what Lincos "looks like" (it is actually a radio transmission, see Excerpts from Lincos. For more information on extraterrestrial intelligence and contact, see my Extraterrestrial intelligence links.

The W3C lives in a fantasy world where we all have good WYSIWYG tools for doing all of our HTML design. Complexity doesn't matter, as the tools handle it all for us. Unfortunately, at the current state of the art, the good tools suck and the bad tools (which everybody seems to use) produce HTML of Lovecraftian horror. We're gonna be doing it (or at least cleaning it up) by hand for a long time, folks.

MathML is another one of those things that tries to be all things to all people, all at the same time. Result is yet another markup language trying to be a page description language.

As a counter suggestion, how about something based on the old eqn preprocessor for troff? Simple and easy to understand, and far more in the "content, not format" spirit than MathML. Brian Kernighan was supposedly working on something like this. Any news?

--

Having been a mentor for First and judging for First Lego League, I just couldn't let this comment stand.

There are 2 different competitions. The High School League and the First Lego League.

The High School league involves making a robot, that is about 3ft x 3ft x 3ft, from stock materials (basically anything you can get at a hardware store.) Everything a team uses on a robot has to be documented and on an approved list of materials. These lists are used to keep the teams on an equal footing. The list for electronics is very small. But there is some real work to get all the electronics you want, with what you are allowed.

You do need to program you robot. Robots are tele-operated and run from 2 joysticks and several discrete switches and buttons. The processing is done by a basic stamp but First provides a control module that gives you DACs, and PWMs out of the Stamp. First gives you a basic program that will run everything but not very well. A good CS person can do a lot to make the robot run better based on changes to the code. Most of the work would be in low level control code not in high level AI type stuff.

The competition that really impressed me was the First Lego League. The competition is for middle school age kids. The teams make robots out of Legos using the Mindstorms RCX box as a controller. These robots are autonomous. The kids program the robots to do different tasks. Once the robot returns to a certain section of the playing field the kids can change the program and reconfigure the robot. This competition really requires some CS skill. Here the teams are limited to the parts that come with the Lego Robotics Inventor Kit. Judging this competition convinced me to go out and buy Mindstorms for myself.

With both competitions the real key is have a coach (and/or mentor) that really leads the team. When I judged the PA state finals you could tell the difference between a team that had a coach that did nothing, a coach that did everything, and coach that guided the kids but left that actual design and choices to the kids. The kids with a coach in the last category, were having the most fun and learning the most.

Beyond coaching, the kids get out what they put in. If a kid decides he wants to program, reads up on what he can do, how he can do it, and then does it, he can fill the whole time doing CS type stuff.

If you are interested in using robotics for education or are in middle or high school and are interested in robotics take a look at http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/education/

There really isn't any easy way to upgrade the m100. That's part of why they can be sold so damned cheap. If you want to upgrade the memory on your m100 or IIIe you need to take it apart and desolder the RAM chip from the board. There is a description of this process here given the domain name on this link I'd say that it's probably a pretty reliable source. I've not tried to do this yet either with my IIIe or with my girlfriend's m100 since my soldering skills aren't all that I'd like them to be.
_____________

Probably the best site for Mac tools/utlities is versiontracker.com. Try Nifty Telnet, I found this to be the "best" for the Mac. There's also a Nifty SSH client as well. If you want to do tracerouters, PINGs, etc... try What Router

While the topic is open source billing, you may find that at some point, the seasoned grey hairs (your ISP's board of directors or investors, for example) in the organization may press for a "real billing system" (read "monolithic ball-o-code that could have been written by Adm. Grace Hopper in 1963).

Being a former ISP startup guy (first in a six-state region - yea) and having spent the last 2.5 years for a larger long distance company, I headed up our search for billing solutions. Here are some things to avoid:

- Convergence: Lots of the billing companies talk convergence (meaning you can bill for radically different things, like long distance, local service, Internet and cable TV... wow!), but until you've seen the code in operation, don't believe them. Convergence to many (like Lucent's Kenan division) means "if you pay us $6 million, we'll start writing code and bill you $350 an hour additional to develop something convergent." Avoid like the plague.

- Big/old vendors: These guys aren't struggling, but most of their new customers are. In fact, the only people I could find doing well on systems like Kenan and Saville were the RBOCs. Must be one of those paradigm things - and trust me, you're not of the same paradigm as they are (thank god).

- Little startups: Some of them have great ideas, but unless your vendor is CMM 2 or greater, they'll have a snowball's chance of being able to manage the system as it grows. There are a couple of notable exceptions, but these are startups that have understood managing complex processes, application design, project management, etc. (Two of the notable exceptions I came across were Telution and Daleen, both competent vendors albeit focused on NT solutions).

- Add-ons: This seems to be one of the games the billing companies play. They know you're not a billing expert, and will leave out tons of things to nail you for later. "Oh, you actually wanted to import Radius data into the system? Oh, the package you bought just bills. You need our $500K mediation package to do that."

- Turn-Key Claims: Most of the bigger boys claim they have turn key packages. What that really means is that they send a dozen programmers, at $350/hour, and get them programming at your location for a half year to write a custom application just for you. Believe it or not, many of the guys who've been in business quite some time don't have anything more than a source library and an Oracle database, which they write a custom application around just for you.

- Integration Labor: Watch this like a hawk and specify in your contract that billed hours don't count unless they're itemized and approved by one of your senior people each week. Our company got its first notice of where it was at with its integration when we got notified that all the hours were used up - and the vendor hadn't even been on site yet! Make sure you specify that they're responsible for a delivered product within those hours, or the overage is their expense (otherwise you end up paying to send their people to tradeshows and golfing in Vegas, as we did).

- Support Contract: You know the pitch you get at your local Best Buy/Circuit City about "for only $69.00 you can add three years of maintenance on that cd player" - support contracts are the margin booster for billing companies. Don't buy open ended contracts - prefer to pay by hour. My experience has been that service has actually been better ala carte.

- Expenses: Most vendors dump travel, lodging, etc. for every visit they make into being your expense. That's fine, as long as you control it and approve where they go, when they come, etc. (When your vendor expenses $350 a night in Omaha Nebraska, something is wrong).

- Revenue-based, Subscription-based, or Seat-based license: Lots of vendors include an "annual license fee" - which means you get to buy their software year after year. And the fee goes up as you grow revenues, number of subscribers, etc. Avoid this, since when you look at the overall billing cost per subscriber, you end up negating any advantage of growth in your subscriber base in many cases.

- Be Creative!: Lots of things (especially the add-ons) can be done in house by your own people for a fraction the cost. Lucent sells a mediation package called Billdats that downloads records from phone switches and puts them in a central space. It uses dedicate x.25 connections to each switch, which cost you an arm and a leg, and last time I was told, it still didn't have support for IP. Save the $500K and buy a really nice Linux or freeBSD box for $20K (lots of drive space). For extra money, Billdats can sort records (grep, comes free in Linux/freeBSD), Billdats can convert from one call record format to another at $70K-$80K per custom format (Perl can do it for your programmers in a couple of hours, $200 probable cost), etc.

Sorry to be so wordy, but I am overjoyed that someone else brought up the topic of open source systems. We did that with our mediation instead of buying Billdats. Funny thing - I showed the Lucent Billdats people our system and said we'd consider theirs if they could beat our little $20K box. Oh, theirs doesn't even come with hardware... :-)

Most of these billing vendors thrive on selling a poorly documented product, not allowing you to maintain it yourself (source code? you should see their response when you ask for it!), charge $350 an hour or more for a half dozen $30K a year interns to learn on your time, and provide horrible support. ISPs that can avoid this have a much better chance of surviving.

But the rest of the billing, provisioning, print-house, and related functionality needs to be included as well. If anyone's interested in a coordinated open source project, email me (scoove@americanrelay.com) - I'm game.

*scoove*

I don't know if this is an urban legend or not, but I had heard that petroleum is actually more valuable as a lubricant than as a fuel, because we can't yet create synthetic lubricants which are as good as the real thing. The danger is that all of our machines may literally grind to a halt when we run out of oil, even if the machines themselves are solar/nuclear/etc powered.

True and false. There ARE in fact things we can put together out of carbon which are superior to any petroleum-based lubricant. Unfortunately, no one has done so commercially. This is mostly because it's expensive. You can see pictures of buckyballs here. CMU has a buckyball project. So does SUNY. You could make your own fullerenes. There are a number of fullerene-related patents.

That last page produces the real gem: this patent is for a "Magnetic recording medium comprising a solid lubrication layer of fullerene carbon having an alkyl or allyl chain". The abstract reads:

A magnetic disk has a magnetic medium or a protection film, and a solid lubrication film formed on the medium or the protection film and consisting of a fullerene C60, C 70 or C84 and an alkyl or allyl-chained fullerene. The lubrication film provides the disk with high mechanical durability and high linear recording density.

There are further supporting references. The Buckyball: An Excruciatingly Researched Report (which gives its references at the bottom) contains this quote:

A fully fluorinated buckyball would create the slickest molecular lubricant known to man, C60F60. The uses for a molecular lubricant are boundless, limited only by our imagination.

Of course, I don't know that anyone's actually assembled such a molecule. I located an article called Just Rolling Along which discusses tungsten disulfide, which is similar to buckyballs. It is, however, expensive to produce, and difficult to make in quantity; This is what we're waiting for. Incidentally, I did find one article that gave hope for this, under the heading "Cheap Buckyballs". Amusingly enough (to me) the anchor tag is named "cheapballs". I guess when you're hopped up on this much sugar all kinds of things are funny. If anyone has access to the text of "Journal of Organic Chemistry, March 8" perhaps they could help out here.

So in summary, there ARE better lubricants than those cracked from crude. They are not, however, currently on the market, as they are expensive and time-consuming to produce. However, science marches on, and we'll solve this problem, too.

HTTP mirror and FTP mirror

It's kind of pathetic that reuters never mentions who created this monster.

Greg Reshko made this when i was still in high school with him. He wasn't even a cmu student then, although he was working with the robotics department. This kid deserves more credit than the blurb '...developed at Carnegie Mellon University ...'

Give greg another pat on the back, and if you are a cute girl in pittsburgh give him a call, i think he is still lonely.

JustinC
-- note: greg: it's now official, you owe me lunch.

Wow, $300. That's unbelievable, when you consider if you check out this page it's got the part's list and the prices the guy got them for. You get a whole $40 off if you buy the "bare bones" kit from this company. You'd be better off building your own from scratch with the plans that you can find at the site of the guy who originally built it.

> take it on the street and your ass goes in a sling.

Not true.

Read The Right to Travel

I don't have a driver's license, and my car hasn't been registered for the past few years - I haven't had any problems with so called "pull-overs" (Not that I go out of my way to flaunt my freedom. I "obey" the speed limit, etc.)

Cheers

BZZZT! RTF is an internal Microsoft technology.

What? The similarity in name to this RFC just a coincidence? I know, an RFC a standard does not make, but it is pretty close...

Microsoft's RTF 1.0 Spec (old) seems to share a common origin, andstrikes me as legitimate "extension" of a non-standard. Problem is, they keep on extending it. This upgrade notice certainly suggests that even Microsoft cannot keep their RTF specs in order from one release of Office to the next!Oh, how I remember this particular set of conversion issues...

Microsoft appears to be at revision 1.6 of their RTF Standard. So, I guess I would agree that it is an internal "technology" -- but Microsoft's declaration of RTF as a cross-platform document spec seems to have found a cross-purpose in their all-to-frequent alteration of that spec.

Anyone care to explain how Java's implementation of javax.swing.text.rtf differs from wherever Microsoft is at currently, with regards to their own RTF Specs? Is it *another* RTF Specification altogether, a subset of Microsoft's Specification, as complete an emulation as they dare construct?

I'd have to say that the best teachers I've ever had don't care about the money - they'd work for $1 a year. My CS teacher in high school (also taught me calc) was the best teacher I've ever had. Even though he was teaching to three levels of CS kids at once (Intro [Pascal] / Basic [C++] / Data Structures [C++]), I learned so much from him. He would stay and work with students as late as possible, and he taught himself C++, then Data Structures when kids were demanding a more advanced courses. He could be a researcher or a professor, but instead he's doing what he loves, teaching high school students. A good programmer does NOT make a good teacher.

We didn't do AP. We do The University of Pittsburgh College in High School Program. It's much more effective, multiple tests and mastery programs are assigned over the year, rather than a one shot deal like the AP test. You end up with actual Pitt college credit, not a goofy AP score. [the Data Structures course at my old high school isn't supported by Pitt]

Carnegie Mellon took my Pitt credits just like they take AP scores, to get out of 15-111/15-112 - I placed into 15-113. (Currently introductory CS courses are taught in C++)

I'd have to say that the best teachers I've ever had don't care about the money - they'd work for $1 a year. My CS teacher in high school (also taught me calc) was the best teacher I've ever had. Even though he was teaching to three levels of CS kids at once (Intro [Pascal] / Basic [C++] / Data Structures [C++]), I learned so much from him. He would stay and work with students as late as possible, and he taught himself C++, then Data Structures when kids were demanding a more advanced courses. He could be a researcher or a professor, but instead he's doing what he loves, teaching high school students. A good programmer does NOT make a good teacher.

We didn't do AP. We do The University of Pittsburgh College in High School Program. It's much more effective, multiple tests and mastery programs are assigned over the year, rather than a one shot deal like the AP test. You end up with actual Pitt college credit, not a goofy AP score. [the Data Structures course at my old high school isn't supported by Pitt]

Carnegie Mellon took my Pitt credits just like they take AP scores, to get out of 15-111/15-112 - I placed into 15-113. (Currently introductory CS courses are taught in C++)

I'd have to say that the best teachers I've ever had don't care about the money - they'd work for $1 a year. My CS teacher in high school (also taught me calc) was the best teacher I've ever had. Even though he was teaching to three levels of CS kids at once (Intro [Pascal] / Basic [C++] / Data Structures [C++]), I learned so much from him. He would stay and work with students as late as possible, and he taught himself C++, then Data Structures when kids were demanding a more advanced courses. He could be a researcher or a professor, but instead he's doing what he loves, teaching high school students. A good programmer does NOT make a good teacher.

We didn't do AP. We do The University of Pittsburgh College in High School Program. It's much more effective, multiple tests and mastery programs are assigned over the year, rather than a one shot deal like the AP test. You end up with actual Pitt college credit, not a goofy AP score. [the Data Structures course at my old high school isn't supported by Pitt]

Carnegie Mellon took my Pitt credits just like they take AP scores, to get out of 15-111/15-112 - I placed into 15-113. (Currently introductory CS courses are taught in C++)

I'd have to say that the best teachers I've ever had don't care about the money - they'd work for $1 a year. My CS teacher in high school (also taught me calc) was the best teacher I've ever had. Even though he was teaching to three levels of CS kids at once (Intro [Pascal] / Basic [C++] / Data Structures [C++]), I learned so much from him. He would stay and work with students as late as possible, and he taught himself C++, then Data Structures when kids were demanding a more advanced courses. He could be a researcher or a professor, but instead he's doing what he loves, teaching high school students. A good programmer does NOT make a good teacher.

We didn't do AP. We do The University of Pittsburgh College in High School Program. It's much more effective, multiple tests and mastery programs are assigned over the year, rather than a one shot deal like the AP test. You end up with actual Pitt college credit, not a goofy AP score. [the Data Structures course at my old high school isn't supported by Pitt]

Carnegie Mellon took my Pitt credits just like they take AP scores, to get out of 15-111/15-112 - I placed into 15-113. (Currently introductory CS courses are taught in C++)

Also see the Largon file entry for syntactic sugar.

Bottom line: if Linux were to become an Open System by adopting open industry standards and stating compliance, rapid change would be irrelevant to developers because Linux would always be backward compatible. UNIX did this years ago.

More information on open systems is available at the SEI's Open Systems page.

A lot of the pictures (and other neat stuff) were taken from the inside Chernobyl by Pioneer, a robot devoloped by students at Carnegie Mellon University.

Prof. Touretzky has such a tool, written by Omri Schwarz in October, in his Gallery

Well, assuming you need a computer anyway to read these, why not just read your kid the free version from Project Gutenburg itself?

At CMU, our operating systems class writes a kernel called Yalnix. It's a user-mode Solaris implementation, and we're provided a codebase to work from -- we're basically responsible for implementing the kernel call API, the scheduler, and the memory manager. Details available here.

At CMU, our operating systems class writes a kernel called Yalnix. It's a user-mode Solaris implementation, and we're provided a codebase to work from -- we're basically responsible for implementing the kernel call API, the scheduler, and the memory manager. Details available here.

> Just like you have a natural right to travel where you like in the US,

True.

> you have an artificial right to drive on public highways.

False.

Read the documented court cases in The Right To Travel

EVERYONE has the right to travel on public highways. You DO NOT need a driver's license. (I have a International Driver's Permit.)

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but in a class I'm taking right now we were discussing MPAA and DMCA. One of the (disturbing) trends in technology seems to be authentication between the host CPU and devices - basically, any peripheral you attach will authenticate with the host box, making sure they are "compatible."

Sounds cool, doesn't it? But now companies could start being able to restrict what you hook up to your computer. Sony does like HP right now? Now Trinitrons won't work on your Pavilion PC.

DVD drives apparently have this technology already...in preparing to start your DVD drive, the CPU and the DVD drive exchange encrypted messages to make sure you can use the DVD functionality.

I didn't see it in the article, but does anyone know if this new monitor technology will definately be using this stuff? If so, be prepared to get a EULA with your next hardware purchase :-/
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Is this American dollars?

If it was, then no matter who it was - unless he was endangering others lives (like if he had one other car around him at any time - or he had another person in his vehicle) - this seems excessive.

Not too long ago, I was caught speeding outside of El Centro, CA - I was doing 10 mph over the speed limit (75 in a 65 zone). To be honest, I didn't even realize I was speeding until I looked out the rearview mirror and seen the cop (I had gotten a severe sunburn the day before at Oceanside - and probably shouldn't have been driving - wasn't feeling very good). I pulled over, got the ticket, and went on my way. I later paid the fine, attended an online traffic school (to keep the points away) - in all, spent about $130 - plus my time.

Do I still speed - no - I realize now it isn't worth it - 65 vs 75 doesn't shave much time off in the end.

What gets me about the whole incident is the situation - I was speeding - yes - but I was outside of El Centro (about 25 miles outside), and anyone who has been out there knows it is flat, open land (desert?) - there wasn't a SINGLE car around me - my car is well tuned, the tires at proper pressure - the highway I was on was well maintained with a smooth surface, on a straight section. It was a VERY sunny and hot day (good grip on the road). I wasn't weaving, the road was empty around me (well, aside from the cop who probably pulled out from under an overpass to pull me over).

I guess what I am trying to say is that I realize that I broke the law - but that in the whole scheme of things I was really a danger to nobody, including myself. It wasn't like I was cruising at 120 in a 60 mph zone.

The final thing that irks me about all of this is what I know of an American citizen's constitutionally protected "Right to Travel" - if you really want your eyes opened, check out this link:

The Right to Travel

Essentially, the argument is (excerpted from the link above):

The forgotten legal maxim is that free people have a right to travel on the roads which are provided by their servants for that purpose, using ordinary transportation of the day. Licensing cannot be required of free people, because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of a right. The driver's license can be required of people who use the highways for trade, commerce, or hire; that is, if they earn their living on the road, and if they use extraordinary machines on the roads. In other words, if you are not using the highways for profit, you cannot be required to have a driver's license.

For further info, check out these links:

Vehicle Manufacturer's Certificate/Statement of Origin

Vehicle Registration in California

If you are an American driver/"owner" of a vehicle, you owe it to yourself (as a supposedly free individual) to be aware of this information...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

Carnegie Mellon has a decent sized Wireless LAN.

To obtain a lease from the DHCP servers you have to be a registered device on the network.

This approach seems to work well enough along with secured client applications (AFS, IMAP, etc via Kerberos [kclient]).

Carnegie Mellon has a decent sized Wireless LAN.

To obtain a lease from the DHCP servers you have to be a registered device on the network.

This approach seems to work well enough along with secured client applications (AFS, IMAP, etc via Kerberos [kclient]).

IPSec isn't really needed.

CMU has a rather large wireless network on campus and they rely on the application providing security, not the network medium.

Wireless Andrew FAQ

I think this song covers my feelings.
--

Hacking coffee pots is enough of a problem ;-)

Mr. Coffee on the web
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For more information, read Installing Japanese support in Linux or if you're using windows download the IME from windows update.

Well, obviously. It's hosted by America On-Line, which is America's most popular and therefore best on-line service.

The funny part is that Tom still kept it up, despite the fact that he is now privy to the world's largest Internet uplink for civilian use, and is also a TA for 15-212, which I'm currently taking.