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Columbia University actually has a distance learning program (if you qualify for admission there):

http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/

http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/b/degrees/csms.html

Definitely a little more respectable than your average degree-by-mail solicitation.

Columbia University actually has a distance learning program (if you qualify for admission there):

http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/

http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/b/degrees/csms.html

Definitely a little more respectable than your average degree-by-mail solicitation.

Looks like you can go buy Wordperfect 10 for Windows in a family pack for $49 - $20 holiday discount from corel, then go Here to buy a legal $40 copy of the Wordperfect 5.1 floppies that you are then entitled to use.

Many Wordperfect DOS tips here.

This Ask Slashdot answer provided to you by Google, like most of them. ;)

It sounds like your organization is genuinely trying to do the right thing. The FSF is eager to help organizations like yours become compliant with the GNU GPL. The FSF's general counsel Eben Moglen has said that he spends a good deal of time helping people become GPL-compliant. Perhaps he could help your company too.

It sounds like your organization is genuinely trying to do the right thing. The FSF is eager to help organizations like yours become compliant with the GNU GPL. The FSF's general counsel Eben Moglen has said that he spends a good deal of time helping people become GPL-compliant. Perhaps he could help your company too.

Tony Jebara of Columbia University devised a wearable computer to assist in planning shots: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~jebara/stochasticks.ht ml

In the SIP community, Linux is used quite extensively. I just returned from an even called SIPIt which is the major interoperability event for SIP based telephony. There were around 50 vendors there -- everyone from big players like Cisco and Polycom to little startups. Many, many people there were using Linux for their products -- I would say at least 50%.

I also have worked with several SIP companies recently, Vovida, and open source SIP stack and suite of applications later aquired by Cisco, and Jasomi, a company that produces telephony boundary control products. These places used Linux extensively as the deployment platform, and there are real working deployments out there using these products.

So for SIP anyway, the answer is a resounding yes!

xmove could do some of what you want, moving clients between X servers. I haven't used it in 3 or 4 years, so I don't know if it still works.

From the man pages:

xmove starts a pseudoserver which allows X11 clients to be relocated from one display to another. Upon startup it will create a listening port from which it accepts new client connections. When xmove is invoked it chooses a default server, and all clients will be displayed on that server until moved elsewhere. Several clients may connect through a single xmove, thus requiring only one xmove process per machine.

Everyone, CLICK THIS LINK. Let's give those ivy researchers some first hand data.

I know quite a bit about online education... I think it's a good thing. People seem to be taking very reactionary views, without much knowledge about the subject (totally out-of-character for /.).

I'm studying at Columbia University through their online system. Lectures are viewed via Windows Media Player, along with still images (indexed by time against the ASF stream). Professors are available via phone/e-mail and I sometimes go to their offices.

I've just completed a degree in Genetics and am working towards my MSEE. Overall, I think online education is great. Without it, there's no way I could make the commute in to NYC a few times a week to attend class[es], and still hold down a full-time job.

I've certainly benefitted from this. I have had a number of papers published since I started (they are in leukemia diagnosis techniques and gene ontology discovery). I also have a few patents (I know, I'm evil...).

Now, maybe I'm not the typical student. When I got my BS (in astrophysics), I rarely attended classes. I may just learn well on my own, but I can assure you that people can do it.

If, as they say, you are really just doing your classroom portion of the program online, there's nothing wrong with that at all.

It's very convenient. Isn't that what technology is for?

how little -- none at all -- they paid to the claim he makes in the brief (and mentioned briefly during the questioning) that the birth of a new technology regime (the Internet) should have a profound impact on how we craft copyright law.

For Ginsburg, at least, this should all be old hat; her daughter who wrote one of the classic treatments of it in a Representations article about 10 years ago: J. C. Ginsburg, "Copyright Without Walls ? Speculations on Literary Property in the Library of the future", Representations,42. On the assumptions that one's own daughter's works should be canon, I imagine she's familiar with it.

See Jane C. Ginsburg's CV and this Ruth Bader Ginsburg Biography.

People still speak it.

I would've thought that the kind of person who'd post their grades might've been the kind of person to spend 2 seconds double-checking. Guess not.

VAXGeek, I trust you are using NetBSD/vax?

and as for Apple, well, they're trying to make a buck off you -- what do you expect? That's capitalism. There are other ways, you know.

"We must save the internet from its founding myth that it is good for democracy and is open and cannot be regulated."

Oh, is *that* why we need to be told what to do? For DEMOCRACY?

Eli Noam is an academic who moonlights as a beurecrat. Based on his webpage, he doesn't seem to advocate censorship exactly - he wants to somehow use regulation to encourage people to talk one another when they have diverse social backgrounds. This is a laudable goal, and I'm certainly no anti-government nut - but this is a stupid target for regulation. Like regulation to make people be nice.

He complains about centralization of information. This has NOT been my experience with the web - EXCEPT for academic journals. If he wants regulation to require peer-reviewed academic journals to make their content available for free online; well, that would be great. I'd support that 100%. A journal that wants money shouldn't publish publically funded research.

The fact is - the protocols (TCP/IP, http/html) fascilitate free, open and DIVERSE exchanges of communication. I can't think of any changes I'd make that would encourage people to interact with people of diverse experience. If there were improvements to these fundamental protocols, there would some justification in legislating them (you'd get them no other way), but I don't think his goals are well enough defined, or the effects well enough understood, to even talk about this as an option at this juncture.

His op-ed pieces are particularly enlightening if you really care what he thinks.

"We must save the internet from its founding myth that it is good for democracy and is open and cannot be regulated."

Oh, is *that* why we need to be told what to do? For DEMOCRACY?

Eli Noam is an academic who moonlights as a beurecrat. Based on his webpage, he doesn't seem to advocate censorship exactly - he wants to somehow use regulation to encourage people to talk one another when they have diverse social backgrounds. This is a laudable goal, and I'm certainly no anti-government nut - but this is a stupid target for regulation. Like regulation to make people be nice.

He complains about centralization of information. This has NOT been my experience with the web - EXCEPT for academic journals. If he wants regulation to require peer-reviewed academic journals to make their content available for free online; well, that would be great. I'd support that 100%. A journal that wants money shouldn't publish publically funded research.

The fact is - the protocols (TCP/IP, http/html) fascilitate free, open and DIVERSE exchanges of communication. I can't think of any changes I'd make that would encourage people to interact with people of diverse experience. If there were improvements to these fundamental protocols, there would some justification in legislating them (you'd get them no other way), but I don't think his goals are well enough defined, or the effects well enough understood, to even talk about this as an option at this juncture.

His op-ed pieces are particularly enlightening if you really care what he thinks.

Most universities have been offering online resources for students and professors. But few offer substancial material for non-enrolled students. This makes somewhat sense, because after all if you want Ivy League education you should meet all the prerequisites and pay for it.
Regardless, among the few institutions really puting what they have out there for anyone to benefit, Columbia University so far has the most to offer. Few schools come close to Columbia's Interactive department as far as content beyond an online syllabus. MIT seems to be in the right track, until they start making access to the general public impossible. I don't think it should be free (as it isn't at CI or Harvard), but at least reachable. Some other schools simply block access and give no options to outsiders/non-students.
From a purely business perspective, as some one else already pointed out, making content available to outsiders gives University recruiters a great "businesscard".

Goddamn you are one ass-ugly motherfucker.
Stupid too!

Goddamn you are one ass-ugly motherfucker.
Stupid too!

In the 1960s, Ford said we'd be driving atomic-powered cars in 20 years. In the 1930s, just about everyone assumed we'd all have our private helicopter or airplane by 1980. (Imagine the air congestion and accidents with that...soccer moms flying their SUV-copters.) And we're still waiting on our Mr. Fusion powerplants...

Yogi Berra said it best. "It's tough to make predictions. Especially about the future."

Cheers,

Ethelred

...the incorrect spelling of Colombia.

Actually, Columbia is the name of a university in New York City. (and popular brand of sportswear).
The fact that this story describes a band of well dressed, collegate Revolutionary Armed Forces is less annoying than it is scary....

Slashdot covered clockless chips briefly a few months ago. Why do they make sense? To learn why, let's compare computers to real life industry.

In the 1800s, industry was limited to a few very large factories and workplaces. Over time, these factories became bigger and bigger and faster and faster, until eventually it became impractical to make everything in one place. So.. things were decentralized. Now when your car is built, the raw materials come from Brazil, the parts are made in Taiwan, then the cars are built in America.

Processors are headed the same way. Things are becoming decentralized, and the load on the processor should, therefore, go down. The giant leaps and bounds with video cards have actually caused CPUs to have less work to do. No longer do CPUs have to do nasty 3D calculations.. the video cards do it!

Clockless chips work very well in decentralized situations, since they operate based on incoming data, rather than to a clock. This means thousands of non-standard components can work together to produce the same result as one CPU.

Even -car- engines are becoming decentralized now with specialist automatic gearboxes, electric backup motors, and psuedo-petrol engines in the Prius and Insight. With processors it makes even more sense.

References:

Business 2.0 article on Clockless Computing

Economist article on Asynchronous/Clockless chips.

Microsoft is using the classic two-part tariff pricing method, but the strategy as they use it is flawed, IMHO. Just look at Iopener as a fairly recent example.

The concept behind two-part tariffs is actually pretty complex. Think of it like a state fair. You pay an admissions fee to get in (entry fee) and you must use tickets (which you have bought) each time you take one of the rides (use fee). The fair sets both the admissions price and the ticket price with the goal of seperating as much money as they can from you. So, how's the best way to set these two prices to make the most money? In Microsoft's case, the hardware is the entry fee and the license portion of the cost of the game is the use fee.

I'll let you explore the concept of two-part tariffs on your own (as an exercise to the reader), but here's a good graph of what the profit (pi) implications are.

Microsoft has set their entry fee to be negative, expecting to make more profit in the end through a compensatingly higher volume of use fees. Although possible, in theory, it also assumes that they have perfect control over the use fees. If I buy an XBox and run only Linux on it (no game purchases), Microsoft has net lost money because they subsudized my console purchase. If I jump over the fence at the fair, but don't ride any rides, the fair has only lost the opportunity to make money from my entry fee. This issue is a little clouded by differences in exclusivity (only one person can own the XBox, but most likely the fair space is not space constrained). The most basic strategy for setting these prices is to have the entry fee equal your fixed costs and the use fee equal your variable costs + profit. Deviating fom these increases risk (which can make you more profit if you do it correctly).

The pioneers of the at-a-loss entry fee were razor manufacturers. They lose money on the handle and make it up on the blade cartridges. Of course, what am I going to do with a razor blade handle without the blades? A lot less that I can do with an XBox (or Dreamcast or Iopener) without the games. Simply, I don't have any motivation to "hack" the razor handle.

This whole issue is similar to the trap that satellite companies fell into. They are walking a fine line by destroying the ROMs of people pirating their signal. Technically, they are destroying that person's property. Most cable companies, on the other hand, retain ownership of the cable box. Then, if you modify it to pirate the signal, you have destroyed their property. Either way, you're still stealing, but the cable companiers have a more-easily defendable position.

I really like automatic news grabbers. I have been using Columbia Newsblaster for a while which does a similar sort of thing.

There's been a series of stories about oil wells refilling themselves lately. One of the ideas is that our current source of oil is from methane that was trapped beneath the Earth's surface at the big bang, and from fosilized animals. This story could actually be further evidence of that idea.

An alternate theory is that their is a biomass layer bacteria below the surface of the Earth that is producing methane. That methane is then changed into oil by heat, preasure, and the filtration to the surface of the. Haven't you noticed that most oil well are dug where there is a large amount of sandstone and other porous rock?

<Useful links>
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.ht ml
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/recharging/
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/Energy.html
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/origins.h tml
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/038798546 8/202-8329969-5193459
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/margins/seeps_worksho p.html

You might be interested to read how another independent did it the hard way -- over ten years and 12 albums -- and now has fans everywhere (and is probably a millionaire, but not overnight).

I'm glad someone mentioned G&T, and not just because my PhD supervisor is one of the managing editors, and my MSc supervisor is the other one :)

If I remember correctly, the whole thing was sparked off by Rob Kirby's article on the pricing of research journals. There's an interesting article by Joan Birman in the Notices of the AMS (vol 4, no. 7, Aug 2000, pp770-774) which discusses the various issues, and includes detailed discussion of the day-to-day overheads of running a free, properly peer-refereed research journal. It's available from her web page, in PostScript form.

G&T (and its sister journal Algebraic and Geometric Topology, and the related Monograph series) isn't some low-quality vanity-press thing - it's a real, proper, peer-refereed journal with high standards. At a quick glance, I recognise the names of three Fields medallists on the editorial board, as well as some other very eminent names in the field. And yet it's being run with virtually no overheads by two university lecturers (one of whom is semi-retired) in addition to their normal departmental duties (lecturing, administration, supervising research students).

I understand that a lot of the procedure is automated, with a mixture of TeX and Perl, with copies of all articles being submitted to the arXIv.

Ah yes, I'd almost forgotten about the arXiv. A central repository for research preprints in mathematics, physics, and computer science. It's an unrefereed archive for research announcements, preliminary reports, and preprints. Papers submitted to refereed journals often take up to a couple of years to actually appear in print, so the idea is that you issue a preliminary version of your paper to faster communicate your ideas to anyone else who might be interested.

This stuff is great - it's all about collaborative research and the free and efficient sharing of ideas, and it gives me a great sense of hope for the future.

-- nicholas

I'd never heard of the massacre myself -- obviously I don't pay enough attention to world news.

In any case, for those who want to know more about what happened, here are some links:
The Rohde to Srebrenica
Women of Srebrenica
US Congressional Hearing

Geocities appears to be completely blocked.

The Chinese government doesn't like Playboy or sex.com - hmm, do we see a correlation between repressive government and antisexual morals there? Nah, couldn't be.

I have no idea why they censor {Insert Something Funny}, an obscure weblog, an anti-tobacco group, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Columbia Earthscape, or Columbia University.

Google is on their shitlist. No surprise given its cache and large index. The Wayback Machine isn't - I'd expect that to change in the long term. Anonymizer is accessible as well.

Peek-A-Booty and Freenet are not accessible, of course. It appears that all SourceForge sites are blocked (unless the testing engine is slashdotted and not working properly, but other sites are reported as accessible). I presume this might be because Freenet is hosted at SourceForge.

>Everyone with any knowledge of audio will agree that CDs are
>a poor format. Crappy error-correction, only 16-bit precision
>(20 is optimal), and a relatively low sampling rate are all
>problems. Guess why audiophiles mostly listen to vinyl.

Amazing how much you can get wrong in three little sentences. CDs are a fantastic audio delivery format when compared to their predecessors. CD error protection is fairly bulletproof - witness the ability of most quality (and many cheap) players to track even severely scratched discs, while inaudibly correcting for any read errors the optics can't get past. Try doing that with a scratched analog LP or jammed tape. CD's 44.1 kHz sampling rate meanwhile is adequate to reproduce the full 20 Hz - 20 kHz range of human hearing, and then some (this article explains how the oddball 44.1 kHz became the standard).

As for "audiophiles", I don't know how you'd possibly go about defining an audiophile these days, now that many low end consumer multichannel receivers and surround speaker systems boast specs that demolish those possessed by high-end, $1000+ pieces of equipment just a decade ago. I do know there are plenty of self-identified audiophiles out there who won't touch vinyl with a 10 foot pole. Given the format's numerous limitations, I can't say I blame them:

* Loud tics and pops caused by stray dust and wear, resulting in a *negative* signal to noise ratio - i.e. the noise can become louder than the music! (with N'Stynk, I suppose this would be a blessing in disguise . . . or simply redundant.)
* Rumbling caused by the turntable's motor and the friction of the stylus as it passes through the groove
* Wow and flutter, caused by speed irregularities in the turntable's drive system and by any imperfections in the geometry of the disc
* Phase irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization and the subsequent need for the preamp to de-equalize the signal
* Frequency response irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process
* The inability to reproduce loud bass accurately (the cutter making the wax master would pop out of its groove if it tried to reproduce the kind of bass CDs can handle effortlessly)
* The tendency for the turntable, platter and even the disc to function as microphones, picking up room reverberations and - particularly - the sound being produced by the speakers, smearing and distorting the audio in numerous ways
* Cartridge / tonearm misalignments, causing inaccurate stylus pickup, accelerated record wear, or both.
30dB of stereo separation, vs. CD's 70+dB of separation
* A theoretical maximum of 60dB of dynamic range for virgin vinyl of the highest quality (and only at certain frequencies - obviously, not in the low bass) vs. around 90dB of dynamic range from even the cheapest CD players, across the entire spectrum
* In practice, roughly 40dB of usable dynamic range across the majority of the spectrum
* A relatively flat frequency response from only around 60 Hz to 15 kHz, with severe rolloffs beyond those limits
* The need for mastering engineers to severely compress and re-equalize the signal in order to steer clear of the format's limitations relative to CD, which requires no such distortion-educing compensation
* Pitch and frequency errors caused by the speed difference between the cutter used to produce the wax master and your turntable
* The tendency of the media itself to wear out as its played, and to be damaged during routine handling with audible results

CDs are based on 25 year old technology now. Newer formats - such as DVD Audio - offer even more impressive specifications (and multichannel audio capabilities), but the difference between them and the Compact Disc is nothing like the quantum leap in fidelity the CD represents vs. the vinyl LP. Vinyl was obsolete for at least a decade before the CD rolled along, and it was probably only confusion in the marketplace regarding the various tape formats (the 8-track, Philips' compact cassette, open reel) that allowed it to survive as long as it did.

• Many excellent formats have fizzled and died for far smaller reasons than that they intentionally eliminate your fair use rights.
• during that transition, neither side (the content people or the electronics people) can jump without the other (or they risk a zero-sales incident) and there are too many parties for everyone to jump at once.
• Any transitional period would have both formats available [I should point out in with roughly equal quantities of media], hence my point: consumers would have to choose, and as long as they have the choice, they won't choose DRM [because of the inconveniences it causes - even if there are "carrots" on the DRM side, the barrier to invest in new hardware is high, based on the cost of that hardware].
  

Several people have suggested creating CPUs from FPGAs. Others have objected that such CPUs would be slow. Maybe they are, but you gotta start somewhere, right? (Just how slow is "slow" anyhow? Maybe you can't yet make a 2 GHz chip from an FPGA, but can you make a 200 MHz one?)

Here's an idea -- if anyone wants to design CPUs with FPGAs, why not aim for asynchronous CPUs? (See It's Time for Clockless Chips.) "In 1997, Intel developed an asynchronous, Pentium-compatible test chip that ran three times as fast, on half the power, as its synchronous equivalent." (Of course, that's assuming that FPGAs aren't already locked into a synchronous design...)

It sounds like asynchronous chips are the "way of the future" and inherently more efficient -- if free tools are going to be created anyway, why not have some geared toward asynchronous designs? It would be a worthwhile research effort, at least.

Who knows? If a particular design works out well on FPGAs, maybe some chip manufacturer will be willing to mass-produce the chip at much higher speeds. It could be a good thing all around...

Dewey believed that school should teach students how to be problem-solvers by helping students learn how to think rather than simply learning rote lessons about large amounts of information. In Dewey's view, schools should focus on judgment rather than knowledge so that school children become adults who can "pass judgments pertinently and discriminatingly on the problems of human living" (Campbell, 1995, p. 215-216). Dewey also believed that schools should help students learn to live and to work cooperatively with others. In School and Society he wrote, "In a complex society, ability to understand and sympathize with the operations and lot of others is a condition of common purpose which only education can procure."

The problem in our system is not that Dewey's arguments prevailed, it's that they did not.

A quick calculation, assuming those figures represent "typical" mpeg-4 cd-length content (~650MB), I get a total of 372TB/day, at that rate (possibly double, since to get any reasonable quality a full-length movie takes two or more CDs).

Based on this site (and extrapolating, they only have the numbers I wanted for 2000), the total internet traffic amounts to only 2700 terabytes per day. So fully one seventh of the total internet traffic results from pirated movies? That strikes me as somewhat unbelievable.

Or, to put that in perspective (since one seventh doesn't really "mean" much), according to this site, by the end of 2002 the world will have a total digital storage capacity of 12 exabytes. Yet we somehow transmit that much data, JUST IN PIRATED MOVIES, every month? I don't think so!

Arial Unicode was available for download with a click-through licence that basically required you to say "I own a copy of FrontPage 2000". I don't have a down-loaded version to hand to check the exact words. I noticed it had been removed from the MS web site a few weeks ago and I just assumed that they had re-organised their web site -- they have never seemed to care about the persistance of URIs...), but I guess I was wrong and it was a conscious decision to remove it.

The reason why Arial Unicode is (was?) important is that as far as I can make out it's the only way to put several languages on the web (using Unicode), specifically Indic ones, including Punjabi and Gujarati. The site that uses these languages I worked on can be found here.

There is no support for Indic languages in X11 (or OSX AFAIK). Gnome2 and Pango should fix this though :-)

Windows still has the best internationalisation support (most languages), but a default Red Hat install with the latest Mozilla is getting very good -- all the demo languages on the Unicode web site work with no problems and also all the UTF-8 samples on this page work -- this is better then Windows 2000 (I have not tried with later versions).

In 1 AD, there were about 150 million humans worldwide (Source), and according to Columbia University there were ~6B people in 1995 (a growth factor or 40).

As best as I can figure, that means we are 40 times more likely NOW that someone on the planet will develop a significant new gene mutation than we were at the birth of Christ (give or take 15 years, but that's another story entirely). I wonder what the factor is if we had an idea of the population in 198,000 B.C. I couldn't find a source.

At any rate, I guess my point, or question, is this; Given that it's 40 times more likely that someone will have experienced a significant gene mutation today than in 1 A.D., and the factor probably goes up a tremendous amount given the population difference between 198,000 B.C. and the birth of Christ, isn't it possible (maybe even likely) that just ONE of the people in this world who claim Extra Sensory Abilities might actually be telling the truth?

Now OTOH (On The Other Hand), it's also JUST as likely that some mutation will come along which will wipe out these beneficial mutations, but those mutations won't spread like beneficial ones.

This also leads me to a question: How did the first person with the ability to speak spread the gene? It's not like they had anyone to TALK to. I'm guessing the first person to speak was a man. Here's why:

Man Speaks First:
Man: "Hey baby, you want to come back to my cave and check out my wall paintings?"
Woman: "Grunt"
(Man and Woman go back to cave, presumably check out wall paintings, have children...)

Woman Speaks First:
Man: "Grunt"
Woman: "Buzz off, loser. You don't have a fast enough rock." (Man goes off and kills deer)

Just my humble opinion.

Or how about Columbia, where we have special forces troops training the local military to protect the Occidental Petroleum

This would be funny if it were true, but sadly there are no special forces training the "local military" (frat boys?) at Columbia. I think the kids are too busy studying anyway. If it's oil you want, you'll have to visit UT

In case anybody is actually confusing him with another Meestah Katz:

This should put the confusion to rest.

Surely this can't be the same guy...

It's not. This is the guy.

Quoth the original poster:

...fixing security holes that could "JEAPORDIZE NATIONAL SECURITY...

Actually, I just toured Columbia University's Augmented Reality lab... They're actually using an xbox in their studies for the Department of Defense.

They assure me it's strictly for research purposes though.

I was with you up until the Clysdale/Livinsgton. The nullmodem-in-*nix box too... but minicom? Yech!

Real serial terminal diehards go for either tip/cu or Kermit. Minicom has crappy terminal emulation (especially when dealing with Sun serial console, for example). cu/tip might not play nice with ssh, because the break sequence for cu/tip is the same as in ssh, but that just depends on implementation. Kermit just works everyhere, and anywhere. And it's free too! wow...

Just a tip from a fellow admin with systems on serial console. Ditch that minicom abberation. Heck, even seyon is better.

And, oh yeah, to still stay ontopic, newer intel 1u servers usually have that feature that the bios can be altered/monitored/whatever across the serial port too.

Otherwise, if they're big mighty compaqs, give Compaq Insight a go. It saved me from getting up from bed when I was stuck in the hotel with a 56 Kbit modem connection and someting important decided to crash. I fixed it all remote from the SSL web-interface from my hotel bed. I was done in a short while, and I got to go back to sleep again. Very good. Compaq saved my lusers from a cranky and sleepdeprived sysadmin.

Columbia University had a competition demonstrating that robots can work in teams, learn, and have sportsmanship! ;) The direct link to the research results can be found here. Speach recognition, then soccer, next the WORLD!

Columbia University had a competition demonstrating that robots can work in teams, learn, and have sportsmanship! ;) The direct link to the research results can be found here. Speach recognition, then soccer, next the WORLD!

ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/xmove/
has it.

Early AI assumed they could define the input output relations of their systems ignoring the details of the real world. I.e. people would write programs to pass the turing test. Wouldnt it make much more sense to build systems that learn from radio or video. Such systems might one day be able to learn to imitate people without any supervision.

I'd really like to see one of the checkpoint patches includeded in the mainline kernel series. There are several to choose from: EPCKPT, CRAK, CP.... Which one doesn't matter (feature wise), they all basically allow for the kernel to stop a process, save it's state and pages to a file, and then load and restart that process by request.

Yes, I could distribute a patched kernel across all of my systems. But then I'm tied to that kernel until whichever project I'm following updates their patch (or I update it myself, and I don't consider myself competent as a kernel hacker). This would be a really useful mainline feature for those of us in the scientific computing community. Wasn't there some talk of one of these going in 2.6 proper? --M

There is this technological wonder called Google (I shall keep the exact URL secret, lest the unwashed masses learn about it), which told me that here there be a HowTo...

Try this how to:

A little google is a wonderfull thing is it not?

They're not exaggerating. Watermarking can survive printing and scanning in addition to many manipulations. I know I tried it once just to see -- it's a weird feeling to put a watermark in something, save it as a jpeg, print it out, wrinkle up the paper, recan it, and still be able to get the watermark out of it. I don't know about steganography, but if the process is similar your information should survive.

I like this one:

Si hoc adfixum in obice legere potes, et liberaliter educatus et nimis propinquus ades

...which translates too "If you can read this bumper sticker, you are both very well educated and much too close".

I never understood why they chose that name for a car.