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That's a heck of a spin on the situation. Google paid to be Firefox's default search engine for 10 years. It released the Chrome browser in 2008 and many wondered why it still paid Firefox to be their default search engine when Chrome had the same or higher market share. (answer was it was still worth it!)

When Google was just a search engine, they were fine paying Mozilla for Google to be Firefox's default search engine.
After Google Chrome's market share far exceeded Firefox's, they had their own solid browser platform to push Google as a default search engine. Their strategy changed. They no longer had to pay to get a wide audience, and the best way to get more browsers with Google as default was to push Google Chrome and crush Firefox. I'm sure they would have given something to be Firefox's default, but not as much as Yahoo was offering -- and likely nowhere near the amount they'd been paying prior to the Yahoo offer either.

Yahoo needed a win to boost their search income, and they got it. It was a large increase for Yahoo, but a small loss for Google... and Google is winning firefox users over to Chrome, and helping remaining firefox users to switch their search back to Google.

http://computing.dcu.ie/~humph...

It made perfect sense for Google to shrug off the tiny, declining value of Firefox search engine users as they expected to pick up market share from those leaving Firefox as well as continuing to pick up market share from those scampering off the sinking IE ship.

Meanwhile, Mozilla is running out of cash and slashing features on Firefox to save on expenses while picking up crap like Pocket to survive. It's truly sad that they're likely getting 90% of their revenue from another dying company (Yahoo) and wasting money on developing phones no one asked for. I fear they may not recover from this death spiral. (over 90% of their revenues from previous years came from Google... and you know that was more money than Yahoo gave them b/c they admit they're slashing expenses and begging for cash).

Increasing the bandwidth of existing fiberoptic cables:

We present simulations of a scheme to perform wavelength conversion of signals that eliminates phase-noise transfer from the pump to the converted signal. Nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier is used to convert the signal to a new wavelength; and if an optical comb generator is used as the multiple-pump source, then the signal can be converted without incurring any phase-noise transfer from the pumps. We highlight the capabilities of this scheme by simulating the conversion of 16-QAM signals at 10 Gbaud and showing that errors due to phase-noise accumulation are eliminated thus enabling conversion whose only impairment would be the total additive optical noise.
Source: http://doras.dcu.ie/19643/

Here's one. Here's another.

Better than bad is good is a time honored rationalization.

From the Log Song of Season One Ren and Stimpy.

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~fatwa/ren/songs.html

http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Networks/physical.phone.html "Basic speed 2400 bps. Clever coding used to get up to 56 kbps. The last mile is (usually) analog."

Whatever professor is teaching this curriculum should be shot. Telephone lines were upgraded to digital almost twenty years ago. And the speeds can range from 110 symbols per second upto 3429 symbols per second (analog). Or 110 bit/s upto approximately 34000 bit/s (analog).

Here read this list of speeds for better understanding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#List_of_dialup_speeds

Sorry for the repost, I meant to add this link explaining twisted pair:

http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Notes/Networks/physical.phone.html

I really agree with this. If someone is already going to the effort of writing a lot of scraping code, it's already worth it to them to buy one of those $10-15/month shell accounts online that have SSH access. SSH gives them the ability to forward local TCP requests to that remote IP, their scraping app just has to have the ability to use a SOCKS proxy. This means scrapers have a proxy IP that 1) doesn't show up on any of the open-proxy DNSBLs, and 2) is fast and reliable enough for them to get real work done. And if you block them, they just pay another $10-15 to get another reliable IP.

Well, it's not authoritative (I'm at work and don't have time to dig up primary sources), but here's an overview of what happened:

Studios flee to Hollywood[1]

In the early 1900s, filmmakers began moving to the Los Angeles area to get away from the strict rules imposed by Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey. Since most of the moviemaking patents were owned by Edison, independent filmmakers were often sued by Edison to stop their productions.

To escape his control, and because of the ideal weather conditions and varied terrain, moviemakers began to arrive in Los Angeles to make their films. If agents from Edison's company came out west to find and stop these filmmakers, adequate notice allowed for a quick escape to Mexico.

Working without disturbance from Edison, the Biograph Company moved west with actors Blanche Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others, to make their films. After beginning filming in Los Angeles, the company decided to explore the neighboring area and stumbled across Hollywood.

Biograph made the first film in Hollywood, entitled In Old California. After hearing of Biograph's praise of the area, other filmmakers headed west to set up shop.

The first motion picture studio was built in 1919, in nearby Edendale, just east of Hollywood, by Selig Polyscope Company, and the first one built in Hollywood was founded by filmmaker David Horsley's general manager Al Christie in 1911, in an old building on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. Movie studios began to crop up all over Hollywood after Christie's appearance, including ones for Cecil B. DeMille in 1913, the Charlie Chaplin Studio in 1917, and many others.

[1]: http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3871.html
[2]: http://webpages.dcu.ie/~flynnr/hollywood_history_1891_-_1917.htm (interesting timeline)
[3]: http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/edison_trust.htm (details on Edison's monopoly, which Hollywood broke)

Primary sources would take longer than I have to dig up, but you get the idea.

Metaphysics has no place in science. Read some Karl Popper for Christ's sake.

Here's a university in Ireland that is just begging for more zealots! http://www.dcu.ie/news/2008/feb/s0208a.shtml

One of these skills is keyboarding, and honestly, how many typing training packages have you seen on 'nix? Or even Mac?

That is a valid point. The point should not mean every computer capible of running Windows needs a copy. How many copies of KStars have you seen in the science lab? There is no reason to have every computer a clone of each other. A keyboarding class is OK to license some machines to run educational software. The license should not exclude other very fine educational software simply because it is not Open Source. Schools having kids play Where in the world is Carman and The Oregon Trail because it might have some valid history or geography is no replacement for real educational software, much of which does not run on Windows.

There is a place for Kickstart software. There is also a place for Linux chemestry, astronomy and physics software.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/genchemlab/
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~noel/linux4chemistry/
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004APS..MARW38008R
http://www.mathlab.cornell.edu/support/m434_support/gap_info/
http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/whatsnew.html
http://edu.kde.org/kstars/
http://edu.kde.org/

Some of the above can run on Windows, but it is not a requirement. The valid complaint is the requirement to license all Windows capible machines, even those without Windows, or even needing Windows. It's like getting a pre-paid Texaco credit card for your kid's car and they require you to buy a Texaco license for any hardware you have that is capible of burning gasoline including your weed eater, hedge trimmer, chain saw, your boat, and all other cars. Maybe you want to run Flex Fuel on your PT Cruiser.

I find it interesting which ones of the object-recognition and scene categorization algorithms make it to Slashdot.
Why does this one make it?
This is a very hot research topic at the moment.
to name a couple of groups:

http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/
http://lear.inrialpes.fr/
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/
http://www.science.uva.nl/research/isla/
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/
http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.research.ibm.com/slam/
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/ln/dvmm/newResearch.htm

oh, and people should not stare themselves blind on the claimed results.
Research papers *always* have to present good results, or else you do not get published.
Furthermore, these images are of a very high quality, make by professional photographers.
Many algorithms perform very well on these ('corel'-like) sets, while utterly failing if applied on real-world data:
http://www-nlpir.nist.gov/projects/trecvid/

The tribes I'm talking about are extremely xenophobic.

Interesting, the one in the documentary I saw were too, or at least, they were extremely territorial. Yet, they had a meeting with another tribe in order to make peace (had been a long-standing feud, even some killings in previous clashes, iirc).

Their culture is extremely exclusive. I see no reason to believe in the "possibility" of their interbreeding just because our own culture makes that possible. Theirs does not, unless I learn otherwise.

For me, there are two things wrong with the reasoning in this paragraph:

1. You are assuming inter-breeding between populations is a cultural phenomenom peculiar to (say) western people. But inter-breeding a biological *neccessity*, shared not just among humans but all sexually reproducing animals. It should be fairly obvious that small populations, no matter how xenophobic, *need* to at least *occasionally* inter-breed with other populations to avoid dying out completely.

2. You are assuming that individual behaviour is bounded by the social norm. This is clearly wrong. Just because the social norms of some tribe are highly xenophobic and eschew external contact, it does not restrict individuals behaviour. (Especially younger individuals, who can be more curious and 'foolhardy' - particularly where social norms are heavily influenced by older, more conservative members of the population, such as tribal elders).

The original paper would be interesting to read for such bias. I'd like to read some peer reviews which critique its statistical premise. But the article linked to neither.

Well, (joking - no offence intended) you apparently were too busy looking for the hidden creationist agenda, which no one else saw it seems (I thought it was a good pop-science article on how statistics, networking theory and computer modelling can provide rather unexpected and interesting insights into connectedness of the human population), to notice they mentioned the book, Mapping Human History right near the beginning. He's a journalist though it seems, not a scientist. The work may have done by the DCU computer scientist, Mark Humphrys quoted in the same AP article, as this article more clearly suggests. I'd love to read a paper too, can't find one, but Dr. Humphrys has some articles on his site at least it seems.

Note that even if some Amazonian tribes have indeed been fully disconnected genetically from humanity for the last 600 years, that the conclusion instead becomes "we all, except for some statistically insignificant disconnected populations, share a common ancestor from as little as 2k years ago", which remains an interesting thought.

There is a large, well-funded theocrat movement at work in America today, priotitizing science in the media for subversion.

That's a great reason to start attacking one of the better-writen pop *science* articles, isn't it? :). FWIW, if the actual work was done (in part) by a DCU scientist, the (waning, thankfully) vested theocratic movement (Catholic and Anglican churches) over here at least strongly support the scientific method and evolutionary theories arising from it.

Most have just argued with me without logic, just defensively against the idea that theocrats have gotten so far in the media.

Most of those arguing this line with you, to my reading, have been trying to highlight the lack of evidence in the article to support your notion it's some kind of subtle pro-creationism piece. I'm wondering did you somehow read a different article to the rest of us. :)

Try forgetting about BushCo, Rove and the creationist nutters for ten minutes and reading the article again. You might find the interesting and enjoyable pop-sci article the rest of us read.

Could become a representative for Great Britian to the International Olympiad of Informatics next summer, to be held in Mexico.

If you're in northern Ireland, you'd compete in the Irish Schools' Programming Competition.

You can also compete in online contests such as USA Computer Olympiad (operated in the USA, but open to everyone), or a quick google search will yield more.

Jesse.

I wasn't sure who Lysenko was, so I did a search on google and this turned up:
http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/lysenko.htm

It's a very interesting article.

Paul.

Female lionesses do not like tofu either.

Here's an answer for you:
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mip/
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mobileip-charter .html
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~jnoonan/mobileip/mipwork.h tm

overview: Your IP address is rooted with one provider who, when you're within his network sends traffic directly to you. When you're in a foreign n/w he forwards your traffic to an 'foreign agent' in the other n/w that sends it on to you. A mobile-ip daemon on your host takes care of all the automatic registration/deregistration.
The difficulty: As you said, agreements between operators :-(

Here's an answer for you:
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mip/
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mobileip-charter .html
http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~jnoonan/mobileip/mipwork.h tm

overview: Your IP address is rooted with one provider who, when you're within his network sends traffic directly to you. When you're in a foreign n/w he forwards your traffic to an 'foreign agent' in the other n/w that sends it on to you. A mobile-ip daemon on your host takes care of all the automatic registration/deregistration.
The difficulty: As you said, agreements between operators :-(

There is a simple criterion that separates trivial self-replication (as in crystals that grow and break, then grow again, etc.) from interesting self-replication (as in living beings). This criterion was introduced by Von Neumann more than 50 years ago. An interesting self-replicating system is one that has the possibility to evolve, and to reach arbitrary levels of complexity.

See Barry McMullin's paper or Tim Taylor's thesis.

The simple way to do that is to have a "plan" (the genome) that can be read by a "constructor" (the rest of the machine) which follows the plan for building a copy of itself, including the plan. Modifications in the plan lead to modifications in the result. That sounds obvious to us, but Von Neumann wrote about those things more than a decade before the structure of DNA was elucidated.

It also means that the constructor must be, or contain, a Turing machine - a universal computer, making it able to construct anything that can be mechanically constructed out of a program. In living beings, the Turing machine is the result of the complex interactions between proteins that regulate each other's transcriptions and activity. Again, this is obvious to us, but only because Monod and Jacob discovered it in the 70s.

That's why Von Neumann had to invent a very complex structure in a very complex cellular automaton to obtain a really "self-replicating" system (in the interesting sense). That's also why Chris Langton's self-replicating loops are not really "interestingly" self-replicating. And that's why the structures in TFA are even less interestingly self-replicating. Hell, they have to rely on ready-made modules ! They are not even on the same level as simple self-replicating patterns in the Game of Life, wince in the Game of Life new "modules" are constantly created.

The defining factor of life is not self-replication on the global scale. It is the fact that this self-replication occurs by constant self-building. Living systems can build themselves, not out of ready-made modules (babies aren't built by patching together bits of arms, legs, brains, etc) but by breaking down external materials, extracting energy from their environment, then using it to build themselves, in apparent complete contempt the 2nd law of thermodynamics (the key word here is apparent - every single reaction in living beings is completely compatible with the laws of physics, otherwise it wouldn't take place - duh!). Even though the resulting compounds are thermodynamically very unfavorable, they persist because they are constantly replenished by the set of chemical reactions known as "life", which can essentially be defined as autocatalysis resulting in structures with a capacity for evolution.

Hod Lipson is a really great researcher. His work on developmental systems for evolutionary design of structure is so cool it hurts. But I think he and his guys might want to tone down the comparisons with biological self-replication. Right now the structures they have are not even on the same level as the simple patterns that you can see in the Game of Life !

There is a rough overview and list of further reading available at
http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~gavin/tcpa/essay.pdf

If the readers wish to actually inform themselves about TCPA and not listen to the FUD blindly spread by those that haven't read the technical specifications.

Big Bang Cosmology? Isn't that like when Homer made that makeup gun?

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~elmer/simpsons/homer/m akeupgun.jpg

I know in Ireland you have to be registered as an ISP and the is a yearly fee., it's a few K can't remember the exacted price.
Know a guy who lived in Blessington, which is way out from anywhere.., And not Eircom (are AT&T) or NTL (cable comp.) are planning on rolling out Broadband is the next 10 years is ever.
He owned a PC shop in the locale town, which is on a hill on an enclosed lake, rented ~2MB line off an ISP, got it bounced from ISP on Three Rock Mt http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~hiking/photo_files/fea tures/2003/ThreeRock/Dsc02616.html/ into a Field off an aerial on a Tower rented from a farmer, and down into a Aerial on a Mt near Blessington.
Then offered Wireless Net access to the Area...,
Sorry about the long story but..,>

----------
"Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy

"If they want to addresse the issue of quality in open source software, there is a lot they need to consider. Most importantly... what do they mean by quality? What represents good quality in one project, may not be relevant to others."

Sticking with the "ISO" flavour, ISO 9126 defines software quality characteristics as Functionality, Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Maintainability and Portability

Drugs+Money=Chicks

Quick correction:

The XML APIs were part of a standard extension in 1.3. They were added to the core in 1.4. Also, I found the JavaDocs for 1.1, so here's a link to back up my statement that MD5 support has been around that long.

Soros is a follower and student of Karl Popper. I believe that Soros was most influenced by Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper is a really interesting person, who most /.ers would find a lot of ideas in common. You may find that some of the ideas you hold about rationality and science originated with Popper. I think that Karl Popper managed to breath new life into Liberalism when many were questioning how much further it could take us.

Karl Popper was also one of the first to advocate Free Markets as a feature of the Open Society, although I think that his idea of Free Markets more resemble what the current debate is calling Fair Trade rather than what is called Free Trade. The Clintons and many of the people that served in Bill's Administration were at least influenced by Karl Popper, which is why I think the Democrats during the 90's were so confusing to many in the far-left.

Soros is a follower and student of Karl Popper. I believe that Soros was most influenced by Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper is a really interesting person, who most /.ers would find a lot of ideas in common. You may find that some of the ideas you hold about rationality and science originated with Popper. I think that Karl Popper managed to breath new life into Liberalism when many were questioning how much further it could take us.

Karl Popper was also one of the first to advocate Free Markets as a feature of the Open Society, although I think that his idea of Free Markets more resemble what the current debate is calling Fair Trade rather than what is called Free Trade. The Clintons and many of the people that served in Bill's Administration were at least influenced by Karl Popper, which is why I think the Democrats during the 90's were so confusing to many in the far-left.

Maybe they could perform to ASCII StarWars? (Last I looked, it wasn't finished yet. Details!)

As luck would have it: check it.
Direct link to image: sassy.

Woah.. I just previewed/clicked that -- didn't realize they have a full-sized pic... she could play a hotty secret agent on TV :).

As luck would have it: check it.
Direct link to image: sassy.

Woah.. I just previewed/clicked that -- didn't realize they have a full-sized pic... she could play a hotty secret agent on TV :).

Claire Whelan's personal homepage with more info

The proposed voting machines are made by a Dutch company, they're called Powervote/Nedap. An Irish study seems to find them rather unsatisfying...
Too bad the same machines were introduced in France last month.

This old chestnut again. Chris Cowart has done little for his cute chatbot fetish over the past few years but award prizes to his friends, and spam a lot of people with ill-informed nonsense.

Before voting or participating, read why you should ignore the chatterbox challenge.

This he doesn't accept entries, and excludes previous entries based on their questioning of his methods is another reason to giggle a little at his antics.

Mozilla could be a contender, but it's split into a million project as a mozilla user, i know of the current browser (1.6?), Firefox (lets remember this IS a beta we're talking about), Thunderbird - a mail client, and some MAC OSX only broswer that I'm too lazy to go get the name of. My point is, that's 4 projects, please name the other 999,996 please cause I'd like to explore their other products.

And really FF and TB are branches of the main Mozilla suite. There was the Sunbird project, which was developing a stand-alone version of the Mozilla Calendar, but I think it's dead; and there was talk of creating Moonbird, an HTML editor. The other projects listed on Mozilla's download page are developer tools, and, strangely, a Java email client.

Being an open-source project, there are naturally some unofficial projects based upon Gecko, like Aggreg8 and Newsmonster, but they aren't taking resources away from the Mozilla Foundation.

Yeah... Sword of Shannara is so much like LotR it reads like an homage. I mean really... two rustic lads in a rural village, suddenly a foreboding wizard-type shows up, makes them leave on an artifact quest to destroy a dark lord, while his dark minions close in... Allanon's fight and fall with the Skull Bearer is a carbon copy of Khazad-dum.. Hall of Kings is the Paths of the Dead... Skull Mountain is Mount Doom... the list just goes on and on. Check out this page.

It's still a well written novel though, I quite enjoyed it, and it really launched my interest in fantasy before I even knew about Lord of the Rings.

Dragonlance isn't the greatest thing in the world, but I still find myself coming back to it on occasion... all those great characters like Tanis, Sturm, Raistlin, Kitiara and everyone else just resonate and stay with me like old friends that I have to visit every once in a while :)

Look here for concerns on Nedap

You wanna see a plasma lamp?

If your at work, look up.

Those florescent lights are plasma lights with a phosphorus coating that absorbs the UV light emitted by the plasma and emits visible light. The plasma is created by applying high voltage to the electrodes.

Did you know that there is no such thing as a white fluorescent light?

The lights are shifted ever so slightly towards either the red green or blue spectrum. Thats why if you go into a older office building and look up you will likely notice that some of the lamps just don't look the same - look at it closely relative to the other lights and you can tell what color shift it has.

Neon lamps (I believe any noble gas will do), cold cathode lamps (the ones people install in their windowed computer cases), those cheesy globes that when you touch them lightning shaped light appears to be reaching for your finger - all plasma.

Read about plasma here:

http://www.prl.dcu.ie/expl.html


Here are the different ways to create plasma:

http://www.phys.tue.nl/EPG/epghome/polylab/sourc es .htm


Or if you can find them - some of you probably remember these:

http://bulbmuseum.net/bulbs/figuralargon.htm


Noble gases:

http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Elemen ts /NobleGases/index.s7.html


Anyway the real story here is the tools that they used to capture the data in the instant that is takes to turn on the lamps. I see nothing of intrest here esp. regarding 'life'.

The crap about life is garbage. Plasma is the fourth state of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma). They are not "reproducing" thereby mimicking life. Rather, they are merely converting an element from one physical state to another.

Quick theory:

Gas can not pass an electrical current because if the electrons (- charge) in the atom move then the rest of the atom goes along with including the + charged protons.

The electrical potential (voltage) has to be high enough such that the electrons begin to be ripped away from the atom itself. This exchange of energy causes the gas matter to change from a gas state to a plasma state and is called ionization. The emission of light (photons) is caused by the change in energy states. As you can see here..

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/images/bohr_a to m.gif


When an electron jumps from one orbit to another energy must be released by the atom this energy is released in a form of a proton at a fixed wavelength relative to the distance of the state change (atom specific). If the wavelength falls into the visible range of the EM spectrum you'll be able to see it.

jeremycec writes " Evidently, nothing's been resolved since 2001 , when this happened the first time. In these Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction documents from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., we see how the court stepped in to pull the plug on a system, which, through its abject lack of due care, left someone's important financial information wide open to attackers. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: 'For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure, ... Our entire network has no, firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid.' So, when the BIA could get no relief through Interior's IT Dept., it went to the courts. Source: Government Computer News "

reminds me of that old qbasic game where gorillas calculated tragectories and tried to blow each other up with bananas

Gorilla! That game ruled... I used to play that w/my dad back in the day..

After a little googling, I managed to find this page that has it avail for download :)... ah yah!

Perhaps you should become a CMS

(Cardholding Member of SAT)

(Society against TLAs) (Three Letter Acronyms)

many years ago while in University DCU a computer studies student found a still logged in Vax terminal session belonging to a first year business student, and decided for the hell of it to send a mail to Bill Clinton, where among other things threatened the presidential cat, it was called "socks" I believe. Computer studies student goes back to the bar and continues to drink heavily. Fast forward a couple of weeks and the father of the business student gets a knock on his door. It is the special branch (Irish version of the FBI I guess). After having the story explained to him and having his rather generous offer of tea refused he is finally getting the picture, it is "a federal offense" to threaten the life of the president and they US authorities handed this to their Irish counterparts. College sys admins lock the business student out, and word gets out that the Business student is in deep poo with the ploice, the computer applications student then owns up to it and has his time with the police. Apart from getting around his school trip to "SOVIET RUSSIA" when it still meant something and his little hammer and sickle badge the police believed that he wasn't actually in a position to follow up his threats. And they all lived happily ever after except that

1) Nobody had told the university president and being asked to comment by the newspaper reporter was not the way to tell him
2) The rumor was that the Computer applications student was put on a blacklist which would mean never being allowed into the US
3) His family was put on the same list
4) As was the business student
5) And all her family
6) Socks the cats is fine...

An Irish/Scottish jig and reel generator.

The music isn't based on any kind of mathematical technique, and it's all the better for it.

This seems to be a pretty good intro to resistor logic.

You might want to try your rap about 'Communism benefits scientists' on some Geneticists from the USSR. Specifically the ones who weren't Stalinist enough and so got a free vacation to the labor camps.

Research subject: Lysenko.

http://redbrick.dcu.ie/~valen/epic.txt

I don't believe this for a second. Word is complex, but I've looked at the Microsoft Word 97 Binary File Format spec (and spent a good week starting to write my own parser) and I don't see the big deal. This stuff is not that hard. Parsing it is actually pretty easy (yes Werner, you were right, a yacc parser is useless). The hard part has nothing to do with Word. These guys are trying to write a word processor which is more about rendering and efficient editing than how it serializes it's state. But there going about it in completely the wrong way. The're trying to build a word processor around the Word format. Separate your peas and carrots guys. Don't limit your exectations to the abilities of Word. These guys should be exploring the proven priciples behind rendering and editors, find a good data structure to represent a document and then deserialize and serialize documents to and from that data structure (a tree) into whatever format you want include .doc, .ps, .html, ....

Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.

Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

Anyway Ive started looking at Voice Reccognition:

IBM have made there Via Voice SDK freely available, which is being made use of in the rather interesting looking XVoice, though its been passed between developers, the most current page is here ang the mailing list here. However training hasnt been implimented yet, but Via Voice Dictation for Linux compares rather favourably at ~ $50 compared to several hundred for the windows version.

Alternately, there is the Freespeach/Open Mind Speach project, gpl and makes use of the Overflow language/enviroment.

Not really aware of any active projects beyond such, hopefully this ask slashdot will prove to be interesting reading.

Here's a guy who had a lisp bot keep a moron chatting for NEARLY 90 MINUTES! It's a great read.