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I don't know what precisely you mean when you refer to "much of religion", but it can't be the Christian faith as described in the Bible, which makes very clear that belief in "free will" is not part of the Christian faith, see e.g. Exodus 9:16 and Romans 9:17ff.

However moral responsibility for one's actions is an essential part of what the Bible teaches. You can be morally responsible for what you do even if your will isn't totally, entirely free. Such moral responsibility requires only the ability to consciously veto proposed actions that the unconscious part of the mind is proposing, and this veto ability has in fact been experimentally observed, See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57.

Therefore, free will and moral responsibilty are not the same thing. It is true that some people have been preaching a version of Chrstian religion which is based more on philosophical assertions like "free will" than on what the Bible actually says, but that is not a valid argument against religion. It only demonstrates the foolishness of listening to people who try to base religion on human philosophy instead of focusing on what the Bible says.

"We can't rule out that there's a free will that kicks in at this late point," said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. "But I don't think it's plausible."

Actually the experiments of Benjamin Libet suggest that whatever precisely is the reality that the philosophical model of "free will" approximates, it kicks in at that late moment which Haynes considers so implausible.

See Benjamin Libet: "Do We Have Free Will?", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8--9, 1999, pp. 47--57

I think of my subconscious mind as a kind of computer which tries to compute useful answers to the various challenges of life in the form of proposed actions. Our moral responsibility is in the areas of training our subconsciousness to produce proposed actions which are morally acceptable, and in the area of exercising what Libet describes with the words that the "conscious function ... can veto the act".

Do you suppose at any point during the development of this, someone somewhere at MS thought to shout "KICK OUT THE JAMS, MICROSOFTERS!" at the top of their lungs?

People think that targeting ads are just adapted to customers to make them more attractive. But the target may not the ad but the web user himself! In The digital Person , Daniel J. Solove mentions the case of a banker in Maryland who checked its list of bank loans with the records of people with cancer in order to cancel the loans of cancer sufferers. With targeting ads, advertisers accurately select their customers. Therefore, a bank could soon directly refuse to addresses its ads to cancer sufferers. Relying on all the gathered information and the established user profiles, they can easily targets the wanted costumers.

That's also true for insurances (health, car, house): advertisers can choose to display really good offers to profitable clients and expensive offers to other users. Similarly, job offers can target specific users: depending on your political opinion there could be job offers that you would never see. Google already proposes to advertisers to target web users depending on their annual salary, their age and their ethnicity...(demographic targeting)

Internet is becoming a primary place for social interactions where search engines play the most important part. Our political, social and cultural behaviors on Internet directly impact our social interactions and users have no control on their own profiles. Job, house, insurance, travels... will depend on our opinions, behaviors, health records and our personality.

I wrote a longer post on these issues: http://squigglesr.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15.

A regex visualizer is pretty useful too for understanding how regex works. I used this one a few years ago and it does a good job:

http://laurent.riesterer.free.fr/regexp/

It will color code your regex pattern and the associated matches in the string to be searched so you know what is matching what.

The way they "just don't support it anymore" looks a lot like doing everything they can to discourage anyone from tinkering with their device.

Which, by the way, is coherent with their whole DRM/iTune/exclusive_deals strategy of leveraging their control over their customer to limit competition.

In France, the best ISP, http://free.fr/ , gives you a modem that actually runs a trimed down version of linux, acts as a tivo, and even uses a custom version of vlc to stream videos (TV or VOD) to your PC or TV! People have tinkered a lot with it, to add youtube support and the like.
So excuse me for having high standards :)

Not pointless at all. It's also good to have feedback of what the machine is doing.

For Linux, check wmhdplop.
(check the animation at the bottom right of the page)

Also available as a gkrellm plugin.

I believe that Linux being free has nothing whatsoever to do with its value perception.

Instead I believe that people, and to some extent correctly, still equate Linux with "something for geeks, not end-users" because of:

- the generally poor standard of GUI's on Linux itself and Linux software

- the generally dismissive attitude of Linux users / software developers for a nice polished GUI with all the details taken care of.

There ... I've said it. So flame me.

Ordinary users simply do _not_ want something that forces them to go to the command line for system maintenance. Neither do they want to have to edit configuration files, let alone scripts. It has taken Linux distributions years to come up with something as sophisticated as YAST (for SuSE Linux) and KDE Control center, and especially KDE still doesn't provide a reliable one-stop solution to detect and install my inkjet printer. I have to go to CUPS for that. In a word ... it's less simple than MS Windows (unless you already know what you should be doing because you did it before and kept notes).

I have seen threads with expostulations about how great command line oriented programs are, and I agree ... for some programs that are oriented towards batch processing, for repetitive jobs, and for software that I write myself for my own use. (When I write software for my own personal use, I never write GUIs. Command-line, control files, and file in, file out. If a GUI is needed, someone else can do that.)

But for other people's programs, and for programs I don't use every day I want to be prompted and guided ... by a GUI ... with tooltips and a smoothly functioning and fairly complete Help function. The very last think I want is to be obliged to read a manual and remember commands for some fink of a program before I use it. I believe I have a typical end-user mentality in this respect.

And did I mention that as an end-user I really do _not_ want to see every program sporting its own GUI layout either? I don't care a fig about what some programmer thinks is good way to organise his GUI. I want my GUI to be *standardised* (at least the toolbar) so that it's somewhat familiar as soon as the application starts. Copy-paste should of course be supported, and don't you dare to let it default to any other key combination than C for copy and V for paste, and a print option (if applicable at all) right where I expect it ... under the menu (which has to be the leftmost menu) somewhere 3/4 down the list.). Well ... I might be able to cope with a standard GUI layout under Linux that's different from Windows, but no more than one.

And then the graphics itself ... ouch. I really *hate* GTK-based programs. They look somewhat like the Windows programs I'm used to, but the widgets work differently. I find them clunky. Ugly and clunky. Again, I couldn't care less what some programming community thinks of them. I don't want them. Take the typical GTK file menu for one thing. An abortion! And what's more, I won't have them unless there is no alternative.

As an illustration, take for example AviDemux (see here: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/). It comes in two flavours: with a GTK+ interface and with a QT4 interface. I tried the GTK+ flavour first and disliked it. The QT4 version on the other hand was acceptable. It didn't irritate.

The good news is that this nicely illustrates the difference between what in the context of "Git" (the version control software) is called: the plumbing (the guts) and the porcelain (the superficial layer that comprises the GUI). A well-designed GUI can be rendered in either GTK+ or QT4, and it should have absolutely no impact on the plumbing.

Looks like the inventor may have stumbled upon the so-called "Newman Machine."

A more detailed analysis, including a DIY kit (several of which are shown built on YouTube), was made in '98 for your review. Testing on one variation, schematics provided, resulted in an apparent measurement of overunity.

Both inventions may actually have been anticipated by US Patent 2928959 granted to L. M. Christian in 1956. See http://www.google.com/patents?id=JDlIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#PRA1-PA3,M1

Looks like the inventor may have stumbled upon the so-called "Newman Machine."

A more detailed analysis, including a DIY kit (several of which are shown built on YouTube), was made in '98 for your review. Testing on one variation, schematics provided, resulted in an apparent measurement of overunity.

Both inventions may actually have been anticipated by US Patent 2928959 granted to L. M. Christian in 1956. See http://www.google.com/patents?id=JDlIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#PRA1-PA3,M1

Looks like the inventor may have stumbled upon the so-called "Newman Machine."

A more detailed analysis, including a DIY kit (several of which are shown built on YouTube), was made in '98 for your review. Testing on one variation, schematics provided, resulted in an apparent measurement of overunity.

Both inventions may actually have been anticipated by US Patent 2928959 granted to L. M. Christian in 1956. See http://www.google.com/patents?id=JDlIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#PRA1-PA3,M1

You'll find it here : http://beijingtobeirut.free.fr/ The first half of the blog is in French, the second half in both French and English. Yep, I come from the country of stinking cheese and sparkling wine :-)

Yet one more reason to support Open Source software.

To take your argument somewhat further (to satisfy the paranoid?): make sure the OS and tools you use don't contain 'uninvited guests', i.e. malware.
Consider this wonderful little gem: tcc. It's a C compiler whose source code (in particular the obfuscated version) you could wear printed on a T-shirt or have tattoo'd on your back. It's tiny and compiles blazingly fast (Way back when it was used to compile a kernel while booting!)
The tcc source (the unobfuscated version) can be verified not to contain malware by any competent C programmer.
I propose improving tcc such that it is able to compile GNU tools and libraries without too much hassle, at the same time fixing the GNU stuff to compile with tcc. Next bootstrap tcc, bootstrap gcc, build your kernel and tools, then the world.
Why not bootstrap gcc directly? Well, because in theory the standard library and code generator of your host compiler could store 'uninvited guests' into the target at each stage, and no amount of bootstraping cycles might be able to get rid of all of it. The (statically linked) tcc binary is very small and can easily be verified not to contain malware.

Gentoo from scratch?!

I have on freeware app I use periodically. It is imaginatively called Maintenance and appears basically to be a front end for built in Mac OS X scripts the system already uses, but also allows you to do things like clean caches and such. It isn't really necessary, but I do like that it helped me determine that my HFS++ volume had some header corruption and advised me to reboot from my Mac OS X install DVD and run a disk scan. It did and it repaired the headers and now the disk access is just as fast as the day I bought the computer.

I Know that obfuscation is not very popular to protect privacy (just have a look on Bruce Schneier review of TrackMeNot, and you'll see what I mean), but I think it remains a good solution to protect privacy in that case because anonymity does not exist anymore ;).

The idea is to use a tool that frequently generates queries to searches engines. Basically is quite like opening your WiFi access to protect against RIAA: if you use a tool that generates queries, none will be able to prove that a query is issued by you and not by the tool (with mail it's quite harder).

I know that TrackMeNot (http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot) has been criticized, but they improved it, and there also SquiggleSR (I develop it, so it's quite a promo: http://squigglesr.free.fr./

The real difference between Europe and the U.S.of A.

All I can say is "vive la difference!"

Other copies, in case of slashdotting ... here and here

For Windows, I use AutoHotkey.

For Linux, you can use xbindkeys (all desktop environments), edit the Metacity settings via gconf (GNOME), or use the Menu Editor (KDE). I'm using the Metacity way.

"universal"? Yeah why not, connect it everywhere,
but without drivers, its not like you are gonna use it anyway..

Case in point webcams,
very few webcams have drivers that work under Linux,
the following site was a good effort http://mxhaard.free.fr/ [mxhaard.free.fr],
sadly, it looks like a lost cause as most popular webcams go unsupported in Linux.

for example, support has been promised "soon" since mid 2006 for the microdia webcams
(usb id like 0c45:xxxx), but looking here https://groups.google.com/group/microdia [google.com]
shows that one and a half years the users have been waiting,
USB 3? HAH, I hope it never takes off

Something Pez forgot to mention is that you can emulate an XO relatively painlessly. There is even a premade image file that is available that you can drop into say QEMU and see what it's all about.

A few caveats: Use something with virtualization which unfortunately means x86. Trying to run this emulated on a high end PowerPC system was saddening. Yes it is only a 433MHz target, but 433MHz is pretty high when you think about it. The other thing to keep in mind is that the premade image wants to change the display to about 1024x768 instead of the XO native 1200x900. The Sugar manager seems to be fine with it but most activities (XO apps) will not display properly.

Neither Make nor Slashdot have the basic decency to name the man: Claude Paillard.

What is it with acting like foreign nationals are some sort of trained monkey? C'mon folks.

Anyway, here's a direct link to his site so you can skip the non-article at Make. Site includes much information (use the fish as needed), the streaming dailymotion vid, and a download link for those who can't see streams. Enjoy.
http://paillard.claude.free.fr/

Thanks Claude! That rocks.

I got old (fat) PSP for Christmas so I spent some time modding it out and here's what I've found.

4gb memory sticks can be found for $60 online and are a great investment.

You can use this program to backup your UMD disks and then compress them, put them on the memory stick, and tada.

iR Shell is awesome, it provides a the ability to control IR devices, nice skinnable shell, good file browser, lets you switch out of games (think alt-tab), play MP3s while you're playing a game and mute game music, toggle CPU speed, do adhoc wifi transfers between PSPs, take screenshots and much more, you can find a larger list of features (and the un-official forum) here.

PSP Vault has a very nice downloads section, tons of guides and very active forums.
Psp-homebrew has a great list of homebrew you can sort by firmware version. compatibility
QJ.net is another good resource.

PSP Radio lets you stream internet radio on your PSP.

There are NES, SNES, GB, GBC, GBA, Sega Genesis, Neo-Geo, N64, Atari 2600, C64 and probably others.

Wifisniffer is a great probably that does just what it says.

PSP Weather is another good one.

PSP HTTPD lets you use your psp as a webserver.

Portable VNC lets you control your PC with your PSP and there is software that will let you use your PSP as your gamepad for your PC.

PSP XTI is a TI-92 (Graphing calculator) emulator for the PSP. GPS is soon coming to the PSP (USA only), it will be available as a UMD but no release date or price has been set.

There are many others, just browse the file collections and forums.

If you have a PSP with the factory firmware and wish to downgrade it can be an annoying process, it depends on what version firmware you're running.
This forum post as has the information you need.

Used PSPs can be had for less than $100 in stores near me, including a 1gb pro-duo stick, I think I've squeezed $100 worth of features out of it.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes

SvSIP

It exists. SvSIP allows to to send and receive calls with SIP on your Nintendo DS. You can download it at http://svsip.free.fr/spip.php?rubrique9. There are also a couple free places you can use with it to make free calls on your DS that you can find by looking at the accompanying gbadev forum thread at http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14121.

It's pretty cool, though, the out-going quality is sort of bad (it could just be the free service I was using), while the incoming sound to your DS sound just fine.

So, take that PSP :-P

Win-dows ? http://obligement.free.fr/images/windows_firewall.jpg

Let's not forget ClamWin, which will give ClamAV protection to Windows machines. The only real criticism I've seen is that it doesn't have a real-time scanner, but supposedly one is in the works. As it stands now, you can pair it with WinPooch for real-time scanning.

Poor to nonexistant connectivity. Try asking the average ISP for an ipv6 address and they'll just look at you funny. It's not just consumer ISPs either - this business park I'm in at the moment has *no idea* what ipv6 is and has no timescale to look at it either.

As I already mentioned, I'm developing a privacy enforcement plug-in which generates false queries (it's quite like TrackMeNot, but with more coherent and personalized queries see http://squigglesr.free.fr/ for details).

As my plug-in click also on ads, it may cost money to Google since advertiser won't be happy to be charged for simulated click. So, if tomorrow Google asks you to pay the bill for your privacy, how much are you willing to pay?

I'm not sure we'll agree to pay for all the services if they had to be paid with dollars... if we are not even ready to pay just by switching search engine.

I wonder how we can actually evolve into an energy-based being... hmmm...

We already are. If you instead think of 'longevity', YMMV.

CC.

Regarding interfacing with R note that R itself can do minimal symbolic
differentiation out-of-the-box as shown by this sample R session:

> deriv(expression(x^2))
2 * x

and has a partially developed interface with yacas via the addon package Ryacas.
After installing Ryacas and yacas this R code works:

> library(Ryacas)
> x = Sym("x")
> deriv(x^2)
expression(2 * x)

This Ryacas interface includes a partial recursive decent R parser that translates
R code to yacas code and an XML-based OpenMath connection in the other direction.
Communication is via sockets. See

http://ryacas.googlecode.com/

Unlike Sage, symbolic computation is not really the focus of R but R does have
1000+ free addon packages including interfaces to numerous other free and
commercial systems. The addon packages are listed in these repositories which
focus on general items, interfacing and biology, respectively:

http://cran.r-project.org/
http://www.omegahat.org/
http://www.bioconductor.org/

Also there is a graphics gallery with sample R graphics:

http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

The R home page can be found by entering the single letter R into google.

PSK31 uses (you guessed it!) about 31 hertz of bandwidth, though it doesn't have error correction built in to the mode. There is also a related mode (PSK63) that uses 63 hertz of bandwidth with a higher data rate. PSK is indeed a very reliable low-power and low-bandwidth means of communication. Whether you're a ham or a short-wave listener, I highly recommend giving it and the other digital modes a try. Just hook up your radio's audio out to your computer's sound-card, download one of the many digital mode software packages out there, and enjoy monitoring! If you're a ham, hook up a few more cables, adjust your audio level a bit, and you're on the air! I recommend MultiPSK as a good software package to get started. It's a bit ugly in the interface but it will work with almost any digital mode on the air. Or, for just PSK and RTTY, give WinWarbler a try, from the DXLab suite. It's a much easier to use interface, and is my personal favorite for when I don't care about anything but PSK.

Enjoy!
Brad - N0TCP

Actually there is already a great homebrew application for using the DS as a phone: SvSIP! http://svsip.free.fr/ Use the Nintendo headset, the quality is impressive.

This looks neat and very promising, but I don't think it's background free, is it? This is based on page 2, "The building blocks of the standard
model and gravity are fields over a four dimensional base manifold. I think there remains an unanswered question regarding what "x" means in the equations. And you can derive some stuff trying to answer that question. Just 2 cents.

I bet you $1,000,000 you can't emulate my MacBook Pro on my Palm Z22. I'll make it easy for you - you can make your emulation as inefficient as you like.

Why on earth wouldn't you be able to emulate x86(-64) on ARM?

I think you owe the Qemu guys some money: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/status.html

Hello We had a party in Lyon, France and we took a lot of pictures !!! Btw Duke Nukem Forever was released during our party. I am sure you can't stay without the link, now ... So where are we supposed to send it to qualify for the Party Grand Prize ?
Our Party
DVD cover
Duke Nukem
Some of us we didn't have any /. t-shirt but we even enjoyed our party : http://cielissime.free.fr/slashdot-party/

Last time I checked webcam support was implemented as a kernel module (gspca or spca5xx):
http://mxhaard.free.fr/index.html

it's not built in (yet), but there is such a thing available.

http://sianka.free.fr/?lang=en

The only problem I see in the use of a text file configuration is the lack of documentation. For example, to run a standalone fastcgi based application (IIPImage) I had to spend few weeks reading blogs and participating in forums, just to realise, at the end, that I have to use fake empty files to set the fcgi handler correctly... If somebody is interested here is the howto. In terms of performances... IIS + fastCGI is very quick!

The trick is to use motion and multiple frames to "discover" edges. Usually the target of enhancement is a human who moves slightly, even when standing still. What the analysis software does is measure the change from each pixel to the next.

Zoom in on the pixels near a "sharply focused" curved edge in a photo of a black circle on a white background (or even a straight line on a diagonal.) You'll see filler pixels near the boundaries that are neither black nor white, but shades of gray where the individual pixel straddles the line on the original. You'll also likely see some colored pixels due to the camera sensor not having all the red, green and blue pixels at the same point. By moving the subject a mere fraction of a pixel and examining another picture, the shades and colors will change accordingly. Interpolating the difference can give you a more precise definition of where the edge really is. The more frames you compare (and with suitable motion) the more likely it is you can determine the edges.

Astronomy software exploits this fairly easily with a technique known as image stacking, as in DeepSkyStacker. However they have it fairly easy as the stars themselves make excellent reference points. It's not as easy with a subject that's not exactly trying to pose for a camera, but it's still possible.

But none of those techniques can do the whole "zoom in on that crowd, zoom in on that guy, zoom in on his name badge, zoom in on the barcode, translate that to text, look him up in the database" that spy shows like to do. There's a difference between magic and miracles.

If you're going to Godwin the thread I might as well add a couple of pics of Nazi book burning-

Pic 1
Pic 2

It's been a while since last time I used it, but I think Winpooch can be set to work on a whitelist principle.

Wake me up when you're able to use PCC instead of GCC to do a 'make world'

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned tcc on this thread - it's lighter, faster, and close to a drop-in replacement for x86. The original poster doesn't seem aware of the wider context or they might have mentioned icc too. Even lcc is almost a drop-in, if far less optimising than gcc, and it supports more than just x86 targets.

TCC FTW

3) Because it's interesting to somebody who likes seeing how compilers work. "simple, fast and understandable".

TFA makes no claim about it 'going up against' gcc in any way (apart from an observation about speed of compilation). Compilers are intersting things to some people, that's all.

Your linux distribution quite possibly comes with tcc anyway. Is that a problem?

DirectX is HEAVEN for game devs, because in theory it means we can write to a single standard for the windows platform, and have our games work on any card.

For your purposes, it sounds like OpenGL+SDL would be heaven, too; possibly even a better one. :-> You can write to a single standard and have your games work on any card, too - but on lots of platforms. Not just Windows, but also Mac and Linux, plus quite a few others. The book "Programming Linux Games" is only a little out of date (basically in the audio section) but is available for free download and covers the ground well. I've been using it for a project and it really is quite straightforward but complete.

Okay, you'd have to rewrite engine code, I grant that. But I'm pretty sure you'd only need to do it once forevermore. And if DX7 really is going away, you'll have to do it eventually anyway.

Any time foobar2000 is recommended, popular components should be mentioned as well (also a link to that hydrogenaudio-hosted wiki). My essential components (all on that linked page):

• Columns UI
• LyricsDB
• Monkey's Audio decoder
• Autoplaylist Manager

Also, foobar2k includes transcoding settings for LAME MP3 and Nero AAC, but the binaries aren't included (for licensing reasons I assume). Foobar2k asks for the locations of "lame.exe" or "neroaacenc.exe" the first time you try to encode to these formats. They can be downloaded for free:

• LAME MP3
• Nero AAC

Finally, essential reading for newbie foobar2k users: Bachi-Bouzouk's Guide to Foobar2000 v0.9.

I'm not sure spell-checking can really be made to work because, by definition spell-checkers flag anything that is not in the allowed list (also called dictionary) as an error. But source code always contains tons of identifiers that are not real words, like pid, ret, req, riid, etc. The problem is that there are hundreds if not thousands of them in a large project and that you get a ton of new ones making the maintenance of a custom directory a pain.

But I've been annoyed by spelling errors too and what I noticed is that the same errors come over and over again. So what I did is write a script that specifically checks for common typos. And I've very imaginatively called it 'typos'.

What's great with this approach is that, no matter whether you're writing a C, Perl, PHP or HTML file, 'seperate' is never going to be a real word. So we can identify these with no cumbersome custom dictionary, and a very very low false positive rate.

Typos is open-source (GPL) and has no dependency that I know of (besides perl). So you can try it out just by downloading it, making the script executable, and running it with no argument on your source:

• Readme: http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/Readme.txt
• the script: http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/typos
• Git repository: git-clone http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/.git

I'm not sure spell-checking can really be made to work because, by definition spell-checkers flag anything that is not in the allowed list (also called dictionary) as an error. But source code always contains tons of identifiers that are not real words, like pid, ret, req, riid, etc. The problem is that there are hundreds if not thousands of them in a large project and that you get a ton of new ones making the maintenance of a custom directory a pain.

But I've been annoyed by spelling errors too and what I noticed is that the same errors come over and over again. So what I did is write a script that specifically checks for common typos. And I've very imaginatively called it 'typos'.

What's great with this approach is that, no matter whether you're writing a C, Perl, PHP or HTML file, 'seperate' is never going to be a real word. So we can identify these with no cumbersome custom dictionary, and a very very low false positive rate.

Typos is open-source (GPL) and has no dependency that I know of (besides perl). So you can try it out just by downloading it, making the script executable, and running it with no argument on your source:

• Readme: http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/Readme.txt
• the script: http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/typos
• Git repository: git-clone http://fgouget.free.fr/typos/.git