Slashdot Mirror

Normally, one would need to back up such statements with links that prove something. But not in the far left land of slashdot.

As for the media to the right thing...I suggest you and anyone else that believes that tripe for a second to read this. Its a difficult read and don't expect many of the American left to be able to understand it. Here's the choice quote though, "Since the New York Times is
twice as far from the center as Fox News' Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times."

How about you pull YOUR head out of YOUR ass and quit spreading lies. Hey, I wonder if slashdot censorship will silence this post?

Crime-obsessed South Africans have a powerful new weapon with which to stop likely criminals: the car flamethrower....

The Blaster squirts liquefied gas from a bottle in the automobile's trunk through two nozzles, located under the front doors. The gas is then ignited by an electric spark, with fiery consequences.

I'm looking for to taking the prep course which starts in a couple of weeks prior to taking the Bradners advanced class in the Spring. Bradner sometimes guest-lectures one of the Fall classes.

I'm looking for to taking the prep course which starts in a couple of weeks prior to taking the Bradners advanced class in the Spring. Bradner sometimes guest-lectures one of the Fall classes.

I'm looking for to taking the prep course which starts in a couple of weeks prior to taking the Bradners advanced class in the Spring. Bradner sometimes guest-lectures one of the Fall classes.

I would love to see a study comparing how english is read to how chinese is read by native speakers.

Research shows that

Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language. But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go unspoken when they get older.

Here is an interesting note on the XM case, from someone at the Berkman Center

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2004/08/31#a805/

Example of how this works in the real world and exactly opposite to your fantasy.

Philip Greenspun

That would be true if for except the small fact that open/closed source implementations already exist.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/dbfs.html
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~vernal/learn/cs261r/d bfs-proposal.pdf
http://www.thyme.net/imp/dbfs.html
http://www.eamonwalsh.com/projects/masters/writeup .pdf
http://www.orafaq.com/faqifs.htm
http://relfs.sourceforge.net/Home.html

One could presumably go on.

After all, the guy got his doctorate from Harvard and has taught at MIT for most of his career.

For more info, see Pinker's CV

Fuck you. Pinker is a real scientist.

I'm so relieved that even though I live in an era with constant threats such as domestic terrorism, senatorial flight risks, the patriot act, the induce act, and non-Christian "citizens" running amok, that Pope Ashcroft can see through the unholy mess and guide our nation in the direction it needs. "Need not you worry", he said to his congregation of corporate leaders and wealthy elite, "For I, a federal chair, shall perform all of your duties in this civil matter." Praise Jesus that in these treacherous times a man of a singular holy vision shall unite American corporations with its 228 year old government to make the most self-righteous, most capitalistic, most federally pervasive and invasive political embodiment in all of recorded human history.

For more interesting reading on Ashcroft and his fight for the status-quo and his battles against individuality, please visit the following links:
BBC Profile
Rotten.com
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Extreme Ashcroft
Ashcroft's Detention Camps
Some guys blog

There already are a number of groups that do this. One of them is Spaceguard. There are a few others in the works (eSTAR, Pan-STARRS).

That is still illegal:

DMCA 1201(a)(1)(A)
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Who do you think wrote this law? It was the same people that came up with region coding and restrictions on fast-forwarding.

THE AMYGDALA AND PARASITIC CASTRATION

A key structure in human fertility, particularly male fertility, is the amygdala, which dramatically reduces in size upon castration. According to Malsbury and McKay, the amygdala shrinkage can be about 25% within 8 weeks of castration. (Malsbury, C.W. and K. McKay. Neurotrophic effects of testosterone on the medial nucleus of the amygdala in adult male rats. J. Neuroendocrinology, 1994, 6:57-69.) Although reduction in size is not the only way this brain-structure may be reprogrammed to effect parasitic castration, it is a possible observable. Furthermore, since large changes in human migration patterns have occurred in living memory, there should be plenty of intact amygdala specimens that can be correlated with their genotype as well as changes in the environmental genotypes that may impose extended phenotypic parasitic castration.

During the period of greatest environmental influx of more dominant genes into the environments traditionally reserved for more recessive males in the United States, autism rates have increased four-fold, from 1 in 2000 before 1970 to 1 in 500 in 2000. Furthermore, although reporting is always problematic, the increases are most apparent in peripheral geographic regions associated with more recessive traits that have experienced some of the greatest rates of change in geneflow as measured by dominant:recessive ratio -- regions such as the Pacific Northwest.

Furthermore, as reported in The Geek Syndrome:

In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.

What genetic change has occurred in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world over the last decade, more than other times in history ?

Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.

Furthermore, according to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small. Add to that the fact that the only type A blood common among "whites" is called ABO*A2, and that this blood type is centered in northern Scandinavia, according to the gene map on page 3 of the world gene maps in "The History and Geography of Human Genes" (unabridged

What the heck is Focus fusion? Aha, it's a crazy astronomer and his computer-scientist friend.

Indeed. Despitethe vacuous blurb on the Fusion Focus people page, Eric Lerner appears to be rather a failure as an astronomer. Looking at his list of refereed journals on ADS, it seems he has only a single paper in a front-runner astrophysics journal (The Astrophysical Journal). The remaining publications are in journals like Astrophysics & Space Science -- often referred to as the 'Sargasso Journal', since it's where old papers go to die.

I'm not impressed in the slightest, and see nothing which might persuade me to consider Eric Lerner -- or the AC who referenced him -- as anything more than another free-energy loon. And his perm is fucking criminal.

What the heck is Focus fusion? Aha, it's a crazy astronomer and his computer-scientist friend.

Indeed. Despitethe vacuous blurb on the Fusion Focus people page, Eric Lerner appears to be rather a failure as an astronomer. Looking at his list of refereed journals on ADS, it seems he has only a single paper in a front-runner astrophysics journal (The Astrophysical Journal). The remaining publications are in journals like Astrophysics & Space Science -- often referred to as the 'Sargasso Journal', since it's where old papers go to die.

I'm not impressed in the slightest, and see nothing which might persuade me to consider Eric Lerner -- or the AC who referenced him -- as anything more than another free-energy loon. And his perm is fucking criminal.

Indeed so.

Read this news article which shows another study that found the opposite out.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21- think.html

Something that won't take decades to bring to fruition ("Don't be so mean to them and cause them to blow stuff up").

There are things the U.S. could do in a few days that would alleviate the suffering of millions of people within a few days. Of course, they will never do it even if it makes total sense like ending the drug war.

Think I'm talking nonsense? There's a book about it: Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. Read it and decide for yourself. Also, "Profit Over People" by him is good as well.

Seems like a poignant chance to (re)bring up John Gilmore's interview (recently covered by Slashdot). John is highly concerned about the US government's increasing restrictions on the ability of supposedly free people to go from place to place in what was once a free country.

If current Chinese growth translates into enhanced human capital, we can expect political improvements such as democracy and enhanced freedoms.

A recent study showed that good economic policies, not political freedoms, are responsible for helping countries develop. However, once development allows human capital to expand (in terms of educational level), political improvement occurs:

Reference (PDF)

BTW, the US just took down two dictatorships and are replacing them with democracies...

Indeed, Bloom Filters are the shit.

These days, in my spare time, I'm writing a p2p program -- think of it as a swarm-download system, like BitTorrent, on an overlay network topology, like eMule (only eMule uses Kademlia, and I'm using Pastry). It has been shown, here and here, that Bloom Filters can drastically reduce the traffic generated when searching peer to peer networks. I recently coded a Java implementation of a Bloom Filter for my p2p program, and it works great in testing. (But the p2p program isn't anywhere near done, so don't ask about it ;)

Furthermore, Bloom Filters can be compressed -- see Michael Mitzenmacher's work here. The idea that you can compress a Bloom Filter is a little counter-intuitive, because the size of the bit vector and the number of hash functions are derived using calculus to maximize the compactness of the set, for a given false positive rate -- thus, in this state, it is non-compressable (it is "already compressed" by simply being an optimal Bloom Filter). To compress a bloom filter, you must choose a large bit vector, and a non-optimal number of hash functions, then apply the compression algorithm (typically arithmetic coding). Because the bit vector is so large, it is sparsely populated -- and so compression works.

Often you can save 10% and 20% on the size of your bloom filter, while having a lower false positive rate. Score!

A very nice, very interesting survey of all the applications of Bloom Filters can be found here.

- sm

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Sometimes I think he's just promoting that developers learn more than one programming language. I can dig that. I don't agree with equating intelligence with choice of programming language. Things are harder than that, particularly in a large company.

In a general sense, there has been a long debate about whether language influences thought, or if all languages are independent of thought. In oral human languages, Steven Pinker would argue that language is an instinct, and doesn't influence thought -- it evolves from thought.

In computer languages, however, you're not just communicating. You're representing. Also note that computer languages are written langauges, not oral languages. Harold Innis and Marshal McLuhan have both shown that written languages do influence thought, particularly the western phonetic alphabet leading to a paritcular societal pattern vs. eastern pictographic languages.

Turning to computer languages, one could argue that if you've only been exposed to one way of "representing" a thought, say with Visual Basic 6 - you are limited in the boundaries you set up in your own mind about what's possible. Ideas like dynamic dispatch, inheritance, etc. are all foreign, unless you've been exposed to them in another language.

Or, on the other hand, you may be using a language like C with very few boundaries, but this doesn't help either -- there's a lot of freedom there, and not a lot of guidance about how to use it properly. I always find it interesting when C programmers defend their choice and suggest "but, you can do object oriented programming in C!". Well, of course you can! But it required another language, Simula, followed by Smalltalk, to generate the discipline and ideas around what object oriented programming really was. Could that paradigm have evolved without another language to naturally support it? It's possible, but somewhat unlikely.

Any Turing complete language could implement a programming paradigm, it's just a matter if it's natural to the language's constructs or if it requires more elaborate structures. For example, if anyone has programmed Microsoft's COM realizes that the underlying concepts are relatively simple, but the elaborate syntax for achieving it in C++ (prior to ATL especially) is ridiculous. In this light, .NET really is about bringing the level of language up to and beyond the semantics that Microsoft technologists already had with COM.

Nevertheless, there's still a practical problem with modern dynamic languages. The world has a legacy, and that legacy is large, chaotic, crufty, and not very dynamic. Getting a handle on it requires simplification, constraints, and classifications for the kinds of languages, tools, techniques, and platforms for the future. This is the main reason why languages like COBOL, C++, or Java stick around: we have to stick to something for a few years to simplify the system dynamics in the large. Picking "one standard" or "one vendor" is a key way of ensuring quality - by constraining and simplifying the business environment.

Java is clearly not a "thought leading" language like Python or Ruby , or even older languages like Lisp or Smalltalk. But that's not what it was supposed to be. Java was an "action provoking" language that took a very large C and C++ legacy of systems, skills, and mindsets, and pushed them forward an inch.

A lot of independent technical people may not agree with "constrainting" the environment, because it limits innovation. Modern dynamic lanaguages make life so much simpler for the programmer. And I agree they do. But there are levels of simplicity -- and organizational simplicty in the large often trumps simplicity in the small. We'll get there eventually, but it will take a while. Most enlightened organizations will have an emerging technology lab to bri

especially since there's a spare mirror.
However, do we really want to go thru another Hubble Wars ?

How many kids would be studying their asses off if they knew they could pilot a mecha?

--Andrew

Obviously that's why OSETI experiments use photodetectors with nanosecond speed (eg. photomultiplier tubes). Nanosecond pulses are perfectly resolvable on these detectors. Check out a recent paper to see how this really works and for edification on other technical issues. --Andrew

--Andrew Howard

--Andrew Howard

--Andrew Howard

In case you missed it, Michael Crichton gave a great lecture about SETI and consensus science.

I believe there are already some possible Hubble replacements. The new telescope in Arizona is planned to produce visual images 10 times sharper than Hubble (according to cnn.com) . Also, many scientists studying deep space are using X-rays, which has the Chandra X-ray observatory

I agree. Most Defcon attendees aren't even close to being experts, but the Black Hat convention is a completely different story. The kiddies at Defcon would be bored out of their minds. It's more for "grown ups" - for example, speakers wouldn't throw raw meat at the audience.

My thoughts exactly. Katie Jones said

I originally had links to my business, my resume, and also personal items such as photo's of my son and other family members. Seeing as my business is online chat / community development it was obviously not in my best interests to be linked to the subject matter of this book so I removed that. And of course, I didn't want people who were interested in the subject of pedophilia or molestation viewing pictures of my baby boy.

Granted this latest development will stem the flow of traffic to her domain eventually, but will it ever be the same? Maybe this will quickly fade away in a week or so, but given the amount of publicity this has gotten penguin should have to answer for something at least in my opinion, rather than just giving a backhanded "so... we were wrong. but we didn't actually do anything wrong. all that stuff you say we did we didn't do or have any intention of doing" type of comment.

-xerox_rat

Many papers can already be accessed, at least in astronomy, for free online, e.g. NASA's ADS or the arxiv.org system.

Yah, uh-huh. I was (working for) one of Alan B. Clegg's customers around '93 or so: http://www.zug.com/pranks/outgoing/gateway.html/ And, even though this suggests Alan prevailed: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/domain/gatew ay.html/ This: http://www.gateway.com/ seems to suggest that the Gway2K now has the domain. Anybody know the rest of the story?

The DMCA may have a loophole that makes this legal

It's not a "loophole", it's an explicit exception.
European law has a similar provision.

It's there for good reason: To promote competition and not allow DRM to be used for vendor lock-in.
(Current attempts notwithstanding)

What the DMCA does is prohibit circumvention of copyright-protection devices (e.g. "cracking"), unless it's done for interoperability purposes.

However, the EULA might prohibit reverse engineering no matter what. The enforcability of them are questionable, though. The UCITA act passed by some states is thought to make such clauses enforceable.

But I'm a bit sceptical, since a federal court found such a clause to be unenforcable in 1988 despite a Louisiana state law which allowed such clauses. I can't see why Federal law would not pre-empt the UCITA as well.

What inventions?

Other rodent performance evaluation.

If they need to capture specimens to test, there's always this method.

What's really annoying about this guy is that he seems to think that un-manned spaceflight will somehow benefit if manned spaceflight is scaled back. Of course, that's nonsense. Cut manned spaceflight and I will bet you a donut to a Delta VH that within a decade NASA will cease to exist. This guy, who benefitted professionally to a huge extent from the existence of manned spaceflight programs, now has the nerve to turn around and bite the hand that (probably quite literally) fed him. That's annoying. And it hurts all of space science in the long run.

On a dollar-for-dollar basis space research of any kind (manned or unmanned) is pretty much a total waste of money. Some examples will help: the Hubble Space Telescope cost something like 2 billion. That's about 20 times the cost of the Keck Telescope, and it is about neck-and-neck when it comes to scientific output between the two. When it comes to planetary exploration - can you honestly say that there have been spin-offs that are useful here on Earth? I mean, let's be honest here: the science return from space research is all pretty trivial. Between us, who really gives a sh*t about some radiation belts around the Earth? A few power-line operators maybe, but it's not like they need a detailed understanding of the Earths bow-shock to operate, now is it? As for the rest of it - well, pretty pictures of Saturn are nice and all, but who really cares? They're ice and dirt, and have absolutely no impact on our daily lives. None whatsoever.

Some would argue that certain kinds of science can only be done from space, things like far-infrared, or X-ray observations. But those missions have in effect been subsidized to the tune of billions by other, less worthy missions. If you had to factor in the development cost of heavy-lift boosters into the cost of developing the Chandra X-ray observatory, it would have cost $20 billion or more. I doubt that would have been seen as worthwhile science.

In terms of improving human life, wouldn't the billions spent on un-manned space exploration be better spent curing disease through the NIH? Or a tax-cut. I mean, tax -cuts and de-regulation make more ultra-billionaires; if they want to fund space research privately then they can do that, and the free market will reward it accordingly (if in fact it is worthwhile).

Only a true naif would think that science is funded for scientific reasons alone, and Dr. van Allen has an inflated sense of his own importance when it comes to national funding priorities. Sciences like physics were funded because physiscists know how to make very, very large bombs. Bio-medical science is funded because people don't want to die. Everything else is pretty much not funded, or lives off of the table-droppings from the big sciences. And the big sciences are not funded because Congress has a love for deep knowledge.

By somehow pretending like his particular kind of science is more worthy than other science, he's starting a discussion that by all rights should hurt all of space science. In other words: Jim, SHUT UP. We've got a good gig going here, and you're messing it up.

Err, yeah, definitely didn't mean to hit submit there.

Anyway, I wonder if anyone has ever taken the time to poll people and find out what "Room Temperature" is actually considered to be and mapped out the answers, like the Dialect Survey Map. I'd guess people in Miami have a much different definition of room temperature than people in, say, Bangor.

Optical SETI makes a lot more sense than radio SETI. Transmission and reception are more directional, as well there being much less terrestrial impulse noise in optical versus radio to increase reception SNR.

RSS already supports the <ttl> element type, which indicates how long a client should wait before looking for an update. Additionally, HTTP servers can provide this information through the Expires header.

Furthermore, well-behaved clients issue a "conditional GET" that only requests the file if it has been updated, which cuts back on bandwidth quite a bit, as only a short response saying it hasn't been updated is necessary in most cases.

..but it doesn't help if the clients don't support either vanilla RSS syndication tags (ttl, skipDays, skipHours) or the tags defined by the optional syndication module (updatePeriod, updateFrequency, updateBase).

But even if every client obeyed these and used and respected appropiate HTTP headers (If-Modified-Since, Last-Modified, Expires), it would only make the request flood more synchronized. On the other hand, if the RSS generator randomized the syndication settings, it could distribute the load better and even premptively shift load off the peak times.

Maybe so. But the developers I've worked with were MIT comp-sci grads proud of their credentials. Greenspun's comments are dead-on, it would seem. There are too many other languages out there that perform well while making database access straightforward and efficient for both app and database.

I even have it on good authority that the client-server giant of the mid 90s, PowerBuilder, is making a comeback built upon the failure of Java applications to get delivered working and on-time.

I was born in Las Vegas as a result of the 1950's atomic tests.

Interesting, so this must be you.