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no-life-guy writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a web-game to harness the natural human abilities for electronic design automation (EDA). Arguing that people are still much better than computers in games of strategy and visualization, and that we'll do anything as long as it's fun, a group created FunSAT — a game where an average Joe gets to solve a Boolean satisfiability problem. Known as SAT, this problem is an important component in various hardware design tools from formal verification to IC layout to scheduling. The pilot version is a puzzle-like single-player Java app (akin to those addictive web-games), but the researchers envision that it can be extended to a multi-player (and, perhaps, replace WoW as the favorite past-time of the millions), so anybody can be a hardware designer. If anything, this is definitely a great learning tool."

igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."

infofarmer writes "Today at about 11:30 MSD (GMT+4) a major electricity outage in Moscow, Russia brought new meanings to words like "uninterruptible", "redundant" and "uptime" for network administrators, who haven't experienced such harsh and unexpected power failures since the USSR got its Internet connection. Half of the city is totally out of electricity - including subway and the most important traffic exchange point, half of the top russian sites went down, including www.mail.ru, www.rambler.ru, www.lenta.ru, some of them haven't been brought up yet. IP packets going from ADSL users in Moscow to some local sites got rerouted to somewhere in London and then back to Scandinavia, where they met their "No route to host" deadend. Other routers found themselves in a loopback, which made many packets get dropped with TTL expired. The point is that most of popular servers have got two or three mainline Internet connections, but lack of BGP/RIP2/whatever configuration resulted in packets losing their way to hosts."

danila (Danila Medvedev) writes "'Gnothi seauton' was the precept inscribed in gold letter upon the temple of the Oracle of Delphi. The authorship of this famous maxim was ascribed to every great Greek philosopher, from Pythagoras to Socrates. According to Juvenal, this precept descended from heaven. It is immensely strange, then, that most people, including you, my dear reader, never really make the effort to 'know thyself.' The number of misconceptions, superstitions and myths that we spread about ourselves is indeed astonishing. Fortunately for you, someone else has already taken the time to understand you and present the results in entertaining, easily digestible, but at the same time scientifically rigorous format. Let me introduce Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter, an illustrated user manual to the software that runs inside our skulls -- the human mind." Read on for the rest of Medvedev's review. Mapping the Mind author Rita Carter, Christopher Frith pages 224 publisher University of California Press rating 10 reviewer Danila Medvedev ISBN 0520224612 summary Extensive illustrations drawing on the lastest in brain imaging techniques, along with expert text, makes this book especially imformative and a wonderful companion to other titles in neuroscience.

Rita Carter is a British medical writer. She was twice awarded the Medical Journalists' Association prize for outstanding contribution to medical journalism. The book gives a comprehensive description of our knowledge about the brain (as of 1998, when the book was written). It covers popular topics, such as the causes for optical illusions, the nature of the Mona Lisa's smile, the differences between the left and the right brain, between males and females, the mechanisms of drug addictions. It also delves into less popular subjects, such as the need for rationalization, the mechanisms of speech and reading, the "programmability" of patients with a lobotomy, the causes of face-blindness and many others. In fact, after finishing the book I can hardly name any aspect of the mind that the book didn't tell me about.

Throughout the book, Carter's descriptions invariably remain strict, rigorous and factual. The book doesn't make any empty claims about our minds, nor does it delve into controversies perpetrated by the uninformed. Everything written is always based on pure hard science, with references aplenty.

This doesn't prevent the book from being easy to read and immensely entertaining. Imagine the weirdness of thousands of clinical histories condensed into 330 pages for our education. The simplest way to understand the function of some part of the brain is to find a person in whom it is damaged. Here you have it all: A man who believed that copulating with the pavement was normal; the famous man who mistook his wife for a hat; Vladimir Nabokov and his account of synaesthesia; people with Fregoli's syndrome (who constantly mistake strangers for people they know, even though they realize they look totally different); chickens excited by Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut"; Nadean Cool, her false memories of baby-eating Satanic cults and her 120 different personalities, including a duck; and people with anosognosia, who refuse to realize their illnesses, such as blindness or paralysis. And what's even better, you will be able to find explanations for your own quirks and deficiencies. There are bugs in every program; your mind is no exception. It is an amazing feeling to be able to realize how your mind works, what makes you tick, what constitutes "you" -- why you feel, think and act the way you do.

The book is a treat for the eyes: the huge number of helpful, pretty illustrations makes it both easier to comprehend it and more pleasant to read. The numerous diagrams and brain scans illustrate every subject, showing which areas become more active when you have depression, which areas cause OCD (caudate), what causes eating disorders (faults in hypothalamus), the pathways activated during face recognition, etc. This helps dispel the illusion of our brain being an incomprehensible black box, letting you get a grip on the physical basis for thoughts. It's like ignoring the EULAs and looking at the source code for your mind for the first time.

The book consists of eight chapters. It begins with an introduction to the brain structure in "The Emerging Landscape," starting with an overview of the misconceptions of phrenology, and ending with a short comment by a neurophysiologist Horace Barlow, who explains the usefulness of a reductionist approach as a first step to studying the brain. The section covers all brain modules, the neural pathways and explains the evolution of the brain.

After we are through the basics, our journey around the brain starts. First, in the "The Great Divide," Carter explains the roles of the left and the right hemispheres and the corpus calossum -- the connection between them. Among other things Carter explains the alien hand phenomena, describes experiments that demonstrate that people whose corpus calossum have been severed exhibit two separate personalities, and touches the puzzle of left-handedness.

After that, we delve deep into the brain, into its more primitive part, the limbic system, which is responsible for our emotions. Then we are shown the nature of perceptions and how they achieve their meanings. After that the author breaks from the confines of the brain and explains the social nature of humans, and how language enables most of our social interactions.

Then Carter describes the nature of our memories. She explains amnesia and Alzheimer's disease, explains the amount of memory we have, and where different memories (such as procedural memory, fearful experiences, or normal memories) are stored. She describes H.M., a patient with most of the hippocampus and amygdala removed. His mind had no continuity at all; H.M. lost the ability to form most types of new memories, but he could form procedural memories and could learn some new music to play on the piano. Another man, after having a minor stroke in the middle of a family dinner, suddenly found that he didn't remember where he was, and no longer recognized the people at the table. He didn't do anything, though, and later told the doctor: "I felt quite happy being with them even though I didn't know who they were," and "they seemed rather an agreeable lot." We are shown why false memories are the norm, rather than an anomaly.

Finally, our most unique and advanced feature -- consciousness -- is explained. Carter describes the "working memory" model developed by Alan Baddeley, where images and speech-based information is held for short time in a cache-like space, while the "central executive" part co-ordinates the information processing. She demonstrates how complex programs can be easily triggered in patients with lobotomy. French neurologist Francois L'Hermitte once invited two of his patients, a man and a woman, to his home. He ushered the man into a bedroom without explanation. In the middle of the day the man saw the ready-to-use bed and immediately undressed, preparing to go to sleep. When a woman was let in and saw the rumpled bed, she immediately started to make it. Carter explains the illusion of the free will and its evolutionary origins.

She ends the book with the optimistic conclusion: "I believe one thing is already clear: there is no ghost in this place, no monsters in the depths, no lands ruled by dragons. What today's mind voyagers are discovering is instead a biological system of awe-inspiring complexity. There is no need for us to satisfy our sense of wonder by conjuring phantoms -- the world within our heads is more marvelous than anything we can dream up."

What does this book leaves the reader afterwards? It left me with the insatiable desire to immediately read it again, this time with a notebook and a pencil at hand, so that I do not miss a single fact, a single lesson, a single bit of truth about who I am. To me the book was perfect -- a unique combination of scientific rigor and entertaining writing. Each amusing medical account was always accompanied with a detailed explanation of the physiological basis for it and a handy illustration. It was complete, well-structured and accessible.

I think it was the best book (fiction or non-fiction) that I read in the past year. The only other book that approached it was another take on the nature of the mind - the amusing Permutation City by Greg Egan, which takes the technologically feasible idea of mind uploading and pushes it to its limits, exploring the philosophical and mathematical consequences along the way.

You can browse the book at Google Print. Please do so and then read it in full. Learning about yourself should be the top thing on your agenda, if you consider yourself an intelligent creature. And for a computer scientist or a programmer there can hardly be a more interesting subject than the most complex software application, written over the millions of years, an amalgamation of legacy features, sloppy code, perfectly optimized routines, special cases and the ever-harmful neural goto operators. "Gnothi seauton," and have fun doing it.

You can purchase Mapping the Mind from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Tarohann asks: "I work for a large software services company and I'm planning to write an article on Enterprise application Stress and Volume Testing (SVT) based on a couple of experiences I've had. For the most part I feel that most Enterprise SVT initiatives performed by companies at the enterprise level are flawed as they are done on ideal/non-production environments. I was wondering if anybody here has had any good/bad experiences or pointers (websites, books) I can refer to on this subject. Full credits will be given. Thanks, Slashdot!"

elhim writes "According to an article in the Moscow Times: 'Spammers last week got on the wrong side of the wrong man, and quickly found themselves with a taste of their own medicine. The man? Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov. Tired of the endless spate of unsolicited messages that clog e-mail systems everywhere, [Korotkov and others devised] ...an audio message to be volleyed nonstop to the telephone numbers listed in the... [email] spam messages.' Sometimes Russia reminds me of the Wild West."

The Zapper writes: "The Mumbai (Formerly Bombay) Cops now want to control the Cyber World. In what they call a 'Step to curb hacking and proliferation of Pornographic Email ' they are going to introduce I-D cards issued on basis of passports and driving licenses without which no one will be able to have internet access in Cybercafes all over Mumbai. If this gets implemented, and it seems it will, the Mumbai netizens can kiss anonymity good bye for ever. The I.T bill recently passed by the present Government makes hacking and accessing pornographic sites a crime punishable by imprisonment for more than an year. Here is Link to the story on Yahoo India."