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So what happens to people who are paranoid about backing up THEIR OWN videos that they made with their own digital cams??? Or backing up their HUGE family images in raw tiff format???

Or backup your own development projects? (mine needs at least one backup every week, and the dir is 600MB)

Or download and burn legitimate video/music? Like tuff licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 (like these few wonderful lectures?)

I happen to do all those things, and I go through a TON of CDs (MP3s really do use an insigfinicant number of CDs - Not enough for them to charge me ANYTHING extra).

Are they providing me with a service for me to pay them? Since the way that I see it, if they will be charging me for "their music", I might as well burn it AND distribute it (since, hey, you're paying for it anyway - they already factored in the cost into the price of a CD).

AND according to their logic, I'm a software developer, and I'm sure some percentage of disks is used to distributed warez, so I might as well get some money for EVERY CD sold... (it might be *my* programs that are copied, so...) we have a 3% tax on music, then we'll have a 5% on Videos, then we'll have a 10% on software (with money going to our good friends in Redmond), and what's next??? Don't think that the 3% or whatever it is will be the end of it.

He looks like an escapee of a TJ Hooker episode gone wrong.

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

His ideas, as I understand them, are to build increasingly complex robots using subsumption architecture, i.e. simple behaviors like movement come first, then more complex behaviors are added in layers. His approach to AI is radically different approach than traditional symbolic processing AI.

His research raises all kinds of interesting questions about evolution, emergent behavior, and how to pass the Turing test.

White Collars Turn Blue
by Paul Krugman

Interesting essay worth reading about this topic.

Here's another link that was posted to VersionTracker

Al.

The younger is Robert Tappan Morris, and he's at MIT http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~rtm/. Among other things he's done some stuff on high-performance routing and computer security.

The elder is Robert H. Morris, not sure the middle name.

You may wish to look into programming by example/demonstration, which does as you suggest and more: it generalizes user examples into complete programs/macros:

http://lieber.www.media.mit.edu/people/lieber/PBE/

However, that's not the purpose of DRT. DRT is a tool to help you understand other people's code by considering concrete scenarios/actions.

As for automatic instrumentation without code changes, that would be difficult right now even if we focus just on qt/gtk.

DRT currently patches applications to ensure they do not perform too much polling (which confuses DRT action detection) and also that they have a non-blinking cursor of a unique color (to allow cursor tracking). Amir

Compare this to an illusion that actualy passes this test: checkershadow

The question is why make a bogus illusion when a good ones exist? NIH? (Or perhaps they don't want to support MIT?) Is all their "research" of this quality?

The reason why the brain confuses colors and such is because it quite sensibly corrects for shadows. It very sophisticatedly determines the light source, and compensates for it. Why is that so hard to grasp?

If you program a computer to 'see' (using cameras or whatever) it can tell that two colours in an illusion are the same if they are 'really' the same.

Now do the same to a human. You might /know/ that you are seeing an illusion, but you /cannot/ see the two colours as being the same. Thus the eye isn't a simple camera, and we certainly don't have access to the vision 'bitmap' from the cornea in our concious brain, or we could train ourselves not to see the illusions.

The writeup says that the conventional explanation involves (something like) colour bleed within the neural system to get the effect; for which there is no direct evidence and no explanation for /why/ our eyes would have such a defect (why didn't illusions disappear as we evolved better sight?).

The idea that there might be some evolved preprocessing mechanism at the fundament of our vision which prevents us from seeing like cameras (as opposed to simple 'mechanical flaws') is actually recent and controversial (theres a chapter on exactly this in The Blank Slate thats worth reading), so I don't think it quite qualifies as 'banal'.

The Duke guys don't seem to be quite saying that we see the past at a macro level (leaves, trees, sheep) so much as at a micro level. Something is translating raw colour info into shape, distance and colour /cues/ that we internally reconstruct into the image using past knowledge. This layer is where the visual illusions arise.

Anyway, thats what I thought they were saying, I could have completely misunderstood. It would be more convincing if they could construct a computer model from their ideas that had the same vision defects we do.

-Baz

AT&T assigned the setuid patent to the public domain. I can see a reference to it here among other places.

The problem with DNS is that while the rest of the Internet is fairly decentralised, and that no organization has complete control over it (which is both technologically and politically sound), DNS is very centralised.
But now we have algorithms to deal with this! Distributed Hash Tabels like kademlia and are completly decentralised (every one who wanted, e.g. all (even small) ISPs could particiapte in the system), secure and do exactly what DNS does: it maps one value (e.g. a domain name) to another (e.g. an IP).

4. Secure Input/Output: user input (i.e. mouse, keyboard)/output (i.e. monitor) are encrypted and thus cannot be sniffed or spoofed


Even people who know Palladium is evil generally don't realize just how evil it is. You need Palladium certified and encrypted mouse, keyboard, monitor, soundcard, video card, network card, probably the even the freaking parallel port and game port.

-

With the exception of Donald Knuth, all of the names you list are of people who had mostly engineering contributions, as opposed to bringing scientific advancements in the field (although the two are somewhat related). Did you mean to exclude the people who created and formalized computer science? If not, then you most definitely want to include Alan Turing, Edsger Dijsktra, C. Antony R. Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, and Marvin Minsky.

Prior art must be public.

To make software prior art public:

• Develop a program as a proof of concept of an invention. Package it in a tarball, zip file, source RPM, or any other commonly used compressed format.
• Use PGP to sign the package digitally.
• Have one of the many e-mail notaries sign a message containing the current date in the headers and a PGP signature of the package in the body.
• Publish the package, the message you sent to the notary, and the notary's digital signature on SourceForge.net (whose parent OSDN owns Slashdot) under an OSI approved license.

You now have Pretty Good evidence that you were in possession of those bits at that time. You can back it up with a U.S. copyright registration ($30 at copyright.gov). Proof that you had actually published the package at a given time is left as an exercise for the reader (reply to this if you know how).

...or, at least, that's the message we're sending by actions like this.

So, if we aren't going to encourage our own students to become scientists and engineers, AND we aren't going to encourage foreign students to become scientists and engineers... yes, I'd say that in a few years we'll be facing a shortage of scientists and engineers.

But it won't matter as long as we have plenty of skillful marketers.

http://www.mit.edu/~dmark/palm/

See Von Hippel's papers here.

Enjoy,

Frank Ruscica

Vector subtraction implemented neurally: A neurocomputational model of some sequential cognitive and conscious processes

Artificial synapses copy brain dynamics

Computing and Learning with Dynamic Synapses (1999)

Computing at the Tissue / Organ Level

From neurobiology to silicon

Principle of Neuroinformatics and Neuroinformation Coding


In short. The synapse is a computer in it's own right.

If all books go into ebook format, won't it make it that much easier to just "Edit" "Find" phrases and paragraphs in a book, rather than actually reading the entire book? Believe me, the Internet Classics Archive has been a godsend this semester for me, however, I confess that I also didn't read much the material I should have, rather just searched for the phrases I needed to write my thesis. Being a philosophy major, its come to a point where I barely buy books because they're almost useless in book format (just like music not in .mp3 format for me is also useless).

I'm sure to people who do indepth research it'll be a godsend, where people actually read the material but need to find key topics quickly, however, I think it's going to help provoke a world of undereducated undergrads.

So how is the stitching happening in Cyra's software? This is a nontrivial task, to reconstruct a surface from a set of data points. Or is this proprietory information? :-)

One of the coolest 3d surface reconstruction algorithms I've seen to date is the crust algorithm. With a clever combination of Voronoi cells and Delaunay triangulation it does a very very good job of recreating the surface. Very cool stuff!

Cheers,

Costyn.

There are a lot of packages out there that will do bayesian analysis for you, if you have a fairly standard type of problem (ie you'll be doing EM with exact inference via junction tree or some approximate algorithm). A good list is here. Many of these packages have source available.

In general, as has been noted by everyone else, Mathematica is great for symbolic analysis, and Matlab is great for numeric analysis. Most people I've talked to in the field use Matlab.

I've been doing some Bayesian analysis recently and I've been writing everything from scratch in R, since it's free so I can use it at home. If you will be doing the whole shebang yourself, and you have the funds, I'd advise going with Matlab, since it tends to be more stable and well supported than R.

If you are interested in R, here is a page about the project to integrate graphical models into R.

Go here. That's all I'm saying.

Talking about gender bias, it is all too easy in this political correctness obsessed age to forget about the real biological differences between the sexes -- and I'm talking about brains and minds, not other anatomical differences. A good place to start is Pinker's new book, and don't take my word for it, check the reviews.

Talking about gender bias, it is all too easy in this political correctness obsessed age to forget about the real biological differences between the sexes -- and I'm talking about brains and minds, not other anatomical differences. A good place to start is Pinker's new book, and don't take my word for it, check the reviews.

Since the previous site got slashdoted they have moved the location of the movies. The links to the non embeded versions of the movies are now:

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/teaser.mov
http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/actthree.mov
http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

Also note: the starshipexeter web site it's self appears to have a broken link for the embeded move for act 3. The URL I gave for act 3 worked for me at the time of this post.

Since the previous site got slashdoted they have moved the location of the movies. The links to the non embeded versions of the movies are now:

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/teaser.mov
http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/actthree.mov
http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

Also note: the starshipexeter web site it's self appears to have a broken link for the embeded move for act 3. The URL I gave for act 3 worked for me at the time of this post.

Since the previous site got slashdoted they have moved the location of the movies. The links to the non embeded versions of the movies are now:

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/teaser.mov
http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov
http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/actthree.mov
http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

Also note: the starshipexeter web site it's self appears to have a broken link for the embeded move for act 3. The URL I gave for act 3 worked for me at the time of this post.

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov

http://starshipexeter.pdox.net/exeter/actthree.mov

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

here are the new links

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov

http://starshipexeter.pdox.net/exeter/actthree.mov

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

here are the new links

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://www.mit.edu/~pdox/exeter/actone.mov

http://web.mit.edu/pdox/www/exeter/acttwo.mov

http://starshipexeter.pdox.net/exeter/actthree.mov

http://www.flapdoodle.org/exeter/tag.mov

here are the new links

Such a broadening of trade secret "protection" will eliminate the need for patents

Oh really? Nowadays, United States patents are primarily used not to obtain a monopoly on an invention in exchange for public disclosure but rather to obtain a monopoly on an invention that is obvious to anybody who looks at the product. Just look at Amazon's "one click shopping" patent on sending billing and shipping information along with a request to buy. It's so simple and obvious given the product's outward appearance that anybody could hack up a clone.

And look at some of the other bad patents found by the League for Programming Freedom: drawing and undrawing an image with XOR, topologically sorting statements in a spreadsheet program, and other things that any competent software engineer could have come up with after looking at the problem for ten minutes.

Large corporations in the United States use patents to 1. stop copying, and 2. stop independent invention. The disclosure of the contents of a patent is almost redundant in 2003.

Have a look at David Cavallo's thesis, or do a search for Project Lighthouse.

"In the comfort of being digital, we forget the enormous leverage a single Net connection provides to, say, a rural primary school in one of the hundred poorest nations. In these places, there are no libraries and almost no books; the schoolhouse is sometimes a tree. To suddenly have access to the world's libraries - even at 4,800 bits per second - is a change of such magnitude that there is no way to understand it from the privileged position of the developed world.

But the [rest of the world] understands. World leaders realize that the most precious natural resource of any country is its children, and that the digital world is key to education. For this reason, development is starting not only to include but to mean telecommunications."

One thing Lars failed to mention is the fact that evolutionary mechanism (e.g. genetic algorithms) work quiet nicely in computer simulation.

So we have theories that explain given observations by means of an understandable mechanism versus creationism that relies on some outer-worldly intervention of god, who most certainly can not be simulated in a computer.

It boils down to a very simple matter: As soon as you invoke god to explain anything you leave the realms of science.

A biology teacher of mine followed what I thought was a better approach to bring his believe system and scientific education into alignment: He studied the earliest bible texts in their original language (old Greek, Hebrew etc.) to prove that whoever wrote Genesis actually received a vision of the evolutionary process and tried to put it into words as well as the language of the time allowed him (or her) to.

Anyway my old teachers motivation puzzles me as much as the one of creationists because it looks to me as in both cases people feel the urge to uncover some "prove" that their believes are right. Correct me if I am wrong, but from my point of view somebody who is secure in his faith shouldn't have to fish for such "proves".


Happy 2003 to all.

Almost everything you mentioned is in there.

I have another parking spot story for you -- this one's a little more practical though.

• I know a fellow who worked at Hamilton Standard in the 60s. One time when the parking lot was being repainted, he and a friend waylaid the person responsible for stenciling on the 'reserved spot' numbers. They didn't make any disappear, though --
• they made sure two of the numbers were duplicated, thus assuring two young engineers their own parking spaces.

  Since the person whose spot they'd duplicated never knew any better, never missed anything, the spots were assured until the next time the lot was painted.

(He never did go bowling in that long underground hallway between buildings, though.)

The MIT portion of which is well documented here. Great stuff.

Actually Logo is a quite powerful language. It's much better for teaching about structured programming and mathematics. Turtle graphics, which everyone starts with, is just a small part of Logo.

Check out StarLogo for some really cool massively parallel programming.

There was another link I can't find anymore to a lab moving microscopic drops of water around on a sillicon substrate really fast. The target apps are in biochemistry, but iirc the design used the liquid to do some logic, also.

L2K Ring around the Man
http://www.synaptick.net/l2k/brg_article.html

Shadow Engine
http://sub-zero.mit.edu/fbyte/projects/shadowengin e/

Beaming Man
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/galle ry/burningman/wilcox.html

Telestereoscope
http://www.eyestilts.com/

You'll find a bunch more here

L2K Ring around the Man
http://www.synaptick.net/l2k/brg_article.html

Shadow Engine
http://sub-zero.mit.edu/fbyte/projects/shadowengin e/

Beaming Man
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/galle ry/burningman/wilcox.html

Telestereoscope
http://www.eyestilts.com/

You'll find a bunch more here

They ran out of money like so many other dotcoms. There's some chance of a revival but I'm not holding my breath. I'll forward the url of this thread to Eric Blossom and maybe he'll post something. Meanwhile, here's a comparable product. And there's always Nautilus and PGPfone (disclosure: I'm a co-author of Nautilus).

Not unusual, but in one paragraph they call it a "polymer molecule actuator" and in the next they say it works "when the water inside the plate expands in response to electric stimulation".

A better article on artificial muscles can be found a MIT. There is enough information there to actually build one, including sources for the materials.

The MIT work is most likely quite different from the work done at Eamex, as there are a number of approaches to making artificial muscles.

Another article describes yet another approach, but also gets some of the science wrong.

Oh, well...

LOTUS DEV. CORP. v. BORLAND INTL., INC. No. 93-2214
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT
1995 U.S. App. LEXIS 4618
March 9, 1995, Decided

III. Conclusion

Because we hold that the Lotus menu command hierarchy is uncopyrightable subject matter, we further hold that Borland did not infringe Lotus's copyright by copying it. Accordingly, we need not consider any of Borland's affirmative defenses.

The judgment of the district court is

Reversed.

Linked from User Interface Copyright

LOTUS DEV. CORP. v. BORLAND INTL., INC. No. 93-2214
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT
1995 U.S. App. LEXIS 4618
March 9, 1995, Decided

III. Conclusion

Because we hold that the Lotus menu command hierarchy is uncopyrightable subject matter, we further hold that Borland did not infringe Lotus's copyright by copying it. Accordingly, we need not consider any of Borland's affirmative defenses.

The judgment of the district court is

Reversed.

Linked from User Interface Copyright

yotta? ::dances back and forth:: oh, sorry, I though you said YATTA!

Checked out the links! Sweet! Did you notice something though...

Ok, the Part 2 clip is onimously missing... this is where the robot hunts down and kills its first kangaroo! The rest of the clips show the kangaroos running from their lives as this "creature" chases them, licking its bloody robotic chops! After it finishes off the 'roos, it literally jumps for joy and even flips as it stumbles upon a herd (I guess that's what you'd call it) of ostrichs... also running for their lives as the robot has already multiplied and is now ready to feed extra hungry mouths.... see a pattern?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Troody, MIT's robot dinosaur, mentioned on Slashdot a year and a half ago. The head researcher, Peter Dilworth, said he was going to market talking, human-size versions to theme parks. Guess Disney went off on their own.

I saw a prototype of this about a year ago on the discovery channel, or maybe it was their website. None the less, this thing was huge, dwarfing an SUV and it had fluid movements - similar to the impressive way the honda robot moves - except that it looked like it could use a SUV as a soccer ball. This thing looked incredibly scarey when it turned and walked towards the camera. Terminator 3 comes to mind when remembering it. Oh! I found it. HERE IS THE LINK and check out the video too!!!