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Teflon was invented in 1938 and had nothing to do with NASA.
</nitpick>

And thanks for the links, btw.

Your comment was moderated as Flamebait, so here is a flame:

Nobody voted for Ashcroft- he is a Bush appointee. The only "votes" taken were in his Senate confirmation hearings.

That having been said, I believe you are otherwise correct in your analysis of the fucktards you were speaking of.

After all, nothing assures freedom like easily manipulated, credulous and distractible voters. Keep it up!

We'll see if everyone stays at home on election night in 2004 the way they did this year. People actually don't seem to mind living in a police state, but there may be trouble ahead for Bush once the word is out that his administration wants to increase income taxes on those earning between $50-75K per year by a third to support their tax cuts for the highest income brackets that they're always bragging about. This idea was test marketed in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. The plan is to raise taxes on the poor so that they become furious at government spending, which means they will vote for antitax Republicans.

They are also arguing that the FICA payroll tax isn't really a tax, it's like a "Christmas club" at a bank and you eventually get the money back when you retire anyway, so therefore we poor suckers are very lightly taxed. The WSJ even refers to people earning $12000 or less per year as "lucky duckies".

Public discourse has fallen into a sad state of affairs. I'm going to get skewered and modded down for saying this, but I miss the Clinton years- no police state and there wasn't this open class warfare going on either.

tRNA and small RNA (snRNA?) are members of the evil plot by scientists bent on intimidating those of us dinosaurs who went to a lot of trouble a dozen years ago to learn all the stuff that was then hot science. And it works!

The progress is staggering, and appears exponential. When HIV was idscovered, they said that a dozen or so years earlier the technology to identify the virus didn't even exist. HIV gets the unwitting assistance of host tRNA and other cellular machinery.

Of the RNA family, let's not forget about mRNA. Any other alpha-RNA's I should know about? Here is a quiz if you'd like to show off your acronymial brilliancce!

All right... I'm learning sign language. Now.

Too bad ... computers already know sign language

• A Windows only reader for "CosmicBook"
• A demo for "ZigZag" in bootable floppy form--the link to the supposed Java version leads only to a page reading
  

  
  OOOOOOH YEAH BABBBBBBY!
  
  Site is underway as we are GO GO GO GO GO with our sponsor. We will be bringing you the big time content with eye popping, mouth drooling, ear candy delights of wonderful visuals.
  

  
  along with a link to teen porn (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up)
  

Zephyr [of MIT fame] has also been around since 1980 or so. AOL should claim patent for the wheel too, I suppose.

Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like DooM on the PS3 or XBox 2?

Why would anyone want to play a game that looks like the original Super Mario Bros. on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 based PC with a GeForce 4 processor?

Why would anyone want to play Solitaire on that same system?

Why would anyone want to play Tetris on that same system?

Because they're still fun.

Then that's your decision, and IMO, your mistake. But don't slam HFS+ unless you know all the info. UFS has some advantages yes, but Apple does not recommend its use for OS X except for Development and compatibility...HFS+ is preferred for several reasons.

Perhaps you should read the paper by Wilfredo Sanchez, who was at the time a lead developer on Darwin/OS X. The first section is called "File systems" and discusses HFS+ vs UFS. A good read..and you might find that you could have incompatibilities with some files and programs that base themselves on the old Mac Toolbox (and Carbon to some degree). Just a thought.

I'm not sure how AOL's patent application is worded, but if they specifically mention a windowed environment, MIT's Zephyr system operates under X.

Here's a graph which includes the logarithm of the temperature Voyager's reading of the solar wind plasma which surrounds it. Converting back from the logarithm, this temperature displayed here varies from about 5000 K to about 50000K. Of course, in such high vacuums the heat transfer is minimal. Another source for more detailed data is here.

Placing most electronics in 1 atmosphere of air at those temperatures would boil them, but that's as irrelevant as the 5 K comparison as this is high vacuum.

It's very hot... in space. KHAAAAAAN!

Not so long ago, we all found out that the multi-billion dollar stealth aircraft that is the pride and joy of the US Air Force can be detected with cell phones.

Now WiFi jams military RADAR? What's next? Toasters cause bullets to malfunction? The beige of PC cases gets banned because soldiers in OD greens can't blend in in a server room?

Until the military says they want to ban cell phones, I'm going to be skeptical of any ban of WiFi technology at large.

MIT had an instant messaging service called Zephyr when I was an undergrad there starting in 1989. And MIT's Project Athena, from which the Zephyr service was developed, started in 1983.

-FP

MIT had an instant messaging service called Zephyr when I was an undergrad there starting in 1989. And MIT's Project Athena, from which the Zephyr service was developed, started in 1983.

-FP

Already posted Zephyr above but apparently this crowd is more interested in griping than invalidating a poorly conceived 200 claim patents. Yup. 200 claims. Don't forget to remember znol and its counterparts when necessary.

MIT's Zephyr.

MIT (who is hosting this conference) has a key server that presumably hold millions of mail addresses.

Hmmm. Seems like it would be easier to say that everything which has been done in computer science has 'been done', whereas everything that hasn't been done in computer science, 'hasn't'.

Seriously, though, you may be mis-categorizing your subjects. Look at computers as computational entities, rather than disk drives, monitors, and so forth. In that case, an optical computer or a biocomputer operates on many of the same systems priciple as a 'digital computer', and there is therefore much to be done in the field of computer science.

Absolutely. Optical computing is getting some great advances in Holographic Video at the MIT Spatial Imaging Group. And chemical computing is advancing nicely in Carbohydrate Chips at the University of Chicago.

For my money, I'd bet on optical video cubes, 3D television, and biochips in the future... which are all applications of computer technology. Remember, 'computer' use to refer to the job title of a person.

For my money, I think that the future has got SnowCrash, Cryptonomicon, Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Johnny Mnemonic written all over it (and maybe a bit of Jurassic Park.

I give it 30 to 1 odds on holographic video and three dimensional television within the next 30 years. For more information on holographic video, check out this Spatial Imaging Lab

I'd also give 2 to 1 odds on voice recognition within the next 10 years. Heck, 5 to 1 odds that the voice recognition in Windows Longhorn actually is functional enough to unplug the keyboard and dictate all your commands.

20 to 1 odds for grid networking infrastructure within the next 20 years.

The facts behind the charges were pretty solid, as were the determinations. So why were they exonerated? As you can read here, less than a week before a 2-day congressional hearing was scheduled to review the allegations of scientific fraud, the National Institutes of Health reopened the inquiry and this time found "significant errors" in the paper, but "no evidence of fraud, conscious misrepresentations, or manipulation of data" by the authors. As you'll read in that article, the scientists basically thought that any government intrusion would be too much, and so the convictions were suddenly overturned. Ever since, this has been an example of how the scientific community was unable to police itself.

Check out the University of Chicago's Computing Cluster & Cybercafe"> and MIT's Media Lab for more information about human user interfaces. This article is behind the times, in regards to stuff that's already been produced in the laboratories.

Unlike Robert Gallo and David Baltimore, who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.

So, these biologists were held accountable (at least for a while), but for something they didn't do.

So last month, the American Physical Society, representing some 40,000 physicists, expanded the ethical guidelines for researchers, in their Statements on Profession Conducts document. The new guidelines call for more ethics training in science and urge all research institutions to adopt the same set of misconduct procedures. The guidelines also clarify co-authors' roles and duties, making it clear that when you put your name on a paper, your reputation is on the line.

Biologists faced similar scandals during the Gallo and Imanishi-Kari cases in the 90's. Unlike Robert Gallo and David Baltimore, who survived the scandal virtually unscathed, the physicists involved in today's scandals are actually being held accountable.

The above info was compiled from an article that originally appeared here.

I happen to be reading this book right now and I find much of the information it presents very interesting. Some of the more interesting and exciting topics include wearable computing, and always on Inet connections, and what the meshing of those two ideas could mean. Check out this link here for info on one such program, the MIThril wearable computing project. Some very cool stuff coming out of MIT.

Maybe instead of just blindly throwing more transistors at the problem, they will be forced in the future to design energy efficient chips using reversible logic that recycle much of their computational energy? This becomes obvious every time I open the closet and the blast of hot air from the space heater masquerading as an SMP server hits me in the face.

mp3 version here. (search for Pachelbel)

The LA Unified School district can't afford books for all its kids, but they just spent a million dollars to roll out fiber optic drops to one of the Junior High schools. As far as I know, they are wiring all the schools.

Hopefully expensive schoolbooks will be a thing of the past in the near future. See Open CourseWare for details. Sometimes things just need to be done differently.

By the time I have kids of school-age (maybe 2015?) I expect they won't be using printed texts for much besides reading literature.

Here are a few uses:

--Suit of Armor, Shield, Sword, and Helmet

--Scare Grackles from your bird feeder for cardinals

--Robot wheels

--Microwaveable dish

Was he featured in this book?

This release of intellectual property sounds a lot like MIT's OpenCourseWare. Hopefully future publishers will start the timebomb license: This book is copyrighted till 2005, after which it becomes completely free (public domain). After all, this would be better than rotting in libraries.

These free releases have bigger implications than it might first seem. Its competition value will push the quality of future text (unless say, its an obsolete text on pre-Quantum Mechanics physics in 1910s language). Such releases should also popularize the author.

Now I'll get back to my project of Home Cyclotron...

PureFiction writes "Peer networks are gaining some attention these days given advances in much more decentralized search architectures and swarming distribution networks. Research has indicated that these decentralized networks are resistant to legal and technological attacks. The continued proliferation of broadband and wireless networking will ensure pervasive deployment of distributed peer networking infrastructure that will drive significant innovations in personal and community digital communications services."

AND FOR THOSE OF YOU IN A HURRY... A- R- T- I- C- L-
E-. -- S-
U- M- M-
A- R-
Y-

Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The right thing is to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine. It is called PC loser-ing because the PC is being coerced into loser mode, where loser is the affectionate name for user at MIT.

The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.

The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix: namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.

Usability Testing of Athena User Interface
Voices from the Open Source Revolution
KDE Usability - First Steps

A few of these books grace our desktops here at work.

There are extra features hidden behind a password. I guess it's hacker-friendly in a twisted way -- there's now a distributed project to brute-force the password.

MIT?
Same as above as well as political speach that may be there.

MIT?
Same as above as well as political speach that may be there.

I could try and summarize what I managed to learn from this communivations forum at MIT concerning the clashes between copyright and culture, and I'd probably talk about how law dictates that whenever you play music for your friends, you should pay a liscense fee and charge your friends, but reality dictates that you do nothing of the sort.

however, the two speakers at the forum did a much much better job, and subsequently I strongly suggest going and listening to the audiocast (2hrs, perhaps some jumping around if you don't have the time).

No, no, use your cycles to crack something real like the TiVo password!

I fail to see how the PGP vs. GPG question isn't settled on this very point. PGP won't even run on many platforms, so any ease-of-use claims should be dimissed out of hand on that basis alone. The choice is really between GPG (which is being actively developed) and freeware PGP (which looks to be getting pretty old). That isn't much of a choice.

Go ahead and flame away...

-B

The very cradle of modern geek society was heavily into model trains as well; read up on the TMRC sometime. They were the spiritual leaders of a lot you consider to be cool now.

Check this out, I think you'll like it much more (its not real-time yet, though). Surprised this hasn't been Slashdotted already: Tony Ezzat's Mary101 Page

According to this, the only way to contribute is to either take classes at MIT or a related school, or give money. As a footnote, there's an "everyone else" category, but it doesn't look all that interactive.

I was getting all set to rant about how Open Source doesn't apply to housebuilding, until I realized that Open Source doesn't apply to this article, either.

You really need to learn more about the MagLev train and what advantages it would offer over "200 year old technology" before you post (and someone mods you as Insightful???). Here's a very brief primer on MagLev that will hopefully help you realize the importance of MagLev. You should do a google search and find out more.

What would you trust more, a well developped and well researched almost 200 year old technology (the first steam train ran in 1804 [schoolnet.co.uk]), or a new, extremely complex technology that has yet to carry it's first passenger???

Who the hell modded this as Insightful? Sheesh!

GMD

Sorry, I forgot to include this link in my previous post.

GMD

OK, I guess this Tectoy SMS is probably licensed, but now I'm curious about Brazilian copyright and patent law.

Here we have patent law just like in the us.

In Brazil, do you also have software patents?

Do you have companies that apply for a patent, get it, hide it for years, and then enforce it, so as to harm other firms in the industry?

Do you have broad look-and-feel copyrights, which the USA had until Lotus v. Borland?

Do you have life+70 jail s^H^H^H^H^H^H copyright terms?

Do you have lawsuits over copying a mere four notes?

OK, I guess this Tectoy SMS is probably licensed, but now I'm curious about Brazilian copyright and patent law.

Here we have patent law just like in the us.

In Brazil, do you also have software patents?

Do you have companies that apply for a patent, get it, hide it for years, and then enforce it, so as to harm other firms in the industry?

Do you have broad look-and-feel copyrights, which the USA had until Lotus v. Borland?

Do you have life+70 jail s^H^H^H^H^H^H copyright terms?

Do you have lawsuits over copying a mere four notes?

Basicly, this system can scale to sizes of current p2p systems and far beyond. The system would would be able to "detect bad nodes quickly, and it would incorporate enough redundancy into the system to recover gracefully from tampering."

I remember the notes that I took on electrodynamics, quantum devices and other math-rich subjects... there is no way to convert them to text, ever.

Nor will you be able to for awhile, of course. Diagrams, formulae, etc. are stored as graphics. But the metadata text labels you place on those graphics can be converted, & allow you to search and catagorize those graphics.

In general, students won't benefit from the tablet PC.

O yeah right, I can't imagine any way for anyone to benefit from any technological advance. We really should go back to stamping ideograms on clay tablets, everything since then has cost much more than it has been worth.

It will be useful (because it is - these areas are already served [teklogix.com] by existing wireless terminals).

O yeah, no campus anywhere has thought of setting up a wireless network, and no one has ever released curricular materials for free... O and don't forget they can't be made to run linux while selling for less than $800.

Nope, you're right, college students will never want something like this, they like carrying around 50lb packs, spending $100-$500 per semester on books, and keeping all their notes on dead trees.

One thing Cringley hints at is a coming boom in popularity and capability of truly decentralized peer networks. It is the fully and highly decentralized network architectures that the Microsoft group credits most with resilience against any kind of legal, technological or political attacks.

We are starting to see some of these technologies emerge, awaiting integration into flexible infrastructure that allows fast, easy and efficient distribution of data, content or otherwise, between peers on a local and global scale.

The end result will be a combination of a number of technologies seamlessly interoperating like:

- distributed hash tables

- decentralized search

- swarming distribution

- wireless networks ... and many others.

It is nice to see the word get out: You cannot control the flow of digitial information in decentralized peer networks!

Check out tengo's friendly guide to classical music. It has a complete mp3 of the 4th movement (Ode to Joy). And plenty of other music too.