Slashdot Mirror

For example, see: inTouch. It was presented at CHI 97.

More technical article here

There's a lot more info in this press release from MIT.
Using this for telemedicine sounds particularly interesting...

Earth to Brandon Wiley, have you perhaps heard of the Morris worm?

This DDOS attack was carried out in 1988, and it was done by mistake. Our boy Robert Morris wasn't careful about how quickly the worm spread itself, and as a result when it started infecting computers, about one in seven of them would relentlessly pound away at any host it could find. Now, the Internet wasn't nearly as big as it was today, but even so it meant that hundreds or thousands of infected hosts were lining up to rape any given computer.

These days, you have to be CAREFUL when you write your virii or it'll be much much more than just a minor annoyance, it will flood networks out of existence. This white paper doesn't outline an attack strategy, it demonstrates the destructive effect of sloppy virus design.

http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/chord/

...is politics in general. As many people,so tritely, observe... people who want power are usually very self-centered and have no concern for the betterment of their fellow man. This is, sadly, completely out of alignment with what politics were originally intended to be. Let's take a look at the official definition of politics and break it down:

The science of government; that part of ethics which has to do with the regulation and government of a nation or state, the preservation of its safety, peace, and prosperity, the defense of its existence and rights against foreign control or conquest, the augmentation of its strength and resources, and the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals.

Let's also consider that politics is considered a science, where "science" is taken to mean:

Any branch or department of systematized knowledge considered as a distinct field of investigation or object of study.

By this definition, a politician should have a great body of knowledge regarding ethics, citizens and their rights and proper morals. If you apply that branch of logic to the politicians of the last few decades, we find that there is something that has slowly gone seriously wrong. Our politicians tend to be anything but knowledgable, ethical, moral or have any concern for citizen's rights!

We will start with our current administration. The polls say that G.W. Bush has had anywhere from a 49% approval rating at lowest and as high as his post Sept. 11th rating of 93%. While this speaks well of him, it completely obscures many well known facts regarding his knowledge (quite lacking), ethics, morality and feelings on citizen's rights. If we delve deeper, we find that he, in fact, has very little knowledge about the system. Further evidenced by the fact that he is a poor speaker and his father's former cabinet appears to be running the entire show. He is just a mouthpiece.

Regarding ethics, I would question any politician's ethics who would have other men in thir cabinet involved in scandal. Especially in a position so close to the power seat as vice-president Cheney. Mr. Cheney's desire to conceal the connections between Enron and the current administration are very disheartening. Even the staunchest conservative must admit that this was not one of the finer moments in conservative history. (The liberal-controlled media argument doesn't wash here either as the news sources that reported negatively on this story tend to be just as far right as you can get.)

While Mr. Bush professes to being a good christian. He hasn't always been that way. His morals are not exactly what one would call "good". It's very well known the George W. Bush, was quite the party down, rich kid. As he grew away from his "youthful errors", he became quite the shady businessman. I would have to say that his morals are questionable at best.

Citizen's rights and the current administration are at odds with each other. This has been an ever increasing problem since Sept. 11th. As most Americans blindly wave their flags, their ability to do much of anything else to affect their own well being is being erroded by things like "The Patriot Act". In the name of security, the man in the white house and his staff are trying to convince us that it's good to lose your freedoms sometimes. This is quite damning evidence that he does not understand or care about the citizen's of this country's rights.

Seeing that all of this is true, it appears that George W. Bush fails to live up to the definition of what a politician should be, as do many of his cabinet.

The last administration has it's blemishes on many counts as well. Analyzing Mr. Clinton in the same way, we find that his knowledge of the governmental system was stronger than Mr. Bush's. (If anyone can provide links that prove otherwise please do so, I couldn't find any.)

Where ethics are concerned, Bill Clinton had his share of gaffes. Not to mention the more serious allegations regarding his time as Governor of Arkansas. No... Sadly, we can't say that Mr. Clinton has shiny repution either.

Everyone knows about his moral problems since they've been beaten to death. Like him or not, Bill Clinton was not a man of morals by strict definition.

As geeks, we all know that it was his administration that passed the DMCA which has potential to seriously impinge on citizen's rights. Not just your ability to "swap songs", but you ability to write code freely!

So, by the same analysis, Bill Clinton fails the test of what a good politician is. As do most other politicians. Why is this? Because we are humans. We have imperfections that prevent us from being able to truly hold to the ideals of what how politics should work. Some do better than others, but in general the lot of them are corrupt.

Most politicians are only interested in politics due to their hunger for power. Just that alone is damning as it points to a deep seated greed and selfishness that is almost required to be a politician. So how is it that our system even works? In reality, it doesn't.

Most of what the operations of the government and the way they affect us are almost 100% happily incidental. Ocassionally one person somewhere deep in the system does one thing right. Another one somewhere else in the system does something else right. And so on... There are the few people here or there who intentionally or unintentionally (They're human, remember?) do something wrong. But the aggregate result is something that more or les resembles a system that works. This illusion trickles upward toward the leaders (Senators, congressmen, governors, and ultimately the president) and makes them look good. (It works this way in any large organization) So... for now we are stuck with a system that appears to work, but is solely based on chance. Or looking at it another way, real politics (as opposed to the ideal defined above) is just another form of gambling.

In closing, I'll offer you this joke about politics:

Son: Dad, I have a special report for school. Can I ask you a question?

Dad: Sure son, what's the question?

Son: What is politics?

Dad: Well son, let's take our home for example. I am the wage earner, so let's call me the management. Your mother is the administrator of the money, so let's call her the government. We take care of you and your needs, so let's call you the people. We'll call the maid the working class and your baby brother the future. Understand?

Son: I'm not really sure dad, I'll have to think about it.

That night, the boy is awakened by his baby brother's crying, so he went to see what was wrong. Discovering that the baby had a heavily soiled nappy, the boy went to his parent's room and found his mother fast asleep. He than went to the maid's room, where, peeking through the keyhole, he saw his father in bed with the maid. The boy's knocking went totally unheard. The boy went back to his room and went to sleep.

The next morning...

Son: Dad, I think I understand politics.

Dad: That's great son, explain it to me in your own words.

Son: While the management is screwing the working class, the government is fast asleep, the people are being completely ignored and the future is full of shit.

---Whew! All that work just to post this---

-I am a Windows user

-I am also a f4g0rt

-All Windows users are f4g0rtz

-Bill Gates loves men

-Linux is the sux0rz

-BSD is dying

-Stephen King loved goatse.cx before he died

-75% of people in the US make up 3/4 of the US population

-Adolph Hitroll is my bitch

-RecipeTroll loves the cock too

-Natalie Portman is naked and petrified

-I poured hot gritz down my pants and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

-R.M.S. is a commie

-Linus Torvalds is keeping his brotha down. Free him!

-Looser = Loser and vice-versa. Stop complaining and learn New English

-Imagine a Beowulf cluster of trolls

-The CowboyNeal jokes are old

-X is unstable, let's get rid of it

-KDE is the sux0rz, GNOME rules

-Real men use TWM

-vi is better then emacs (no it's not, emacs is better than vi)=Tastes great/Less Filling

-Ford sucks

-Chevy sucks

-Capitalism is dying

-Linux on the desktop is dead

-IE won the browser war, give it up Mozilla. (No. The war's not over yet M$)

-MySQL is robust and scalable

-PostgreSQL is better than MySQL. Nyah!

-So you like your pages W I D E N E D?

-I 4m 1337. giv3 m3 w4r3z d00dz.

-w00t!

-In other news...

-1. Steal concept from open sores 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!

-RMS is a dirty hippie

-Moderation sucks

-UNIX will never be as secure as VMS

-GayPee is not a hacker, he's a dork

-General strike!! Now!!!!!!

-ESR is a homo

-Grok THIS you GIMP!

-Corporations are evil

-Corporations are good

-Quake is the sux0rz, give me Unreal Tourney! (You Canadian f4g0rt, UT sucks, Quake 0wnz j00)

-Canadians are gay

-Americans are stupid

-Brits are assholes

-For hot gulrz see: http://www.bakla.net

-~the fux0rz has spoken~-

doesn't gas its own citizens

Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly prohibits
involuntary sterilization as means of "preventing births among" a
targeted population. Yet, in 1976, it was conceded by the
U.S. government that its ÒIndian Health ServiceÓ (IHS), then a
subpart of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was even then
conducting a secret program of involuntary sterilization which had
affected approximately forty percent of all Indian women of
childbearing age. The program was allegedly discontinued, and the IHS
was transferred to the Public Health Service, but no one was
punished. Hence, business as usual has continued in the ÒhealthÓ
sphere: 1990, for example, it came out that the IHS was inoculating
Inuit children in Alaska with Hepatitis-B vaccine. The vaccine had
already been banned by the World Health Organization as having a
demonstrated correlation with the HIV-virus which is itself correlated
to AIDS. As this is being written, a Òfield testÓ of Hepatitis-A
vaccine, also HIV-correlated, is being conducted on Indian
reservations in the northern Plains region.

I found that there was a mix of pure BS and interesting if not necessarily useful work being done in the Physics and Media Group. Honestly, though some was BS, this was still better than most of what is done in the Media Lab, where most work is 90% BS. Go look through the current publications list here. While not much of this is what I would consider "basic research", a lot of it is potentially interesting - physical one-way functions (have been discussed on /. before, parasitic power harvesting, electric field sensing). Then some is just hokey beyond all belief (Electronic Music Interfaces: New Ways to Play, Instrumented Footwear for Interactive Dance). And some of it is stuff like NMR QC which may someday pan out, though frankly it doesn't seem like anything terribly innovative has been done with this recently in the Gershenfeld group, that may change now that Isaac Chuang has moved there from IBM Almaden - still 50 years out from usefulness if ever.

See this for instance.

Just for the record: he never went to jail.

Not a bad comeback. Considering Mitnick served a total of five years in prison and now earns his pennies doing interviews on TechTV's Screen Savers.

And then he got a job teaching the hoodlums
of tomorrow at MIT

http://web.mit.edu/bin/cgicso?query=alias%3DR-morr is2

MIT runs a class called 6.033: Computer Systems Engineering. These lecture notes contain a list of projects that had great sums of money spent on them only to be abandoned. Also the reading list has a bunch of papers that discuss the "big splash" failures like Therac 25.

MIT runs a class called 6.033: Computer Systems Engineering. These lecture notes contain a list of projects that had great sums of money spent on them only to be abandoned. Also the reading list has a bunch of papers that discuss the "big splash" failures like Therac 25.

Package your application in a self-extracting/self-decrypting archive which uses two keys (k1,k2). k1 is either zero-length or known to the group of indented users. k2 is kept secret until published online at some central site at a time specified by the publisher. If k1 is zero-length, then it'll be an open release of software/data.

software = Decrypt(software, key), where key = Hash(k1 concatenate-with k2).

This is called time-lock crypto as written by Rivest Shamir Wagner in [3].

CertainKey offers this service with all the software/crypto you need at a modest price see [1].

note: I'm a founder of CertainKey...so use discretion.

References:
[1]
[2]
[3]

...is politics in general. As many people,so tritely, observe... people who want power are usually very self-centered and have no concern for the betterment of their fellow man. This is, sadly, completely out of alignment with what politics were originally intended to be. Let's take a look at the official definition of politics and break it down:

The science of government; that part of ethics which has to do with the regulation and government of a nation or state, the preservation of its safety, peace, and prosperity, the defense of its existence and rights against foreign control or conquest, the augmentation of its strength and resources, and the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals.

First, let's start with the fact the politics is considered a science, where "science" is taken to mean:

Any branch or department of systematized knowledge considered as a distinct field of investigation or object of study.

By this definition, a politician should have a great body of knowledge regarding ethics, citizens and their rights and proper morals. If you apply that branch of logic to the politicians of the last few decades, we find that there is something that has slowly gone seriously wrong. Our politicians tend to be anything but knowledgable, ethical, moral or have any concern for citizen's rights!

We will start with our current administration. While the polls say that G.W. Bush has had anywhere from a 49% approval rating at lowest and as high as his post Sept. 11th rating of 93%. While this speaks well of him, it completely obscures many well known facts regarding his knowledge (quite lacking), ethics, morality and feelings on citizen's rights. If we delve deeper, we find that he, in fact, has very little knowledge about the system. Further evidenced by the fact that he is a poor speaker and his father's former cabinet appears to be running the entire show. He is just a mouthpiece.

Regarding ethics, I would question any politician's ethics who would have other men in thir cabinet involved in scandal. Especially in a position so close to the power seat as vice-president Cheney. Mr. Cheney's desire to conceal the connections between Enron and the current administration are very disheartening. Even the staunchest conservative must admit that this was not one of the finer moments in conservative history. (The liberal-controlled media argument doesn't wash here either as the news sources that reported negatively on this story tend to be just as far right as you can get.)

While Mr. Bush professes to being a good christian. He hasn't always been that way. His morals are not exactly what one would call "good". It's very well known the George W. Bush, was quite the party down, rich kid. As he grew away from his "youthful errors", he became quite the shady businessman. I would have to say that his morals are questionable at best.

Civil rights and the current administration are at odds with each other. This has been an ever increasing problem since Sept. 11th. As most Americans blindly wave their flags, their ability to do much of anything else to affect their own well being is being erroded by things like "The Patriot Act". In the name of security, the man in the white house and his staff are trying to convince us that it's good to lose your freedoms sometimes. This is quite damning evidence that he does not understand or care about the citizen's of this country's rights.

Seeing that all of this is true, it appears that George W. Bush fails to live up to the definition of what a politician should be, as do many of his cabinet.

The last administration has it's blemishes on many counts as well. Analyzing Mr. Clinton in the same way, we find that his knowledge of the governmental system was stronger than Mr. Bush's. (If anyone can provide links to examples please do so, I couldn't find any.)

Where ethics are concerned, Bill Clinton had his share of gaffes. Not to mention the more serious allegations regarding his time as Governor of Arkansas. No... Sadly, we can't say that Mr. Clinton has shiny repution either.

Everyone knows about his moral problems since they've been beaten to death. Like him or not, Bill Clinton was not a man of morals by strict definition.

As geeks, we all know that it was his administration that passed the DMCA which has potential to seriously impinge on citizen's rights. Not just your ability to "swap songs", but you ability to write code freely!

So, by the same analysis, Bill Clinton fails the test of what a good politician is. As do most other politicians. Why is this? Because we are humans. We have imperfections that prevent us from being able to truly hold to the ideals of what how politics should work. Some do better than others, but in general the lot of them are corrupt.

Most politicians are only interested in politics due to their hunger for power. Just that alone is damning as it points to a deep seated greed and selfishness that is almost required to be a politician. So how is it that our system even works? In reality, it doesn't.

Most of what the operations of the government and the way they affect us are almost 100% happily incidental. Ocassionally one person somewhere deep in the system does one thing right. Another one somewhere else in the system does something else right. And so on... There are the few people here or there who intentionally or unintentionally (They're human, remember?) do something wrong. But the aggregate result is something that more or les resembles a system that works. This illusion trickles upward toward the leaders (Senators, congressmen, governors, and ultimately the president) and makes them look good. (It works this way in any large organization) So... for now we are stuck with a system that appears to work, but is solely based on chance. Or looking at it another way, real politics (as opposed to the ideal defined above) is just another form of gambling.

In closing, I'll offer you this joke about politics:

Son: Dad, I have a special report for school. Can I ask you a question?

Dad: Sure son, what's the question?

Son: What is politics?

Dad: Well son, let's take our home for example. I am the wage earner, so let's call me the management. Your mother is the administrator of the money, so let's call her the government. We take care of you and your needs, so let's call you the people. We'll call the maid the working class and your baby brother the future. Understand?

Son: I'm not really sure dad, I'll have to think about it.

That night, the boy is awakened by his baby brother's crying, so he went to see what was wrong. Discovering that the baby had a heavily soiled nappy, the boy went to his parent's room and found his mother fast asleep. He than went to the maid's room, where, peeking through the keyhole, he saw his father in bed with the maid. The boy's knocking went totally unheard. The boy went back to his room and went to sleep.

The next morning...

Son: Dad, I think I understand politics.

Dad: That's great son, explain it to me in your own words.

Son: While the management is screwing the working class, the government is fast asleep, the people are being completely ignored and the future is full of shit.

---Whew! All that work just to post this---


-I am a Windows user
-I am also a f4g0rt
-All Windows users are f4g0rtz
-Bill Gates loves men
-Linux is the sux0rz
-BSD is dying
-Stephen King loved goatse.cx before he died
-75% of people in the US make up 3/4 of the US population
-Adolph Hitroll is my bitch
-RecipeTroll loves the cock too
-Natalie Portman is naked and petrified
-I poured hot gritz down my pants and all I got was this lousy T-shirt
-R.M.S. is a commie
-Linus Torvalds is keeping his brotha down. Free him!
-Looser = Loser and vice-versa. Stop complaining and learn New English
-Imagine a Beowulf cluster of trolls
-The CowboyNeal jokes are old
-X is unstable, let's get rid of it
-KDE is the sux0rz, GNOME rules
-Real men use TWM
-vi is better then emacs (no it's not, emacs is better than vi)=Tastes great/Less Filling
-Ford sucks
-Chevy sucks
-Capitalism is dying
-Linux on the desktop is dead
-IE won the browser war, give it up Mozilla. (No. The war's not over yet M$)
-MySQL is robust and scalable
-PostgreSQL is better than MySQL. Nyah!
-So you like your pages W I D E N E D?
-I 4m 1337. giv3 m3 w4r3z d00dz.
-w00t!
-In other news...
-1. Steal concept from open sores 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!
-RMS is a dirty hippie
-Moderation sucks
-UNIX will never be as secure as VMS
-GayPee is not a hacker, he's a dork
-General strike!! Now!!!!!!
-ESR is a homo
-Grok THIS you GIMP!
-Corporations are evil
-Corporations are good
-Quake is the sux0rz, give me Unreal Tourney! (You Canadian f4g0rt, UT sucks, Quake 0wnz j00)
-Canadians are gay
-Americans are stupid
-Brits are assholes
-For hot gulrz see: http://www.bakla.net

-~the fux0rz has spoken~-

this is what we do in our spare time. but seriously, the lcs has declined much since i've come to mit. i think they got too complacent with too much money during the internet boom and started putting huge capital in go nowhere projects like project oxygen. and now things like this. i shake my head. and now they have so little money, they can't support grad kids like me anymore who are the ones who really drive the research in my opinion. sigh. i remember being awed before coming here at the things this place used to research and churn out. how sad.

Actually, this security advisory (from the list) states that "Serious buffer overruns exist in krb4 compatibility code." It's not dated, but from reading it, it must be from at least six patches ago.

In other words, this latest advisory is the *first* specific bug of this type found since the problem was first discovered (and numerous other bugs of this type have presumably been fixed by now).

I think it's safe to assume that it won't be the last, so if you really want to be secure, take the original advisory to heart and avoid krb4 compatibility code.

Actually, this security advisory (from the list) states that "Serious buffer overruns exist in krb4 compatibility code." It's not dated, but from reading it, it must be from at least six patches ago.

In other words, this latest advisory is the *first* specific bug of this type found since the problem was first discovered (and numerous other bugs of this type have presumably been fixed by now).

I think it's safe to assume that it won't be the last, so if you really want to be secure, take the original advisory to heart and avoid krb4 compatibility code.

From our friends at MIT: Kerberos: The Network Authentication Protocol

I currently have to implement a DotLRN (.lrn) site which is based on OpenACS.

But anyway, OpenACS is the reworked version of ACS (which stands for 'Asomething' Community System) that was written for Oracle and AOLserver.

OpenACS is written in TCL, specifically for PostgreSQL and AOLserver.

I don't like TCL that much, but at least it works

Brooks teaches the Embodied Intelligence course at MIT (which I took two years ago). One of the first things the course covers are Braitenberg's creatures (see the syllabus). So while Brooks may certainly get more air-time than Braitenberg, he certainly gives credit where credit is due. .. but then, remember that Braitenberg focused on astoundingly simple circuits that lead to interesting-appearing behavior, whereas Brooks has used his approach to build working autonomous robots...

Brooks teaches the Embodied Intelligence course at MIT (which I took two years ago). One of the first things the course covers are Braitenberg's creatures (see the syllabus). So while Brooks may certainly get more air-time than Braitenberg, he certainly gives credit where credit is due. .. but then, remember that Braitenberg focused on astoundingly simple circuits that lead to interesting-appearing behavior, whereas Brooks has used his approach to build working autonomous robots...

Brooks teaches the Embodied Intelligence course at MIT (which I took two years ago). One of the first things the course covers are Braitenberg's creatures (see the syllabus). So while Brooks may certainly get more air-time than Braitenberg, he certainly gives credit where credit is due. .. but then, remember that Braitenberg focused on astoundingly simple circuits that lead to interesting-appearing behavior, whereas Brooks has used his approach to build working autonomous robots...

The ideas are interesting by themselves, linking to other's work isn't much a validation in itself.

You mean this post doesn't rival the writings of Shakespeare or the thoughts of Aristotle?

Why, I belive it is genius rivalled only by Einstein.

A Framework to Understand the Impact of GPL-Copylefting vs. Non-copylefting Licenses

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.

Here, I think need to go to this link to full apprectiate what the orriginal author was tryong to convey.

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!

It seems to me that most of the free books mentioned on this thread are sci-fi, and popular fiction. It is by virtue of this fact that these dispersion methods for books have not caught on more. The more popular the book, the more likely one is to charge for it. Perhaps we ought to start organizing things in the public domain, and things like classics, technical works, etc, that are more likely to be thought of as "free". Make these books accessible, and create a good interface, to show proof of concept in terms of readers and the bigger guys may come around, at least to publishing on and off-line works (the online versions being free or very cheap). Here are my links to some stellar classics archives. Aside from some of the more obscure math and science works, I believe my whole school's curriculum is available for free on the web:

Perseus Project

Great Books Index

The Internet Classics Archive

Bartleby

Enjoy these free reads. They are the greatest books ever written.

I ate your Web page.
Forgive me. It was juicy
And tart on my tongue.

Surely Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-6 had it in 1963?

Or is this modern "asynchronous" logical some totally different concept?

I agree-- it seems like they need a real P2P system for this to work. A better approach might be a distributed hashtable system, like the ones at IRIS which just got a large grant from the NSF. I posted a message to OSAF's dev mailing list to see if they would be interested in considering this approach.

Actually, librarians were one of the earlier professions outside of the hard sciences to "get" computers.

Indeed, I'm inclined to agree with you. It gets worse...you don't need radar or or IR systems...all you need is a well-developed cellular phone network. Other references here.

For those robot geeks among us who did NOT know, this is Rodney Brooks' company.

Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the 230 person MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp (Roomba)

He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981.

This guy is to robot-geeks what RMS is to Open-Source.

how many [DVD Video titles from] other regions include Japanese subtitling or dubbing???

Does it matter? A lot of Japanese people know quite a bit of English. The "It's so easy, happy go lucky, we are the world oh, we did it" in the "Yatta" video (and the Flash video) wasn't an accident.

How many carry Japanese films, which are mostly crap and barely even sell in Japan

Another anime hater. Or does anime really sell better in the USA than in Japan?

.. the first rule of aerial surveillance is to make yourself look like a huge flying lizard. That's also why you saw all those CIA guys in Afghanistan dressed up in the Tyranasaur suits.

Incidentally, I assume you're talking about the 18-foot pterodactyl captured in the IMAX film On the Wing in 1986. It was built by Paul McReady, who also built the Gossamer Condor, the world's first human-powered aircraft.

You can buy (somewhat) similar models here

The first book try to condense modern computer science into a few hundred pages written for a layman (much like "A brief history of time" does it for physics). The second combines everything interesting (Art, music, mathematics, philosophy, literature, genetics, etc), with programming, and is among the most interesting books I've ever read.

The foundations of programming in Scheme is covered quite well in "Abelson & Sussman: Structured Interpretation of Computer Programs". But this is only one view. You may also want to read "Bertrand Meyer: Object-oriented software construction" for a relatively different view (more mainstream). Of course, when it comes to programming, there are no hard facts, and people tend to have a lot of differing opinions.

Functional programming and logic programming arose out of a need to make programming more like that of writing specifications, to make it easier to construct mathematical proofs. It would be a good idea to look into that as well. I can recommend "L. C. Paulson: ML for the working programmer" as a good introduction to functional programming. There are also a number of good books on Haskell, please pick one. When it comes to logic programming, things are unfortunately a bit more messy. The main logic programming language, "Prolog", is all but logical. Also, most research these days seems to focus on constraint programming, which is a generalization of logic programming. For a good online introduction, check out Oz Mozart.

The foundations of mathematics (logic, set-theory, category-theory, etc) are all important in computer science. And of course also more mundane subjects such as combinatorics, calculus, etc...

Logic relates to programming, as mathematics do to engineering. While formal methods have not had much practical value so far, it's an important part of computer science, and undoubtedly something that should become important sometime in the future, once we find a practical way to do it. The best place to get the basic ideas are still "Edsger Dijkstra: A discipline of programming". It's more than likely that you local CS department offers some courses.

Since your view is from philosophy, I guess you are more interested in the important insights of computer science, rather than the boring details. In that case, I can also recommend: "Papadimitrou: Computational Complexity" which covers more or less the same stuff as Harel's book, but in a bit more in depth. It would be good to have read a basic book on algorithms first (basically any will do, but I can recommend the books by Sedgewick, or Cormen, Leiserson & Rivest). By this time, you should be able to find your own references in computational complexity and algorithm analysis.

You can find the full text of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming online here.

I know others don't think HCI is the place to be looking here, but I really like Jenifer Tidwell's stuff at Common Ground This is a great start at a Pattern Language for UIs.

If I recall correctly, it is Israeli intelligence which uses torture to get information. Cf. http://www.free-market.net/forums/main0203b/messag es/838491397.html, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www/mitejmes/issues/200105/ br_asmar1.htm, http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/aireport/ar98/mde15.h tm.

jim

The class website is here, and this page gives information on the lecture.

No, I'm not karma-whoring. This is useful information, if you plan on asking questions other than "MS sucks, don't you think?"

Scroll down on the lecture page to "Lecture 12", and take a look at the background reading on Palladium. Gives you an idea of what the students will (should) know before asking questions, and as thus it might be useful in this forum, too.

The class website is here, and this page gives information on the lecture.

No, I'm not karma-whoring. This is useful information, if you plan on asking questions other than "MS sucks, don't you think?"

Scroll down on the lecture page to "Lecture 12", and take a look at the background reading on Palladium. Gives you an idea of what the students will (should) know before asking questions, and as thus it might be useful in this forum, too.

The class website is here, and this page gives information on the lecture.

No, I'm not karma-whoring. This is useful information, if you plan on asking questions other than "MS sucks, don't you think?"

Scroll down on the lecture page to "Lecture 12", and take a look at the background reading on Palladium. Gives you an idea of what the students will (should) know before asking questions, and as thus it might be useful in this forum, too.

I assume that this is the seminar that is being referred to.

Rate me off-topic, but (esp. considering MIT's OpenCourseWare) I think I would love to attend that meeting virtually or watch some digitally available copy of that session... Is that possible? :)

Are there any plans to have this webcasted via audio or video, or at the vary least transcripted for our analytical pleasure?

MIT's page makes no mention of any intention to do this, and seeing how it will apparently be the "most technically detailed lecture publically given to date," I think that the public would benefit greatly from such a service.

Actually... to the best of my knowledge that uninstall method has issues.

I think those issues pale in comparison to the OS X meta-data and directory separator travesties.

Perhaps it's because all the technical people from the East end up in the West?

Look at the listing of graduate students in the CS department of any US university, and you notice a high percentage of them do not appear to be native-born.

examples:
The University of Washington
MIT
Stanford
...and the list goes on.

So, it's not that the East doesn't contribute, it's that Easterners come to the West before they contribute; and who can blame them? Wouldn't you rather be at a well-funded school in an industrialized nation that has the latest equipment than fighting off the roaches while hoping the power doesn't go out to the old VAX in some third-world university?