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A copy of Donald Knuth's argument against software patents can be found on the LPF's web site. He is a very well respected computer scientist and programmer and makes a good argument.

Check out this and this.

I like JPGVideo a lot, since I can choose any encoder I have.

Dave

You can send out a bad copy once, but if well-known and trusted copies already exist on the network you are not going to be able to replace these with bad copies, the self-verification does not prevent the single-point attack you describe, it prevents the propogation of this attack throughout the network. If an attacker serves up bad files (ones that do not match the SHA1 hash advertised) then the downloader should treat the host as malfunctioning and query a more reliable source. The downloading agent does not need to unpack the file and see what is inside, it just checks the SHA1 hash and then can simple assume that there was a transmission error and try another source. Eventually the malicious node will be trimmed from everyone else's peer list and a new node identity will have to be generated and the game starts again.

This single attack costs the attacker as much as it does the downloader (and you can bet the RIAA is paying more per MB of data sent than someone downloading the data via a DSL or cable modem line) and a few simple changes to the system like favoring trusted peers (ones who have not given you mismatched hash/payload data) as the first nodes to query and only moving down the local reputation food chain if you need to expand your query or search for alternate sources. Unless an attacker can pretend to be a vast majority of the nodes in the system it is not going to be able to make this attack scale-up in the manner you suggest.

There is a difference between an attack that works on a single download and an attack that would be viable for a network-wide assault. The case you and Mr. Chen bring up here is clearly in the first category, an inconvenience for individual users but not something that will be a significant problem for the network as a whole.

Moderation and peer reputation require some method of recording "ratings" of users on the network. Something not present in the current Gnutella network. But if implemented, it would have to be distributed as well. This means that there, at some point, must be a blind trust between clients to complete these "ratings". That blind trust will lead to poisioning of the ratings system and make it worthless.

"Ring of trust" simply does not work in a distributed environment that is truly open to anyone. Closed distributed environments, or virtually closed environments within an open environment would be the only way. However new users would not be able to enter them and that is how Gnutella keeps itself alive.

Which is why I think that things like Raph Levien's work in reputation systems (and actually coding up working examples of such a system, see refs below) are rather attractive because they solve this specific problem in a rather elegant fashion and make such simplistic attacks much more difficult and expensive to pull off. [Here's a quick hint: Have you ever noticed that most people seem to care about Roger Ebert's opinion rather than yours when it comes to what movies to go see? This is because distributed trust system can deal with voter flooding attacks by limiting how much influence comes from untrusted sources.]

You seem to think, Mr. McCoy, that there are obvious solutions. Yet you really don't present any nor do you present any existing real-world examples.

One of the problems I addressed in the original paper was the fact that it was poorly researched in certain aspects. It seems that everyone is too lazy to actually do any research these days, but since spending five minutes doing google searches on various terms related to reputation systems seems to be too much work for either you or Mr. Chen, here is a quick summary of a few minutes work (although I selected papers that I am familiar with after google returned a hit).

1) For starters look at Google itself. Google is the single biggest distributed reputation system in the internet. That is what a pagerank is, the "repuation" of a particular link for a particular subject using link count as the voting mechanism. It can be attacked and subverted on a small scale as various Google-juicing experiments prove, but it is also very effective at filtering out these attacks (see some of the Scientology google-juicing wars to see how hard it is to really influence a massively distributed reputatioon system implemented my people who know how to pick the best ideas from current research and invent a few of their own.

2) EBay seller rankings. These can also be attacked and tweaked, but even when money is involved (making the incentive for dishonest behavior very high, much more so than any p2p system will ever have to deal with) EBay manages to keep fraud to a manageable level and recent research into seller/buyer identity-blinding and reputation cluster filtering can make the seller ranking system even more attack-resistant.

3) Amazon buyer ratings and recommendations. Yet another example of a real-world distributed trust management system.

4) Advogato is a community forum site that implements some of Raph's Ph.D. work in reputaitons and distrubted trust management to create a flow-constrained reputation system that has some very good attack-resistance characteristics. Raph has been running Advogato using his distrubted trust metric for several years now.

5) Pattie Maes' agents group at MIT, specifically the Yenta reputation clustering system but just about everything to come out of this group is a source of good ideas and practical research in this area.

6) Check out some of the available research bibliographies (like this) and places like citeseer for other research in the subject.

One thing you will notice about these real-world examples is that none of the systems tries to be "perfect", just good enough to get the job done.

> if you don't, you wind up doing nothing at all.

Thanks for providing me a reason to keep trying to educate. It may be pathetic and pitiful, but not everyone can hope to be great.

> by shoving document after document of propaganda, doctrine and philosiphy

What is wrong with that? You can't dismiss arguments by classifying them as propaganda or doctrine. One has to read, understand, and then prove them wrong. Your failure to do that can be interpreted in many ways: reading incompetence, unwillingness to face intellectual challenge are some of them.

> you are an extremist

I read from Paul Krugman that it isfunny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself?. Also from him, sometimes you have to be extremist to be truthful. Because being at some extreme or at the middle has nothing to do with being right or wrong, but with not agreeing with the current climate of opinion. Where extremism is unseemingly is when the extreme is pursued as an end in itself: that's what I call "opositionism", or opposing something just because it's unfashionable to be in accordance.

> The extremes to which you would want to go with free software is unatainable at best, and at worst, absolute insanity.

Please prove them so.

> I have not experienced this evilness of corporate which does not allow me to get my work done.

I don't know what's your field, but in the database industry is bad enough that people are bashing the only fundamentally sound approach to the field because they don't realise it was never attempted, instead Big Corp pushes SQL which is brain-damaged. If you don't have database education I won't ever be able to tell you how bad this is, neither in bad faith nor in consequences.

But even outside of IT, haven't you heard about the railroad tycoons, or the military industrial complex, or Enron, or the California energy crisis, or Microsoft? I can't provide you with every piece of reading that's good for your education, but for a starter you could read some Paul Krugman or some Bill Parish. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, much more can be said at the deeper cultural, even philosophical level. Then you will have to do deeper reading, from Plato & St Augustine to Francis A Schaeffer & Rookmaaker, along with their contradictors.

> philosophy means nothing without fact and proof

Well, show me where my own philosophy is lacking. I don't doubt it has lackings, as I am young enough and even elders aren't perfect, being human. But you never cared to disprove it.

> I have yet to come across a person who uses only free software and who's life has dramaticaly improved because of it.

That's show you are missing the whole point. Free software isn't pragmatical in the first place, even if we hope it will be eventually. It's idealistic. It's building a new future, with all the sacrifices that entails.

> it is a rare enough instance just to come across someone who uses all free software period.

Yes, and I've given you the reasons: unreasonable forking (because there is such a thing as reasonable forking too) and time wasted reverse engineering file formats, protocols & APIs which should be documented in the first place.

Anyway, free software is not about being popular -- not yet. We do know it's not yet fit for general consumption, and therefore we are far enough from World Domination(TM).

> When you show me the proof of corporate evil and rule. When you show me the proof of GNU Nirvana, then I will consider your position. But sending me link after link of propaganda is nothing more than that. Propaganda.

Now spare me the junk. These last phrases in your comment are just that, junk. If you can't do your reading and understand your own time and its signs, even yet don't ever go around calling names and putting words in other people's mouths.

The Public Anemone was presented at SIGGRAPH '02 in San Antonio, about a month ago - that's where the pictures in the article were taken. The exhibit was in the Emerging Technologies area. I visited the exhibit almost daily (reactive robotics is an area of interest), and spent some time observing both the exhibit and people's reactions.

The Media Lab students explained that it was an experiment in social interaction - but how people react with something that doesn't have a face, or a voice. In a way, it's easier to create a creature that doesn't have to synthesize speech, etc. At the same time, it's much more difficult to elicit a reaction from people when they can't interact the same way that they do with other humans.

The Public Anemone had two main forms of reaction that I could make out - shrinking back from people who reached out toward it, and tracking faces. (With the assistance of dual stereo cameras in the back wall.) The exhibit was more like a terrarium than an aquarium (as the BBC article mentions), but the creature had a silicone skin which allowed it to play in the small pond and waterfall without shorting. During the day cycle, the anemone interacts with guests. During the night mode, the anemone goes to sleep and guests can interact with other fiber-optic anemones (that also shrink away) and drum on gemstones embedded in the surface of the exhibit. The exhibit certainly looked cool, with fiber optics, a soundtrack, and changing colored stones (using ColorKinetics lights), but the interaction left something to be desired. Almost all the people I observed in the exhibit did the typical museum "Oh, that's nice, let's look at it for a few minutes." Almost no-one tried to interact unless prompted to by the media lab representative that was standing there, describing what was going on. Nobody that I saw tried to play with the face tracking abilities of the robot.

Cynthia Brazeal(the person in the second pic) is more commonly known for her work on Cog & Kismet. (Pic)

IMHO, The coolest project in this area is Doc Beardsley, by the Entertainment Technology program at Carnegie Mellon. Here's an article at Discover Magazine. Interaction with Doc emphasizes fun over artificial intelligence.

I have more pics of the Anemone from Siggraph. If anyone wants to post them somewhere where they can stand the slashdotting, send email to mistermund@yahoo.com

The Public Anemone was presented at SIGGRAPH '02 in San Antonio, about a month ago - that's where the pictures in the article were taken. The exhibit was in the Emerging Technologies area. I visited the exhibit almost daily (reactive robotics is an area of interest), and spent some time observing both the exhibit and people's reactions.

The Media Lab students explained that it was an experiment in social interaction - but how people react with something that doesn't have a face, or a voice. In a way, it's easier to create a creature that doesn't have to synthesize speech, etc. At the same time, it's much more difficult to elicit a reaction from people when they can't interact the same way that they do with other humans.

The Public Anemone had two main forms of reaction that I could make out - shrinking back from people who reached out toward it, and tracking faces. (With the assistance of dual stereo cameras in the back wall.) The exhibit was more like a terrarium than an aquarium (as the BBC article mentions), but the creature had a silicone skin which allowed it to play in the small pond and waterfall without shorting. During the day cycle, the anemone interacts with guests. During the night mode, the anemone goes to sleep and guests can interact with other fiber-optic anemones (that also shrink away) and drum on gemstones embedded in the surface of the exhibit. The exhibit certainly looked cool, with fiber optics, a soundtrack, and changing colored stones (using ColorKinetics lights), but the interaction left something to be desired. Almost all the people I observed in the exhibit did the typical museum "Oh, that's nice, let's look at it for a few minutes." Almost no-one tried to interact unless prompted to by the media lab representative that was standing there, describing what was going on. Nobody that I saw tried to play with the face tracking abilities of the robot.

Cynthia Brazeal(the person in the second pic) is more commonly known for her work on Cog & Kismet. (Pic)

IMHO, The coolest project in this area is Doc Beardsley, by the Entertainment Technology program at Carnegie Mellon. Here's an article at Discover Magazine. Interaction with Doc emphasizes fun over artificial intelligence.

I have more pics of the Anemone from Siggraph. If anyone wants to post them somewhere where they can stand the slashdotting, send email to mistermund@yahoo.com

The Public Anemone was presented at SIGGRAPH '02 in San Antonio, about a month ago - that's where the pictures in the article were taken. The exhibit was in the Emerging Technologies area. I visited the exhibit almost daily (reactive robotics is an area of interest), and spent some time observing both the exhibit and people's reactions.

The Media Lab students explained that it was an experiment in social interaction - but how people react with something that doesn't have a face, or a voice. In a way, it's easier to create a creature that doesn't have to synthesize speech, etc. At the same time, it's much more difficult to elicit a reaction from people when they can't interact the same way that they do with other humans.

The Public Anemone had two main forms of reaction that I could make out - shrinking back from people who reached out toward it, and tracking faces. (With the assistance of dual stereo cameras in the back wall.) The exhibit was more like a terrarium than an aquarium (as the BBC article mentions), but the creature had a silicone skin which allowed it to play in the small pond and waterfall without shorting. During the day cycle, the anemone interacts with guests. During the night mode, the anemone goes to sleep and guests can interact with other fiber-optic anemones (that also shrink away) and drum on gemstones embedded in the surface of the exhibit. The exhibit certainly looked cool, with fiber optics, a soundtrack, and changing colored stones (using ColorKinetics lights), but the interaction left something to be desired. Almost all the people I observed in the exhibit did the typical museum "Oh, that's nice, let's look at it for a few minutes." Almost no-one tried to interact unless prompted to by the media lab representative that was standing there, describing what was going on. Nobody that I saw tried to play with the face tracking abilities of the robot.

Cynthia Brazeal(the person in the second pic) is more commonly known for her work on Cog & Kismet. (Pic)

IMHO, The coolest project in this area is Doc Beardsley, by the Entertainment Technology program at Carnegie Mellon. Here's an article at Discover Magazine. Interaction with Doc emphasizes fun over artificial intelligence.

I have more pics of the Anemone from Siggraph. If anyone wants to post them somewhere where they can stand the slashdotting, send email to mistermund@yahoo.com

Different that other security measures, this one is intended on stopping the user, owner of the machine, to do with it as it pleases him.

Anyway, google, and the paper.

"Again?! Okay, I'll pretend to forget how to do it so Master can demonstrate it a few more times. Heheh. Then I'll do it and he'll feed me... Life is goooood!"

Anyone who trains animals sees that happen. It makes you think about the animal's motivational structure, and your own. It's encouraging that game designers are reaching the point where this is an issue for players.

MIT's Alpha Wolf and related projects explicitly go in this direction. A key issue here is that it's quite possible to have an useful emotional structure controlling behavior without much "thinking" or "planning". This is obvious to anyone who trains animals, but the AI community is just beginning to get it.

according to the "auspicious MIT Tech", the comic was attributed to the daughter of one of the professors/researchers working on the proposal. So the researchers only erred in trusting his daughter. Who's not guilty of that?

Myth of eletronic terrorism (trollish site, but still interesting)
Definition of electric terrorism.
Tips on preventing electronic terrorism.
Opinion article by a MIT student about overreacting to terrorism.
First article I can find mentioning electronic terrorism

i had the good fortune of attending a school in cambridge.. although i'm originally from the south so i'm very familiar with the academics of auburn university.

a joke i've heard many times back home about auburn: What's the admissions test at auburn university like? Admissions official asks the prospective student to hold out his hand, palm down. The student does so, then the admissions official holds his two hands out in the same manner. He holds them on either side of the student's hand, then moves his hands around very quickly. First to one side, then the other, back again and again. After a few seconds of shuffling his hands around the student's, he asks, "Now which one is yours?"

I seriously doubt Prof. Thomas' daughter is a professional graphic designer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she's a high-school kid who just knows how to use Photoshop.

That not what Professor Thomas says in his email to the Lai's.

It was a last minute decision, and I asked my daughter, a graphic artist, to provide an image.

According to the MIT Policy for Academic Dishonesty, the VP for Research is supposed to investigate reports of dishonesty.

Here's a snippet from a random course handout at MIT's site (STS001, The History of Technology in America):
As in any historical report, you are expected to footnote all of your sources (for text, images, sounds, and anything else you use - copyright and plagiarism laws do apply to the web).

It would be interesting to see what other faculty at MIT, especially those who teach courses like Intro to Ethics, think about this affair.

In any case, I think this episode has taken the glitter off of some of the shine at MIT. Lets see whether MIT values the $50M more than ethics and honesty. The only honorable thing to do would be for MIT to fire the offending researcher.

According to the MIT Policy for Academic Dishonesty, the VP for Research is supposed to investigate reports of dishonesty.

Here's a snippet from a random course handout at MIT's site (STS001, The History of Technology in America):
As in any historical report, you are expected to footnote all of your sources (for text, images, sounds, and anything else you use - copyright and plagiarism laws do apply to the web).

It would be interesting to see what other faculty at MIT, especially those who teach courses like Intro to Ethics, think about this affair.

In any case, I think this episode has taken the glitter off of some of the shine at MIT. Lets see whether MIT values the $50M more than ethics and honesty. The only honorable thing to do would be for MIT to fire the offending researcher.

According to the MIT Policy for Academic Dishonesty, the VP for Research is supposed to investigate reports of dishonesty.

Here's a snippet from a random course handout at MIT's site (STS001, The History of Technology in America):
As in any historical report, you are expected to footnote all of your sources (for text, images, sounds, and anything else you use - copyright and plagiarism laws do apply to the web).

It would be interesting to see what other faculty at MIT, especially those who teach courses like Intro to Ethics, think about this affair.

In any case, I think this episode has taken the glitter off of some of the shine at MIT. Lets see whether MIT values the $50M more than ethics and honesty. The only honorable thing to do would be for MIT to fire the offending researcher.

This public apology is featured on their news page. See the press release here

Just another example of how timely /. can be at times

;-)

heck even RFN has followed this

;-)

This public apology is featured on their news page. See the press release here

Just another example of how timely /. can be at times

;-)

heck even RFN has followed this

;-)

This public apology is featured on their news page. See the press release here

Just another example of how timely /. can be at times

;-)

heck even RFN has followed this

;-)

Professor writes artist to apologize for
inadvertent use of comic book image

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2002/thomas.html

You mean like this? Sure, it's not with the stalls themselves, but close enough, since they're single-occupancy.
Oh, don't forget they're also the people who did this.

You mean like this? Sure, it's not with the stalls themselves, but close enough, since they're single-occupancy.
Oh, don't forget they're also the people who did this.

again...the geeks have fulfilled your dreams

fun stuff.

seen on slahsdot before, i believe.

Of course, this has already been done byt the Geeks at MIT

• Why Functional Programming Matters
• Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming Second Edition
• FAD: A Functional Analysis and Design Methodology
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
• CLOS Meta Object Protocol

So, still keeping some Java projects, I've decided to try something else. First I've tried was Python, which I used for while in OS automation scripts, but now I've tried to use it for a bigger scope: "servlets", UI, JMS-like messaging, XSLT, text processing, RDF, and finally in some AI stuff using FP, which is poor in Python, but at least it is there. By the way, OOP in Python is also far away from being perfect. It is slow on massive calculations, although it is fast enough for script -based OS automation, UI, "servlets" and XML processing (but not on huge files). it is dynamically typed and it has lazy evaluation - both very important features for messaging. Python is less known, comparing to Java, but its community is not really tiny as Perl and other *n*x hackers usually know Python.

After Python I've tried Erlang, Oz, OCaml, Haskell. I think Erlnag is ready for distributed messaging and for OS automation. The others are not - the lack of libraries. Although, each of them, Oz, OCaml and Haskell, has a very great potential if some big corp will do support. Any of these three may need just 10% of Java marketing to collect a crical mass and become recognized.

Before Java I had an experience also in C, Perl, Scheme, Lisp and Tcl, in few projects each. C is very "crashy" in you hands if you don't use it every day. Tcl does not handle well big enough apps. Perl is a "write-only" self-obfuscated lang. The only choice left is Lisp and Scheme. Lisp is very power for big standalone apps, Scheme is convinient for being embedded somewhere.

So, in the finals I've got Python, Erlang, Scheme and Lisp. Not a bad choice.

Coming back to UML. It does same help for Python programming as for Java. As for Lisp/Scheme and Erlang, I think that things like UML are too primitive to fit. On serious languages you need a serious math, and usually diagram is just an iluustration in the math article, not a whole article.

So, if you tired from kid pictures get the math in your hands :)

(Lisp/Scheme) are base on "S-Expressions".
But you are 100% accurate. S-Expressions save space, eliminate redundant information, and any programmer worth his salt can easily write a simple S-Expression parser in under an hour.

Take a look at this if you want some reading material. It's by Ron Rivest (the R in RSA).

I think you ought to take a look at "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte. Certainly, though he is a fan of fiber, he believes that the installed copper wire, if used intelligently, can handle what is needed.

Debunking Bandwidth: From Shop Talk to Small Talk

"Nature's Role in Copper Versus Fiber

Few people know how good copper twisted pair is. Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop (ADSL-1) can provide 1.544 Mbits per second into, and 64 Kbits per second out of, 75 percent of American and 80 percent of Canadian homes. ADSL-2 runs above 3 Mbits per second and ADSL-3, above 6 Mbits per second. ADSL-1 is fine for VCR-quality video.

Which would you prefer: 500 channels from which you can choose one, or one channel that can be switched to any source on the network?

It is absolutely true that fiber delivers thousands, in fact, millions of times more bandwidth. Frankly, we don't really know the limits of fiber. In addition, fiber now costs less than copper - when lines are updated, fiber will be used, with or without a need for bandwidth. Therefore, fiber will come into being automatically through the forces of common sense and Mother Nature"

"The goal of a programming language is to provide a machine with a set of instructions, ..."

No. From SICP: "...a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute."

Use dotLRN a FREE (as in speech) course management system that has the backing of the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Univiersity of Heidelberg and many other soon to be announced universities and school districts.

talli

What about LAME? They've managed to create an MP3 encoder without, from what I understand, infringing upon FhG's patents. Couldn't they create an encoder to do the same? I'm currently in the middle of reading an FAQ off their site about the MPEG patents. It is a good read: http://web.media.mit.edu/~eds/mpeg-patents-faq.

• 3D trajectory [java]
• current(?) mission status
• more images from NASA's Spacelink

By the way, have you noticed the privacy statement at Battlebots. Have you noticed that they reserve the right to supply 3rd party companies with your info??

I haven't heard about any BSD based bots yet - have you?.

I would also like to whine about "the lack of jobs where you get paid to fire foam darts at colleagues". </test>

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.

It was rather difficult finding this. Everything I found was either not specifically relevant, or conflicting. This reference seems to be the most clear description.

Basically, it says that only the owner of the program is allowed to make a temporary copy, but a licensor is not. link. Google's PDF to HTML of the link

And, a link on software copyright that I thought was interesting, but doesn't specifically relate to anything. link

I was only off by a factor of a thousand...

The trajectory still needs to be taken into account, but even then I concede it's going fast enough to escape. This applet shows I & II's flight plans in 3d, and it looks like I is heading more directly away from the sun than II, so a larger component of its speed is actually contributing to that escape velocity.

His work is a bit wider than just the CRC which by itself is "just" cyclic redundancy check. He talks about error-CORRECTING.

the "error-correcting-guy" has his homepage here, his papers are here. Really interesting stuff. But what can you expect from a guy whose hairstyle has similarities to Einstein's :)

the "error-correcting-guy" has his homepage here, his papers are here. Really interesting stuff. But what can you expect from a guy whose hairstyle has similarities to Einstein's :)

In about 4 hours, I'll be heading off to Boston to start my freshman year at MIT, generally considered to be a pretty good engineering school (I'm going to try to go into EECS).

We have a ton of general ed requirements. My 5's on both AP English tests earned me no credit, so I still have to take all the GE. Also, there is a PE requirement, as well as a swimming test. Yes, every graduate of MIT must be able to swit a certain distance.

There's some interesting information here about the engineering programs.

I just found the actual GE (mit calls them GIR) requirements: ( here )
you must take 6 science courses and 8 humanities, arts, and social sciences courses.

I guess my point is that some schools are already doing this to a point. Of course, MIT isn't fully endowed....

In about 4 hours, I'll be heading off to Boston to start my freshman year at MIT, generally considered to be a pretty good engineering school (I'm going to try to go into EECS).

We have a ton of general ed requirements. My 5's on both AP English tests earned me no credit, so I still have to take all the GE. Also, there is a PE requirement, as well as a swimming test. Yes, every graduate of MIT must be able to swit a certain distance.

There's some interesting information here about the engineering programs.

I just found the actual GE (mit calls them GIR) requirements: ( here )
you must take 6 science courses and 8 humanities, arts, and social sciences courses.

I guess my point is that some schools are already doing this to a point. Of course, MIT isn't fully endowed....

Barthe's essay on wrestling (in Mythologies) is a great read, but the connection to talk (shows) requires an acceptance of his semiology--if not explicitly then provisionally or merely for the sake of metaphor, don't you think?

Looking at Jenkins' cv, I agree he should've known what he was in for.

Smart students should read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, used in the introductory programming course at MIT. Some students will see the elegance of that approach, and some won't. Those that don't get it should be directed to Visual Basic class without penalty.

Surprised that no one
has thus far not yet mentioned
the SPAM-KU archive

~N

spam is annoying
but can this magic haiku
stop the snakehead fish

I struggled in the non-intro classes at MIT while I studied CS. The intro class- 6.001 (also called structures and interpretations of computer programs (itself a great book on how to program)) was wonderful and lead me through iterative programming without my realizing it. The next class, Computer Programming Lab, only had 6.001 as a prereq and I struggled. I did not have enough experience (even though I did well in the sole prerequisite). Anyway, Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks is a wonderful book. It describes how to estimate the time needed to complete software projects (longer than you think), and how to go about (and think about) coding up a system. Code Complete by Steve McConnell is excellent at teaching one how to code, and for Java I liked Java: How to Program . Good luck--programming is fun. Just DOCUMENT IT. Then you won't have to spend the next n years of your life maintaining it; you can write new code instead :)

The trick is that when you receive polarized light, if you pick the wrong polarization there's a 50% chance that the light will spontaneously flip to that polarization. Thus, unless you know the correct polarization sequence (the key), as you receive the light, you will not be able to intercept the communications under even the best of circumstances.

FYI, for those not owning photon transmitters/receivers, it might be interesting to know of its vague relative, a software method of communicating confidentially over an insecure link, called Chaffing and Winnowing. It, too, is based on mere plaintext embed into random noise with keys for the sender and receiver to recognize the right packets off the stream. Unlike in quantum transmission, the participants to the protocol won't notice someone sniffing but the changes for the sniffer to manage to pick up the right packets is near impossible in both cases.

I think that whoever approved this should be the first test subject. Let's see if he has any brainwaves.

Here's a complete list of successful El Al hijacking in the last 30 years:





They don't have brain-wave scanners. They don't have k3wl, l33t supertechnology. They don't even have armed pilots.

What they do have is bulletproof and hardened doors between cockpit and passengers, openly armed air marshals on board, and ground security that's trained and clueful.

They don't give terrorists a break with profiling.

I like Star Trek technology as well as the next guy, but I also recognize the difference between SF and reality.

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

-- Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2

As Ifile source code is available that dates back as far as about 1996.

The "foreign language" Spam that I get gets nicely refiled by Ifile into my Spam/Foreign folder.

That folder has a corpus of messages assortedly written in Han, French, Kanji, Korean, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Russian, and Ifile nicely recognizes that words in those languages provide evidence that messages seem most relevant to go into that folder.

Ultimately, it all involves human classification:

• Initially, the corpus must be "primed" with an initial set of messages that I classify into the various categories I want to distinguish between.
• Some messages are processed by Ifile into an appropriate mail folder.

  I go through them, and read them, perhaps just browsing titles when I see that spam seems appropriately filed.

  By leaving the messages in the folder, indicate that they were correctly filed, and should become part of the corpus.

• Ifile drops some messages in the wrong folder.

  That then involves human intervention as I move the messages to where they should have been.

Note that IFile is useful for filing good messages, not merely at throwing away spam.

Indeed, the more that you use Bayesian filtering for, the more folders with distinctive kinds of message that you have, the better it gets at discriminating where messages should go. I don't have one "Spam" folder; I've got about 8 for different sorts of spam. I don't have one 'inbox' for all my "good" mail; the mail gets thrown into a veritable huge chasm of mail folders. The more there are, the better.