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Apple's a little new to this UNIX desktop thing.

Erm, not really, there's AUX, oh and a little thing called NeXTStep and even UNIX for the Lisa (mention only). You might add MAE the Macintosh Application Environment which was written for Solaris and HP/UX, or to a far lesser extent (because it's hard to say that this was other than a split away organisation eventually subsumed by IBM and turned into frameworks for VisualAge amongst other things), the Taligent OO-OS initiative, which was targetted to interoperate with AIX at least at one stage in its life.

Since Jobs left Apple - 1988 iirc - Job's has been involved in UNIX on the desktop. It's no secret that the NeXT technologists / staffers supplanted the previous Apple corporate hierarchy.

Some interesting reading is this USENIX paper The Challenges of Integrating the UNIX and Mac OS environments.

My point is that Apple has a fair deal of relevant experience, and the NeXT - Apple merger is almost distant history, in corporate terms, when Be Inc. seemed to have a chance. And man, that feels a long time ago, even though it isn't _that_ long :)

Yatta! We are the wad of dough! Who dong hide?

Translation: "All right! We are the world! We just go to bed."

These are lyrics from "Yatta!" by Happatai (the Japanese version of the Village People), as interpreted in "Irrational Exuberance", a popular Flash music video of the song.

Surprisingly, the parent is somewhat on-topic because Flash videos use JPEG compression technology to save bandwidth.

They've had tutorials on how to build your own Teddy Borg, among other things. I do wish they'd give credit to the originators of the design on the show and the website, instead of just the site, though.

This actually echoes the same understanding behind the Computer Clubhouse (which, incidentally has a presence in India).

http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/1998/clubhouse/
http://www.computerclubhouse.org/

i was in this dude's basketball PE class in high school.

he wasn't that good, but local news stations brought cameras to watch him play after he won the westinghouse.

adam cohen

what's most incredible was that building the STM wasn't even the main point of his project. he just needed it to see what he was creating.

I think you make some sweeping generalisations, but I also share your concern about the education system.

But the system is also due in part to the students; if all they want is a piece of paper that will get them a bigger salary, if they sleep through lectures and do poorly on homework assignments, it's demoralising to a professor. And if occasionally the professor slips, or tries to cater to students to reach them in any way possible, I think it's understandable but regrettable.

What is your ideal education system? Mine is a system that is more self-paced and customised to each student, but in an environment that still encourages social interaction. But you're right, it is an incredibly huge task. Technology may make it easier, but it's too easy to misuse technology, or use it in a fluffy way.

I admit to being somewhat partial to the thinking of Seymour Papert, who teaches at MIT (the "GeorgiaTech of the North") where I go to school. His testimony to Congress is fairly interesting, and makes the point that education has not advanced as much as other institutions because of lack of technology and lack of fundamental research into improving education.

So while I once believed that an easy way to improve education is to increases salaries and attract better teachers, I now think a better solution is to invest that money into education research instead.

Regardless of what service you use...if you use the Gaim client, you can find a variety of encryption plug-ins. Also, you can just write your own script, like this I use with my friends.

> The island is called Thera - "Fear" in Greek according to the TLC Documentry. One problem is that the explosion occurred 900 instead of 9000 years prior to Plato's original story. This however can be explained by difference in number systems, or clerical errors.

Or maybe Atlantis didn't exist at all?

Just because some myths have historical underpinnings doesn't mean that all myths have historical underpinnings.

And when you have to start twisting the myth around a lot to make it match the "evidence", then you should really stop and wonder why you're trying so hard to make it match.

Moreover, Plato isn't exactly a good source of mythology. He was neither a historian nor a mythographer. He was a philosopher, and not a very deep one at that. (IMO he operated on about a 10th grade mentality.) He liked to write stories about things like how the ideal state would be constituted, and he used an idealized Socrates as a sock puppet in his writings.

Plato tells the Atlantis story in his Timaeus . In particular, Plato tells a made-up story about a conversation between Socrates, Critias, and a couple of others, and in that story Critias tells a story he heard from another guy named Critias, and in that story the second Critias tells that he heard it from Solon, and in that story Solon tells that heard it from the Egyptian priests (along with a bunch of other drek). So we the recursively embedded stories Plato(Critias1(Critias2(Solon(Egyptians)))) -- and we know that the outermost story was a work of fiction (one of Plato's so-called dramatic dialogues). This is not a source that inspires a lot of confidence.

Once you get beyond that it makes a lot more sense to try to figure out what role the story played in whatever point Plato was trying to make with his polemic than it does exploring the world trying to find something that can be stretched to fit the story.

The story doesn't even appear to be real mythology, let alone real history.

<uncle>One more thing!</uncle> "Thera" doesn't mean "fear", it means "the hunt", "the chase", "pursuit", "the catch", or "hunting ground". And the name of the island may not even be the same word; Liddel and Scott list it under a separate entry.

Hopefully this gives everyone an idea why scientists and historians tend to scoff at claims that lost civilizations have been discovered, until verifiable evidence is in hand.

Here's why I'm making a point of insulting you. Nuclear power of all kinds is backed by a lobby of smug, short-sighted techno-fetishists who just love it in when some hippie does the usual misinformed kneejerk antinuke rant. This allows them to portray all their opponents as such, and avoid the serious issues nuclear technology raise. You just scored one for their side!

All you had to do was make a quick search on Google, which would have led you straight to the specs for the spacecraft in question. Which would have told you that the HETE is powered by a combo of solar cells and nicads.

(Of course, nicads are also an environmental problem, but at least the ones on HETE aren't going into a landfill. Good environmentalist that you are, I hope you take your used nicads to a toxic waste depot. Or is pollution always somebody else's fault?)

Next time you feel inclined to speak up for The Cause, make sure you're actually serving The Cause, and not your own pathetic ego.

We specimens of Homo Sapiens grow old and infirm, but thanks to the Robot AI Mind Rejuvenate Module, the new species of Robo Sapiens may live forever. Therefore we are on the verge of a Cybernetic-Economy Prosperity Engine that will give all human beings (not just the super-rich elite) the birth-right to have, when elderly or infirm, a robotic caretaker as a kind of physical guardian angel to watch over thee and keep thee.

Such Robot AI Mind caregivers need not be socially isolating for the elderly, because each old person may say, "I'll have my (robotic) people get in touch with your (robotic) people." In other words, we will not replace humans with robots but rather enhance humans with robots.

First, however, the original Robot AI Mind needs to be developed further and translated (ported) into more languages than Visual Basic and Java (as Mind.JAVA).

if you turn the thing on with a cool reservoir, the CPU temp stays below 76F. but after being on for 10 hours, the reservoir temperature raises to about 113F due to my lack of money to buy a real radiator. so my equilibrium CPU temp with an Athlon XP 1600 is 123F, when the fan it came with ran it at 145F.

you can see pictures and stuff here.

granted, copper slugs and machining equipment and "free" swagelock (and peltiers!) is not something everyone has, but use what you got, right?

hope someone finds it useful or interesting.

muerte

"One of the most basic 'hacks' (to use the media's bastardization of the term)"

Well isn't that a bastardization of a bastardization???

"Someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result, called a 'hack'. The essence of a 'hack' is that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant." reference

"The term 'hacker', in its original meaning, refers to someone who applies ingenuity to create a clever result - usually in a technical sense - called a 'hack'" reference

"The original meaning of the word 'hack' was born at MIT, and originally meant an elegant, witty or inspired way of doing almost anything...Now the meaning has changed to become something of a portmanteau term associated with the breaking into or harming of any kind of computer or telecommunications system." reference

Actually, spam filters work quite well. Most filters can filter out 95% of all spam while throwing away about 1% of legitimate e-mails.

Filtering can be done based on the content of the message. For example, if the message includes the words "enlarge" and "penis" or "herbal viagara" it will be quickly classified as spam. This is done automatically using algorithms similar to those of search engines.

Also, legitimate e-mails could usually be easily detected: mailing list traffic is tirival, any message including a copy of your sig, your real name, names of people close to you or your place of work, etc. The automated tools take advantace of all this in filing your message.

To try it yourself, see ifile which does this for both spam filtering and folder classification.

but healing is not just medicines. Having a nurse to talk to and do the psychological healing is very important for a patient.
And becouse the robot does a part of the medicine delivery nurses and doctors might finaly get time to do exactly that.
And becouse of the money saved by having a 5$/hour leased 24-hour no vacation robot doing the job compared to many sleeping and eating humans who also mess up their job ocasionally (just for people who would argue anything about robot reliability) these nurses and doctors could actaully be paid for doing the social part of helping people rather then getting paid on a patients/second base....They are not now, but it gets the "more time/money to the ones who make the hospital work" argument over. And as soon as they can carry blood and controled substances (I would think they are more safe in the robot`s safe then on the cart of a human delivery person where everyone can see they are narcotics) Then there might actually be financial room for having a second robot who could cheer up people ;-) (not just a joke though, a furby proves in sales figures what MIT proves with research, robots make better companions during long hospital visits then the old snoring people loudly discusing funeral arangements in the next bed)

Also interesting, from a different perspective, is the first part of this Alan Kay essay.

• 
  
• four solar panels, made of honeycomb aluminum with silicon substrate, each supplying 42W.
  
• power box with power point tracker,~90% efficient
  
• 6 battery packs, each made up of a string of 24 1.5V NiCd cells, and each with 1.2 A-hrs capacity
  

You could build a system that cancels for a small target area from a distance, but it's going to produce twice the sound in other places.

Well, actually, if you could combine this with one of the audio spotlights from http://web.media.mit.edu/~pompei/spotlight/ you'd have the perfect device for dealing with people like my neighbor who thinks it's his job to open the window and DJ for the entire neighborhood on sunny days ...

(Hey, pal, JC Superstar, the Ike & Tina soundtrack, and Bruce Springsteen are okay, but not the same three in rotation over and over and over, okay?)

Don't like the Skeptic? Well, then try this, or this, or maybe even that.

I can't believe that some moron moderator +1 interesting'd this bullshit.

The energy consumed in erasing bits is NOTHING compared to the energy lost to heat. If PhysicsGenius was right, Reversible Computing would have taken over the embedded systems world years ago, instead of simply being a labratory curiosity.

Maybe they could adapt the odor meter idea later... v2.0?

You mean, something like the Random Hall Bathroom Server?

Whoa... where's the Internetworked toilet seat?

My oldest memory of reading about amorphous semiconductor photocells of the future is from the early 70's. They were the brainchild of Stanford Ovshinski, who later invented metal hydride batteries. Good to know amorphous solar cells might finally be taking off.

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

RMS is the über-hacker from the MIT AI Lab who largely created Emacs and GCC and founded Project GNU and the Free Software Foundation.

FWIW, NAI posted the source for PGP Freeware, for peer review purposes. It is still available from the MIT Distribution center for PGP. It's copyright NAI, of course, but it makes for a good read, if nothing else. IANAL, but I wouldn't think it would be illegal to peruse and learn. Certainly lots of integration tips to glean in there (Eudora, Lotus Bloates, LookOut Express, etc). No cut and pasting tho! :>

If you want to make nice, solid, constantly evolving software, go with Open-Source. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of the worl, you'll want to make money along with nice software (hopefully). Then, you'll go wtih Closed-Source proprietary, patented software.

The problem with patented software is that the patents that the USPTO has issued in the last 20 years are so d*ng broad that instead of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts," they have precisely the opposite effect. For instance: data compression by dynamically building a character-to-string dictionary? Patent 4,558,302. Falling blocks puzzle game whose goal is to remove a specified initial set of colored or shaded blocks from the playfield (in other words, B-type Columns)? Patent 5,265,888. Image analysis by blocks against a smaller version of the same image? Patent 5,065,447. Heck, even topological sorting and XOR drawing were once patented in the U.S.

And don't count on waiting for the patents to expire. Just as Hollywood managed to get a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed with tons of soft money and (possibly mandatory) individual contributions, watch the pharmaceutical industry propose a Cherilyn LaPierre Patent Term Extension Act.

There are many other research programs, both academic and industrial, on wireless ad hoc networks, going back at least to the 1978 DARPA-sponsored Distributed Sensor Nets Workshop at Carnegie-Mellon University. Most of the work has been funded by DARPA, by the low-power wireless integrated microsensors (LWIM) project of the mid-1990s and now by the SensIT project. (Their projects page lists more than 25 academic research programs on these networks, complete with links.)

The University of California at Los Angeles, often working in collaboration with the Rockwell Science Center, has had a Wireless Integrated Network Sensors (WINS) project since 1993. UCLA also supports the similar-but-different "Smart Dust" program, which also employs ultra-low-power networking, but uses optical communication between network nodes.

Professor Anantha Chandrakasan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the Principal Investigator of the uAMPS (microAMPS) project.

On the commercial side, these networks are being developed by Ember, graviton, Wherenet, and Motorola, just to name a few.

The ZigBee industry consortium is the marketing and compliance arm of the IEEE 802.15.4 draft standard, in a relationship similar to that between WECA (with the "Wi-Fi" brand) and IEEE 802.11b. This draft standard for ultra-low-power, ultra-low-cost wireless networking, now under development, should be finished this winter.

Although finally having a legit copy of XP Pro was a nice bonus as well :)

College seems like a fun place.

I'd pay big dollars for a device that would recognize people I'd met in the past and pull up their contact file. If it was standardized I'd happly attach my facal geometery to my vCard to make it easier.

Fellow at the MIT wearable computer project was doing this very same thing. Borglab and Thad Starner were talking about it. Of course, they had full on wearable computers to run the apps on, not just cell phones.

-il cylic

With no world model at all, you're limited to insect-level behavior. This works for insects because they're small and light. If a feeler hits something, that's OK. Larger creatures need some minimal prediction of the future just to put the feet in reasonable places and not bump into obstacles. Once a creature gets fast enough and large enough that inertia matters, it needs a control system with some predictive power.

What's needed is the "lizard brain", or limbic system, which does that job for lizards, birds and mammals. Instead of trying to crack that problem, Brooks tried to go all the way to human-level AI in one step, with his Cog project. He didn't claim to know how to solve the problem; he just planned to throw about 30 MIT PhD theses at it and hope. That didn't work.

I once asked him why he didn't try for a robot mouse, which seemed a reachable goal. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the person who built the world's greatest robot mouse". That's where he went wrong. This problem is too big to solve in one big step.

I think we'll see a solution to lizard brain AI in the next few years, but it will come from the video game community, not academia.

Not so fast.

There are some cockroaches, you step on the, and all they do is get mad. You have to splat them with a hammer. Of course, you could always get some as pets. Nevermind the ones in Florida that fly imported from Asia.

Crikey, you figured that out after two semesters. I guess I wasted 4 years of my life doing a degree in it all then... I must never have cottoned on to how well expert systems such as Mycin and Dendral actually perform.

You think programming is just the "intelligence of the programmer"? Guess again -- many people have AI systems running which program themselves, coming out with emergent behaviour which the programmer never expected.

Do you really think that a person can simplify circuit boards to their simplest form by themselves? I thought not. I know that Julian Miller can't, but that using his Cartesian Genetic Programming he's managed to wirte programs that do just that. Thus proved that a computer program can ultimetaly be more than the sum of its external inputs.

Kerberos was not invented by Microsoft.

They just took the existing standard and added a little bit to make a version incompatible with everybody else who wasn't a psychopathic landgrabber.

This is typical Microsoft behavior. I cannot believe that anyone on /. could be so misinformed, you must be a troll.

This is the same as if someone moved into the city park and started growing corn. Very antisocial.

UW CS tution is about CAD$5400/year. MIT tuition is about US$26,000 (CAD $40,000) per year.

Paul

P2P research by well known research institutions is far from unheard of. MIT has Chord which is a project to produce robust scalable distributed systems using peer to peer ideas. They have an efficient hash lookup algorithm that could form the basis of many p2p systems and they have code available for download.

I made a (somewhat) similar keyboard to help myself overcome RSI symptoms. Each key is concave, and has an infrared beam across the top so no pressure is needed to activate it. It takes some getting used to, but works great and has helped my arms/wrists immensely. See it at: http://web.mit.edu/mjduff/www/keyboard/

This is why we instroduce the notion of a universal turing machine (UTM), which along with the input on the tape, takes in the description of a machine M. The UTM can go on then to simulate M on the rest of the contents of the input tape. A universal turing machine can thus simulate any other machine.

Secondly, I thought SK was functional and the Turing machine is imperative? Non-trivial paradigm mismatch here?

Some here, here, here, and here to name a few, for a large listing try here.

Many DARPA projects are done in cooperation with universities and many of the software supporting them end up as OSS.
Here's a list of DARPA research areas, tying in to projects. I know MIT's project oxygen has helped a lot in the world of linux on handhelds.

NIME

CCRMA program

Joe Paradiso @ at MIT Media Lab doing some interesting stuff

enjoy

According to X.org, the first commercial release of the X-windows system was back in 1986. This was part of MIT's Project Athena which began in May 1983.

According to this page, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.

However, according to the Wikipedia, Xerox Parc codified the WIMP paradigm (where the W stands for Windows) for their Xerox Star system released in 1981.

So, depending on how you slice it, the concept of 'windows' clearly predates MS's work on Windows and the term X-Windows refers to a product which was virtually the same age as the MS product.

That's all I got from googling around for 20 minutes. I Am Not A Historian.

It makes you wonder how much of this is based on theoretical linguistics and formal semantics, and how much is based on good old fashioned statistics and optimization.

You mean something like this? (Found through an article (in German) in Telepolis, that draws a link to the Kate Bush song Experiment IV.

Reserach Papers

I'm not sure if they've done anything really novel. I skimmed through one of the more recent papers, on sentence ordering; but that seem to only operate on the same event There's research like this going one at alot of major universities like CMU and MIT. That said, it does look impressive.

Where would you guess that I have met the people that I mention? Consider the possibility that I learned the SICP in this class and that my teachers have been the very best in their fields. My perspective may be skewed, but your personal attack and supposition that I am a teacher is misguided at best.

You can get back to stewing in bitterness now.

I post anonymously only out of laziness. My screen name is Aix.

Steve is a bonafide asshole and a plagiarist to boot. He's invented his own myth and you id10ts buy into it because he's the only thing uglier and more socially inept than yourselves. Plus you don't have the slightest clue of a) what he's doing, b) what parts of it are interesting, c) what he's actually invented, and d) how little parts b) and c) have to do with part a).

I only wish the exaggerated reports of his ordeal were true. Just ask anyone who's had to work with him what a thieving, duplicitous, and self-promoting purveyor of half-truths he is.

Here is what his colleagues at MIT used to think of him (and a damn sight more kindly than they do today).

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

You'd perfer some EPS?

Markup languages are not meant to be terse, they're meant to be easy for someone to parse and to be readable by humans if need be. The design goals of the XML spec state as much:

6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

and

10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

XML was developed as a reaction against the complexity of SGML, not to be perfectly tailored to your pet domain.

Here's a useful project: Try writing a parser to take "x^2 + 4x + 4 = 0" and spit out the MathML. Ta da, suddenly you can share your math. And you don't have to use unreadable EPS, LaTeX, or send people your Mathematica notebook.

As the Technological Singularity approaches and engulfs us, the widening tech-savvy gap does not matter in the long run, Maynard, where we are all dead.

What does matter is the contribution that each one of us can make in a smooth transition from sole dominance of the planet by Homo sapiens to a joint stewardship of Earth with Robo sapiens.

Your Majesty, You have it in Your geek power to transform the world for the better -- regardless of Your high or low level of tech-savvy -- if You web-host the Tutorial AI Mind or make an original AI contribution or simply tweak some code in the Robot AI Mind.