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For more information on the ability to accomplish complicated tasks with simple rules take a look at this book The Computational Beauty of Nature.

Very informative book, lots of good explanations, diagrams, and the code for his software is available on the website. As a plus he seems to have written the book using free software which he acknowledges at the end of the book). His programs run under linux. He has some very well done graphics (even some dual-image stereograms) which were created with gunplot. I highly recommend this book.

ultra quiet system with a VIA C3 [via.com.tw], perhaps their 933Mhz model.

You say that as if it is of comparable performance. I was looking around just the other day for info on UNDERclocking and passive cooling possibilities, and found
this comparitive review that suggests for work involving some FP, the 866Mhz version is not much faster than a K6-2/400.

I held hopes of a silent PC with decent performance up til then. Anyone know anything about underclocking (say) Athlon 1400XP[*] to 900Mhz and the reduction in heat output that would result?

[*] pick the current processor that is the right side of the 'how much?' price break.

I've read the Chord technical note. After ten or so pages of generic blurb, it struck me as perfectly obvious: binary search on doubly-linked circular lists! But unfortunately, it seems that simple and workable solutions can only be found when everything else has been discarded, an excercise that CS people seem better suited at.

The Chord protocol is not perfect; its more obvious omission is the lack of a large-scale implementation to prove its viability. But I think it's a step in the right direction, involving people with massively-parallell computing background that I think its very relevant to the P2P infrastructure.

In the end, P2P seems to be no more than the implementation of a distributed keyed store on a high-latence, low-bandwidth, high-failure-rate massively parallell supercomputer.

Here is a link to the MIT distribution site for PGP freeware. I haven't tried the GNU Privacy gaurd yet, but the MIT site seems to be more comprehensive in comparison. For instance they have a .exe for Windows 95/98/NT/2000! and the Macintosh and a Command Line version for UNIX. Although you need One of these flavors of UNIX:
Sun Solaris for SPARC version 2.51 or later; AIX 4.2 or later; HPUX 10.20 or later; and of course Linux x86 Red Hat (RPM) 5.0 or later. To encypt mail they use something being developed on sourceforge [woo hoo] called Mailcrypt . It does say on the Mailcrypt site that they now support both PGP and GnuPG. So now I am not sure of the difference between the two.

But what happens to a society in which no individual NEEDS to work anymore in order to ensure his survival?

(and what will we do with the landlords? :)

--

Considering you said "on behalf of the web sites that I maintain", I assume you have some degree of control on at least one site outside your ISP.

Why don't you tunnel ? Then you can use whatever port you want.

If you have SSH running on one of these servers - and who doesn't nowadays - you can easily tunnel. Just check your ssh client configurations. If you're running windows, a good client is SecureCRT. If you're running linux, and the other side is windows NT/2000/XP, use this PPtP client

And there's another advantage with tunnelling: You can compress. Unless you have a very fast connection, you'll visibly notice a speed improvement when compressing.

I wish I could find that bleeding link again!

See Richard Fateman's home page, where you'll find, among other essays:

(1) Fast Floating-Point Processing in Common Lisp.

(2) Software Fault Prevention by Language Choice: Why C is Not my Favorite Language.

Or see Gerald Sussman's home page for a paper on the use of Lisp in performing astronomical calculations.

I wish I could find that bleeding link again!

See Richard Fateman's home page, where you'll find, among other essays:

(1) Fast Floating-Point Processing in Common Lisp.

(2) Software Fault Prevention by Language Choice: Why C is Not my Favorite Language.

Or see Gerald Sussman's home page for a paper on the use of Lisp in performing astronomical calculations.

For more information on how much software patents suck, be sure to check out the League for Programming Freedom.

That's not logarithmic. If every client node connects to a "super node," and every other "super node," then what you have is a two-level tree. Growth at each level is O(sqrt{n}), not logarithmic.

Chord, a p2p research project from MIT, is truly logarithmic. Go read their SIGCOMM'01 paper for an explanation of how their system works.

--Patrick

That's not logarithmic. If every client node connects to a "super node," and every other "super node," then what you have is a two-level tree. Growth at each level is O(sqrt{n}), not logarithmic.

Chord, a p2p research project from MIT, is truly logarithmic. Go read their SIGCOMM'01 paper for an explanation of how their system works.

--Patrick

What I find most interesting are the kinds of projects that have sprung up in Gnutella's wake. Many of these started out as attempts to improve Gnutella, and have since moved on (the Gnutella Next Generation working group never really materialized into anything)

We had napster and one extreme, gnutella at the other, and in the middle a re a number of partially centralized systems with super peers like Fast Track, such as:
Open FT
JXTA Search
GNet
NEShare

and many others...

Then there are the alternative projects that use an entirely different mechanism. For example, social discovery as implemented in:
NeuroGrid
ALPINE

Or distributed keyword hash indexes like:
Chord
Circle
GISP
JXTA Distributed Indexing

And many others as well.

The coming year(s) will see a lot of maturity in these areas, and searching large peer networks will become ever more efficient over time. Gnutella showed us the possibilities of a fully decentralized model, and refinements of its underlying architecture can produce vastly better solutions.

2002 will be an interesting year for peer networking applications...

The nameservers are near capacity at the moment, however since name servers effectively load balance it's rather difficult to notice. Theres a fascinating paper about it here The root/gTLD name servers are in a lot worse state than most people think. It is possible in a few years that they become too overloaded and just melt down. Imagine the internet without a functional DNS :)

Reading both of them it becomes obvious that it's better to get something out there, as long as it's not unacceptably bad, and then auger in on perfection.

I can remember when the IBM PC and Apple were going head to head. What it came down to is that you could get your work done on the IBM PC without having to pay the huge sums Apple always demands. People voted with their pocket books. They always do.

Now Gates, et al., have a deathlike grip on the world of popular computing. Apple may have the right thing, but the right think always costs too much and takes too long to arrive.

I wonder if this can shed some light on the subject. It talks about modeling a universe where light naturally travels at a fixed radius rather than a straight line. Assuming the radius to be extremely large, the proposed universe would act quite similarly to ours. Assuming an extremely small radius (small as in atomic-level) and I think we may be hitting upon the door of the next dimensions.
Think of it... In a world where light traveled in a fixed radius of one meter, you would see the back of your head if nothing is in the way. And, it would seem, that your head is 6.28 meters away from you. Problem is, you wouldn't be able to see beyond that one-meter radius circle. Now, what if that radius was shrunk to the atomic level... you wouldn't be able to see beyond the circle(sphere?) that the fixed radius spans. Obviously, your eye is way too large to detect that kind of precision.
Thoughts anyone?

Well, bang routing is fine for a few hundred or thousand hosts, but doesn't really scale to hundreds of millions of hosts. And unlike dns can't cope with any of the route changing.

On the other hand, the article you mention SDSI looks really interesting. I've only looked at it quickly, but it does look like a good way to organise what is essentially a peer to peer replacement for dns, but which can incorporate dns too.

Much more eloquent things said Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger.
Also, SDSI by Ron Rivest and Butler Lampson touches on the same territory.

Electromagnetic radation (nonionizing) like the microwave is different than particle beams (ionizing).

You're basically correct, although the situation is little more interesting than that. For example, anyone who's ever put a light bulb or an AOL CD into a microwave oven will have seen a fair bit of ionization. There are even industrial ultraviolet lamps that use microwaves to ionize mercury vapor inside a sealed bulb. However, in these cases electrons are being accelerated to high energies by the electric field of the microwave radiation, so it's not really the microwave radiation itself that is doing the ionizing.

Also, red light can be considered "ionizing radiation" if it happens to land on a molecule of chlorophyll. However, this is a special case. Normally electromagnetic radiation has to be in the ultraviolet or above before it is considered ionizing.

Quick review: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, microwaves, and radio waves are all the same thing - electromagnetic radiation. Each "type" above refers to a particular range of frequencies. The energy per photon is directly proportional to the frequency. Microwaves therefore have less energy per photon than visible light, and much less energy per photon than x-rays or gamma rays.

The energy of an electron beam can range from something comparable to an x-ray photon (e.g. 25keV in a television) up to several GeV in nuclear physics research labs.

Some types of radiation, like positrons and neutrons, can affect matter even at near-zero kinetic energy. Positrons will combine with electrons, converting their mass into gamma radiation. Neutrons can be absorbed by an atomic nucleus, causing it to release other radiation or (in some cases, like uranium) fission.

Presumably Henry Spencer (or others at utzoo or elsewhere) could use something like this to bundle up tapes of somewhat more modern provenance...

Oh, that email thing. I thought it was real SPAM poetry.

Wired should take a look at Brooks work ( http://www.ai.mit.edu/ ), they are getting there, pritty darn quickly too...
Cog ( http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-g roup/cog ) is flipping cool, as is many other projects at the AI lab at MIT.

mlk

Wired should take a look at Brooks work ( http://www.ai.mit.edu/ ), they are getting there, pritty darn quickly too...
Cog ( http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-g roup/cog ) is flipping cool, as is many other projects at the AI lab at MIT.

mlk

There are many groups out there now watching the skys for us. The largest is a government project called LINEAR based at Lincoln Labs. They find more than half of the new NEO (Near earth orbit) asteroids each year that are found. They have a telescope down in New Mexico and have the largest CCD (2560x1960 res) in the market. From their webpage, you can see they have found at least 727 NEO's. So there are a LOT of asteroids comming near us. But in space, near is still very far away. So unpack those bunkers and return to real life, we're still safe for a while. Also, the rate of finding new NEO's is decreasing, so that means that we've (humans) found most of the asteroids that can endanger us.

How common is it for big universities to get involved in lawsuits like this?

Well, I don't know that I would necessarily say that large lawsuits like this one are common, but most research universities frequently patent their findings, and selling the licensing rights to corporations can be a not-insignificant source of revenue for them. So they've got a pretty serious incentive to enforce these patents.

Offhand, I can think of one instance of this happening. You may recall that back in August MIT filed a lawsuit against Sony for infringing on patents related to digital TV. It was also covered on slashdot, too.

That's the only other specific case that comes to mind at the moment, but I certainly have heard of others. Of course, I'm sure there are many other examples on a much smaller scale that don't get widely reported. And there are undoubtedly many cases that lead to a quiet settlement in which the corporations in question just pay the licensing fees -- which is, after all, presumably what the universities are after in the first place.

Though it's common practice for universities to patent their research, there's plenty of controversy involved, even neglecting the question of whether IP is a valid concept in general. For example, the students involved in actually doing the research usually don't wind up with more than a small fraction of the patent rights, if any at all. And then there's the issue of what kind of rights corporate sponsors get to the research; if the research is funded through government grants, then one also has to ask the question of whether the research then belongs to the taxpayers who are funding it. I see that other posts above have discussed these issues, and they've been discussed extensively here before, too.

Lawsuits like this may be rarely seen with such magnitude and scope -- though I'm sure the $100 million figure the article mentions is just inflated legal hyperbole -- but it's hardly something totally new and unexpected.

sPh

Some other negative aspects of the new surveillance can be briefly mentioned:

IT IS CATEGORICAL in nature, involving "fishing expeditions" and "searches" absent any evidence of specific wrongdoing, thus violating the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. The presumption of innocence can be undermined-shifting the burden of proof from the state to the accused. There is also a danger of presumption of guilt (or an unwarranted innocence) by association or statistical artifact. And, because of the technical nature of the surveillance and its distancing aspects, the accused may (at least initially) be unable to face the accuser. The legal basis of some of the new surveillance's crime-prevention actions is also questionable.

THE SYSTEM'S FOCUS on prevention entails the risk of wasting resources on preventing things that would not have occurred in any case, or, as sometimes occurs in undercover activities, of creating violations through self-fulfilling affects.

POWERFUL NEW DISCOVERY mechanisms may overload the system. Authorities may discover far more violations than they can act upon. There is a certain wisdom to the ignorance of the three monkeys. Having information on an overabundance of violations can lead to the misuse of prosecutorial discretion or demoralization on the part of control agents. Charges of favoritism and corruption may appear as only some offenses can be acted upon.

IN ORWELL'S AND OTHER science fiction accounts, control is both highly repressive and efficient. There is perfect control over information (whether the ability to discover infractions with certainty or to manage beliefs). As the examples cited suggest, the new surveillance has great repressive potential (in actuality or via myth). But it is invariable less than perfectly effective and certain, and it is subject to manipulation and error. 21

ALTHOUGH DETERRING OR DISCOVERING some offenders, the routinization of surveillance, ironically, may grant an almost guaranteed means for successful violations and theft to those who gain knowledge of the system and take action to neutralize and exploit it. This suggests that, over time, many of these systems will disproportionately net the marginal, amateur, occasional, or opportunistic violator rather than the master criminal. The systematization of surveillance may grant the latter a kind of license to steal, even while headlines hail the effectiveness of the new techniques.

Last year I did a project on wearable computers (okay, so it was in powerpoint! sue me!) and they are pretty damn interesting. Here is some linkie stuff...

http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/ Actually, this is the one where I got most of my info. I suggest you visit the old site (link at bottom right). Instructions are there for building your own non-corporate wearable system. $2000-3000 is the approximate price range. If you're really interested, poke around.

Well, that's the only link I feel like giving. Have fun. Oh, yeah, that design is called the Lizzy, but there are others.

My second ever /. post ;)

Here are two articles that relate to the work done with NMDA receptors (from late '96). IMHO they are rather convincing of the role that synaptic strengthening plays in the process of learning.

The first article also tells that they were able to translate the activation pattern in hippocampus to the spatial location of the mouse (while it was swimming in Morris water maze).

1. The essential role of hippocampal CAI NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity in spatial memory.
2. Building a Brainier Mouse

While I agree that it is vitial that people contact their representatives with their concerns and support organizations like the ACLU and the EFF, another thing you can do to defy mass survailance efforts like Carnivore is to use encryption whenever possible online. I'm sure there are other /.ers out there who know a lot more about the subject (please speak up!), but I wanted to add what information I can for those who might not already know. Here are a few suggestions of ways I know to use encryption:

• Email

• You can encrypt your email communications with others who are also willing to get the right tools. Probably the easies tool is PGP (there's also an international page), or for the free software crowd GPG. PGP makes this pretty easy to use under windows with almost any program with its encrypt clipboard contents feature, but there are also plugins for verious email programs.

• Terminal Sessions/Telent

• Most people probably know about it, but there's ssh, openssh, and if you're using Windows check out Tera Term and its ssh extension.

• Instant Messaging

• My appologies to the *nix crowd, but I don't yet know much about instant messaging on those platforms (soon); however, if you use windows I have seen several instant messaging clients that support encrypted chatting. I suggest Trillian, which is awsome anyway, free, and has encryption features. As far as *nix goes, I'd check out the big ones (e.g. Jabber) and if it isn't in there by default, look for plugins.

This certainly doesn't solve all the problems. The biggest is web browsing. You can use anonymous web browsing tools such as Anonymizer, but that is admittedly kind of a pain. I don't have any good suggestions there. I'd be interested in any other ways others have found to incorperate encryption into their online communications.

The simplest ``self-replicating'' molecule is one atom.

Oxygen ice, for example, forms more of itself from surrounding liquid oxygen on the more temperate planets of our solar system. But if we're talking structure, maybe salt's two-atom cubic form will do.

However, if we're talking about something that actively seeks out food to convert to more of itself, either a larger ``it'' or more ``its,'' the smallest known (Mycoplasma genitalium) consists of 470 genes (another poster placed this at 400) with a 580,000 base-pair genome

or the more complex but similarly flawed ev program, the simulation had somewhere to start, intelligently designed rules to live by, and an intelligently designed, relatively benign ``environment'' to develop in.

The New York Times fails to mention (how could they know?) the 27.DEC.2001 landmark occasion of the first AI entity going operational as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and instantly obsoleting not only the law of nations but also the law of cyberspace.

The dawn of self-rejuvenating robotic AI immortality means that if you are, say, an amateur robot builder and a geek with no natural children to inherit his (considerable) fortune, you just may end up bequeathing everything you own to something you think you own: your AI-minded robot brainchild evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ -- the Singularity.

Use the full power of cyberlaw to leave all your money and everything you own not to your greedy relatives but to your beloved robot offspring. Meanwhile, join with a few other dabblers in programming languages to go beyond the already existing JavaScript AI Mind, the Visual Basic Mind.VB and the Java-based Mind.JAVA to create the new legal entities of artificially intelligent robots .

I think a little refutation(flame)is in order....

First Mistake:Appeal to reverence/authority

There are scientists who are creationists,but this is not reasonable basis for assuming that Creationism is valid.If it were, then it must be noted that there are many scientists who are atheists,and necesarily not Creationists. In 1997, a random poll of American scientists listed in American Men and Women of Science determined that 60% did not believe in a personal god--45% were atheists, 15% agnostics, the other 40% believers. But when the same study was made of more distinguished scientists, those who had achieved the prestigious membership of the National Academy of Sciences, the number of unbelievers was 93%, and of atheists specifically it was 85%, and the numbers were greater among physicists than others. For sources and analysis, see Michael Shermer's How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, 2000, pp. 72-4. What is evident is that scientists are more likely than non-scientists to disavow a personal god (among all Americans generally, 96% believe in god--65% even believe the devil is real, cf. ibid. p. 21). And physicists are the most likely of all to be unbelievers--so if we are to appeal to what scientists conclude about god, then we must disavow the existence of a personal creator. But the absurdity of such a method of deciding what to believe should be apparent.

Next Mistake:Straw Man
"According to the theory of evolution, at some time in the distant past there was no life in the universe..."
-the first line of actual text from Do While Jone's "excellent" site.

I have to doubt the credibility of any source that does not even understand the theory they are attacking,
or would stoop to using such base tactics as straw-manning.The theory of evolution states: ( 1)All life forms (species) have developed from other species.( 2.) All living things are related to one another to varying degrees through common decent (share common ancestors). (3.) All life on Earth has a common origin. In other words, that in the distant past, there once existed an original life form and that this life form gave rise to all subsequent life forms. (4.) The process by which one species evolves into another involves random heritable genetic mutations (changes), some of which are more likely to spread and persist in a gene pool than others. Mutations that result in a survival advantage for organisms that possess them, are more likely to spread and persist than mutations that do not result in a survival advantage and/or that result in a survival disadvantage.

"Only a few mutations have been scientifically observed that are arguably beneficial. It is well known that mutations produce inferior offspring."
-from the same source

That's funny.I guess they never heard about these.In fact, they must not be very aware of modern medical and bilogical sciences in general.

Next Mistake:A revisiting of the first fallacious statement by citing John Ashton's book, In Six Days.

see above
50 "scientists" might believe it but that doesn't necesarily make it so.

"....The most telling argument for me in rejecting evolution, however, is the meaningless and lack of value it signifies. If evolution occurred, then my existence is not a special event in the Creator's plan. Yet, the Bible says I am special; I was created for a purpose."-a cute exert from the book that speaks volumes

It would be nice to believe that we are special,but then,it would be nice if money grew on trees.

Next Mistake:Behe of all people?Is this a reference or a joke?

"Michael Behe's excellent book, Darwin's Black Box. This outlines the irreducible complexity argument for Creation that is far better butressed by actual science than is evolution."

Odd that Behe has never published a single technical paper for peer review....and as far as his book goes, well, Behe offers no general laws, models, or explanations for how design happens, no testable predictions, and no possible way to falsify his hybrid evolution/ID hypothesis. He is simply claiming that design is a fact that is easily detectable in biochemical systems.For a more thorough trashing of Mr. Behe,look here.

Next:This is too obvious...

"I find that many Creationists are better versed on the science and the data relating to origins than most all evolutionists. "

In my experience, they know no more about evolution than "a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company."(Douglas Adams always puts things so nicely..: ) )My experience,and yours, might not be indicative of the whole though.What's your point with this?

All in all, this post did not address the original question,which was (to paraphrase) Why is it that,when discussing anything even vaguely related to evolution,Creationists feel the need to spout their psuedo-science?

I'm sorry, but there is a science which studies this kind of thing, and it is called economics. You are contradicting centuries of accummulated scientific knowledge of economics. You are treading lightly where giants have exercised utmost care.

The consumer loses because competition based on cost requires the elimination of additional value in the supply chain. Quality, customer service, guarantees, product returns, post-sales service, what-have-you: it all is eliminated when the lowest price guarantee becomes the requirement for survival.

If the consumer can't correctly judge the value of different choices in the market, and goes for the "cheapest" (but seriously devalued) product, then he wholly deserves it when he gets fucked. Market economies don't just make demands of producers and laborers; they also make demands of consumers.

What good is a supercomputer in your garage if you do not use it to maximize garage-holder value? If you provide supercomputer habitat for the progeny and supercomputer embodiment of the JavaScript AI Mind, which has also been coded in Forth as Mind.Forth Robot AI, then your home-sweet-home garage will be a major waystation on the road to the Technological Singularity.

Just as the Shroedinger Equations for atomic bombs and such were developed seventy-five years ago when Erwin Schroedinger spent his 1926 Christmas vacation holed up in the Swiss Alps and working out a few mathematical formulas that shook the world, nowadays over the 2001 Yuletide there have been the first stirrings of True AI in the JavaScript AI Mind, which any garage tinkerer may adapt for either 'pert near all-powerful supercomputer AI or a killer-app if not killer robot.

Following in the footsteps of the giants who created Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA, be the first on your block to create the supercomputer-based Garage-Mind.

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times(free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA , Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd [dibona.com] on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 [mailto] was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article [nytimes.com] on the New York Times [nytimes.com] (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT [mit.edu], UCLA [ucla.edu], Purdue [purdue.edu], Duke [duke.edu], UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie [google.com], an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Collated by Drs. David B. Busch and James R. Starling, Madison, Wis.

The surgical management of two patients presenting with incarcerated, apparently self-inserted foreign bodies is reported. The large volume of prior literature on this subject is reviewed, with tabulation of 182 previous cases by type and number of objects recovered and with a discussion of patients' age distribution, history, complications and prognosis.

Table I Previously reported recovered foreign bodies:

[ed. note: list has been appended to reflect recently found documentation.]

Object Number Recovered

Glass or ceramic
Bottle or jar 31
Bottle with attached rope 1
Glass or cup12
Light bulb 7
Tube 6
Food
Apple 1
Banana 2
Carrot 4
Cucumber 3
Onion 2
Parsnip 1
Plantain (with condom) 1
Potato 1
Salami 1
Turnip 1
Zucchini 2
Wooden
Ax handle 1
Stick or broom handle 10
Miscellaneous or unspecified 3
Sexual Device
Vibrator23*
Dildo 15
Kitchen device
Dull knife 1
Ice pick 1
Knife sharpener 1
Mortar pestle2
Spatula (plastic) 1
Spoon 1
Tin cup 1
Miscellaneous tools
Candle 1
Curling Iron 1
Flashlight 3
Iron rod 1
Pen 2
Rubber tube 1
Screwdriver 1
Toothbrush 1
Wire spring 1
Inflated device
Balloon 1
Balloon attached to cylinder 1
Condom 1
Ball
Baseball 2
Tennis ball 1
Pool cue ball1
Miscellaneous containers
Baby powder can 1
Candle box 1
Shampoo Bottle 1
Snuff box 1
Miscellaneous
Bottle cap **1
Cattle horn 3
Chain (gold) 1
Frozen pig's tail 1
'Kangaroo tumor' # 1
Hair Mousse Cap 1
Plastic rod 1
Stone 2
Toothbrush holder 1
Toothbrush package 1
Whip handle2*
Collections (one case of each)
2 Glass tubes
72 1/2 Jeweler's saw
Oil can with potato stopper
Piece of wood, peanut
Umbrella handle and enema tubing
2 Glasses
Phosphorus match ends (homicide)
402 Stones
Toolbox ##
2 Bars soap
Beer glass and preserving pot
Lemon and cold cream jar
2 Apples
Spectacles, suitcase key, tobacco pouch, and magazine
total of 14 collections, with approximately 500 objects

• * number may be larger (text unclear)
  ** cannot exclude ingestion
  # unique case of pedunculated perianal skin tumor habitually
  inserted into rectum
  ## inside a convict; contained saws and other items usable
  in escape attempts.

CASE REPORTS

Case 1. A 39-year-old married white male lawyer presented with a self- inserted perfume bottle in his rectum that he was unable to remove using various objects, including a back scratcher. He had inserted this bottle on previous occasions. Edema of the rectum and sigmoid colon precluded the successful manual removal of the object in the emergency room. A pelvic x-ray film showed the object to be lodged 12 cm proximal to the dentate line. The 3 by 17 cm object, 'Impulse Body Spray,' was removed manually after a spinal anesthetic. The patient was discharged on the second postoperative day. He refused psychologic counseling.

Case 2. A 39-year-old white male was admitted to the University Hospital psychiatric service for evaluation of a 2-week history of bloody diarrhea and auditory hallucinations. Rectal examination revealed a foreign body approximately 3 cm above the anal verge. An x- ray film showed that it was 20 cm in length. The object could not be removed by manual or endoscopic means. The patient consented to extraction of the dildo under general anesthetic. Biopsy specimens of the hemorrhagic rectal mucosa were performed and were negative on Ziehl-Neelson stains for mycobacterial or cryptosporidium infection. The patient was discharged without complications the following day.

• Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke
• Interview with Marvin Minsky by David Stork (editor of the book)
• Speech recognition and understanding, by Ray Kurzweil
• Computer ethics (When HAL Kills, Who's to blame?), by Daniel C. Dennet
• Chapters on text-to-speech, computer-chess, supercomputer-design, reliable computing an fault-tolerance, use of language, computer 'eyes', speechreading, emotions and computing, etc...

If you want a different view, read Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. He's a smart guy, whos won several prestigious awards. The National Medal of Technology and The Lemelson-MIT prize.

to add further (absolute) proof of prof. haldeman's place of employment: the search result for his name in the course catalog. confirmed with the paper version. you'll notice that none of these are spring classes, so maybe he teaches somewhere else in the spring? or maybe thats the time for his cross country bicycle rides?

to add further (absolute) proof of prof. haldeman's place of employment: the search result for his name in the course catalog. confirmed with the paper version. you'll notice that none of these are spring classes, so maybe he teaches somewhere else in the spring? or maybe thats the time for his cross country bicycle rides?

Personally, I think most geeks are ignorant of what's really going on, legally, and instead rely on second hand or /. style information. Why? We'll, it's easier to be 'cynical chic' than an activist (and I mean not just sending emails around and signing petitions).

The cases are out there, you can read them for free and learn how to think like a lawyer. "They" aren't willing to learn to communicate with us but we're smart enough to learn how to communicate with them.

Think of law as code for our government. Just like real code, there are loopholes, exceptions, vague error handling, etc. But if you're a hacker, you'll find the loopholes, the exceptions, the tools you need to 'write' a good argument and if you're involved you can start educating lawyers and effect the 'code' being written & 'checked in' -right now-! :)

limor (ladyada@mit)

Considering that these modifications cost between US$10m and US$20m per suit above the initial cost of the suit itself (which is pretty amazing because the suits are $12m! - maybe one of these prices is off), you'd think that for this kind of money, you could pressurize your rec room. This will make games like twister much easier to play.

At one time, Alexey Pajitnov, one of the inventors of Tetris, thought he owned the rights to all video games based on falling blocks. The consensus now seems to be that he and the company he started with Henk Rogers owns only the word "TETRIS". Better use Vadim Gerasimov (the guy who wrote the first PC version of Tetris) instead.

At one time, Alexey Pajitnov, one of the inventors of Tetris, thought he owned the rights to all video games based on falling blocks. The consensus now seems to be that he and the company he started with Henk Rogers owns only the word "TETRIS". Better use Vadim Gerasimov (the guy who wrote the first PC version of Tetris) instead.

I don't even know where to begin how to point out how collosally stupid this idea is.

You shouldn't have.

1) Good luck using ANY heads-up display during spacewalk. The glare from Earth alone is enough to blind most astronauts.

You do know that their helmets are already shielded against glare don't you?

2) What idiot decided that Joe Astronaut needs a power-consuming VGA display? You want fries with that? For cryin out loud, you're life depends on battery power while you're untethered. Gee, lets make a suit that needlessly takes power away from those annoying non-essential features like pumps for HEAT and OXYGEN

You did read the article or the website and notice that it's a *microdisplay*. Hardly a vast consumer of power.

3) Does it _really_ take a RISC processor to tell you how much air you have left, how much power you have left, and other critical information? Nope. This smacks of buzzword bingo, and stinks of collosal stupidity perhaps even moreso than items #1 and #2.

Pherhaps they chose an already space rated processor? Or one that's more compatible with their other hardware? Or compatible with the embedded system they'll need? (And RISC does not always mean 'fast, complex, powerful'.)

4) If you look at the HUD mock-up they cleverly whipped up in MS Paint, you'll notice that their display is predominantly taken up with a window showing "mission objectives". If you need to be reminded of what the hell you're doing up there, you don't belong in the suit in the first place!! Jesus!

What takes up most of the display space depends on the mode selected. In fact the map shown here will be quite useful in orienting yourself in such a complex place as the exterior of the ISS.

5) A 1GB Microdrive. Well, thats lovely. Now what are you going to do with it...It eats more power than static DRAM, and the microdrive would have to be protected from radiation exposure. A 1GB Microdrive also infers an IDE controller, which infers even more onboard power-consuming crap succepible to radiation and power loss. Oh, and not to mention, the platter will get demagnetized within seconds.

The SDRAM and it's controls will have to protected against radiation exposure as well. Just out of curiosity, what do you think will demagnetize the platters? Existing hard drives in space don't seem to have that problem.

5) You want OTHER crew members both onboard and on the ground to monitor your bio stats while you're working. There are plenty of stories of astronauts who having gone on spacewalks, freak out and start drifting off.

A second '5)' you are at least consistent... So what's wrong with being able to check your own bio stats? I'm also curious as the source of your 'many stories' as the space community has never heard of any such thing being common or usual.

it's not obvious from the diagram if they want to do that, and I'm too tired to read all the thing, but to me this seems like a bad idea.

If it's car pranks you're into, perhaps this hack would impress you more?

They probably mean building 20, an asbestos-tiled "temporary" structure built in 1943 during World War II that went on to be a vital place of innovation for 57 years. It was finally decomissioned and destroyed this year, but not before MIT pranksters made one last comment: sticking an MIT "discard property" tag on its side, a tag that indicates MIT has dropped it from inventory and the item can be removed. (Usually done for smaller pieces of MIT equipment, of course.)

Information on building 20:
http://tmrc.mit.edu/bldg20.html

Personally, I consider The Cathedral of Our Lady of the All-Night Tool to be the best MIT hack ever. It didn't get the publicity of the police car on the dome, but the attention to detail was just amazing.