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kcsduke writes "Following a recent speech at MIT on Movies in the Digital Age (streaming audio available), MPAA front man Jack Valenti sat down for a revealing interview with The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. In this entertaining read, Keith J. Winstein grills Valenti on fair use and the right to play DVDs under GNU/Linux. My favorite part is when Winstein shows a dumbfounded Valenti a six-line DVD descrambler he's designed, to which Valenti responds with language inappropriate for the Slashdot homepage. Throughout the interview, Valenti demonstrates his ignorance and misunderstanding of fair use."

kcsduke writes "Following a recent speech at MIT on Movies in the Digital Age (streaming audio available), MPAA front man Jack Valenti sat down for a revealing interview with The Tech, MIT's student newspaper. In this entertaining read, Keith J. Winstein grills Valenti on fair use and the right to play DVDs under GNU/Linux. My favorite part is when Winstein shows a dumbfounded Valenti a six-line DVD descrambler he's designed, to which Valenti responds with language inappropriate for the Slashdot homepage. Throughout the interview, Valenti demonstrates his ignorance and misunderstanding of fair use."

Joanne Pransky's tongue is firmly in her cheek a fair amount of the time as she answers your questions, but much of what she says is thought-provoking, especially in light of speculations like Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation essays about the inevitable spread of robotic devices in our society.

Human Nature - by skywalker107

Do you think we will ever be able to program robots to understand and possibly copy human nature?

Joanne:

Assuming that you mean human nature as a human conditioning (personality) that has been experienced in human existence, I believe that robots will be comprised of both software and hardware and that the combination of their programs and various sensors will help them to learn, understand, and communicate with humans in a human's environment. In my eyes, it won't be as simple as just downloading a particular 'understanding' program - it will be unique to the combination of the overall structure and systems each robot will have combined with its perceptions and interactions with its surroundings (e.g., a domestic robot will understand humans more than a mining robot will, and a domestic robot in a home with many people of different ages, genders, etc., will understand humans more than a robot who lives with a sole individual). I think robots will be able to communicate with us verbally and to understand what we are saying, but not understand in terms of empathy, sympathy, or in a visceral way. In terms of copying human nature, I foresee an emulation of human nature in order to respond, interact, and work with other humans, and though some humans may perceive a future robo-personality as a 'copy', to me it will always be a robotic nature, though possibly housed in a very human-like shell.

Re: Human Nature - by jbrader

To which I would like to add: do you think there is any reason to try to copy human nature? I can see the point in having machines understand humans as it could make communicating with robots and computers easier. But why try to make an artificial human? It seems as though we have more than enough of the real thing already.

Joanne:

Depending upon how you define artificial, most of us humans are already physically 'artificial' in that we have in some way technologically augmented our organic selves - lasik, pacemakers, structural implants, cochlea implants, neural prostheses, electroactive polymer actuators, and in the next few months, for a few paralyzed individuals, a neural interface implant as part of a U.S. clinical study which will provide them with a permanent interface to a computer.

It is this ongoing quest for humans bettering themselves and wanting to live longer and more qualitatively, that an artificial human will at some point result, whether 'artificial' will be defined as more than 50% of a human's biological body parts merging with technology or whether 'artificial' is an automonous robotic being that looks like a human in order to best serve and work with humans in an environment that is set up for humans. In the latter case, I believe 'copying human nature' will be more of an indirect consequence (a result of an effective response system in sophisticated, higher performing, higher communications robots), rather than as a direct attempt.

Aren't you just another shameless tech self-publicizing... - by Sanity

I spent a while looking through the "publications" section of your website to seek out the "hard academic underpinnings" that Roblimo mentioned, but all I could find there were a selection of puff-piece articles, vaguely gushing about a brave new robotic future (without actually saying anything that Asmov didn't cover years ago, but he did it with infinitely more elegance and forsight). Which brings me to my question: Do you do any scientifically valuable research? I ask because you seem like just another shamelessly self-publicising cyber-pundit, much like the UK's Kevin Warwick [kevinwarwick.org.uk] (who, famously claimed to be the world's first cyborg after implanting a dog-tracking chip in his arm).

Joanne:

I am not a scientist nor an engineer, and therefore my goal has never been to do scientific research. My goal, by humorously proclaiming myself as the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist (and the real Susan Calvin) 18 years ago, was and still is, to educate the public, that group of people that buy the National Enquirer, watch American Idol, and read puff-piece articles. My objective is to make them aware of robotics, a technology that will have more of an impact on their lives than the automobile, PC, and the internet, by 'translating' the technology developed by roboticists so that the public can understand its benefits as opposed to fearing them, something that I think is more common in the U.S. due to how robots have been perceived over the years via the media and Hollywood. Thus, I was immediately interested in the practical, not theoretical applications of robotics, and informing the masses about them.

Here's more detail:

In the 80s, (after graduating from Tufts University in child development - mostly cognitive development, which by the way, Marvin Minsky's book, Society of Mind is based on), I sold computers to small businesses - doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. At the time, this was not an easy task as business operations were manual and few were readily willing to automate them. For those that did, however, the burden usually fell on the secretary, who was typically female, whether she liked it or not. Expectations were way off - the business owners thought the computer and all the information would be up and running in no time, and the secretaries feared they'd lose their jobs to their computers. When personal computers became a commodity in the late 80s, executives bought them - and often they just sat on their desks, never used.

If people can't program their VCRs, nevermind use their PCs, I thought, how will we as a society be ready for a robot in our home to do our dishes? It was then, in 1986, that I proclaimed myself as the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist, and brought Susan Calvin to life. There was no formal course of study for robopsychology. Therefore, I became the first in my field and gave myself credentials (and actually received an official U.S. Trademark later on). I was pioneering unchartered territory.

Being the World's First Robotic Psychiatrist was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that one day, like pets, when robots co-existed with humans, they may actually develop problems similar to humans. It was a way for me to get the public to think about the future of technology while increasing their current awareness. If a non-engineering 5 ft. tall woman understands the technology, subliminally, so will the rest of the public. (And this is another topic altogether, but I believe females will be the primary purchasers of domestic and household robots, yes, for all types of purposes). Robotic Psychiatry during my lifetime, I believed, would not be to program robots, but to ready the humans (though I always hoped that there would be patients that, like Susan Calvin, I could communicate verbally with and observe their behaviors within their environments). The best way to make the U.S. masses aware is through the medium of television. For years, various people - Joan Embery, Jack Hanna, et al - have been bringing rare animals onto The Tonight Show and the Letterman Show. Millions of people got to see rare monkeys peeing and koalas clinging. It was funny, entertaining yet educational. That's exactly what I wanted to do with robots, especially considering most people had never seen one.

While researching robotic developments that might be of interest to the general public, I decided to engross myself completely in the robotics industry while at the same time learn about robots in science fiction. I met Asimov in 1989 at a World Science Fiction Convention and continued correspondence until he was too sick to do so any longer. He dubbed me the 'Real Susan Calvin' (in writing).

In 1991, I began working for an industrial robot manufacturer. I attended the company's programming and maintenance classes and wrote technical manuals and eventually ended up where I wanted to, in sales and marketing. During the ten years I worked for Sankyo Robotics, I must have visited hundreds of manufacturing plants. You name it and I saw it made: cars, golf balls, jelly beans, eyeglasses, IUDs, robots (in Japan), french fries, and the list goes on. However, in each case, I was there to sell SCARA robots - SCARA, the acronym for a type of robot arm developed in Japan in the 70s that stood for selective compliance assembly robot arm.

Yup, my job was to go into factories and try to justify why they should invest in SCARAs (being from the northeast, it sounded more like Scare Har to me. How did we allow this acronym to become nomenclature in the U.S.??). Regardless if the manufacturing engineering manager was knowledgeable on robotics and could easily justify automating his process, if the executive(s) in charge of the money were not accepting of robotics, even if it saved them $, there was often great resistance at the corporate level. No amount of scientific evidence would change their mind to their opposition to technology. (Though it was fun to get them to try, and one year I succeeded in breaking company sales records.)

Also while at Sankyo in the early 90s, I ran a RoboCamp for kids in the summer in which kids not only built robot kits, but learned about industrial robots. Ten years later, I developed a curriculum for elementary school children called "Robots and Me", a program that fosters the robot/child interaction.

In 1996, I was asked by MCB University Press out of England, to be the U.S. Associate Editor for their journals, Service Robot, Industrial Robot (IR), Sensor Review, and Assembly Automation. My main role was (and still is with Industrial Robot Journal ) to research innovative robotic technologies here in the States, and work with the developers of the technology to get them to contribute a technical article on their findings. Industrial Robot Journal is in its 31st year, is an internationally respected journal, listed in all the important citation indexes and regularly used as the publisher of choice by the world's leading practicing industrial, service and healthcare roboticists. I've published many articles for Service Robot Journal and Industrial Robot Journal and one of them, an article on surgeons' view of RoboDoc, the first surgical robot in the world (which was manufactured by Sankyo Robotics, the robot company I worked for) won a literary award and was referenced by the International Federation of Robotics in their annual World Robotics publication two years in a row. I am now the U.S. Associate Editor for the world's first International Journal of Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery, being launched as you read this. Do I do the scientific research for the medical robotic companies? No, but I help them educate clinicians and surgeons worldwide by getting them published and reporting their innovative applications.

The above represent some of my efforts over the years.

Ongoing research and scientific developments in robotics are a necessity, but without real world exposure and acceptance, the inventions may not survive. Robotics cannot go forward without the simbionic relationship of all those things occurring. I hope, therefore, that you will see that I am not a scientist, but someone helping to bring others' robotic developments to the forefront.

About Human-Robot Relationships... - by MagiGraphX

I've watched too much Chobits perhaps, but is it right for a human to fall in love with an artificially intelligent (and emotional) robot? Just a thought of what could happen...

Joanne:

Is it wrong for a human to fall in love with a sentient robot? Humans have loved all sorts of machines for years - their cars, boats, computers, their Aibos....imagine how we'll feel when the computer-face of our dreams with its robotic body lives with us (I know, this is sounding like the movie Cherry 2000). Robots will offer companionship to those who are lonely, to those who feel more comfortable with a robot than with a human, and falling in love will be a natural phenomenon out of coexisting with them. But will they love us back in the same way? They may love us in terms of being loyal, subservient, trustworthy, etc., but I don't think they'll ever experience how we as humans define "falling in love". And how will this make us feel if a robot does not feel the same way as we do for it?

Falling in love is just part of the issue - will sexual relations between a human and a robot be right? To me, it's more right than those immoral relations that occur between a teacher and student, a parent and child, a priest and altar boy, and the list goes on. Sex with a robot could decrease the rampant spreading of Aids and other diseases and possibly even help to decrease violence.

A whole host of other issues may arise: Will it be legal to love a robot? Will a robot love us back out of being subservient while really loving another robot? Will humans who love other humans feel rejected when their partner falls in love with a robot? I think any of these situations may be feasible, though not in the near future.

Future of robots? - by Merkuri22

We've all seen the movies and read the books about machines in the future, and frankly most of these stories portray robots and AI as terrifying things that humanity will end up battling with for supremicy of the planet. Do you think there are any truths to these stories? Will robots compete with us in the future for jobs and/or living space? Do you ever see robots and humans living side by side as equals, or do you think they will always be subservient machines? Or, even, do you think robots will surpass us one day as the dominant force on the planet?

Joanne:

My view of robots is that they are tools used to assist humans to do the mundane, the dangerous, the difficult, etc. Put more simply, I also see a computer as a tool - attach mobility, manipulators, and sensors to my computer and you've got a robot that can do a lot more for me.

I don't see humans competing with robots for jobs - I see them doing the jobs we don't want or shouldn't be doing, and creating more jobs for humans. This is perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions - that "Robots take jobs away". Robots help companies stay competitive (by helping produce better quality products at a lower cost, and allowing companies to meet the changing demands of customers); thus, robots help save jobs that otherwise may have been lost, and help create new jobs (although not always the same type of job). Perhaps if there were more robotic automation in place, there would have been less jobs going offshore...

As a side note: The Wall Street Journal recently (Friday, April 2) cited some Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predictions back in 1988 and looked at the results through 2000...."Of 20 occupations that the BLS predicted in 1988 would suffer the greatest losses between 1988 and 2000, half actually grew. The agency predicted that the number of assemblers in electrical and electronic factories would drop 173,000, a 44% decrease. Twelve years later, there were 45,000 more, an 11% increase. Neither outsourcing nor robots made as much of a dent as the BLS expected."

Source: Robotic Industries Association

Living space - I don't see us competing there, either. In some of Asimov's stories, robots were actually banned from earth. They didn't need what we humans need to survive and they did their work on other planets.

Robots will be in different sizes and shapes for a multitude of tasks and we've certainly found space for all our appliances, computers and TVs, and thus we will welcome our robotic assistants. Having more robotic assistants that can allow us to stay in the convenience of our home longer may decrease the need for as many buildings such as day care facilities, nursing homes, assisted living care facilities and hospitals, particularly as the worldwide aging population continues to rapidly increase.

I see robots living and working with us side by side, but not necessarily as 'equals'. They are designed to be better than humans at some things (much like computers), but I don't see them as 'equals' either, i.e., having the same needs as humans do. Robots may surpass our own abilities, but having a robot uprise where robots want to dominate the planet, I don't buy it.

Interesting books on the subject by Dr. Hans Moravec, "Mind Children" and "Robot: Mere Machine to Transcedent Mind."

What form will A.I. take? - by mykepredko

A bit of a navel gazing question for you; what form do you think A.I. will take when somebody finally comes up with a program that is accepted as intelligent?

My own feeling is that the first A.I. program will simulate a simple life form (like a worm) instead of a highly complex and communicative form like humans. This goes against what Dr. Minsky believes A.I. should be, but I can't honestly believe that our first interaction with an intelligent mechanism would with something with similar capabilities to ourselves, but with something with the same mental capabilities and capacities as a bug. The important aspects of Aritficial Intelligence will be making sense of its environments and learning from experience. To demonstrate that the Intelligence is learning is observing and testing the Intelligence's application of this knowledge. What are your thoughts?

Joanne:

The definition of artificial intelligence is still an age old debate (right up there with what is a robot), and there are plenty of artificially intelligent forms today (that are accepted as intelligent) being used in both software (AI agents, computer games, etc.) and in robotics. ASCI Purple, built by IBM, is supposedly the world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of carrying out 100 trillion operations per second, which some believe could be approaching the processing power of the human brain. Two famous roboticists share your view of a simple life form (bugs/insects) with their behavior based robotics: Dr. Rodney Brooks who pioneered Subsumption Architecture, which provides an incremental method for building robot control systems linking perception to action; and Dr. Mark Tilden with his processorless, autonomous, intelligent BEAM (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics) Robotics which uses simple analog circuits. (Also, check out his latest humanoid, RoboSapien. It will be a HUGE success.) I agree that the important aspects of artificial intelligence are making sense of its environment and able to learn from its experiences.

My question... - by hookedup

Dr. Joanne Pransky, do you see Asimov's 3 laws of robotics playing a role in our relationship with robots in the future? Since most of our technological advances seem to come from developing warfare systems, will the 3 laws be left by the wayside, or will it become an integral part of robotics in the years to come.

Joanne:

I think safety for humans has and will continue to be a critical part of robotics, but I don't think Asimov's three laws, though brilliant as they are (here goes my entire career as Susan Calvin), will suffice exactly as is as a postulate for all robots.

You brought up a good point - that of warfare systems, something robots are well suited for. As a matter of fact, just last week CNN reported what a great moment for it was for iRobot Corporation when they were told by the Pentagon that one of its PackBots was destroyed in action for the first time, meaning the life of a human may have been saved.

Though Packbots are used for battlefield reconnaisance, in the future, other robots may certainly be utilized in the front line of fire for destroying enemies (not that I'm a proponent of war nor killing humans (nor destroying robots for that matter), but certainly I'd rather see a robot hurt than any human). There are many situations in which we can envision security robots having to injure some humans to protect others and in each situation, a robot would have to make the best decision it can, as we humans must do at times, with its understanding of the information at hand.

For intelligent robots in the real world, the Three Laws as they stand now, will not work effectively, although I believe there will be some other similar safeguards that they will need to adhere to.

Human Features of Robots / Bonding with robots - by jhouserizer

Over the years, there has been a fair amount of debate about whether robots should take on human forms, especially with regards to having detailed life-like faces. Some robot designers, wary of this debate, have settled on giving their creations near human-like faces [theconnection.org].

My question is in relation to this topic. Do you think that people (and "sentient robots" that may exist some day) will be be overall better served if robots are readily distinguishable from humans? How strongly will this affect our "bonding" with robots and their bonding with us? Dogs for instance look quite different from humans, but many a family-pet seems to believe itself to be a real part of the family, and sometimes even seem to think themselves to be human. How will this affect the way we deal with "death" of a robot?

Joanne:

I think it depends on both the task at hand, and who the user is, that will determine if humans will be better served by robots that are readily distinguishable from humans. My Roomba is a robot that is perfectly well-designed for vacuuming so in this case the answer is yes, I am glad that it is distinguishable. Personally, I am more concerned that a robot do its job well and less concerned about what it looks like.

However, I still think that humans in general will relate and bond more easily to anthropomorphic robotic companions. I think it will be easier for most to accept and communicate with robots that look like themselves. Even when we communicate with other humans, we are conditioned to look into someones eyes to gauge how we're doing in the conversation. When someone's wearing sunglasses, it's harder to determine how they're responding to us. I think we're going to want to look into the eyes of a robot to know it's listening to us and we may want it to smile, frown, etc., much like a human face.

But exactly like a human, as you say indistinguishable, is an excellent question. The Uncanny Valley theory, described by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, addresses just this issue. Mori found that people tend to empathize more with robots that are more humanlike, but if the robot becomes too human at a certain point, the robot becomes repulsive to the human. So what's the answer - a robot that is slightly, but not too indistinguishable?

People will bond with their robots regardless of how distinguishable or indistinguishable they physically are, and yes, I do believe that like our pets, we will mourn their "death." I've always believed that our initial relationships with them will be similar to our relationships with pets. That means that some humans will: buy them matching clothes and jewelry; take pictures of them on Santa's lap; pay for an extra seat on the airplane to have them fly with them; make sure that their wills provide for their maintenance contracts and all the latest upgrades when they outlive them; fight over who gets to keep them in a divorce suit; and if owners feel a robot is depressed, they will even take them to a robotic psychiatrist for a weekly family encounter session. Humorous or not, it will no doubt be interesting

Artificial intelligence without embodiment? - by macshune

As an undergraduate philosophy student interested in the theoretical implications of A.I., could you tell me what your thoughts are on the validity of the assumption that artificial intelligence is possible separate from the notion of embodiment? I think the lack of consideration given embodiment is one reason why artificial intelligence researchers have come up empty-handed so far in their quest to synthesize a conscious, self-reflective entity. To ask the question more succinctly, do you think a mind needs a body and possibly and environment to interact with in order to be conscious, or can a mind exist and know itself independent of an external context?

Joanne:

I don't think that the quest of AI researchers has been to synthesize a conscious, self-reflective entity as it has been to emulate the human thought and reasoning process. As part of this, many researchers believe that for an entity to have artificial intelligence, it must have an understanding of and be able to interact with its environment. Some believe it is the form of an embodied robot, but not necessarily - as long as the machine that simulates human intelligence is receiving information from and responding to its surroundings (e.g., an intelligent computer).

I personally believe that nothing artificial will be able to be truly conscious in the same way a human is; however, there could be some kind of machine consciousness that has similarities to human consciousness, and it could be difficult to dilineate the difference. What if, however, we are able to download a human's brain into a machine that had no embodiment. Ten years later, after continuing to receive stimulus from its surrounding and responding to it, would this machine be considered conscious?

Roborights? - by jrpascucci

Do you believe there will come a time that we will have a 'robot rights' movement? Will it be more credible than most of the 'animal rights' movement, or just a good-hearted (but weak-minded) anthropomorphization of our silicon companion machines?

Someone (Dennis Miller?) once said, animals can have rights as soon as they accept responsibilities. Robots obviously can be given responsibilities (your job is to fit tab A into slot B), but ethically, should they get rights? As soon as someone programs a robot to pass the turing test, and then immediately ask for his rights? Or is it something deeper?

Beyond some kind of second-class entity status, will robots become citizens? Do robots have a god-given right (recall, our rights are considered by the Declaration of Independence to be given us either by 'Nature's God' or by their 'Creator') to freedom of expression, association, religion? The right to bear arms? Do robots have a 'right to work'? "One Robot, One Vote"? Will Robots have to file tax returns? Will there be Robot Courts? Robot Lawyers? Robot Jail? Robot Schools? Robotic Members elected to the Legislature? Some day, will we have a Robot President? Is a Robot built in Japan eligible to be president? What if the robot was shipped from Japan as parts with software, and put together here, does that count?

If you start building a robot, and decide to stop, will that be considered to be a robaboration? Or the work of their 'creator'? And if, after building, you switch it on and then decide you don't like it that much, and power it off again and harvest the parts, is that robomurder and disrobomemberment?

Joanne:

I suppose anything is possible, and perhaps I am blinded by the hopes of an optimistic future long after I am dead, but I just can't see the motivation for robots to do a lot of the things you're describing. I see them as extraordinary mechanisms able to physically and mentally perform many tasks/jobs,and though I see them having behaviors and challenges similar to humans from dealing with humans in a human world, I just don't see them with the innate human emotions that drive a lot of the above `rights' such as the desire for greed, power, freedom, control, etc. I see robots as almost the future perfect child - we help to create them, they're like us and we're responsible for them, but yet they remain quite content serving us humans and implementing their tasks.

That's not to say that I don't think a robot would make a better politician (certainly can't be much worse than some of the human ones we have now) nor that certain robots wouldn't get certain responsibilities (police bots that carry guns), but a desire to vote? For what, so that they can vote against humans allowing robots to get destroyed in a robotic sporting event, against the very reason they were designed in the first place?

However, I do see robotic law as possibly the largest field of law (i.e., humans practicing robotic law). Whose responsible for a robot who 'breaks the law'? Is it the company who manufactured the domestic robot or the hacker who purchased it and had it harm someone in his family?

Regarding a robot rights movement - hopefully we will protect the integrity of our robots. Don't we as humans have a responsibility to use our robots properly and not to misuse or abuse them and shouldn't there be laws in place for those who don't? I suppose if we aren't responsible with our robots, then there could be the need for robots to protect their own interests.

where's the positronic brain? - by futuretaikonaut

In Asimov's robot novels, the assumption was that modern science had invented the positronic brain, which was thought to be capable of actual sentient thought, though most of the robots in the books did so on a very basic and childlike level. It was this that actually gave Dr. Calvin a job... seeing as how the brains had the capacity for original thought, even though it was mostly predictable. As it stands today, and into the foreseeable future, we have invented no such thing capable of acting with original thought. Our hardware has, instead, given the appearance of thought, as it is capacble of so many calculations per second that it appears to come up with things on its own. So, my question is, what use is a robot psychologist if every action that a robot can take is already predetermined by its programming? What new field is there to be discovered that is not already known? In the human mind, we are constantly learning new things about the brain, a mechanism we only barely understand, but what is there to derive from a machine we ourselves create?

Joanne:

I don't agree that every action that a robot can take is already predetermined by its programming - there are some highly sophisticated robots out there that are provided with a set of tools for navigating in their environment and the combinations of these systems are often unpredictable. (The autonomous robotic vehicles at the Darpa Grand Challenge are an example. Communicating real-time data between various systems such as correctional decision-making systems, perception sensor systems, navigational systems, and terrain modeling systems, and translating the results into the movement of a military vehicle or HMMWV is not predetermined.)

Yes, we are constantly learning new things about the brain and as humans and machines merge, who knows what fields it will bring? Could anyone have predicted the types of new fields, say in 1970, the computer industry would bring?

Asimov himself, a few years before his death and nearly 50 years after first writing about robopsychology (and after seeing the burgeoning field of robotics take reality) wrote at the end of the 80s, "Robotic intelligence may be so different from human intelligence that it will take a new discipline - "robopsychology" to deal with it. That is where Susan Calvin will come in. It is she and others like her who will deal with robots, where ordinary psychologists could not begin to do so. And this might turn out to be the most important aspect of robotics, for if we study in detail two entirely different kinds of intelligence, we may learn to understand intelligence in a much more general and fundamental way that is now possible. Specifically, we will learn more about human intelligence than may be possible to learn from human intelligence alone."

Interesting Read: The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Your favorite fictional robotic character - by Strange Ranger

What is your favorite robot/cyborg character in written or film fiction?

Why?

For instance, I'm happy to admit mine is Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. Most especially the earlier seasons. Reason: I'm not much of a "trekkie" but that character made me consider so many different possible aspects of AI and of being not-human. From trying to understand other humans' emotions to his contrast with 'The Borg' down to what it might be like to have an "internal chronometer". For totally different reasons I loved Douglas Adams 'Marvin the Depressed Robot' in HHGTTG.

Joanne:

I have a lot of favorite robot characters - RoboCop, Bicentennial Man, Johnny Number 5 in Short Circuit, and I'm not sure if it's my favorite or that for the past couple of years he's the one I've been thinking about most, but I'd have to say David Swinton in the movie AI. Perhaps it's my maternal, female side coming out, but my reaction to David was very strong. David 'imprinted' his love solely to his mother - unconditionally and forever, yet there were no requirements for her to do the same for her robot child when she decided to activate his code. Usually this is the opposite - we love our children unconditionally although it's not always the reverse. To have this unilateral condition of a one-way commitment on the part of a robot, I found especially disturbing.

nate writes "Convinced your favorite programming language provides unbeatable productivity? Convinced you and your friends are world-class programmers? If so, we're providing you the opportunity to prove it! We are pleased to announce the 7th ICFP Programming Contest to be held in conjunction with ICFP 2004. All programmers are invited to enter the contest, either individually or in teams; we especially encourage students to enter. You may use any programming language (or combination of languages) to show your skill." Read on below for the details.

"On Friday, 4 June at 12:00 Noon (EDT), we will publish a challenge task on the Web site and by e-mail to the contest mailing list. Teams will have 72 hours until Monday, 7 June 12:00 Noon (EDT) to implement a program to perform this task and submit it to the contest judges. We have designed the contest for direct, head-to-head comparison of language technology and programming skill. We have a range of prizes including cash awards and, of course, unlimited bragging rights for the winners.

Previous contests included: 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999 and 1998."

John Miles writes "It's been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods's pioneering computer game Adventure and its descendants are finally beginning to garner the critical recognition they deserve. At only 286 pages, Twisty Little Passages is a small, accessible book that addresses a deep and complex subject. The author's stated intention is to bring us the first book-length consideration of interactive fiction (IF) as a legitimate literary field, and he has certainly succeeded." Read on for the rest of Miles' review. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction author Nick Montfort pages 286 publisher The MIT Press rating 4 out of 5 grues agree: Montfort's one of them! reviewer John Miles ISBN 0262134365 summary The definitive survey of interactive fiction for the literati... and the rest of us

Eight chapters, arranged in roughly-chronological order, detail the lineage of interactive fiction from its origins in Delphic riddles to its newest and most intriguing forms.

Passion and precision Among Montfort's first statements is one that demonstrates a commitment to careful scholarship that recurs throughout the book: "Text adventure and interactive fiction do not mean exactly the same thing." Infocom's Deadline and Emily Short's Galatea are cited as examples of IF that are not "adventures" in the pop-fiction tradition of exotic settings and perilous situations. These titles, among others, demonstrate that IF isn't just a delivery vehicle for the stereotyped themes of juvenile fiction with which it's often associated. Montfort proceeds to explain why he found it necessary to write Twisty Little Passages:

To see why a solid treatment of (IF) needs to be written, one need only consider this selection from the single page that mentions IF in Ilana Snyder's Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (1996):

The precedent was Adventure, developed in the 1960s at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). The program was conceived of as an experimental game. A computerised version of role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure comprises a series of descriptions of fictional locations inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy The Lord of the Rings (1954), and set in the surrounding Californian mountains.

These three sentences state six specific things about Adventure - when, where, and why it was developed, that it is a computerized version of Dungeons and Dragons, that its fictional locations are inspired by Tolkien, and that it is set in California. At least four of these six statements are clearly false, and the remaining two are misleading. (pages 9-10)

Essentially, previous authors and critics writing about interactive fiction just didn't care. In Chapter 1, "The Pleasures of the Text Adventure," Montfort shows that he does. Here, and in the following chapter ("Riddles"), he suggests that the IF art form has a much deeper history than we might think:

... the combination of an explicit challenge and a verbal literary work has a clear precedent (:) the riddle. By presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does. (pages 3-4)

Recognizing that his audience is likely to include technical geeks as well as literary theorists, Montfort defines some lit-crit terms as they apply to interactive-fiction analysis. Towards the end of the first chapter, we're presented with terminology like "story," "narrative," and "plot," but the definitions Montfort offers could have been fleshed out without sending us to the library to brush up on our Russian formalism. The distinction between "diegetic" and "extradiegetic" exchanges (communication with the game world and the game engine, respectively) appears next, illustrated by Zork 's first few interactions with the user. "Metalepsis" comes next, defined as an intrusion or transgression between levels of story and narration -- sometimes unintentional, sometimes with fatal results. (Portions of Floyd's commentary in Planetfall are cited as an example of the former; the protagonist's robot-assisted suicide in Suspended exemplifies the latter). Happily, none of these intimidating-looking terms are prerequisites to an understanding of the book as a whole.

Naming the game Assuming the art of interactive fiction began with the riddle, what constitutes a work of IF today? After a brief excerpt from LookingGlass Technologies veteran Dan Schmidt's For A Change gives us an example of description, interaction and puzzle-solving, Montfort goes on to establish four requisite aspects of IF:

• A text-accepting, text-generating computer program;
• A potential narrative (a system that produces narrative during interaction);
• A simulation of an environment or world; and
• A structure of rules within which an outcome is sought, also known as a game.

Works which do not include each of these elements are deliberately excluded, among them "hypertext fiction," most graphical computer games, and numerous experimental titles. In this respect, Montfort perhaps misses an opportunity to reflect upon the true extent of IF's influence over the rest of the entertainment software world. With a reported 30,000 lines of text in Deus Ex 2 - more than any Infocom game ever boasted - I'd argue that the historical text-only criterion is becoming more questionable all the time.

The rise of the smart machines Much more than a theoretical treatise on IF, Twisty Little Passages is also the most complete chronicle of important IF titles, authors, and publishers assembled to date. Its middle four chapters focus largely on academic and commercial efforts at crafting and publishing interactive fiction. Chapter 3 begins with an introduction of the concept of generative literary machines ("ergodic literature"). Montfort cites the Turing machine-like nature of the I Ching , followed by a mention of Jonathan Swift's satirical machine from Gulliver's Travels, "made of equal parts of irony, sarcasm, and mockery, that would automatically write books on all the arts and sciences." Advancing to the modern era, we encounter Theodor Nelson's early hypertext experiments in 1970; the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books that appeared near the close of the decade; and the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon that introduced a generation to the idea of participative fiction and inspired more IF and computer-game authors than even the most dedicated scholar could count.

The mother of all computer games, in Montfort's view, was Spanish engineer Leonardo Quevedo's 1912 chess-playing robot. Devised to attack a particular endgame problem on a vertically-oriented chessboard, Quevedo's machine was unique in that it represented the first so-called "chess automaton" that operated by legitimate electromechanical means rather than by fraudulently-concealed midgets. A subsequent refinement of Quevedo's machine would later catch the eye of famed computer scientist and AI researcher Norbert Wiener, achieving recognition as the first genuine attempt at artificial intelligence.

Mechanical curiosities aside, no discussion of human-computer interaction would be complete without inviting Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966) to the party. As the first convincing conversation "bot", ELIZA accepted plain-English input from a human interlocutor, transforming it (albeit with no semantic understanding) into a sympathetic textual murmur geared to elicit further input:

Person: Men are all alike.
Computer: IN WHAT WAY?
Person: They're always bugging us about something or other.
Computer: CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE?
Person: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Computer: YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
Person: He says I'm depressed much of the time.
Computer: I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED. (page 82)

Even more impressive than ELIZA was fellow MIT researcher Terry Winograd's SHRDLU, the first computer program capable of modelling, rendering, and allowing a human to interact verbally with objects in a virtual world:

Person: WHAT DID THE RED CUBE SUPPORT BEFORE YOU STARTED TO CLEAN IT OFF?
Computer: THE GREEN PYRAMID.
Person: THERE WERE FIVE BLOCKS TO THE LEFT OF THE BOX THEN.
Computer: NO, ONLY FOUR OF THEM: THE RED CUBE, TWO LARGE GREEN CUBES, AND A LARGE RED BLOCK.
Person: PUT THE BLUE PYRAMID ON THE BLOCK IN THE BOX.
Computer: OK (does it)
Person: IS THERE ANYTHING WHICH IS BIGGER THAN EVERY PYRAMID BUT IS NOT AS WIDE AS THE THING THAT SUPPORTS IT?
Computer: YES, THE BLUE BLOCK. (page 84)

Prior to reading the transcript above in Montfort's book, I'd heard of SHRDLU only in passing. It deserves a lot more attention than it's received. SHRDLU was one hell of an impressive hack in 1970, and it wouldn't be trivial today, judging by the capabilities suggested. Like the incredulous audiences that must have attended the early chess robot demonstrations, I'd have been prying panels off Winograd's PDP-6 with a screwdriver, looking for midgets ex machina.

Worlds from Adventure to Zork After bestowing the title "the first work of interactive fiction" upon a deserving SHRDLU, Montfort summons the spiritual grandfather of them all: William Crowther's Adventure . Released in 1975 for the benefit of his five- and seven-year-old daughters and any interested lurkers on the nascent ARPANet, Adventure combined ELIZA and SHRDLU's human-interaction capabilities with a primitive fictional setting:

YOU ARE AT A COMPLEX JUNCTION. A LOW HANDS AND KNEES PASSAGE FROM THE NORTH JOINS A HIGHER CRAWL FROM THE EAST TO MAKE A WALKING PASSAGE GOING WEST. THERE IS ALSO A LARGE ROOM ABOVE. THE AIR IS DAMP HERE. (page 88)

Crowther is a contemporary of Zork co-author Dave Lebling, who, coincidentally, was a member of the same Dungeons and Dragons group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In one of Montfort's many personal communications with IF luminaries, Lebling says:

Eric Roberts . . . started running a D&D group a year or so before Adventure was written. Eric had his own ideas about how D&D should be done, emphasizing storytelling and de-emphasizing the mechanical aspects of the game such as die- rolling. He tried to create a Tolkien-inspired world that was fun and consistent with Middle Earth... I think one strong component that carried over into Zork was to try to keep the mechanical workings of the game as hidden as possible, which to me enhanced the fun and immersiveness of the experience. (page 86)

With such similar roots, it's no surprise that Zork and Adventure play like long-lost brothers. In Chapter 4, Montfort details the evolution of Zork and other important IF titles that were created by multitalented college students with free mainframe access and seemingly-limitless time on their hands. Much has been written about Zork and its legendary Implementers, but seldom have we been given such a well-documented survey of the personalities and motivations behind the game's creation. One tongue-in-cheek room description from the mainframe version of Zork didn't make the cut for the commercial releases:

Tomb of the Unknown Implementer
This is the Tomb of the Unknown Implementer. A hollow voice says: "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
In the north wall of the room is the Crypt of the Implementers. It is made of the finest marble, and apparently large enough for four headless corpses.
The crypt is closed.
There are four heads here, mounted securely on poles.
There is a large pile of empty Coke bottles here, evidently produced by the implementers during their long struggle to win totality.
There is a gigantic pile of line-printer output here. Although the paper once contained useful information, almost nothing can be distinguished now. (pages 102-103)

Zork accepted complex sentences with indirect-object phrases, offered a much-larger vocabulary than its predecessors, and broke significant new ground in multiplatform software development, predating UCSD Pascal as the first commercial application for virtual-machine technology. But it also advanced at least one purely-literary aspect of computer gaming by introducing its first complex interactive character: the wily Thief. One of Montfort's references offers an insightful Joseph Campbell-esque definition of "villain": "the symbolic representation of forces working to seemingly hinder, but actually promoting, the hero's or heroine's development." (pages 112-113) Since Adventure's dwarves and pirate are not representations of anything else ("parental figures or psychological drives"), their deeds are destructive without being truly "wicked." Zork's thief, on the other hand, serves as a foil for the player character's combat skills, as a reflection of the player's own rapacious treasure-lust, and, ultimately, as an unwitting assistant in the quest.

Zork's innovations over the state of the art established by Adventure are too numerous to count, although Montfort explicitly avoids the common mistake of canonizing Zork and Infocom games in general while giving short shrift to other important IF efforts. In Chapter 5, we learn what became of the Zork implementers in their post-MIT lives at Infocom.

Alas, poor Infocom. . . In Montfort's words, Infocom, which was founded June 22, 1979 by Lebling, Blank, Anderson, and seven other MIT alumni, "began work on the foundation of IF while the plot of ground that it was to be built upon had not been completely surveyed." Chapter 5's opening paragraph is revealing:

Adventure is considered the great original epic of interactive fiction. Infocom's works call for a grandiose comparison made on a slightly-different metaphorical ground. Whoever the "Shakespeare" playwright actually was - common or noble, working largely alone or in close collaboration with a theater company - Shakespeare wrote, remarkably, not just the greatest English-language play, by critical consensus, but almost all of the great English-language plays. Similarly, the interactive fiction creators at Infocom devised practically all of the best-loved IF works in the history of the form. (page 119)

Although Scott Adams (no relation to Dilbert's creator) and his company, Adventure International , were the first to sell IF commercially in 1978, Infocom was the most successful IF publisher of its era. The company reached US $10 million in sales in 1985 with over 100 employees on the payroll. A quoted excerpt from the New Zork Times , the company's newsletter, illustrates how Infocom's marketing focused on their games' puzzle-centric design:

Although our games are interactive fiction, they are more than just stories: they are also a series of puzzles. It is these puzzles that transform our text from an hour's worth of reading to many, many hours' worth of thinking. . . . The value of our games is that they will provide many hours of stimulating mental exercise. (page 120)

Montfort subsequently comments:

The company's ... belief in the centrality of problem solving should explain ... why Infocom did not focus on creating what might more easily be seen as artistic and literary works that favored exploration, communication with characters, or alternate plot progressions. Yet Infocom did make some progress along these lines, and advanced the state of the literary art by coupling the textually described worlds and situations with carefully crafted puzzles in ways that great riddlers might, in provocative and affecting ways. (page 120)

Of the thirty-five games that Infocom published before its US $7.5 million sale to Activision in 1986, their earlier releases receive some of the most detailed analyses in Twisty Little Passages. In addition to discussion of the Zork and Enchanter trilogies, Montfort offers us insights on the unconventional, revelation-driven structure of Deadline, the Reagan-era sociopolitical commentary found in Infidel , and the tragic end of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall:

As a character who is also a technological artifact, Floyd is more important than his immediate function in the IF world suggests. He is a figure for the sometimes emotional relationships that people have with computers, or that are mediated through computers. (page 150)

Many other games, from Trinity to A Mind Forever Voyaging and the Douglas Adams- assisted adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are discussed extensively in Chapters 5 and 6. Private communications between Montfort and Adams's collaborator at Infocom, Steve Meretzky, lend a glimpse of what it was like to work with the late, lamented author:

Adams's "world-class procrastination abilities," as Meretzky called them, did cause some problems for the ( Hitchhiker's Guide) project, which began in February 1984 and was slated (ambitiously) to be completed by the following Christmas. Meretzky said of Adams that "being a successful person with tons of interesting acquaintances, he had an extremely distracting life. Plus, he wasn't fond of the actual task of writing. He loved coming up with ideas, but hated wrestling them into a properly-formed work." (page 173)

Montfort's 35-page bibliography is a treasure trove in its own right, with online and printed references given equal weight. Academic grognards may question the long-term utility of online citations, but the omission of sources such as Briceno et al.'s comprehensive Down from the Top of its Game: The Story of Infocom would have been a serious shortcoming. Throughout the book, Montfort's goal of preserving and documenting the great IF works remains clear, with a scholarly ethos that's just as relevant to fans of today's games. He praises Infocom's relatively-lax copy protection schemes, compared to those used by other game publishers whose heavily-protected works may be lost to posterity:

If any examples of heavily-copy-protected computer games survive through another two decades for study and discussion, it will be thanks to the loose, widespread network of teenagers and college students who assiduously cracked these programs, allowing the crippled disks to run freely both on systems at the time and on compatible computers today. (page 159)

Activision, in particular, earns well-deserved props in the book for opening earlier Infocom works and encouraging independent development.

... and other commercial efforts Although Infocom's oeuvre receives the lion's share of attention in Twisty Little Passages, the book does not neglect the many other commercial IF publishing efforts on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 6 ("Different Visions Worldwide") opens with a quick drive-by tour of Roberta Williams's 1980 Mystery House , recognized as the first graphical adventure game. A number of IF book adaptations were undertaken in the early 1980s as well, among them The Hobbit from Melbourne House and the classics Fahrenheit 451, Rendezvous with Rama, and Nine Princes in Amber from Tellarium. Along with the aforementioned Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy released by Infocom in 1984, Montfort gives favorable attention to US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Mindwheel , published in the same year by Synapse Software.

Brief histories of British IF publishers Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls round out the chapter, along with an even-briefer mention of Legend Entertainment, written before Legend's shutdown in early 2004. The latter constitutes one of the few weak spots in Twisty Little Passages's coverage of the classics. Legend's integration of music, artwork, graphical navigation, and other interface enhancements in the Spellcasting 101 series went far beyond Infocom's efforts to modernize their own IF engines, and the company deserves more than a single paragraph.

At the end of Chapter 6, Montfort recounts the 2000 failure of former Infocom author Mike Berlyn's Cascade Mountain Publishing, one of the last commercial publishers of pure text-based IF. He proceeds to draw a sheet over the commercial market for interactive fiction in general, pronouncing it as dead as Graham Chapman's parrot:

A few individuals have since sought to sell their IF works, and the occasional company like Activision has re-released older works. The main market for interactive fiction today, however, is on eBay and other auction sites, where packaged disks from the 1980s are bought and sold by collectors and IF enthusiasts. Fortunately, the end of the interactive fiction market is not the end of the story for this form. (page 191)

I don't agree with this proclamation of commercial doom, which is a recurring theme in Twisty Little Passages. It's unreasonable to look at the failure of a single company which released two IF products in two years -- one of them a recycled effort from the mid-1980s -- and draw the conclusion that future IF games will only be offered for sale alongside Beanie Babies, assorted stolen laptops, and someone's spare kidney. Unlike modern PC and console games with multimillion-dollar budgets, a killer IF title can still be written by one guy or girl working the graveyard shift at home. Success is arguably a matter of recalibrating one's expectations -- and business model -- to match contemporary market conditions. (Did it ever make sense for Infocom to employ 100 people in some of the most expensive commercial real estate in Boston, working on a handful of all-text games that fit on 140KB floppies? Montfort stops short of considering this question, but in the post-Ion Storm era we live in, the answer should be pretty obvious.)

Fortunately, as the last two chapters reveal, a healthy independent IF community has sprung up to take the place of the commercial publishers who are no longer with us.

IF's independent authors: the once and future scene In April 1993, at the culmination of a long reverse-engineering effort by "a group of programmers called the InfoTaskForce" (page 202), Graham Nelson released an object-oriented programming language capable of creating story files for the Infocom Z-machine interpreter. Along with a commercially-available text-adventure authoring system known as TADS, Nelson's language, Inform, sparked an indy IF revolution.

The (growing) community of IF authors really began to demonstrate the vitality of the form in the 1990s, innovating in ways that early hackers and later game companies did not. Their IF works are usually even more widely available today than the most successful commercial software of the 1980s, since they are typically free for download and, thanks to the Internet, widely available. ... A relevant FAQ notes that ... there were five IF games in the 1996 Year-End Download Top 40, making these games some of the most popular non-commercial computer games in the world. (page 193)

As Montfort writes, Nelson also fired the first shot of that revolution:

Nelson's most famous piece of interactive fiction - and likely the most well-known IF work since the demise of Infocom - is the first fruit of Inform, the 1993 Curses . This large, complex, and difficult adventure is set in an English country home and in certain other spaces that are linked in fantastic ways to it. Nelson (2002) said he "consciously wrote it in an Infocom-esque spirit, aiming at the same epigrammatic style of wit." (page 203)

Ten years after the first release of Inform, hundreds of independent IF authors and fans congregate on Web boards and Usenet newsgroups to discuss new titles released using Inform, TADS, and a host of other IF platforms. In particular, the annual Interactive Fiction Competition, begun by the denizens of rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, celebrates its own tenth anniversary in 2004. Past Competitions have spawned groundbreaking titles like Adam Cadre's Photopia , released in 1998 and still much-discussed today, and Andrew Plotkin's unsettling Shade . These, and many other indy releases, are reviewed extensively in Chapter 7. It would have been good to see more pointers toward longstanding IF fan sites such as Eileen Mullin's XYZZYNews in this chapter, but for the most part, Montfort's latter two chapters do a great job of summarizing the state of interactive fiction's art and culture. His enthusiasm as an observer of the modern IF scene is infectious.

Two tentacles up I can wholeheartedly recommend Twisty Little Passages not only to IF fans and amateur historians, but to anyone serious about the foundations and culture of computer gaming. Infocom and Legend Entertainment auteur Steve Meretzky's back-cover blurb says it all: "(Twisty Little Passages) is a thoroughly-researched history of interactive fiction, as well as a brilliant analysis of the genre. Reading it makes me itch to fire up that old DEC-20 and start writing interactive fiction again!" As a fan of Meretzky's many IF works, I should be so lucky. As a fan of the IF art form as a whole, I'm indeed lucky to have run across Nick Montfort's excellent book.

You can purchase Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page

In anonymous reader writes "RMS will be moving his office to the new William H. Gates building at MIT's Stata Center starting today. This marks the end of MIT's use of building NE43, which housed the LCS and AI labs (now combined into CSAIL). On a strangely unrelated note, shortly after Harvard, in a laudable attempt to retain solidarity with the Open Source community, dedicated the Maxwell Dworkin building (named after Gates' and Ballmer's mothers respectively), Gates' credit card was hacked. After all, they did have his mother's maiden name... "

the.jedi writes "With the release of GTK+ 2.4, and Gnome 2.6 due out some time next week, it seems of some the Gnome developers are looking at how they'll be coding Gnome and the rest of the Linux desktop. Havoc Pennington of Planet Gnome has written a short blog pondering and analyzing the available options as coders move towards high-level languages like java and C#. He gives a good overview and assessment of technologies like mono, OO.org's UNO framework, as well as other ways of tying new languages to the existing code base. An extremely interesting read for desktop linux hackers everywhere." Update: 03/17 14:44 GMT by T : Speaking of the future of Gnome, aeneas writes with a list of Gnome 2.6 release parties around the world (linked from gnome.org/start/2.5).

Ben Crowell writes: "The economics of college textbooks is goofy, because the person who picks the book isn't the person who has to pay for it. Combined with the increasing consolidation of the publishing industry, this has blown the lid off of textbook prices over the last decade. But remember what the World-Wide Web was basically about before the Dot-Com Detour? It wasn't about marketing dog food, it was about democratizing publishing. Many textbook authors these days are using the internet to bypass the traditional publishing system, making their books available for free downloading. Although MIT's Open Courseware project gets most of the press, the movement started before that, and is going strong. In this article, I've reviewed five calculus textbooks that are either free as in speech or free as in beer." Read on for Crowell's take on each of the five books he's selected -- and pass the review on to any math teachers you know. (See each) author (See each) pages (See each) publisher (See each) rating (See each) reviewer Ben Crowell ISBN (n/a) summary (See each)

First-Year Calculus Notes author Paul Garrett pages 70 URL http://www.math.umn.edu/~garrett/calculus/ rating 7/10 summary Would make a good concise refresher.

The author provides this book in PDF format. As far as I can tell from the somewhat ambiguous notice on his web page, the book is intended to be licensed under the GPL copyleft license. That warms my heart as an open-source enthusiast, but it's slightly strange, for a couple of reasons. First, the GPL is a software license, and is less suitable as a copyleft license for books than the GFDL or a CC license. Also, the source code of the book isn't available (it appears to have been done in LaTeX), which I think makes it legally impossible under the GPL to redistribute the book, whereas the author's intent in GPL-ing it was presumably to make it freely distributable. Just as I was in the process of submitting this review to Slashdot, the author replied to an e-mail I'd sent him about this, and it sounds like he's interested in clearing up this issue, and really does want his book to be free as in speech.

This is a lively and very readable treatment of basic calculus. At 70 pages, it's a welcome antidote to the usual bloated textbooks, and the topics that are included match up pretty well with my own opinions of what it's really vital for a student to know after taking a calculus course. The tone is conversational without being condescending or cutesy, and the author almost always explains why he's introducing something, rather than just throwing it at the reader. (An unfortunate exception is the opening section on inequalities.) There is no attempt at rigor whatsoever, which I consider to be a feature, not a bug. Applications are discussed, although not enough for my taste (and I have to suppress my gag reflex every time I see a calculus book that insists on presenting the acceleration of gravity in non-metric units).

Although the book comes with some of the paraphernalia of a complete college textbook, such as homework problems, it's probably not the kind of book that another professor could just adopt as a stand-alone text, nor would I recommend it for someone learning calculus on her own for the first time. The title suggests that the author had in mind more of a memory aid, or a way to keep students from having to scribble madly in their notebooks for an hour and a half at a stretch. It lacks an index and illustrations, and there are some misfeatures in terms of organization: the chapters aren't numbered, and the homework problems are scattered around where they're hard to find. In some cases it sounds as though the first time a word or concept is used, he's assuming the reader has already heard it defined. I would, however, recommend this book to someone who needs to refresh her memory of calculus, and doesn't want to spend hours wading through epsilons and deltas to get to the highlights. It might also be a good option for the student who is completely broke, and needs a reference to use in place of an officially required text that carries an exploitative price tag. Although there are other calculus textbooks that can be downloaded without paying, this is the only one I'm aware of that follows the typical order of topics, and is also (AFAICT) copylefted, so that we can be assured it needn't evaporate if the author signs a publishing contract, or loses interest in maintaining his web site.

Difference Equations to Differential Equations: An Introduction to Calculus author Dan Sloughter pages 600 URL http://math.furman.edu/~dcs/book/ rating 6/10 summary Takes too long to get there.

Like Garrett's text, this one appears to have been done in LaTeX, is licensed under the GPL, and appears to suffer from the same legal problems, because it's not available in source form.

The book is well written, and seems to have been well designed for practical classroom use. The approach is visual and intuitive, and there are lots and lots of graphs and numerical calculations. I felt, however, that it took a long time to get going, and the idiosyncratic selection of topics might make it difficult to use at many schools. Although the very first page gives a nice clear explanation of what calculus is about, we then have to wait until about page 136 to learn any calculus. I say "about" because of the inconvenient way in which the book is split up into 54 separate PDF files, each of which has page numbers starting from 1. I had to estimate page number 136 by weighing part of the book on a postal scale. Related to this problem is the fact that the book has no index or table of contents.

The book uses many numerical examples, which gives it a modern feeling . After all, calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz because they needed to do calculations in closed form, but nowadays it's more natural to solve many problems on a computer, using a spreadsheet or a programming language. The book has a problem, however, in integrating the computer stuff with the didactic parts and the homework problems. No indication is given of how the numerical examples were actually computed. The author may consider it a trivial task to set up a spreadsheet or write a ten-line program in Python or Mathematica, but it's not so trivial for many students, and they will need extensive guidance from elsewhere to be able to carry out such computations for themselves. This makes the text incomplete in practical terms: any instructor wanting to use it would have to come up with extensive support materials to go with it. It also contributes to my sense that the book lacks focus. Students have a hard enough time learning the basic concepts and techniques of integration and differentiation, but to use this book, they would also have to learn about computer programming and difference equations. Adding to the bloat is the author's tendency to discuss every possible pathological case before moving on to the main event. It's a little like a parent trying to explain sex to his child, but feeling obliged to explain foot fetishes before getting on with where babies come from.

The examples that students are expected to do numerically also presuppose quite a bit of resourcefulness and insight. For instance, one of the homework problems asks the student to sum the series 4(1-1/3+1/5-1/7+...) numerically, adding up "...a sufficient number of terms to enable you to guess the value of the sum," which turns out to be pi. The trouble is that over 600 terms are required to get the sum to settle down in the second decimal place, which is about the minimum I'd want to see to convince me it was pi. Pity the poor student who first tries 10 terms on a calculator, then 50 terms on a spreadsheet, and then finally realizes he's going to need to write a Python program to get the job done. Of course, some students might enjoy the process, but my experience (teaching college science majors taking introductory physics) is that the majority don't consider computers to be fun.

Lectures on Calculus author Evgeny Shchepin pages 143 URL http://www.math.uu.se/~oleg/ShchepinCalc.html rating 2/10 summary Not for consumption by mere students.

This book is from a set of lectures on calculus given by visiting professor Evgeny Shchepin at Uppsala University in 2001. The first obstacle potential readers will encounter is that the book is provided in PostScript format, with hideous bitmapped type 3 fonts embedded. This makes it virtually impossible to view the book on a monitor in any legible representation, although it looks fine when you print it out. The typical Windows or MacOS user will give up long before that point. This is a shame, because it's not at all difficult these days to get LaTeX to output Adobe Acrobat files that are viewable on virtually any computer, and are legible on the screen. There is no index, and virtually no graphs or other figures.

The main question in my mind is for whom this book was written. This deep, dark forest of mathematical symbols, interspersed with ungrammatical English, is meant to follow the historical development of the subject, but it never makes it clear why the historical route is the right one to follow. There are many seemingly pointless digressions.

Is it possible that this book was meant for young people taking their first calculus course? The presence of end-of-chapter homework problems would seem to imply that it was. If so, I feel sorry for them. Although it's cute that the author manages to develop integrals before limits, and derivatives only at the very end, I somehow doubt that real, live students would read this book and exclaim, "We sure are lucky to be learning calculus using this novel order of topics!" Most of the problems begin with the words "Prove that...," and neither the text nor the problems give any of the standard applications to biology, economics, physics, etc.

Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals author Jerome H. Keisler pages 992 URL http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html rating 10/10 summary I wish I'd learned calculus from it!

Textbooks are usually unoriginal, because most teachers are conservative in their choices. They get used to teaching a subject a certain way, and don't want to change. This is a calculus textbook with a very unusual approach. It was published in 1976, and evidently was successful enough, despite its idiosyncracy, to justify a second edition a decade later. Its publisher, however, eventually allowed it to go out of print. The copyright has reverted to the author, and he has made it available in digital form on his web site. The digital book consists of pages scanned in from a printed copy and assembled into an Acrobat file, so it's a big download, and you can't do some things with it, such as searching the text for a particular word.

The title leaves no doubt that the book is different. Whereas most textbooks these days define derivatives and integrals in terms of limits, this one uses infinitesimals. The real numbers are generalized to make a number system called the hyperreal numbers, which include infinitesimally small numbers as well as infinitely large ones. Essentially, this represents a return to the way Newton and Leibniz originally conceptualized the calculus, but with more rigor.

I don't know about other people, but when I learned calculus, I got very uneasy when we got to the Leibniz notation. My teacher said that dy/dx wasn't really one number divided by another, but rather an abbreviation for the limit of the quantity y/x. That wasn't so bad, but what really made me queasy was when he then suggested that you could usually get the right answer by treating these dx and dy thingies as if they were numbers. The scary part was that word "usually." What was legal and what wasn't? How many sizes of infinitesimals were there? Was it legal to say that 1/dx was infinite? What operations would lead to paradoxes? What about proofs that used infinite numbers to show that 1=2? The wonderful thing about this book is that you end up knowing exactly what you can and can't do with infinities and infinitesimals, and you get to use the Leibniz notation in all its intuitively appealing glory. For instance, the chain rule really can be proved simply by writing (dz/dy)(dy/dx)=dz/dx, simply canceling the dy's.

It would be interesting to see how students reacted to this book when learning calculus from scratch. I suspect that they'd have an easier time with many of the concepts like implicit differentiation, which seems so awkward in the traditional approach, but they might be scared a little by the initial development of the hyperreal number system. The book develops the hypperreal system axiomatically, which left me yearning for more of a constructive method. Then again, we develop the rational and real numbers axiomatically in high school, so maybe it's not such a big issue. My initial unease was cleared up by a few crucial examples:

• If H and K are infinite, then H-K may be infinite or finite -- it depends on which infinite numbers H and K are.
• If H is infinite, then (2H+1)/(H+1) isn't equal to 2, but it differs infinitesimally from 2.
• (H+1)^1/2-(H-1)^1/2 is infinitesimal.

After that, I began to see the hyperreal numbers as simply another tool for calculating things.

I confess, however, to a little residual indigestion at the way the author develops the integral. He introduces finite Reimann sums first, and gives several numerical examples. But next, instead of taking the limit of sums with more and more terms, he takes the finite sum with n terms, and replaces n with an infinite integer. Instant vertigo!

This is a wonderful, original textbook, and I hope it remains free on the web forever -- it's not copylefted, so unfortunately it may disappear if the author stops maintaining his web site.

The Calculus Bible author G.S. Gill pages 370 URL http://www.math.byu.edu/Math/CalculusBible/ rating 3/10 summary Incomplete, and badly written.

I'm reviewing this book in February of 2004. It's clearly not a finished product, and I'm not sure whether or not the author is still actively working on it. The book is available from the Brigham Young University math department's server, but the author isn't on the department's list of faculty, which makes me think he may have moved on to another job and abandoned the book. It's provided as a PDF file. There is no copyright page and no licensing agreement, so it's hard to know the book's real legal status.

The path through the topics is pretty standard for an introductory calculus course: a review of functions and trigonometry, followed by limits, differentiation, and integration. There is a good selection of problems, although to my taste as a physicist far too few are applied to anything useful. There is a table of contents, but no index. There are no illustrations; sprinkled throughout the text are little placeholders for graphs that just say "graph."

Although the problems I've referred to so far are ones that could be fixed if the author continued to work on the book, I feel that there are some more fundamental problems with this text that will not go away unless it is extensively rewritten. The style is extremely dry, and moreover the author has a habit of introducing concepts without any explanation or preparation. A symptom of this is that the student is expected to grind through the first hundred pages without any clear statement about what calculus is, what it's good for, or even whether the initial chapters are calculus (they're not). Equal prominence is given to topics that I would consider vital (the fundamental theorem of calculus) and others that I would label as trivial (tabulations of facts) or esoteric (the Dedekind cut property).

The Leibniz notation, dy/dx, is given with only this explanation "To emphasize the fact that the derivatives are taken with respect to the independent variable x, we use the following notation, as is customary..." Huh? So are these dx and dy things numbers? Is dy/dx the quotient of them?

Even if the missing graphs were included, the approach would still be relentlessly symbolic, rather than visual. For instance, integration by parts is introduced without ever giving its geometric interpretation.

cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."

cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."

cyranoVR writes "Today's CBS This Morning ran an interesting profile on MIT Professor Michael Hawley. Aside from recently publishing a super-jumbo-sized book about the Kingdom of Bhutan, he has invented (among other things) an interactive kitchen counter, designed a heart monitor embedded in jewelry, contributed to the MIT Toys of Tomorrow project and has written several classical compositions for piano. What really struck me was Hawley's observation that 'today's computers aren't musical enough.' For him, there is 'no difference between an ivory keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard.' I think it's a good thing that the mainstream media is starting to show how 'computer nerds' (as the correspondent identified Hawley) can be rich individuals with much more to their lives than hardware upgrades, programming languages and pocket protectors."

purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."

purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."

purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."

purduephotog writes "Doctoral candidate Saul Griffith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and inventor of the Lego powered chocolate printer was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a device that molds eyeglasses rapidly and cheaply. Best of all, he's motivated for the good of humanity."

Colonel Panic writes "Why the lucky stiff has written one of the most unusual (and poignant) books about programming that I've ever encountered. The best description for it so far (seen on comp.lang.ruby) is that it's sort of like 'The Little Prince meets SICP'. However, it defies all attempts at description (at least in this small space), you've got to read it for yourself. Like SICP, the full text is available for free. This one is destined to become a classic - it will likely be known to future generations of jobless American computer scientists as 'The Fox Book.'"

Lurker McLurker writes " BBC News reports that Ambient Devices, the MIT Media Lab spin-off which brought us the Ambient Orb, have developed a new product, the Ambient Dashboard . The orb changed colour to display information at a glance, for example turning red if the stock market is going down. The dashboard has three displays, similar to speedometers or barometers, to show the information of your choice, from stock market volumes to the pollen count." As a proof of concept, this is neat stuff. However they seem awful pricey.

colinmc151 writes "Both Groklaw and Internet News are reporting on the visit made to Harvard University by Darl McBride, SCO president and CEO, and Chris Sontag SCO senior vice president. Darl and Chris made a presentation titled 'Defending Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Age'. One protester gave out copies of Linux to all that attended. Bottom line SCO plans to carry on with the lawsuits. Best line was one student who when Darl asked if he was impacted by MyDoom.A e-mail virus answered 'No, I use Linux'." One MIT student has a write-up of the event as well...

Makarand writes "MIT Researchers have developed a device to make the most precise rulers - the Nanoruler, whose "ticks" are mere nanometers apart. The Nanoruler can pattern gratings of lines and spaces more accurately than other methods across large surfaces more than 12 inches in diameter, a capability important to a number of applications like preparing larger wafers for the production of computer chips and higher-resolution space telescopes. The Nanoruler works by using interference lithography where two laser beams interfere with each other to produce interference "fringes", or parallel planes of high and low light intensity. These fringes are then recorded onto the surface as lines and spaces using the same techniques used for tracing circuits onto silicon."

Endymion53 writes "The TMRC at MIT may be the best known model railroad layout because of its role in the formation of hacking culture, but railroad uber-enthusiast Jack Burgess has built himself a pretty enviable layout, that does its best to capture the look and route of an old rail line that went to Yosemite National park, called the Yosemite Valley railroad. I was tempted to make some crass remarks about having too much time on one's hands, but frankly, the whole thing looks just awesome. He's been working on this thing since 1981."

Isaac Skibinski writes "Remember gawking at photos of bullets going through apples (and the pretty fruit gibbage)? We've recently built an apparatus to capture similar results, using a BASIC controller stamp, a disposable camera flash, an air compressor, an electronic sprinkler valve and some pipe. Considering the cost of the device, it has allowed us to take suprisingly crisp photos of high-velocity objects."

Isaac Skibinski writes "Remember gawking at photos of bullets going through apples (and the pretty fruit gibbage)? We've recently built an apparatus to capture similar results, using a BASIC controller stamp, a disposable camera flash, an air compressor, an electronic sprinkler valve and some pipe. Considering the cost of the device, it has allowed us to take suprisingly crisp photos of high-velocity objects."

Romeo Elias Cabrera writes "The most hated invention in America -although also one of the most used- is the cell phone, according a recent survey. The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, an annual survey by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent said the cell phone."

bluephile writes "CNN is running an article on the The Transport Security Administration's (TSA) renewed efforts to implement the CAPPS II color-coded passenger risk-assessment program, despite outcries by numerous privacy activism groups at the program's collection and redistribution of personal information. The TSA has made several claims that the system respects passengers' privacy, but their track record isn't impressive. Congress suspended the program last year in order to investigate its privacy implications. One MIT paper suggests that CAPPS II could make flying MORE dangerous, rather than less."

Furd writes "The Pew Internet & American Life Project has posted a new data study that purports to show that the RIAA lawsuit strategy has successfully reduced P2P filesharing. While the presentation of the data is weak (poor graphics and weak statistics), the report does suggest that there has been a change in the usage of P2P tools."

guess-for-success asks: "In Lester Thurow's latest book, published by HarperBusiness Books (Fall 2003), Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, there is a chapter which discusses the beginning of new industries. During this time, several business models are introduced and only a few will survive. Looking at the PC industry, Commodore was the industry leader in the 1980's, but ultimately failed and went bankrupt in 1994. Successful business models such as Dell were not introduced until years after the industry began. I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed? Which companies will rise to the top? Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?"

"You can find out more about Lester Thurow here. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the Dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT. He has three New York Times best selling books to his credit and consults widely around the globe."

guess-for-success asks: "In Lester Thurow's latest book, published by HarperBusiness Books (Fall 2003), Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lasting Global Prosperity, there is a chapter which discusses the beginning of new industries. During this time, several business models are introduced and only a few will survive. Looking at the PC industry, Commodore was the industry leader in the 1980's, but ultimately failed and went bankrupt in 1994. Successful business models such as Dell were not introduced until years after the industry began. I now ask the Slashdot community: which internet business models they believe are going to succeed? Which companies will rise to the top? Will they be infrastructure related companies such as Cisco and even FedEx, or will they be true dot.com's such as eBay or Amazon?"

"You can find out more about Lester Thurow here. He is a professor of economics and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been the Dean of the Sloan School of Business at MIT. He has three New York Times best selling books to his credit and consults widely around the globe."

eval writes "According to the Chessbase website, the new sport of chessboxing has been devised 'to combine the No.1 thinking sport and the No.1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors.' Sure, it sounds like a joke, but an actual match was held not too long ago at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, which 'was packed with around 800 people' to see the world champion, 'Iepe the Joker' crowned."

Slashback tonight with words on the real-life security level of Mac OS X, the fate of stranded polar adventurer Jon Johanson, poetry for JenniCam, more on the Wright brothers & Co, and more. Read on for the details.

Multi-player markets are a good thing. Indiana University seems to be one of the first big fish to publicly announce a license agreement with Progeny's Transition Service. This service provides updates for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 beyond January 1st 2004, and RedHat 9 after May 1, 2004. According to the press release, this will allow for 'a flexible migration path as the University considers various options regarding Linux distributions during the coming year.'"

But I thought MPlayer ... Simon Bysshe writes "In response to some complaints about the WMV encoding of the recent pro-gaming film 'Intel Extreme Edition Challenge' (featured here on Slashdot). Intel have requested that the film also be encoded as a DIVX file especially for Slashdot. This divx file can now be downloaded here."

More on (At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight relbs was one of many to submit word (as reported by MIT News) of a replica of the Wright brothers' Flyer perched above the Great Dome early yesterday morning, and relbs adds a link to additional photos, too.

They had better luck getting off the ground than did those trying to actually fly a Wright flyer: CrazyTalk writes "As a follow-on to the earlier story, the much-ballyhooed attempt to recreate the first flight of the Wright's literally fell flat."

Maltese Falcon writes with another candidate for First Powered Flight. "Or was it Gustave Weiskopf (aka Gustave Whitehead)? There are many claims that he flew up to 2 yrs before the Wright Bros. NPR's report yesterday seemed to imply almost paranoia as far as a conspiracy to why the NASM only recognizes the Wrights, but this link provides more info on why this could be true. Look here for another article."

Speaking of audacious pilots, jcenters writes "An earlier Slashdot story reported that Australian adventurer Jon Johanson was trapped in Antarctica, and scientists stationed there refused to sell him fuel. Reuters is reporting that Johanson has now obtained fuel from a British rival, but weather conditions are preventing his departure. Johanson hopes to leave by the end of the weekend."

BlameFate writes that "British adventurer, Polly Vacher has allowed Johanson to use her pre-stored fuel at the base after her expedition was forced to be cancelled. Fox News has the scoop. Choice quote from the head of NZ's Antarctic Research dept: 'Polly's trip was well organized and properly planned,' he said. 'It is ironic that she is now assisting a stranded pilot who embarked upon an ill-prepared and secret flight over the South Pole.'"

If something happens in Berkeley, does it count as a "real world" experience? codythefreak writes to deflect certain barbs lately directed at the security level of Mac OS X: "Working as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley's Residential Computing, since we serve more than 6,000 clients living in the dorms, we tend to know the major computing trends. There are 5,120 registered Windows XP machines in our system, and our staff have logged 2,452 duty logs to assist them (about one in two). On the other hand, there are 341 Mac OS X machines, and only 56 duty logs (about one in six). If we restrict these to virus and security related duty logs: Windows XP has 491 (about one in ten) and OS X has 2 (less than one in a hundred)!"

(See also this well-reasoned response to the recent OS X criticism.)

Was it the tail? Really, is the pointy tail a deal-breaker? Mister.de points out this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story which says "VMware Inc., a business-software maker that is being acquired by EMC Corp. for $635 million, turned down an offer last year from Microsoft Corp.

'"We were unable to come to terms, so they bought out our distant competitor, Connectix" Corp., said Diane Greene, VMware's chief executive officer and co-founder.'"

Alas, we hardly knew ye. dlc3007 writes "The Register has published the results of the JenniCam Poetry Competition. There is little funnier in the world than creative geeks pouring their hearts and souls into 'a haiku or limerick lamenting the demise of JenniCam.'" I can think of some things ...

Battlestar Galactica 2003: Series Highly Likely, Say Recent Rumors Cliff writes: "Syfy Portal reports that officials for the Sci-Fi channel are likely to announce that the new Battlestar Galactica will become a series, most likely to air as early as Summer of 2004. No official announcement has yet been made, but since the 'mini-series' is Sci-Fi channel's third highest rated program, it is assumed that such an announcement will be made before the end of 2003, if they are going to keep options on the major actors. Personally, I'm looking forward to the show, as long as they stay away from monkeys in robot-dog suits!"

Slashback tonight with words on the real-life security level of Mac OS X, the fate of stranded polar adventurer Jon Johanson, poetry for JenniCam, more on the Wright brothers & Co, and more. Read on for the details.

Multi-player markets are a good thing. Indiana University seems to be one of the first big fish to publicly announce a license agreement with Progeny's Transition Service. This service provides updates for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, and 8.0 beyond January 1st 2004, and RedHat 9 after May 1, 2004. According to the press release, this will allow for 'a flexible migration path as the University considers various options regarding Linux distributions during the coming year.'"

But I thought MPlayer ... Simon Bysshe writes "In response to some complaints about the WMV encoding of the recent pro-gaming film 'Intel Extreme Edition Challenge' (featured here on Slashdot). Intel have requested that the film also be encoded as a DIVX file especially for Slashdot. This divx file can now be downloaded here."

More on (At Least) 100 Years Of Powered Human Flight relbs was one of many to submit word (as reported by MIT News) of a replica of the Wright brothers' Flyer perched above the Great Dome early yesterday morning, and relbs adds a link to additional photos, too.

They had better luck getting off the ground than did those trying to actually fly a Wright flyer: CrazyTalk writes "As a follow-on to the earlier story, the much-ballyhooed attempt to recreate the first flight of the Wright's literally fell flat."

Maltese Falcon writes with another candidate for First Powered Flight. "Or was it Gustave Weiskopf (aka Gustave Whitehead)? There are many claims that he flew up to 2 yrs before the Wright Bros. NPR's report yesterday seemed to imply almost paranoia as far as a conspiracy to why the NASM only recognizes the Wrights, but this link provides more info on why this could be true. Look here for another article."

Speaking of audacious pilots, jcenters writes "An earlier Slashdot story reported that Australian adventurer Jon Johanson was trapped in Antarctica, and scientists stationed there refused to sell him fuel. Reuters is reporting that Johanson has now obtained fuel from a British rival, but weather conditions are preventing his departure. Johanson hopes to leave by the end of the weekend."

BlameFate writes that "British adventurer, Polly Vacher has allowed Johanson to use her pre-stored fuel at the base after her expedition was forced to be cancelled. Fox News has the scoop. Choice quote from the head of NZ's Antarctic Research dept: 'Polly's trip was well organized and properly planned,' he said. 'It is ironic that she is now assisting a stranded pilot who embarked upon an ill-prepared and secret flight over the South Pole.'"

If something happens in Berkeley, does it count as a "real world" experience? codythefreak writes to deflect certain barbs lately directed at the security level of Mac OS X: "Working as a sysadmin at UC Berkeley's Residential Computing, since we serve more than 6,000 clients living in the dorms, we tend to know the major computing trends. There are 5,120 registered Windows XP machines in our system, and our staff have logged 2,452 duty logs to assist them (about one in two). On the other hand, there are 341 Mac OS X machines, and only 56 duty logs (about one in six). If we restrict these to virus and security related duty logs: Windows XP has 491 (about one in ten) and OS X has 2 (less than one in a hundred)!"

(See also this well-reasoned response to the recent OS X criticism.)

Was it the tail? Really, is the pointy tail a deal-breaker? Mister.de points out this Seattle Post-Intelligencer story which says "VMware Inc., a business-software maker that is being acquired by EMC Corp. for $635 million, turned down an offer last year from Microsoft Corp.

'"We were unable to come to terms, so they bought out our distant competitor, Connectix" Corp., said Diane Greene, VMware's chief executive officer and co-founder.'"

Alas, we hardly knew ye. dlc3007 writes "The Register has published the results of the JenniCam Poetry Competition. There is little funnier in the world than creative geeks pouring their hearts and souls into 'a haiku or limerick lamenting the demise of JenniCam.'" I can think of some things ...

Battlestar Galactica 2003: Series Highly Likely, Say Recent Rumors Cliff writes: "Syfy Portal reports that officials for the Sci-Fi channel are likely to announce that the new Battlestar Galactica will become a series, most likely to air as early as Summer of 2004. No official announcement has yet been made, but since the 'mini-series' is Sci-Fi channel's third highest rated program, it is assumed that such an announcement will be made before the end of 2003, if they are going to keep options on the major actors. Personally, I'm looking forward to the show, as long as they stay away from monkeys in robot-dog suits!"

Erik Rauch writes "The European Beagle 2 Mars Lander, set to touch down on Mars on Christmas Day, will be controlled by a single Linux-based workstation. I wonder if the Spacecraft Control Operating System is free software?"

Rhett Creighton writes "For the past few years, webmasters have found tricks that bring their page higher for a given keyphrase search. Google recently implemented a filter to block sites that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking. This NYTimes article reports of angry retailers who are losing their businesses, while this article gives more technical conspiracy theories of what google is actually doing."

Anonymous Coward writes "p2psim is a free, multi-threaded, discrete event simulator developed at MIT to evaluate and investigate p2p protocols. You can quite easily add your own p2p protocol and compare it with others to make sure it runs well before you write the real thing. p2psim runs in Linux and FreeBSD."

Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the continuing rise of academic programs related to videogames, covering the University Of Southern California, who are "...planning to offer a minor degree in the topic in the fall of 2004... it is believed to be the first major research university to do so." The article also notes that, previously, "gaming programs were limited to more-specialized schools such as DigiPen in the Seattle area and art schools like the Art Institute of California in San Francisco, which offers a degree in game art and design. NYU and the University of Washington have certificate programs in video games, and others, like MIT, wrap gaming into media studies programs."

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this short article, Technology Review tells us that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have built a new robot, named Cardea, which is able to push open doors and has the bottom half of a Segway scooter. Cardea will be five feet tall with a torso, three arms, a variety of sensors, and a human-like head with expressive features and vision, and mounted on a Segway base. More details and references are contained in this review which also includes several pictures. For even more details, go to the Cardea Project homepage."

Thanks to the MIT Technology Review for their Henry Jenkins-authored opinion piece on the use of recent wars in videogames. Jenkins, an MIT professor and much-interviewed game-related academic, argues: "If the idea of turning war into games is so intrinsically offensive, why has there been so little public outrage over the use of playing cards as a way of representing the search for and capture of Iraqi leaders?" He concludes: "Given the divisiveness of current sentiments toward the war and the newness of games as a rhetorical medium, it is hardly surprising that these games offend some and disappoint others."

Jesrad writes "A friend pointed me to this impressive demonstration of the SenseTable by James Patten, of the Tangible Media Group project of the MIT. This project aims at conceiving better human-machine interfaces by using the concept of physical objects that the user can manipulate, to represent abstract computer data and commands. The device looks and works a lot like what was envisioned in Minority Report, it uses pressure to track blocks on a sensitive surface, and feeds back to the user by superimposing graphical data. Want to change the volume of your MP3 player? Just put a block on it and turn like you would a radio knob. Menus and commands are accessed by moving a block along command hierarchy, represented in a simple tree, or by touching the command's name. So far it only lacks a device for text input, like a keyboard, but maybe voice recognition will replace it?"

Jesrad writes "A friend pointed me to this impressive demonstration of the SenseTable by James Patten, of the Tangible Media Group project of the MIT. This project aims at conceiving better human-machine interfaces by using the concept of physical objects that the user can manipulate, to represent abstract computer data and commands. The device looks and works a lot like what was envisioned in Minority Report, it uses pressure to track blocks on a sensitive surface, and feeds back to the user by superimposing graphical data. Want to change the volume of your MP3 player? Just put a block on it and turn like you would a radio knob. Menus and commands are accessed by moving a block along command hierarchy, represented in a simple tree, or by touching the command's name. So far it only lacks a device for text input, like a keyboard, but maybe voice recognition will replace it?"

Jesrad writes "A friend pointed me to this impressive demonstration of the SenseTable by James Patten, of the Tangible Media Group project of the MIT. This project aims at conceiving better human-machine interfaces by using the concept of physical objects that the user can manipulate, to represent abstract computer data and commands. The device looks and works a lot like what was envisioned in Minority Report, it uses pressure to track blocks on a sensitive surface, and feeds back to the user by superimposing graphical data. Want to change the volume of your MP3 player? Just put a block on it and turn like you would a radio knob. Menus and commands are accessed by moving a block along command hierarchy, represented in a simple tree, or by touching the command's name. So far it only lacks a device for text input, like a keyboard, but maybe voice recognition will replace it?"

aurum42 writes "MIT's LAMP music-over-cable initiative has been shut down due to licensing concerns, as reported on The Boston Globe. Ars Technica has a good summary of the story. It appears that Loudeye did not have the rights to sell music to MIT for distribution over cable, although they apparently assured MIT that they did in fact have those rights. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"

tessaiga writes "The New York Times has an article about a new project at MIT to replace music file sharing over P2P with sharing over cable TV (reg free link). The Library Access To Music Project relies on the more relaxed copyright restrictions on analog transmission formats like cable. From the article: "M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students." The article goes on to point out that this is (hopefully) legal under current laws because MIT already has a blanket license to broadcast music over analog media, and recording songs played over this system "would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts"."

sukottoX writes "Penn State along with MIT and the University of British Columbia are developing a P2P application (called LionShare in the PSU incarnation) to be used only by students, faculty and staff. According to this article at the Penn State Daily Collegian, the file-sharing program, which wouldn't be completed until 2005 at the earliest, would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced. The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. Funding will come in part by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as from the students' information technology fee."

Codeine writes "The Seventh Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), to be held later this month, will again feature members of MIT's Media Lab showing off the group's MIThril jacket. Taking its name from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the jacket combines body-worn computation, sensing, and networking in a clothing-integrated design, according to the project." According to a new paper (PDF link) to be presented at the conference, the latest version of this long-evolving system uses a Sharp Zaurus running Linux.

Codeine writes "The Seventh Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), to be held later this month, will again feature members of MIT's Media Lab showing off the group's MIThril jacket. Taking its name from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the jacket combines body-worn computation, sensing, and networking in a clothing-integrated design, according to the project." According to a new paper (PDF link) to be presented at the conference, the latest version of this long-evolving system uses a Sharp Zaurus running Linux.

Comp Bio Guy writes "As promised, MIT has finally released 500 courses worth of lecture notes, syllabi, and exams to provide a 'free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world.' Take a look (and maybe a test or two) at MIT's OCW site."

SiliconEntity writes "Cryptographer and security expert Peter Gutmann has demolished several Linux security software packages in a recent posting to the cryptography mailing list. He says, 'It's possible to create insecure 'security' products just as readily with open-source as with closed-source software. CIPE and vtun must be the OSS community's answer to Microsoft's PPTP implementation. What's even worse is that some of the flaws were pointed out nearly two years ago, but despite the hype about open-source products being quicker with security fixes, some of the protocols still haven't been fixed.'"

captnitro asks: "My father works for the US Dept of Commerce in the Eastern Bloc. His hotel room phones are routinely bugged -- a few (former) coworkers have had their stays 'shortened' and politely asked to leave the country, when they said dumb things over the phone. A few days ago he asked me what I use for secure voice when I don't have broadband. Remembering PGPfone from a while back, I looked up the link, but apparently they're no longer supporting/distributing it. While I wouldn't recommend he say much of anything in a bugged room, it got me thinking -- what do *you* use for simple, no-nonsense (requiring modem + sound card), low-bandwidth secure voice app? Unix works, and scriptability gets geek points, but I'll take what I can get."

Slashback tonight brings you more on the recent cracking of GSM encryption,the odds of file sharers escaping industry scrutiny in Canada, the recently found (and stomped) OpenSSH bug, installation-time ads in Mandrake, and more. Read on below for the details.

Art of the Saber Jagaast writes "As a counterpoint to all the hype about the Star Wars kid, here's a Star Wars fan film that's actually very well done. Art of the Saber is 'a light saber fight sequence with the flavor of a Hong Kong martial arts action movie.' Well worth watching." Update by J : I've made torrents available.

Vote early, often, and reversably. An anonymous reader writes "As a follow up to a previous story here on Slashdot on electronic voting, Excite has a story on the same subject with a bit more information including this amazing quote from Deborah Seiler, Diebold's West Coast sales representative: '"These activists don't understand what they're looking at," Seiler said.'"

GSM-crack paper online morcheeba writes "Copies of the GSM-crack paper described in last week's Slashdot article are now available online (PDF) thanks to John Young's Cryptome"

Mandrake ads...take 2 *no comment* writes "Apparently there has been some controversy over the ads in the upcoming Mandrake 9.2. I thought it was pretty cut & dried, but apparently Mandrake thought it was enough of a controversy to to release a written statement about it. I wonder how many flames were posted in the slashdot forum using the download version of Opera."

Blaster Worm still alive and well on MIT campus fwc writes "MIT still has 900 network drops disabled due to the Blaster worm infection. Of particular interest is that MIT network security requires users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system before they get back on the network. Sounds like a good excuse to reinstall something other than a Microsoft operating system."

A big AWOOOGAH for Canadian file sharers. Rumor writes in response to a recent story suggesting that Canadian users could swap files scot-free: "Listen, Canadians, don't go using your p2p apps and thinking you are immune from lawsuit, you are liable for copyright infringement if you share files on p2p apps.

To wit: a fellow law student and I have written an analysis of s. 80 of the Copyright Act and we've concluded that one can download music safely under the Private Copying provision, but no one can share or upload files without infringing on copyright.

In a nutshell, Private Copying allows anyone to make a copy of a song purely for their own use. As you probably know, when you share files and someone downloads from you, what actually happens is that their computer makes a request and your computer actually sends the file to them. Thus, you're copying for someone else's use and infringing. It doesn't matter if you didn't realize that's what happens, either... intent is not required for infringement.

The upside is that you can accept copies from other people (ie. download) all you want. Although there might be an issue of contributory infringement to worry about... I won't go into analyzing that, since so far the record companies are only suing uploaders.

The article can be found on greplaw.

I've recently confirmed this analysis with an IP law professor at my university, so I'm pretty damn sure of it. So, please, be aware of this danger. Downloading cool, uploading/sharing not. I guess the situation still better than nothing."

Why not ask for your money back? zaaj writes "There are several articles out about a newly found/fixed(openssh.org) buffer management bug in OpenSSH and some derivatives. Cisco's Advisory only mentions DoS attacks against certain of their SSH-enabled devices, but ZDNet's article hints at rumors of long-existing root exploits. Regardless, RedHat's got their typical list of updated packages with the patch back-ported. A few other distro's have info in the vendor section of Cert's advisory CA-2003-24"

Steve Weis writes "MIT is hosting a workshop on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Privacy on November 15th, 2003. Representatives from industry, academia and privacy advocate groups will discuss the privacy issues associated with a widely deployed consumer RFID system. Pre-registered university students may attend the conference for free. The workshop website includes a RFID Privacy Blog."

An anonymous reader submits: "MIT has released the name of the alleged infringer whose information was subpoenaed by the RIAA. The student's position? He was (1) not in the country at the time of the infringement, (2) he does not own a computer, and (3) he is not, and has never been, associated with the username in question (crazyface@KaZaA). MIT initially opposed the subpeona, but the RIAA refiled with the proper court."