Slashdot Mirror

Erotic Computing Group - Mit Media Lab
http://ecg.media.mit.edu/

[smile]

http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-393.HTML

The biggest problem about getting science fiction applied in what is laughingly called 'the real world' is the old Catch-22. It is best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke's explanation of why he is not rather better off than he actually is. When he first had the idea of the communications satellite, he tried to get it patented. 'Come, come, Mr Clarke,' said the people at the Patent Office. 'We're a serious outfit, we haven't got time to waste on fantastic ideas like this.' Years later, when the first satellite (with which Arthur was actively involved) actually went up, and the nations were queuing to get their own satellites up, Arthur went back to the Patent Office. 'But, Mr Clarke,' they said, 'the satellite already exists. You should have come to us earlier.'

Typical Bureaucratic bungling.

and there is more:

The very first paper describing the very first constellation, consisting of three satellites in geostationary orbit. Allegedly the only accurate science-fiction prediction ever. Authored by the famous Arthur C. Clarke, before the space race, before Sputnik 1, and before Arthur C. Clarke became a famous author. (There's a mirror of the paper. And now we call it the Clarke orbit, and you can simulate the original proposal.

This Page also discusses the legal issues because at the time Clarke wrote his paper, there was no way to get a satellite into orbit to begin with.

This approach has a better chance of working for universities than it does for ordinary commercial enterprises, for at least two reasons:

1. The sort of software universities produce is more likely to be the kind of code that will be integrated into other systems, which lends itself to a dual licensing approach. Universities aren't selling shrinkwrapped software to consumers: they're selling more basic technology to companies that want to exploit it commercially. This could be perfectly suited to a dual licensing approach. Legitimate businesses, for the most part, are unlikely to try to base products on software that they don't have rights to.
2. Universities don't rely on software licensing for their entire livelihood, so if an open source strategy happens to result in somewhat lower revenues, they can handle it. However, open source may be one of the best and cheapest ways of "advertising" a university's software products, so these factors could balance out.

Besides, this is exactly the sort of issue on which we should look to universities to lead the way. Open source is an important form of cooperation, and its heritage is the very academic freedom and open sharing of information pioneered by universities. There are benefits to this cooperation that may not be completely in conflict with the profit motive; however, the truth of that claim can only be verified by those with sufficient vision to look beyond the next quarter's results. Universities are one of the few organizations which have both the vision and financial ability to do that. MIT's recent decision to make its course material freely available over the web is an example of this.

For a first computer language though, I would reccomend something like logo instead of C because it's more visual and also builds math skills (geometry and so on).

It's worth mentioning that the famous Lego Mindstorms product is the result of a sort of intellectual collision between some media lab people and the Lego company. As with all Logo systems, there's an emphasis on creating visual results (though in this case the visual results have a rather high Cool Factor!). But what makes Mindstorms interesting (and also the Media Lab "programmable brick) is that the programming environment is itself visual. Probably has a lot to do with this being the most successful commercial robot "toy".

You're damn right. Best toy symphony demo song too. Here is where a guy at MIT named Joe assimilated his SK-1 into his modular synthesizer, and hacked MIDI interfaces onto the SK-1. So much to be done with that cheap little keyboard.

I realize that, but I think it's fair to say that there are those who wish that it could. (extend) Watermarking and device-based protections are the (insert "lame" here for karma) attempts that have been made. But I suspect there may also be chaffing and winnowing possibilities. (This was pointed out to me the other night in a different thread)

They will not stop trying until this works, imho.

Ok, I think eveyone needs to go and read The Halting Problem and Worse is better

Here is the referenced article from Dr. Rivest's homepage.

Here is the referenced article from Dr. Rivest's homepage.

Every country that signs onto this treaty currently has citizens who can use encryption. The legalities are changing, it seems since the various governments realized that the cat is already out of the bag, wrt encryption. The bad guys got it, and the good guys need to get it now. Witness in fact, direct from the treaty:

to the extent that such means provide appropriate levels of security and authentication (including the use of encryption, where necessary

So, it's simple. Make yourself a key, and begin to encrypt things you send. If you dont know what it means to make a key, then go read any PGP site, including the one (still) at MIT.

If you really want to oppose this at the level where it matters, then encrypt. Dont write your senator, dont address the fine folks in Brussels. Encrypt.

Remember, encryption makes the internet a cozy bedside chat. Use it with your lovers, and use it with your friends.

Fear only the One who can factor large primes in his head, and never let them put a key on your head or your hand. Simple. Easy. Fun. Have fun. Love God. Love your neighbor. And have a Great Thanksgiving, America.

The class I TA for at MIT is 6.170: Lab in Software Engineering. We force the students to learn how to write software using these documentation tools, in part to help them come up with better designs, but in part so that they can work more effectively as a team in their final project.

--Kurt

You should really consider trying out the program GNU stow (apt-get install stow) - it's a really cool utility that lets you manage your /use/local tree. Very easy to use, and quite powerful.

There is a package which does just that: GNU stow. I use that to organize /usr/local. Very easy to use.

You install each package under /usr/local/stow/<packagename>, and then you run stow <packagename> to make the links. After an upgrade, you do stow --restow <packagename>.

(To me, having all binaries in /usr/bin is not a problem: the package manager takes care of them. And stow is sufficient to handle the things I install locally.)

Hey,

Or a pinball machine. The best god-damn disposable income purchase I ever made.

If anyone is looking to buy one, you can learn at MIT's pinball page.

Or you could check ebay.

Michael

I'd be much more impressed if someone gave me one of those little robots that you hooked up to your computer, and controlled via. LOGO.

[okay...I played with LOGO for much too long... I harrassed my instructor until he told me how to pass variables between functions]

Logo Robotics

However, the file-cabinet view of the desktop have lots of nice alternatives. I really want a system that treats my desktop like a giant mind-map. Every project that I work on, and all the little notes that I find myself writing all the time would fit great in a mindmap structure. Also having the entire map in a zoomable format would be a better way to use the background than just putting the standard Manga/Astronomy/Softcore/Whatever-floats-your-boat pic there. Furthermore such a desktop would interface nicely with remembrance agents. Imagine having an interactive system (perhaps integrated in emacs, like the one in MIT) that monitors what you write and suggests related nodes, that you have written before.

And it doesn't stop there! If you have a little checkbox for 'public' on each node/note, a mindmap maps well to a html-site (like MindMan does), so you could easily transform a set of loose thoughts on a subject to something that the entire world can benefit from. The RA could perhaps also interface with something like Everything and the mindmap desktop could have an easy function for uploading nodes/groups of nodes to the community. The entire hivemind of such a network would have an enormous potential.

Got interesting incoming mail? Tag it with a few keywords and give it a place in the hierarchy and the RA will pop it up when you need it again. The mindmap structure is immensely powerful. Got a whole slew of files in a programming project? Using the same system as you do for all the rest of your documents, you could easily arrange them so as to get a nice visual overview of their interdependence.

Can you tell that I've been thinking about implementing a desktop (probably in scheme for that schweet scriptability) that does something like this, for a while? ;)

I have a page I made that shares some of my experiences with the xbox and gamecube hardware. Of interest to those reading this thread is the XBOX rom extraction. I have the ROM binaries...but holding off on posting them on a large forum due to worries over legal ramifications...

Good fucking luck getting an analog dialup line in these places.

Eight years ago, I spent a few evenings on an air base outside of Detroit. I was providing medical care to a quadriplegic who had been invited their as a guest. We had a suite of rooms in some sort of officer's military hotel within the base.

There were notices on every phone about how the phones were not secure and to not discuss military operations on them. It also had a notice prohibiting modem calls.

I said to myself "flock() that, I'm a civilian, not my rules" and unplugged the phone on the desk and plugged my laptop in. Less than a minute later, there was a knock on the door.

Point of the story, it was an analog line on one hand, on the other hand, they knew what was connected to their lines somehow.

I wrote of my experiences in the comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup and an archive of the post is still online:

Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1993 07:51:33 -0400
Subject: Telecom Experience at a Military Base

To read it, go to Telecom Digest Archive and do a page search for the above subject string.

This was done when Al Gore gave a commencement speech at MIT in 1996.

Have you ever heard of shared-copy-on-write executables?

Have you heard of U.S. Patent 4,742,450 on the shared-copy-on-write memory segments that loading such executables requires?

Dude, you're making some major mistakes!

• No Goatse.cx links.
• No references to the fact that linux users are communists
• WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW WW
  No page widening

Hope you get your monitor working again. I know I hate making mistakes.

ESR was previously going to be talking about this at the Lightweight Languages Workshop, but he's not on the agenda now. What happened?

MS IP Toilet?

Nope! MIT already has enough proof of the concept that MS can't copyright IP Toilets.

DNS doesn't work instantly. Never has, never will. And with the profusion of names, it will just get slower. It's only the local caching which seems to make DNS fast.

http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/papers/dns-imw2001.html

-Patrick

Slashback with more on cheap satellites, the relative speeds
of threads under Linux and two strains of Windows, a skeptical response to the
idea that crowds of people are retreating to dial-up access, and some
tantalizing hints at products killed along with the HP calculator division.

Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc. Writing with a
followup to the Slashdot post titled, "Who
Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared" Splinton had this to say: "In this
article, Ed
Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's critical sections.
Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are twice as fast again!"

The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while back HP
closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's calculator department was
unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have thought they had no innovation.
This was not the case. Turns out that management had 4% workforce to kill and
they were part of the cut.

This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based PDA's ready
to produce that were killed by management. Sounds interesting? Go check it
out.

The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a team as
possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a large team of
specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of the engineering and
technical work. A small, carefully selected engineering team filled in the
knowledge gaps."

Quitting isn't easy, and why bother

Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, Etc.
Writing with a followup to the Slashdot post titled,

"Who Has Faster Pipes? Linux, Win2000, WinXP Compared"
Splinton had this to say: "In

this article, Ed Bradford compares semaphores, mutexes and window's
critical sections. Pthreads look good, but Win2Ks critical sections are
twice as fast again!"

The computing equivalent of Area 51? A short while
back HP closed its calculator division. Many have thought HP's
calculator department was unprofitable. This was not the case. Many have
thought they had no innovation. This was not the case. Turns out that
management had 4% workforce to kill and they were part of the cut.

This article
explains more. It turns out they had designed several Linux based
PDA's ready to produce that were killed by management. Sounds
interesting? Go check it out.

The biggest expense was the 12 gross of Estes D engines ...
Satellite Designer writes: "The topic of low cost satellites
having been mooted here recently, I though I'd alert readers to another
such project. The HETE-2
satellite recently

located a cosmic gamma-ray burst precisely enough that (with a lot
of help from friends) an afterglow was detected, identifying its source.
HETE-2 cost $26 million, only 1/3 of what a "small" scientific satellite
normally costs.

A lot of commercial "off the shelf" technology went into HETE. Nothing
from Radio Shack, but there are quite a few parts from Digi-Key onboard.
You can't save money by using cheap parts (but you *can* save money by
using easily obtainable parts), and you can't achieve reliability by
using expensive parts (but you *can* help reliability by using the parts
best suited for your application). The radical thing about HETE's parts
selection was that it considered parts in the application context (as
one would do in a normal engineering process), rather than restricting
selection to a QPL assembled to meet irrelevant requirements.

The real trick to keeping costs down is to do the job with as small a
team as possible in the minimum time possible. Rather than employing a
large team of specialists, HETE's scientific investigators did much of
the engineering and technical work. A small, carefully selected
engineering team filled in the knowledge gaps."

Quitting isn't easy, and why bother?
dmarsh writes: "This
new
article from C|Net seems to be a
total contradiction to last week's

"Dump Broadband, Dig Out Your Modem!" thread's article. I guess the
important difference being that this one is backed up by an actual
survey by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."

Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at
least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source ;)

<

Light Emitting Pictures On Standard Inkjet Printer

I have been wanting exactly what you are talking about for at least 6 years now. I've been looking for off-the-shelf because I've felt that I didn't quite know enough about hardware to build one and really don't have the time. A few years ago when Sun was talking about Java chips that could natively handle the language and perhaps it's own OS I thought they might head this direction with some hardware... but alas.

There are certainly enough (net|sys)admins out there to support a 'community' for this effort. After all this hardware setup is perfect for us at work or on the road. (Even at work we are away from our desks at racks of computers or in foreign data centers!) My company (Steem) will gladly step up the web resources , maybe even hardware purchasing if we could begin producing something 'sell'able. I would even venture to guess that ThinkGeek would support the endevour on some level.

I'll keep an eye on this story and see what develops. Obviously the more off-the-shelf (COTS as the gov businesses call it) stuff we can find the better. I have looked at the PC104 hardware and it seems do-able but we'll need to work at getting all the other pieces together.

BTW, if you haven't read through the MIT wearable web pages or wearables central, I suggest that you should. Lots of good hardware suggestions there.

Ah, but the beauty of Ad-Aware is that you have the choice to remove those cookies or not. Check the box beside the cookie it and it will remove it. If you don't check it then it remains. Simple, easy and fast. After all we don't want to have to identify ourselves everytime we visit Mike's World Wide Web of Barfbags?

Ad-Aware is from Lavasoft and can be found here.

I knew that they were filling the tanks for more data collection. I guess it's good my friend already has the data she needs to write her senior thesis.

:-(

I have no corporate affiliations. I am a Jr. undergrad student at MIT, and I'd like to see Gnome succeed, like all of you. If I win, I don't promise to do a better job than most of you could do, but I do promise to do it while eating a truckload of bananas. Really, I want to use the position to impress chicks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhelp guide the direction of Gnome toward what I think will make it the ideal computing platform.

And don't forget to read Rhett Creighton's Master Plan.

There is no inherent link between s-expressions
and the powerful Lisp macro facility. It is
certainly easier to implement with s-expression
syntax, but can (and has) been done in languages
with infix syntax. See Dylan for example, and Java Syntax Extensions. While neither of these implementations allows using the full power of the language to generate code (i.e., procedural macros), there's no reason that couldn't also be done in an infix language.

First, not that it matters really, but you're just wrong about source level debugging. It was present in Lisp Machines much earlier (two or three major releases and a half dozen years) than you realize. It wasn't turned on for Lisp for unknown reasons"

Seems like you are confirming what I'm saying: the Lisp machine did not have source level debugging until Genera 8. Whether it was hidden somewhere in the source code where your customers couldn't get at it hardly matters.

Second, you're also wrong about what killed Lisp Machines. [...] The Lisp language did not cause the problem.

I didn't claim that Lisp caused the problem. I claimed that poor business decisions, i.e., delivering an overly expensive niche market product, killed Symbolics and LMI and gave Lisp a reputation for being expensive and complex, something you, again, seem to confirm.

To be honest, I don't really understand why it's important to someone to declare a language or community dead while there are people using the language and happy with it. [...] destructive to take a posture of such definitive negativity that can't possibly aid you in any way and can, by confusing people with misinformation, injure others.

You are still operating under the mistaken assumption that Lisp has become marginalized because I or others have an irrational dislike of it. Quite to the contrary. I think Lisp is the greatest thing since sliced bread. That is why it has been so painful to see its decline over the last two decades, a decline I attribute to greedy and poor management at various Lisp vendors and a poorly conceived standard for CommonLisp.

I hope a new generation of researchers and programmers will learn from this history and that over this decade, Lisp will make a comeback. But that's why it is important to understand what went wrong in the first place.

Another interesting link about the history of Lisp and the Lisp machine is here, which basically reaches the same conclusion that I did.

Oh, and if you would like to experience a little more the sensitivity and humility with which many in the Lisp machine community have criticized other systems, just take a look here.

So it seems that my biggest problems don't lie with LISP at all. I may find myself a LISP convert yet! Perhaps solving criticism #1 (above) may facilitate that. :)

a language for describing partial recursive functions.

The important point here is that the definition has nothing to do with physical devices. Of course, most computer languages can be understood by particular physical devices (electronic computers), but that is not required--and it only came about later. Even after the advent of electronic computers, some computer languages were still being invented for the purpose of communicating with people. Two good examples illustrating this are APL and MIX.

APL (A Programming Language) was invented by Ken Iverson, a Harvard mathematician. His sole purpose was to have a good way to describe algorithms to people. Physical computers were not even a consideration. Later, other people thought that it would be a good idea to implement the language, and interpreters for computers were crafted, but that was strictly secondary.

MIX was invented by Don Knuth, a Stanford mathematician. His primary purpose was to have a "formal, precise way" to "present the various techniques" detailed in his book Art of Computer Programming (I'm quoting from the preface). Although algorithms described in MIX could be executed on a (idealized) computer, Knuth's primary purpose was communicate to people.

Both these languages are intended to be used to describe algorithmic calculations, but not all computer languages need do this. Prolog is an example, where you just describe the input and output of the program (e.g. input "a list" and output "an ordered list", where "ordered" means "i LE j implies list[i] LE list[j]"), without necessarily describing how to calculate the output. And Prolog was invented primarily to be executed on a computer.

If an algorithm is described in English, then plainly, there are free-speech protections. What if Esperanto were used? Again, free-speech protections should apply, but note that Esperanto is an artificial language. So, I think that the same provisions should apply if the language is APL or MIX. From there, we surely get protection for Prolog, Java, C, etc.: all human-readable languages.

Has this line of reasoning been used in the courts? If not, why?

While I would certainly recommend some programming background, and perhaps The little Schemer. (Many more tips on www.schemers.org even a few worthwhile tutorials online such as "Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days"). SICP as it's affectionately known is one of the best books on programming, period. It may not be in the "teach yourself xx in n days" category, and rather heavy going at times, but the rewards are worth it.

This is IMHO the book that makes Scheme worthwhile.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is probably the best computer science text ever written (with the possible exception of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming), and uses Scheme. it's such a small language (14 basic reserved words, i think?) with such clear syntax that little time is spent teaching the language, and more time is spent teaching programming.

after reading SICP, it will take you perhaps a week to learn any computer language. highly recommended.

There as been a significant amount of pressure (from both non-CS administration and some CS-because-it-pays-well,-not-because-I-want-to-lea rn students) to change to Java or some other "real world" language, but thankfully, the instructors haven't given in.

The differentiation between good programmers and bad, isn't in the number of languages they "know." Programming is a methodology, and Lisp/Scheme is a great tool to teach it.

This is what I use. The source code is available. Quite helpful. Enjoy.

Set yourself a challenge - put a time limit on it - try to come up with a new kind of project to work on, doesn't have to be useful, doesn't even matter if it's been done before, but do it off your own back

Failing that, try what the MIT hacks guys use to spice things up

So many possibilities...

handheld with projection system. It has the standard touch sensitive lcd (or LEP or whatever), but it uses a single chip reflective projector to put a *huge* picture up on any viewable surface. It's not very steady, so integrate some motion sensors in the device and some hardware to steady the projection (IR for distance to surface (image size), accelerometer for lateral stabalization).

When the projection is running, the touch screen on the device is still the input method.

But really, why not go all the way. I wear glasses, so give me a covert HMD. Something that can't be seen by the rest of the world, but that gives me unrestricted hands free access to my "handheld".

Then steal an idea from MIT and put a ring on each index finger. Radio connected, position sensing, and presure sensitive. Touch the left one with your thumb and the on-disply pointer tracks with movements of the right. Tap the right one, and it clicks, rotate the right one (around your finger) and it's like that little roller on your mouse.

Think all this is fantasy? I read too much science fiction? I think not.

single chip projectors
accelerometers for displacement
covert HMDs
The One Ring (fictional, I think)

Couple reasons for this. First, development at WorldForge (like most open source projects) is kinda seasonal, and so over the summer development was in fact slow. Second, most of our website developers have been focused on our next generation website (you can preview here and here/A>).

However, there *has* been a great deal of low level achievements - libraries, server code, databases, etc. And activity has really picked up a huge amount of steam over the last month, now that summer's over and everyone's ready for more development. Most people are extremely enthused about our new game Mason, which just entered implementation.

I would like to see something really cool come of this but games are just not an area where open source works well.

Common fallacy. *Some* types of games may not do well if following open source principles. Plots are difficult to keep secret, and of course it is by definition no prob to determine all of the rule algorithms, AI secrets, etc. But in my opinion, relying on "secrets" to make a game fun is foolish and destined to break as soon as someone posts a spoiler list to the Internet. I believe most *good* game designs would have no particular issue with open source development, any more so than a photoshop-clone or an alternative desktop. It's just a matter of getting enough folks to put the work into chipping in to create it.

Another oft-cited reason why open source games "can't be" is that they are by nature multi-disciplinary. You need musicians, writers, and artists, in addition to programmers. But I feel this is just a difficulty of mindset. Other game projects have had difficulty finding and coordinating such people, but WorldForge hasn't; there are lots of these people out there, and while the idea of allowing their work to be shared under the GPL is novel to them, many are willing to work under that condition anyway.

It really boggles me why people who can be so gung-ho about open sourcing everything under the sun would stop shy of games? FreeCiv, TuxRacer, NetHack, and thousands of smaller games prove that such assertions are in fact false. Yeah, making good games is difficult, but not nearly as hard as making a good operating system, web browser, office suite, or desktop system, which I think we can agree that are well within our community's grasp.

WorldForge *will* succeed. It might take us a heck of a long time, but we set out our plans and objectives a couple years ago and have been achieving the milestones slowly but surely. Trust me, we too would like to see results come more swiftly. The only thing we need to accelerate is your help. :-)

Check out ITS. The source code is available here, and you can grab the documentation over here.

Check out ITS. The source code is available here, and you can grab the documentation over here.

I'm not entirely certain I know how to respond to this, but the thinly veiled sarcasm and factual inaccuracies beg a response so I'll give it a try.

...you also have houses composed of zillions of individual 'brick' objects...

This isn't really true. You seem to be taking concepts from *one* game, taking them to absurd lengths, and applying them to the whole of the project.

Therefore, to clarify, we are talking about Mason, a game which is primarilly a proof of concept game. I suggest the interested look at the overview, located here.

Since this game is centered around *construction* there is a high degree of user involvement in the construction of new things. This does not imply that *all* games will focus so tightly on this one aspect, but rather that future games will be built upon the discoveries and developments made through implementing Mason.

...peasants make their houses brick by brick

This is highly deceptive. Peasants *can* make buildings brick by brick if they so choose, and in a large game you can be certain several will want to (see the "I want to bake bread" article). However there are higher level methods for building objects. You could contract to get your house built, paying an NPC to build it from a blueprint that you provide, or that you select from the ones the builder might provide. Or, if you don't really want the immersive feel, just have the builders point and click and *bamf* insta house. These options are *game* specific, not specific to the underlying software.

Who knows what you can do in a game where you can dynamically create wholly new types of objects due to the great flexibility of the underlying software! I'll tell you- you can sit there holding half a brick.

First of all, half a brick isn't a new type of object, it's just a different sized brick. As to the *point* of what you are trying to say, yes, you can dynamically create things in Mason which were not initially in the game. That is the *point* of the game. The natural question that follows is: "Is this useful? Will it make the game more interesting?"

to this I can only respond with an opinion:

This is this same flexibility that will allow truly innovative solutions to game problems. The ability to create new, unexpected things (traps, weapons, mazes with sliding walls), to alter the game world (avalanche/mudslide, dams, earthworks, canals) and to integrate those things into the world will add to the richness of the world. An interesting, changing world will captivate the imagination of the gamer, something sorely lacking in most computer games today.

...there is a (laudable) pacifist streak...

I have no idea where this notion came from.

Though pacifism may be laudable, it is not overly present in the hallowed halls of worldforge. Combat is not central to our current development. When we have more foundation, combat systems will be implemented. If you look around the web site you can probably find references to how such things will be designed. However, there are more fundamental things to develop before any usable system could be implemented. If you can't wait I suggest you go play quake.

-SpeedBump the even more verbose

• Processors are too numerous to merit individual names. Any interaction between programmer and processors is a bulk operation; processors are never individually addressed. Think broadcast architecture.
• Processors are unreliable. Any individual processor may fail at any time, or may be broken already at power-up.
• No assumption of reliable geometry: processors have no a-priori knowledge of their physical location in the cloud.
• Weak assumptions about connectivity: each processor is connected to N close neighbors, where the probability distribution of N is approximately known. Connections are unreliable and may be time-varying.
• All processors are assumed to be manufactured with the same program in ROM. (This doesn't preclude the possibility of a distributed boot loader.)

I thought it was too much when I heard of the "Smart e-toilet".

There's Infocom's excellent text adventure The Lurking Horror, which is a horror story based on G.U.E. Tech (Great Dome, anyone?). It is an excellent story, and it can get scary as hell as you play it.

You can download it here (direct link), as well as pretty much all of Infocom's adventures. You can also find these high-quality scans of the manuals that came with original Infocom games very helpful -- you should always read them before actually playing the game, as you'll discover with The Lurking Horror.

Sidenote: in order to play these games, you'll need something like frotz. Good luck.

• Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
• Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade. :) Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
• The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
• Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.

• Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
• Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade. :) Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
• The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
• Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.

• Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
• Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade. :) Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
• The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
• Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.