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Surprisingly few of our Defense Contractors' engineers are actually qualified pilots. That's why our DC ANG F-16 pilots complain that the F-16 is an airplane "designed by engineers, not pilots." That's why Lockheed had to pay so much money to the wives of German fighter pilots after the F-104 fighter failed so miserably as to break up under stress. (Our own government didn't do anything extra for the US F-104 widows.)

The Boeing B-1 Lancer was a good plane when they designed it, but the engineers then overloaded with so much gear that they either stall on climb or go into an unrecoverable dive. Naturally, the Reagan DoD claimed we needed the B-1 to win the Cold War. I guess that's why they're still flying B-52s.

Pointing to a DoD press release doesn't help your case, and neither do ad-hominem attacks, (to which I shall never stoop). This is the same DoD that claimed we had a missile gap in 1960, that East Germany had a higher standard of living than West Germany in the 1980s, and that we're winning the war in Iraq. The first version of the M-1 tank couldn't even shoot and move at the same time. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle? Another triumph of military engineering so great they had to make a movie about it.

The Moab desert robot drive challenge was successfully completed only last year. AI isn't as advanced as you might think. UAVs certainly do NOT have to follow all the rules of passenger aircraft under Parts 61, 91, 141 or 142 of FAA regulations. When UAVs fly, the FAA issues a NOTAM and restricts the airspace around it so no airplanes with humans on board fly anywhere near them. A surprisingly large amount of U.S. airspace is restricted, including most of the airspace over Nevada, for instance. Thus, the military and defense contractors get whatever exemptions they want from civil airspace rules. Don't believe me? Fly over Area 51 and see what happens.

The FAA controllers regularly complain about military bozos who want to restrict all US airspace to military traffic only. After 9/11, the Pentagon almost seized Washington's Reagan National airport and were stopped only when members of Congress figured out how long it would take them to drive to other airports.

Those of you who are ready to fly in airliners piloted by AI should:
1) take a class in AI
2) get a pilot's license, or at least take a flight lesson.
I have done both (not at MIT, though), and those designing these aircraft, for the most part, have not.

The main point of this is, don't believe everything you read in a press release.

1. First, Parago acknowledged that the company had received the correct rebate information. At this point, everything is fine.
2. After 23 days, on March 25, Parago said in an online notice that the check had been sent and had been cashed. It was not sent. Mr. Kamens had asked that the money be directly deposited electronically to his checking account, so a notice about a check was complete fiction. Obviously no one checked to see if their excuse was plausible.
3. Next, Mr. Kamen received a message saying that he had asked to receive a "bonus item" and a "Pinnacle Instant Album" instead of $10, and that these had already been shipped on March 16. The web page customers can use to check the status of their rebates still said that he had received and cashed a check. Again, Parago did not check to see if their statements were plausible.

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

Great post about http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/ Appleseed
The difficulties in web2.0 are apparent for slashcode's experience. Although I have a slash site at http://mashdot.com/Mashdot. It was a bitch to install, and I'm still unsuccessful after a 2-3 attempts at restarting the site with cvs. Luckily the release version is doing the job for now. I also have an interest in bringing AI applications using web2.0, right now at its infancy at http://ai.residentmanual.com/Radiology Decision Support. There are also the partially free open cyc projects and its like... An MIT grad student, http://web.media.mit.edu/~push//Singh, has a couple of interesting projects: Conceptnet and openmind

We webloggers are collectively turning the World Wide Web into one superintelligent global brain.
Michael Anissimov
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Thomas Burick
Hal Daume III
David Heller
Marco Koch
Bob Mottram
J.M. Pratt
Eric Ringger
LM Squires
Ting Qian
Oliver Wrede

The first thing to realise there are plenty of technology related hobbyists around the world, although most are not high profile and some may be different very different demographics than yourself.

Some (hobby) groups to consider looking towards for ideas and help include: woodworkers, metalworkers (hobbyists using micromills and mini-lathes from TaigTools and Sherline, etc.), model railroads, model aircrafts (static and RC), robotics, amateur radio (ham), 2600, LUGs, and Artist Run Centres/Communities

Random list of some I use or know of:
  Make magazine http://www.makezine.com/
  Instructables http://www.instructables.com/
  ARRL http://www.arrl.org/
  http://www.sparkfun.com/ (check out their tutorials)
  http://www.fpga4fun.com/ / http://www.knjn.com/
  QRP-L http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/qrp-l/>
  GQRP http://www.gqrp.com/
  http://www.pololu.com/ (cheap stencils laser cut, e.g. 3x4 for $32)
  http://www.diyaudio.com/
  http://www.digikey.com/ (if you're still buying electronics from Radio Shack, get these 3 catalogs now!)
  http://www.mouser.com/
  http://www.jameco.com/
  the ton of various surplus/NOS dealers online
  http://www.frontpanelexpress.com/
  http://www.seattlerobotics.org/
  http://www.chibots.org/index.php
  DorkBot
  http://eyebeam.org/production/production.php?page= tools
  MIT CBA FAB http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
  http://www.leevalley.com/
  http://www.smallparts.com/
  http://www.danssmallpartsandkits.net/
  http://www.wmberg.com/
  http://www.acklandsgrainger.com/
  http://www.grainger.com/
  http://www.onlinemetals.com/
  http://www.amqrp.com/
  http://www.princessauto.com/
  http://www.sherline.com/
  http://www.taigtools.com/

I always thought that Thinking Machines deserved the award for most "I feel like I live in the future" cool in their computers with the CM5.

If you were really diligent you could put it on a website, almost like some of MIT's OpenCourseWare only more upto date with current curriculum.

Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a Warming Environment. P. J. Webster, G. J. Holland, J. A. Curry, and H.-R. Chang (2005). Science 309: 1844-1846

Emanuel, "Increasing Destructiveness of Tropical Cyclones Over the Past 30 Years" Nature 436, 686-688 (4 August 2005)

Trenberth et al., Science: "An important measure of regional storm activity is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index (see the second figure) (1). Since 1995, the ACE indexes for all but two Atlantic hurricane seasons have been above normal; the exceptions are the El Niño years of 1997 and 2002. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the hurricane seasons from 1995 to 2004 averaged 13.6 tropical storms, 7.8 hurricanes, and 3.8 major hurricanes, and the ACE index was 169% of the median."

Good enough?

According to this article from MIT, aluminum foil hats may actually amplify some signals...notably, amplification at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz.

-Jim
Gmail Tips
Jim's Tips

Don't be silly. Everyone knows the people who did this study were government operatives, to reduce the use of tinfoil hats, so their mind control satelites could get to us.

Don't succumb. Keep wearing it.

For a funny paper on tin foil hats check out http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ has some funky tin foil hat fashion in it too!

We would _love_ to be able to apply this statistical methodology back in time, but we just don't have the data. That's the simple answer.

He stated that something was true, yet gave no evidence that the heroes of myth are equivalent to superheroes. So why did you post to me looking for evidence? Did you do the same for the GP?

The GP's point seems obvious to me; the Greek myths feature heros with power above and beyond those of ordinary men. Super-powers. Thus, super-heroes.

People have been pointing out how superhero stories fit the Campbellean monomyth for years. Roger Zelazny makes mention of it in his introduction to Gaiman's The Book of Magic, for example.

I'd be interested in an analysis to the contrary, and was hoping you might has one. Instead all I've seen from you on this thread can be summarized in "Nah-uh!".

I'll even get you started: one might argue that a distinguishing feature of the modern superhero from the classic super-powered hero is the "secret identity". Which is a very interesting characteristic; as Salman Rushdie said: :

...the lesson they taught children - or this child, at any rate - was the perhaps unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great and so easily misunderstood that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a "secret identity." Superman could not have survived without "mild-mannered" Clark Kent; "millionaire socialite" Bruce Wayne made possible the nocturnal activities of the Batman.

Except, that than excludes from "superhero-dom" those without secret identities, and I do believe there are a few from the comics. What about Professor Xavier? Or Swamp Thing? I'll leave it to those more familiar with comics to debate this point.

But more than that, you should ask yourself why you only ask for evidence from people who disagree with you, instead of from everyone making assertions.

Issac Asimov once said something to the effect that if someone claimed to have the kilograms of salt in their lab, you'd not ask for any additional evidence; if they said they had ten kg of gold, you'd want to see it before accepting the claim; and if the claimed to have ten kg of plutonium, you'd call bullshit without extraordinary evidence.

That ancient myths featured super-powered heroes, is an "I have a bunch of salt" type of claim.

resistance is useles as well as conductivity

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

Second, Crichton whines about the patents on the Hep-C virus genome. What he doesn't mention is for a decade no one managed to isolate Hep C virus or sequence its genome. Chiron took a big gamble and succeeded where everyone else had failed. If there were no patent rights in the offing, would we even have a Hepatitis C genome sequence to squabble over? This is a debatable question, but Chrichton is more interested in taking cheap shots than in substance. This is quite in character for him.

Finally, Crichton complains about people potentially patenting ways to end an essay, but perhaps he is so sensitive about this because he plagiarized the Afterword to State of Fear from Richard Lindzen. Crichton copies (without attribution) the thesis of Lindzen's 1985 essay, Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics. It's interesting that with all Crichton's footnotes and bilbiographic apparatus, he never references this essay or offers Lindzen credit for the ideas.

I guess if these people never used a PC before, they shouldn't have a bug learning curve to adapt to Linux since they don't have a lot of pre-concived ideas of how things should work.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to get them working with Linux for much better performance on old hardware with a user-friendly distro like Ubuntu or Linspire. You would also be helping to get Linux on to the mainstream public, which I believe the $100 Laptop program from MIT will do.

To sum up: the data DO show a change in hurricane patterns. (Of course, if you look at property damage caused by hurricanes, it is skyrocketing mostly because people are dumb and build lots of expensive property by the beach, but that doesn't mean that hurricanes aren't getting worse at the same time as people are building more stuff in their path)

As it turns out, we do have a pretty decent mesh protocol: RoofNet - open source, works well, continuously maintained and updated. But a good mesh protocol doesn't solve all the problems in providing ubiquitous broadband. It's hard to reach rural areas, without doing some tricky antenna placement and other things that are simply beyond most peoples' ability. Now, we could train a vast force of radio techs to go do this, but I am sure that this won't happen. I am sure that the democrats will continue to screw us, just like republicans, by giving more power to the telcos and shipping more jobs overseas.

The MIT Website has taken it down, but I remember it working somewhat well between two IP address.

Was it just too far ahead of its time?

In the spinal cord, you have 31 pairs of very long nerve cells. It isn't one small cell bridging to another. So I don't think this technology necessarily scales for spinal injuries - and the BBC site was not suggesting it did either. - that is why I provided this link to the MIT site where this research is taking place.

Quote from MIT article:

This technique, which involves giving brain cells an internal matrix on which to regrow, just as ivy grows on a trellis, may one day help patients with traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and stroke.

Does this answer some of your questions?

I submitted this story with a better description and a better link from MIT.

Actually what happened is this: the tracks in the visual cortex were severed and then a biodegradable peptide solution was injected into the damaged area in the brain, which created a 3d matrix of that allowed new cells to the edges in the matrix thus reconstructing the actual cell connections rather than producing scarring tissue.

This process can be applied to damaged areas of the brain or nerves in the spinal cord.

I think this brings the humans one step closer to immortality - imagine using stem cellls and these peptides to reconstruct damage of the brain and the nerve system that is caused by aging and/or trauma.

Our friends at MIT have shown that tin foil hats enhance reception of government transmitters.

I shudder to think what a whole body suit could do!

There's already a slew of gizmos out there to help couples feel intimately close when they're a world apart (here's another one); this would just be the final piece of the puzzle. All it is is cybersex with moving parts - message with *both* hands on the keyboard for a change. You'd be a millionaire, there'd be fewer wars because nobody would come out of their apartments for weeks, and the human race would gradually become extinct.

Maybe it would be easier to see what Unix is by pointing out the weaknesses, reading "The Unix Hater's Handbook" for instance:

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Which, despite the name is not a mindless bashfest and is interesting.

--Plan9/Inferno and Lisp Machine advocate--

Net Promoter Score is a measure created by Frederick F. Reichheld, a consultant as Bain and Company (a strategic management shop). His article in the Winter edition of MIT's Sloan Management Review goes into it in descent depth, and Reichheld's new book explores its usage quite thoroughly. (The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth)

While I haven't read his new book yet (it was released on the 2nd), he's not your typical brain-dead consultant. He wrote an excellent book, The Loyalty Effect, on how to manage and measure loyalty and its effects to customer, employee, and investor relationships. Whenever I see his name its usually associated with company's known for treating their employees well.

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

I recall there was a post on this somewhere recently, else see this:

    http://lees.mit.edu/lees/projects/cnt_ultracap_pro ject.htm

Ultra capacitors now can hols 6Wh/kg which is only a fraction of conventional Li-Ion batteries but according to MIT this can be boosed to 1000 battery capasity by using nanotubes.

And ultra capacitors have a large number of advantages: no dangerous components, recharge in a matter of minutes, better temperature tolerance, longer durability ...

I don't know why people bother to talk about fuelcells...

have you ever looked at their projects? http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/research/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/#Research http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects

have you ever looked at their projects? http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/research/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/#Research http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects

have you ever looked at their projects? http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/research/ http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/#Research http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects

And Benjamin Franklin was generally against patents. He declined to patent his invention of the Franklin Stove.

According to Article I, sec. 8 of the US Constitution patents are supposed to promote the progress of science.

Hm. You are probably right by assuming that it's a joke. Then again people have been hosting corporate images privately for the sake of archiving some of the more hilarious suff and some corps would do ANYTHING for attention. Microsoft released a rather ridiculous penguin photoshop (which essentially portrayed Linux' versatility) as an ad campaign against Linux (see http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/misc/msad.jpg). I do trust business to come up with such such a brain-dead ad campaign. They have before and they will again.

From the screenshots, it looks like it lacks a Marcus Bains Line.

Oh well. At least we can greasemonkey it in.

For 1) there are plenty of vendors offering pre-configured working Linux systems. Yeah, they're not Dell, but so what?

http://www.ibexpc.com/

For 2) you conveniently fail to say what features you feel are missing. I'm betting there aren't any, given that Linux has Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice, GnuCash and so on.

http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html
http://web.mit.edu/is/topics/linux/equivalents.htm l

You're just rationalizing your laziness with convenient plausible-sounding excuses.

More specifically, learn Scheme using SICP. MIT has videos of the lectures, and Berkeley is podcasting both audio and video streams of current class session. There is a free Scheme environment for all manner of OS free and not here

Scheme and this book.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

If by 'beginner' you mean someone who just needs to learn a language to do simple projects for their homework or something, and who has no aspirations of becomming a software engineer or computer scientist, then yes it's probably a decent 'beginner's' language. Lots of free stuff from MS, including their free (for one year) Visual Studio Express IDE's and free (indefinitely) SQL Server 2005 Express edition.

However, if by 'beginner' you mean an aspiring computer scientist or software engineer, then by all means no, it's a terrible beginner's language. In that case, start them out with Assembly, as someone suggested in an earlier thread. Or, if you want them to learn the two fundamental language paradigms, start them with C and LISP (preferably the Scheme dialect for starters). C teaches pointers, LISP/Scheme teaches recursion.

MIT has much more than a Class A.
http://macfadden.mit.edu/colserv/digital/ordering/ ip.html
When I worked at MIT, I was aware of the size of their IP space (larger than China), but I didn't realized the full extent of how much they really had until we needed some address space for our subdomain, csbi.mit.edu. The planned subdomain spanned a half dozen buildings spread out over a distance of four square kilometers, with dedicated fiber links between all the buildings.
After I send network-ops a detailed email explaining our planned network, I sat back and waited for their reply. I was thinking we could get access to a Class C, or maybe a /28. The email that I got back said, basically, 'Ok, the 18.68.0.0/16 network is now under your control. This should take care of all your problems.' I was pretty much dumbfounded. Where else but MIT would you get this at 25?
In terms of a solution, though, the Class B was the best possibile option. MIT only had to make a quick change to their OSPF routing table, and we were able to subdivide the Class B as we needed.

Eddie Kohler, whose PhD thesis at MIT was the Click modular router (which from what I understand turned into the "engine" behind XORP), is one of the principal designers and developers of XORP. They published a paper at NSDI last year, which you can read here (Warning: PDF). It states very clearly what the goal of XORP is, and how well it performs. Quite interesting.

and more power to you, for understanding what your users need. As a user, not an admin, I can't understand why such puny email quotas are being enforced. Storage is relatively cheap. Moreover, being miserly with it is a great way to get your users grumbling. Storage issues, especially for email, is one of the few things that quickly get annoying if you put very restrictive limits on how much your users can have.
I am a graduate student now and was in a bioinformatics company before coming here. In industry, as well as here, I deal with large documents and datasets the easiest way of transferring which is often email. Yes, I can use ftp, scp or simply upload things to shared sites. But they are not convenient for everybody. Email is the most convenient. So get out of my way, and let me use it as I want to. At my job, our group members regulalrly got hell for being "data hogs"- both on the backed-up network share as well email attachments. And when you are dealing with genomic data, you can't help but use data. The admins just didn't get it. And every hour spent talking to my boss, asking him to talk to the admins' boss about increasing quota, resulted in two hours worth of wasted effort. In contrast, my current IT admins are much more get-out-of-users-way with storage issues. We get 500 megs and they are nice about increasing it, if you need. ven a issue with a I speak as a user who has always been somewhat hated by the ad

bob hearn claims that microsoft office is 13 years behind clarisworks.

"No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties."

Ugh, no. There were many patent disputes in the 1980's. The Cadtrak XOR patent is one of the most famous ones. Cadtrak collected millions of dollars during the 1980s from companies that it found infringing on the patent.

Ironically, I am also the victim of one of the most notorius software patents: The infamous "XOR Cursor" patent, #4,197,590, filed in 1978 and granted in 1980. Way back in 1976, while a student at UC Davis, I built a computer terminal for NASA that used an XOR to move the cursor around the screen. The work was published in an obscure NASA journal. Only recently did I learn that Cadtrak has collected large sums of money and successfully defended patent #4,197,590 against a number of claims, on something I invented as a sophomore computer-engineering student. Talk about "obvious to anyone versed in the art." Had our work for NASA been more widely published, or if I'd worked in a job where I might have run into the Cadtrak controversy, Cadtrak would probably have lost the patent. Instead, I only found out about the XOR patent last year, after it had expired.

From: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2004 101107275739

There are many other examples of software patent disputes in that first decade of software patents. Refac shut down Apple's HyperCard program because of a patent dispute, and there was a dispute between AT&T and the X Consortium about the "backing store" method, which was developed and used at MIT.

See: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/pike.d emo for more on the backing store.

The League of Programming Freedom (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/) is a good resource for information on software patents.

The software industry was growing very quickly before 1981 without software patents, so the point is still valid, although the parent's timeline is a bit off. Currently the largest companies all have so many software patents that there is almost a situation of mutually assured destruction preventing any of the "big names" from filing lawsuits against each other.

"No, the software industry was big and healthy and patentless before the mid-nineties."

Ugh, no. There were many patent disputes in the 1980's. The Cadtrak XOR patent is one of the most famous ones. Cadtrak collected millions of dollars during the 1980s from companies that it found infringing on the patent.

Ironically, I am also the victim of one of the most notorius software patents: The infamous "XOR Cursor" patent, #4,197,590, filed in 1978 and granted in 1980. Way back in 1976, while a student at UC Davis, I built a computer terminal for NASA that used an XOR to move the cursor around the screen. The work was published in an obscure NASA journal. Only recently did I learn that Cadtrak has collected large sums of money and successfully defended patent #4,197,590 against a number of claims, on something I invented as a sophomore computer-engineering student. Talk about "obvious to anyone versed in the art." Had our work for NASA been more widely published, or if I'd worked in a job where I might have run into the Cadtrak controversy, Cadtrak would probably have lost the patent. Instead, I only found out about the XOR patent last year, after it had expired.

From: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2004 101107275739

There are many other examples of software patent disputes in that first decade of software patents. Refac shut down Apple's HyperCard program because of a patent dispute, and there was a dispute between AT&T and the X Consortium about the "backing store" method, which was developed and used at MIT.

See: http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Links/prep.ai.mit.edu/pike.d emo for more on the backing store.

The League of Programming Freedom (http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/) is a good resource for information on software patents.

The software industry was growing very quickly before 1981 without software patents, so the point is still valid, although the parent's timeline is a bit off. Currently the largest companies all have so many software patents that there is almost a situation of mutually assured destruction preventing any of the "big names" from filing lawsuits against each other.

See: http://web.mit.edu/lit/www/

Hold on a sec. I am not butchering anything. I obtained and confirmed the quote from several independent sources. You only provide one. While yours does look like it has been researched (or copied) by that wiki author in a little more detail, that doesn't guarantee it is more accurate. For the sake of argument that yours is correct since it really isn't important at all to the point.

What is perhaps more important than the actual wording of the quote is the point: that trading rights and freedoms for security is generally not a good idea. I don't think anybody would have interpretted it as mean any right or freedom starting from 100% no restrictions. That's just silly.

But you are completely bypassing the point I was making for the sake of trying too be geekier about the correct quote. Millions died protecting the rights to not have government monitoring them over reading books on Winnie the Pooh, or Islam, or whatever (as an example). That 3000 more have died and everyone turns 180 degrees on these issues, without even requiring the government to demonstrate the necessity or usefulness, is a travesty and says a lot about the self-centeredness of today's society in America and the ability of propaganda to scare the crap out of them and just start handing over their rights.

I'd rather live with a 1/100,000 chance (3000 out of 300 million) of being killed by a terrorist on American soil than have 300 million people lose rights like this. And that terrorist risk also doesn't take into account the bungling of the intelligence under the existing system in 2001 nor in the increase in security that could be done without reducing rights and freedoms. It hasn't been demonstrated that these measures are even necessary. In some cases, the response security measures (and potentially violations of rights) are even counter-productive towards securing against terrorism.

For something innovative, see:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/research/media /UIST%202006/uist2006.swf