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Socrates: So you'd like to hear my theory?

Thrasymachus: I'd be honored.

Socrates: My humble little idea goes something like this. [He is suddenly extremely loud and violent. Roars:] Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole? [Slaps Thrasymachus across the face with his gun]

Thrasymachus: Uh, uh, uh ...

Both of you are misleaded, thinking as programmers. The concept of abstraction is totally foreign to the average user (at least when related to task automation). Also average users don't need universal programmability - just "good-enough" one. They would have little use for whole Turing completeness.

No, the silver bullet are related to direct manipulation (removing abstraction and simplifying input) and programming by example (again removing abstraction, and simplifying depuration). I should know, I'm a researcher in the End-user Development field.

Natural language? Yes, that might help to some extent - but only until the first "gotcha", due to the inherent ambiguity, ruins the completion of the supposedly automated task.

How quick is this software? I mean, theres not much use figuring out someones emotions after the fact, at least no computational use. What I want is live emotion recognition so that software can adapt to your affective state on-the-fly. I know this has been done (e.g. MIT's Rea), but are these guys doing it better?

You wrote of how the law now is while I was referring to how it got that way. Now, both copyright and patent laws have been tinkered with a time or three since 1976, and I would suggest that this was done more in reaction to what was happening in the courts rather than proactively. You can read some interesting history of software copyrights at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/articles/int-prop /software-copyright.html

You can decide for yourself whether the courts' actions were appropriate, but you will have a hard time proving that the courts were not heavily involved in expanding the scope of copyrights.

Now, I would have to spend longer than lunch hour digging out the whole legislative history, but it would not be atypical to find that congress was, in fact, writing what the courts had already decided into law, in order to ensure uniformity, etc. Further, you can be sure that established software developers were lobbying to get their expanded rights codified since they provide such a splendid barrier to new competitors.

Congress, as i recall, moved all patent cases to a single federal court for the purpose of providing uniformity in the interpretation of the law. It appears that this court has a reputation for tending to favor patent holders and for expanding the scope of patents.

I would prefer to see congress adjusting intellectual property in response to the will of the people rather than tweaking it after the fact in response to industry lobbyists.

The obvious question is: "Do the current copyright and patent law do what the constitution says they are supposed to do?" The answer is of course both "yes" and "no". And don't ask me how to fix it!

But it is fun to see a major beneficiary of current patent and copyright law get hoist by their own petard.

You can find corpuses of human faces taken with different emotions displayed.

Once you've either collected them yourself or downloaded them, you need to use a process called eigenanalysis which is basically fancy talk for analyzing a large dataset with multiple classes (emotions) using matrix decomposition.

I've actually worked on many projects involving this and the result is an eigenface (or eigenmask) that allows you to transform the space that the original image is in and classify it using any of a number of algoirthms that use euclidean distance.

I know I left out a lot but there are many papers out there that you can find on citeseer and white papers floating around out there that provide a lot of reading material on this.

There are also strategies which require tagging certain features as points on the face (like corners of eyes, corners of mouth, center of eye, etc) and then using the relative distances between all these points to determine what classification you would give a new face. The problem with this is that it requires a lot of hand work to prepare the training set.

Hope this helps anyone who wants to learn more about the actual process used to accomplish this recognition.

Everything I've found out I've written up in the $100 laptop Wikipedia article.

I still have more to write up about the software system.

But little hint: think about where Alan Kay comes from. Smalltalk. The Dynabook. Constructivist learning.

This is not a "linux laptop" as most of you know it (linux kernel + X + GNU tools + a Window manager). This is a Squeak/Linux laptop not a GNU/Linux (to parallel the nomenclature). This is the Dynabook that finally ships to lots of people.

The user will live in a Squeak (i.e. Smalltalk) world. They'll have everything they need to modify the system. In Smalltalk. With other systems on top of it (yes, you can write browsers and email and everything else in Smalltalk and the user can modify it if they should wish. I suspect that it will also ship with Kay's current research systems like Scratch and possibly Croquet

It is sad to see geeks deriding what is, in essence, an alpha of A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. This is hardware that is plentiful for many things (it is more capable than the computers we were using less than ten years ago), and that, judging by the people involved (Seymour Papert, Alan Kay), will come with great software, too. I live in a third world (although not miserable) country, where poor people can climb the social ladder. Hopefully a thing like this laptop will help more people do it.

Some sources say it will have 1024 Flash Memory, instead of a HD, and 128M of RAM. On the MIT page it is only 512M os Flash. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

In adidtion, many of the text books will be re-designed to work on this.

From http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html:

The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports.

I'm not familiar with ebooks or similar, but I'm curious how much data can be stored on such a machine or how long the flash memory will last due to limitations on writing to the disk.

There are always networks and USB storage devices, which may be a solution.

I submitted the story 2 days ago, but it was rejected (damn I hate when that happens), so here is more information...

Here is the official press release from the One Laptop per Child organization. OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, "Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away."

Also tech specs can be found on the FAQ page: 500 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM.

I submitted the story 2 days ago, but it was rejected (damn I hate when that happens), so here is more information...

Here is the official press release from the One Laptop per Child organization. OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said, "Any previous doubt that a very-low-cost laptop could be made for education in the developing world has just gone away."

Also tech specs can be found on the FAQ page: 500 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM.

Call me an old-fashioned nit-picker

"Low Earth Orbit isn't high enough to cause feelings of weightlessness" Can you explain me the difference between "low earth orbit" and "high earth orbit"? besides the altitude and speed? it's the same thing, works the same way. If you got some trouble understanding how that whole orbitting thing works like, mess around with that http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/sp acewar/

You should look up Constructionist learning sometime.

Or maybe something on situating constructionism or it's applications. It's cog-sci + AI, done by folks who're definitely way smarter than you ever will be.

I mean, all those folks from MIT and elsewhere with degrees in AI and Cog Sci who're recognized the world over, what do they know, right?

But don't worry, though - your ignorance is amusing.

You should look up Constructionist learning sometime.

Or maybe something on situating constructionism or it's applications. It's cog-sci + AI, done by folks who're definitely way smarter than you ever will be.

I mean, all those folks from MIT and elsewhere with degrees in AI and Cog Sci who're recognized the world over, what do they know, right?

But don't worry, though - your ignorance is amusing.

As a physics professor, I would guess that I'm WAY better qualified to judge that than you are. Sorry about ruining your religion and all.

I'll agree with you, if you can tell me you've made an honest attempt to try other similarly high-level languages (i.e. not C) and found them wanting. If you're saying you use Perl because that's what you're familiar with, then you're on shaky ground for making choices for other people, or influencing their choices. You say you used to do this stuff with C but now find Perl better -- but what languages are your current students going to find better than Perl in future? How do you know those languages aren't already available? Have you looked?

Also, your appeal to self-authority on this matter doesn't mean much if other authorities have made very different choices. For example, Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary science at MIT and co-author of Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, seems to have chosen Scheme (although I don't doubt that Gerald Sussman would have had a strong influence on that choice).

To bring this back to why I responded in the first place, I responded to your statement that "They really ought to know enough Perl". I vehemently disagree with the "ought". I don't have a problem with your subsequent restatement, that you "don't care if they know Perl or something else".

However, if you're really out there influencing your students to use Perl, I don't think you're doing them any favors. If you don't want to go for something quite as "fringe" as Scheme or its functional cousins like Ocaml, SML or Haskell, I'd suggest that even Python would be a big step up from Perl in terms of ease of use for casual programmers, tractability and maintainability of programs, etc. Googling for "Python physics" indicates that you wouldn't be the first to go that route, and in fact googling for "Perl physics" seems far less fruitful. Argumentum ad googlum at least matches appeal to self-authority. ;-)

No it's: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

Others have posted the whole story, here the link (again):

http://mit.edu/tylerc/www/twt/LQ1.htm

Read all of that great list but "How to solve it."

>> Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming.

This book is great, it touches on some things nobody else has studied before, but it is very dated.

I wish someone would write a new version with updated holywars. We've moved from Batch vs Interactive terminals and Microcode vs Assembly through Asm/C and now Non-GC/High Level languages. Have we learnt anything, though?

>> Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

I've been watching a few lectures every night, you can download free videos of the lectures. Fancy production value for 1980s, too!

http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-s ussman-lectures

I'm sorry, don't blame *any* editor for your RSI; blame bad ergonomics and lack of exercise for that. I know this because I had the symptoms of an emerging RSI from excessive typing, and even worse I had problems with my elbow from too much longhand writing, and I improved it considerably with exercise and ergonomics. Here's an example, do more research, http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/disabilities/rsi/exerc ises.html

Some others that should be read by most programmers:

The Dragon book
Some modern compiler book, like one of Appel's, or possibly the new Aho, Sethi, Lam, and Ullman book when it's released.
Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki
possibly Algorithms : A Functional Programming Approach by A. R. Fethi, though it's a bit light
SICP, which has been mentioned a couple of times

and does anyone know if there's a book out there on how to get off your ass and write some good documentation to accompany your code.

Woohoo, terrific reference to Asimov! Thank you!

The Last Question

by Isaac Asimov

Copyright © 1956 by Columbia Publications, Inc.

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face--miles and miles of face--of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp on the whole.

Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. --So Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac's.

For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but pas that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.

But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.

The energy of the sun was stored, converted and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.

Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public function, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the might buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it.

They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle.

"It's amazing when you think of it," said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. "All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever."

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. "Not forever," he said.

"Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert."

"That's not forever."

"All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?"

Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. "Twenty billion years isn't forever."

"Well, it will last our time, won't it?"

"So would the coal and uranium."

"All right, but now we can hook up each individual spaceship to the Solar Station, and it can go to Pluto and back a

I highly recommend this book for the part about computation alone (there are 5 parts in the book). In the computational part it covers number systems, infinity, and computability and incomputability. Then the rest of the book is gravy for a geek: fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation (genetic algorithms and neural networks). It's the kind of book that gives you a framework to hang the rest of your knowledge on. Seriously, get it.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman) is avaliable to read online for free!

CLR[and now]S is great even if the implementation is available in a class library: it really can help you pick the best algorithm for a given task.

Was it 12 inches. Thats a lot to expand 1 million pixels to. See the specs in the faq page "Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel."
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

Not that it's relevant, but MIT certainly does research AIDS cures.

[MIT's] Whitehead [Institute] is recognized worldwide for pathfinding programs in cancer and HIV research, structural biology, genetics, infectious disease research developmental biology, and transgenic science. Link

Are you sure? The specs seem reasonable: I'm interpreting them as "500MHz processor, 1GB flash storage, 1024x768 screen". The relative lack of moving parts makes it much easier to make the whole thing durable. There isn't a hard drive, and I'm guessing passive cooling would be sufficient for the fan. So reliability would be high. They're saying the display portion will only cost $35, and that's usually the most expensive part of any laptop.

Estimating the feasibility of this project by comparing it to a ruggedized laptop that is intended to act as a full desktop replacement seems misguided. My guess: it's going to happen.

Different angles here: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-crank.jp g and http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-side.jpg Couldn't they've labled it an "Option" key or a "Super" key, or even not used it at all (I don't use it for anything on my Linux boxes...) instead of imprinting the children's minds with the MicroSoft logo? I'm not totally anti-MS, it just seems lame to have their logo on the machines if you reject their OS (and even Apple's OS) because it's not "free" enough. (Same AC as parent, just thinking out loud.)

Different angles here: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-crank.jp g and http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-side.jpg Couldn't they've labled it an "Option" key or a "Super" key, or even not used it at all (I don't use it for anything on my Linux boxes...) instead of imprinting the children's minds with the MicroSoft logo? I'm not totally anti-MS, it just seems lame to have their logo on the machines if you reject their OS (and even Apple's OS) because it's not "free" enough. (Same AC as parent, just thinking out loud.)

Look in the screenshots on their page of that green laptop. From the bottom left of the key board to the space bar: Fn, Ctl, Alt, Windows Logo?!? I thought these were running Red Hat or something. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/images/laptop-front.jp g

Actually, a lot of people on Slashdot do not seem to have a clue about this stuff.

The thing is, more than for developing countries, MIT developed this for kids. MIT is a big proponent of constructionst learning. In fact, the very concept originated at MIT from Seymour Papert.

Constructionism says that when you play with things, and make new things, you learn. Lego blocks are an example. Lego Mindstorms were in fact the brain-child of Papert. Other tools, such as Programmable Bricks/Crickets and Flow Blocks etc. are other tools that came out of the Media Lab. There are several other folks such as Mitch Resnick and the like who believe in similar methodologies.

All of them have one thing in common -- the using of computers in one form or the other. So, while the tools themselves are nice, they are not really a universal tool.

What is, in fact, a universal tool, is a computer. So, Papert, along with Negroponte and Alan Kay (who's a big HCI dude), decided that the best way to bring constructionism is to give kids a powerful tool to play around with.

And hence the $100 computer was born. But then, most folks here do not seem to have a idea clue, and babble on and on.

Actually, a lot of people on Slashdot do not seem to have a clue about this stuff.

The thing is, more than for developing countries, MIT developed this for kids. MIT is a big proponent of constructionst learning. In fact, the very concept originated at MIT from Seymour Papert.

Constructionism says that when you play with things, and make new things, you learn. Lego blocks are an example. Lego Mindstorms were in fact the brain-child of Papert. Other tools, such as Programmable Bricks/Crickets and Flow Blocks etc. are other tools that came out of the Media Lab. There are several other folks such as Mitch Resnick and the like who believe in similar methodologies.

All of them have one thing in common -- the using of computers in one form or the other. So, while the tools themselves are nice, they are not really a universal tool.

What is, in fact, a universal tool, is a computer. So, Papert, along with Negroponte and Alan Kay (who's a big HCI dude), decided that the best way to bring constructionism is to give kids a powerful tool to play around with.

And hence the $100 computer was born. But then, most folks here do not seem to have a idea clue, and babble on and on.

Actually, a lot of people on Slashdot do not seem to have a clue about this stuff.

The thing is, more than for developing countries, MIT developed this for kids. MIT is a big proponent of constructionst learning. In fact, the very concept originated at MIT from Seymour Papert.

Constructionism says that when you play with things, and make new things, you learn. Lego blocks are an example. Lego Mindstorms were in fact the brain-child of Papert. Other tools, such as Programmable Bricks/Crickets and Flow Blocks etc. are other tools that came out of the Media Lab. There are several other folks such as Mitch Resnick and the like who believe in similar methodologies.

All of them have one thing in common -- the using of computers in one form or the other. So, while the tools themselves are nice, they are not really a universal tool.

What is, in fact, a universal tool, is a computer. So, Papert, along with Negroponte and Alan Kay (who's a big HCI dude), decided that the best way to bring constructionism is to give kids a powerful tool to play around with.

And hence the $100 computer was born. But then, most folks here do not seem to have a idea clue, and babble on and on.

Actually, a lot of people on Slashdot do not seem to have a clue about this stuff.

The thing is, more than for developing countries, MIT developed this for kids. MIT is a big proponent of constructionst learning. In fact, the very concept originated at MIT from Seymour Papert.

Constructionism says that when you play with things, and make new things, you learn. Lego blocks are an example. Lego Mindstorms were in fact the brain-child of Papert. Other tools, such as Programmable Bricks/Crickets and Flow Blocks etc. are other tools that came out of the Media Lab. There are several other folks such as Mitch Resnick and the like who believe in similar methodologies.

All of them have one thing in common -- the using of computers in one form or the other. So, while the tools themselves are nice, they are not really a universal tool.

What is, in fact, a universal tool, is a computer. So, Papert, along with Negroponte and Alan Kay (who's a big HCI dude), decided that the best way to bring constructionism is to give kids a powerful tool to play around with.

And hence the $100 computer was born. But then, most folks here do not seem to have a idea clue, and babble on and on.

"unattractive to consumers who will be disappointed by their 'limited range of programs'"

Oops! Looks like someone forgot who these laptops are for! It can be found at the group's website (the big words on the front page).

This laptop is not being designed for "consumers" who are used to having all of their pay-for-use windows software. It is meant for people who wouldn't be able to choose commercial programs to begin with. That said, you can be sure that once users of these devices become comfortable with them a whole heap of software will fill any shortcomings of the default software.

When the group licenses the laptop for other companies to make it comercially available in developed nations you can bet that more clutter will be included. Hell, there will probably be a distributor of $300 windows versions of the thing.

Myself? I just want the hand crank and the black-and-white screen. The rest of it can go to hell.

Actually, in the last couple of models, AMD has been making huge strides in reducing the heat dissipation of their models, beating intel pretty often. Wikipedia has an article showing some of the heat dissipation details..: Wikipedia.
But then again, given that the specs of the notebook show it to be a 500 MHz machine, it is true that the Intel chips of that time were more thermally efficient as show by these websites: Intel CPU thermal ratings and some others including many AMD cores. But then again, we have the AMD Geode that consumes max of 4 watts at 500 Mhz. So... it's really something that AMD is just as competent at I presume.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

WiFi-enabled
"USB ports galore".
Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

seriously: go to this website

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

and then tell me what the heck this thing does? it basically networks with other machines like itself, and then it does... nothing! no hint as to how it will help children. its got more marketing fluff than a white house press conference.

let's be honest, MIT is throwing these things out there with hopes that someone will figure out the killer app for them. they remind me of the HP-95x: a whiz-bang DOS machine that ran on 2AA batteries, and it bombed. if this thing is designed to surf the web and do email, then why not go with a cheaper cell phone technology like southeast asia? what is it supposed to do?

Hire some better professors? ;)

In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.

I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.

Hire some better professors? ;)

In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.

I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.

Hire some better professors? ;)

In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.

I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.

Hire some better professors? ;)

In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.

I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.

Hire some better professors? ;)

In all seriousness, I had some great, great instructors. However, I also had a few professors who cared much more about their research money than teaching students. But I suppose it's the same at every school.

I don't really know how much MIT alumni donate in relation to other schools - I suppose it's easy enough to research, but I'm too lazy to do the comparison. I will say that I'm generally cheap, and I've donated a few $hundred to the athletic department.

http://admissions.mit.edu/AdmissionsWeb/appmanager /AdmissionsWeb/Main?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageAbou tTransfer#q1

http://web.mit.edu/admissions/pdf/MIT_transfer_app .pdf

You have nothing to lose by applying except a $65.00 application fee.

http://admissions.mit.edu/AdmissionsWeb/appmanager /AdmissionsWeb/Main?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageAbou tTransfer#q1

http://web.mit.edu/admissions/pdf/MIT_transfer_app .pdf

You have nothing to lose by applying except a $65.00 application fee.

I don't know if it will happen from what we think of as terrorists, but I'll go on record saying that we'll eventually have a Nightmare worm.

It could have already happened, but perhaps the worm writers had a conscious. There will be a worm that 0-day exploit that compromises a common MS Windows service and isn't so polite as SQL-Slammer. Slammer infected almost every vulnerable host in the world within 10 minutes. I would call Slammer a 'polite' worm as it did no harm other than flooding networks.

It's certainly possible to write an impolite worm. One that doesn't just spread itself, but after 20 minutes of attempting to spread itself decides to stop all of your services and then wipe the data off your hard drive. If a computer isn't directly affected, it will probably be affected downstream by the network traffic or reliance on Windows network services. Those that managed to survive may have a hard time finding other surviving resources.

Hopefully the business world has backups, but can you imagine the global disaster that would follow? In 30 minutes almost every computer in the world is down. Airlines will be grounded, you may lose electricity, you might not be able to order a mocha frappancino(tm) at your favorite fourbucks.

(Not to be judgemental, but in today's world if it doesn't target Windows it's not the Nightmare worm)

By that analogy, I guess Slashdot would be turning into the Beijing Evening News.

Ahhh, you haven't heard about the proof against tinfoil hats' effectiveness, have you?

One of the net things is if you couple together Kerberos with LDAP - much like a windows network
with Active Directory.
Does the Fedora DS intergrate those two neatly, single sign on is neat, but OSS provides
no turnkey solutions for this (yet).

The blurb seems to indicate a version of something like this with a built-in expert system for analysis and presumably, sorting of data. They're claiming that it can identify emotional expressions in video feeds, among other things...which while in itself is certainly no mean feat, calling that genuine strong AI would be an exaggeration.

It looks interesting, and possibly a somewhat more muscular example of weak AI than most of what we've seen so far...but I don't think we need to prepare for welcoming our new cybernetic overlords just yet. ;-)