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Project Vote-Smart has a ton of unbiased information, including profiles of politicians such as VP Cheney.

Government Information Awareness (cached copy; the site has been dodgy lately) is "a research effort by the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab. It aims to provide software and data to help citizens understand the complexities of their government". I find it entertaining, at least.

Well, if the selectivity wasnt in these colleges, these colleges wouldnt have most of these inflated prices - but then it wouldnt look good if anyone could get access to the best education. After all, we wouldnt want the masses able to move the privleged out of their well established (multigenerational) comfort zones.
Just let the masses in and let their own effort sort them out. Enough that we have some of the results of these selective colleges. With all the money they're raking in, I wont mind if I have to deal with some of the optional promotions if it means that it'd make the tuition 1/4-1/5th of its current cost due to more people paying in. They dont have problems getting the money, so they could afford to allow open admissions.

It is the case. Just like your firewall, NAT devices don't normally allow incoming traffic. What you need to keep in mind though is that traffic is almost always bidirectional. The only difference between incoming and outgoing UDP traffic is who sent the first packet. With a technique called UDP hole punching both clients initiate the "connection", thereby punching holes through NAT as well as through firewalls which allow outgoing "connections". If your firewall has an option to list traffic per ip/port pair, repeat the experiment and observe how the traffic flows directly between the two firewalled computers.

The third-party routing clause is in the license because there are rare cases where it is necessary, but normal NAT and the usual personal firewalls are not a problem for hole punching.

last I heard, MIT was working on something like this. Just a rumor - can anyone verify?

Some things that you can do:

1. Support free (as in freedom) software, open-source software, and software such as shareware or freeware, produced by individuals.
   
2. Support open standards that are not patent-encumbered i.e. HTML, Ogg Vorbis (audio), and PNG (graphics.) Discourage MS Word attachments for e-mail.
   
3. In addition to the EFF, there is the League for Programming Freedom. They have a paper opposing software patents.
4. For engineers and software developers, it may actually be better to not search for or examine software patents. Willfully infringing a patent is said to be much more serious than innocently infringing a patent. See this article on patents. It was written by an attorney who comments that he can no longer deal with patents in good conscience. The article mentions that the risk of examining software patents serves to defeat the supposed advantage that patents increase public knowledge of technology. Also see this article about Linus Torvalds; he comments on the idea of not looking for software patents.

I'm not sure I understand the first part of your post ...

Sussman and Wisdom's simulation integrated only backwards in time, from what I understand.

No. SSH provides you with a secure method to log into a particular machine. However, if you have several services (applications, machines, etc) that require authentication it is desirable to have a secure method of not only having one username/password combo but allowing services to authenticate off of that username/password combo. That is where Kerberos comes in.

In the case of SSH it is quite common that its pam configuration is using Kerberos for authentication.

Check it out, truely intersting stuff.

The Kerberos Dialogue should help explain a little bit about what Kerberos is. I like it because it shows why certain design decisions were made.

I don't believe anyone has mentioned it yet, but so far I haven't heard that the Heimdal Kerberos distribution is affected.

Paul Krugman does not agree with you.

> because nuclear power is cheap and the utilities don't want their stock to go down when [...]

Maybe there are two other reason. A nuclear plant is a a) huge b) risky investment. Risky, not necessarily because of the operation but for planning and building alone.

Next thing, nuclear power is far from cheap.
A nuclear power plant costs a lot of money to be build and take a long time until they get profitable.
According to studies from the MIT (PDF) and from Japanese energy companies, nuclear power is more expensive than conventional energy production and slightly profitable at best.

Synesthesia all the way baby!

An interesting post. The part I find most interesting is "Graphite is an inherently stable material." Pretty stable yes but doesn't graphite burn furiously if its hot enough and it comes in to contact with oxygen. These reactors are using helium gas I believe and its cool they can shut off the coolant gas without a problem but what happens if you replaced the helium with oxygen while pebbles are hot. It sounds as though if the vessel were breached and a hot bed came in to contact with oxygen merry little fire/explosion would ensue. Maybe its not that big a risk but burning graphite in a nuclear reactor evokes images of Chernobyl, and the nuclear industry has zero credibility when they tell everyone their reactors are safe after Three Mile Island and Chernobly in particular.

Here is a link from MIT that gives a few cons especially from a Boston Globe piece:

"But you pay a price, just like in every tradeoff," Kadak said. Because the reactors produce less total heat, they also produce less energy. In addition, the pebble-bed reactor generates greater volumes of radioactive waste material than conventional cores - albeit much less concentrated waste material. What to do with this volume of waste is a significant consideration if PBMRs are to be successful."

"But industry critics are deeply skeptical that the pebble beds are all they're promoted to be. They say the nuclear industry made similar boasts in the 1950s and early 1960s when they promised a safe energy form that would be "too cheap to meter." ...

"There is strong debate over proponents' statements that some safety systems - such as concrete and steel containment buildings - won't be needed. Critics say that the pebble bed could burn if a breach in the reactor allows oxygen to come into contact with the graphite inside the reactor. Industry analysts are still studying computer models to see whether or not this is a serious risk."

See some of the definitions online...

I plan on being a morlock. I will at least need some kick ass mechanical engineering sources if I am going to automate the slaughter process, so I will not be haunted by their screams.

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.

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.

While the animation capabilities of Flash have been widely misused, there are still examples of useful interactive animations that would take a great deal more bandwidth done any other way.

Flash is also useful for font embedding. While both Netscape and Microsoft came up competing technologies that never really caught on, Flash and a touch of JavaScript allows supporting browsers (most of them) to substitute bandwidth friendly Flash for larger, fixed resolution images in a web standards compliant process. And while you might think that the few fonts your browser usually displays are fine, the /. crowd's fascination with anti-aliased font technologies like FreeType illustrates the need for properly rendered text. And if I can't convince you, try talking about the sorry state of web typograpy with your local font geek.

And you should conjecture as to why a liberal arts scholar was elected to be president of a heavily engineering/science-oriented school (MIT=Massachussetts Institute of TECHNOLOGY).

Bullhockey! She's a scientist, not a "liberal arts scholar".

See what MIT board and others have to say about her scholarship and achievements:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/president-comme ntary.html

>Nevermind, just RTFA... :-/

Well, then try this article:

http://alum.mit.edu/ne/noteworthy/ebbel.html

"Hold on to your pocket protectors--MIT alumni have accomplished yet another first: Erika Ebbel '04 has won the Miss Massachusetts pageant, and now has her sights clearly set on becoming Miss America."

Yeah, can you believe that MIT didn't even start accepting women until 1870?

Seriously, please have some clue what you are talking about before you post such nonsense. MIT was the first scientific school to enroll a woman and last year's incoming class was 44 percent female . I'm not saying there is complete equality among the sexes, but I am saying that MIT is generally ahead of the curve on this one.

See MIT's actual announcement for Dr. Hockfield's scientific achievements and administrative experience. It's not suprising that the news outlets all highlight the fact that she's a her, but it is not why she was choosen.
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2004/president-annou ncement.html

.As a language, Java isn't anything new

Actually, I'd say that's one of Java's strengths: it brought useful concepts and features to mainstream coders that used to only be in non-mainstream languages. C++ did the same thing.

Sure, they're both far from ideal, but for whatever reason the more perfect languages have (sadly) not succeeded in business. Since I have use an imperfect language on the job, I'm glad there are these less painful compromises.

As Guy Steele (one of those Lisp-loving geeks) says about his work on Java:

We had to make hard choices about what to fix before releasing it.

And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?

Unless you want to pay money, you are stuck reading negative gifs (sucks when you get to the photographs), but this is pretty good.

Advantages:Provides visual cuing to conceptual relationships, works in way that non-technical people identify with.

Disadvantages: Windows only, I think the data store is proprietary or maybe just obfuscated, memory hog in a "longhorn" sort of way, did I say windows only. This sort of aggravates me I uses lots of OSes and none of the ones I use at home are supported.

Haystack http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/ Maybe more our speed, honestly it's been a while since I've looked at it, but because we're talking about it, time to go check it out again and see if it's out of beta.

Bottom line Brain Mapping software is very, very cool because it leverages how I think (very disjointly) and helps me overcome my weaknesses (AHADA, Dyslexia, gnat attention span syndrome, and having a job (as in getting paid for) using way more of brain than I generally am willing to give up BUT I don't think Brain Mapping will come into it's prime until I'm senile. But still it's getter than what I use now: A word document titled "stupid ways to develop medical instruments and what I will do in the future to avoid them" and "How to look stupid in clincial trials" which I suppose is like Beta for software developers.

How are your own brain and genes external forces?

The brain is an organ that functions according to physical laws, but it's also an organ that's evolved to respond to a social environment where people are held accountable. You don't need a soul or some mysterious and magical process of free will to hold people accountable. In fact, you can argue the opposite of that, because if your will was totally unconstrained then the bad consequencies of your actions under the law would have no power to dissuade you from doing them.

Steven Pinker explains this in greater depth than I can here in his book The Blank Slate , which demolishes cherished and commonly held myths about human nature, including the blank slate of the title and the ghost in the machine myth. The book is a good summary of current knowledge of the brain and human nature, but most importantly, it analyzes those commonly held myths about human nature and explains both why they're false and why we don't need to believe them to sustain our society.

For the hordes of us who don't understand Japanese, here's a Chinese version. Seriously though, this version is much longer and somewhat easier to follow.

Most sensible thing? Well yeah, for the terrorists maybe.

The Carnival Booth algorithm provides quite an illustrative approach how to turn dumb, schematic security measures into your own advantage for nasty purposes.

Or to explain it to the dumber folks: You have a finite number of resources to screen passengers. For example with the resources in Mobile, AL - Pascagoula, MS [MOB] airport they are able to screen 300 people per day intensively. Now based on Mr. Furious' brilliant insight Sheriff R. Neck (known as Red to his friends and foes) decides to do just that and screen every bloody, unshaved raghead daring to take a flight in MOB.

Let's say 296 gentlemen of middle eastern origin have the bad misfortune to board a plane in MOB on an average day and are thus taken special care off by Mr. Necks stormtrooper airport security goons. That leaves 4 more searches for other suspects.

Now here's the pop quiz for Mr. Furious:

If you are Baddy Evil Trrist what type of character do you chose to tape the Semtex to his body in order to blow up a plane departing from Mobile, AL - Pascagoula, MS airport:

The middle eastern gentleman sporting a beard (first name Ahmed)?

The good looking white English chick?

The guy with the EDS clone haircut and the standard EDS 59.99$ cheap suit?

There is no need to thank me.

MIT's AI Lab is in the new Stata Center.

Since you asked, I mean...

MIT's AI Lab is in the new Stata Center.

Since you asked, I mean...

It has been said before:

I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their staff you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to work for such rags as Time and TV Sports. When appointing Mr. Journey to lead Technology Review, William Hecht said:

"Technology Review has long been highly regarded for its editorial excellence," Mr. Hecht said. "It is now time for MIT to invest in its commercial potential. With the appointment of Mr. Journey, we have begun the effort to secure a prominent place for Technology Review in the competitive world of commercial publishing."

I would not be surprised in the least if that article was literally a Microsoft-sponsored advertisement.

FYI, the most complete reference for my research paper was the Ph.D. Thesis for Dr. Alexander Roman Sich when at MIT:

Sich, Alexander Roman, Ph.D. The Chornobyl [sic] accident revisited - source term analysis and reconstruction of events during the active phase Thesis (Ph.D.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Nuclear Engineering, 1994.

If you want to download and watch it tto watch it with quick alternative or whatever, direct link: http://jove.psfc.mit.edu/~mauel/first_ldx_plasma_v ideo/First_LDX_Plasma2.mov

Yes, here's a good list.

Also, how do you articulate a feeling? I'm sure you know what hunger (or love, etc.) feels like, but if you had to really explain it, could you? Not bloody likely.

As I mentioned elsewhere, some languages have words that describe feelings in ways that are not possible in English. That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it.

Japanese onomatopoeia includes many words that describe feelings or states of the world. For your examples I offer "gura gura" and "hara hara" (also "doki doki"). A Japanese speaker hearing these words will have an inherant understanding of the feeling.

Even expressions for sounds are much richer in Japanese which is why you will find American Goodyear engineers using term like "gwooaarrrrrr" and "shhhiiiiii" to describe tire sounds during testing. They picked this up from their Japanese colleagues.

This reminds me of the MIT Barber Pole Hack (http://alum.mit.edu/ne/whatmatters/200304/memorie s.html.

What do you mean by this?

I'm groking it as meaning everything needs to be converted to p2p. TCP/IP is pretty much the protocol of choice right now, I don't see it going away any time soon.

If you mean "uncontrolled/excessive routes", well, yeah. You're right.

Is the change in philosophy worth the cost?

I hate to make the comparison but would the change of open source adoption be worth the cost in 1995?

The Wireless of today is primitive. It's not like RoofNet is going to encompass the continent and surely not with 802.11 ;)

I'm not suggesting the Internet is dying, but it too has changed since the 1990's, much like business use of OSS.

I was thinking what the heck is WIRED poster geek girl Cynthia Breazeal doing commenting on Wi Fi security ....

Must be the AI researcher in me...

Oh, ..

If this post held any truth whatsoever, then the developers of this (and almost every) wind farm made a very big mistake considering the turbines in the middle would never spin.

Indeed, Bloom Filters are the shit.

These days, in my spare time, I'm writing a p2p program -- think of it as a swarm-download system, like BitTorrent, on an overlay network topology, like eMule (only eMule uses Kademlia, and I'm using Pastry). It has been shown, here and here, that Bloom Filters can drastically reduce the traffic generated when searching peer to peer networks. I recently coded a Java implementation of a Bloom Filter for my p2p program, and it works great in testing. (But the p2p program isn't anywhere near done, so don't ask about it ;)

Furthermore, Bloom Filters can be compressed -- see Michael Mitzenmacher's work here. The idea that you can compress a Bloom Filter is a little counter-intuitive, because the size of the bit vector and the number of hash functions are derived using calculus to maximize the compactness of the set, for a given false positive rate -- thus, in this state, it is non-compressable (it is "already compressed" by simply being an optimal Bloom Filter). To compress a bloom filter, you must choose a large bit vector, and a non-optimal number of hash functions, then apply the compression algorithm (typically arithmetic coding). Because the bit vector is so large, it is sparsely populated -- and so compression works.

Often you can save 10% and 20% on the size of your bloom filter, while having a lower false positive rate. Score!

A very nice, very interesting survey of all the applications of Bloom Filters can be found here.

- sm

Thank you for taking the time for your response.

Saturn's missing ring spokes.
"scientists are already puzzling over the noticeable absence of the ghostly spoke-like dark markings in the rings first seen by Voyager on its approach to the planet 23 years ago"

Oxygen on Venus
"An unexpected sign of atomic oxygen has been found in spectroscopic data of Venus' atmosphere. This comes as a major surprise since data from earlier studies had shown molecular oxygen, O2 and ozone, but not single oxygen atoms.

It wasn't just a weak trace of atomic oxygen either. The data shows a green line nearly as intense as the glow from Earth's atmosphere, even after taking that effect into account in the ground based data.

"I certainly trust those data," stated Dr. Crisp. "Something weird is going on in the upper atmosphere of Venus."

The first bottom line is that we just don't know what's going on."

Hot Io Temperatures
"In its chilly corner of the universe, Io needs to release its inner heat, just as a cup of hot coffee cools by releasing steam. Scientists have known for a while that Io is the solar system's most volcanically active planetary body. Yet scientists were surprised by the extreme temperatures.

"Given Io's intense vulcanism, we expect extreme differentiation," McEwen says. "The evidence suggests we're seeing heavy magma erupt to the surface. How do we explain that? It's harder for dense material to rise through a low-density crust, although this has occurred on Earth's moon. Perhaps some process mixes the crust back into Io's interior, so the crust has a higher density."

On Earth, the tectonic plates move slowly around the surface, forming new crust at mid-ocean ridges, for example, and recycling oceanic crust into the hot mantle where two plates collide, one diving under the other. Scientists don't know yet how to explain what's happening on Io."

I am interested in your explanation about precipitative heating, but I don't see any information on it. A quick google for "precipitative heating" "gas giants" returns zero results. I have to say I still find it hard to believe that denser elements sinking would cause greater energy radiation than the entire planet is receiving from the Sun though, or that this process is still going strong after billions of years.

Puzzling Seasons and Signs of Wind Found on Pluto
"Seasonal change on Pluto is causing the planet to warm up even as it moves away from the Sun, according to two studies that also detected the first firm signs of weather on the tiny planet.

In a deeper analysis of data first announced in October, researchers now say Pluto's atmospheric pressure doubled since 1988. They say the average global temperature must have climbed, too, by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius)."

Pluto is undergoing global warming, researchers find
"Pluto is undergoing global warming, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in the planet's atmospheric pressure during the past 14 years

"This is a very complex process, and we just don't know what is causing these effects" on Pluto's surface, Elliot said."

---------------

So it still appears to me, regardless of Hoagland's wild rantings, that there are indeed large scale planetary phenomena going on in the solar system which scientists are at a loss to adequately explain. The bottom line is that we seem to have a rather limited understanding of planetary climate change.

Subsequently, I am concerned that similar rapid and global change coul

Wasn't the statistical formula in questions created by Dartmouth College professor Andrew Bernard and Berkeley's Meghan Busse? Did John Hawksworth from PricewaterhouseCoopers really come up with this formula? Are the editors and fact checkers over at MIT's 'Review of Economics and Statistics' slacking off?

I've been saying this for years: we already have robots capable of handling themselves in alien environments. They won't get stuck, because they learn. They won't get their rollers caught, because they walk. Rodney Brooks has been working on them for decades now. The small ones are built with off-the-shelf parts.
We can make a big batch of the cheap self-propelled ones, and then send them plus one or two big control-from-home bots. We let the little guys run around, and then send out the big specimen-gathering ones ourselves if anything looks interesting.

Notice who they got to compare Linux and SVRX (and AIX and Sequent) code against each other?

A REAL LIFE MIT scientist... and not just any fictitious MIT scientist.... but Dr. Randall Davis, Director of Research for CSAIL.

i read that and said to myself... wholly fscking shit... THAT is funny.

The relevant bit from:

Pure Crypto Project

which was 'cited' from:

http://diswww.mit.edu/bloom-picayune/crypto/13190

-- begin quote --
Adi Shamir once proposed the following hash function:

Let n = p*q be the product of two large primes, such that
factoring n is believed to be infeasible.

Let g be an element of maximum order in Z_n^* (i.e. an
element of order lambda(n) = lcm(p-1,q-1)).

Assume that n and g are fixed and public; p and q are secret.

Let x be an input to be hashed, interpreted as a
non-negative integer. (Of arbitrary length; this may be
considerably larger than n.)

Define hash(x) = g^x (mod n).

Then this hash function is provably collision-resistant, since
the ability to find a collision means that you have an x and
an x' such that

hash(x) = hash(x')

which implies that

x - x' = k * lambda(n)

for some k. That is a collision implies that you can find a
multiple of lambda(n). Being able to find a multiple of lambda(n)
means that you can factor n.

I would suggest this meets the specs of your query above.

Cheers,
Ron Rivest

Ronald L. Rivest
Room 324, 200 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139
Tel 617-253-5880, Fax 617-258-9738, Email
-- end quote --

My question is that does such a hash function live up to Shamir's and Rivest's claims? If so, such hash functions are a lot simpler to understand, use, and implement in software. Apart from the 'factoring n' bit, I can see no problems with this hash function as well but I am not a 'hardcore' mathematician like Rivest and Shamir are.

PS: Please help me decode the following:

0x0d0a (568518) 's signature line:

US War on Terror victories: an old chess champion, a student volunteer forum moderator, a US-planted mole. Proud?

old chess champion = Robert James 'Bobby' Fischer.

So who are the other two?

I cannot ask 0x0d0a by email, he/she won't give their email address out.

Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
SpamByte code: 7
(see http://www.cf13.com/game-over-spammers.htm )
http://www.cf13.com/press-release.htm
All email containing unwanted content will be summarily deleted or reported as spam.

Well, it wasn't me that linked to that paper. But try this for an overview.

With a reversible machine you aren't changing its state in that sense; it will still use energy, but it's not clear there's a hard lower bound.

Now, actually building one of these and getting it to do anything useful is a whole other issue; to date as far as I know reversible computers are research toys and simulations, not practical compute engines.

Maybe I'm naive, but I think it's at least slightly possible that people in the government are trying to make it harder for thousands of people to be blown up.

Yes, you ARE naive. A perfect example is the CAPSII system of profiling suspects to search at the airport instead of a blanket random search. It's mathematically provable that the CAPS2 system is LESS secure and has a gaping fundamental loophole that terrorists can exploit that random sampling does not. But, to the ignorant, profiling SOUNDS much safer, since all the dark-skinned poor people can be pulled out of line and harassed, so it was enacted by the government.

(For mor information go look here)

And a personal anecdote: I was flying home from Japan once, and was searched 6 times during that adventure. The entire time I had a hermetically sealed biohazard box given to me by a hospital worker to put my home-made super-hot hot-sauce in, complete with all sorts of biohazard flowers and warnings that the content was amazingly dangerous. It wasn't some joke box, it was the real deal from a real AIDS hospital that a friend nursed at. This was looked at and passed over by not less than 15 different people who did not open it or even look twice.

They did take away my Korean chopsticks (made of metal, but not sharp or anything).

Your government is not trying to protect you at all. They ARE trying to offer you the slight illusion of protection and betting on the fact that the 9/11 events were a fluke.

In a similar exercise, a pair of business professors have predicteding the final Olympic medal count using socio-economic data rather than athletic performance. Andrew Bernard and Meghan Busse developed their methodology using four factors: population, per capita income, past performance, and a host effect.
They were 96% accurate in their predictions for the 2000 Games, including correctly guessing 97 total and 37 gold medals for the USA. Also discussed is why some countries, such as Australia, surpass expectations while others, particularly Canada and Japan, underperform relative to countries with similar populations/national income.
This year's predicted winners? The USA (93), Russia (83) and China (57). The full paper was published in the Feb 2004 Review of Economics and Statistics - summary here.

Absolutely. Also PERL, LISP, and MAC (unless you mean Project MAC). Some may have begun as acronyms, but there's no justification for capitalizing them now.

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.