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His son has invented his own hieroglyphic language - to him it is obvious what it means, and if his parents have it framed, he will probably remember what it means for his whole life. But anyone else will have no clue what it means.

A real world archeological example is Rongo Rongo, an Easter Island language that was found written on wooden tablets. The unfortuate part is that while the authors may have stored the most advanced knowledge of their civilisation, they never anticipated that knowledge of their language would die out, so no one can decipher what they mean.

So the lesson is that if anyone develops a storage format for audio/video, they should always make sure that there exists some means to reproduce that information.

I opened my old Amiga 500, and for some reason Rock Lobster was on my motherboard!

"The tradition was started by George Robbins - the man responsible for most of the low end Amiga systems and continued by other Commodore employees. Robbin's handiwork was immediately recognisable by the B52's song title. His first Amiga project - the A500 - was originally developed under the working title of B52 and the trend continued to four subsequent models."

Sadly, George Robbins aka Grr passed away 3-1/2 years ago. After Commodore disolved he went on to become director of network engineering for Philadelphia's first ISP, where he literally lived on the premises most of the time.

• forced medical procedures
  Woman who killed baby will be sterilized watchers
• the tips program came from here
  citizencorps

it would be interesting to find a document from the cold war days and go point by point and fill it in.

tin hat aside, i am quite sure the u.s. has passed the tipping point for a fascist state. my opinion is based less on the fact that there is a "evil entity" but more out of the observation the base of the economy is shrinking for and you have more and more displaced people. people say with innovation there are new opportunities. i realize that computational theory is not a hot topic on ./ but i think otherwise forget moore's law look up "church's thesis", hint we are computational processes too. connect the dots and you will see why bill gates is the richest person in the world "he who controls the spice rules the world."

fast forward another 10 years; there are are prob. 100k coders/chip makers who create the digital stuff that runs most of the world ... people 100k in the argi-business feeding most of the world ... run through the top 10 industries you cover pretty much all what we need for civilization ... dunno what you are going to need the other 6 billion for, the mean green fighting machine or maybe just solvent green.

so me thinks : you have to keep people in check somehow; prisons : dept of corrections, tv : csi , dhs : terrorist in your cereal etc.. bravo we have a fascist state. the question now for me is how far will it go.

time to take my pills, lets see the blue on or the red one

guess i can afford both, i forgot i moved to canada 4 years ago ... after 2 years of protesting and people not getting it ... shortly after the coronation of king george ii and people still not getting it ... so long suckas. guess it pays to be a person of conscience or a rabble rouser in fascist speak or a terrorist in new fascist speak ... i forget.

smash the state : [black-n-red]

I run a monthly board-gaming day, and there are NO END of good choices. Here are some categories with examples:

• Cosmic Encounter - the new one is not as good as the original, but still excellent
• Robo Rally - The programmers board-game. This is tons of fun, and can be a huge, days-long event or an hour-long game depending on how you set it up
• Titan - The mother of all day-long strategy games. Fun, but harsh!

• Chez Geek/Dork/etc. - This is a fun and funny line of games which I recommend to anyone living in a dorm or group house of any sort!
• Munchkin - A great game (and line of spin-offs) which pokes fun at fantasy role-playing.
• Flux - This is a wild game, but not very serious. Lots of fun once in a while

• Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures - The new minis game they put out a couple years ago is going strong and lots of fun from what I hear (I buy them for a D&D game I run, not the collectable game)
• Shadowfist - I keep hearing about this card game, and everyone says it's the best many-player game ever.

• New Eleusis - A fun game for people who like puzzles. You just need cards and something to keep score on.

You may not find it interesting, but it's closely related to Russell's Paradox, which was of serious concern to set-theoreticians. This, in turn, is closely related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and also to the Halting Problem, which place fundamental limits on mathematics and computability.

Let me set the record straight. This site has links to various recent studies on this topic.

The U.S. Government does not want you to know this, but all the studies that have been done regarding the effect of marijuana on driving show that it has very little impact on driving performance.

UK: Cannabis May Make You A Safer Driver (2000)

University Of Toronto Study Shows Marijuana Not A Factor In Driving Accidents (1999) (To be fair, this one is a "study of studies")

Australia: Cannabis Crash Risk Less: Study (1998)

Believe it or not, there's even one from the United States!

RC kits for flying lawn mowers have been available for years. There are other rediculous flying this as well, several of which are available from this store, which happens to be the first link on the page when I Googled it. There are lots more where that came from, including a flying witch, flying doghouse, flying US flag, and a flying stop sign.

RC kits for flying lawn mowers have been available for years. There are other rediculous flying this as well, several of which are available from this store, which happens to be the first link on the page when I Googled it. There are lots more where that came from, including a flying witch, flying doghouse, flying US flag, and a flying stop sign.

RC kits for flying lawn mowers have been available for years. There are other rediculous flying this as well, several of which are available from this store, which happens to be the first link on the page when I Googled it. There are lots more where that came from, including a flying witch, flying doghouse, flying US flag, and a flying stop sign.

RC kits for flying lawn mowers have been available for years. There are other rediculous flying this as well, several of which are available from this store, which happens to be the first link on the page when I Googled it. There are lots more where that came from, including a flying witch, flying doghouse, flying US flag, and a flying stop sign.

School kids see past most blatant attempts to brainwash them. Case in point: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE.

We play Zendo asynchronously in my workplace (people take turns whenever they have a break, and we are pretty lax with turn order). This is an inductive logic game, like Eleusis. It's very friendly as opposed to competitive when we play, and is very social indeed as people talk over their reasoning with one another.

So anyone even vaguely interested in photography won't give this a second look.

It's not the tools, it's how you use them.

Ever heard of Lomo, or the even-more-respected-by-"art"-photographers-but-not -as-hyped Holga? which comes with a lens that's not only crappy, but has serious camera-to-camera variance so you have to buy a few ($15 each in lots of 2-5), find & tape up the light leaks, then shoot to find out which distortion you like the best.

Every photographer doesn't have Greenspun's aesthetic.

Some people like cheap cameras 'cause you can shoot on any street in the world without worrying about getting ripped off. This guy has a Leica, but check out his ode to the lowly Canonet of the golden age of 35mm (1967-1988)

Do you know that Leicas from the 30s still work and are repairable, but LCDs have finite lifetime and spare parts mfg a the same time as the original cameras age the same way, so NO Nikon F5s will be operational in 50 years?

So what happens when someone is programming in some language/dev-system that won't permit non-correct program ta be wrotted? Eh?

Ironically, it's provable that no Turing Complete language can be limited to create only correct programs for any non-trivial definition of correctness. Computer science is full of such fun things.

Proof: In your supposed language, there is a set of "correct" programs for some criterion, and a set of incorrect programs.

(Sub-proof: The program "return 1" is only correct for the problem consisting of "Always return true" and isomorphic problems, and "return 0" is only correct for the problem consisting of "Always return false" and isomorphic problems. Thus, for any given correct behavior there exists at least one incorrect program in your language, OR your language contains only a trivial number of programs and as such is hardly deserving to be called a "language".)

If there does not exist a Turing Machine (read: 'program') that can decide in finite time whether a given program meets a correctness criterion, then we can never decide whether a program is correct, because Turing Machines are the best computational tools we have. Therefore, suppose some Turing Machine M exists that accepts as input some suitable correctness criterion, and a program, and outputs whether that program meets the correctness criterion (in finite time).

By Rice's theorem, no such TM machine can exist. (Indeed, it's fairly trivial to show that any non-trivial definition of "correctness" must certainly include asserting that the program executes in finite time, and therefore a program that could check such a correctness criterion must be able to solve the Halting Problem, if such a machine existed.)

Since any language that only allowed one to express correct concepts is isomorphic to a Turing Machine that correctly validates the existance in that language, and no such TM can exist, no such language can exist, unless it is trivial and the correctness criterion is trivial. In which case as I alluded to earlier, it's hardly worth calling a "language" in the computer science sense.

In fact this sort of proof is one of the reasons I seriously wonder why so many people still seem to be pursuing this. (Fortunately, I see many signs that the field is waking up to this fact and good, dare I say useful research has been starting to get done in the past few years; perhaps the empirical successes of unit testing in software engineering has helped prompt this.)

BTW, no offense but I've been on Slashdot for a while, and I direct this at any replier; if you don't even know what Rice's Theorem is, please don't try to "debunk" this post. Many exceedingly smart people have dedicated their lives to computer science. I only wish I were smart enough to craft these tools, rather then simply use them. Rice's theorum has withstood their attack since 1953 . The odds of a Slashdot yahoo "debunking" this theorem are exceedingly low. (On the other hand, if you do understand what I was saying I of course welcome correction and comment; still, this is a fairly straightforward application of Rice's theorem and I can't see what could possibly go wrong. It's a pretty simple theorem to apply, it's just the proof that's kinda hairy.)

Also, your determination that grown biological computing is unlikely to ever achieve its ultimate goal, yeah, we prove that, don't we...

I do not believe biological computing is impossible; we are an obvious counterexample. What I don't think is going to happen is that at any given point, the most powerful (man-manufactured) computing device that exists is biological, because biological systems by definition require a life support system to support them, which must consume space, power, and resources better spent directly on the actual computation by a non-livi

Now, the catch is that during compilation, data and code are mixed in the resulting binary.

Not last time I checked. My compiler emits at least four segments in a compiled program: .text (program code), .rodata (initialized data marked as 'const'), .data (initialized data), and .bss (zero-filled data, which is run-length encoded). Segments .text and .rodata are also write-protected.

Yes, there is a halting problem, but this isn't it. Segments make distinguishing code from data straightforward. I understand that a few programs make platform-specific API calls that write-enable .text would be harder to disassemble (and subsequently decompile), but do most user programs make such calls?

Besides, even if the halting problem were relevant, the halting problem can be solved in a real computer, which has limited memory and is thus a linear bounded automaton rather than a Turing machine.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.

The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Only slightly less well known is this:
Never go in against a geek when technology is on the line.

Original quote from The Princess Bride.

From avi freedman's homepage: the Freedman doc - info on multihoming and BGP.
BR~z

These molecules were named right (fullerenes) doubly: first for their resemblance to Bucky's famous dome structures, and second for their persistent versatility -- who expected non-metallic magnetism? or superconductivity?

Long live Bucky's spirit!

Multihoming and BGP FAQ - has some links to the RFC's etc.

Avi Freedman's site has some very useful docs, in particular his Multihoming for the small ISP, and his newer BGP Routing docs. He even has a powerpoint presentation titled "How to Multi Home" but I have not seen it.

Multihoming and BGP FAQ - has some links to the RFC's etc.

Avi Freedman's site has some very useful docs, in particular his Multihoming for the small ISP, and his newer BGP Routing docs. He even has a powerpoint presentation titled "How to Multi Home" but I have not seen it.

I wish it had a Linux port, since that's what I use exclusively these days.

It doesn't cost very much to buy an advance supporting membership. I wish this page for the current Worldcon still had the prices for advance membership posted, but that info was probably removed when the deadlines passed. The prices were probably not too much different than next year's Worldcon. Act now; for just $35 USD, you too will be able to nominate and vote the Hugo for works first published in 2001.

*** Ponderoid

Of the other nominees I liked 'calculating god.'
And HP wasn't the only Fantasy novel nominated, 'A Storm of Swords' is the umpteenth installment of a fantasy series.

Why would anyone need OO? They don't. Why does anyone need C? They don't. Maybe we should just all be using hexeditors and doin raw binary. Don't really need assembly, or the OO macros for assembly (yes, they exist).

There are actually quite a few Forth object systems. MOPS and bigForth come to mind. Come to think of it, Forth plus an object system is probably about the fastest OO you can get.

On the other hand, you could propose that "Forth" be followed by "Further". After that, you need to *think* before finding a new name.

Ignoring the obvious fact that choosing a name like "Further" for no reason but that would be stupid, one could just as easily say "Farthest," and "Damn, we're serious about being Far now (DWSABFW)".

ummmmmmm, right - Easter Island is in the PACIFIC ocean, a long way off the coast of Chile. Christmas Island is in the INDIAN ocean, off the coast of Indonesia. theres this tiny little place called Australia, that sits in the middle.

I recommend looking at an atlas to help you get a feel for the distance and difference between the two Islands.

One has big statues of heads, the other has lots of little red crabs. Christmas Island is certainly not "pristine and untouched" having been both a nuclear testing ground, and now a bird shit mine. Granted, there is some lush rainforest, but anyway... you (hopefully) get the point.

Avi Freeman has some decent stuff on BGP for free: http://www.netaxs.com/~freedman/bgp.html. If you really want to get down and dirty, get Halibi's Internet Routing Architectures, the BGP Bible.

a buckyball is a specific arrangement of atoms so that they form a sphere (like a geodesic dome). they're named after r. buckminster fuller.

Previously ([37], [118]) I thought his ethics was just confused, but as I read further through the article I realise that Bertrand has completely lost it.

The free software advocates must recognize that some issues are more important than who owns software

Eh, yes, but what does that have to do with anything? There are always more important issues, but that does not make all issues unimportant.

And what does gun control have to do with free or open source software!? Beats me. But even if we try to follow his thread of thought we end up at:

Given the choice between

• a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing .. a disturbed ... [person] from buying a ... gun without any background check...;
• a society where all software would be free and Mr. Raymond's views on gun "freedom" were fully realized,

any ethically-conscious person would choose the former

A couple of points are in order, lest anybody should be persuaded by Mr. Meyer's ravings:

1. You sould always be very nervous when somebody claim they speak for "any ethically-conscious person". Not everybody will agree with the Law According to Bertrand, and to brand them all as un-ethical shows Mr. Meyer as a bigot.
2. The two choices offered are not the only ones. We can choose to free software and restrain the right to bear arms, if we want.
3. I do not particularly care for Eric's views on guns, but, as the saying roughly goes (Voltaire again, I think), I will defend his right to express those views. That freedom is important, and it is sad that Bertrand does not recognise this.

Enough! of this madness. Next subject, please!

A SYN is part of TCP/IP messaging suite. SYN is the first message sent to establish a connection, its short for Synchronizing.

Here is a Document by Avi Freedman that explains SYN and SYN floods in more detail. It very informative and easy to understand.
--

Books can't hyperlink!

Ever hear of Choose Your Own Adventure books?

(The proof of that involves feeding the program itself. Since knowing whether it'll ever stop is dependent on knowing whether it'll ever stop, you have an infinite loop. The computer's molecules will decay long before it ever gives an answer).

Just to pick nits, that's simplified to the point of incorrectness, and since Turing's proof is simple enough to describe in a paragraph, there's no reason to oversimplify.

The proof involves assuming that a program exists that can decide whether, given any program and some input for it, that program will halt. Supposing we have this magical program (call it M for Magical), Turing then proceeds to show a contradiction. He does this by constructing another program that will loop forever if and only if it's fed a program that M says will halt. Then he feeds that machine to itself, which yields a paradox because if the machine halts when fed itself, then it will loop forever -- but wait! How can it both halt *and* loop forever? This is impossible. So, by contradiction, the original assumption (that M exists) is false. It's a really cool argument because it's very simple but really brain-twisting. A quick google search turned up this if you're interested in a better explanation.

Goedel's First and Second Incompleteness Theorems are constructed in much the same way, BTW (and Goedel did it first).

Then there is the whole opensource argument that I wont even go into... why should companies opensource their drivers and specs? Do you expect Coca Cola to give you their recipe. No, I think not.

I think ESR has already made a pretty good argument in favor of hardware vendors opening their source and specs (LINK) .

Companies who spend their time replicating other companies' products, there are many, are limited to selling cheap knock-offs. You can't hope to stop them by hiding your specs and driver code, because they'll just hack away until they figure it out on their own, but why should you stop them in the first place? They're exactly where you want them--selling cheap knock-offs of old technology, while you design and market the cutting edge stuff.

Under march, you'll be reminded of Eric S Raymond's "Take My Job, Please" essay fiasco. If you go and reread it, as I did, you'll notice the following text at the bottom as one of the qualifications ESR said was necessary to have his job:

"You'll need to be financially secure enough not to need to have a regular job. (This one will give you some perks but no pay.)"

Especially not $36 million. No sir, I wouldn't call that pay. That one's definitely a perk.

Melissa's a good beginning example to show the weakness of the internet, but all Melissa did was become a "cholesterol," if it were, to the "arteries" of the internet. Once it was cleaned out, everything got back up and running.

As it was suggested, I did some looking into BGP, because quite frankly, it'd be pathetic for me to blabber on about something that I didn't understand. The only problem is, you need a pretty good understanding of IP to understand how BGP works, and there isn't much documentation out there that sums it up in a dime. Here's the easiest explination I can get for how BGP works (the whole document that goes in to far greater detail can be found at http://www.netaxs.com/~freedman/bgp.html) :

The primary purpose of BGP4 (as we're studying it here) is to advertise routes to other networks ("Autonomous Systems").

An AS, or Autonomous System, is a way of referring to "someone's network". That network could be yours; a friend's; MCI's; Sprintlink's; or anyone's. Normally an AS will have someone or ones responsible for it (a point of contact, typically called a NOC, or Network Operations Center) and one or multiple "border routers" (where routers in that AS peer and exchange routes with other ASs), as well as a simple or complicated internal routing scheme so that every router in that AS knows how to get to every other router and destination within that AS.

Layman's terms: Every personal network out there (company networks, school networks, government networks) works in it's own little private world. BGP (BGP4 is just the current version of BGP) is the protocol (acronym stands for Border Gateway Protocol) that allows all these networks to talk to each other. The protocol is utilized by Cisco's routers, and since Cisco currently has the majority share of internet routers currently in use, if l0pht (or anyone else who knows how to do it) creates specific scripts that break these bonds between the network, the majority, not all the internet, but the good majority of it, will fall like the giant it is.

How can you bring it down? Well, due to my ignorance, I'm not completely sure, but I believe the web site I quoted earlier sheds some light on it:

When you "advertise" routes to other entities (ASs), one way of thinking of those route "advertisements" is as "promises" to carry data to the IP space represented in the route being advertised. For example, if you advertise 192.204.4.0/24 (the "Class C" starting at 192.204.4.0 and ending at 192.204.4.255), you promise that if someone sends you data destined for any address in 192.204.4.0/24, you know how to carry that data to its ultimate destination. The cardinal sin of BGP routing is advertising routes that you don't know how to get to. This is called "black-holing" someone - because if you advertise, or promise to carry data to, some part of the IP space that is owned by someone else, and that advertisement is more specific than the one made by the owner of that IP space, all of the data on the Internet destined for the black-holed IP space will flow to your border router. Needless to say, this makes that address space "disconnected from the 'net" for the provider that owns the space, and makes many people unhappy...Anyway, the bottom line: Test your configs and watch out for typos. Think everything that you do through in terms of how it could screw up.

Layman's terms: Say someone wanted to shop at Amazon.com. Their computer says "take me to Amazon.com". If my computer saw the request "take me to Amazon.com," and I wanted to stop the request, I could say "Sure, I know where it is... follow me!" Then I'd lead him to a cliff edge and tell him it's right over the cliff. Poof, end of request. If I wanted my computer to direct everyone who asked for Amazon.com to someplace OTHER than Amazon.com, I'd just stick an arrow sign by the cliff that said "Amazon.com -->", directing them over the cliff.

Even Lamer Layman's terms: remember the good old Looney Toons cartoons where Wil'E'Coyote would repaint the road and dashed-yellow line, directing it to the face of a cliff? If the Road Runner was a packet of information traveling pretty fast on a network (the roads), and you "tweaked" the network and told it that this new route (repainted road) went somewhere, when infact it ends abruptly (cliff wall), you're going to loose the information (aka "SPLAT!").

For man with no mind: "Oh, you want to know where New York is? Try looking in Russia."

Another place that explains the BGP protocol and actually makes the technicalities of it easier to understand (diagrams and simple numbers), the address is http://www.alliancedatacom.com/cisco-bgp-routing.h tm.

• CTS page with computer info
• UofChi MD CTS summary
• Yahoo! Health CTS page
• Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT). CMT is a hereditary progressive neuromuscular disorder which can be confused with CTS.
• CTS summary

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Home Page

A Patient's Guide to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

My advise is to use Microsoft Keyboard and/or Microsoft Mouse. They may make a lame OS but they sure know how to design good hardware.

Hasdi

Replying to myself, hmmm....

Charlie Parker's now going to paper-publish his Internet comic Argon Zark so you may want to talk to him about his publisher.

Methinks ESR would disagree with you on that one...