Slashdot Mirror

Introduction to Computer Science using Java by Bradley Kjell

Introduction to Computer Science in Java by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne.

A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science by Dr. David Reed

video
Introduction to Computer Science I by David J. Malan, Harvard

Check again. According to wikipedia and other sources as well, "America" can be used to refer to the continent or the US of A. Whether or not it "should" is no as relevant as whether or not it does, in this case...

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/webtiming.pdf

I wonder how these events affected the output of a few random number generators.

0ur understanding of how brains and memory function is rapidly improving. This follows on the heals of for example the engineering of smart mice a few years back http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q3/0902-smart.htm. We are likely not very far from the point where we will have a good enough understanding of such abilities to be able to safely incorporate them into human embryos. Ethical questions that a few years ago that were being primarily addressed by pot heads need to be seriously examined. I, for one, see nothing wrong with genetically improving the human population, especially my own children when I eventually have them, but these discussions need to occur. Also, work like this is interesting for another reason: It is yet another nail in the coffin of mind-body dualism. At this point, I'm surprised the coffin can handle the weight given how many nails are in it, yet most humans seem to still be strong dualists.

The fundamental issue with the new RIA standards is the lack the of authoring tools. I have got a number of graphically-inclined friends who are never going to write something with HTML5 mainly because there are no tools out there (yet) which come even close what the Adobe authoring tools can do.

Recently, I sat with one of my friends (who's a decent artist) and played around with Processing 1.0. After several minutes of hard work, it just became abundantly clear that visual thinkers have a lot of trouble expressing what they want algorithmically. The experience was repeated the next time, when he was playing around with chucK (yeah, he's a music dude too).

The graphic artist folks will have a lot of trouble using the HTML 5 authoring tools currently available, especially if they're confined to use HTML Canvas programmatically. I've easily gotten upto speed with canvas, but I'm a programmer with no artistic pretensions.

Real adoption of HTML5 - canvas and video & all, will need easy ways to author media ... not write code.

In hindsight, aborting a potential human in the womb seems a lot less brutal.

"Embryo" is a stage of development. It doesn't indicate a distinct organism.

It's certainly a potential "human adult"--and a potential "human infant", for that matter--but it's not a potential human. It's a very-early-stage human.

You can still argue from there that early-stage humans aren't as ethically significant as later-stage humans. You can argue that there some particularly significant aspect of development. (Peter Singer does so, and argue that even infants aren't "people" in the ethically significant sense. See his FAQ, section 3.) You can argue the ethics of various kinds of human beings. But at least keep the biology straight.

you've just lost 99% of average readers

This is just Sturgeon's law. It is also the definition of "average". The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about any topic you want to name. It has nothing to do with highbrow notions of philosophy.

Of course, given enough words, you can explain any concept.

I doubt that. Given enough words (and a few pictures) you can explain arbitrarily complex expressions of concepts that our brains have evolved to handle. You will run aground past some point with underlying concepts of physics and mathematics, precisely because our brains aren't formatted to visualize a tesseract or grasp the collapse of the wave function.

On the other hand, one might assert that after some point words become a hindrance when trying to express ideas that (for good or bad) are disconnected from the underlying reality. You can read all the philosophy books you want, but the arguments will never gel into a single coherent picture of reality - because each author has a different notion of what that is. Truth is to be found in the synthesis of disparate ideas, but a lot of synthesis involves discarding dreck.

And then you are asserting a grabbag of disconnected notions:

• most readers aren't interested in hearing the full explanation

  and you can fool most of the people most of the time...

• They're fine with a glossed over version

  As are we all for various purposes under various conditions at various times.

• to the point of being a flat out lie... and they won't be able to tell

  The big lie! But then, they would accept the big truth, too. The issue is perhaps that our public communication channels require no referees, no peer review.

• Worse, they may believe themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to detect a false explanation when, in fact, they aren't.

  And this was the link back to the other blog entry. Perhaps we should require all students to have a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer.

The modern world at least supports the notion of subverting the dominant paradigm. The real issue here isn't the ability to discern truth - it is the ability to discern the opposite

I've just never seen a good explanation of the difference of a cult and a religion that doesn't boil down purely to the difference in number of believers.

Yes, that is the definition. At least Finnish translation for cult ("lahko") would be defined something like "A group of believers whose dogma and rituals are significantly different from their mainstream religion" or something like that. Apparently same is true for English as cult is defined "cult (a religion or sect that is generally considered to be unorthodox, extremist, or false)"

Something being a cult is not itself bad. The amount of followers and the type of dogma just defines it. However, large part of cults have common charasteristics which should (accordingly to my moral code at least) be despised. They include brainwashing, violence, intentional cheating and ruining of lives for profit, etc...

I am a rather "militant atheist" some would say and I believe that Mormonism is a brainwashing cult for example. I've talked to mormons and know how they have to leave their family, friends, etc. for a long time when they do (practically mandatory) missionary work. They are only allowed to read mormon literature during that time and their pairs change often so they have nothing that mind needs to keep it's protections up.

This is very different from main christianity, for example, because while I believe both to be false, the amount of intentional brainwashing techniques is a big difference. And scientology is far, far worse than mormonism as they use blackmailing, threatening, etc. tactics.

They aren't bad because they are a cult. They are bad because they are a brainwashing cult with only intention to bring in more profit by exploiting people in extent unknown to any western religion perhaps since middle ages.

That's definitely another option: http://www.princeton.edu/main/admission-aid/

i would, but i'm dumb. and lazy.

That's definitely another option: http://www.princeton.edu/main/admission-aid/

On top of that, conservatives tend to be wary of other acts that don't involve the destruction of an embryo, but are conceptually close. For example, conservatives often oppose emergency contraception,

That's not a matter of being "conceptually close" to destruction of embryos. One of the mechanisms of emergency contraception (and the Pill) is destruction of embryos--preventing implantation.

I bet you didn't realize that "destroying an embryo" isn't necessarily the same as "abortion", did you? By the technical medical definition, "abortion" is ending a pregnancy, and we mark the beginning of pregnancy at the moment of implantation. (And there are sensible medical reasons for these divisions--but those distinctions are only relevant in some contexts.) So if you prevent implantation, they call it "contraception", not abortion--even though the fertilized blastocyst is being killed.

(Note: By some definitions, "embryo" only applies after implantation. But by that definition, the debate isn't about "embryonic" stem cell research--it would be about "blastocystic" or "zygotic" stem cell research.)

In other words, this website is bordering on misinformation. Technically correct misinformation, but misleading information.

some even regular contraception.

To my knowledge, that typically comes from a theological disapproval of birth control, unrelated to destruction of embryos. Most often from Catholics. It's about the question, "Should we be taking control of getting pregnant out of God's hands?" It's not about a "every sperm is sacred" idea.

It may be for some... Hmm, actually, I have no idea what the breakdown is.

I would not be surprised if many conservatives were opposed to research on existing embryonic stem cell lines.

Of course. It's the same question as, "Should we use the results of Nazi medical research?" It's a difficult ethical question. Once the harm has been done, can we use the "tainted fruits"?

Either way, I could imagine creating a fingerprint based on different sections of a song has the same problems doing an MD5 hash would- each fingerprint would be entirely different. If you don't just compare bit-to-bit, it'll be impossible to catch ALL permutations. And the fact is, that's a lot of computing power anyhow.

To be honest, I'd be fairly surprised if they used a method that boiled down to a hash for exactly the problem you point out. I would make a bet they either currently use, or will use, a method that stems from Broder's method of identifying near duplicate documents (Paper: Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents). Using such a method, removing the first 30 seconds of a song won't necessarily fool the fingerprinting method. It might, but there is a high probability that enough of the "shingles" will match between the song and the fingerprint to raise an alarm.

But who knows, I'm not an expert in song fingerprinting (IANAEISF?)!

I believe you're proving my point for me when I say that the people who vehemently oppose the Electric Universe (EU) theory tend not to be familiar with it.

I'm guessing by your response that you believe their theory. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about them after Deep Impact because they were wrong about the outcome of the collision.

Even so, I'll see your link and raise you another: Electric sun

(Full disclosure: I believe in String Theory, even though it rarely makes predictions that can be proven in a lab. I also follow the Ekpyrotic universe model, which is almost as out there as the Electric Universe theory.)

I have read their works extensively and have never, ever seen the EU folks make the claim that the Universe is made up of antimatter. If you want to see what they had to say about the Deep Impact collison with Tempel 1, look here and you will find something entirely different from what you just described.

To date, I have never once seen an opponent of the EU theory who was thoroughly familiar with it. There is no substitute for your own inquiry.

To be completely fair, I haven't done due diligence with the Electric Universe model recently. I tried doing that once with the flat-Earthers to figure out how it all worked. After reading about 10,000 posts of back-and-forth I decided that sometimes the crazy theories really are crazy and not worth investigating. I read pro- and con- arguments for EU back before the Deep Impact mission and haven't looked at it since. I'm not really likely to have my mind changed now, but I'll browse their site(s) to see if they've made any new predictions.

Princeton Wordnet

I am a casual curser too!

Since you insist:
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&o7=&o5=&o1=1&o6=&o4=&o3=&s=correlational+statistics

I digress, and apologize. I merely wanted to illustrate that the sensationalist title of "facebook users get lower grades in college" is an irresponsible claim, especially given the lack of detail in the reported "study". To claim that there exists even a casual relationship is difficult given the evidence provided, and that is just opinion for the record.

Two projects that do what you say that I know of:

http://flashback.calit2.uci.edu/apache2-default/

http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/2009/04/firecoral-iptps/

All life on this planet? [wikipedia.org]

Where do you think the vent gets its energy? Where do you think the core gets its energy?

The Big Bang; then a few precursor stars, which exploded; then the collapse of a portion of a nebula containing radioactive elements from those precursor stars, and heating caused by the conversion of kinetic/potential energy in the incoming matter; plus the radioactive decay of the radioactive elements in the collected matter. All of which are more or less independent of the existence of our current sun.

If Sol was responsible, then Earth would not get warmer as you went deeper toward the core, but cooler. At best, the Sun slows down the rate of cooling by messing with the thermal gradient between the planet's interior and the cosmic background radiation, but that means little to organisms living 2 miles underground.

mdarksbane may be right concerning prehistoric societies, but there's organisms which, metaphorically, are thinking "That squatter? Good thing the last one isn't around to smite thee."

Software patents are trivial because what they protect is not scarce.

Microsoft gets the paycheck for what it resisted so violently, even with lobbyists in third nations: sane patent reform.

Read this IPwatch article to get an idea what is going on in the Microsoft community. Phelps says:

What we've tried to do with "Burning the Ships" is take IP questions out of the realm of arcane debate among lawyers and show real people, in the midst of a highly dramatic internal struggle at Microsoft, learning how to deploy IP for tangible business benefit. As one reader put it, the book is a "thoroughly entertaining and informative canâ(TM)t-wait-to-get-to-the-next-page read."

Marshall Phelps wants to turn Microsoft into a kind of patent troll, or as they call it "open innovation".

IPW: A basic lesson in the book could be interpreted as, 'We were getting hurt by others who had patents, so we used our market power to require partners to agree not to enforce their patents until we had enough of our own patents to start enforcing them the way we didnâ(TM)t want others to do to us.' Can you address that?

PHELPS: Remember, this was back before software patents were a fact of life. MS was just getting a real head of steam but wasnâ(TM)t at all sure patenting was the way to go.

So either Microsoft kicks its bastards out or it simply deserves to suffer from these fines of a rotten patent system.

Ah, this is Marshall Phelps. A dark side of IBM import.

Sure, the recent job losses at Microsoft will not affect their "creation of IP". Look at SCO! Developers leave your company and lawyers litigate you to the ground. Great business model.

And btw darkmeridian, there is no such word as 'jury'-rigged

Princeton University disagrees with you.

Language changes; the original phrase (now pretty much abhored by everyone) was "nigger-rigged", which was actually from the gear slave owners let slaves use; construction and repairs were haphazard, since it was "only" the slaves who would use it.

In WWII it was changed to "Jerry-rigged", also a slur as the Germans were known as "jerrys".

After the war was over "Jerry" in that context was meaningless, but juries were rigged by mobsters, which had pretty much the same effect on society as jerry-rigging a piece of machinery was to the machinery.

There are exceptions of course, but yeah, statistics show that rural-urban is by far the single physical trait most correlated with views. Whether you call it Red vs Blue, or Republican vs Democrat, or deeply-religious-worldview vs secular-worldview, it is very highly correlated with rural vs urban life. Even in the Bluest of states, the far rural areas "vote Red". Even in the Reddest of states, the biggest urban centers "vote Blue".

You can see the effect in this map for example. Population density is scaled as hight, and the 2004 presidential vote percentages are represented in red-purple-blue. Population-dense areas are consistently blue, population-sparse areas are consistently red. The biggest problem with the map is that the statistics are gathered at the county level. A dense city dominating a large sparse county will have the appearance of being sparse & blue.

I don't know much about the megachurches, but looking nationally the rural-urban factor is strong and fairly consistent.

-

Here is a link to the actual research paper: http://citp.princeton.edu/paper/

According to Google definition search...

[...]
* a coin worth one-hundredth of the value of the basic unit
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Both?

Not really. Interestellar travel, is hardly rewarding from an economic standpoint. SeeKrugman's work.

Not really. Interestellar travel, is hardly rewarding from an economic standpoint. See Krugman's work.

That is only because people like you refuse to correct people when they use a word incorrectly.

People have been using the term in this way long before either of us were using the term. It's the contrast to conservative which isn't really conservative in the US either. They are generic labels unique to US political discussion that hide mediocrity and idiocy that doesn't exactly fit into a specific category. Correcting people in the term's usage ends up lending legitimacy where it doesn't belong.

And it's not just wiki that uses that definition. Merriam Webster has "liberal" as meaning "of, favoring, or based upon the principles of liberalism" and "liberalism" as "b: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard"

And yet we know the liberals in America hate the self-regulating or free market. I don't mean this to sound confrontational, but it's exactly why politicians prefer to use the labels and attach the cannotations to themselves and it is exactly the reason why the definition has changed in American politic. Lets look at another set of terms that have Unique definitions like the word Owned. It's the past tense of own which means you have the right or title to something Owned also referes to something having an owner. But the Ubran dictionary defines it's use as: To be made a fool of; To make a fool of; To confound or prove wrong; embarrasing someone: Being embarrased. - As you can see, there is nothing mentioned along the terms of possession.

OneLook has more definitions along this line. Fact is is the first liberals used "liberal" to mean liberty and laissez-faire economics and self-regulating markets. Thomas Jefferson was one of those liberals as was Thomas Paine.

A fish has been called 200 some different names before the University of Oxford started writing down definitions and essentially created the dictionary. It's a basic evolution of language and a common reason to why there are so many different languages that are so similar. Spanish in Spain is quite a but different then Spanish in Mexico and Italian is relative to the same root languages too. But that probably going farther then I'm prepared to go. The thing is, groups of people often use a word outside it's defined intention for various reasons. The use of the term as applied to Jefferson or Paine would not be the same use as is being used today. However, when refering to Jefferson or Paine, it is proper to either define the term as for the period or explain it away with newer terminology. Now I didn't make the rules or the way things are, If we corrected people and still allowed politicians to label themselves and others in the way they do today, then we could easily slide Hitler and Mussolini into the same definition and promote their ideals.

It does make it difficult to follow which is why people shouldn't suffer from group think. But they need to be aware enough to not suffer incorrect assumptions based around them. Many conservatives in the US consider themselves to fit the definition of liberal much more then who we call liberal do. The battle cries of the conservatives over the last 20+ years was individual freedom, less government controls, a self-regulating market or free market and even the laissez-faire economics. The people we call liberals on the other hand, want to hamper freedoms they don't specifically approve of like Gun Ownership, Free speech with Talk Radio that they are as of now attempting to force the airing of their own arguments on with the fairness doctrine, a restricted and regulated economy and market, a restricted and regulated enterprise with deep controls on corporate activities and so on. Yet, the democrats are t

Please cite your evidence for human lifespans several thousand years ago. I'll agree that during the past few centuries they were lower, but in a sense, generalizing past that is a form a propaganda to justify the current political regime.

Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."

Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."

You can see this in that human skeletons 10000 years ago were taller than all but for most people in the last 100 years. Medieval suits of armor show this too -- they are too short for most people of this generation.

The creation and spread of various diseases is also tied to humans living in densely packed cities and with livestock they are raising (see the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel").

So, there has been recent progress, but only after a great setback that took 10000 years to recover from.

Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.

As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."

Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But,

Julian Havil's book, Gamma, is both a popular mathematics book and a mathematics book. It gives both history and results.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7494.html

I believe the author means 'free', not open source.

The word you are looking for is gratis. Not open source, and certainly not free.

While school contacts with the space station are routinely made through the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station program, many of those contacts are made using a traditional ham radio.

They made their own radio that used Amateur Radio frequencies (nitpick: Amateur Satellite Service freqs) as opposed to using a Yaesu or Kenwood radio on Amateur freqs. To hams like me, this isn't a big deal. Designing software-defined radios and protocols that can span Virginia->New Zealand using 1W of power is cool, but making an 5W VHF or UHF radio is so 1970's.

Benefits are as follows:

1. The unencrypted portion of the disk (boot record) can still be tampered with: a. planting passphrase-stealing code in boot code for later retrieval b. brute-forcing the passphrase

2. The user might only need to type in a short PIN number rather than a long passphrase. Often, the weakness of an encryption solution isn't the encryption, but bad practices on the part of the user, including bad passwords. A hardware-based solution means that a strong, cryptographically random password is generated, and then unlocked by a weaker password/PIN. However, the hardware chip restricts the number of guesses an attacker can make, meaning the entropy of the password/PIN is less relevant.

4. Resistance to cold boot" attack. This attack exploits the fact that the contents of RAM can be read even after shutting down a machine, meaning that cryptographic keys held in RAM can be obtained. Hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) solutions retain the key (in a safe, tamper-resistant memory cache) rather than ever copying it to main memory.

Ultimately, the reason for the focus on hardware-based FDE has a lot to do with economics and little to do with conspiracy theories. Private enterprise knows that government and corporate mandates to secure mobile media mean that the demand for FDE will rise. Companies that are responsive will flourish; others will lose market share. Solutions that are later found to fail or have a backdoor in any form will be subject to massive liability, such as lawsuits, as well as massive divestment. It's economics, not geekdom, that is driving hardware-based FDE.

> They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.

    Never underestimate the human capacity for taking a problem, and cascading it into a catastrophe. If nothing else, we're probably the best known in the universe for taking a good idea, and destroying something with it.

    Knife -> hunting tool -> interpersonal weapon

    Gunpowder -> Tool for removing rocks/stumps -> tool for blowing each other up.

    Nuclear power -> clean energy -> mass destruction and constant threat of global annihilation.

    Hell, we can do it with anything.

    Biofuels -> deforestation -> profit {sigh}

    I have full faith in humanity that we'll completely destroy this planet. I don't know if it'll be this year, or this century, but I'm confident at some point in the future it will be an uninhabitable sister planet to the 4th planet in the Sol system. Future archeologists may find traces of something, but then again, maybe not.

    I'm pretty sure someone will be around that'll remember 50 years ago, we used 120VAC 60hz sine wave. It's not too hard to find information on "the way it was". Like, back in 1890, the Niagara Falls plant provided customers with 110VAC 25hz. That wouldn't exactly work for the common PC, but it would work incandescent lights fine.

    Now, if anyone remembers how to work Linux, OSX, or Vista in 50 years, that'll be the important question. How many folks can attempt to operate state of the art equipment from 1959?

    For giggles, I installed Windows 3.11 in a virtual machine. It installed fine, but I couldn't remember how to use it. It took me a while, but I found instructions on getting TCP/IP networking installed, and still I had problems. Relatively, Win3.11 isn't all that old.

    I think the bigger concern will be the physical hardware. Pieces will corrode. Parts will fall apart. Media will decay. Maybe, just maybe, it will even turn on.

    I was excited to find an old "Novell UnixWare 1.1" (circa 1994) box at an office someone I knew worked at. It was still shrink wrapped from the factory. It sat on the shelf in a climate controlled office. It had been delivered, just in case they had to use it. In about 2005, I decided to install it into a VM. I had to scrounge to find a 5.25" floppy drive to install it. The drive was brand new too, still in it's shrink wrapped box. I happened to have an old floppy cable that I could connect it to, and my BIOS still supported 5.25" drives. I carefully unsealed the box. I then carefully broke the seal on the disk package, after reading it of course.

    Everything was going great. I booted to the first disk. It worked! I started the install, and got the bad news. The media was corrupt. I tried to make it work. The host machine was a Linux box, so I tried to make images of the disks, so I could try to restore them back to new disks. The first disk had errors about half way through, which is what I encountered. The second disk was unreadable. I finally gave up. No ancient Unix for me.

    I've done the same for old hardware. The "I wonder whats on this hard drive" game is always fun. IDE is IDE, and should (hopefully) work. The drives worked when they were unplugged (according to the note I had attached years before). Some didn't even spin. Others didn't even read.

    So, good luck preserving a modern machine for 50 years. You may have a cool ancient toy to play with, or you may have something you can set in the corner and admire. :) Good luck finding replacement parts in 50 years.

Of course, clicking on the following might lead to seven more grams of carbon dioxide being generated . . ..

Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation

http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_nature_406_1047_00.pdf (pdf warning, obviously)

When I first read that, I read: ultimate physical limits to [i]copulation[/i].

Oh well, just another pot of tea boiled I guess. 'ave another one guv.

Of course, clicking on the following might lead to seven more grams of carbon dioxide being generated . . ..

Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation

http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/QM/lloyd_nature_406_1047_00.pdf (pdf warning, obviously)

Mauldin et al., ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.

Rogue had a storyline in it - okay, not exactly a really complex one, but a storyline nonetheless... and this thing plays it automatically, in case people don't want to play it themselves! Yup, people have been making self-playing games since forever.

But ROG-O-MATIC plays Rogue automatically... even if you do want to play it yourself. There's no ability to place your hands on the keyboard and take control for an hour, then remove your hands and let the bot take over again. Self-playing games isn't the point - it's an assisting game, such that you can play until you get stuck, let the game take over until you're past the particularly difficult platform jump, then take control again for the boss fight.

Mauldin et al., ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.

Rogue had a storyline in it - okay, not exactly a really complex one, but a storyline nonetheless... and this thing plays it automatically, in case people don't want to play it themselves! Yup, people have been making self-playing games since forever.

Statements like this "90% of their sales staff (in enterprise) would rather sell a product and never have to maintain contact with that customer until they need to buy something more again" make me think of XKCD.

I just Googled "Setting up X server" clicked on the first link ( http://xray0.princeton.edu/~phil/Facility/osx-mskcc.html ) who blatantly say they took most of it from this site ( http://sage.ucsc.edu/xtal/ ) and there, first item in the third column, Backing up and Cloning Disks.

I will agree on your assessment of the probability of them having an IT person. This seems like a problem any user who didn't RTFM and didn't have IT experience would make on any OS. Had these guys ran Linux, I think their actions, the outcome and apparent denial would have been the same.

Note, the last Apple I had the pleasure to use is a IIe and I'm not feeling the urge to rush out and get one.

If you like stuff like this, you night want to give ChucK a test drive if you haven't seen it. It's a programming language written from the ground up to do audio work.

This has been posted to slashdot many time over the years. All tire are being tracked right now:

TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act

the TREAD act requires all tire to have a radio transmitter in them.

http://www.tireindustry.org/pdf/tread_act.pdf

this writeup is several years old now, and it is pretty much impossible to buy tires that do not have tracking devices in them.

http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/repost-of-anonymous-rant-most-cars-have-secret-rfids-to-allow-us-govt-to-spy/

This is a repost. I did not write this. The original writer is anonymous.

TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders! While you drive on highways. Wires in the road and 14 feet above, work fine and log your car movement. Read on for more.

Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.

A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFID chips embedded in the tire).

Yup. My brother works on them (since 2001).

The us gov T.R.E.A.D. act (which passed) made it illegal to sell new passenger cars lacking untamperable RFID in the tires allowing efficient scanning of moving cars.

Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.

Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.

Taggant chemical research papers :
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF [princeton.edu]
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)

I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].

It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.

Photos of tracking chips before molded deep into tires! :
http://www.sokymat.com/index.php?id=94 [sokymat.com]

PLEASE LOOK AT THAT LINK : Its the same shocking tire material I have been trying to tell people about since the spring of 2001 on slashdot.

a controversial dead older link was at http://www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html [sokymat.com]

(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it inserts usually into any of my urls to get to the shocking info and photos on the embedded LOGI 160 chips that the us Gov scans when you cross Mexican and Canadian bord

Why yes, yes it does.

Ok, strictly speaking, it probably doesn't affect the electrons themselves; but DRAM remanence is very much related to temperature.

I wonder if this has applications to any of the experiments done at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research department. I seem to remember some of their experiments being dependent upon generating large amounts of *truly* random numbers, usually generated from thermal fluctuations. If you believe them, they were able to generate statistically significant variations in these thermally generated random numbers simply from a person thinking that way...

I know, I know...sounds weird, but read some of their experiments and the outcomes and see what you think.

It's still sound, it was never intelligent to apply copyright to consumer/home use (I remember a bit on Johnny Carson about VCRs and home taping ... all that's new is the "D"). If I record a song and it's the title track to your movie, I expect to be protected by copyright and paid accordingly. This definition is what works for me:

copyright, right of first publication (a document granting exclusive right to publish and sell, literary or musical or artistic work) http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=copyright

I don't expect copyright to benefit me from you copying .mp3s, CDs, or other formats for you and your friends. Copyright will never do anything for black market piracy, either. But at the industrial/corporate level, copyright isn't so hard to enforce, because it's easy to detect ("I was sitting in a movie theater and TA-DAH there was my song.") There are issues with copyright law aside from home use (duration, renewability), but I don't think it's a fundamentally flawed concept.

I'm surprised that no has yet mentioned Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms in %s" % lang series (where lang in ['c', 'c++', 'java']). It's truly the best algorithms/data structures book I've come across. (Though personally, I wish he had a Python version)

He's blaming greedy people. You can be poor and greedy at the same time. Taking a loan that is beyond your means to repay is greedy. Offering high interest/adjustable rate loans to people who wont be able to repay them is also greedy. Greed is one of the roots of all this, and it doesn't rest in just one group.

Greed: excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=greed

br

I think AC... [isn't] afraid of anything.

I don't think you know what "Coward" means.

why is there a reason to swap to another propitiatory product?

Yeah, I guess if you're into that sort of thing, lots of people say "Jesus saves," and he's been around for way longer.

OK. I know you're big on definitions, so let's look at one for "objective" and make sure we're both on the same page here The definition that applies to my point is this one:

(adj) objective (belonging to immediate experience of actual things or events) "objective benefits"; "an objective example"; "there is no objective evidence of anything of the kind"

Now you find me some objective evidence for creationism, and I'll concede the point.

I should add that I don't regard the bible as objective evidence that the Garden of Eden is the literal truth. Hell, it's not even objective evidence of those things for which we have independent historical corroboration. It's hearsay at best, and it's a hearsay account of a sequence of events that we have no objective reason to believe to be possible.

I found extraterrestrial in the gcide dictionary. That is 16 letters. I don't know if its in the illustrious Oxford Dictionary. But, it is on Princeton Word Net. http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=extraterrestrial

I think it comes from a range of experiments conducted at Princeton in the 80s. They modelled the way humans seemed to be altering the seemingly random output of experimental machines, based on a quantum-mechanical style model. Note that they were not saying that it was quantum-mechanical, just that it was similar in form. Sometime after that, vast numbers of new age types began explaining all paranormal things, using QM.

The original studies are interesting though.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

can't believe I found it after all this time...that it still exists.