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better link: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/

here is a larger version

here... http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pictures/a-f/chou/Chou_micrographs.jpg

Hello, it's the misheard phrase police! We would like to inform you that the actual phrase is "fell swoop". Foul kind of works too though. At least you didn't say fowl. That would have been too much.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=fell has the adjective meaning at the bottom.

You already can, I can dump your RAM from my USB key already(After a reboot, even after removing the RAM from one computer and putting it in another) and go through for whatever I'd like, whether it's encryption keys, disk cache, or buffers from IM conversations. http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/boot.png http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/memoryremenance.png http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/memoryremenance-filecarving.png http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/ http://mcgrewsecurity.com/projects/msramdmp/

The latest news on this is that Judge Feinberg denied Sequoia's attempt to avoid the outside review of the machines. "Feinberg said she was confident ... that the attorneys for the opposing sides could draft a 'protective order' that would safeguard all concerns," says the news story.

Interestingly, the story doesn't list Felten as the one doing the review, but rather Andrew Appel, a different Princeton computer science professor.

This is not something new people, I can dump your RAM from my USB key already(After a reboot!) and go through for whatever I'd like.

http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/boot.png
http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/memoryremenance.png
http://tourian.jchost.net/shadow/liveusb/memoryremenance-filecarving.png

http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/
http://mcgrewsecurity.com/projects/msramdmp/ (The MS isn't for microsoft)

Encrypting in hardware rather than software has some security advantages. Keys can be kept out of main memory, preventing cold boot attacks which have been used to break Linux's software encryption. Also, software encryption can be more vulnerable to side channel attacks such as cache timing attacks which have also been successful against dm-crypt.

Pssst: Ed Felten is a constituent of Rush Holt.

There's nothing particularly special about loop quantum gravity that makes it possible to avoid having a singularity at the big bang. Loop quantum gravity is just one theory of quantum gravity. The best known theory of quantum gravity is string theory. In pretty much any theory of quantum gravity, the classical picture of the big bang singularity is going to get heavily modified. The conditions of the big bang are pretty much the only conditions under which you really need a theory of quantum gravity (unless you're really clever about finding some other situation, like black hole evaporation, where quantum gravitational effects come in). In all theories of quantum gravity, there's a scale called the Planck scale, and when you go beyond that scale (e.g., the universe is hot enough so that the wavelengths of particles are on the order of the Planck length), mysterious stuff happens. Because of this, it's reasonably plausible that the big bang singularity is eliminated in any theory of quantum gravity.

Old attempts to make a theory of a rebounding big bang (with, e.g., a cyclic universe) had various technical problems, which have been solved in recent years. In a rebounding big bang, there are issues to worry about such as what happens to causality, entropy, and the thermodynamic arrow of time. E.g., you could imagine that a universe cycles through a series of big bangs, and that each cycle is a lot like the one before, or you could imagine that the second law of thermodynamics operates across rebounds, so that each cycle has more entropy than the one before. You could imagine that there could be cause and effect relationships extending across rebounds, or that that could be prevented by the laws of physics. Some people believe that there's an unsolved "entropy problem" in the current standard big bang theory. Here is a good FAQ about cyclic models.

Just a small correction, but you do hack it http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hack

(v) hack, hack on (fix a computer program piecemeal until it works) "I'm not very good at hacking but I'll give it my best"

You are looking for

(v) crack (gain unauthorized access computers with malicious intentions) "she cracked my password"; "crack a safe"

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=crack

Just a small correction, but you do hack it http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hack

(v) hack, hack on (fix a computer program piecemeal until it works) "I'm not very good at hacking but I'll give it my best"

You are looking for

(v) crack (gain unauthorized access computers with malicious intentions) "she cracked my password"; "crack a safe"

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=crack

There is no such thing as true randomness. You can't measure something without effecting it.

Consciousness can effect randomness, as this Princeton page proves.

Sturgeon's Law
90% of everything is crap.

Sturgeon's Law is that 90% of everything is crud. If you are crapping crud, you should see a doctor.

Agreed. True WMD (as opposed to dirty bomb) detection is even worse. Turns out you're not looking for the U-235 but instead the easier-to-see U-238 that was not removed during the enrichment process. It's still trivially easy to shield your small fissile core during transport with a couple of hundred pounds of lead. See this and this and this for interesting details.

While it doesn't warrant physical destruction of the memory modules, data can be recovered from DRAM for "seconds to minutes" after power has been lost.

This probably won't get read, but I need a way to procrastinate my thesis :) I can't say much about the financial aid policies of lesser institutions, but I do know my college's financial aid policies pretty well, and the other elite institutions have been catching up to us lately. Just some rough figures for Princeton, the median income for a family on financial aid here is $90,000/year, and the average family on financial aid only pays $10,000/year to Princeton. Our aid policies are all need-based, so it depends on your exact financial situation, but I'm guessing that "upper-middle class" will be somewhere in that range. Also, education is an investment, so you might also want to consider student loans. Princeton doesn't make you take out a loan as part of the aid package either, but if you need a loan to help cover the family contribution, they are available.

The best advice I can give you is, for the most part, apply to colleges without looking at the price tag. Then, when you get your acceptances, look at the aid awards and make a decision then.

Oh, and if you're interested in CS, I just have to say that I'm currently taking Brian Kernighan's class, and it's awesome :)

People continue to confuse identification with authentication.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=identification
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=define%3Aauthentication

Biometrics are good for identification.. they replace your "login", not your "password".

Since Dr Felten is on the faculty at Princeton, perhaps Princeton could help him out with the legal fees. They could probably use some of their $10 billion endowment if necessary (yes, I know an endowment shouldn't be used for this purpose).

Since Dr Felten is on the faculty at Princeton, perhaps Princeton could help him out with the legal fees. They could probably use some of their $10 billion endowment if necessary (yes, I know an endowment shouldn't be used for this purpose).

ISCA is the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, the top computer engineering conference in the world. This year it's in Beijing.

Here are a couple of the most pertinent links from his site:
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/whatmakesmusicsoundgood.html
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/ChordGeometries.html

Here are a couple of the most pertinent links from his site:
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/whatmakesmusicsoundgood.html
http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri/ChordGeometries.html

This subject reminds me of a paper I saw some time ago, on a way to use the cosmic rays to your advantage and breaking out of the JVM. Here's the link: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/pub/memerr.pdf

To continue fighting this redundant spewage...

Open Source != Open source.

Just because some guy with a political agenda picks a common word loosely related to his goals as a name, doesn't mean that the word changes it's meaning to match that guy's goals.

There is a world of difference between Democratic process and democratic process.

Real life runs on *nix, case is sensitive.

-Rick

Based on these notes, placed on a public web server by one of Princeton's greatest mathematical minds, where would humans go?

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8673726680080882009

Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

Using the figure from the article, we could then expect there to be as many as 5.9*10^49 diamonds in a cubic parsec, with a total mass of 2×10^26 kilograms, and a total carat weight around 10^30 carats in a cubic parsec. Alas, not exactly gem quality material.

Some notes:
A well-formed 1 cubic nanometer diamond crystal would have about 175 carbon atoms total.

Our solar system has a total mass of about 2*10^30 kg, 99.8% of which is the sun.

The mass of the earth is about 6*10^24 kilograms.

If split among the population of earth, your share of the diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud comes to about 30 trillion tons.

If you merged all the nanoscale diamonds in a cubic parsec molecular cloud into a single diamond, it would have a volume of 5.7*10^13 cubic km, about 50 times that of the earth.

Good.

Florida names it correctly: the "theory of evolution" ( http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world ),

and not the "hypothesis of evolution" (which many people incorrectly interpret "theory" as meaning - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hypothesis Hypothesis: a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations

Good.

Florida names it correctly: the "theory of evolution" ( http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world ),

and not the "hypothesis of evolution" (which many people incorrectly interpret "theory" as meaning - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=hypothesis Hypothesis: a proposal intended to explain certain facts or observations

One of the ways ways by which we know that increased levels of CO2 are due to fossil fuel burning is that O2 levels have been measured to be dropping at the opposite rate of the CO2 increase. But ~20% of the atmosphere minus a couple hundred ppm is still ~20%, so not worth worrying about

http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/bender/lab/research_o2n2.html

Please define 'scientific proof', from what I understand 'proof' is a term that only makes sense in axionomic systems.

You also don't have to look far to see people are cautious about change when lives are at stake, just ask any bridge builder.

Your political argument is OT and even if were relevant it falls flat when you compare modern China with Mao's cultural revolution.

Finally I don't think tautologic means what you think it does.

BTW: Your criticisim that 'it's just an example' is valid but it does not mean the study is not scientific, it simply means the theory is not as robust as one that has been tested many times in many ways. First 'examples' of this kind are known as 'scientific breakthroughs' no matter how inconsequential the subject may seem to be to outsiders.

Do you have a reference for this? I did a quick Google for activex sandbox without much luck.

The top hit is this rather dated page which says:

That was written in 1997 and maybe (most likely) they've changed things since then, but it definitely wasn't written with a sandbox in mind. Actually, most or all of the links in that search date from the late nineties.

Changing the search to "activex security" and we get a nice page on MSDN that says:

No idea when that was written or if it still applies. So, do you have any references on this subject?

Time for some anecdotal "evidence". A week or so ago I was asked to upload a large (2+ gig) debug trace file to Microsoft's tech support site, and doing that made use of an ActiveX control (I tried using Firefox with the "simple upload" option but I just got a generic and uninformative server error). Given the way in which it sat there saying "Connecting..." 99% of the time with the occasional momentary change to say it was transferring data, I'm sure this wasn't using a plain HTTP POST file upload. Which means this control was able to read the zip file on my desktop and upload it to the site.

Even more disturbing was the effect it had on my RDP session. I used 7-Zip to zip it with maximum compression and since that was gonna take a while I went home, and connected to my desktop later that night to do the upload. Set it going and started doing some other stuff and noticed my keyboard was being weird: almost every keystroke was being duplicated. I've got a Microsoft wireless keyboard and sometimes it does odd things like repeat a keystroke a bunch of times, but this was just twice and for everything. So I closed the IE window and disconnected the RDP session and re-connected -- back to normal.

Started the upload up again and sure enough, same problem. Disconnected the RDP session thinking maybe it was just a bit confused by the crappy uploader ActiveX page and logging in again would reset it. Went to reconnect, and found the keystrokes were being duplicated even on the login dialog! At that point I gave up and just left it for the weekend.

If an ActiveX control can somehow screw up key processing for the RDP login dialog, then I have a tough time believing it's actually sandboxed in any meaningful way. If you have references to the contrary, I'd love to see them.

SFX: WAVY FLASHBACK LINES

The lock is easily picked--one member of our group, who has modest locksmithing skills, can pick the lock consistently in less than 10 seconds. Alternatively, this slot can be reached by removing screws and opening the machine. Some attackers will have access to keys that can open the lock--all AccuVote-TS machines in certain states use identical keys [24], there are thousands of keys in existence, and these keys can be copied at a hardware or lock store.

From Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine: A.Feldman, J.Halderman, E. Felten: Princeton University (September 13, 2006).

You mean the turning of people into toilets?

Hear! Hear!

We as Americans will seriously need to wake up to the fact that wasting literally hundreds of killowatts sitting in traffic slowly pushing around a ton of steel and plastic just to get us from point A to point B is not a right, but a privilege - and one that we will very soon be paying real market value for.

The energy economics of single-passenger cars are so far out of whack with any other decision that a sane and rational person would make, it is truly unbelievable that so many otherwise intelligent people defend driving as some sort of moral right.

Ride a bike, take the bus, return intra-urban rail to our communities, and here's a real shocker: put the businesses near where the people live.

To crib Deffeyes - With all the incredible things can be done w/ hydrocarbons, our grandchildren will one day ask in horror, "You BURNED it?"

>>I don't know of any religion that accepts "that's the way things are", they all try to say "no it's not! This is the result of our doing something!!"

There do exist religions and religious texts that take an open-minded view on understanding the processes of creation. I recommend reading the Hymn of Creation from the Rig-Veda. There are numerous translations available online. I quote the following from a translation available at: http://www.princeton.edu/~howarth/573/rig-veda.html

"Who really knows, and who can swear,
How creation came, when or where!
Even gods came after creation's day,
Who really knows, who can truly say
When and how did creation start?
Did He do it? Or did He not?
Only He, up there, knows, maybe;
Or perhaps, not even He."

While there's a political divide in the US, actually more than one, I doubt that many of them are so much rural vs urban as other divides.

Forget about specificly rural vs urban issues like farm subsidies.

Rural vs urban life in the US on generally influences general cultural and social views in a variety of ways. Skipping the hows and whys and dodging any value judgments, it is a trivially demonstrable fact that the rural-urban one dimensional axis has a dominant correlation with almost every political issue. There is a simple direct numerical matchup between population density and politics in the US. If you look at a US election map by county, it goes almost exactly by population density. Here's a red vs blue county by county map with population density on the vertical axis. And I think a significant problem with that map in in lack of resolution - an evenly spread Red rural county population may show up higher than a largely empty county with everyone in one or two focused urban/suburban Blue concentrations.

Even in the Reddest states, the most urban areas go Blue.
Even in the Bluest states, the most rural areas go Red.

Red vs Blue is obviously a simplification, but the mere population density axis alone is indeed an extremely powerful predictor in the US on almost all political issues.

-

Democracy is done.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYA5ggwG84

This is Princeton University, not some wingnut moonbat conspiracy club.

Free ones - both only require that you change your URL slightly and the both work

Coral Web Cache:

http://www.coralcdn.org/

Cobliz Web Cache:

http://codeen.cs.princeton.edu/coblitz/

I'm not a Microsoft fan-boy. In fact, our company is totally run on FOSS and we've never looked back at MS for anything other than pointing out to people how much freer we were without the Beast of Redmond on our backs. But I'm always left a little confused by the monopoly charge and, since you seem to have a solid understanding of their business practices, I'd like to see if you can set me straight.

By definition a monopoly is a market where there are many buyers but only one seller. A good example of a this would be Bell Telephone in the 1970's and early 1980's before they were broken up. In those cases, there were no other alternatives and Bell could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Competition was non-existent. Compare that to the so-called Microsoft monopoly. Microsoft creates Microsoft Windows and a hosts of other software for the consumer market. But, if you don't like them or their products there are other choices out there. Don't like Windows? Go to Linux or OS X. Don't like SQL Server? Go to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or Oracle, don't like Internet Explorer? Go to Firefox or Opera or any of the other browsers that set you free from Microsoft. In fact, for every piece of the Microsoft pie you don't like, there is almost always at least one alternative that is not controlled by Microsoft.

Sorry, that doesn't scream monopoly to me.

Now, people always bring up the fact that Microsoft has twisted vendors arms to only supply PC's with Windows and MS software. They've charged higher fees to vendors who refused to be exclusive and, rumor has it, that they've even threatened some vendors. Many point to this as evidence of Microsoft's monopoly power. I say it's rubbish.

It points to greedy vendors

Do you really believe that Microsoft would refuse to deal with a major PC vendor at reasonable prices if the PC vendor simply said "Fine. Raise licensing costs and we'll dump you totally. We'll go to Linux on all of our 5 million+ PC sales this year". If you look at it carefully, the problem isn't Microsoft here but the PC vendors supporting and even CREATING the so-called monopoly. Want to penalize someone? Penalize Dell or Gateway or Acer (all of whom now also offer Linux alternatives on at least some PC's).

The fact of the matter is Microsoft is not a monopoly. People gravitate to Windows and Microsoft software because 1) it's easy to use and 2) until VERY recently there were simply no other real alternatives out there. Add to that the fact that people tend to go with what's familiar and you can understand why Microsoft, even as evil as they are, are so powerful.

But there is hope. Because Microsoft is NOT a monopoly, competition is rising up all over the place. More importantly, that competition is slowing taking speed and gaining market share. It took Microsoft nearly 30 years to gain the market it has. Its eventual market overthrow isn't going to happen overnight. But, if you look at how fast the alternatives are gaining ground, it should give even the most die-hard Microsoft marketer nightmares and chills at night. And, it should give those of us who truly believe in Open Source reason to smile. It might not be as quick as we'd like, but change is happening.

My Company is 100% open source. We don't use Windows or Microsoft products for ANYTHING. We've never run into a problem that we couldn't find an open solution for and we'll never go back to Microsoft again. But getting us to that point took education and time. And that is what the market needs: education and time. And maybe a few Windows vs Linux commercials...

Who defines a word has much to do with who fits the definition.

The definition I quoted comes from Princeton's WordNet. I don't think, anyone would suspect them of any particular partisanship.

Many in southern Asia call George Bush a terrorist.

Those people (and they are everywhere, Rosie O'Donnel among them) simply use the word as a derogatory without realizing its meaning.

Who's right should be about actions and motives.

Yes, motive is particularly important for the definition.

• adds - Means making an addition by combining numbers.

• ad - As in annoying popup advertisements. An example would be the sticker on the back of your car that advertises the dealership that you purchased the car from. You can't even remove those suckers easily!

• adds - Means making an addition by combining numbers.

• ad - As in annoying popup advertisements. An example would be the sticker on the back of your car that advertises the dealership that you purchased the car from. You can't even remove those suckers easily!

Why do you "disagree" with me? With this one specific issue (software needs admin rights) I did agree that it's a problem and not the fault of MS. I was only pointing out that it's also a problem with XP.

Umm, have you ever worked IT in the business world? Sometimes you can't move away from the software. I worked for an Insurance Agency once upon a time. We were barely able to get our management system (hint: there's only two of them on the market, both with their drawbacks, so changing isn't really an option) working without the users having admin/power user rights.

We were never able to get all of the third-party crap that we needed running without them. Every single insurance company that we worked with would invariably design their own software (rating software, illustration software, proposal software, etc) that we HAD to use. The "choice" was use the software or don't write business with that company. When said company offers the cheapest rates for your customers the IT department's objections are going to be overruled.

"New feature"? You show me a single new feature in Vista that's justification for the upgrade. Microsoft didn't give two shits about the customer when they designed that piece of shit. If they did then they would have worried more about what the customer wants and less about what's in the best interests of the media companies. Half the new "features" in Vista exist to take control away from the end-user.

Hell, they've removed useful features from the Operating System. My favorite example is the removal of the ability to disable autoplay by holding down shift. WTF was the rationalization for that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with this would it?

The answer is two-fold:
1) it's a very specialized research reactor, and,
2) it's a fast neutron reactor that uses highly enriched uranium (not mentioned in the above article, but check out this article which provides all the details -- sorry, it's PDF, but it's recommended reading)

Apparently it's large size (for a research reactor) makes it particularly efficient at producing medical isotopes in bulk. There are only a handful of other reactors in the world that are suitable (about 5 significant ones according to the above report, but an average of 40% of the world's production is produced by this one reactor).

The main isotope in question is technetium-99m, which has very short half-life, by the production of molybdenum-99, which is the stuff that is actually shipped out to hospitals. Making the molybdenum-99 in a reactor is far more efficient than generating technetium-99m directly, such as via a cyclotron.

What I didn't realize about the process, and what I haven't seen explained in any of the other posts here yet, is what the molybdenum-99 is made from, and I was pretty surprised by the answer: highly enriched uranium (HEU). That sentence almost deserves an exclamation point. The use of HEU is the other sticking point. You don't want to have many more HEU reactors in the world, because HEU is the stuff that is needed to make a nuclear weapon, and you have to move it around to get it to the reactors in question and processed. The second article above makes the case that the reactors making medical isotopes can be switched to low enriched uranium (LEU), but that there has been some resistance on the part of producers. Understandably, this costs a great deal of money, but they should just get off their asses and do it, or build a new one.

The bottom line here is that the very limited number of places to make this stuff is intentional, and in the interests of controlling the risk of diversion of the HEU to nuclear weapons.

Also here, here and here. It was probably done more than once.

Err.. isn't it still?

Satire: exposing human folly to ridicule