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Trademarks are easier to defend if they are not already commonly used words.

Trademarks are easier to defend if they are not already commonly used words.

(I'm not the original author but here are two)
Tiny C
LCC

No official word yet on whether the company thinks there are any infringers.

This is really old news. RHex has been around for at least a few years now.

Bob Full is one of the lead scientists on the RHex project. His biomimetic approach is amazing. See the following link for one of his lectures.

Robert Full: "Bipedal bugs, galloping ghosts and gripping geckos: BioInspiration for Rapid Running Robots"
http://www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/

J Wolfgang Goerlich

I admit that DBC is no magic bullet. It's possible for a not-so-perfectly-tested module to have a defect such that it does not fulfill its contract. However, Sun has a vested economic interest in making the Java platform more reliable than the Windows platform alone; to this end, its developers most likely use elements of several software defect control methodologies in the JVM.

Let's try the empirical route. When and where have you learned of a critical bug in the Java platform's type safety as implemented, other than one caused by a hardware fault?

Tell that to the neutrino guys I've worked with.

Neutrinos have non-zero rest mass, and hence are known and detectable dark matter. (It's worth noting, though, that they're "hot" dark matter, and "cold" dark matter is more like what you're complaining about. Neutrinos also only account for maybe 20% of the needed dark matter.)

The article is very misleading. PlanetLab is primarily developed by Princeton University. The claim that the network was "funded by Intel" is a huge exaggeration: Intel has merely donated some of the original servers, which are now only a fraction of the total number of PlanetLab servers.

You can read a more informative article about the background here:
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/03/q2/0624-planet lab.htm

Furthermore, I'd like to point out that most of the work on the PlanetLab infrastructure is done by grad students at Princeton University, not by Intel.

Princeton Professor Sam Wang's Electoral College Meta-Analysis

Ed Fitzgerald's Electoral College Survey (updated on his blog)

From the article it seems like Fleischmann saw more energy coming out than he put in (up to 250% apparently) and thought to himself:

"Aha! This must be cold fusion."

Is it just me, or does that seem to be a bit of a leap of faith? After all, if one sets light to petrol one gets more energy out than a match puts in. Surely there are other possibilities.

Occam's razor anyone?

I'm not sure about "strong evidence" from a single research laboratory either...

ChucK is a "concurrent, on-the-fly audio programming language", designed from the ground up precisely for this application: live programming of generative music.

Hmm - only just seen the irony- people who see the iconic raincoat, worn by geeks (okay not for along time - only the BSD Guys) and train spotters alike, as the name of a computer that spells the path out of geekiness.

At the end of a google "define macintosh" you get this definition - http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stag e=1&word=macintosh

MIT is following the lead of another fine institution.

President Tighlman was installed in 2001. Her background is also in the life sciences.

Normally I would never reply to a sig but in this case I feel it is important. The water I drink every day comes from my backyard and your sig seems to be encouraging people to pour used motor oil on their lawn to fertilize it. If any of my neighbors were to do this they would not only contaminate their own water supply but the well water of everyone in this neighborhood. One quart of oil can contaminate tens of thousands of gallons in an aquifer or even millions of gallons when spread into a slick on a body of water. And when it is in an aquifer it can take decades to dissipate. Please read some of these links:
http://www.nj.gov/dep/watershedmgt/cleanwaterbook/ waterbook_chp10.htm
http://www.co.miami-dade.fl.us/derm/Tips/you_help_ dispose_oil.asp
http://www.princeton.edu/~njh2o/tips.htm

Pouring oil on the soil can make groundwater unsafe to drink at high concentrations, taste bad at low concentrations, raise your taxes due to government mandated cleanups. Please don't encourage anyone to do that.

For the billionth time. Apple did use a proprietary standard. Here's the "licence"

http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/stan dard.html

AAC, MP4, whatever, it's owned.

By the way, it's spelled "proprietary".

http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn?stag e=1&word=proprietary

Before you post, perhaps you might consider checking out your assumptions and spelling.

From Wordnet here;

1. brilliant, superb -- (of surpassing excellence; "a brilliant performance"; "a superb actor")
2. brainy, brilliant, smart as a whip -- (having or marked by unusual and impressive intelligence; "some men dislike brainy women"; "a brilliant mind"; "a brilliant solution to the problem")
3. brilliant, glorious, magnificent, splendid -- (characterized by or attended with brilliance or grandeur; "the brilliant court life at Versailles"; "a glorious work of art"; "magnificent cathedrals"; "the splendid coronation ceremony")
4. bright, brilliant, vivid -- (having striking color; "bright greens"; "brilliant tapestries"; "a bird with vivid plumage")
5. brilliant -- (full of light; shining intensely; "a brilliant star"; "brilliant chandeliers")
6. bright, brilliant -- (clear and sharp and ringing; "the bright sound of the trumpet section"; "the brilliant sound of the trumpets")

Actually the word I've heard used to make the disctintion is "Amerindian" for those from North or South America.

Since you seem to be ignorant, I will try to educate you here. From Princeton University

principle, rule -- (a basic generalization that is accepted as true and that can be used as a basis for reasoning or conduct; "their principles of composition characterized all their works")

CIAB-X (Computer In A Bag-X). You can overclock the system by jumbling the chips to get more optimal chip layouts. All powered by microwave.

... Or I could jumble these chips around: http://www.princeton.edu/~jpredd/pictures/India/la ys.jpg

Princeton has a 6000x3000 resolution on an 8' by 18' display using 8 rear projectors:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/omnimedia/

There's a word for this idea that we should keep unecessary jobs at all costs and to hell with the price of the finished product. Communism.

NO! Having no ownership rights to your personal property, that's communism... or palladium I forget which.

A hypocrite is a person who professes beliefs and opinions that he does not hold. I don't believe that's the case here... rather; it's a bit rich to here about media consilidation evils coming from such a man - But the more Ted Turner represents the very media consolidation he now says are so detrimental, the more you should take his arguments seriously. I can hardly image a more appropriate preacher for this gospel :-). --Eamon

If it's "copy protected", it's not a CD.

Not exactly true. Every copyprotected CD-like disc out there relies to one of the following tricks:

a. Deliberate RedBook errors on audio tracks. Used at least on Cactus Data Shield discs
b. Data session at the end of the disc left deliberately unclosed. Used at least on Sony Key2Audio discs
c. Audio obfuscation driver that relies on Windows autoplay for installation. Used at least on SunnComm MediaMax discs (complete analysis here).

In the case c, the disc is perfectly standards compatible CD -- it could even have the CD-DA-logo. If the copy protection hurts you because you're using Windows and had Autoplay on -- well, bad for you, but on other OSes -- like OS X or Linux -- there are no problems ripping these CDs whatsoever. Neither in Windows, if you don't let autoplay run.

The bad thing is obviously, that it is damn hard to find out what was the technology used, as even the non-copyprotected discs often lack the logo nowadays. But I think most shops will normally accept returning of copyprotected CDs, if you'll just claim that they didn't work in your stereo CD player. In case of C, you don't really need to -- the disc will work, if you don't just act like a fool by letting Windows autoplay it.

Case A is usually worst, as these discs do not stand physical damage as well as standard discs. Deliberate errors also forces to use special tools when ripping. OTOH, in thgis case the copy will be better in quality terms than the original. In case B most drives are able to rip the audio tracks succesfully, at least using special software. There are some drives, though, which refuse to ever recognise these discs at all.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but sexual relations (the legal def as intercourse or otherwise!) by a boss with an underling is essentially the essence of sexual harrassment right?

Since you ask, you are wrong.

Only in the mentality of the US Christian Ayathollas it is comparable to have a blow job and try to hide it to sacrifiying thousends of lives based on false pretenses.

I know which politician did something about peace and combating terrorism (Clinton in Northern Ireland, or pushing the Middleast peace process, that only failed due to the pigheadness of ARafat and his cronies). And I know which one has worsened things (great, we now have another unestable country leaning towards fundamentalism with a hurt pride to avenge).

No brainer honestly.

This is a bald-faced "Urban Myth" go back and review the facts of the 2000 election and you'll find the Supreme Court in reality ended up being a non-factor in the outcome of the election.

American

Grow up!

Considering irony is "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs", ironic would be a project named Entropy staying together. A project named Entropy coming apart perfectly congruous IMHO. So there.

In Why Men Won't Ask for Directions , Richard Francis exposes the hollowness of much sociobiological science with a detailed analysis based on work in developmental biology. He shows that much of what is pointed to as evidence by sociobiologists as the action of evolution is actually explained by the underlying biochemistry; in many cases, the behaviours are an artifact of developmental biology -- like nipples on men -- rather than the result of evolutionary pressure.

The book is fun, you will never see sex and gender the same way. He leads you through the lives of some bizarre vertebrates, while elaborating his vivid argument against both the 'science' and the underlying philosophical approach of the sociobiologists. It's an eye-opener for all who have only heard the sociobiologists and their non-scientific opponents.

He wrote The Computer from Pascal to Von Neuman besides working on the ENIAC. An excellent read.

4 degrees centigrade at a pressure of 760 mm of mercury.

See here. Note, one liter is the volume of a cube .1 meter on each edge. 1 cubic meter is 1000 liters.

Likewise a calorie is the amount of energy necessary to heat one gram of water up one degree (from 14 to 15 deg C IIRC) at 760 mm of mercury pressure

4 degrees centigrade at a pressure of 760 mm of mercury.

See here. Note, one liter is the volume of a cube .1 meter on each edge. 1 cubic meter is 1000 liters.

Likewise a calorie is the amount of energy necessary to heat one gram of water up one degree (from 14 to 15 deg C IIRC) at 760 mm of mercury pressure

Actually, the lyrics are:

Check it out
What DRM is all about
Work it out
Let's turn this motherfuckin' operating system out

All that skipping is just from the DRM.

Khan is actually a title used in many asian languages, sort of like "sir" in English. Here's a definition.

The "kh" has a special pronunciation, as per this page: 'occurs in Hebrew and Arabic, in the German pronunciation of Nacht, or in the Scottish pronunciation of "Loch" (a voiceless velar fricative).' or the Dutch pronunciation of G in Gronigen.

But as is unfortunately the case too often, this is all lost on the average American.

-hadohk

My guess is that he simply had Autorun disabled, and that's why he didn't notice it. (Yes, the protection is that weak ...).

I find it funny reading all these outraged posts about how the disc is not valid red book, etc, etc.

The protection on this disc is very light, and will really only catch the casual user. If you know what you're doing, it's very easy to bypass.

I find this protection a breath of fresh air. It is almost as if the publisher is saying "Here. If you know enough to bypass this, presumably you understand copyright law and won't swap files." No scheme will stop a dedicated cracker, so they offer one that doesn't even try. In fact, the publishers even acknowledge it isn't a very secure scheme. Yes, their trust is probably naive, but that's their problem not mine.

See this article for a description of MediaMax.

In this case, the CD uses MediaMax protection. MediaMax protection does not involve any of the tricks you listed.

See this article for a description of MediaMax.

Of course, you still need to hike around a whopping big capacitor bank to have this work over any reasonable distance, and the repeat rate of fire would probably be lousy since the capacitors would have to be recharged....

Regarding item 2, I had a colleague at a University I worked at, which had a "proof" (I didn't look into it and it wasn't published but rather a good discussion and it was a bright guy) that a garbage collector was faster, in theory, in certain situations.

In a copying garbage collector, the work required is proportional to the live memory. With manual memory management, the work is proportional to the amount of garbage. So given enough memory, garbage collection will always be faster, "even if the cost of freeing a cell is only a single machine instruction" (Appel). Garbage Collection Can Be Faster Than Stack Allocation by said Appel is a good start if you want to know more.

The key phrase here is "given enough memory". And in my experience, I've never succeeded in giving real Java programs enough memory :->.

Ditto. For more info, check out a course I'm taking next semester that's taught by Ed Felten on Information Security. Part of it is designing security procedures into systems.

I designed one of the problem sets (homework assignments) for the intro CS course at Princeton University. The assignment is a digital signal processing one where you animate waveforms from an mp3, generate your own sound waves, and add a basic filter to a sound wave. All the sound stuff including decoding the mp3 file is done for you, you just have to manipulate the data. The assignment was intended to teach the use of objects in Java (we had students create a Wave class that had some built in capabilities to add two sound waves together, amplify/attenuate sound waves, and generate waves of a given amplitude frequency - musical notes are characterized by their frequency), and make them deal w/ arrays. FYI, here is the assignment. N.B: I'm sure I screwed up some technical sound details in there

Point of the post: I got responses ranging from I hate it to this assignment made me want to be a CS major. The people who were interested in CS/math/sciences loved it because they got to do something fun fairly simply. Those who were taking the course to fulfill a requirement or to dabble in programming hated it because it required them to deal w/ creating their own class and some math (fill an array with samples of a sin wave) and other stuff that required some thought/learning. They much preferred the assignments I hated that involved no creativity/original thought and were rather boilerplate. A lot of people (even really smart people) don't like being forced to think and much prefer memorization to critical thinking/problem solving. That's why, IMHO, many programs don't teach concepts (it disgusts me that in engineering classes the profs are "afraid" to give mathematical proofs for things b/c so many students hate them) or foundation - because too many people hate it and shy away from courses that focus on things that can't be crammed for and require understanding.

This is some weird combination of revisionist history (the ancient Greeks knew about irrational numbers) and just plain making shit up (irrational means it can't be expressed as a ratio of integers). See Mathworld's definition of irrational number for one more credible, and more researched, version.

Imaginary numbers under a variety of names were discussed at least as early the 16th and 17th centuries and credible sources claim references back to the ancient Egyptians; this reference also says the term "imaginary" was in common use at the time of Descartes (though makes no reference in the online material as to who coined the term). Many less credible online sources place the name as coming from Descartes and claim it to be dergatory, but many of those sites appear to be copying from some common source of unknown origin. So, the guess that imaginary was derogatory may be correct.

I suppose one of four (calling the fact of the name and date of discovery each as guesses at the truth)possibly correct speculations isn't bad for just spewing stuff that sounds credible

Perhaps irregardless is a word?

Irregardless

I will continue to use this stupid word. Quit Bitching

sickening stuff, only a handful of japanese were ever tried and japan has never apologized to china (to my knowledge)

Functions aren't a problem. They have a strict syntax. MACROS are the fucking problem.

Macros that evaluate to include directives that include executable code are the particular problem I'm dealing with right now. No debugger I've tried can browse into that code until I cut and paste it over the offending macro. Which kind of defeats the purpose, dunnit?

The things some people (myself at one time) consider "clever" are how other people get hurt.

And remember how the PowerPC used to be the champion of RISC? Eh, not so much no more. 150 defined mnemonics for conditional branch instructions. The Eskimos don't have that many words for "snow".

We need a way to lay down a trail of popcorn when these weasels are dragging us down these ratholes.

During this time, a paediatrician was hounded out of her home and forced to move because people incorrectly associated her job title with paedophilia.

Well, in the states, we've had people lose their jobs over the use of the word niggardly.

Not to mention the various versions for Csound, including Chaosynth.

There is some merit to talking about some mission critical programs being moved to java, but of course you have to recognize that VM's are vulnerable to all sorts of hacks.

I do think that java probably is preferable as a language for avoiding buffer overflow vulnerabilities, especially for less experienced developers. It will be interesting to see how James will stack up with the notoriously holy (pun intended--damn I crack myself up) Sendmail. There ARE other examples of java in critical situations, I'm sure -- but none spring to mind.

I do constantly use java to write the shell stuff that I know someone is going to bang on -- just because I haven't seen a root exploit from a java process yet.

This sounds a bit like Alloy. Alloy is both a code modelling language (like UML), but structured in such a way that the model can be analysed automatically using SAT solvers (yeah, I didn't know what those were at first either. Here's a site with some good info on them).

Alloy's cool because you can use it to model code at a very abstract, high level (much like SPARK, it seems), although with Alloy you aren't tied to any specific language. The downside is that since the model isn't embedded in the code it's more useful as a design tool than something which will "guarantee" correctness every time you compile.

There's a reason they're called Trojans.

I'm not trying to defend communism here, but the ideology behind communism does not imply totalitarian governing methods.
The fact that most communistic governments has resolved to said measures is a sad fact that just proves that communism doesn't work

The only places communism truly works, are in anthills and termite nests. ;)