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Seam carving removes continuous seams (wavy lines) of pixels that are hard to perceive after being removed. Thus it's well suited for changing the aspect ratio of images (in Photoshop this is called content aware scale), since if you remove a seam the image gains or loses a whole row or column of pixels. But it's less suited for filling in big holes, where you need to find the right textural pattern to put in the hole. To do this we made a new tech called "patchmatch" that basically dices the image into little squares (patches) and then matches similar patches :-). We used this core tech in a global optimization, where good matches outside the hole are pasted in the hole, averaged, and then this is repeated until convergence. I did this at an internship at Adobe. http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php

You're calling media relations a "PR department"? You're comparing a small group of people who put out press releases with the massive industry-funded disinformation campaign which organizes massive denier conferences and offers prizes to scientists who can publish papers that support their position. Please, get serious here.

You know, not all PR departments are nothing but lying conspirators out to twist and hide the truth. Most company PR departments do nothing but put out a little press release with some boosterism and self-congratulating -- just like university PR departments do. A lot of crappy science journalism gets its start with a boiled-down press release that proclaims that the university's researchers have released a study proving some fact when the study in truth doesn't say much of anything conclusive.

For example, look at the story that was recently on Slashdot about HFCS causing obesity in rats. Several respectable science journalists have taken the time to look at the study more closely and concluded that it was deeply flawed and didn't prove much of anything. (1 2 3)

So where did the wide-eyed, "Big News!" take on the study come from? Why from Princeton's press release. This sort of things happens all the time in headline-grabbing areas of science, like global warming, nutrition, anthropology / humanoid evolution, cosmology, etc. Universities know that donations and grants come to those institutions that make the biggest splash, and they are more than willing to trump up the importance of a study that isn't as powerful as the headlines might make it out to be. Just like all those massive industry campaigns you decry as so different, lazy newspapers pick up the PR piece and publish it almost verbatim as news.

The problem of self-promoting PR compounded by a lack of journalistic integrity and diligence is just as prevalent in science as in industry. You want to know where the whole "eggs are good for you, eggs are bad for you" debate comes from? It comes from press releases overstating the importance of a particular study before it's faced years of peer review and double-checking. And this sort of irresponsible bragging is a large part of why the public is so skeptical about science actually knowing anything.

And the ONE reference you give is to someone that is been criticized by his peers due to his work being poorly researched. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton

Same as the Bell Curve was refuted by the authors peers (one such example here http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5877.html )

Connelly Barnes at Princeton University, who did the "PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing" SIGGRAPH paper used by Photoshop:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php

has some nice video research here:
Video puppetry: a performative interface for cutout animation:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1409077

This seems to be legit. The youtube account has a video from October demoing the same algorithm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFEBamdtdiI

This earlier video references the name of the algorithm as "PatchMatch" and says that it was developed in collaboration with Princeton and University of Washington. A quick search found this paper:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch.pdf

Here's the paper, from a comment above.

Liquid rescale is an implementation of the Seam Carving technology which was incorporated into Photoshop CS4 as a feature titled Content Aware Scale.

This new feature comes from an algorithm titled PatchMatch which was presented at SIGGRAPH 2009:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/index.php

Product: (n) merchandise, ware, product (commodities offered for sale) "good business depends on having good merchandise"; "that store offers a variety of products"

Our founding fathers were considered terrorists when they created this country.

Please show a historical document of the era of the founding of the United States that labels the founding fathers as terrorists. Please list all the terrorist acts perpetrated by the founding fathers or the revolutionary army.

On the flip side, so long as no government exists, there's no such thing as "criminal" behavior - as it is, by definition, the kind of behavior that breaks criminal law

Criminal:
* condemnable: bringing or deserving severe rebuke or censure; ...
* guilty of crime or serious offense; ... (Source)

You're ignoring several common definitions. No, "criminal" is not exclusively defined by governments, even ignoring the international sense where no one government has any jurisdiction. An obvious counter-example would be common law, which arose from private dispute-resolution unassociated with any government. In any event, whenever you see me using the term it is synonymous with "aggression", or the use of force (i.e. violation of natural property rights) against a non-aggressor.

any entity doing so would be government in effect, even if it calls itself differently

Defense from aggression is not the only qualification for government. Among other things, to be a government an organization must (a) claim a monopoly on the use of defensive force; (b) use non-defensive force, a.k.a. aggression; (c) claim that it has a "legitimate" right to act as it does, when any other organization in its place would be classified as organized crime. Note that (b) is required to enforce (a).

You can consider other organizations "governments" if you like, but if they don't meet criteria (a) or (b) above then I am not opposed. It is the behavior which is important, not the label.

So, with a government, you have legitimized but limited coercion. Without a government, you have coercion by anyone who is stronger than you, without any limits or recourse.

With a government, you have legitimized coercion by someone who is stronger than yourself, without any effective limits or recourse. So long as others consider the coercion "legitimate" you cannot organize any defense. Without a government others may attempt aggression against you, but this aggression is clearly illegitimate and you are free to work with others to voluntarily defend yourself and your community. If your goal, like mine, is to eliminate aggression then only the latter choice offers any hope at all. From the perspectives of ideology and practicality alike, there really is no choice at all but to oppose aggression in all its forms.

In practice, the most common aggression most people experience originates with their own governments, not private criminals. What thief could escape unscathed after taking thousands of dollars from millions of people, year after year? What extortionist could get away with unjust demands on the scale of those handed down by government bureaucrats? True crime is the domain of rare and degenerate individuals, but governments make criminals of ordinary citizens and label it "public service."

Personally I intercalate between doing fun stuff and paying attention

You insert days in a calendar between doing stuff and paying attention?

Slums are good for people who don't live in them.

This is one of the single most insightful comments in this thread. New urban megaslums exist because the political structures in those countries have failed to establish a civil society that redistributes the income more fairly among its inhabitants to create situational stability, upward mobility, without too much downward mobility below a certain floor . It is not so much a failure of wealth creation as a failure of political will, or a product of a definite politial will to clear the countryside so as to establish monoculture agriculture to grow cash crops for export to rich countries and to enrich a select few. To compare the slums of Lagos to expensive moored boats in Sausalito, and to imply that all slums are generating a transformation where "the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan", as Brand does, is to insult the intelligence of all but the most criminally naive and deludedly optimistic.

One of the single best books published within the recent few years about the new megaslums is Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. He takes a little bit of a historical detour, illustrating that the phenomenon of urban megaslum is not unique to the late 20th century. There was a single example of amegaslum (that is, a place where 1m+ people subsisted on virtually no income for generations in the context of a markedly unequal society) and that was Dublin, Ireland, during the 19th century following the abolition of the Irish Parliament when the remote British Westminster Parliament basically deindustralised what had been one of the more advanced nations in Western Europe and left it subject to famines and depopulation. Anyway, Davis shows that during the late 19th century economists studied Dublin's inhabitants, wondering how it was that they managed to subsist on so little, and many of their arguments then echo those today from analysts across the political spectrum as they regard an increasingly slummy world where the City of Tomorrow is not made of gleaming postmodernist spies ala Dubai, but in fact is much smellier and grimier, and has no running water or sewage.

That literally billions of people precariously subsist in these cities today is a miracle. To imagine that they will survive the disruptions of the coming water and resource wars of the warming centuries is magnificently optimistic.

I'm copying here a blog post on Metafilter because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day A new book by Daryl Collins of Bankable Frontier Associates (first chapter of the book is available from PUP); Jonathan Morduch of NYU's Financial Access Initiative; Stuart Rutherford, author of The Poor and Their Money and founder of SafeSave; and Orlanda Ruthven of Impactt investigates the question of how over a billion people make ends meet on only $2 a day. "The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money." The strategies adopted by the households of

Verb

        * S: (v) ink (append one's signature to) "They inked the contract"
        * S: (v) ink (mark, coat, cover, or stain with ink) "he inked his finger"
        * S: (v) ink (fill with ink) "ink a pen"

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ink

Of course... this is 1Gb shared bandwidth...

But for comparison, Princeton's entire campus has peak utilization at 1Gb

Realtime chart: http://www.net.princeton.edu/

How about all the other things that can be found in one's browser history, such as Google searches, or, say, one's own name on some websites, such as Facebook when viewing one's own profile?

I think you don't get it. The same-origin principle, enforced by all contemporary browsers, prevents sites from just querying the history. Thus, an arbitrary site is by no means able to just view the user's Google searches or Facebook profile from the browser's history, contrary to what you seem to suggest.

The problem is that it's very, very hard to truly enforce 100% of the same-origin principle. Some limited information might leak due to side channels. For example, an attacker can try to find out if the victim visited site X by attempting to retrieve X, timing how long it takes, and concluding whether or not X was retrieved from the browser's cache based on the response time; see, e.g., "timing attacks on web privacy" (which was BTW published 10 years ago). There are lots of other tricks unrelated to timing that an attacker can employ.

As far as I understand, the contribution of TFA is noticing that group membership information is nearly unique, per user, and (based on the aforesaid methods) suggesting practical ways to trick the browser into revealing this information.

Is this worthless?

In real terms, that involves raising the level of education and the quality of life in all parts of the globe to the point where there are no large groups of people who are still so poor that they have nothing to lose, or so ignorant that they have nothing to believe in beyond what their local preacher tells them.

It's hard to square this advice with the fact that most terrorists are college-educated. Bin laden was an engineer from a wealth family, Mohamed Atta had a PHD in urban engineering, KSM has a degree in mechanical engineering, Ayman al-Zawahiri was a surgeon from a wealthy family, Abdulmutallab was a mechanical engineer from a very wealthy family. The Israelis have had the same experience with the PLO & Hamas -- the more educated and affluent tend to be over-represented, especially engineers and doctors (this was discussed on /. a little while ago). When in the Global Attitudes Project, respondents who were more educated or higher income were more likely to say that suicide bombings carried out against Westerners were justified.

Even more bizarrely, most terrorists come from the wealthier nations in the area, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, despite the fact that they enjoy a much higher per-capita GDP, standard of living and education systems than places like Somalia, Sudan or Indonesia. The better their lives, the more they seem to gravitate towards violent extremism. There are a number of plausible explanations for this, my favorite is that military/political influence is luxury good and those that are in abject poverty are effectively apolitical since they have no labor to spare from making ends meet. There is also the point that since terrorist networks are fragile they must only recruit the most competent and self-sufficient.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't promote education and economic growth as worth goals, but the idea that terrorism is born from a lack of opportunity is plainly in conflict with the facts. Terrorists tend to be educated (quite often Western-educated which not a good mark on our schools) and more wealthy than then unwashed, apolitical, masses in the third world.

See, e.g:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Makes-Terrorist-Economics-Terrorism/dp/0691134383
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/terrorism2.pdf (PDF)

A quick google search should help that http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+byte&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t

I mean take a look at how many places say 8bits is 1byte
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte -- but the modern de facto standard is 8 bits
http://www.choicesandchallenges.sts.vt.edu/modules/evillage_glossary.htm
http://www.satech.com/glosofmemter.html
http://www.teds.com.au/www/6/1001102/displayarticle/glossary-of-terms--2104323.html
http://www.precisecyberforensics.com/glossary.html
http://www.its.strath.ac.uk/helpdesk/glossary/

There are several places including Princeton University that state 8 bits is 1 byte.

I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word 'bribe'. Indeed, the very first definition on Google for Bribe is:

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=bribe :
make illegal payments to in exchange for favors or influence; "This judge can be bought"

'Co-operate (work together), 'cooper-ate' (a nonsense word), 're-cooper-ate' (get better).

co-operate = work together

cooper-ate = a nonsense word

re-cooper-ate = another nonsense word

Try recuperate if you mean "get better".

By the way, there is one pill these days that can help a lot with life-extension for most US Americans. Vitamin D3 gelcaps 5000 IU, with this treatment protocol including blood testing:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

Human lifespan in hunter-gather times past infant mortality might have been into the 60s or older.

The following is from something I wrote elsewhere:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

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."

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, they miss the big picture of the phase change transition from pre-scarcity hunter-gatherers (like the Hmong or Iroquois in older times) to

lmao all those evil capital 'R' have ruined days for me, oh how I long to change them to lowercase of all priorities in life. All 3 people in the world are affected by this, come on seriously is that a real big priority?

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=example

Anyways there are plenty of programs to sort stuff out there and rename it, you got a commandline to find all duplicate .mp3 songs in a folder with 50,000 songs that can sort it in group by albums. All I gotta do is type 'file renamer freeware' in Google search and it will usually show me the most used/trusted programs for Windows, I don't know how changing whether its lower case or uppercase matters to anybody. Majority of people don't need to rename hundreds of files, so once again you can play the numbers game and play that minority crowd but it doesn't mean it is more efficient.

And we wonder how the Windows crowd can get their computers so filled with spyware and startup apps. That's exactly why: they have to download new apps for every action they want to do.

I will take this program over any command line any day as it will be useful for me in the future as I can set the settings so it remembers next time

Before you had that program, cli programs were already accepting configuration files. Really, have you looked at a .vimrc or mplayer.conf?

options that are all presented to you in a nice beautiful GUI

That one I give you. No, cli apps are not all fluffy and candy, it's only for people who want to get things done. SO not for the majority of users, I guess.

But I don't really care that you the majority of people don't like the CLI; as long as I can do only "update_podcasts" and have the PC search a list of RSS feeds for new podcast episodes, auto-download them, convert all OGG files to mp3 and send them to my cellphone via bluetooth, I'm happy :)

Pinochet does qualify. I set the qualifications, not you.

Not quite. Your original description of the dictator, that the US would, supposedly, install instead of the poor benevolent Socialists read: "a brutal military dictator who will slaughter your people for generations to come."

Now, "slaughter" is an inflammatory term, which you used for its rhetorical impact, not precision. And I caught you there, because the term does have a definition: the savage and excessive killing of many people. Perhaps, in your ignorance, you really did think, the entire 60000 victims of "Operation Condor" were on Pinochet's conscience, but, in fact, the most that it was possible to accuse him of was about 3000 total.

Even if all of them were innocent (their killing thus "excessive") and killed "savagely", their total number would not qualify for "generations", in any reasonable reading of the word — for example, the 9/11 hijackers killed about the same number of people (all innocent, actually), but nobody would say, they killed "for generations". This alone disqualifies Pinochet — his general benevolence, the remarkable achievements of his country under his rule, and his voluntary stepping down are just "gravy on top".

My advice to you for next time:

1. Temper your rhetoric...
2. Catch-up on facts, such as:
   • Socialist countries in history,
   • victims of dictators per creed
3. Figure out your love-hate relationship with your country: one you call "a nation of brutal, arrogant, power hungry thugs," but claim to love anyway.

I'm tired of this thread.

I don't hate America. I love America.

Sorry, but I find it unbelievable for a person to love a country, which he characterizes as a nation of brutal, arrogant, power hungry thugs. There are no ifs-and-buts about this... Either you admit to an earlier gross exaggeration, or — after a moment of honest clarity earlier — you are now (again) being insincere about your true convictions to avoid an outright dismissal as a "fringe".

Your version seems to be the love of an abused spouse who will defend their abusive mate whatever the cost.

So, you think, I was abused by America... What do you know about me, that I don't? Or is it your opinion, that everyone is being abused by this country — and some, like yourself, recognize it, while others still don't?

Read up on what the CIA did to Chile and Allende. How we supported Saddam Hussein. How we supported Suharto. How we stuck our fingers into dozens of Central and South American countries democratically elected governments. Remember Iran Contra? Remember Ferdinand Markos? Manuel Noriega? Alfredo Stroessner? Remember how invaded the Dominican Republic because they elected a socialist? No, of course you don't.

I may be too young to remember it, but I do applaud those past efforts of America to stop the inevitable tyranny and misery of Socialism in its tracks, wherever it tried to rear its ugly head or raise it bloody flag. Even he failed to properly follow through, Kennedy's words express this sentiment best:

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." John Fitzgerald Kennedy

That said, to bring you back to the original contention, I'm yet to see an acceptable example, where the US installed a military dictator, who'd slaughter his countrymen for generations. It simply has not happened, and the two nominations presented so far — Hussein and Pinochet — don't qualify for different reasons. Although Hussein was, indeed, a bloody slaughterer, we didn't install him. And Pinochet — even if we did install him — was not a slaughterer at all, but a blessing for his country, which became South America's top economy under his rule; moreover, considering, that he stepped down on his own, he was hardly even a dictator (except in an Ancient Roman sense of the word)...

As already mentioned, I have no doubt, you quite an admiration for Che Guevara and own clothing with his famous portrait — and yet he was part of a still existing dictatorship far worse, than anything America helped create. Talk about abusive mates!

The ones you mention had tyrannies. Not socialism, not communism: tyranny.

Well, well... Is not it convenient, when you can reclassify things at your whim... I guess, you liked the freedom-fighter Mugabe until he turned into a dictator too... And Chavez may already have lost your favor by becoming a tyrant — or, maybe, not yet... No, I'm not going to allow you to weasel away from this. The countries I listed all had nationalized (state-owned) means of production and capital, which, by very definition, means, they were/are Socialist.

Face it... Capitalism has brought hitherto unknown riches and comforts even to the least successful of its participants. Socialism, at best, allows countries to survive economically (although those still leave some parts of the economy private), but unable to even defend themselves. There simply aren't enough rapists and murderers in the CIA, to explain Socialism's mediocrity and outright failures...

That wasn't Aquinas, that was Anselm.

Various accounts I’ve read of UNIX, Ritchie’s retrospective on it, and even an interview you did with some people for a video back in 1981 talk about the system as being, or UNIX as being, sort of culling all the best ideas in operating systems that emerged during the ‘60’s.

Ken answered

My background for obtaining these ideas was .... I worked on CTSS, I used CTSS per say. I used CTSS and did some, a lot of programming on CTSS and I worked on MULTICS.

either. No free redistribution, derived works, or anything. Just because the source code is available doesn't make something open source.

And only OSI can define what open source is?

• S: (adj) open-source (of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available)
• "Open source is simply programming code that can be read, viewed, modified, and distributed, by anyone who desires. WordPress is distributed under an open source GNU General Public License (GPL)."
• Open Source: "Software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open source code evolves through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Some examples of open source initiatives are Linux, Eclipse, Apache, Tomcat web server, Mozilla, and various projects hosted on SourceForge and elsewhere."
• "What is open source, and what is the Open Source Initiative?"

While the term "open source" was coined by the Open Source Initiative source code was open, visible to see, study, and modify as early as the 1960s. The hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the '60s was posting their source code on boards for anyone to improve and optimize.

But then again that was before "hackers" was used as a negative word.

Falcon

Wrong. A calculator is a personal computer. If it handles any form of numerical data, it's a computer, and if you own it, it's personal. In fact that definition has not changed SINCE ITS INCEPTION.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=personal%20computer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer

"A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator."

Sometimes I wonder if you people with 7-digit UIDs are even out of high school.

cracks, black cats, and higgs bosons? Got it. Honestly, I'd say it's being suggested CERN integrate a project like Princeton's. Sorting large amounts of random numbers looking for periods of non-randomness. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

"For instance, I am currently part of an email conversation with a prominent FOSS community member who has been pilloried who is hurt and baffled that I (or anyone else) could apply the word "sexism" to them. Their reasoning? They did not intend to be sexist, so therefore they can't possibly be. Therefore, labelling their behavior as unacceptable is unfair, they argue. The fact that, in context, their actions and remarks could not possibly be described in any other way honestly does not seem to have occurred to them. No matter what I say, they remain hurt and baffled -- and, like so many, deeply in denial."

The version of sexism as I see it(and I'm guessing most people in the UK/western world) is sexism *is* an intentional chauvinistic attitude, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=sexism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism are the main things I am looking at right now. I can see that sexism may technically mean "the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other", but this would mean that their intentions would be very important into determining what is meant. Using an emotionally charged word like that to describe someone without defining it would hurt most people, there is no reason to be surprised here.

I believe there might well be some bias in the FOSS world against women (although I've never encountered it due to working on fair few projects) and this should be rallied against (it's just foolish to be biased and helps noone, the project would suffer from fewer contributors), but labelling it sexism places it close to "women should be in the kitchen" thinking in my mind and is unproductive and will lead to defensiveness and even resentment from the male community for being labelled as such. It seems as if the author can't understand why someone might be hurt by being labelled a sexist.

In all, this doesn't seem to be very objective or useful reporting and is purely to get clicks and links onto his site and stir up some debate. In my opinion. :D

Squatter, or just extreme slacker?

When I first reached out to google for the definition of squatter, I got a bit confused as to where the illegality lay[gr.?]. The definition of squatter hereseems to express two types, those with legal, and illegal. When I switched the search to cybersquatter, I then understood more about where the laws start, (though seems a amendment may be needed) here in the United States, Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act passed in 1999, an amendment to the Trademark Act 1946 also known as the Lanham Act.

Where am I going with this? How does one determine good faith? How do you differentiate between a person who might struggle to get it up (specially if a deadline looms overhead, further if that deadline is tightened) and one who is squatting maliciously, awaiting a time when they can resell the slot to someone else who has developed the application, put in the sweat, time, thought, tears, hours, etc...
To end with a wee bit of entertainment amidst all this legal jumbo-gumbo, figured I might throw a little head-nod to J.R. Bob "Dobbs" (not MS's failed project). Slacking is an artform, a religion, one that many take quite seriously. So much so they used it in the naming of a Linux distro. Slacker? Or Ill-memes willful disconsolation?

Sorry to be pedantic (too much time on /.?), but GP is correct. A compound fracture is one that is poking out of the skin. Not logical, I know. http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=compound%20fracture

Yes yes. And another good one is this logarithmic map of the Universe [PostScript], , other formats.

Yes yes. And another good one is this logarithmic map of the Universe [PostScript], , other formats.

Actually, maybe it is you who should read more and quit inferring details you have no idea of.

The criminal charges, of which they were acquitted, were for contempt of a court order, not for blessing the meal. They were at a luncheon (not a dinner) on school property and had obviously done it in the past since a court had told them they couldn't do it anymore. And yet they did it anyway. And someone had to have complained on both occasions or the ACLU would have never known about it. That's hardly the situation you described.

A court order the ACLU complained they violated because of saying a prayer over the meal. A luncheon and a dinner are the same thing so that point is a little anally ignorant. And no, they didn't get busted for this in the past, the ACLU got a restraining order because one of the teachers had pushed religious views onto the students and they found a handbook suggesting that students conduct themselves in a christian manner. The ACLU took this completely out of line and the judge ruled that way too.

Also, if you read more, you'd know the difference between the pledge of allegiance and the pledge of elegance. I'm not sure I've ever heard of the pledge of elegance, but it sounds like it would be making students pledge to wear ball gowns and tuxedos to school which seems like a stupid idea.

It's a fucking spelling error brought on by spell check suggesting the wrong word and me not checking. The more intelligent people in this thread knew exactly what was being talked about and the fact that you have never head of the pledge of elegance should indicate that it was either a spelling error or it was a topic you knew nothing about and shouldn't have opened you ignorant mouth about.

I'd also venture that we'd be doing away with the pledge of allegiance regardless of it's references to God. Blind allegiance to the state is the stuff of fascist and communist governments, not supposedly free countries like the US. Students shouldn't feel forced to support their country any more than they should feel forced to believe in a religion.

IF that was the case, then people wouldn't be complaining about the under god and complaining about the pledge itself. The problem you are not getting is that you are learning about the pledge in school, not committing yourself. There is nothing binding about the pledge and most of the intelligent people understand that.

And Christians are so quick to believe that Christmas is such an innocuous subject and yet would be up in arms if the school play or carols dealt with another religion. They don't want to see a school play depicting the miracle of the lamp oil that should have lasted only 1 night but lasted 8 nights (the basis for Chanukah) and they don't want their kids learning songs about dradles. Why should students and parents from other religions be forced to see plays and sing songs about Christmas when they're not allowed to see plays and sing songs about their own religion?

I have no idea why you would think that. What religion does Santa depict? Or better yet, where is the north pole, Santa, reign deer and all that depicted in the christian religion. Also, the entire Chanukka thing was represented at my school pretty well. We even catered to Kwanzaa which is a made up holiday originating in the 1960's for African American kids who were muslim and not christian.

Your ignorance about schools and plays or what Christians do is completely unfounded. You have made the world less intelligent with your comment on something you know nothing about.

There's a good reason why the rules about separation of church and state are in place. Without them, state officials who are religious can and

Actually, maybe it is you who should read more and quit inferring details you have no idea of.

The criminal charges, of which they were acquitted, were for contempt of a court order, not for blessing the meal. They were at a luncheon (not a dinner) on school property and had obviously done it in the past since a court had told them they couldn't do it anymore. And yet they did it anyway. And someone had to have complained on both occasions or the ACLU would have never known about it. That's hardly the situation you described.

A court order the ACLU complained they violated because of saying a prayer over the meal. A luncheon and a dinner are the same thing so that point is a little anally ignorant. And no, they didn't get busted for this in the past, the ACLU got a restraining order because one of the teachers had pushed religious views onto the students and they found a handbook suggesting that students conduct themselves in a christian manner. The ACLU took this completely out of line and the judge ruled that way too.

Also, if you read more, you'd know the difference between the pledge of allegiance and the pledge of elegance. I'm not sure I've ever heard of the pledge of elegance, but it sounds like it would be making students pledge to wear ball gowns and tuxedos to school which seems like a stupid idea.

It's a fucking spelling error brought on by spell check suggesting the wrong word and me not checking. The more intelligent people in this thread knew exactly what was being talked about and the fact that you have never head of the pledge of elegance should indicate that it was either a spelling error or it was a topic you knew nothing about and shouldn't have opened you ignorant mouth about.

I'd also venture that we'd be doing away with the pledge of allegiance regardless of it's references to God. Blind allegiance to the state is the stuff of fascist and communist governments, not supposedly free countries like the US. Students shouldn't feel forced to support their country any more than they should feel forced to believe in a religion.

IF that was the case, then people wouldn't be complaining about the under god and complaining about the pledge itself. The problem you are not getting is that you are learning about the pledge in school, not committing yourself. There is nothing binding about the pledge and most of the intelligent people understand that.

And Christians are so quick to believe that Christmas is such an innocuous subject and yet would be up in arms if the school play or carols dealt with another religion. They don't want to see a school play depicting the miracle of the lamp oil that should have lasted only 1 night but lasted 8 nights (the basis for Chanukah) and they don't want their kids learning songs about dradles. Why should students and parents from other religions be forced to see plays and sing songs about Christmas when they're not allowed to see plays and sing songs about their own religion?

I have no idea why you would think that. What religion does Santa depict? Or better yet, where is the north pole, Santa, reign deer and all that depicted in the christian religion. Also, the entire Chanukka thing was represented at my school pretty well. We even catered to Kwanzaa which is a made up holiday originating in the 1960's for African American kids who were muslim and not christian.

Your ignorance about schools and plays or what Christians do is completely unfounded. You have made the world less intelligent with your comment on something you know nothing about.

There's a good reason why the rules about separation of church and state are in place. Without them, state officials who are religious can and

... which you didn't fake yourself.

But seriously, it happens not only in medicine. It also happens in physics. [pdf]

moot, adj.
2: deprived of practical significance : made abstract or purely academic
(http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moot[3])

Yet the Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd ed, 1983, (Simon and Schuster) has
moot, a. subject to or open for discussion or debate; debatable.
Nothing more, nothing less, despite 6 column-inches of small type devoted to the various noun and verb forms of the word, none of which come close to suggesting "deprived of practical significance...."

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of Webster dictionaries that points out

Throughout the 20th century, some non-Merriam editions, such as Webster's New Universal, were closer to Webster's work than modern Merriam-Webster editions. Indeed, further revisions by Merriam-Webster came to have little in common with their original source

Looking elsewhere, Google's "define:moot" brings up Princeton University's large and authoritative dictionary (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=moot:

S: (adj) moot (of no legal significance (as having been previously decided))
S: (adj) arguable, debatable, disputable, moot (open to argument or debate) "that is a moot question"

Conclusions:

1. "Moot" continues to mean what it has always meant: something that is unresolved until it is debated and settled by a gathering of appropriate authorities;
2. www.meriam-webster.com has lost value as an authority on English words. Probably students, and definitely lawyers, should avoid it;
3. this post trumps parent post in totally off-topic pendantry.
4. And, oh yeah, the 10 lb hard copy dictionary I've been lugging around for 26 years is still occasionally useful.

KDE is able to project a halo of (mostly valid) hype around itself which attracts users and hence contributors, which results in more features and hype, and so on.

from the princeton wordnet: "hype: to publicize in an exaggerated and often misleading manner".

the word derives from 'hyperbole'.

from wikipedia: "Hyperbole, meaning excess or exaggeration, is a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated..."

i fail to see how any exaggeration can be valid.

Free will: the power of making free choices unconstrained by external agencies
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

If you "Creating a three-laws-safe robot", you are, by definition, not giving the robot free will.

Secondly, you are assuming that within the robot there is some sort of physical override: "if a human is in danger, move these parts until they are no longer in danger;" and in their mind they are dreading the action. First of all, the robot has to determine whether or not they are in danger. This is subjective. They could find some loophole in the code and think "they are not actually in danger right now, the fire is still 3 feet away," if they didn't want to do it.

It's much more likely that instead of a physical override, we would implement "basic instincts." I could, technically, climb on my roof and dive off, head first, onto my driveway. But i'm not going to. Ever. It's not because I physically can't, it's because it's instinct. I don't want to hurt myself. Similarly, if my house caught on fire and my wife and child were inside, and I knew that "[my] chance to survive is almost zero", I would still run in to try to save them. Once again, I don't have to. It's just that my desire to see them live is greater than the desire to see myself live. If I had to sacrifice myself for them, I would in a heartbeat.

That is how you program the three laws into robots. By making them desire to do the 3 laws more than anything else.

Linux is not officially supported at Princeton, but we do have a pretty good Linux user's group. This seems to be the case at most research universities: official support is rare, but there are enough Linux users among academic scientists and engineers to form a linux-oriented community. At smaller liberal arts universities, I'm not sure this remains the case.

Princeton linux resources:

user's group website http://plug.princeton.edu/linux/

community-provided documentation http://webscript.princeton.edu/~pug/faqwiki/index.php?title=Special:Allpages

Linux is not officially supported at Princeton, but we do have a pretty good Linux user's group. This seems to be the case at most research universities: official support is rare, but there are enough Linux users among academic scientists and engineers to form a linux-oriented community. At smaller liberal arts universities, I'm not sure this remains the case.

Princeton linux resources:

user's group website http://plug.princeton.edu/linux/

community-provided documentation http://webscript.princeton.edu/~pug/faqwiki/index.php?title=Special:Allpages

From Princeton's web site: //Princeton welcomes applications from home schooled students. Although they still make up a very small portion of the applicant pool, applications from home schooled students have been increasing. Among the home schooled students admitted in recent years was a student who graduated as valedictorian of the Class of 2002.// http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/tips_for_home_schooled/ Stanford likes homeschoolers, too: //Former Stanford University admissions counselor Jon Reider, one of the first to draft an admissions policy for home-schoolers, said such applicants often stood out for their maturity. "There were things these home-schoolers had," Reider said. "A certain amount of responsibility. They were in charge of their learning process. They were impatient with normal assignments and reading lists." When Reider left Stanford seven years ago, he said there were 36 home-school applications. This year, the university counted 104. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/10/AR2007061001351.html There are more, of course. But I think these two examples disprove your claim.

Words can change. Get over it.

Poland has an unfortunate history both during and directly after the war, extending into the 60s. The embarassing reaction to the relatively recent release of Jan T Gross's book (hereby incorporated by reference) in which the former Kaczynski, the former Primitive Polish Prime minister even tried to prosecute the author.

It's important to remember that during the war the Poles had much harder situations for rescuing Jews than in most other countries (you risked your entire family going to a concentration camp; elsewhere you risk only yourself and only prison) and many still did. It's also worth remembering that the reason Jews were in Poland was because they were historically treated better there than elsewhere. Poland is much further along coming to terms with and apologizing (though with reservations) for it's former anti-semitism (even Kaczynski has made efforts to return passports to the victims of the 60s) than a number of surrounding countries.

Essentially anyone who tells you that Poles are all good is a Holocaust revisionist. As is anyone who tells you that they are all bad.

In all cases where I referenced Wikipedia, all references in the page references are incorporated by reference as material to read. There; is that enough citations for you?

"An American" in English has one and only one meaning. Someone from the USA. There is no other English meaning.

Princeton seem to disagree.

It's not my job to use the wrong words

Sorry, are you saying that it's incorrect to use the noun phrase "United States of America"? "USA" is unambiguous: "America" is not. That's my point.

But again, you seem to have modified your statement. It was "that's ambiguous" (which it is not) and is now "someone that doesn't know the language may be confused"

I call troll. You're making up quotes and attributing them to me. The only person who's used the word "confused" is you: the word I used was "misinterpret". By definition a word cannot be ambiguous unless there is more than one possible interpretation, and to choose the incorrect one is to misinterpret it.

Incidentally, am I the only one that thinks a republican sounds like someone who is a publican again?

You're right. To keep fixes prices in a free market is non sense.

To some extent, long distance (interstellar) comerce problems were addresed by Paul Krugman in the following essay: The Theory of Interstellar Trade (Paul Krugman, 1978) [PDF] (related Slashdot article here).

Guess Stalin has been right all along: 'It's Not the People Who Vote that Count; It's the People Who Count the Votes'.

The thing is, the people that count no longer matter, they have been replaced by software(It doesnt matter if officials still count aswell, when the used software is malicious).

        Princeton University Exposes Diebold Flaws
        Original research paper

Maybe we just like repeating history so much that people just dont care anymore..

Geobiologist Peter Ward claimed in his book The Medea Hypothesis . that the long term trend in CO2 is declining and there willbe too little for eukaroyote life in a few hundred million years. The early Earth probabaly had double-digit percentage C02 like its neighbors Mars and Venus. That declined to percent or two by the start of multicellular life a half billion years ago. Then It fell currently to three-hundreds of a percent until anthromophic burning looks it will double that. But the long term trend is decline. When CO2 falls below one hundredth of a percent it will be too little for photosynthesis, plant and animal life. The Earth will then revert to the bacteria planet it was for most of its history.

Where does the CO2 go? It dissolves in the ocean and turns into carbonate rock where its pretty well locked up, unless a volcano burns it back into gas. Sea creature skeletons add to this process. 99.98% of Earth's carbon is currently locked in limestone. The rest is in the biosphere and petroleum deposits.

Fair simple global environmental engineering could reverse the process. Just burn limestone to release CO2. Thats how people make lime for cement. But do this on a gloabl scale.

P.S. The Medea Hypothesis is a pun on the Gaia Hypothesis. Porfessor Ward suggests ecology is not stable and friendly to life. But it goes bserk and causes mass extinctions now and then. Read the rest of his book.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/home/

sedgewick has some stuff there.

you can also look through a place like lulu.com - a lot of authors who print there also have free copies of their books online.